I Give My Marriage a Year

by Holly Wainwright

  ‘It had its moments,’ Theo said, still smiling, and then he turned and started down the hall.

  ‘Yes, it did.’ Lou flicked off the light switch and followed him out.

  This is ridiculous, Lou wrote in her head. We need to try something else.

  Her phone buzzed in her bag. She quickly checked it as Theo led the way to the staffroom.

  The text was from Josh. I picked the girls up. Cooking dinner. I’ve signed us up for something fun. Think you’ll love it.

  A joint project. Josh was ahead of her.

  WTF? she typed back.

  He replied with a shrugging emoji and a laughing face. Which suggested the girls were in on this, because Josh had no idea how to send emojis.

  Well, maybe it was time to let Josh take the lead, she thought, sliding the phone back into the pocket of her bag and continuing up the hall.

  Theo was holding the door to the staffroom open for her. He beamed. ‘Welcome to another year in paradise,’ he said, a little too loudly, as she walked through.

  Josh

  ‘What about “Born to Run”?’

  ‘Very funny. Nope.’

  ‘What about “Creep”?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Okay. What about “Shake it Off”?’

  ‘Are you kidding me?’

  Josh was trying to find a song that Lou would be happy to sing with him at the school fundraiser. He’d signed them up to join the parents’ covers band, an institution at the girls’ school that they had so far resisted, in the hope that Lou would think the idea of them doing a duet together was romantic. But buy-in was proving tricky.

  They were sitting in Lou’s car, the family station wagon, waiting for the girls to finish their karate class. The radio was discussing Meghan Markle’s ‘on point’ pregnancy style and he and Lou had just knocked off the giant monthly grocery shop. Lou had pointed out that this had to be the height of long-married Valentine’s Day romance – sharing an evening supermarket trip.

  ‘Well, you didn’t want me to take you out to dinner,’ Josh had reminded her, heaving a bulk box of washing powder into their trolley.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because you said, “I don’t want to go out for dinner and sit there with all the couples who have nothing to say to each other anymore.”’

  Lou pulled an ‘oops’ face.

  ‘I thought that was harsh, but you were obviously feeling it at the time.’

  ‘So instead I wanted you to whisk me away to Aldi?’

  ‘Well, it is one of your favourite places,’ Josh said. He’d thought he was being charming. Apparently, his timing was off.

  Now they were sitting side by side in the car outside the church hall where the girls had once done ballet, which had morphed into hip-hop dancing and now martial arts. It was an evolution Josh and Lou appreciated, not least because karate meant no more sitting through interminable dance concerts where parents had to pretend to care about all the tip-tapping children who weren’t their own.

  ‘I thought it would be cool for us to do something together that didn’t involve the kids,’ Josh said, his hands gripping the steering wheel. ‘I’m sure you’ve said that to me more than once.’

  ‘You thought it would be cool for you to be able to play the guitar in public and not feel guilty that you weren’t including me,’ Lou snapped back, flicking off the radio. ‘This is about you. Not us.’

  Fuck you, thought Josh, and he released the steering wheel and slammed his hands against it. ‘Screw you,’ he said to Lou quietly. And he opened the car door and got out.

  Once outside, Josh suddenly felt ridiculous. That was a pointless gesture. Where was he going, exactly? He walked around the back of the car and over to the open door of the hall.

  Seriously. Fuck Lou.

  It took a lot to get Josh angry. At least, it used to take a lot to get Josh angry. He had been raised by his mum and his sisters to ‘work through’ those roiling waves of fury that had begun to hit him in adolescence. He had been conditioned, he could see now, to consider angry outbursts a weakness, not a show of strength, by a woman who’d had to tolerate living with a man – his father – who thought the opposite.

  But really, he was just trying to give Lou what she wanted, right? This wasn’t about him and his guitar. This was about ‘mixing things up’, a project she’d seemed to be set on since the beginning of the year. He’d thought he was taking the initiative, prioritising them doing something together. Lou was always telling him to do that. That he needed to show her he was thinking about her, about them.

