2.

“How was your day?” she asks me.

I hate this question, although not because she asks it (although she knows how I dislike the question), but because my day was like the day before it, and the one before that, and the one before that. You get the idea. If anything different were to happen, anything spectacular, anything worthy of mentioning, then I’d mention it, but working as an editor in a small publisher doesn’t exactly offer the excitement of, say, working in the bomb squad.

“The usual,” I tell her.

I know she hates that answer because she’s a sharer. She’ll detail everything that happens throughout her day as if it’s the most extraordinary thing imaginable, like bookkeeping is replete with excitement. Well, maybe if she was bookkeeping for a cartel or laundering money for the mob. But she’s not. She bookkeeps for a small accountancy firm.

“So that’s it?” she asks.

“That’s it.”

“Well, what’d you do?”

You’d think “the usual” and “that’s it” would cover what I did, but apparently not. Back to the bomb squad, because now the countdown’s on. If I’m not careful then this is going to escalate into a fight. She used to be more tolerant, but on some level she must sense or feel or just outright see my growing ambivalence.

“I’m working on some books,” I said.

“What books?”

“One’s this relationship thingy. Then there’s this science fiction thingy, too. There’s also this young adult one.”

“Weren’t you doing a romance?”

“The relationship one.”

“Well, you’ll never guess what Mel did,” she says.

I won’t. And I’m not going to bore you with it either. Mel’s an accountant at the same firm – a forty-something divorcee who has seniority, the run of the office, and the gall to be pedantic, like lecturing my partner if she doesn’t clean up after herself while making a tea or coffee, or toasting something for lunch. It’s not that she’s lazy. She’s always cleaning. Always fastidious. But Mel wants things done a certain way, in a certain time, and that irks my partner, because, well, she wants things done in a certain way, and a certain time, and these certainties clash until they produce uncertainties, and God forbid either of them have to deal with an uncertainty.

After dinner, we throw on a movie – a romcom that I’ve chosen (the woeful Last Christmas), because that’s Lana’s genre, and whenever I choose something that interests me (like Zodiac, Donnie Brasco, or JFK) she always seems bored, and that she’s tolerating it like a dental examination.

So we watch it and briefly we sync, because she finds the movie awful, too. This is unusual. Sometimes, I dissect why certain movies don’t work (like when she took me to see Mama Mia! Here We Go Again, and I ripped into the string of outrageous contrivances that drove the plot), she’ll condescend to me, and tell me to accept the stories for what they are – light-hearted entertainment – and other times she’ll agree with me. I never know which way she’s going to come back to me, and I’ve stopped trying to guess.

Once the movie’s done, neither of us are in the mood for another, and since it’s a night we’re having a few drinks (sometimes, it’s a tea and chocolate biscuits night, because around fifty, this is how you rage), she flicks it to the YouTube app on my TV, clicks the button for the voice action, and lifts the remote to her mouth.

“Bon Jovi,” she says, like the remote’s a microphone (it’s not). “Make a memory.”

We start with Bon Jovi, and go through songs from his catalogue, then let YouTube take us down whatever rabbit hole it desires. At first, it just picks more Bon Jovi, then it ranges further afield, the algorithm picking similar bands and music from the 1980s and 1990s.

I’m thankful that we’re still drinking – not too much, but enough that I imagine that bed will just be bed, and nothing more. I can’t bear the taste of red wine on her (and I never drink it), and struggle to feel attracted to her – not because she isn’t attractive, but because that emotional intimacy has become so problematic, so pockmarked, it struggles to fuel anything – from my side at least.

“You want to go to bed?” she says.

I’d prefer she went home, and all this complaining makes me sound unrelentingly cruel, but there’s some last glowing ember that offers some hope (however dimly) that maybe something will take flame again, and although by now I should know that’s a forlorn hope, that the ember will (in all likelihood) never spark flame again, I want to believe.

