After I Do

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  FOUR MONTHS AGO

  Ryan was supposed to go to San Francisco for work one week. He was going to be gone from Monday night to Saturday morning.

  He asked me if I wanted to go with him.

  “No,” I said, without hesitation. “Better to save the vacation time.”

  “Got it,” he said. “I’ll tell the travel department it’s just me, then.”

  “Yeah, sounds good.”

  The weeks went by, and I found myself desperately looking forward to time alone. I thought about it the way I thought about going to Disneyland as a kid.

  And then a week before he was supposed to leave, he called me at work and told me the trip was canceled.

  “Canceled?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “So I’ll be home all next week.”

  “That’s great!” I said, hoping my voice was convincing.

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. His voice was not.

  THREE MONTHS AGO

  I lost my wallet. I’d had it when we were at the store. I remembered pulling my credit card out to pay for the dress I was buying. Ryan was in the men’s section at the time.

  Then we walked around a bit more, got into the car, and came home. And that’s when I realized it was gone.

  We searched the living room, the couch cushions, the car, and the driveway. I knew I had to go back to the mall. I had to retrace our steps from the store to the car.

  “I guess we have to go back to the store,” I said. My voice was apologetic. I felt bad. This wasn’t the first time I’d lost my wallet. In fact, I probably lost it about once every six months. Only three times had I never found it again.

  “You go,” Ryan said, heading back into the house. We had just finished checking the car. “I’m going to stay here.”

  “You don’t want to come?” I said. “We could get dinner while we are out.”

  “No, I’ll just grab something here.”

  “Without me?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You’re gonna eat dinner without me?”

  “I’ll wait, then,” he said, as if he was doing me a favor.

  “No, it’s OK. You seem mad, though. Are you mad?”

  He shrugged.

  I smiled at him, trying to warm him up. “You used to think it was cute, remember? How I always lost my wallet? You said my lack of organization was endearing.”

  He looked at me, impatient. “Yeah, well,” he said to me, “it gets old after eleven years of it.”

  And then he went inside the house.

  When I got into the car and started driving away, my wallet slid out from underneath the passenger’s seat.

  Didn’t matter, though. I cried anyway.

  SIX WEEKS AGO

  It was Ryan’s thirtieth birthday. We spent the night out with his friends, going from sports bar to sports bar.

  When we got home, Ryan started undressing me in the bedroom. He unbuttoned my shirt, and then he took the tie out of my hair, letting it fall onto my shoulders. I had a flash of how this would all go. He would kiss my neck and push us onto the bed. He would do the same things he always did, say the same stuff he always said. I’d stare up at the ceiling, counting the minutes. I wasn’t in the mood. I wanted to go to sleep.

  I held on to the sides of my open shirt and pulled them closer. “I’m not up for it,” I said, moving away from him toward my pajamas.

  He sighed. “It’s my birthday,” he said, keeping his hands on my shirt, staying close to me.

  “Just not tonight, I’m sorry, I’m just . . . my head hurts, and I’m so tired. We’ve been out at the smoky bar all night, and I’m feeling . . . not very sexy.”

  “We could get in the shower,” he said.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I offered, putting on my sweatpants, ending the discussion. “Would that be OK? Tomorrow?”

  “Lauren, it’s my birthday.” His tone wasn’t playful or pleading. He was letting me know he expected me to change my mind. And suddenly, that enraged me.

  I looked at him, incredulous. “So what? I owe you or something?”

  LAST WEEK

  Ryan asked me where his leftover burger was from the night before.

  “I fed it to Thumper for dinner,” I said. “I added it to his dog food.”

  “I was going to eat that,” he said, looking at me as if I’d stolen something from him.

  “Sorry,” I said, laughing at how serious he was being. “It was pretty nasty, though,” I added. “I don’t think you would have wanted it.”

  “Like you have any idea what I want,” he said, and he grabbed a bottle of water and walked away.

  RIGHT NOW

  The ride home from Dodger Stadium is cold and lonely despite it being eighty degrees out and that there are two of us in the car. We use the radio to gracefully ignore each other for a little while, but it eventually becomes clear that there is nothing graceful about it.

  When we pull into the driveway, I am relieved to be able to get away from him. By the time we get to the front of our house, we can hear Thumper whimpering at the door. He is fine being alone, but the minute he can hear us, and I swear he can hear us from blocks away, he suddenly becomes overtaken with dependence. He forgets how to live without us the minute he knows we are there.

  Ryan puts his key in the lock. He turns toward me and pauses. “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “No, me, too,” I say. But I don’t really know what I am even sorry for. I feel as if I’ve been sorry for months now without a reason. What am I really doing wrong here? What is happening to us? I’ve read books on it. I’ve read the articles that show up in all the women’s magazines about marital ruts and turning the heat up in your marriage. They don’t tell you anything real. They don’t have any answers.

  Ryan opens the door, and Thumper runs toward us. His excitement only highlights our own misery. Why can’t we be more like him? Why can’t I be easy to please? Why can’t Ryan be that happy to see me?

  “I’m going to take a shower,” Ryan says.

