I Give My Marriage a Year

by Holly Wainwright

  ‘If you want to, why don’t you?’ Lou was saying. ‘Maybe that’s exactly what you need.’

  Her face had been close to his ear, her breath hot, her face twisted into something like a smile, but there was no lightness in her eyes.

  ‘Stop it, you two.’ Gretchen’s voice, forceful. ‘You are not cut out for this shit.’

  *

  Eva Bernard wasn’t helping. Josh felt like he’d failed an important maturity test when he used the recent therapy session with Sara to provoke Lou. Eva, in her low, calm voice, always emphasised the importance of remaining neutral in counselling. You should refrain from trying to persuade the professional to take your side, because of course everyone wanted that, the validation of the marriage counsellor saying, ‘Yes, you’re right, they’re the problem, not you.’ Therapists don’t do that, Eva said.

  And it was true, Sara had not done that. When he’d launched into his values speech about Monogamy and Security, she had just looked at him with a direct, unwavering stare as Lou squirmed in her seat, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that Sara might assume he was projecting. ‘No,’ he wanted to say, ‘you don’t understand. She’s the one who’s . . .’

  He’d walked out of the therapist’s office that day feeling irritated with himself and the way he was handling this.

  That night, instead of watching more Eva videos as he waited out the evening in the guitar room, he started to write a song.

  It had been Dana who suggested he started writing again. After the concert, rehearsals had stopped. But on the days when he collected the girls from school, he’d see Dana the Strangely Straightforward in the playground, and she’d told him it wouldn’t be good for his soul or his marriage to put down the guitar again.

  ‘We could jam,’ she’d said in the schoolyard one afternoon. ‘Why not? We both have partners who don’t care about music. It will help.’

  Josh had suspected that Eva Bernard would consider this a dangerous invitation. That there was a high level of risk involved in embarking on a new friendship with a woman at exactly the moment your wife was questioning your relationship.

  He knew that, in theory. But also, he just wanted to.

  He liked how he felt when he was playing. He liked how he felt when this woman told him he sounded good, that this was his talent. He liked that she was encouraging him to do more, rather than Lou, who, it felt, was always trying to make him go away.

  What? Was he supposed to just be miserable?

  So these last couple of weeks, Josh had been working on something in the guitar room, and he’d send Dana the file, and she’d send back notes. Notes like, ‘Love the opening, lots of heart, maybe bring the first chord in a beat sooner . . .’ and Josh had felt listened to; he had felt heard.

  The invitation to come camping had been a weird one. He’d been waiting for Stella to finish her violin lesson on a Wednesday afternoon, listening to her murder ‘Three Blind Mice’ note by note (she had no passion for the fiddle, but Lou insisted that she choose an instrument, and that was the one she’d picked this year) when Dana had appeared next to him, as she seemed to do quite a bit lately. She’d asked him about Easter, and he’d told her about camping, how they always went to the same campground, booked the same spot. How often another family or two would join them, but this time none of the others could make it . . . Dana said that was strange, because she and Marco had planned to take Umbert and Aurora to that very same campsite, but she’d only just realised that her husband hadn’t actually called to make the booking, and now the kids were devastated, because they’d set their hearts on camping by the beach. And somehow Josh had found himself saying that he knew the guy who ran the place, after a few years of going, and sometimes there were late cancellations – he could give him a call.

  And that’s how they’d got to this strange situation of arriving at their allotted spot on Good Friday to discover that Dana and Marco were right next door, set up already. Lou had looked like she might explode. She and Gretchen – who’d somehow managed to book a late-cancellation cabin – had taken the kids off for a swim as he put up the tent and pondered how the hell he’d let this happen.

  The first day had been fine, really. The four kids formed a fast alliance, and roamed the campsite’s attractions – a jumping pillow, a playground, a ping-pong table, a giant foam Jenga – falling in and out of gangs, occasionally returning to their parents to get fed or register a complaint or show off a scraped knee. Gretchen and Lou went for long walks while Josh sat under the tarp outside the tent with his guitar.

