He pecks my neck and flips me upright. “That was my maximum energy expenditure for the evening. But I didn’t want you to think I couldn’t make the effort.”
“Duly noted.” I smile and bite my lip, delighted at his playfulness, like maybe he read my mind. “Good day?”
He plops right back on the sofa.
“Not terrible, actually. Got the job with Tech2Go. They matched my fee from the Microsoft job. How did it go with the pooper pants?”
“Shitty.”
“Ha!” He angles his face back toward me so I can see his genuine laugh. He doesn’t do that as often as he used to — sink into his laughter. He’s always tired or working or hunched over one of his various laptops or devices that demand more than I do. You have forty-seven new messages and you have to answer them all immediately or this phone will blow up like a grenade in your hand! Don’t worry; your wife will be there in the morning!
“You’re cute when you laugh, you know.”
“Laughter is the best medicine,” he replies, reaching for the remote and scrolling through the channels.
I dig through a kitchen drawer for the Hop Lee menu. “Oh, do you have cash? Because you canceled my credit cards, right?”
“I called. No new charges — it probably wasn’t stolen. You must have lost it.”
I search his tone for something close to judgment: Shawn has never lost his credit cards, never would lose his credit cards. He’s too stream-lined, too meticulous for that. He was the child of MIT professors. He was raised with order, with linear thought, with to-do lists that ensure safe passage from one cushion (Choate) to the next (Harvard). He’d never leave his bag half-zipped or zone out to his iPod on the subway, which I’ve been known to do from time to time, but only because ‘80s metal rock is my guilty pleasure, and I’m too embarrassed to listen to it anywhere but in the company of strangers. No, Shawn was secure, predictable, and for these reasons, he would never, ever lose his credit cards.
I watch him on the couch, already sucked back into some National Geographic documentary on African tribesmen. And then I remember: Grape! Perhaps he’s less anal, less risk-averse than I thought. He and his friends, kings of the coding world, out blowing their IPO-funded wads of bills on lithe women wearing tank tops a size too small. It didn’t seem like Shawn, but then again, there was the receipt.
I stare at the ceiling, so fervently wishing we could just go down to Hop Lee and earn those egg rolls. Finally, a little too sharply, I announce:
“I didn’t lose my wallet. Someone took it.”
“Willa, you’ve been known to lose it.”
He’s not wrong: I have lost my wallet three times since we’ve been together.
Before I can leap to my own defense, Shawn’s phone comes alive with the seemingly ever-present buzzzzzzzz of a text (if a site crashed in the woods and a coder couldn’t text about it, would the site have actually crashed in the woods?) and he falls silent, reading, then typing.
Hello, hello, were we not just having a conversation? Why is your phone more important than egg rolls?
“Amanda wants to know if we can take Nicky this weekend.”
“But we…um…okay…”
He is already typing her back.
“Shawn!” I say, more firmly than I mean to, or maybe exactly as firmly as I mean. His flying fingers abort, and he snaps to.
I say, more kindly: “We haven’t had a weekend to ourselves in a month. I mean, I don’t want to be the bad guy here, but…”
“Will, we’re all she has. And you love Nicky.”
“I do love Nicky,” I agree. But I think: but not as much as I used to. Pubescent twelve isn’t nearly as great as adorable seven. And then I hate myself for even giving voice to conditional love and what it might say about both me and my own prospects as a mother.
“…Mister Card. Is. Calling. Mister. Card. Is calling.”
“Who’s Mister Card?” Shawn asks.
“MasterCard,” I say. My face points down but my spirits buoy upward — I knew it was stolen! I knew I didn’t lose it!
I grab the receiver.
“This is the fraud early warning department. Is this Willa Golden?”
Golden is actually Shawn’s name. When we married three years ago, I was desperate to shed the moniker — Chandler — that had followed me around like a shadow, my dad’s shadow, for so long. And though I knew Shawn was my destiny, knew he was my “meant to be,” I’d never quite adjusted to the switch. Golden. I wanted so desperately to slide into it without a hiccup, but the truth is that I still hesitated when someone called out “Mrs. Golden!” in a restaurant, still looked twice at my driver’s license to ensure the proof. Shawn was mine. I was his. Willa Golden. Like the “Chandler” part was maybe just the in-between phase of my life.
