Sometimes I think wistfully of The Musician and the easy symmetry of our life before The Scientist upset the balance. But I’m electrically charged. I’m hooked on this man who burns incandescent. It feels different to love like this. It feels like a hurricane.
Other than great sex, all we mostly do is fight in these early days. We fight and fight and fight. Once, I throw a bowl of cherries at the wall, and it smashes into pieces, a fireworks display of red and white. Another time I put all his stuff in a bag and throw it off the rooftop of my apartment into the alleyway. He doesn’t seem to care and doesn’t call me for days, which makes me crazy. I imagine him doing horrible things I don’t want to imagine him doing with cute university girls. But apparently he’s just playing video games and waiting for me to cool down. We cannot understand each other, ever. It’s all one giant miscommunication. We fight and fuck and fight and fuck.
So yeah, there is a lot of passion and drama in that first year together. But there is also a lot of growth. I become a much less judgemental person because of him. I stop writing people off because of things like political affiliation or the fact that they don’t read books. He asks me to teach him about music, so one night we listen to Led Zeppelin, and I teach him to count time signatures out by slapping his thighs with his hands. I also attempt to teach him to distinguish between Beatles (it doesn’t work; he still can’t tell who’s singing). I introduce him to foreign films, and he takes me to blockbuster action movies. We learn to love the things the other person loves. Or at least, we try.
To get to my three-hundred-square-foot apartment you have to take a fire escape in the alleyway of Honest Ed’s — an old department store famous for its quirky signs and the way you’d get lost in its maze of cheap stuff. Light bulbs hang in strings in the alleyway, and young cooks and dishwashers of neighbouring restaurants are out by open doorways having smokes at all hours of the night. The rats as big as cats in the dumpster, you can hear them fighting as you fall asleep. I paint the entire apartment mustard; I can’t imagine why now, but I do, and The Scientist helps me. We do the bathroom bright purple.
I am twenty-five and living alone for the first time ever. Sort of. Once I’m in and settled, The Scientist settles in mostly, too. He’s writing his master’s thesis and that’s hard to do while living with roommates. So during the day while I’m at work producing radio shows, he’s at my place writing his thesis on an old laptop at my vintage Formica table. He sleeps at my new place most nights, too, but not always. I hate when he isn’t there because I don’t know where he is. It makes me anxious, panicked, possessive.
His thesis work is in atomic physics, and some days I get home from work and the entire floor of my little apartment is covered in paper — all with the mad scratchings of a mathematician. It looks like that scene in the movie A Beautiful Mind, just equations everywhere, and then his shiny dark eyes, his tense jaw. It makes me love him just to think of it now.
Each day is the same. I come home from a full day’s work, he’s sitting at the table, head deep into the workings of the cesium atom. I walk in, say hello, and without a word he comes to me and kisses me, removing my purse with one hand, shutting the door with the other, and we have sex immediately, right there or wherever — it’s only three-hundred square feet. And then we might eat some dinner, or he’ll go right back to writing and I’ll play guitar and sing, but quietly, so I won’t bother him.
We’re in a mustard-coloured cocoon at the turn of the century, and everything feels full of promise. Every moment feels electric, even the ordinary ones.
Eventually I begin to edit his thesis for him, for grammar only, obviously. I know absolutely nothing about physics, let alone this very specific thing he has done to an atom, or the giant machine he’s built himself in order to do it. Sometimes it takes me an hour to edit two pages, not because of the physics, but because he has no idea how to write a sentence. He has no idea how to write at all, his brain full of math and machines and experiments, not syntax. About a month into the editing, he comes up to me, there at the table hunched over his thesis, and he says to me with all sincerity, “So are you starting to get some of this?”
I laugh and tell him no, I am in no way starting to “get” any of it. He asks how I can edit something I don’t understand, so I try to explain that it’s just grammar, it’s just sentence structure, the content is irrelevant. He finds this fascinating. I find him fascinating. We’re in awe of each other, since we’re from totally different planets, since the other person seems capable of powers we can’t possess. We are total opposites. We are madly in love.
And then for reasons I’ll never understand, because we’ve never talked about it, he asks me to marry him. On September 13, 2001. Yeah, that’s right, two days after 9/11. He phones to say I should meet him at our favourite Italian restaurant for dinner. Like every journalist in the world following the attacks, I’ve just worked about thirty hours straight. I haven’t been home at all. I’m tired. And I want to get out of the newsroom to forget for a little bit the terrible things we’ve all watched, over and over again.
I don’t know what he’s thinking, at all, especially at a time like this. But here he is, asking me to marry him. He has a ring, even — a big diamond ring, just sparkling at me, and I laugh and laugh and laugh. I can’t stop laughing. I seriously don’t know what the fuck is going on. I don’t even ever want to get married, to anyone! Let alone this complicated, adorable man I have nothing in common with. But I love him. He makes my life an incredibly charged and technicolour thing. Everything about him makes me feel alive.
I love him so much the thought of not loving him pains me. But I’m also slightly conflicted; do I really want something as important as marriage to begin right when a huge tragedy has just happened? I worry it’s a bad sign, this proposal in the aftermath of terrorism so close to home, while airspace is still closed, while loved ones are still missing, while images of people jumping out of falling buildings are still playing on a loop in my mind.
I’m looking at this ring, and after a while he says, “So?” and I say, “Why not?” Because really, why not? I say, “I love you and you love me. Let’s take a chance!”
And we do.
TEN YEARS LATER
I’m reading in bed. Downstairs I hear the now familiar sounds: the pop of a beer cap, the hum of the television, the punctuated laughter that seems forced, as if he is trying desperately to find joy in something. Earlier, I stood in the doorway of the TV room, lingering unnoticed.
“Why don’t you come up to bed with me?”
He didn’t. He never does anymore.
We just celebrated our ninth wedding anniversary. By celebrate I mean we had strained conversation over dinner, where he said he was tired about fifty times. I tried to make him laugh, but his face has turned into a hard piece of stone, his eyes expressionless. Our marriage is stuck. It’s just … there. And festering. He’s motionless, unresponsive. I don’t know what’s happened to him, and it’s making me bitter. Angry. I feel trapped and resigned.
Of course what has happened to him is her. I just don’t know it yet.
COMPROMISE
We are engaged for a year, and during that year we learn that planning a wedding is the least romantic thing you can do. We spend that year rolling our eyes at each other in utter exasperation, or giving each other long resigned looks. Despite how independent and kooky we both are, we also want to please everyone and do what we think we “should” do.
And so we give in to every expectation and trope, and end up planning the most traditional of weddings. 160 guests. Open bar. Seven-course meal. A DJ named