I Give My Marriage a Year

by Holly Wainwright

  And then Gretchen inhaled too, and she said, ‘Why?’

  ‘Things aren’t . . . good.’

  ‘Well, you’ve been there before, right? Worse than not good. You sorted it out.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. I thought we did. Maybe we didn’t.’

  ‘What’s changed?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Lou played with the sand next to her, letting it run through her fingers. ‘Me? Christmas was . . . shit.’

  ‘You should have called me!’ Gretchen sat up now, and grabbed Lou’s sandy hand. ‘Why didn’t you call me?’

  ‘You were in Byron.’ Lou twisted her finger around her friend’s, gave it a little squeeze. ‘Anyway. I’m giving it a year.’

  Another pause. Lou’s girls had abandoned their pit and were wrestling. Half of the sand on the beach was coming home with them, clearly.

  ‘I hate to say it’ – Gretchen always said it – ‘but if you’re back here again, if it keeps being not good, why wouldn’t you just . . . leave?’

  Lou looked around. Why did it look like everyone else on this beach – and there were hundreds of them – was having the summer of their life? That family over there, with the beautiful dark-skinned toddlers, everyone wearing tasteful neutrals and straw sunhats, the woman’s blonde head thrown back in laughter, the man wrestling with his adorable sons.

  Her girls. Just there. They were lying on their stomachs now, their arms back in their hole, burrowing out a tunnel.

  ‘Them.’ She nodded towards Stella and Rita. ‘And history.’

  Gretchen let out a little puff of air between her lips. ‘History? History’s bullshit. Donald Trump is making fucking history. History just happens, babe. It’s the passing of time. It doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘That’s not true, Gretch,’ Lou said. ‘It means a lot. Look at us.’

  ‘We’re different. Being friends with me doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to be friends with anyone else, and’ – as Gretchen spoke, Lou again had a flash of those hands on her hips – ‘you don’t have to live with me. If you did, I think you would have dumped me years ago.’

  Lou knew her friend was about to go off on one of her diatribes about modern monogamy and how humans weren’t meant for long-term cohabitation and why marriage was an institution that was good for men but terrible for women. But Lou, sympathetic to all of this in theory, couldn’t bear to hear it again. Not today.

  ‘Gretch, Josh isn’t some guy I’ve been seeing,’ she said. ‘We’ve been together forever. He’s my life. I’m his life. With the girls, we’re each other’s home. It’s a lot. It’s everything.’

  ‘Still . . .’ Gretchen took her hand back. ‘Here we are again.’

  ‘I’m not dumping Josh, Gretch,’ Lou said, more decisively than she felt. ‘Starting again feels like the end of the world. I want to fight for it.’

  ‘I’d say you’ve been fighting for it for years.’

  ‘I’ve got a plan.’

  ‘Of course you have.’ Gretchen let out a slightly snarky giggle, but she was smiling. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Right now, sex.’

  A snort. ‘Sex is not a plan. Sex is a given.’

  ‘Said the woman who has never been in a relationship for longer than a year.’ Lou pushed her friend’s bare shoulder, her eyes still on the girls. ‘Sex is a big deal when you’ve been with someone a long time. It can . . . go away.’

  ‘I was with Gen for eighteen months,’ Gretchen said, mock offended. ‘And we still had sex.’

  ‘With her and with other people,’ Lou pointed out. ‘Including Barton.’

  ‘And Barton and I had sex every time we saw each other right up until he decided tantric sex was his destiny.’ Gretchen blew a raspberry. ‘Who’s got time for tantra? It’s so greedy.’

  ‘This is not very useful, Gretch,’ said Lou. ‘I don’t think tantra is on the menu. We need to start more vanilla.’

  ‘Okay, so you tell me, married lady: when does the sex go away?’

  Lou went back to playing with the sand. ‘It wasn’t our problem for the longest time,’ she said. ‘Much longer than a lot of other couples I know. We used to laugh about other people not having sex, when we were still . . .’

  ‘Screwing.’

  Lou suddenly felt an ache below her stomach that brought her hand there, pushing into her swimsuit. The word that came with the ache was empty. She was suddenly very aware of feeling empty.

