The Theory of Opposites (2 page)

To: Vanessa Pines

Out sick. Same idiot just said accidental moistness.

Text from: Vanessa Pines

To: Willa Chandler-Golden

Some1’s getting fired. And Hannah’s not sick. She needs rehab.

—

For the first time in at least two weeks, Shawn is waiting for me when I slink home after an epic seven-hour meeting with Adult Diapers, in which I made the grim discovery, much to their executives’ displeasure, that there really is no way to make grown-up Pampers sexy.

“Hi! I’m glad you’re home,” I say.

Shawn gulps a deep sip of his beer and nudges his chin upward as a greeting.

“Hey,” he says. “Oh my God, am I beat.”

When we first moved in together, we would meet every night at the deli on the corner or the Chinese joint down the street or some version of dinner under ten bucks within a one-block vicinity. We’d hem and haw over what to order until we would finally come to an agreement over something that we could split 50/50. We did this every weeknight without fail, and we would sit on the same side of the booth or tucked into a tiny side table, and we were shiny and new and a tiny bit smug at our coupledom — and people around us would smile, our euphoria at having found each other apparently contagious. Lucy, the cashier at the Chinese restaurant, would throw in an egg roll for free because as she said, “You be so happy. Me be so happy.”

Eventually, things (like euphoria) settled down into a low simmer, and five nights a week at a restaurant down the block became untenable. Shawn’s career exploded; natural complacency set in; we stopped trying to impress each other with twenty-minute make-out sessions to earn free egg rolls; sex became dull when everything revolved around my ovulation cycle. Now, we have reached the apex: I come home from work, and he nudges his chin up, his fist tight around his beer, and says, “Hey.”

It’s the natural evolution of things, my dad would say. “
You can’t go around screwing like banshees all the time
(figuratively speaking, but literally, too),
and our brains account for this
,” he’d add. So that Shawn and I meet only two times a week for dinner now isn’t of much concern. Or it wasn’t, not until
Grape!

I’m so caught up in this notion (
banshees! let’s at least try to be like banshees
!), that now, with him half-asleep on the couch, I say:

“Let’s run down to Hop Lee — see if we can be cutesy enough to get Lucy to throw in some egg rolls.”

“I’m so spent. I honestly can’t motivate off the couch, much less out of the apartment,” Shawn says. “Can’t we just order?”

“Okay.” The air seeps out of me like a deflated balloon. Like this wasn’t a big deal, like him running down to Hop Lee and kissing me until we got free food wouldn’t have been a grand gesture.

And maybe he senses my discontent or maybe he hears me exhaling my disappointment, but he says: “Oh, screw it!,” and thunks his beer down on the coffee table, leaps over the couch and wraps an arm around my back, dipping me like Astaire would Rogers.

“Can we go to Hop Lee?” I ask, my head still tilted toward him, his hand still pressed against the small of my back.

He pecks my neck and flips me upright. “That was my maximum energy expenditure for the evening. But I didn’t want you to think I couldn’t make the effort.”

“Duly noted.” I smile and bite my lip, delighted at his playfulness, like maybe he read my mind. “Good day?”

He plops right back on the sofa.

“Not terrible, actually. Got the job with Tech2Go. They matched my fee from the Microsoft job. How did it go with the pooper pants?”

“Shitty.”

“Ha!” He angles his face back toward me so I can see his genuine laugh. He doesn’t do that as often as he used to — sink into his laughter. He’s always tired or working or hunched over one of his various laptops or devices that demand more than I do.
You have forty-seven new messages and you have to answer them all immediately or this phone will blow up like a grenade in your hand! Don’t worry; your wife will be there in the morning!

“You’re cute when you laugh, you know.”

“Laughter is the best medicine,” he replies, reaching for the remote and scrolling through the channels.

I dig through a kitchen drawer for the Hop Lee menu. “Oh, do you have cash? Because you canceled my credit cards, right?”

“I called. No new charges — it probably wasn’t stolen. You must have lost it.”