“Yes,” I say to the MasterCard agent. “This is Willa Golden.”
“We have some suspicious activity on your card, and we’d like to go over the charges with you.”
I look at Shawn and pump my fist (my card was stolen! I knew it!), and he looks at me and shrugs.
I turn back toward the phone.
Yes, I think, I was right. I win.
And then the moment passes, and I remember how much I love Shawn, that Grape! can’t be what I think it is, and my dad wouldn’t call this a win. No, in fact, he might even chalk this up as a loss.
—
Later, Shawn and I settle into our Thursday night routine: our Chinese food and the highest-rated network reality show, Dare You!, in which contestants are goaded on by the opposition and the host, a chisel-jawed blond named Slack Jones who has gone on to fame and notoriety thanks to the decade-long gig. If you land all the dares, you win $100,000. (There is a small portion of the population who devote their lives to preparing to be contestants. Google it. You’ll find the forums. It’s strange, but I suppose not the strangest obsession out there.)
Though I’d never admit it aloud, I watch the show to assess what can go wrong due to the forces of gravity and nature or engine speed or torque or rope slack while simultaneously assessing what can go awry due to human nature: can the contestants control their fear enough to abate their shaking fingers as they clutch a wire while belaying across a skyline? Can they calm their tempers enough to get through a task in which their frustratingly inept partners are responsible for pulling their own weight up a volcano? Can they tiptoe quietly enough not to disturb mountain lions; can they repress their gag reflex when forced to drink a smoothie made of urine?
The push-pull between what’s in their control and what isn’t is what makes Dare You! so fascinating to me, though inarguably most people watch it just to see a lot of stupid people do a lot of stupid shit.
“Listen,” Shawn says, when they break for a commercial. He wrestles an egg roll from the box on the coffee table and bites off the top, the greasy crumbs landing on his chest. “I know that Nicky is going through his awkward phase right now, and I know that you want some us-time…”
“Don’t you want some us-time? I thought you liked our weekend routine.”
“That came out wrong. You know what I mean.”
I’m not actually sure I do know what you mean, I think. Grape! That might possibly be the dumbest name for a club in the history of ever!
“Anyway, I’ll make it up to you, okay? I’ll plan something lavish and romantic and sexy, and you won’t be able to keep your hands off me.” He smiles, and I smile back, mostly because I want to believe him. It was just one receipt, one small thing, one tiny fabrication as to his whereabouts. Grape! It was probably nothing. (My dad would remind me here that nothing is ever nothing. Everything is something, and all roads lead to here, blah, blah, blah.) I pretend not to remember that Shawn hasn’t planned anything romantic or sexy in at least a year (I blame the Microsoft job — hey, Bill Gates,
how do you make your wife happy?) and, frankly, not too often before that either. Which is just as well because I’m not overly comfortable with grand displays of affection. We like Chinese food. We like Dare You!. We like our couch on Thursday nights. I wouldn’t mind making out for free egg rolls, but Shawn doesn’t have to whisk me off to Bali (or whatever) to prove his devotion. Though not hanging out at nightclubs and lying about it would probably be a good start.
He reaches over and squeezes my calf, and then Slack Jones pops up on the screen to introduce tonight’s first task, which involves couples being lowered into a pit of vipers. If they manage to hold themselves perfectly still, the viper will leave them be. If they don’t, well…there’s a medical tent on the premises. (And it’s true that last year one contestant did die when he lost his wrestling match with a grizzly bear, but the network was very adamant — and thus avoided litigation — that the contestant had signed away any medical liability.)
“Haven’t they done this one before?” Shawn asks. He has stuffed the rest of the egg roll in his mouth, his cheeks bursting as he speaks. He grins unapologetically. He did this once on our second date — his chipmunk impression — and it made me laugh so hard that wine dribbled down my chin. Izzy is right: Shawn is the coding-world anomaly: his green eyes and his chestnut stubble and his jaw that rivals Slack Jones’s make him too handsome to loiter behind a screen all day.