  ‘It’s been a few years, I guess, since things changed,’ she said. ‘Two, three.’

  Gretchen knew what had happened three years ago, but she also knew not to go there, not now. ‘Maybe there are only a certain number of years you can actively remain attracted to one person, whoever they are. You ever think of that? Maybe you guys have just run out.’

  ‘Again, Gretch, not helpful.’ Lou took her hand away from her stomach, reset herself. ‘Anyway, I give my marriage a year. My plan is that we’re going to try all the things that people say you should try to save a relationship that’s in trouble.’

  ‘And you’re starting with sex.’

  ‘Sex with Josh.’

  Gretchen suddenly sat up, took off her sunglasses and looked at Lou. ‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’ she asked, and Lou knew that Gretchen was trying to get her to turn away from where Stella and Rita were now dumping double-handfuls of sand on top of each other’s heads. ‘You haven’t gone back to . . .’

  ‘Gretch, stop. I just need you to listen to me.’ Suddenly Lou knew that this was what she needed. ‘You know all kinds of things about relationships that I’ve never experienced, including bloody tantra. I want to try everything to stop my family from falling apart and I need your help.’ She turned her head. ‘I need your support. And your ideas about what to try next.’

  Gretchen and Lou looked at each other for a long moment.

  ‘So, are you going to keep score each month, like “this is the percentage I’m leaning towards staying or going”? Is that how it’s going to work?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Lou hadn’t really thought about that. ‘Sort of, I guess. Like, how will I feel after the month of sex? Differently? The same?’

  ‘And are we starting at fifty-fifty odds?’

  Lou scrunched up her nose. Not really. But, sure. ‘I guess so. That’s the point.’

  Gretchen put her sunnies back on and lay down. ‘This is one of the crazier things you’ve done, Lou,’ she said. ‘Your marriage isn’t a reality TV show. Or a blog. Like that woman who cooked a Julia Childs recipe every day for a year even though she, like, couldn’t cook and didn’t have five hours to baste a ham.’

  Lou laughed. ‘Julia Childs didn’t baste hams.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  Lou looked over at the neutral linens couple. He was taking pictures of her with his phone, the beautiful boys were building a sandcastle that was taking on epic proportions. The woman tilted her golden head back, looked at her husband like he was a delicious pie, and he lowered the phone and playfully began to crawl over the sand to where she was sitting.

  ‘Do you think the sex will help us reconnect?’ Lou asked.

  Gretchen reached out a hand and squeezed Lou’s thigh, which was covered by a sarong she’d draped across her lap. ‘Can’t hurt,’ she said. ‘But really, you have to want it. The connection, I mean. It’s not going to turn up if you’re not there for it. It’s going to take more than fifty per cent.’

  Lou nodded, still looking at the perfect couple, who were kissing now, as their sons worked on an improbably intricate sand turret. ‘Wise words, my friend.’

  ‘And there’s something you haven’t told me yet.’

  Lou stiffened, knowing as she did that Gretchen’s hand would be able to feel her tension.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Does Josh know about this? Does he know that his marriage, the whole fucking centre of his entire wood-whittling, guitar-twiddling, middle-aged life, is on borrowed time?’

  Lou exhaled, loosened.<
br />
  ‘Nope. Not yet.’

  The girls came charging back at them, spraying sand.

  ‘Can we have ice cream?’ Rita yelled at a volume that made Lou flinch. She looked over at the destroyed hump of sand where they’d been digging and burying and dumping.

  ‘Sure you can, it’s the holidays,’ Lou said, reaching out to brush sand off Rita’s lips.

  And Gretchen was looking at Lou again now, over her sunglasses, even as Stella was pulling at her to get up, get up, get up.

  ‘Well, that’s probably for the best, right?’ she said to Lou.

  ‘Yes, definitely for the best,’ Lou answered.

  And as she started rummaging in her cavernous beach bag for her wallet, Lou’s phone, lying on top of towels and Tupperware snack-packs and squeezed-out sunscreens, started vibrating. It was flashing up a number she’d last called two nights ago.

