Giving Up (14 page)

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of their lives is maintained, and until now James had always been happy with this arrangement, but he's starting to resent it, so when he is down in the basement trying to get some work done and Mary starts banging around in the kitchen, no doubt making banana bread or something equally superfluous, instead of cleaning out the fridge (like she's been promising to do for weeks) or getting dinner ready (her only regular task – and one she often put off or neglects until they're both so hungry that James ends up going to pick up some takeout at the Indian place down the street), he tells himself that she's the reason that he'll never finish his life's work. It's not lost on Mary that he blames her for distracting him. She can tell by the way he's standing out there on the balcony that he's furious over the cat incident. He's pretending to look for it but all he's really doing is getting worked up and pissed off at her for keeping him away from the basement. He comes in after wandering around for the last two hours, and when he finds out that while he was gone an injured cat broke into the apartment and that she'd had to literally sweep it out the back door, all he can think about is how long he has to act like he gives a shit before he can go back downstairs. James only wants to be down in the basement. He resents most of the time he spends upstairs, and he clearly believes that Mary is forever oppressing him with things like the cat incident. But it isn't James who is being oppressed by living with Mary, it's Mary who is being oppressed by James. He thinks that living with Mary distracts him from his life's work, when it is actually Mary who is literally suffocated by their living arrangement. And maybe the biggest joke of all is that James thinks that Mary is constantly making demands of him and his precious time when it is James who insists that every moment of their day be devoted in one way or another to his basement work. Mary is ashamed by how much of her life revolves around his ridiculous schedule. Especially now that they have to keep up such a regular sex routine. It bothers her the way she has to monitor his moods, waiting for the moment when he's least likely to be annoyed to suggest they go to the bedroom. ‘If there was a way,' she would say, ‘I'd be happy to leave you out of it.' And she meant it. The way he carried on made her feel almost guilty, as if she should feel grateful that he was willing to do his part. She hates herself for it, but she's even got into the habit of saying ‘thank you.' And what's worse is that he smiles and nods, as if to say, ‘You're welcome.' Why is it, if he wants a child as much as she does, that she feels like she is asking him for a favour? Why does he make it so she has to ask every time? He knows the schedule. They might have even talked about it earlier in the day or the night before, since it is increasingly common for her to give him a few gentle reminders so he won't feel like she is springing it on him out of the blue. ‘Don't forget that we have to do it later,' she says. And then later on she might say something like, ‘Is now a good time?' And he would nod and smile and basically carry on in the same way that her dad used to when doling out money during family trips to the amusement park, peeling off a couple bills with a lordly flourish but never enough that she wouldn't have to come back in an hour asking for more. So here she is at the kitchen table, staring at his back as he leans over the railing, the cat's blood drying out on the floor, while all she can think about is whether or not they'll be having sex tonight. Much like when they first started seeing each other, she obsesses a lot about when the next time will be, but the difference now of course is the total absence of desire. ‘It's weird,' she thinks, ‘to really want to have sex, without really wanting to have sex.' But this is what has happened to a lot of things in their life together – where they seem to be going through all the old motions with none of the old feeling. She really wants to buy their own place, not because she has strong opinions about handling their finances, or because she is eager to control her own property, but because this is what many of her friends are doing and she is anxious that they are falling behind. She worries that this approach even applies to wanting a family, that she doesn't want a child for
the right reasons
. ‘What if I'm doing this out of a sense of obligation or duty,' she thinks, ‘when maybe I don't even really want to have a family?' How can she even tell the difference between what she wants and what she thinks she wants? For instance, when dinnertime rolls around there's always a part of her that wants to scrap the home-cooked meal and just pick up some sushi. But whenever she does go through with it she never ends up enjoying it. She wishes she had stuck with the home-cooked meal because – she realizes, only after eating the cold and tasteless fish – that she actually doesn't like sushi, she just thinks she does. Mary sits at the kitchen table and watches James as he leans over the railing and pretends to look for the cat. Not only is he putting on an act so he can have a moment to himself, but he's also going through the motions so he can prove to himself and to her that he's done the right thing. Ridiculous. She gets up from the kitchen table and goes out to join him at the railing, both of them now staring into the gloomy alleyway, pretending to look for the cat. So much of their time is spent pretending for each other. She knows that when James is in the basement, he isn't really working away on one of his little projects. He is just hanging out downstairs so she'll think he's doing something meaningful and important. When James comes up and asks her what she's been up to she doesn't tell him she's been reading about infertility online. Instead she says something along the lines of ‘not much' or ‘nothing.' What's truly depressing is that none of this pretending actually works, or at least not the way it's supposed to, because neither of them is able to pull it off. ‘But,' Mary thinks, ‘that isn't really the point, is it?' When James asked her what she was up to after she'd just spent hours poring over medical websites, and she said, ‘nothing,' she didn't expect that he'd take what she said literally. By pretending, she was telling him she didn't want to talk about it, it wasn't any of his business, and since there's so much these days that fit into these two categories she spends a lot of time pretending. ‘What's the point?' Mary would think. ‘It's not like there's anything we can do about it. So why bother talking about it?' The thought of talking about it makes her cringe. If, when James asked her ‘what's up?' she were to tell him what was bothering her, why she spent so much time online looking at pictures of her friends, or reading up on infertility statistics, then he would try to comfort her, tell her to relax, be patient, try to live in the moment, and she knew that she wouldn't be able to stand it. She doesn't want to be comforted, to look on the bright side, count her blessings, and anything that would remind her, in ways that make her crazy, that she doesn't care about all the stuff she should be thankful for, she only cares about the thing she can't be thankful for. Who gives a fuck about blessings when the only thing you really want is never going