I search his tone for something close to judgment: Shawn
has
never lost his credit cards, never
would
lose his credit cards. He’s too stream-lined, too meticulous for that. He was the child of MIT professors. He was raised with order, with linear thought, with to-do lists that ensure safe passage from one cushion (Choate) to the next (Harvard). He’d never leave his bag half-zipped or zone out to his iPod on the subway, which I’ve been known to do from time to time, but only because ‘80s metal rock is my guilty pleasure, and I’m too embarrassed to listen to it anywhere but in the company of strangers. No, Shawn was secure, predictable, and for these reasons, he would never, ever lose his credit cards.

I watch him on the couch, already sucked back into some
National Geographic
documentary on African tribesmen. And then I remember:
Grape!
Perhaps he’s less anal, less risk-averse than I thought. He and his friends, kings of the coding world, out blowing their IPO-funded wads of bills on lithe women wearing tank tops a size too small. It didn’t
seem
like Shawn, but then again, there was the receipt.

I stare at the ceiling, so fervently wishing we could just go down to Hop Lee and earn those egg rolls. Finally, a little too sharply, I announce:

“I didn’t lose my wallet. Someone took it.”

“Willa, you’ve been known to lose it.”

He’s not wrong: I have lost my wallet three times since we’ve been together.

Before I can leap to my own defense, Shawn’s phone comes alive with the seemingly ever-present buzzzzzzzz of a text (if a site crashed in the woods and a coder couldn’t text about it, would the site have actually crashed in the woods?) and he falls silent, reading, then typing.

Hello, hello, were we not just having a conversation? Why is your phone more important than egg rolls?

“Amanda wants to know if we can take Nicky this weekend.”

“But we…um…okay…”

He is already typing her back.

“Shawn!” I say, more firmly than I mean to, or maybe exactly as firmly as I mean. His flying fingers abort, and he snaps to.

I say, more kindly: “We haven’t had a weekend to ourselves in a month. I mean, I don’t want to be the bad guy here, but…”

“Will, we’re all she has. And you love Nicky.”

“I do love Nicky,” I agree. But I think:
but not as much as I used to. Pubescent twelve isn’t nearly as great as adorable seven.
And then I hate myself for even giving voice to conditional love and what it might say about both me and my own prospects as a mother.

“…
Mister Card. Is. Calling. Mister. Card. Is calling.”

“Who’s Mister Card?” Shawn asks.

“MasterCard,” I say. My face points down but my spirits buoy upward —
I knew it was stolen!
I knew I didn’t lose it!

I grab the receiver.

“This is the fraud early warning department. Is this Willa Golden?”

Golden is actually Shawn’s name. When we married three years ago, I was desperate to shed the moniker — Chandler — that had followed me around like a shadow, my dad’s shadow, for so long. And though I knew Shawn was my destiny, knew he was my “meant to be,” I’d never quite adjusted to the switch. Golden. I wanted so desperately to slide into it without a hiccup, but the truth is that I still hesitated when someone called out “Mrs. Golden!” in a restaurant, still looked twice at my driver’s license to ensure the proof. Shawn was mine. I was his. Willa Golden. Like the “Chandler” part was maybe just the in-between phase of my life.

“Yes,” I say to the MasterCard agent. “This is Willa Golden.”

“We have some suspicious activity on your card, and we’d like to go over the charges with you.”

I look at Shawn and pump my fist (
my card was stolen! I knew it!)
, and he looks at me and shrugs.

I turn back toward the phone.

Yes,
I think,
I was right. I win.

And then the moment passes, and I remember how much I love Shawn, that
Grape!
can’t be what I think it is, and my dad wouldn’t call this a win. No, in fact, he might even chalk this up as a loss.

—

Later, Shawn and I settle into our Thursday night routine: our Chinese food and the highest-rated network reality show,
Dare You!,
in which contestants are goaded on by the opposition and the host, a chisel-jawed blond named Slack Jones who has gone on to fame and notoriety thanks to the decade-long gig. If you land all the dares, you win $100,000. (There is a small portion of the population who devote their lives to preparing to be contestants. Google it. You’ll find the forums. It’s strange, but I suppose not the strangest obsession out there.)