  Suddenly the heat felt unbearable on Lou’s face. She grabbed the phone with a slightly shaky hand and quickly flipped it over.

  ‘Ice creams!’ she called to the girls. ‘Let’s go.’

  Josh

  Josh rested his head on the steering wheel of the van and closed his eyes, just for a second.

  His head was heavy and the van was cool. He knew that out there in the timber yard a wave of inner-west heat was going to hit him like an iron to the face.

  I want to be at home, he thought. All those lucky bastards having January off. I need to be at home with Lou and the girls, with my feet in that giant paddling pool they got for Christmas and a cold drink in my hand.

  He knew better than to bitch to Lou about January. Living with a teacher for thirteen years had made him as defensive as she was when anyone commented enviously on the length of school holidays. He knew she’d be at the kitchen table right now with her computer open, hacking out the lesson plans for her new year one class while Stella splashed around out the back and Rita snoozed off a fever on the lounge.

  Still, he’d rather be there than here.

  But if he was, Lou might try to make him have ‘energetic’ sex again.

  He lifted his head and hit it gently on the wheel. ‘Shit,’ he whispered.

  ‘Hey, Jon Bon, are you coming?’

  All the other chippies knew that Josh played guitar. He copped every rock’n’roll nickname there was, from Keef to Jimi to Slash, even though he’d never played a metal lick in his life. Now Jon Bon. Tradies – so very funny.

  This was Tyler, one of his most regular partners in the jobs he’d been specialising in the last few years, restoring heritage buildings in Sydney’s oldest and swankiest suburbs. They were both contractors, working for their old mate Mick, who had become something of a building tsar, much to everyone’s surprise.

  The days when Josh loved his job were the ones when he was in the shared workshop, focusing on details for one of the smaller, private projects he took on himself. His hands running over the wood, feeling his way. The satisfaction of standing back from a finished job – a frame or a table or an old chair that was going to sit in someone’s home, quietly making life incrementally better just by being one proper, solid, beautiful thing that would last in the world.

  Today was not one of those days.

  Today was a day when he and Tyler had to sort through hundreds of old doors at this huge, chaotic mess of a place, trying to find six that were an exact match for a city hotel job that Mick had going on. And they’d have to haggle for them with Enzo, who was close to ninety and mean as hell.

  Nope, this was a shitty, stinking-hot day and his heart was not in it.

  ‘Mate, I’m getting sunstroke.’ Tyler opened the door to the cab and Josh lifted his head and climbed out.

  ‘Sorry. Knackered.’

  ‘If you’re already knackered in January, it’s going to be a long year,’ Tyler said, as they crossed the yard to Enzo’s site office.

  Why am I forty and still doing a job that I always swore was a stopgap?

  This was a thought that Josh tried not to let settle for too long. It wasn’t that the money was bad; it wasn’t. The level he was working at now, the jobs Mick managed to pull him in on, he was doing alright by the family – a whole lot better than he had at other times. Times when he’d been trying to make music pay, for example. Lou was happier about that, surely.

  But fuck, he felt too old to be clambering around a grumpy old man’s timber yard on a thirty-degree morning.

  ‘Lou at the beach?’ Tyler asked, as they waited at Enzo’s door. The old guy was on the phone, holding up a hand and shaking his head to stop them entering his air-conditioned shipping container.

  ‘No, she’s home with the girls. Probably working too,’ said Josh.

  Josh knew that Tyler had broken up with his wife more than two years ago now. That he barely saw his kids anymore. Josh knew this because there had been a night, about six months ago, when they’d gone out for a drink to celebrate one of the apprentices at the workshop getting his papers. Josh wasn’t big on drinking with the boys. He told Lou it made him feel old, and like a walking cliché, but also it made him feel like he was truly part of this tribe, when he preferred to consider himself a visitor, an outsider passing through. But that evening, he’d gone to the pub with the others and he’d seen Tyler – who generally seemed sunny and confident – dissolve into a mess of a boy nursing a raw, open wound. Two hours in, he was slumped at the table in the too-bright sports bar, talking tearfully about how his son didn’t want to come over to Tyler’s new place, even though the agreement with his ex, Jodie, was that Tyler could see his kids every second Saturday night. How his little girl looked at him like he was a stranger and squirmed out of the hugs she used to fall into. It was all his own fucking fault, Tyler confessed. He’d been a shit husband who didn’t pay attention, but he’d never meant for this to happen and he couldn’t really blame Jodie, because she was just trying to have a good life, not one with a dropkick, you know what I mean?