to happen for you? She looks at James and guesses at what he might be thinking, probably wondering how long he has to pretend to care about the cat before he can go back down to the basement. Or maybe he really is bothered by the thought of the poor little thing suffering somewhere down there in the alley. It is impossible to tell. She considers asking him. All of a sudden she feels a profound need to know, as if their future depends on it. But just then the doorbell rings. For some reason, which, when she recalls it days later makes her wince with embarrassment, her initial thought is that it must be the police. ‘Maybe they were close by when it happened?' she thinks. ‘Maybe they heard something. . . .' A sickening feeling comes over her as she gradually realizes what a strange thought this is. What does she mean by ‘when it happened'? Is she referring to when the cat was hit by the car? Or when she flung it against the kitchen table with the broom? In either case, just how stupid do you have to be to think that the police would investigate an injured cat? ‘I don't really believe the police are at the door,' she thinks. But, just like when she saw the thing in the cat's jaws and thought it was a mouse, it was just the first thing that came to mind. James is also frozen in place because he is afraid of who might be at the door, but in his case he is almost certain that it is the con man. Horrified, he realizes that he must've been followed. Once he'd handed over the four hundred bucks the shame and humiliation had overcome him with such wearying force that he wandered the streets aimlessly while muttering ‘You fucking idiot' over and over to himself, at first with disgust, then mellowing to anguished hopelessness. ‘How is it possible,' he eventually asked himself, once he finally broke off from the
fucking idiot
mantra, ‘when you knew right away that he wasn't for real, that you could even think for one second that he was telling the truth? And if you knew he was lying, why did you go to the bank machine?' As he asked himself these questions he kept replaying what had just happened, but it was as though it had already been obscured, or covered up, as if he'd managed to repress something that had taken place only moments ago. Yet he still saw enough to feel ashamed, since it seemed to him that instead of the naive faith he'd initially assumed had been the reason he was taken in by the con man, he'd actually just been scared. There was nothing quixotic behind the con, no foolish yet noble impulse inspired his willing blindness, it wasn't even that he'd been afraid that the con man was going to beat him up, nothing so specific, there was just a vague fear that somehow it wasn't going to turn out well, it was this, and nothing else, that made him hand over the four hundred dollars. ‘You're a coward,' he said to himself, ‘simple as that.' The elaborate rationale he'd gone through while he was getting conned was just that, an elaboration, the real truth was much simpler. ‘You invent all this complex bullshit in order to hide the fact that everything you do, you do out of fear,' he thought. Adrift in his neighborhood he felt that he finally understood himself. He saw all his actions through the lens of this devastating realization. ‘How could I have missed this before,' he asked himself, ‘when it's so painfully obvious?' The horror of his behaviour spread out before him like an enormous tapestry or mural, where he could take his time and examine every instance of weakness in his past, and the scenes of the most abject fear and cowardice took place in the basement. He saw himself down there, alone, and in almost every sense of the word, lost. He'd thought that his life's work, however futile, had been an act of courage, when all along he'd been acting from the most banal and everyday anxieties. But just as he was punishing himself with these thoughts he experienced a sense of exhilarating possibility. ‘It's not too late to change,' he thought. ‘It's good that this happened. Otherwise I may have gone on like this indefinitely. Now I know what I need to do. Now I know what has been standing in my way.' He'd hurried home, hoping to put his epiphany to work right away, but Mary's cat incident had distracted him, so it was only now, as he is standing on the balcony after the doorbell had just rung, that all of this came back to him. ‘You're afraid,' he says to himself. Although maybe he's right to be afraid? He'd been so distracted with his own thoughts while he was out wandering the streets that it had never occurred to him to check if he was being followed. He'd been so ashamed, once he'd handed over the four hundred dollars, that he'd wanted to put as much distance between himself and the con man as possible, short of breaking into a full sprint. Once he knew which way the con man was going, James told him that he lived in the opposite direction, but he hadn't waited to see which way the con man went. There was more than a little superstition to this behaviour, like the way a child runs away from a dark basement, terrified that if they turn around all the wild phantasms of their imagination will come to life – ‘so,' he thinks as he stands next to Mary on the patio, with the faint reverberations of the doorbell still sounding through the apartment, ‘it's more than possible that as he fled down the street the con man decided to wait and see where I went. And once I went far enough,' he thinks, ‘he probably decided to follow me to see where I lived.' James had already revealed himself to be gullible and cowardly, so the con man probably figured it wouldn't be a bad idea to find out where he lived in case he wanted to hit him up later on. The entire time that James was wandering the neighborhood, lost in thought, the con man had been keeping a safe distance. James had thought that handing over the four hundred dollars was a stupid and reckless thing to do, but it turns out that he'd done something much much worse. Instead of putting distance between himself and the con man he has brought him even closer. In fact, it was this precise behaviour – to get as far away as he could and never look back – that turned what had been an embarrassing and inconvenient incident into something truly dangerous for himself and Mary. The entire time he'd been with the con man he never thought that the incident might end violently. Of all the possible scenarios that ran through his head as he tried to decide whether the stranger was
for real
or not, he never considered that he might be capable of the horrific sort of crimes that James had only ever read or heard about. It just wasn't on his radar. For all his introspection and deep thinking, he actually had a limited imagination. Far from being a free thinker, he was constrained by a host of blind spots and prejudices that reduced his realm of possibility down to a little set of expected outcomes, and anything that lay outside of this was almost impossible for him to see. He knows that, in principle, and in reality, all sorts of strange and wonderful things happen every day, and that it is technically possible for something unusual to happen to him, but as far as he knows, nothing ever has, and while he knew it is entirely possible that some day he could be surprised by an event so horrific and shocking that people might even read or hear about it, he felt it was just as likely that he'd become rich and famous, or discover that he has a long-lost twin brother. These things could