“Sure,” I say, not because I want to go to bed, but because when she decides she’s shutting down for the night, then I’m meant to follow.

I have a nightly wind-down routine she disrupts. About the only part of it I can keep, because I need to keep it, is my nightly pill – something I need to take because it helps with chronic pain (but more on that later).

Generally, I’m anti-meds because of a horrific experience with antidepressants twenty years ago. I have a packet of sedatives – a prescription I got just in case. But I also got it because I thought if one day I ended my life, I’d have those pills ready. That’s a terrible tie in, but going to sleep and never waking up seems an easy way to go, although I’ve heard it’s not actually that peaceful.

While I’m brushing my teeth, she shouts out from the bedroom, “Are you coming?” No, not at all. I might vacuum. Or take a walk. Or conduct an archaeological dig in the backyard. But I don’t any of these things because obviously I’ll be there, but it’s just how she oversee anything that’s not going to her schedule.

She hates my bed. It’s too hard. I wish I’d bought a slab of marble. So when she sleeps over, she folds a couple of blankets for her side of the bed – well, my side. She claims it. If this was a story, like a full-on novel, I’d suggest the author’s using that as a metaphor for the relationship, for displacement and not feeling quite right or something. But it’s funny: this has become the norm, which makes me think that this is my normal – at least when she’s around.

Displaced.

In bed, we talk briefly – she tells me about squabbles she’s having with her siblings (such a regular occurrence, that it would be more shocking for her to tell me about the peacetimes she’s having with her siblings), and when I do start to talk about my own frustrations with work, she’s soon snoring. Here’s another regular occurrence: my problems put her to sleep.

I lay awake, listening to her snore. She snore’s magnificently. It’s like her vehicle to bother me while she’s sleeping, since she can no longer consciously do it herself. As unkind as it is to say, she’s a lump of dissonance in the night, which leaves me with typical thoughts of self-pity, self-loathing, and melancholy.

This. Is. Me.

It’d be cliché to write that I don’t sleep.

I do sleep. Eventually.

It’s just shit.

 

3.

 

There’s no plot to this, if you’re searching for one – well, not in the relationship itself. It’s just stuff that happens – the interplay of a couple not really coupling anymore (although not really through any fault of hers), but caught in the habit that somewhere, it changes, even though they know it won’t.

I wake in the morning before her, then drift in and out of a restless sleep until she comes away and rolls into me. This is nice: the cuddling. It makes me think of something that could be, although I don’t know if I’m idealizing it, or if it’s some genuine insight beyond my capacity (and intelligence) to grasp.

Most of my friends have been married, divorced, and remarried, or they’ve endured marital difficulties that make them question whether the relationship is worthwhile. Only one friend’s been in a long-term relationship, so maybe he’s discovered the secret. Or perhaps it’s because he’s an idiot, and being idiot simplifies life and uncomplicates relationships. There’s a very good possibility this is the case. You’ll meet him soon, so you can judge for yourself.

Lana’s hand roves down my chest. She’s going to ruin this by expecting sex. I don’t feel like it – the emotional intimacy thingy (although I’m sure somebody would suggest sex could build that). But then there’s morning bloatiness courtesy of the night’s pizza and beer. This is as unsexual as you can feel.

I wonder about how relationships survive those assaults of everyday minutiae. Like when you’re first dating, you’re on your best behaviour – not just in how you behave and talk with your partner, but how you eat, the mess you make in a toilet, whether you fart, if you let them see you without the seller’s presentation. That’s what early relationships are like: pictures in marketplace that make something look great. Reality’s always different. Reality’s going to see that two-bedroom flat that looks so glamorous and spacious on some realtor’s website, only to find in person that’s it’s the size of two mouldy cupboards.

Bouncing out of bed (yes, I literally bounce, like I push back against the mattress, and use the spring to catapult out of bed), I wee, then prepare breakfast: toast, eggs, and tea. Lana has the TV on and is watching the News.  I don’t particularly care. News has become so politicised, it’s no different to watching a drama engineered for ratings.

