I Give My Marriage a Year

by Holly Wainwright

  *

  By 11.30 p.m. they were back in a surge-charging Uber on their way home.

  ‘I really would have liked to stay until midnight,’ Lou said. Her hand was very far from holding his. ‘That’s kind of the point of New Year’s Eve.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Lou, I am.’ Josh’s head felt thick, his tongue felt thick, his head was already pulsing. ‘Must have been something I ate.’

  ‘I don’t think it was something you ate, Josh,’ Lou said sharply.

  ‘Well’ – Josh couldn’t be sure if he’d already said this, but it seemed reasonable – ‘you could have hung out with me more. I wouldn’t have felt like such a spare fucking part.’

  ‘I don’t want to babysit you, Josh, you’re a grown man. I should be able to take you to a party.’

  ‘You know I hate parties. Especially teacher parties.’

  ‘But you could do it for me, right? Once a year? Or are we way past doing nice things for each other?’

  Josh put his head between his hands, holding on to it to stop it spinning. ‘Here we go. Let’s count the ways I’m such a disappointment to you.’ And he knew that was a gateway line to a fight they’d had many times – but this time, Lou didn’t bite.

  After a beat, he looked over at her, and he could see, even in the dark of the car, that she was crying.

  Shit.

  ‘I’ll be out of your hair tomorrow,’ he said sulkily. ‘I’m going to Mum’s.’

  ‘Good,’ said Lou.

  Josh coughed.

  ‘One hundred and fifty dollars if you’re sick in the back,’ said the Uber driver.

  ‘Happy New Year to you too, mate,’ said Josh. He looked at Lou again.

  She was still crying.

  Lou

  I give my separation six weeks.

  Bold. Underlined.

  I give my separation six weeks.

  Six weeks to decision day.

  Lou had written it in her notes as she sat in the car outside Sara’s office.

  The office wasn’t so bright today. The city was shrouded in smoke haze.

  It was the first time Lou hadn’t wished for blinds to soften the light in the room, and it felt like the end of the world.

  All anyone could talk about was how unsettling it was that Sydney was circled by fires and choking with smoke, and compare their degrees of separation from the places that were in flames.

  The sense of anxiety was palpable, but Lou couldn’t stop looking at Josh.

  He was wearing a shirt she’d never seen before. It was navy blue, which was a colour she’d always told him was great for his eyes. The number of navy things she’d bought him over the years that sat in the back of wardrobes, or got worn but washed until they disintegrated.

  Lou was trying to picture Josh deciding he needed to buy a new shirt, planning to go to a shop, travelling there, picking it out, trying it on, buying it. Choosing to wear it today, on the day he’d booked the appointment.

  ‘Is that a new shirt?’ she asked Josh, who was sitting forward on the lounge with his hands on his knees, as if he was ready for something to happen and wanted to give it his full attention.

  Josh shrugged. ‘I guess,’ he said.

  It was deeply strange, trying to unknow someone you knew better than anyone.

  Sara looked up from her notes, ready to start. ‘The smoke’s terrible today, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘The kids can’t play outside,’ said Lou. ‘School’s like a madhouse.’ Then, to Josh, ‘I think Rita’s getting asthma.’

  ‘She’s not,’ Josh said. ‘She just has a cough.’

  ‘Who doesn’t?’ asked Sara, and they both looked at her, a little shocked. Nope, she doesn’t have kids, thought Lou.

  ‘So,’ said Sara brightly. ‘It’s been four months, and I’m really interested to see how you are both feeling about where you are in this trial.’

  Lou sucked in her breath. She didn’t want to go first, not today.

  She didn’t have to. ‘There are some things I want to say,’ Josh said.

  Lou and Sara looked at him, surprised.

  ‘I wanted to say, Lou, that you are right,’ Josh said, in the weird sinister glow of the therapist’s office. ‘About almost everything.’

  Lou had to stop herself from laughing. She instantly thought of all the women she knew who would die to hear those words, which was, actually, every woman she knew.

  ‘What?’ she said, but Sara held up a hand that said, Let the man talk.

