I Give My Marriage a Year

by Holly Wainwright

  He knew it couldn’t go on forever, that the words said through the camping truth serum of whisky were still floating around out there somewhere, and that Dana was an unreliable narrator of the reality of either her own or his marriage, but he enjoyed it; it felt like a bright spot in his life. He was thinking of asking one of his old muso mates, Bob Oslo, if he could play in his band sometimes.

  Which was why there were here tonight. It was not a date.

  ‘I think you seem lighter lately,’ said Dana, shouting slightly over the music. ‘How’s Lou?’

  ‘She seems fine,’ he said, sipping his drink. I can’t talk about Lou with you, he thought, that’s not what this is. But the trouble was, in between the writing and the playing, little slivers of actual companionship had slipped into this strange arrangement, and he had found himself telling Dana things he never intended. His sister Anika didn’t know what went on in the therapist’s office, but Dana had encouraged Josh to stand up for himself, even if she didn’t know all the details. No-one did.

  Except Mum. At the thought of Emma, Josh automatically looked at his phone. He, like most of Sydney, had downloaded an app called Fires Near Me. Josh had plugged in Emma’s address up the coast. So far, nothing had come too close to the blond-brick retirement community, but there were fires above and below, and he’d been arguing with Anika and Maya about going up to get her before the threat got any more serious.

  ‘She won’t want to leave,’ Maya had insisted. ‘It’s her home now.’

  ‘She doesn’t have to leave,’ Josh had said. ‘She just needs to take a little break in the city.’

  ‘Where in the city?’ Anika asked. ‘The two of you are pretty much homeless and my couch is booked out. Let’s wait to see if it’s necessary.’

  Tonight, the fire app didn’t show anything more alarming than the new normal: little blue diamond markers covering the state’s coastline. But blue didn’t signify an emergency.

  The crowd began to shuffle and clap, as Josh’s old friend Bob climbed onto the stage, guitar in hand, to start the show.

  ‘I approve of your therapy breakthrough giving you something to write about for Pearl Hass,’ Dana shouted. ‘Since I appear to be your agent these days.’

  *

  After the show, Josh added an extra stop to the Uber and dropped Dana at her house.

  Pulling up outside in the dark, the night mercifully still after the gusting hot winds that had been fanning the fires all week, Dana didn’t open the car door. ‘You should come in,’ she said. ‘Have one more drink.’

  ‘Not a chance,’ he said, but he hoped he said it kindly.

  ‘You’re messing with me,’ Dana said. ‘It’s not nice.’

  He looked at her. Could he imagine being with Dana, either for one night or many? He liked her honesty, her humour. He liked how he looked through her eyes. He liked that she liked his music. All of that was flattering. And he liked the way she moved in these tight jeans and this T-shirt that stopped just in time to show a little stripe of stomach when she raised her arms. And her swinging ponytail. He liked all that. But he also knew this was about the most complicated rebound sex he could choose. It would be like an act of war.

  ‘I thought we were friends,’ he said. But even as he did, he knew she was right. It was not nice.

  ‘Then come in as a friend,’ she said, nodding towards the house. ‘There’s only a teenage babysitter to pay in there, and then it’s all quiet.’

  Josh looked at her, feeling the Uber driver’s irritation at this lengthy pause. ‘I . . .’

  She leaned into him again, like she had that night when they were camping, and stopped with her lips a couple of centimetres from his mouth, looking into his eyes.

  ‘Come on, guys,’ said the Uber driver. ‘Is there another stop or not?’

  ‘No,’ said Dana. ‘Is there, Josh?’

  She was about to kiss him when his phone rang.

  ‘Don’t look at it,’ Dana said, pulling back and putting a hand on his crotch. ‘Don’t look at it.’

  ‘I’m . . . a dad,’ he managed. ‘I’m looking at it.’

  It was Lou. ‘Oh,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t answer it.’

  He pressed the green button. ‘Lou?’

  Dana took her hand off his jeans and sighed loudly.

  ‘I need to see you now,’ she said. Her voice was thick from crying.

