Giving Up (13 page)

see if they could help
, even if it meant postponing or even cancelling their own plans. At first she thought he was doing this out of a perverse sense of pride, a sort of minor martyrdom, and that eventually he'd find some other way to satisfy this misplaced belief in his superiority, maybe even by doing the exact opposite and only ever acting in his own self-interest. Then she thought maybe he was acting out of a sense of inferiority, and by never doing the wrong thing he was fulfilling his need to deny himself, and to punish himself for every time he put himself before someone else, especially if that someone was a complete stranger. If either of these scenarios were true, however, then in the same way that his sense of superiority and inferiority fluctuated wildly from day to day (and even within each day), this obsession with doing the right thing should be more unbalanced. And if
this
were true, when the opportunity came where he had a clear choice between right and wrong, he might not feel the need to prove himself one way or another, and whether he did the right thing or not would be left to more pressing concerns, so that he might end up doing the
wrong thing
for the sake of convenience. But this
never
happened, which led her to suspect that there's no coherent psychological explanation for his behaviour and that it is likely just a habit, or ingrained familial superstition, like the way two sisters insist on sleeping against the wall because this was the position they fought for when they were young and were forced to share a bed, and even though they are now all grown up and the people they share their beds with are indifferent to what side they sleep on, they still get nervous when asking respective partners if they mind sleeping on the far side of the bed. James, unsurprisingly, was oblivious to this unfailing compulsion to do the right thing, since, unlike Mary, he didn't view his behaviour from the same God-like perspective from which all the discrete actions he took throughout his life could be seen at a glance, the way that a city can be taken in from an airplane so that all the individual features cohere and all that you can see is the vast structure or system always at work governing the life of the city, yet remaining hidden or invisible to the people on the ground. Instead, to James, every choice is unique, and he would've been offended if Mary told him that she knew what he was going to decide before he did. He felt like he struggled with his decision every time he made one. The cat is probably a block away right now, or, if it is under the patio, is James really going to crawl under there and get it? And it may not even be injured, or at least not as bad as Mary thought it was. But if it is as bad as she thinks it is, then he is going to have to bring an extremely traumatized and broken animal to a clinic (if there is even one open at this time of night) just so they can kill it ‘humanely,' which no doubt is going to cost him a couple hundred dollars. Not only would his night of working be completely shot, but all the excitement and subsequent exhaustion would prevent him from working tomorrow as well. ‘I'll just go outside and take a quick look,' he says, ‘just to make sure he's not laying out there suffering or anything like that.' He couldn't help adding that little dig at the end because even though it makes absolutely no sense, he blames Mary for this infuriating distraction from his life's work. ‘First the con man, now the cat,' he says to himself, as if these two incidents perfectly express the condition of their lives at that moment, even though they are in fact unrelated, but putting them into a single phrase, and uttering it silently, illuminates a shared quality, an offbeat affinity that has nothing to do with reason, like the rhymes in a nonsense poem that seem ridiculous on the page but make a strange sort of sense when you read them out loud. He goes out onto the patio and stands at the railing and pretends to search for the cat. Even though Mary hadn't done anything to bring the cat incident about, and even if it was a total fluke that the cat had chosen their apartment over someone else's, he couldn't shake the feeling that she is somehow responsible. It isn't something he'd ever utter out loud, or even allow to the surface of his thoughts, but somewhere below in the grim basement of his mind he keeps hidden the suspicion that her carelessness is to blame for a lot of the things that go wrong in their lives. The irony being that it is precisely this quality that had attracted him to her in the first place. Instead of endlessly scrutinizing every detail, each possible outcome, the countless interpretations of each aspect of daily life, she threw herself into things and simply trusted that they would fall into place. ‘What's the worst thing that could happen?' she would say. If she was picking something up at the store, she left the car running outside, and she might strike up a conversation with the cashier and end up leaving it running for half an hour. One day, on his way home from work, James saw her car idling outside their local coffee shop and, in order to
teach her a lesson
, he hopped in and drove home. But when she got home a few minutes later she didn't even make a remark. ‘Weren't you afraid someone stole the car,' he asked. ‘No,' she said, ‘I just assumed you took it as a lame joke in order to teach me a lesson or something like that.' ‘But somebody could have stolen it,' he insisted. ‘Yes,' she said, ‘but they didn't.' He couldn't help but admire how utterly unconcerned she was with the fundamentals, the sort of
life skills
that everyone needs to be able to make it through the day. Because not only did she make it through the day – she thrived. Let's say they're going out to eat but they get to the restaurant just as it's closing – James would suggest they go somewhere else, whereas Mary would plead with the hostess, who'd initially be hostile but eventually warm to her, so that by the end of the night they would be sitting at the bar with the rest of the staff, eating and drinking for free. It's obvious why James would find this attractive, but there's a less romantic side to this sort of character. She is never surprised when everything works out, but if something goes wrong, she is outraged. He'd noticed this early on but it wasn't until she bought a couch on a whim and then fell to pieces when it turned out to be too big to fit through their doorway that he started to keep score. She developed a bitter impatience with their apartment after that, and within a few more months she told him she couldn't ‘live in this shithole any longer' and they had to move. And then, after she tried to flush a bag of potting soil down the toilet, they had to move from that apartment too. So even though she insists that the cat came through the front window he can't help but suspect that there's something more to her story. ‘She doesn't
mean