  ‘You’re right: you have been dragging my arse around for fourteen years. It’s not your fault that I have let my passions . . .’ he still couldn’t actually say that word without a sarcastic tone, Lou was reassured to see, but still, ‘. . . slide and sometimes blamed you and the family for it. I can be passive, and I can be boring to live with, and I adore you but I don’t appreciate you enough, all the things you do for me, and all the ways you make my life better. I just don’t.

  ‘I don’t support you enough, I don’t see all the work you do, I didn’t deliver you the kind of life your mother wanted for you. All of that. You’re right about all that.’

  As Josh stopped speaking, Lou was expecting a ‘but’. He was sitting there, her husband, in his new shirt, looking at the floor.

  Then he drew a breath and said, ‘And I know we have another month of the trial separation to go, but I hate it and I think you hate it and I’m fairly certain the kids hate it, too.’

  Please stop talking, Josh, Lou was thinking. I can’t hear this. Six weeks. We have six weeks.

  ‘But’ – here it was – ‘I am wrong and you’ve been wrong, too. You took your anger at me and you used it to do something that made everything so much worse. The “stuff” we told Sara about when we first came here, it’s still hanging over our heads. I’m pretty certain that’s why we’re sitting here in this – excuse me, Sara – fishbowl that we can’t afford. And we tiptoe around it, because you think the point of coming here is for me to understand what an imperfect partner I am and all the ways I’ve let you down. Fair cop. But I’ve accepted my punishment for long enough, really, Lou. I think it’s time for you to come clean.’

  Lou wondered if she would ever not feel nauseous again. She had been feeling that way for months, she realised.

  She could feel Sara’s eyes on her.

  ‘Come clean?’ she managed.

  ‘Talk about the elephant taking a shit in the middle of the room,’ said Josh, irritated. ‘I know we’re doing all our non-logistical communication only in this office at the moment, so that’s why I’m saying this here. I think you have to tell Sara – and me – the truth about your affair.’

  ‘Excuse me, Josh, I just have to jump in.’ The therapist was tapping her notebook with her pen. ‘Lou doesn’t have to tell me anything. She has the agency here.’

  ‘Apologies, Sara, I understand your point and your role.’ Lou couldn’t remember when she’d seen Josh so confident, and so . . . certain. ‘What I meant to say was, I am ready to hear it all, here, now, and maybe I wasn’t, for a long time. If I’m going to stop being a deadweight, we’ve got to get it all out . . . The truth will set us free and all that.’

  Sara looked at Lou. Lou looked at Josh. She heard herself go immediately on the defensive. ‘Oh, so now, because you’re ready to hear it, I’m meant to be ready to –’

  And Josh stood up, ran his palms down his jeans. ‘I know it’s bad form to walk out of therapy,’ he said. ‘But I’m just saying, if we can’t be honest, when the stakes are so . . . so very high, for us, the kids, our families, then . . . I want you to call me back when we can.’

  And he walked to the door, opened it, and left.

  Lou stared after him. She knew she was going to cry. She couldn’t cry in front of Sara. She awkwardly started gathering her jacket and bag.

  ‘You know, Lou, you don’t have to take that on,’ said Sara. ‘You don’t need to be told off. You just need to think about whether or not you’re prepared to give
what he’s asking. It’s not right or wrong.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Lou, fighting back rising tears. ‘I know. It’s just . . . a lot at the moment.’

  ‘And you stayed in the room,’ Sara added. ‘He didn’t.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Lou was trying to put her jacket on, but the sleeve was half inside out and she spent what felt like a long minute wrestling with it. ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘I’m not trying to make you feel better,’ Sara the therapist said. ‘That’s not my job.’

  ‘Sure, right.’ Lou finally made it to the end of the sleeve. She wanted to run after him, almost overwhelmingly. But she wasn’t sure what she’d do if she caught up with him. ‘I should run after him, right?’ she said to Sara from the door.

  ‘This isn’t a movie, Lou,’ the therapist said, but she sounded kind.

  *

  Lou didn’t run after Josh.

  Instead, she messaged Gretchen, who was now in bloody Iceland, pushing her tilt at being a digital nomad to the extreme. Can we talk?