  Mind you, the first couple of rehearsals with the school parents’ band had felt great. The guitar in his hands. The band behind him. The other parents in the group telling him he was definitely one of the most talented musos they’d had up there so far . . .

  Josh looked in through the door of the church hall. There was Rita, looking tiny in her oversized white karate uniform, the rolled-up legs dragging on the floor behind her, getting greyer by the minute. Still, she had her fists up, good defensive stance.

  Stella was closer to the front of the group, kicking and spinning like a yellow-belted ballerina. She caught sight of him, mid-turn, and offered a tiny secret wave of her fingers. Josh waved back, offered her a karate chop motion. She shook her head, just a little, as she turned, but she was smiling.

  Josh glanced back towards the car. He could see Lou, hunched over her phone in the passenger seat. Since the end of what she’d started to refer to as ‘Sex Month’, they had barely touched each other.

  ‘Fuck,’ he whispered under his breath.

  ‘Josh?’ A woman stepped in front of him. He had no idea where she’d come from. Was she coming in or going out of the karate hall?

  ‘It’s Dana,’ she said helpfully, clearly registering the blank expression on his face. ‘From the band. Keyboards. “Don’t Stop Believin’”.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course!’ In truth, Josh had barely noticed the other parents playing in the band, unless they were praising him. Apart from the other guitar player, of course. He’d sized him up, decided he was worthy competition. But the others? They were a blur – his back-up band. Was that bad?

  ‘My son’s in Stella’s class,’ Dana went on, and nodded through the open doorway towards one of the boys; Josh couldn’t tell which one. ‘Umbert.’

  ‘Umbert?’ Josh wasn’t sure if he’d heard that right.

  ‘Yes.’ Dana rolled her shoulders back a little. It was clearly not the first time she’d had to explain. ‘It’s Italian. My husband’s Italian. Our daughter’s called Aurora.’

  Oh. Josh could have sworn he’d never heard the name Umbert come out of Stella’s mouth. Or Lou’s. Still, now they were here, he and Umbert’s mum, apparently bonded by rock music, while Lou sat in the car.

  He reached around for small talk. No-one tells you this about school life, Josh thought. That you’re going to have to spend all this waiting time with people you don’t know. That all the friends you’ve chosen over the years because you liked each other and had things in common are going to be superseded by people who’d had sex at roughly the same time as you did and decided not to abort.

  This was the kind of thought he used to share with Lou. Once, she would have laughed if he said that out loud to her. Looking towards the car, Josh could tell by the set of her shoulders that she would choose not to find that funny these days. Especially not right now.

  He turned back to Dana. ‘Karate’s great for the kids,’ he said, gesturing vaguely towards the class. ‘Confidence and all that.’

  ‘I wanted Umbert to learn self-defence,’ Dana said. ‘His father is a weakling.’

  Josh wasn’t sure if he’d heard her right. The woman was standing right beside him, her arms crossed. She looked completely normal, in her leggings and T-shirt; she looked like all the mums did – like she was on her way to or from the gym. She had a yellow ponytail, some make-up on her face. She looked normal, but that was not a normal thin
g to say. Josh waited to see if Dana was going to laugh. She didn’t.

  He looked back towards the car again. He needed to tell Lou about this.

  ‘I’m sure he isn’t,’ he found himself saying, keeping the tone what he hoped was upbeat. ‘Umbert looks . . .’ Josh had no idea which kid was Umbert. ‘Tough!’

  Dana looked at Josh again, this time as if he was crazy. ‘You don’t have to stick up for all men, you know,’ she said. ‘His father is a weakling. And he doesn’t have a musical bone in his body. Umbert’ – she nodded again, and Josh desperately tried to follow the exact direction of her head, to pinpoint which kid she meant – ‘is going to be different.’

  ‘Okay.’ Josh decided to stop talking to Dana. Surely the class would be over any minute. He couldn’t go back to the car without the kids. He’d just have to be the rude prick standing here in silence, refusing to engage.

  *

  Joining the band hadn’t been all Josh’s idea.

  How good is the sex with your husband? Still 50-50?

