This Is Between Us (11 page)

…

We started bickering over small household things, too. I always thought you had the heat up too much and if I turned it down, you’d get mad and pretend like you were freezing. I slept in only boxers, you slept in layers—long-sleeve T-shirt, shorts, pajama top and bottoms, sometimes even a sweater and scarf. I told you that I feared you’d strangle yourself at night.

We fought over the lights too. I liked the apartment bright so I could see what I was eating for dinner, see whatever I was trying to read on the couch. You’d come into the living room and grimace, like the brightness was killing you. You’d turn off the overhead light and turn on a dim lamp instead.

If I had an open bag of chips somewhere, you’d eat them all or throw them out and then yell at me for not hiding them better.

I could not fold bedsheets correctly, according to you.

I complained about your organic peanut butter.

The kids started in on each other too—Maxine getting upset at Vince for being in the bathroom too long. Vince saying she hogged the
TV
.

These small battles seemed silly and innocuous at first, but they eventually bugged me more and more, like small buzzing flies in front of my face.

…

At a certain point in our third year, you were getting bored and didn’t know what to do with yourself. Your hours at the library were cut and you were working only three days a week. You became depressed and stopped doing the things that you enjoyed doing. I tried to help by giving you things to do on your days off, lists to cross out, recreational “lunchtime” video clips to watch. You slogged through the day without giving a thought to any of it. When I came home at night, work-beaten and starved, I asked you if you’d done any of the things I’d asked you to do. You said no and blew out a sigh that sounded like an inflatable boat sinking in a muddy river.

I couldn’t even make you laugh. There was a Ziploc bag of Chinese herbs in my coat pocket that I kept forgetting to take 119 out. It had been in there for a week and had somehow gotten wet and become gooey. Whenever I fished my fingers in there to look for something, they came out looking like I had dipped them in shit. But they smelled good, so I didn’t wash my hands right away. I walked around the apartment waiting for you to notice.

When it was time for bed, we brushed our teeth, side by side, looking in the mirror. We used to exchange sweet glances until things started to feel different. Then you stared straight ahead, watching your mouth turn foamy. I stared so hard at myself I couldn’t see anything.

…

It was unseasonably warm outside, and we were having sex as the sun slowly went down. It was the first time we’d done it in almost two weeks. An old country song was on the radio.

“Do you love me?” I asked.

You didn’t say anything. The humidity made it hard even to breathe.

“Say you love me,” I said a minute later.

You wouldn’t look me in the eyes. Our love making didn’t feel like an emotional reconnection so much as it felt like a response to some kind of mental pressure to end our sex drought. It didn’t truly feel like making love. It was more like we were falling back into our roles. Reluctant romance.

Maybe we were just tired. What we wanted and what we could give were two different things that seemed so far away from each other.

“Can’t you say the words?” I asked you.

I felt you tense up.

“Do you not love me?” I whispered.

“I don’t,” you said. A swallow of air like a hiccup. “I don’t want to.”

There were shadows on the wall eating each other. Even the flies were suffocating around us.

When we were done, I noticed the old country song, still on the radio. Then it finally ended.

…

One of your friends said we should go see her therapist for couples counseling. I always thought we kept up a happy facade, that we were normal in most senses. But your friend said that even happy couples are fucked up.

We made an appointment and I started to compile a list of things we could talk about. You did the same.

At the first therapy session, we went down our lists. The unearthing of these concerns, these nuisances or trivial peeves, gave new weight to things I thought we really didn’t care about, like cleaning the apartment or buying needless things at the grocery store. But we were merely throwing pebbles at each other.

Then your pebbles turned into giant boulders—heavy, abstract things I didn’t know how to catch or deflect. You said, “Sometimes I feel like you’re listening to me, but you’re not hearing what I’m saying.”

I had to space out each word in my brain to piece together the puzzle of your statement. While I was doing that, I didn’t hear the next four minutes of your list.

The therapist sat with her folded hands in her lap. Her long face and feathered gray hair made me think of a horse, staring at us in a meadow.

You had moved on to the time I got mad at you for breaking my computer.

I tried to jump in with something to slow you down. “What about the time you yelled at me about how to stretch out my leather shoes? I told you that my friend Michelle said to spray them with water and you freaked out and called Michelle a stupid lesbian. Do you remember how unnecessarily angry that whole conversation was?”

“But that was when I was crazy,” you said. “That was when I was between meds. You can’t use that against me. And it’s still not the right way to deal with leather shoes!”

“And what about the time you wouldn’t ride in my dad’s Fiat?”

“That was also when I was between meds. And that thing was a death trap.”

Everything I said after that was tossed aside with the same answer: “Between meds.”

I realized that maybe you were right and your temperament was normal now. All of my pebbles (and a few rocks) were coming at you from days long gone. You were able to rewrite history, like Zoloft could make the rough patches of the past well-intentioned and smooth.

The therapist looked at me with an accusing glare as I stammered. I was simply the one without an excuse.

We shook the therapist’s hand as we left. I knew we’d be coming back for more.

…

I kept a journal during our therapy period. Most of the entries are written with a steady hand, easy to read, and often in very direct language, as if I knew how to steer my head and my heart at the same time. But I was faking it.

In reality, my head and my heart were big, lumbering automobiles, careening toward the same parking spot right before they ran out of gas. They were completely separate entities—smoking violently and moaning like old machinery.