  But the time difference was clearly off, or Gretchen was caught halfway up some photogenic glacier, because there was no response. Maybe it was just as well, Lou thought, putting her phone away. Gretchen couldn’t clean up every single one of her messes. Maybe that’s why she was in Iceland in the first place.

  So Lou went back to work. She’d left at three for the appointment, and when Josh stalked off he was presumably heading for the girls’ school, since it was his night at home. She could go and sort out the classroom, get a jump towards the end of year reports, avoid thinking about Josh’s ultimatum.

  Driving through the smoky gloom of Matraville to Bayside, she realised that wouldn’t be possible. Whichever way she looked at it, she knew what the last item on the list had to be:

  11. Confess. All of it.

  Back in the classroom, Lou looked around at the mess she’d left behind after a day of up-cycling rubbish into solar systems. The room was a sea of plastic bottles, scourers and toilet rolls. On every desk sat the results of the kids’ efforts, paint bubbles popping and glue drying. She was focusing on tidying when she heard a familiar clearing of a throat and looked up to see Theo’s frame filling the doorway.

  ‘Congratulations, Ms Winton,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I heard your promotion is official.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Lou asked, her stomach contracting.

  ‘It’s my last day,’ said Theo. ‘I came to say goodbye.’

  He’d had his leaving drinks with the staff. Lou had found an excuse not to be there. The last thing she needed was to spend any more time with Theo than was absolutely necessary. Especially this week.

  ‘Missed you at my farewell.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I was busy.’ But, again, what are you doing here?

  Theo sat on the edge of one of the kids’ tiny desks. It was Ryan Harcourt’s. Despite her misstep with his mum, Ryan had come a long way this year. Sometimes now he sat still for as long as twenty minutes at a time, and today he’d put an enormous effort into the order of his dish-sponge planets, painting them just the right colours, a look of concentration on his face. Now Theo’s arrogant arse was centimetres from squashing it.

  ‘There’s something I haven’t told you,’ Theo said. ‘On New Year’s Eve, the day before you called me, I met your husband at Beth’s party. He was drunk, in the garden, talking to the chickens.’

  Really? Lou felt a stab of panic. ‘I don’t think that’s . . .’

  ‘That’s what he was doing.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about this here, Theo,’ Lou said, looking over to the open door. ‘I think you should go.’

  ‘I had never seen him before then,’ Theo went on.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Of course, I’ve seen him since. At the concert. He’s a handsome guy.’ That was the kind of thing Theo said about other men. Words like ‘handsome’. Big manly words, big manly compliments.

  ‘So what?’ Lou was feeling a bit sick.

  ‘He was also fucking miserable.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about him, Theo,’ Lou said.

  ‘I know that he made a fool of himself that night and the very next day you called me to come over to your house and fuck you,’ Theo said, and he pushed off Ryan Harcourt’s desk, sending a tiny spongy Pluto flying from his night sky, and walked towards her.

  In three years, he had never spoken words like that to Lou inside the walls of the school. It made her feel unsafe. This was the kind of risky behaviour they’d avoided for years, dancing around each other with exaggerated politeness.

  But who was she kidding? A guy who screwed a workmate in a public gym and sexted her when he knew she was home with her family? Who turned up at an event when he knew her husband would be there? That wasn’t risk-averse behaviour. Gretchen was right.

  ‘That was a mistake,’ she said. ‘I was in a bad place.’

  ‘Such bullshit,’ Theo said, smiling a little. ‘A bad place.’

  ‘Theo, I want you to leave, please.’

  ‘Your home is lovely, Lou,’ Theo said, and he was walking towards her, stopping an arm’s length away. ‘I spent six months hoping you’d call me over there again.’

  ‘Theo, we’ve already been over this. It was a mistake. It’s done.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘I have other distractions. I just needed to tell you that.’

  Lou looked again to the open door. She could just walk out. There were people around. It was okay.

  ‘And something else. After observing what I observed – and I am a good observer, a people person, you know that – you’re just going to end up back there again, Lou, no matter what you think.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Lou said. ‘Please, Theo just piss off.’