to distract me from my life's work,' he thinks, ‘but whether she means to or not, and whether she's responsible or not, this sort of thing happens all the time.' He is constantly being distracted by trivial incidents that end up getting completely out of hand and swallowing up all the time and energy he puts aside every day in order to bring the seemingly endless project a little closer to completion. He looks over the railing and stares into the darkness. Mary is supposed to be the practical one, level-headed, so he is freshly disappointed whenever something like the cat incident happens, because he realizes that she is just as ill-prepared for the demands that reality is constantly making as he is. He stares into the alley and listens for the sounds of an injured cat, whatever that is supposed to sound like, but it's quiet. Usually their neighbours stay up late drinking and playing loud music, or have people over for large dinner parties, talking and laughing until one of the other neighbours yells at them to keep it down. And when they first moved in, he had been so sure of himself and his life's work (that he'd only just started) that instead of interfering with his progress, all this street noise and the sounds of the other people living in the building served as a form of accompaniment. But all that is over now, and even the slightest noise from outside is enough to cause irritation, which then quickly grows into full-blown anger, and finally, obsession. He is no longer sure of himself and what he is doing. It's all so precarious and uncertain. He is terrified of failing, of never finishing his life's work, and when he is sequestered in the basement, trying to get something done, and the bullying sound of an action movie or the mewling of a distressed cat comes pouring in through the basement window and works its way into his thoughts, so that he ends up sitting and staring in a distracted stupor, he worries that he doesn't have the talent for concentration that he needs if he is ever going to accomplish anything. In the same way that he is distracted by the very background noise that used to accompany him, he is also irritated by the household sounds that used to cheer him up and sustain him throughout the drudgery of his life's work. Not that long ago, he liked to think about what Mary was up to while he was down in the basement. ‘Here I am,' he would think, ‘working away at my life's work while she goes about the work of living.' The sounds she made as she moved around upstairs complimented the virtual silence of his sedentary work in the basement. It was a sort of symbiosis, the way they both kept to their respective spaces in the apartment and simultaneously worked away at their respective tasks, with the shared goal of living a fulfilled and contented life. Of course, neither of them had ever gone so far as to say this goal out loud, but it was understood, and he felt like they had the same unspoken agreement with respect to his life's work. They were both committed to its completion, and even though she never directly involved herself in it, there was never a question that everything she did upstairs was in service of the work he was doing below. He would imagine what a biographer might write about them if he ever finished his work and his genius was finally recognized. They would point out that he would've never been able to accomplish something so monumental without the tireless and practical assistance of his wife, Mary. Without her, they would say, it's unlikely that James would've ever started out on such an ambitious endeavour, let alone have finished it. James would sit for hours in the basement absorbed in his demanding work but he could always be sure that once he tore himself away he would emerge into domestic calm. Her work was as particular and short-term as his was abstract and unending. Together they sustained and inspired one another, because, just as Mary's activities upstairs served as an ongoing endorsement for the complete shambles he referred to as his life's work, so James's time in the basement elevated the sense of significance and purpose in the work that kept Mary busy throughout the day. Listening to Mary getting supper ready in the kitchen spurned him on to get a little more work done before it was time to eat. When she started watching TV after dinner he knew that he only had a couple of hours before she would call down to him to come join her for the tea that they drank together every night before she went to bed, leaving him with another two hours to
unwind
by half-reading a book or screwing around online. He set his routines by hers. Whenever she was gone for the night and he had the place to himself he found it impossible to get any work done. Because he had started his life's work before he met Mary he never considered that one day she might become integral to it. In the beginning, when they moved in together and he'd been obliged to establish a new set of work habits in order to accommodate his radically new living situation, he worried that he'd been naive about what was involved with sharing a space – maybe living together would become a distraction, or even a full-on obstruction to getting any work done. Now that they had established the routines which have been in place for years, he no longer saw her as impeding his work, although he didn't exactly credit her with assisting him either, instead he congratulated himself for being able to work in spite of her presence. Of course, since he's more or less convinced that he is a failure, he's fallen into thinking she is somehow preventing him from getting anything done. Before, when the floor creaked under her feet, or the muffled waterworks ran overhead as she washed the dishes, he'd reflect on how well they shared their living space, or how perfectly their arrangement was working. But now the sounds of her banging around in the kitchen puts him in a rage. It is as if she waits for the precise moment that he finally buckles down and starts getting some work done, after he's wasted the first few hours in the basement avoiding this very thing – work – while she spends the lead-up to this moment in perfect silence, reading a book on the couch or flipping through a magazine or messing around online, and then, once he's finally got himself into a state where he's capable of taking another crack at his life's work, she gets up from whatever it is she's been doing, and starts making a racket right over his head. He used to think, ‘This is how it should be. While I'm working towards the completion of my
life's work
, she sustains our life together, she fills up all the empty hours I spend down in the basement with the business of
ordinary life
. We have worked out the
ideal conditions
,' he used to think, ‘for accomplishing something of lasting importance.' Once he started to worry, however, that he may never actually achieve his goal, he began to notice the ways that their domestic arrangement fell short of fulfilling this supposedly symbiotic system. He suspected that there was, in fact, no unspoken agreement or domestic truce, and that their home life was made up of a random clutch of mindless activities and last-minute solutions that barely maintained the illusion of order. Mary is just as focussed on impractical, abstract, and unlikely goals as he is. Just as James spends his time in the basement consumed by a project that has no basis in reality, so Mary spends hours upstairs planning
their
future – a future that has just as much to do with the present as James's hoped-for success has to do with what he's accomplished so far. It's also not entirely true that Mary concerns herself with the day-to-day necessities while James works on his grandly unnecessary and abstract life's work, because he actually pitches in quite a bit. It is James who cleans the house, deals with the landlord, handles the bills, runs most of the errands, and all the other things that Mary is unwilling to do or feels are more appropriate for him. Her role and duties aren't as clearly defined, but while it's never been stated outright, and even though James takes care of the lion's share, it is clearly through Mary's guidance and supervision that the