  Marco didn’t look like the ‘weakling’ Dana had described. He looked like a short, stocky man whose irritation with life – and his wife – was close to the surface, roiling just under his tanned skin. He wore a button-up shirt with a collar (camping!) but with the sleeves rolled to his elbows and said hardly anything to anyone. He was into fishing, so he was either away doing it – no invitation extended to Josh – or was endlessly fiddling with his rods and lines, tightening, loosening, hooking things to other things. It was an all-consuming hobby, clearly, and Josh knew Lou would be looking at Marco and comparing him instantly to Josh and his guitar.

  Last night, they’d all decided to cook together.

  First, the kids and their sausages, and then, when the four small mouths had been fed and banished to tents with torches and movies playing on their iPads, the adults sat down to eat their meal – steaks and salad, and a lot of red wine.

  It wasn’t too weird at first. An advantage to taking Gretchen anywhere was that she was gregarious company in any awkward social situation, always ready with a story, a self-deprecating joke, the suggestion of a game.

  Josh sat back and said as little as he could get away with as he drank the wine and avoided Marco’s glare. Marco didn’t drink the communal red. He had a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label, and after the steaks he sipped it from a tin camping mug, no ice, and offered it to no-one else.

  ‘Marco, what do you do?’ Gretchen asked, stretching out her legs to spray them with RID.

  He winced at the smell of the insect repellent. ‘I work for a data company,’ he said. ‘I make systems work.’

  It was the kind of answer that meant absolutely nothing to Josh. Yeah, mate, he said in his head, but what do you do? Like, all day?

  Gretchen seemed to get it, though. ‘I’m a corporate coach,’ she told him, which was another job Josh didn’t get. ‘I work with people like you.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ Marco said quite quickly.

  Josh had never heard anyone be rude to Gretchen before – other than himself, on occasion – so he looked over at her, wondering how she’d react, and whether he was expected to come to her defence. She was kind of a third sister in his eyes after all these years, someone he was duty-bound to side with.

  Lou was carrying a tub full of plates back from the shared kitchen area, and missed the moment. Dana was checking on the kids.

  Gretchen, to Josh’s surprise, smiled. ‘Oh, I do,’ she said. ‘Little big guys like you, all the time.’

  ‘Hey, hey, let’s change the subject.’ Josh’s interruption was half-hearted, and clearly Marco could tell, because he spoke over him.

  ‘I don’t need any coaching,’ he said. And he reached under his seat. ‘Who would like some whisky?’

  The evening turned right then, on the uncapping of the Johnnie Walker Blue.

  Josh could remember all that, and he could remember Lou and Dana coming back, and everyone having some whisky. He remembered a crumpled-looking Stella coming out of the tent at some point and telling all the ‘grown-ups’ to be quiet, she couldn’t sleep, and Josh had taken her back to bed and lay down on the girls’ mattress for a bit, boozily singing them a camping lullaby.

  He should have stayed there. Fallen asleep right then. Because after that, everything went weird.

  When he came back out, Marco poured him another drink and Dana told Josh to play the song he was writing.

  Lou said, ‘How do
es she know you’re writing a song?’

  Before Josh could say anything, Marco did. From his giant camp chair, whiskey in hand, he’d said, ‘Because she wants to fuck your husband.’

  Gretchen laughed. A big, mad laugh. But Lou wasn’t laughing. And Josh couldn’t remember every word, but he remembered Lou not shouting, but hissing. Things like: ‘Go right ahead, I think the feeling’s mutual,’ and, ‘Well, I’m glad somebody does,’ and, ‘Stroke his ego for a minute and he’s all yours.’

  Dana was strangely quiet. Josh remembered trying to say, ‘Hey, hey, it’s not true. It’s not like that. Everyone. Calm down.’

  But the weirdest thing, as Gretchen went over to Lou and Josh sat frozen, like he was stuck to this stupid fold-out chair, was that Dana did not correct her husband, even when Marco said, ‘Why else do you think we’re here?’

  And then things got really blurry, because as Gretchen yelled out, ‘They’re fucking swingers, this is excellent!’ and Dana started to say, ‘No, no,’ Rita had cried out.