“That was with rattlesnakes,” I answer, absorbing the cut of his jaw and the clarity of his eyes. He was handsomer than I was pretty. I never totally understood why he chose me, other than that was simply what was meant to be. Vanessa told me that I needed to see a therapist for my self-esteem, but I was content just to be. Just to know that he had, in fact, chosen me, and that’s what the universe intended. She even texted me the contact info of her favorite shrink, but it lingered in my inbox for two weeks before my phone automatically deleted it.
I suck up a lo mein noodle, and before I can even think to stop because just two minutes earlier, I swore that it didn’t matter, I say: “How was the pick-up game last night?”
“Good,” he says, his eyes back on the TV. “Shit, that woman in the red is totally going to lose it.”
“Who won?”
“What do you mean? The show just started.”
“No, who won the game? The pick-up game.”
“Oh.” He flickers back to me for a moment, and then back to the show where indeed, the woman in red is trembling with such fortitude that production may need to call a seismologist. “We didn’t really keep score. Just shot around. You know. A few guys were sick, so we mostly just blew off steam.”
“Hmmm.”
I want to say more, I want to catch him in the net of knowledge with which I’m armed. I want to flaunt the receipt in front of him and shout — a-ha! But…I don’t. Because that will open up so much, and sometimes, no matter what my dad prophesizes, it is easier to just not know. The knowing is too hard.
“Holy shit!” Shawn squeals. The woman in red has started shrieking, unable to control her fear, and it’s impossible to say which happens first: the vipers sense her weakness and attack, or her weakness betrays her and she was screwed before she even started.
“That is awesome!” Shawn yells, slapping me five.
I smack his palm with fake euphoria, wondering what’s more terrifying: the false reality airing in front of us, or the actual reality that might be unspooling in my lap.
3
Shawn falls asleep on the couch, his hand still clutching his phone, which occasionally shudders with the arrival of a text or an email or some other breaking alert from the Internet world that never sleeps. I watch him for a moment — breathing in, breathing out. It isn’t just that he’s good-looking. That’s the easy part. That’s the part that girls like Izzy notice. It’s also that he’s magnetic, in the way that superstars are. Enough that his handsomeness almost doesn’t matter. Vanessa calls it “the trifecta” — hotness, smarts and the elusive x-factor — even though she doesn’t like him as much as I wished a best friend would. It’s the way he looks at you, the way he’s so steely, so solid.
His phone buzzes again, and he stirs, and for a moment I’m embarrassed that I’m watching him this way, that my neediness is so ripe, that I am admiring the wave in his hair and the way that his lanky body assumes the length of the couch.
I move toward him and shake his shoulder.
“Shawn, come to bed. It’s late.”
He grunts and turns his face toward the pillows, still deeply in slumber.
“Shawn, come on. It’s time for bed.”
He flutters his eyes open and they spin into focus.
“Is today the day? Are we trying?” He reaches for his phone to check his calendar.
He thinks I am waking him for baby sex, I realize. Have I become the wife who only wakes him for baby sex?
“No. Just…come to bed.”
“Five minutes,” he says, though he is already falling back into his dream.
I wait another beat, hoping he’ll return to me, but he’s gone. I shut down the lights in the living room and tell myself that this alone time isn’t so bad. That sleeping in the bed on my own every once in a while isn’t the worst thing in the world. Just before I enter the bedroom, I pause at the doorframe and turn back toward Shawn, hoping this feeling’s not the start of a greater divide.
Shawn and I have been trying for a baby for seven months now. When we married, we came up with a plan — or mostly Shawn did, but I listened and approved: we literally wrote it down in diagram form because, at heart, we are both diagrammers, we both appreciate order. We agreed that we needed two to three years to settle in, to establish who we were as a couple, and then we’d have a kid, and then we’d probably have another, and maybe along the way, we’d adopt a dog, erect a house with a white picket fence, and live happily ever after.