  Josh looked at the time on the Uber dash: 12.30 a.m. ‘Is everything okay? The girls – are they okay?’

  ‘They’re fine,’ she gasped. ‘It’s me. I’m not okay. Can you come?’

  Josh didn’t even think about it. ‘Yes,’ he said. He pressed the red button to end the call, looked back at Dana.

  ‘Ridiculous,’ she said. ‘Fucking ridiculous. I don’t know if there’s a word anymore that you’re allowed to use for “cock-tease”, but that’s what you are, you spineless, cruel prick.’

  As Dana climbed out of the car, Josh said to the driver, ‘Sorry, there’s going to be another stop.’

  *

  Lou was sitting under the tree.

  When Josh climbed out of the Uber he saw her there, on the grass, in a big white shirt he recognised as his, one of the rare collared shirts he owned. Lou had bought it for him for her friend’s wedding; they’d had a row about him having to wear it. She looks good in it, he thought. She always looks good.

  Lou didn’t look up to acknowledge his arrival. He walked over to her and crouched down, put a finger under her chin and lifted her face until she met his eyes.

  Lou’s eyes. He’d looked into them every day for fourteen years. He knew everything about them. Tonight they were full, and they were so, so sad.

  ‘You’re going to get grass stains on my shirt,’ he said to her, still holding her chin.

  She attempted a smile. ‘You never wore this shirt,’ she said.

  ‘I might want to now,’ he said. ‘I might have to go on dates.’

  And she almost laughed. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘You’ll be terrible at that.’

  He let go of her chin and sat beside her. Both of their backs were against the tree trunk.

  ‘I hate the fires,’ said Lou. ‘I feel sick all the time. I’m worried about your mum.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Josh. ‘I’m thinking about going to get her.’

  ‘Everything is trashed. The world terrifies me.’

  Josh said nothing. They sat there. The street was quiet. Just streetlamps and a few cats, some lights still on in a sprinkling of houses, the flicker of a TV screen in the window of one of the flats across the road. The slightest breeze in the tree’s leaves above them. One a.m. in the suburbs.

  ‘I’m ready to tell you,’ Lou said. ‘That’s why I called.’

  ‘What about Sara’s office? What about four weeks?’

  ‘I need to tell you.’

  Okay. Josh took a big gulp of night air into his lungs, held his breath for a moment. He could taste smoke and beer, and the hot chips he and Dana had eaten when they’d left the pub. He reached for Lou’s hand and held it.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He’s called Theo,’ Lou said. ‘The guy from years ago. The guy from this year. He’s called Theo.’

  T.

  ‘He was the deputy head at school.’

  What Josh felt then was like a thud. It took a second, just a second, for his mind to fill with images of the days – all the days that Lou had gone off to work, in her dresses and her jeans and with her hair up and her hair down. Day after day. He was the deputy head at school. That rang a bell somehow.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Back then, I was so angry. You know that. And I wanted to hurt you, and I wanted to feel something other than empty and bruised.’

  Josh closed his eyes and rested his head back against the tree trunk.

  ‘And I ended it. When I told you that I ended it, I ended it.’

  ‘But . . .’ And Josh found it hard to talk, like the sound had to be hauled out from somewhere re
ally deep inside him. ‘He still worked there. You still worked there.’

  ‘Yes.’ Lou held on tight to his hand. ‘But it was over.’

  Josh opened his eyes, looked at Lou, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was looking straight ahead. There were tears on her cheeks. ‘And then, this year.’

  He pulled his hand away. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t bear to be touching her. He put his hands over his eyes.

  ‘I slept with him again on New Year’s Day.’ She paused, took a breath, and whispered, ‘Here.’

  Josh, his hands still over his eyes, thought about New Year’s Day. He’d had a hangover. He was up at Mum’s with the girls. They’d seen a stingray at the beach. He’d come home to a cheerful but tired Lou in the house, assumed she’d been cleaning all night. That awful New Year’s. That party.

  ‘Have I ever met this person?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘He says he met you at Beth’s party, in the garden.’