  Lou rushed to her daughter in the tent. As Josh stood up – to follow, he was certain – Dana lurched towards him, all tangled blonde hair and this big, wet mouth, and tried to kiss him. Josh stood there a beat too long, her mouth on his mouth, her tongue pushing between his lips. He could hear Marco laughing and Rita crying. Then he pushed her away.

  But Lou was there, holding Rita, and she said, ‘If you want to, why don’t you?’

  And Josh was shaking his head at her. ‘No, I don’t want to.’

  Marco’s voice. ‘You don’t know what you want. You’re as bad as her.’ Nodding at his wife.

  And Lou: ‘Maybe we should all just get this out of the way.’

  But little Rita was still there, and Josh took her, and he stumbled off towards the toilet block with her, and that’s when he heard Gretchen telling Lou that they weren’t cut out for this shit.

  When they got to the toilet block, Rita wasn’t crying anymore, but she needed a wee. I’m hiding in here, he thought, sitting on the floor with his back to the cubicle door, his five-year-old daughter on the loo inside. I’m always fucking hiding.

  And when she was finished, he carried his little girl back towards the tent, her head nodding drowsily on his shoulder. He stopped just before he hit the circle of light cast by the lantern hanging above the table.

  Dana was sitting in a camp chair, her head in her hands, Marco beside her, using a torch to examine something important in the fishing box at his feet. Really? Josh thought. Now’s the time to sort your tackle?

  He could hear Lou and Gretchen talking quietly, urgently, but he didn’t know where. And Josh had carried his sleeping daughter past the oblivious couple and into the tent, put her to bed, and then collapsed onto the leaking blow-up mattress.

  *

  Josh was sitting under the tarp in the rain alone, drinking bad coffee from a plastic mug, when one car came back to camp. It was Marco and Dana with Bertie and Aurora.

  Marco got out first. He was wearing an expensive-looking rain jacket, the collar up. He gave Josh a brusque nod.

  Then Dana and the kids emerged, their arms full of chocolate eggs.

  ‘Good haul,’ Josh said to them, trying to act normal in an abnormal moment, but they just looked at him and disappeared into their tent.

  ‘Your family is gone,’ Marco said to him.

  Josh frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Are you surprised?’ Marco asked. ‘After you two made such fools of yourselves last night?’

  As he said that, Marco gave Dana the kind of look you might give a misbehaving dog. What an awful prick you are, thought Josh. How did I get here, tangled up with these two?

  ‘They’ve driven back to Sydney,’ Dana said. She came and crouched next to Josh, put a hand on his arm. She looked different this morning. Her hair was back in its ponytail. Her mouth seemed to have shrunk to a normal size.

  ‘But . . .’ Josh felt furious. He looked at the tent. All the stuff inside it. The rain. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They said’ – Marco smiled slightly – ‘you could pack up and get the train home.’

  ‘Mate . . .’ Josh stood up, found himself squaring up to Marco. ‘There’s no need to look so happy about it. In my memory, you started all this’ – he looked around for kids’ ears, saw none – ‘shit last night.’

  Marco stepped forward, smirking. ‘Yes,’ he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘The problems in your marriage are definitely my fault.’

  ‘My marriage? You said what you said about your wife, mate.’

  ‘Stop it,’ Dana said, again putting her hand on Josh’s arm; he had to resist the urge to brush it off. ‘We were all drinking, things just got away from us. We are sorry. I feel just terrible about all this . . . mess.’

  ‘You should feel terrible,’ Josh’s anger was rising to the pulsing pain in his head. ‘None of it should have happened.’

  He looked around at the other campsites that surrounded them, their guide ropes were all tapped in nice and tight, plenty of distance between the tent and the fly. No leakage.

  He thought about Lou and Gretchen getting in the car and leaving him. What would they have told the kids? Fuck, he needed to talk to Lou.

  ‘You don’t have to go,’ said Dana. ‘You can stay another night. We’ll give you a lift back tomorrow.’

  ‘I think that is a terrible idea,’ Josh said, picking up his rain jacket from a camp chair.

  ‘Easter Sunday, friend,’ Marco pointed out bluntly. ‘Hard to get a train.’

