“Ow!” I say, shucking him off.
For a long time neither of us says anything.
“You have no idea,” I say finally. “You get to wake up every morning and go and do something you love, which also, conveniently, happens to be one of the most worthwhile things you could do in the world. How can I possibly compete?”
“You don’t need to compete! This is a relationship.” He pulls out the chair next to me, sits and takes my hand like the doctor he is. “We’re a team.”
“Right, and I’m the dead weight dragging you down.”
“I don’t like hearing you talk like this.” He grazes my knuckles with his lips.
“Sorry,” I say. “Sorry if you don’t like it. Sorry if I upset you.”
Luke drops my hand and palms his kneecaps. “Whatever. I’m going to take a shower. I don’t know why you’re being such a—” He stops.
“Such a what?” I say. “Say it. Such a what?”
“It’s not worth it. I’ll let you get back to your precious sperm whale.” He stands up. At the door, he places his hands either side of the doorframe. “I’ve been nothing but supportive of whatever this thing you’re going through even is.”
“Yeah, and it’s so annoying! Stop being so nice all the time! You can’t bring yourself to call me a bitch when I’m being a horrible bitch to you! It’s really so fucking boring!”
“I’m taking a shower.”
“You already said.” The door slams. “And you’ve got a milk mustache!” The shower powers on.
“What are you looking at?” I say to my unhappy face, glowering in the sleeping laptop screen.
Standardization
I take a walk to get some air and some perspective (and maybe, if I’m being totally honest, so Luke might worry, thus dissipating the storm of ill will I’ve gone and stirred up in the flat). But all I can think is, Why don’t they make these concrete slabs stride-sized? Really, how hard can it be?
Empty
I skulk past our flat a few times, hoping to see Luke keeping an anxious lookout, but the front-room windows are empty and dark: blank as when we moved in five years ago. Buying the place had felt impulsive and exciting, the first truly proper grown-up thing we’d done together; but the process quickly declined into a bitter slog, with the seller growing increasingly belligerent for reasons that were never really made clear.
On the day we got the keys, it was pouring with rain, and after heaving all our boxes up two flights of stairs we finally closed the door behind us. I flicked on the light switch, only to discover that in a final act of malice, the seller had taken every last fixture and fitting not specifically itemized in the contract: doorknobs, cabinet and drawer handles, picture hooks, towel rings, toilet-paper holder and — crucially in that moment — lightbulbs. Worse still was the bleak detritus left behind: a ceramic teddy bear holding a heart emblazoned with “I LOVE YOU,” filthy rags and twisted bedsheets, broken wind chimes and a single, fetid tennis shoe.
“Oh shit.” Luke sank onto a box. “What have we done?”
“It isn’t so bad,” I said. “We just need to clean and unpack. Once our stuff’s in, it’ll begin to feel like ours.”
“I thought it would look bigger with nothing in it. What were we thinking?” He went through to the kitchen. “We spent our life savings on this. I spent my grandparents’ life savings on this.” He walked out, shaking his head, and wandered up to the bathroom and the bedroom, taking a call from his parents.
“Yeah, we’re in…No, it’s…fine…It’s great…” His voice echoed through the naked rooms, nothing at all to absorb his disappointment.
I wanted to cry: not because it was a shithole, but because he didn’t seem to get that it was our shithole. Instead, I opened a box marked ESSENTIALS and — deciding against the bottle of warm, cheap-looking Chardonnay the real estate agent had shoved ungraciously into my hand along with the keys that morning — retrieved mugs, kettle, teabags, cookies and some non-dairy creamers I’d pocketed from the McDonald’s a few doors down. When I went to find Luke, he was staring at the black street, where a succession of flashing police cars screamed past.
“I promise, promise, promise we’ll make it nice,” I said, handing him a hot mug and a chocolate cookie.
He held the tea with one hand and put the other arm around me, dunking the cookie so I was in a sort of headlock.
“I guess,” he said, “you already are.”
Confrontation
When it starts to get dark, I head for home.
“Hi,” I say in a small voice at the door — so small I think Luke hasn’t heard me. “Hi?” I try, a little louder.
“What do you want?” comes Luke’s voice from the living-room gloom, where he sits in silhouette, channel-surfing on mute.
“To say I’m sorry.” There’s a long pause. On the screen, a cartoon’s playing, one of the old Warner Bros. ones with Porky the Pig. Watching him trotting around, I feel the same sickly rise of boredom I used to get as a kid, in that impossibly wide, drab space between Saturday afternoon and Saturday night, when my parents would take to their bed for “a nap,” which of course, it suddenly occurs to me now, with head-smacking clarity, was obviously a euphemism for sex, leaving me orphaned downstairs with these hectic critters for guardians.
Luke’s silhouette breaks its silence. “You don’t seem to realize there’s a limit to how much a person can take. Sometimes it feels as if your sole aim in my life is to find the line and piss all over it.”
I fight the overwhelming impulse to point out that I can’t be both unaware of the limit and make finding it my sole aim.
“While I wouldn’t necessarily endorse that assertion or…image,” I say, choosing my words with tremendous care, “I will concede I was being pretty awful earlier.” Luke’s silhouette doesn’t move. “For which, again, my most ’eartfelt apologies, sir.”
“Titchy Pip isn’t going to get you out of this,” he says, and I know I’m in trouble: in happier times, Luke loves my Victorian street-urchin character, a plucky young shoeshine with nothing to ’is name but a tin o’ boot polish and a pocketful o’ dreams.
I drop the voice. “Seriously, I was horrible and I apologize. Though I would like to say, both for the record and in my own defense, that you were being quite mean.”
“Well, I will concede it’s a shame you felt that way, but I really, definitely wasn’t.”
“Okay, but…what I’m saying is that you were.”
“I don’t understand how you can say that when it’s simply not true.”
“Well,” I explain in my most patient, helpful voice, “because it’s possible to be mean without meaning to be.”
“Are you actually sorry? It sounds to me like you might be trying to score points with twisted logic.”
“I don’t want to score any points. I just wanted to let you know my experience.”
“Well, now you have.”
“Luke. I really am sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It hasn’t been a good day. I spent hours and hours staring at the computer, and it just felt like all these months in a microcosm, doing hundreds of aimless searches based on stupid, vague ideas I have about what might be a meaningful, or even just nice, way to spend my days. I wasted a full morning on an application to be a TV script editor: I’ve never seen a TV script! I just like watching TV! But I went through all the criteria, kidding myself that I could make my skills sound relevant, and then as soon as I read over what I’d written, I realized how deluded I sounded. Then I texted my parents to say, ‘Hi. How are you guys?’ and my dad basically replied saying, ‘Please let us enjoy our muffin in peace.’ ”