“You seeing your mum today?” Lana asks.

“I’m catching up with Dom first,” I tell her.

“Oh.”

Dom’s two things: the idiot friend with the long marriage, and an actor – well, an actor on the side if the side was the furthest reaches of the Earth. He always wants to collaborate: my writing and his acting, and we’ve bandied about a few projects, but I’ve increasingly become aware that for all his talk, there’s little action. He knows people, but that’s about it. I know people, too. Knowing people is never enough.

Lana knows Dom and I butt heads, but that’s not the cause for her “oh”. It’s that she frowns on me pursuing artistic endeavours that have little-to-no payoff, and everything so far has had little-to payoff. I hope one day to impress her by graduating from little-to-no payoff to little payoff.

“Then you seeing your mum?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“What else you gonna do?”

She’s fishing. For what, I’ll tell you later. Just keep it in mind that she is.

“Nothing,” I say, shrugging.

Her questioning has sped up my heart several beats – not that I’ve done anything wrong. But it’s the anticipation of her finding something that’s innocuous, if not innocent, and transmuting it into a grand inquisition. I just don’t have endurance for that anymore so.

“What’ve you got on?” I say, keen to head off her expedition.

“Dinner, at Lily’s.”

For all the arguing that bounces around Lana’s family, they do family get-togethers like no other family I know. It’s like building a façade on their relationships, seeing those relationships breakdown (sometimes gradually, sometimes spectacularly, but ultimately always explosively), and then re-erecting the fucking thing as a denial of how much they bicker. I can’t even remember what tonight’s about, even though here she sits waiting to see if I remember why they’re doing dinner.

“For my dad’s six-month anniversary,” Lana tells me.

Her father passed away six months ago. In true Orthodox fashion, we commemorate forty days, three months, six months, nine months, and a year as anniversary in a passing – a constant reminder of the person we’ve lost and that everybody should be miserable so don’t you forget it.

“Oh,” I say.

I can see that I haven’t remembered has annoyed her, although there’s no reason I should remember – I have nil interaction with her family.

“I’ll see what time we finish,” she says. “Maybe we can do something tonight.”

“Well, it probably won’t be worth it,” I say.

“Don’t you want to see me?” she asks.

She’s not an idiot – it’s not like I’m opaque. We haven’t had sex for a while now (again, through no fault of hers), and there isn’t much in the way of physical intimacy. We do some couple things, like go to movies and restaurants and take walks, but since a cruise we took a couple of years ago, that’s as good as it gets.

Or got.

“Just it’s probably not going to be worth your while,” I say. “You’ll probably finish late. Then, what? You come here just to go to sleep, and then you get up in the morning and leave.”

She measures that, because it’s all true. It’s logical. But she’s gauging the motivation behind the logic, which is fair enough. I should just break up if I’m not going to commit. That would be the honest thing to do. I don’t know why I hold on. Well, I do, actually. I’m grasping at something other people have – that all my friends have, but which I’ve missed: partner, family, all that stuff, even if they aren’t mine. I’ll contradict myself a lot in telling you this, because I contradict myself a lot in my head.

“I don’t think it’ll go that late,” she says.

I could challenge this. She says it a lot. And most of the time, they always run later than she anticipates. But, in the past, when I’ve pointed it out, she’s treated the exception like it’s the rule.

“See how you go,” I say, because anything else would be disaster.

“Sure,” she says.

I see her to the door, and we exchange a brief moment of closeness in our brief farewell kiss, which results in an equally brief resurgence of hope that maybe I’ve got this wrong, I’ve got her wrong, and the ember should be something I fan, rather than dismiss. Embers can start bushfires, after all.

But, well, my head, my reasoning, doesn’t work so well in these situations, so I decide to remain wishy washy and  just to see where it goes.