  He had been trying to forget the text message he’d seen the night he and Lou had had sex in the shower and Rita had vomited all over the bedroom.

  The fact that Gretchen clearly knew about Sex Month was unsurprising. Josh was used to her being more across Lou’s thoughts and movements than he was; he was even quietly grateful for it, at times, knowing that her friend could offer his wife a level of emotional support that he couldn’t. But the fact that Lou had appeared to give him such a stinging sexual review? That was brutal. Surely things weren’t that bad? He’d genuinely thought that Sex Month was going well. After that, though, the rest of the experiment had bordered on grim. Lou had been determined that not a day of the contract could be missed, that there would be no reneging, no renegotiation – but enjoyment didn’t seem to come into it. There was no longer anything playful about what was going on between them. There was no space for joy.

  Josh didn’t have a Gretchen to confide in. He couldn’t picture himself talking to Mick or Tyler about the fact that his wife was making him have sex with her every day, even though she seemed to hate it. He couldn’t tell them how it felt to be above or below her – this woman he adored but was scared of now – willing himself to be enough. No, that was not a conversation for Tyler.

  Nor Anika. And not even Maya. Josh’s sisters had been his chorus of Lou-related wisdom since the beginning of their relationship, but over the last few years everyone’s lives had grown more complicated and crowded. Space for impartial advice had been gradually bumped out by grudges and tiny, tangled resentments.

  Anika was in the middle of what she called her post-divorce ‘relaunch’. She was training to be a yoga teacher, a life choice of such staggering predictability that Josh had to refrain from rolling his eyes every time she spoke about it. He watched as she and her boys tried to find a rhythm in a new world of two homes, two suburbs, scheduled days here, borrowed nights there . . . and he just wanted to kill Ed, her husband, for forcing his indomitable big sister into this bullshit situation of having to remake herself in her mid-forties. She had already become who she was, you dick, Josh thought. And you were never good enough for her anyway.

  The only pertinent piece of advice Anika had given him about marriage since hers went to shit was to ‘stay in the room’, to never give up.

  ‘I thought I had stayed in the room,’ she’d told him once, in one of the wine-fuelled sessions that had followed Ed’s abrupt departure. ‘But it turns out I was there on my own. He’d already left.’

  No. Anika had enough on her plate.

  And Maya was away, as she always was. ‘My little gypsy,’ his mother had called Maya since she was a tiny, adventurous child. Perhaps his mum had always wanted one of her girls to live a life she might have chosen if everything had been different. Perhaps she had always seen the restlessness in her second daughter. Whatever the case, Maya lived up to her label. She was entirely untethered. In her early forties now, Maya would still arrive on his doorstep unexpectedly, a single suitcase in hand, stopping in on a trip from the Territory to Bali or from Bali to New Zealand, chasing a new plan, a new job, a new relationship. Sometimes she sent epic emails full of wisdom and insight; sometimes Josh wouldn’t hear from her for months. Either way, she was not available for real-time relationship counselling, which, let’s be honest, was never her strong suit anyway.

  The night after the text message from Gretchen, Josh had turned to Google. That day, Lou had called him at the timber yard and asked him to come home urgently. He’d found her tearful but nevertheless insistent that they fuck in the laundry immediately. She was distraught, almost delirious with sleep deprivation from being up all night with a sick Rita, and the whole encounter left Josh feeling panicked.

  Later, when Lou had finally passed out on their bed and the girls were gently snoring side by side in their room, Josh had found himself in the spare room – the guitar room – in the dark, at his old laptop, searching, literally, for ‘marriage advice’.

  He was immediately confronted by his husbandly shortcomings. There were listicles filled with trite soundbites from long-married couples compiled, he suspected, by uncoupled twenty-one-year-old interns: ‘We never wanted to get divorced at the same time.’ ‘He makes me a cup of coffee every single morning.’ ‘Never try to win an argument for the sake of winning.’ ‘Do something every day that lets her know you appreciate her.’

  Then Josh found Eva Bernard.