The only places in my journal where you might be able to detect this conflict are the parts where the handwriting becomes sloppy. The words are scrawled, as if in a code. Like that serial killer who taunted the newspaper editors and practically begged them to catch him. But my bad handwriting is too scared to taunt. It does not know which side to choose. It can’t be read. In this way, it served to protect me.

…

After what turned out to be our last appointment with that therapist, we were driving home, and I told you that I wanted to move out for a while. Your face turned dark and angry and I thought you might hit me. “Don’t,” I said.

You took off your seat belt and curled into a ball in the passenger seat. Your body slumped down and you trembled with your face in your hands. I felt like breaking down too, but your reaction made me turn stoic for some reason. “It’ll be better for both of us,” I said.

“Why?” you said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just how I feel right now.”

“I don’t want to stay there,” you said. “We’ll move out. You and Vince can stay there.”

Besides the emotional drain of a breakup, I realized at this moment that there was a physical drag to it as well—the moving-out part. For some reason, I almost felt worse about Maxine having to move out.

I kept driving down the freeway. I noticed the radio was still on and there was a diamond commercial on. I turned it down, but not off. I started to talk. “Maybe this is just a good time to see if . . .” I trailed off and didn’t know what I wanted to say.

“Don’t speak to me unless you have something fucking clear to say,” you said through your tears.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I love you.”

“You’re just talking at it, not working at it,” you said.

My head felt light, almost weightless. Someone honked at me for driving too slow. I felt like stopping right there. A man swerved around me, his head out of his window, yelling, “What the hell are you doing, asshole?”

…

Two days later, before you moved out, you told me that you simply wanted someone to “love the hell out of you.” I said I did—I loved the hell out of you and the shit out of you and the holy fuck out of you. But still, you wanted more than words that were simply repeated and riffed on. I felt like I had to get on my hands and knees for you. I had to come up with other words that would crawl to you, like soldiers on a battlefield.

But you wanted actions, you said. You made the word sound long in the air between us—“Aaaaaccc-ssshhhuuunnsss”—so maybe I would grab it.

…

All the things we’d talked about doing—
poof!
—suddenly gone. My mind felt blank and my heartbeat seemed to fluctuate every hour.

This confused me. One moment I would feel like collapsing to my knees and a few minutes later, I’d want to jump up and down. I would remind myself that I was free. For some reason, these feelings of untethered freedom would most often emerge while I was driving somewhere. I whooped and hollered with the windows rolled up, like a crazy person.

Then I’d feel myself deflate again.

…

You and Maxine decided to leave for California. You said it would be for two months, or you might stay down there. I was sad to see Maxine, in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead and not even speaking to me before you drove off. I wondered if our breakup would damage her somehow. Maybe she would believe in love a little bit less because of what happened with us.

A few days later, I put your things in storage, not sure if I’d see you again. That was one of the hardest days of my life, loading up that storage space and sending you the key in the mail.

Two weeks after that, I was already restless and didn’t know what to do with myself. I began seeing a woman who worked at the grocery store down the street. She had made a comment about a bottle of wine I was buying one night. “Save some for me,” she said. I started to daydream about her before I even left the store.

Her name was Lucy, and we went out every other night after that. There were two new bars that she liked to go to. A place called the Tiger Bar and another place named Spirits. We did this for almost a month, ending some nights with slow, sad make-out sessions in my car. Then I found out that she was married to a soldier in Iraq. She acted like I was the person in the wrong and gave me a long lecture before breaking off our relationship.

…

I started dating a woman sixteen years younger than I was. She was barely drinking age. When you found out about this through a friend, you asked me if I was a pedophile. I knew you said this out of spite, so I tried not to acknowledge it. But the question did linger with me for an uncomfortable moment.

I showed this girl a lot of things I liked. Music, movies, food. After a while, it felt like I was teaching her, guiding her, molding her into the shape of something I wanted.

Maybe she could just be a younger version of you. But I began to resent all of the work I was doing.

“Show me something
you
like,” I said to her once. And she showed me something I liked. “Show me something
only you
like,” I said.

“I don’t know what I like,” she said, getting flustered.

I had to break up with her.

That was when I felt like I wanted to start seeing you again. Like I needed to see you. You had moved back to Portland and told me in an email about a great deal you got on an apartment.

You let me come over to this apartment, soon after. It was on the other side of town and felt like a long drive. When I first walked in I noticed that it smelled like leather boots. You always had new leather boots. You had new things to show me. Things I’d never seen before. I didn’t have to teach you a thing. You were already taught and prepared.

…

You used to waive any library late fees I had, but you stopped doing that after we broke up. It was a small thing, but it felt like a grudge. A slap on my wrist that left a brief red mark and a sting. I’d return my late books and
CD
s to another library so you wouldn’t see me.

…

You called me early in the morning and said, “Let me think out loud for a second.” I rubbed my eyes and looked at the clock. I couldn‘t tell if it said six or eight. I thought maybe I was dreaming.

“If we had a baby together, I think our lives would be very confusing,” you said.

I started to say something, but you shushed me. “Be quiet,” you said. “I’m thinking.” And then you told me about the last-second shot in the basketball game you went to the night before. And then you wondered who was on the
Today
show and then started talking about breakfast. You really were thinking out loud. I sat up in bed and laid my cell phone on my blanketed belly. I put it on speakerphone and listened to your unedited thoughts spilling out on my lap. It was like I’d cut off your head but it still kept talking.