Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [13]
I watch light bounce off the walls from the cars on the street below. Henry. Where was he now? There was no way of knowing. We weren’t set to meet for another three months, if I choose to meet him again, I remind myself. Jack rolls to his side, lets out a sigh, and flings an arm around me.
It had only been a day, but still, I didn’t miss Henry. I should; I knew that I should, but what I felt wasn’t the ache of a wife who might have lost her husband. What I felt instead was relief. Relief from the mundanity of our lives. Henry provided so many things—security, warmth, a round, solid partner—but zeal, fire, no, not them, and now, free from the suffocation of my seemingly claustrophobic relationship, I only felt free.
Maybe this is why my mother left. The thought startles me, shaking something inside. Maybe she couldn’t take the passive familiarity that comes from sharing a bathroom or swapping the same stories night after night over dinner or scraping bird shit off the Range Rover that was supposed to give you that shiny, picturesque life. Maybe it was all too much, or really, all too little for her. Maybe she dreamed of something more, and when I came along, and then Andy, my brother, came along, she couldn’t take one more fucking minute of the Stepfordian existence that she’d built with my father.
Not that my life with Henry was Stepfordian. My life with Henry was perfectly placid. Ours was the marriage that people looked at and said, “They’ll make it. They’re not going to be the ones to split because he chased around his secretary or she slowly drank herself to death.” We were that couple in the Range Rover ad, only ours was the picture taken after five years of marriage, after we’d stopped noticing the other’s intricacies, after we’d already wooed each other and pledged ourselves to each other, and had, thus, in many ways, surrendered to complacency.
I’d read about this in Redbook—that scientists have discovered that in the first year or so of marriage, your brain receptors still register chemicals that make you want to dry hump your spouse on every flat surface that you can find. Then slowly, these chemicals abate, and eventually, if you don’t find ways to jump-start them—I remember that the doctor who was interviewed suggested exhilarating experiences such as skydiving—then you’re stuck waddling around the vestiges of your younger libidos and memories of what you once had.
I’d mentioned this to Henry one night when he was calling from San Francisco to say good night to Katie before her 7:30 (sharp!) bedtime.
“Maybe we should go skydiving together,” I said, chopping a cucumber in our granite-countered, white-tiled kitchen. My head was angled to hold the phone between my ear and shoulder, and somewhere within one of my vertebrae, a cramp was beginning to form.
“Where’s this coming from?” He laughed. “Besides, you’re scared of flying.”
“I know,” I sort of whined. “But we need to relight the spark. And I read that this might do it.”
“Our spark is just fine,” he answered. “Stop worrying about our spark. Can you put Katie on before I run to a meeting?”
“Sure.” I set down the knife and wandered into Katie’s perky pink playroom, where she was pulling out the hair of a now nearly bald blond doll she’d insisted that I buy her during a two-minute trip to Toys “R” Us for a neighbor child’s birthday present. Henry blew her kisses over the phone, then rattled off a quick “love you” (to me), before he dashed toward his waiting clients.
So now, with our spark nearly extinguished, I hardly feel bad about not missing him. It’s not like I didn’t warn him, I think. It’s not like I didn’t leave that goddamn Redbook article on his nightstand when he got home from his trip and asked him to read it so that he, too, could see the stupid signs that our marriage