The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [43]
One afternoon toward the end of his first year, she came home and tossed her bag with some violence onto the bed before she sat down across from him and drummed her fingers on the kitchen table. They had been bickering about something the night before, and she was annoyed that a gallery owner had blown off a studio visit with her.
“Is there a problem?” he asked, petulant. “I’m trying to work.”
“I don’t know why you ever went to law school,” she answered, less aggravated than fatigued. “You actually used to be kind of fun.”
He responded as if she were responsible for his hidden and unceasing desires. “Fuck off, Amanda.”
“Martin, what the fuck is wrong with you?” she yelled back, provoked. “You look at me like I’m a piece of shit. Do I make you sick? You make me sick! We never talk, we never fuck—are you gay, Martin? Is that why I make you sick?”
“You wish,” he responded, trying to control himself but shocked that she had seen through what was apparently little more than a thin veneer. He felt an urge to make angry love to her, which he knew was idiotic, rooted in nothing more than a desire to prove her wrong, but which in turn made him even more irate. “Is there anything else you want to blame me for?”
At this point her anger seemed to break as she beat her hands against the table in frustration. He was horrified to see real tears emerge from her eyes and spill down her cheeks. Until this moment, it had not occurred to Martin that she had also been losing patience with him, that he was actually the one who had taken on the exact characteristics—cool and aloof, vaguely angry—he had once found so beguiling in her.
He felt a newfound resolve and addressed her calmly: “Aman—I’m sorry—I think we made a mistake—”
“Fuck you, Martin,” she said, in exactly the same tone he had used a few minutes earlier. “You think an apology for wasting three years of my life is enough?” She now continued without emotion, flat and distant as a mirage. “You have these expectations, Martin, and I’m not sure where you get them, but I always get the sense that neither one of us is living up to them, so how can you ever be happy?”
“That’s a good question,” Martin admitted, passing his hand in and out of a beam of sunlight on the kitchen table.
She winked at him. “So you really want a divorce?”
“Don’t you?”
“You bet, but it’s going to cost you.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“No, I’m telling you. I want this apartment, Martin, and you’re going to give it to me.”
“Why should I do that?”
“Because I already know, Martin.”
“Know what?”
“I know you haven’t exactly been at the library studying all these nights—”
Martin felt the hard metal of the gun she had placed at his temple. “What are you talking about?”
“What part of not being at the library didn’t you understand?”
There was a part of him that wanted just to admit it, to confess, but at the last second he panicked and offered a dose of feigned sarcasm: “I love it when you condescend to me, Amanda.”
She shrugged. “Fine. Let me spell it out for you—you’ve been having sex with guys you meet—”
Martin interrupted her. “You’re making this up—”
“Am I?” She flipped open a nearby copy of the Voice. Her tone was shaky but rehearsed, and he realized that she had planned this. “Hmmm—this one sounds good, doesn’t it? Bi-curious MWM—married white male—seeks same …”
He felt a strange sense of dislocation, the way he imagined it might feel to have his head cut off but to retain consciousness for those several seconds as it rolled across the floor or stared up at the sky from the wicker basket. Except the numb quality did not fade to black but continued for what felt like years and years, as though he were living every second of his life in reverse. Unable to talk, he staggered to the bathroom, where the deception he saw in these images of his past seemed to accumulate into something visceral, so that he could no longer contain it. To be sick was actually a relief, because it was a distraction from the reverberating