  I don’t say anything back. He heads to the bathroom, and I sit down on the floor and pet Thumper. His fur soothes me. He licks my face. He nuzzles my ear. For a minute, I feel OK.

  “Goddammit!” Ryan calls from the bathroom.

  I close my eyes for a moment. Bracing myself.

  “What?” I call to him.

  “There is no fucking hot water. Did you call the landlord?”

  “I thought you were calling the landlord!”

  “Why do I always have to do that stuff ? Why is it always up to me?” he asks. He has opened the bathroom door and is standing there in a towel.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “You just normally do. So I assumed you were going to be the one to handle it. Sorry.” It is clear by the way I say it that I am not sorry.

  “Why don’t you ever do what you say you’re going to do? How hard is it to just pick up the goddamn phone and call the landlord?”

  “I never said I was going to do it. If you wanted me to do it, you should have said something. I’m not a mind reader.”

  “Oh, OK. Got it. My apologies. I thought it was clear that if we have no hot water, someone needs to call the landlord.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “That is obvious. And it’s normal for me to assume that you will do it. Since you are the person who normally does that. Just like I am the one who does all the fucking laundry in this house.”

  “Oh, so you do the laundry, and that makes you some sort of saint?”

  “Fine. You can do your laundry, then, if it doesn’t matter who does it. Do you know how to use the washing machine?”

  Ryan laughs at me. No, he scoffs at me.

  “Do you?” I say. “I’m not being funny. I’ll bet you a hundred bucks you don’t know how it works.”

  “I’m sure I could f
igure it out,” he says. “I’m not as much of a complete moron as you make me out to be.”

  “I don’t make you out to be anything.”

  “Oh, yes, Lauren. Yes, you do. You act like you’re the most perfect person in the whole world and you’re stuck with your stupid husband who can’t do a damn thing but call the landlord. You know what? I’ll be the one who gets the hot water fixed. Since you do all the complicated stuff for smart people, like the laundry.” He starts angrily putting his clothes back on.

  “Where are you even going?” I say to him.

  “To see if I can fix the fucking thing!” he says, putting on his shoes with equal parts anger and haste.

  “Now? It’s almost midnight. You need to stay here and talk to me.”

  “Let’s drop it, Lauren,” Ryan says. He walks to the front door. His hand is on the doorknob, getting ready to leave. Thumper is resting at my feet, no idea what he’s in the middle of.

  “We can’t drop it, Ryan,” I say. “I’m not going to drop it. We’ve been ‘dropping it’ for months now.”

  That’s what’s really concerning about all of this. We aren’t fighting about the hot water or the Dodger Stadium parking lot. We aren’t fighting about money or jealousy or communication skills. We are fighting because we don’t know how to be happy. We are fighting because we are not happy. We are fighting because we no longer make each other happy. And I think, at least if I’m speaking for myself, I’m pretty pissed off about that.

  “We have to deal with this, Ryan. It’s been three straight weeks of bitching at each other. Out of the past month, I think we have spent maybe one evening in a good mood. The rest of it has been like this.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Ryan says, his hand gesticulating wildly. When he gets angry, his normally confident and controlled demeanor becomes unrestrained and forceful. “You think I don’t know how miserable I am?”

  “Miserable?” I say. “Miserable?” I can’t argue with what he is saying. It’s really about how he says it. He says it as if I’m the one making him miserable. As if I’m the one who’s causing all of this.

  “I’m not saying anything you didn’t just say yourself. Please calm down.”

  “Calm down?”

  “Stop repeating everything I say as a question.”

  “Then try being a bit more clear.”

  Ryan sighs, moving his hand to his forehead, covering it with his thumb and fingers as if they were the brim of a baseball cap. He’s rubbing his temples. I don’t know when he became so dramatic. Somewhere along the way, he went from being this super calm, collected person to being this guy, this guy who sighs loudly and rubs his temples as if he’s Jesus on the cross. It’s as if the world is happening to him. I can tell he wants to say something, but he doesn’t. He starts to, and he stops himself.

  I’m not sure what it is about me that insists that he say every little thing in his head. But when we fight like this, I can’t stand to see him hold back. You know why? I know why. It’s because if you’re really holding back, you don’t even start to say it. But that’s not what he does. He does this little song and dance where he pretends he’s not going to say something, but it’s clear that eventually, he’s going to say something.

  “Just say it,” I say.

  “No,” he says. “It’s not worth it.”

  “Well, clearly, it is. Because you can barely stop yourself. So get on with it. I don’t have all fucking night.”

  “Why don’t you take it down a notch, OK?”

  I shake my head at him. “You are such a dick sometimes.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re a bitch.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Here we go. Her Royal Highness is offended.”

  “It’s not hard to be offended by being called a bitch.”

  “It’s no different from you just calling me a dick.”

  “It is, actually. It’s much different.”

  “Lauren, get over it. OK? I’m sorry I called you a bitch. Pretend I called you whatever you want to be called. The point is, I’m sick of this. I’m sick of every little thing being a disaster of epic proportions. I can’t even go to a goddamn Dodgers game without you moping through every inning.” Thumper moves from my feet and heads toward Ryan. I try not to worry that he’s choosing sides.