Or something like that.
It made sense, though, at least how Shawn had mapped it out: that he could land some big contract jobs, bank money so that we didn’t have to worry, and that when the time came, I could quit my job (if that’s what I wanted, of course, he added), and stay home with the kids or maybe volunteer or work in the library or…something. I nodded my head and said yes to all of the proposed itinerary. I liked kids well enough, and though I’d never been consumed with the desire for motherhood (a trait passed on by my own overly-rational, cool-headed parents), I figured that at least half the point of getting married was to start a family. And Shawn was already a perfect uncle to Nicky; he certainly could make up for any deficits in my own parenting.
So now we were right on plan, right on schedule. Only my womb wasn’t cooperating. Seven months of nothing. Seven months of anticipation, of hope, of periods. I told Vanessa I was considering Clomid, and she regaled me with horror stories of women who promptly grew hair on their face. “Like, almost a full beard,” she said, though I was 99 percent sure that she was making it up because Vanessa is unencumbered and single by choice for now and mostly well-intentioned but also slightly selfish in the way that a best friend can accept. I told my mom, who sighed, and because we have all been brainwashed by my father, she said the words that I’d already been thinking: “Maybe this just isn’t meant to be right now.”
But then, after seven months, there was that faint pink line four days ago. And something shifted in me, like I could already sense the baby, feel its little bean body sprouting inside of me. And then, just this morning — was it only this morning? — my period came, and I realized how stupid I was for getting ahead of myself, for getting ahead of life and fate and all of the idiotic inexplicable things that fill up the space between the two.
Shit. I hate it so very much when my dad is right.
Alone time. Maybe there is more of that in our future than we anticipated.
I close the bedroom door and r
each for my laptop. It whirs to life, and I rearrange the pillows on the bed and settle in between them, then quickly run through my list of bookmarks.
I click on Facebook, my pulse tangibly quickening, like clicking on something as mundane as Facebook is illicit, like I should know better. Maybe, actually, I should.
Atop my homepage, Theodore Brackton’s friend request glows like a firework, a nuclear bomb. Because even though Shawn is my fate, I do wonder, every once in a while (and recently, it seems more often than that), if fate couldn’t have been different. If I hadn’t somehow misread the stars, or if they’d aligned differently, if everything couldn’t be different.
I hover my mouse for a moment.
Accept.
Deny.
Ignore.
I hear Shawn stir in the living room. He must have flipped off the TV because the background noise slips into nothingness.
“Shawn?”
No answer.
I consider trying to rouse him again. Bring him to bed. But Facebook beckons, and besides, there’s also now my doubt, the seed of mistrust planted. I consider Izzy’s innocent musing — I guess he could also be picking up women! I’d probably give Mark Zuckerberg a pass! — and I wonder, apropos of nothing, if Mark Zuckerberg’s wife is on Facebook, and if so, if she’d mind if I emailed her and asked her what she would do in my situation. WWMZWD?
I stare out the window at the street lamps.
It’s true that Shawn had always been faithful, had never given me any reason to worry. And it’s also true that I should probably have just been more forthright, just asked him why he was at Grape!, instead of poking around with my vague questions while he was already sucked into the vacuum of Dare You!. But ours wasn’t a marriage of confrontation. Ours was a marriage of convenience. (Which makes it sound very Russian bride-y, but I don’t mean it that way.) What I mean to say is that Shawn is my Point North; he’s the thing I don’t question because I was raised by a man who taught me that questions lead nowhere, that answers are murky and misleading and whatever is going to happen is going to happen anyway. So why bother asking? I didn’t ask too much of Shawn because he was mine. That was my answer. The fact that maybe I wondered if I didn’t deserve him, with his handsomeness and his wild success and his Wired 40 Under 40! was almost beside the point. Vanessa would note (and has noted) that this is entirely the point (of a visit to a therapist), but therapy, to me, was like answers: a distraction from the journey. The path was already chosen. Why think too hard about it?
The Theory of Opposites Page 2