  ‘Even if you choose to keep your husband and your happy little home with its pretty yellow tree,’ Theo said, his voice quiet, steady, ‘you’ll still be back. I’ve met him, now. And I know you’ll be back there again one day. You’ll be sitting across from some other guy, saying, I need to have sex with someone who isn’t my husband’ – Theo gave her a high, whiny, desperate voice – ‘and starting all kinds of trouble.’

  For a split second, Lou imagined punching Theo in the face. Or flying at him, whirling, pulling and scratching. In that instant she pictured a crash, a commotion, a scene.

  No. She wasn’t going to do that.

  She was aware of the sounds of voices and scraping chairs in the corridor down the hall.

  Lou clenched her fists and said, ‘You’re pathetic, Theo. I find it very hard to believe I ever thought otherwise. Actually, I don’t think I ever did. I think I was just unwell.’

  He sneered. ‘Sure you were, Lou. All those times.’

  ‘You . . .’ Lou stepped towards Theo, not away from him. It was hard to look up at him, he was so tall, but she wanted to be clear. ‘You don’t know anything about my husband. You don’t know a thing about my marriage, or my family, or my home, whatever you think. I never gave anything of myself to you. You’ – check the door again, Lou, she thought – ‘were a fuck. And your fragile little ego can’t deal with it.’

  I hope no-one heard that, was Lou’s first thought, as she finally did push Theo, who looked like he’d been slapped, towards the door.

  ‘Now get the fuck out of my classroom,’ she said.

  Lou was shaking; she knew she was flushed from her neck to her scalp, and her voice was cracking. This is what fury feels like, she thought. This is what fury looks like. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry.

  Theo looked like he was wrestling with fury, too. He was ridiculous, this giant man in this colourful room of tiny furniture, standing there, wondering where to go.

  ‘Does he know you slept with me in his bed?’ he asked, as he started a slow walk towards the door. ‘Was that just a fuck?’

  And just before he stepped out into the corridor he turned and gave her a little wave. ‘Good luck, Lou.’


  Josh

  ‘Did she like the shirt?’ asked Dana, leaning across the pub table to flatten a spring of Josh’s hair.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ said Josh, with a little duck of his head, and Dana pulled a face at him. ‘She noticed it, didn’t offer an opinion.’

  ‘Do you feel better?’ she asked. ‘Taking a stand?’

  ‘I feel’ – Josh looked into his beer – ‘like I’m in limbo.’

  ‘Write that down,’ said Dana, pushing Josh’s phone towards him.

  ‘I just . . . I need to force the issue. The girls are suffering, we’re suffering. We just need to get on with it.’

  How did this happen? Josh wondered. How had Dana become his confidante? And then he pulled himself up. He knew how it had happened. Intentionally. Like a whole lot of shit that he was trying to do at the moment. On purpose.

  They were at a pub together because they’d come to see a band. Josh felt like he’d travelled back in time, sitting in the Annandale Hotel in the inner west, waiting to see an old friend play. When was the last time he and Lou had done this? Would Lou maybe still like to do this sometimes? Did she ever like it?

  Every other pub in Sydney might have moved on to espresso martinis on tap and crab sliders, but the Annandale seemed reassuringly unchanged. The carpet was still a touch sticky, the beer was still served in unreconstructed schooner glasses and the clientele generally had jeans that went all their way to their shoes. I really am an old bastard now, thought Josh.

  ‘You know this isn’t a date, right?’ he said to Dana. ‘You’re just the only person I know who might not hate this.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘We’re both still married, after all.’ But she was smiling as she said it, and Josh knew that he was probably being a bit of a dick, encouraging this. But fuck it – he was allowed to go to a gig with a female friend. Right?

  The writing was going well. It was helping him feel less . . . wretched. Once a week for the last few weeks, he and Dana had met in the garage of her house, him with his guitar, her with her keyboard, and thrown a few ideas around. The kids were inside the house, entertained by iPad or asleep, as they’d play a few songs they both knew, and then he’d show her what he’d been working on, and she’d critique.