For the
stuff that I want to do, I’m fairly disciplined—no surprise there, right? Which
means that my house is a mess, but I write each day. So the discipline isn’t
the problem—it’s the imagination.
Of which I
have none….
Consider it—there
is a couple three tables down from me at the café where I write. Shouldn’t I be
able to think of a story, shouldn’t I be able to weave a tale, just from the
slump of his shoulders, or the fact that she is looking at her phone, not at
him.
They
argued last night, of course. The same argument they’ve been having for a
month: he wants them to have a baby, she doesn’t.
“I had
enough SHIT FROM MY MOTHER,” she screamed at him. “I don’t want to do that to
anyone. And my therapist says I’m not ready.”
“You’re
never ready,” he said, trying to be reasonable. ‘Christ,’ he thought, ‘if only
she could hear herself…’
“Maybe in
a year,” she said.
“Said that
last year…”
“Look,
Jim, I just want time for us to be together as a couple. Too many couples have
children and then they’re parents, not couples. And then they end up in thirty
years not really knowing each other….”
‘She’s so
beautiful,’ he thinks, ‘why don’t I believe her?’
‘The
problem started after her mother visited,’ he thought. ‘She was so simple, so
sweet before her mother came. It’s like all the mistrust and suspicion got
dumped onto her. Christ, just because your mother had a rotten divorce, do you
have to spoil your own marriage?’
He turned
over in bed and feigned sleep.
It was his
fault—he’d always had this thing for younger women. And now, here he was, in
his third marriage to a girl in her early twenties. And he? Forties, still good
looking, hair graying at the temples, but look…time runs out for men as well as
women. It may be more psychological than biological, as it is for women, but it’s
still there. He doesn’t want to be in his fifties with a newborn crying in the
middle of the night. But he could handle it now.
Now, he
looks at her, absorbed in her phone. He sees the way her earring falls from
her earlobe, and remembers the thrill, the first time he had whispered, “I love
you,” into that ear.
“Let’s not
fight again,” he says. It seems as simple as that.
She
tenses, and thinks that the issue will never go away, never get settled. It
will end her marriage, as it ended her mother’s. Although that was another
woman, not the kid thing. Would Jim stray? Had he already? Or did he have some
lined up, someone in the wings?
“It’s not
like I want to fight,” she says. Is he putting all this on her, again?
“Then let’s
not….”
She gives him
a wary smile, and looks back down at her phone.
“Michelle
texted me—they’re at the Butterfly People, about to have lunch. You want to
join them?”
He doesn’t
like either Michelle or her partner, and he hates the pretension of the
Butterfly People. But the silence between them? Wouldn’t it be better to have
anything else but that?
“Sure,” he
says, and tries to look happy about it.
She stands
up, reaches for her purse, brushing her husband’s hand in the process; he was
about to give it to her. The touch seems as fragile, as fleeting as the
relationship itself.
She moves
away, ahead of her husband, pushes the door to the café open, and steps into
the street. She doesn’t know: in a week she will miss her period, in a month,
Jason will be born.
Now then—can
we tweet this to Patterson?