  Yes. That guy. That was the guy. Chinos. Enormous. Huge hands.

  ‘And he was at the concert.’

  The guy leaning down, talking into Lou’s ear. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  ‘I decided to give us a year,’ said Lou. ‘I felt shit about what had happened, but also, well, you know, angry, confused about what was happening with us. I never slept with him again, I promise. I thought about it sometimes, but I promise you, this year, it’s been all about us.’

  Josh took his hands from his eyes. He turned back to look at Lou and she was looking at him. She tried to take his hand again, but he pulled it away.

  ‘At the school concert. You lied about it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He was calling you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The fucking Sex Month.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All this year when I’ve been trying . . . so fucking hard . . . to please you, to look for answers . . . every day, you’d go to work, and he’d be there.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Josh didn’t know what to say now. There isn’t anything to say now, he thought. Everything was worse. Even worse.

  ‘Josh, I don’t work with him anymore. He’s gone.’

  Josh felt the mossy tree trunk sticking to his shirt. The night was still warm, the air still had the acrid taste of smoke.

  ‘You asked me to tell you everything so we can make decisions in the light,’ Lou said. ‘I have always known that if you knew about this, you couldn’t live with it. You always chose not to know.’

  ‘I didn’t choose any of this, Lou,’ he said. And the anger began to seep in. It started with a taste in his mouth that was worse than the smoke. Went to his stomach, his chest. His hands, twitching into fists. He had to move. Now.

  Josh stood up. He ducked a little to step out of the reach of the tree branches, still long, still everywhere.

  ‘Josh,’ Lou said, still on the ground, ‘I promise that’s everything. I promise that’s true. I’ve genuinely been trying to save our family this year, to save us. That’s what it’s all been about.’

  ‘I have to go,’ said Josh. ‘I have to go now.’

  ‘Not like this Josh,’ said Lou, standing up too, now. Bare feet on the grass, chipped orange polish on her toenails. He looked into her face. She was still crying, but she wasn’t trying to reach him. He felt like he hated her face. Pathetic, pitying. ‘Please. You said you wanted to know.’

  ‘Now I know.’ He started to walk away.

  ‘Where are you going? You don’t have your car. It’s late. Josh!’ Lou called after him. ‘You said you wanted to know.’

  Josh started walking down the road, and then he started to run. A middle-aged man, in jeans and a nice blue shirt, running down a dark, suburban street in the middle of the night.

  Lou

  Lou had looked up at the sound of a door closing in the corridor. Waited a moment.

  It wasn’t him. It hadn’t been him the last time, either. Or the time before.

  ‘That’s it then,’ she said to Sara.

  Josh wasn’t going to come. He wasn’t going to forgive her. He wasn’t even going to fight about it.

  ‘I think he’s given me the answer to my question.’

  ‘What was the question?’ asked Sara, her voice just a little less businesslike that usual.

  ‘Has he given up on us?’

  ‘That wasn’t your question, Lou,’ Sara said. ‘You’re rewriting history. You came here to see if this marriage was still viable. If it was still alive.’

  It was the last therapy session of the year. Sitting there waiting for Josh, high up in the choking haze, Lou had told Sara what happened that night. What she’d told Josh.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I was so angry with him. But I can’t conjure that feeling now. I can’t even really remember it, how it felt, that fury. Now, I can’t imagine our family any other shape than it is. Me, Josh, Stella, Rita. I don’t . . . feel a space where anyone else should be.’ Lou put her hands on her stomach, like she had done every time she thought about that day, for years. She felt nothing.

  ‘Lou,’ Sara said, ‘have you ever thought that, rather than punishing Josh, you were punishing yourself?’

  Lou looked up.

  ‘You didn’t do anything wrong, Lou,’ Sara said. ‘You need to forgive yourself.’

  Lou felt like she might cry again. ‘I slept with my boss, Sara,’ she managed.

  And the therapist smiled, just a little. ‘Yeah. That bit wasn’t ideal.’

  *

  It was ten days until Christmas, and she and Josh still hadn’t spoken.