  ‘I’ll manage,’ Josh said. And he shook Dana’s hand off his arm, drained his tin mug, and walked towards his soggy tent.

  Inside, he found his phone and called Lou.

  No answer.

  He called Gretchen.

  No answer.

  He called again.

  ‘Josh, come on,’ Gretchen said as she picked up the phone.

  ‘Come on?’ He looked at the phone for a moment. ‘Where are you? Can you come back and get me? Put Lou on.’

  ‘She’s angry, Josh, and she’s driving.’ Gretchen’s voice was calm, resigned. ‘She thinks a bit of clear air is for the best.’

  He could hear the bleep-bleep of one of the girls’ games in the back seat. He also really doubted Lou was driving. Josh felt like throwing his phone.

  ‘Gretch,’ he said, ‘what am I meant to do?’

  He heard Gretchen sigh.

  ‘Make your own way back!’ It was Lou’s voice, calling from somewhere else in the car. ‘Sort out your own mess.’

  ‘Josh, I’m hanging up,’ Gretchen said. And she did.

  ‘Fuck!’ Josh looked at his phone in his hand for a moment, feeling the frustration building to an unbearable pulse in his head. ‘Fuck!’ And he threw the phone across the tent, watching it plop into rainwater that had been drip-drip-dripping into a murky shallow pool right next to the sagging blow-up mattress.

  ‘Fuck.’

  Lou

  18 April, 2012

  When Lou saw the tree outside the house in Botany, she knew immediately that they were leaving the inner west.

  She hadn’t told Josh she was coming here today.

  The place was everything she had said she never wanted. A multi-storey townhouse near the airport, not close to anything in particular, not old, not ‘character-filled’, not within walking distance of a cafe or a pub or a supermarket. It was one of a complex of ten, all identical, built just five years before.

  Josh was going to hate it.

  But the tree. The tree might get him over the line. A beautiful, spreading yellow ash; the developer must have had to wrap that trunk in cotton wool to preserve it as the complex went up all around. And here it stood, in the front garden of the first house in the block, the only one that faced the street. It gave the house a feeling of privacy and the front rooms something pretty to look at. And the house was for sale.

  Lou looked down at Stella sitting in the pushchair, shoving a bana
na into her face, her hands covered in mush. Stella looked up at her, giggled through a mouthful of goo.

  ‘You like it, right?’ Lou said to Stella. ‘This is the kind of place we can get messy.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ Stella answered. ‘Yayayaya.’

  ‘We’re going to have to talk to Daddy.’

  ‘Dada.’ Stella had just begun making sounds that could be mistaken for words. Lou, home all day with her daughter, had been coaching her to say ‘Mama’ for weeks.

  ‘Don’t be saying his name first, now, Stella,’ Lou warned her. ‘That would just be cruel.’

  ‘Dadadada.’

  *

  To say a baby changes things is the understatement of a lifetime, Lou decided.

  If pregnancy had made her feel like a stranger in her own body, the first year of motherhood had made her feel like a stranger in her own life.

  Her world had expanded and contracted at the same time. It had expanded to include all these things she had never even thought about before, like: What kind of bullshit design flaw makes breastfeeding so hard? Was she ever going to be by herself ever again? How was it possible for even your hair to feel tired?

  Every week and month brought a new cluster of baffling, banal conundrums. If Stella sleeps for an extra hour in the afternoon, will that mean a later bedtime or an earlier wake-up? If I don’t look her in the eye when I go to settle her, will she go straight back down? Why have I spent a day googling whether the pram should now face in or face out? Why do I suddenly feel that Pocket the cat is a menace who has to go? Why is it when I leave Stella with Uncle Rob for an hour she’s an angel, but as soon as I turn up she cries?

  And so on. And so on. And so on.

  But as all these new questions crowded in, her world had contracted to the four walls of her home, and the specific streets of her suburb.

  Suddenly, the only other people she saw were essentially strangers: other mothers with babies who weren’t at work during the day. They’d huddle together in any coffee shop that would welcome them, as no-one’s home was big enough to hold them all with their prams and their huge bags stuffed with essential accessories.