  Josh had been quietly horrified at Tyler’s desperation and vulnerability. He’d slipped out while someone was getting another round in and gone home to find Lou curled up watching TV on the couch. ‘I’m so glad you didn’t leave me,’ he told her. ‘You know – when you could have.’

  And Lou had looked at him for a long moment and then pulled her legs just a little bit to the side and Josh had folded his long and lanky self into the space on the lounge where he could still fit beside her.

  The reaction of Josh’s workmates told him that the same thing happened every Friday, after four or six or eight drinks, but he and Tyler had never talked about that night. Whenever Josh did ask him how his kids were, Tyler would shrug and say, ‘You know.’ Sometimes he’d mention that he’d been ‘allowed’ to go and watch a football game or rock up at a birthday party and he always made it sound like it was no big deal but Josh could tell by the way his mouth straightened at the edges when he said it that it was a big deal indeed.

  ‘Let’s just bloody get on with it,’ he said, and pushed the door into Enzo’s office open.

  *

  At home, he and Lou were more than two weeks into the sex contract. Last night had been a fairly typical example of how it was going – at first.

  Lou had had to go to school for a few hours, so the girls had come to the workshop with him while he finished a job that had to be done before today’s great door search.

  By the time he got home he was exhausted from sanding in the heat while keeping Stella and Rita entertained and separated from saws and blades. He wanted to have a shower, get the kids’ bath and bedtime out of the way and then go play his guitar for a couple of hours.

  But Lou had other ideas.

  She was already there, stirring something on the stove, when they entered the house. She looked great, glancing over her shoulder and smiling at him. ‘Hey,’ she said, as Rita flew to wrap herself around her mum’s legs and Stella peered at what was in the pot. ‘My people are home.’

  Josh pretty much always thought that Lo
u looked great. One of the things he had always found so attractive about her was that, unlike almost every other woman he’d ever met, from his sisters onwards, she was not endlessly critiquing herself. At least not out loud, and not to him. She had an easiness about her appearance that, from the moment he’d picked her up from that grotty pub floor, he’d always found deeply sexy. The way her hair just fell like that, like it was doing now, over her shoulders and a little bit into her eyes. How she dressed simply, with her strong, runners’ legs tanned from summer in her denim shorts and her T-shirt falling off her shoulder just a touch. They were both older now, of course, and they looked it, with lines appearing around eyes and waistlines shifting and expanding and the shock of the odd grey hair. But still, he would notice his wife in any crowd.

  He leaned over the girls to kiss Lou’s skin just where her T-shirt was slipping off her shoulder.

  ‘Yuck,’ said Stella, and it was unclear whether she meant the contents of the pan she’d been looking into or her parents’ display of affection.

  Josh felt Lou shudder just a tiny bit as he pulled back. ‘Your people are all present and correct,’ he said. ‘I’m going to go and have a shower. Rita, come and wash up with me, you’re covered in crap from the yard.’

  His hand was on Lou’s waist as he turned away, pushing Rita ahead of him just a little.

  ‘Can you put off your shower?’ Lou asked, not looking away from the stove. ‘You know – till after dinner?’

  Josh looked down at himself, his dusty T-shirt, his hands that were browner than they should be. ‘I’m pretty gross,’ he said.

  ‘Daddy’s gross! Daddy’s gross!’ Rita was pulling at him to move.

  ‘You can just wash your hands and change your shirt,’ said Lou. ‘I thought’ – and she turned from the pasta sauce to look up at him – ‘we could maybe clean up together.’

  Stella made a vomiting sound and headed for the door. ‘You two are disgusting,’ she said. ‘I’m going upstairs. Call me when dinner’s ready.’

  Lou laughed and yelled after her, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about! And I’ll call you when it’s time for you to lay the table!’