  If Lou texted, he didn’t answer. If she called, he didn’t pick up. The only thing that would elicit a response was a question about the girls.

  Are you picking them up today?

  Yes.

  Are you okay?

  Nothing.

  It was childish. It was infuriating. It was heartbreaking.

  Lou had gone to the house when she knew he was there, but she couldn’t bring herself to go in. Standing in the twilight near the side window like a stalker, like a ghost, looking in at her husband serving the girls sausages, the house lit up with glimmering fairy lights that Lou had wobbled on a stepladder to string up.

  He’d added to them, she noticed, in the high-up places that she couldn’t reach. A string of golden stars across the top of the kitchen cupboards. An angel at the very top of the tree that Rob had helped her with. A string of solar icicles along the roof of the back deck.

  He did that for the girls. He wanted to make them happy, still. It was just her he couldn’t talk to. Just Lou he couldn’t see.

  In their kitchen, he was smiling at Stella and Rita, laughing. And they were laughing with him. It was late. They should be in bed. It was nearly Christmas.

  And Lou realised how ridiculous it was, she was, being locked out of her home, watching on, and she left, cursing herself.

  12. Let go, she typed into her phone in the car outside her own home. Just let the hell go.

  ‘What you must not do here,’ Gretchen counselled her, back in her white kitchen over a large glass of wine, no sausages in sight, ‘is make the mistake of transferring the power of this to Josh, just because you’re feeling guilty and he’s the one holding you at arm’s length. Remember how all this started. Remember what you want.’

  ‘But I don’t know what I want,’ said Lou.

  ‘It’s time to decide,’ her friend said firmly.

  ‘We have a couple of weeks left.’

  Gretchen rolled her eyes. ‘It’s time to drop the game, Lou. The clock doesn’t matter. The date doesn’t matter. You need to make a fucking decision and go with it. A week here or there is bullshit, and all of this makes me think there can only be one reason why you’re delaying it.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Lou was smarting, but she knew Gretchen was right.

  ‘Because it’s very painful to end a marriage,’ said Gretchen. ‘And you’re putting it off.’

  ‘I don’t
know if it’s my decision to make,’ said Lou. ‘Not anymore.’

  It had been a grim run-in to Christmas. As the smoke lowered, Lou’s father Brian was getting worse, and Rob had organised for a live-in carer to help Annabelle. Annabelle hated having someone in her home, and was on the phone to Lou constantly, usually with a few wines under her belt, complaining about all the things the nurse did wrong. Which was nothing, as far as Lou could tell.

  Meanwhile, as the term finished up, Lou prepared to say goodbye to her class. To Ryan Harcourt and Amber Lin, to the tears and the messes and the tiny breakthroughs. All these years as a teacher and she always, always got emotional at the end of term. This year, her emotions were closer to the surface.

  Thankfully, Theo was gone and she hadn’t heard a thing from him. Their last encounter made her furious every time she thought about it. How had she let that man in? How had she missed all the signs – glaring now in hindsight – that he had become so reckless?

  That night at the school concert, when he’d appeared from nowhere and begun whispering to her in front of her friends, in front of Josh.

  ‘Meet me outside . . . This is driving me crazy . . . Why are you making me suffer?’

  She’d dismissed it, thought he was playing games, turning up the drama for effect. How had she somehow overlooked his anger? She knew why, really, if she was honest. Theo was never a real person to her, and she didn’t really care about him. He was just a thing she was doing to distract herself.

  Let go, she told herself again. Let all that go.

  *

  Lou packed up her last pile of drawings for the kids to take home, and headed out to her car.

  It was her last night away from the girls before Christmas. She’d heard via Anika that Josh was preparing to go up and see his mum, hopefully to bring her back to the city. The fires in Emma’s neighbourhood had died down, Lou knew from her constant checking, but no-one could be sure for how long. Josh wouldn’t be back until the twenty-third; he was doing a job on the way up the coast. A last bit of extra Christmas money for the girls’ presents, Lou knew he’d be thinking.