  She was, according to her bio, the ‘guru of long-term love,’ and that night, despite being a man deeply cynical of gurus, despite being a man who had spent years teasing Lou about her interest in the shallow pleasures of social media and its stars, he clicked. And he watched. And he read.

  Bernard was what Josh’s mum would call ‘a woman of a certain age’, her appearance polished and put-together in a non-intimidating way, and she had a beguiling non-specific European accent and a list of letters after her name. Her qualifications made him comfortable, the sheer number of followers on her YouTube channel gave him confidence. He sat back with his guitar across his knee, headphones on, and watched her talk directly to the camera with gentle certainty. Each short video he watched was aimed at a different, eerily specific problem he could identify but not solve in his wife. This is interesting, he thought.

  That night Josh watched twelve of Bernard’s ‘Mini Marriage Masterclasses’ videos. The next night he watched them again. Eva never broke eye contact with him, even when she was delivering bad news. She just sat in her pastel-toned office and spoke into the camera about everything he was afraid of. And it felt soothing.

  ‘You must find the space in your love, in your life, for play,’ she said to the camera matter-of-factly. ‘Playing together really is a very big part of staying together. Most of us have forgotten how to do this.’ (The way she said ‘this’, with the hint of a ‘z’, was quickly becoming Josh’s favourite thing.) ‘And this is crucial. Crucial. A love without play is like a kite without a breath of wind. Lifeless, lying on the floor, looking pretty, going nowhere.’

  It was Eva who urged Josh to find a joint project for he and Lou to enjoy together. She suggested tennis, or dance classes, or running a marathon, or even taking a course, and this was what led him to the school band, which was playing an evening of cover duets at the next fundraiser and needed volunteers. That’s us, he’d thought. That’s exactly how I picture us being: community-minded but still cool. Not dead yet, he’d thought. We’re not dead yet.

  If Lou was curious about why Josh was suddenly making plans for them, after more than a decade of her being the one who made social arrangements, organised ‘date nights’ and controlled their calendar, she didn’t say so. She was mostly just irritated with him for doing it, which Eva had discussed in a different video – how change made people unsettled but was essential for growth.

  Yes, Eva would be proud of Josh’s proactivity, right up to the point where he’d told Lou to screw herself and slammed the car door
.

  *

  The sky was darkening over the suburban streetscape of red roofs and jacaranda trees and karate was finishing.

  The girls were lining up to thank their teacher. Lou was still in the car.

  ‘It’s Valentine’s Day,’ Dana said. ‘Remember when that meant something?’

  Why does this woman keeps saying this shit? Josh wondered. What does she think is going on with me? He was trying to remember the band rehearsals, whether he could remember Dana being there, what he might have said. He’d definitely said ‘my wife and I’ when he mentioned the song they were going to sing together, hadn’t he?

  He searched for a standard response. Something that wasn’t rude but that didn’t encourage further sharing. ‘Oh, it’s all commercial nonsense, right?’ he managed. ‘Invented by greetings card companies.’

  That’s what people said, wasn’t it?

  A little boy with dark hair, dark eyes and a slightly awkward air about him burst from the hall and ran at Dana. ‘Mama!’ he cried, wrapping his arms around her waist, burying his head in her sweat top. Umbert.

  Stella was walking towards Josh, a smile on her lips at having earned an extra sticky-taped stripe on her belt, which she was swinging lightly so that he would notice it. Proud. Rita was doing handstands against the wall with another girl, hair swinging.

  ‘Romance isn’t nonsense,’ Dana said before Stella reached them. ‘Married people have just convinced themselves it’s frivolous when, really, it’s everything.’

  Josh smiled what he hoped was a polite smile at Dana and, turning away, beckoned Stella into a one-armed embrace. His mum would say that the universe was trying to send him a message today, and it was not a very subtle one.

  He called Rita over and he and the girls walked back to the car, where Lou was still occupied with her phone.

  At the sound of the car door opening, she looked up. ‘Hello, my little valentines,’ she said, and Josh flinched; Guru Eva would not approve of him failing to make his wife feel special on this bullshit day. ‘How was karate? Kick some butt?’