  “If you don’t want me to be upset, then stop doing things to upset me.”

  “This is exactly the problem! I’m not doing things to upset you.”

  “Right. You just get tickets to the Dodgers game even when I tell you I don’t feel like going. That’s not to upset me, that’s because . . . why, exactly?” I move toward the dining-room table, getting a better angle at him, looking at him even more directly, but I’m not doing a great job of paying attention to the speed and force of my body. I hit the table so hard with my hip that I almost knock over the vase in the middle of the table. It wobbles, ever so slightly. I steady it.

  “Because I want to see the Dodgers, and I really don’t fucking care if you’re there or not. I got the extra ticket to be nice, actually.”

  I cross my arms. I can feel myself crossing them. I know it’s terrible body language. I know it makes things worse. And yet there is no other way for my arms to be. “To be nice? So you wanted to spend Friday night by yourself at the Dodgers? You didn’t even want me to go with you?”

  “Honestly, Lauren,” Ryan says, his voice now perfectly calm, “I did not want you to go with me. I haven’t wanted you to go someplace with me in months.”

  It’s the truth. He’s not saying it to hurt me. I can see that in his eyes, in his face, in the way his lips relax after he says it. He doesn’t care if it hurts me. He’s just saying it because it’s true.

  Sometimes people do things because they are furious or because they are upset or because they are out for blood. And those things can hurt. But what hurts the most is when someone does something out of apathy. They don’t care about you the way they said they did back in college. They don’t care about you the way they promised to when you got married. They don’t care about you at all.

  And because there is just the tiniest part of me that still cares, and because his not caring enrages that tiny part of me, I do something I have never done before. I do something I never thought I would ever do. I do something that, even as I’m doing it, I can’t believe is actually happening.

  I pick up the vase. The glass vase. And I throw it against the door behind him. Flowers and all.

  I watch Ryan duck, yanking his shoulders up around his neck and ears. I watch Thumper jump to attention. I watch as the water flies into the air, the stems and petals disperse and fall to the ground, and the glass shatters into so many pieces that I’m not sure I even remember what it used to look like.

  And when all of the shards have landed, when Ryan looks up at me stunned, when Thumper scurries out into the other room, the tiny part of me that cared is gone. Now I don’t care anymore, either. It’s a shitty feeling. But it beats the hell out of caring, even the tiniest bit.

  Ryan stares at me for a moment and then grabs his keys off the side table. He swipes the water and glass out of his way with the shoes already on his feet. He walks out the front door.

  I don’t know what he’s thinking. I don’t know where he’s going. I don’t know how long he’ll be gone. All I know is that this might, in fact, be the end of my marriage. It might be the end of something I thought had no ending.

  • • •

  I stare at the door for a while after Ryan leaves. I can’t believe that I have thrown a vase at the wall. I can’t believe that the crushed mess of glass on the floor is because of me. I wasn’t intending to hurt him. I didn’t throw it at him. And yet the violence of it startles me. I didn’t know I was capable of it.

  Eventually, I stand up and go to the kitchen and get the broom and the dust pan. I put o
n a pair of shoes. I start to sweep it all up. As I do, Thumper comes running into the room, and I have to tell him to stop where he is. He listens and sits, watching me. The clink of the pieces against one another as they hit the trash can are almost soothing. Brush. Brush. Clink.

  I grab a few paper towels and run them over the area to mop up any remaining shards and water, and then I vacuum. I’m hesitant to stop vacuuming, because I don’t know what I’m going to do after I’m done. I don’t know what to do with myself.

  I put everything away and lie down on the bed. I am reminded of when we bought it, why we bought it.

  What happened to us?

  I can hear a voice in my head, speaking crisply and clearly. I don’t love him anymore. That’s what it says. I don’t love him anymore. And maybe more heartbreaking is the fact that I know, deep down, he doesn’t love me, either.

  It all clicks into place. That’s what all of this is, isn’t it? That’s what the fighting is. That’s why I disagree with everything he says. That’s why I can’t stand all the things I used to stand. That’s why we haven’t been having sex. That’s why we never try hard to please each other. That’s why we are never pleased with each other.

  Ryan and I are two people who used to be in love.

  What a beautiful thing to have been.

  What a sad thing to be.

  Ryan must have returned late at night or early in the morning. I don’t know which. I didn’t wake up when he came home.

  When I do wake up, he is on the other side of the bed, Thumper in between us. Ryan’s back is facing me. He is snoring. It scares me that we are able to sleep during this sort of turmoil. I think of the way it used to be, the way fights used to keep us up all night and into the morning. The way we couldn’t sleep on our anger, couldn’t put it on hold. Now we are on the verge of defeat and . . . he’s snoring.

  I wait patiently for him to wake up. When he finally does, he doesn’t say anything to me. He stands up and walks to the bathroom. He goes to the kitchen and brews himself a cup of coffee and gets back into bed. He is next to me but not beside me. We are both in this bed, but we are not sharing it.