Though I’d never admit it aloud, I watch the show to assess what can go wrong due to the forces of gravity and nature or engine speed or torque or rope slack while simultaneously assessing what can go awry due to human nature: can the contestants control their fear enough to abate their shaking fingers as they clutch a wire while belaying across a skyline? Can they calm their tempers enough to get through a task in which their frustratingly inept partners are responsible for pulling their own weight up a volcano? Can they tiptoe quietly enough not to disturb mountain lions; can they repress their gag reflex when forced to drink a smoothie made of urine?

The push-pull between what’s in their control and what isn’t is what makes
Dare You!
so fascinating to me, though inarguably most people watch it just to see a lot of stupid people do a lot of stupid shit.

“Listen,” Shawn says, when they break for a commercial. He wrestles an egg roll from the box on the coffee table and bites off the top, the greasy crumbs landing on his chest. “I know that Nicky is going through his awkward phase right now, and I know that you want some us-time…”

“Don’t you want some us-time? I thought you liked our weekend routine.”

“That came out wrong. You know what I mean.”

I’m not actually sure I do know what you mean,
I think. Grape!
That might possibly be the dumbest name for a club in the history of ever!

“Anyway, I’ll make it up to you, okay? I’ll plan something lavish and romantic and sexy, and you won’t be able to keep your hands off me.” He smiles, and I smile back, mostly because I want to believe him. It was just one receipt, one small thing, one tiny fabrication as to his whereabouts.
Grape!
It was probably nothing. (My dad would remind me here that nothing is ever nothing. Everything is something, and all roads lead to here, blah, blah, blah.) I pretend not to remember that Shawn hasn’t planned anything romantic or sexy in at least a year (I blame the Microsoft job — hey, Bill Gates, how do
you
make your wife happy?) and, frankly, not too often before that either. Which is just as well because I’m not overly comfortable with grand displays of affection. We like Chinese food. We like
Dare You!
. We like our couch on Thursday nights. I wouldn’t mind making out for free egg rolls, but Shawn doesn’t have to whisk me off to Bali (or whatever) to prove his devotion. Though not hanging out at nightclubs and lying about it would probably be a good start.

He reaches over and squeezes my calf, and then Slack Jones pops up on the screen to introduce tonight’s first task, which involves couples being lowered into a pit of vipers. If they
manage to hold themselves perfectly still, the viper will leave them be. If they don’t, well…there’s a medical tent on the premises. (And it’s true that last year one contestant did die when he lost his wrestling match with a grizzly bear, but the network was very adamant — and thus avoided litigation — that the contestant had signed away any medical liability.)

“Haven’t they done this one before?” Shawn asks. He has stuffed the rest of the egg roll in his mouth, his cheeks bursting as he speaks. He grins unapologetically. He did this once on our second date — his chipmunk impression — and it made me laugh so hard that wine dribbled down my chin. Izzy is right: Shawn is the coding-world anomaly: his green eyes and his chestnut stubble and his jaw that rivals Slack Jones’s make him too handsome to loiter behind a screen all day.

“That was with rattlesnakes,” I answer, absorbing the cut of his jaw and the clarity of his eyes. He was handsomer than I was pretty. I never totally understood why he chose me, other than that was simply what was meant to be. Vanessa told me that I needed to see a therapist for my self-esteem, but I was content just to be. Just to know that he had, in fact, chosen me, and that’s what the universe intended. She even texted me the contact info of her favorite shrink, but it lingered in my inbox for two weeks before my phone automatically deleted it.

I suck up a lo mein noodle, and before I can even think to stop because just two minutes earlier, I swore that it didn’t matter, I say: “How was the pick-up game last night?”

“Good,” he says, his eyes back on the TV. “Shit, that woman in the red is totally going to lose it.”

“Who won?”

“What do you mean? The show just started.”

“No, who won the game? The pick-up game.”

“Oh.” He flickers back to me for a moment, and then back to the show where indeed, the woman in red is trembling with such fortitude that production may need to call a seismologist. “We didn’t really keep score. Just shot around. You know. A few guys were sick, so we mostly just blew off steam.”

“Hmmm.”

I want to say more, I want to catch him in the net of knowledge with which I’m armed. I want to flaunt the receipt in front of him and shout — a-ha! But…I don’t. Because that will open up so much, and sometimes, no matter what my dad prophesizes, it is easier to just not know. The knowing is too hard.