wait for me. His dark eyes are so shiny as he holds my hand across the table and says, “I don’t want to share you with anyone.”
When I get back to the apartment, I look around at all the boxes and think, Only a few more days. The Musician isn’t there. I sit on the floor with Our Book. On the cover is a drawing The Scientist has done in pencil, a face with a tree for a body.
When I close my eyes, he is all I see.
THIRTEEN YEARS LATER
We’re in a restaurant with our daughter, Birdie, having our weekly “family dinner.” We’ve been separated for eleven months.
Out of the blue he says, “I was just reading Our Book. All the emails back and forth.” It’s like he’s just put a fist through my chest. There’s no way I’d be able to read it yet; there’s no way I’d expect him to re-read it, not now or ever.
“Did it make you sad to read it?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says, “but a little happy too.”
We smile at one another, but I want to jump across the table and shake him. I also want to crawl into his arms and feel his skin against mine. I want to kiss the nape of his neck and also punch him in his stupid face. It’s complicated to love someone who’s betrayed you, okay?
Afterward, as he walks me and Birdie to my apartment, he puts his arm around me. For the first time in almost a year, we walk like that, his giant parka and mine all bunched together. We stop outside my building. He kisses my forehead and says, “I love you.” He waves at us as we go in.
This is how we are now. This is who we are. Together, alone.
HURRICANE
In the year 2000, after I’ve broken up with The Musician and moved out on my own, I figure my relationship with The Scientist is no big deal. I’m pretty sure that the sex is all we have between us. That we’ll grow tired of each other, eventually, and move on to find people who we actually have something in common with.
I miss the kind of conversations I had with The Musician — long, intelligent talks about films, novels, philosophy, music. The Scientist never knows what I’m talking about. If I play a song by The Beatles, he can’t tell who’s singing! My vocabulary is too big for him, and I’m constantly dumbing myself down.
Sometimes I think wistfully of The Musician and the easy symmetry of our life before The Scientist upset the balance. But I’m electrically charged. I’m hooked on this man who burns incandescent. It feels different to love like this. It feels like a hurricane.
Other than great sex, all we mostly do is fight in these early days. We fight and fight and fight. Once, I throw a bowl of cherries at the wall, and it smashes into pieces, a fireworks display of red and white. Another time I put all his stuff in a bag and throw it off the rooftop of my apartment into the alleyway. He doesn’t seem to care and doesn’t call me for days, which makes me crazy. I imagine him doing horrible things I don’t want to imagine him doing with cute university girls. But apparently he’s just playing video games and waiting for me to cool down. We cannot understand each other, ever. It’s all one giant miscommunication. We fight and fuck and fight and fuck.
So yeah, there is a lot of passion and drama in that first year together. But there is also a lot of growth. I become a much less judgemental person because of him. I stop writing people off because of things like political affiliation or the fact that they don’t read books. He asks me to teach him about music, so one night we listen to Led Zeppelin, and I teach him to count time signatures out by slapping his thighs with his hands. I also attempt to teach him to distinguish between Beatles (it doesn’t work; he still can’t tell who’s singing). I introduce him to foreign films, and he takes me to blockbuster action movies. We learn to love the things the other person loves. Or at least, we try.
To get to my three-hundred-square-foot apartment you have to take a fire escape in the alleyway of Honest Ed’s — an old department store famous for its quirky signs and the way you’d get lost in its maze of cheap stuff. Light bulbs hang in strings in the alleyway, and young cooks and dishwashers of neighbouring restaurants are out by open doorways having smokes at all hours of the night. The rats as big as cats in the dumpster, you can hear them fighting as you fall asleep. I paint the entire apartment mustard; I can’t imagine why now, but I do, and The Scientist helps me. We do the bathroom bright purple.
I am twenty-five and living alone for the first time ever. Sort of. Once I’m in and settled, The Scientist settles in mostly, too. He’s writing his master’s thesis and that’s hard to do while living with roommates. So during the day while I’m at work producing radio shows, he’s at my place writing his thesis on an old laptop at my vintage Formica table. He sleeps at my new place most nights, too, but not always. I hate when he isn’t there because I don’t know where he is. It makes me anxious, panicked, possessive.
His thesis work is in atomic physics, and some days I get home from work and the entire floor of my little apartment is covered in paper — all with the mad scratchings of a mathematician. It looks like that scene in the movie A Beautiful Mind, just equations everywhere, and then his shiny dark eyes, his tense jaw. It makes me love him just to think of it now.
Each day is the same. I come home from a full day’s work, he’s sitting at the table, head deep into the workings of the cesium atom. I walk in, say hello, and without a word he comes to me and kisses me, removing my purse with one hand, shutting the door with the other, and we have sex immediately, right there or wherever — it’s only three-hundred square feet. And then we might eat some dinner, or he’ll go right back to writing and I’ll play guitar and sing, but quietly, so I won’t bother him.
We’re in a mustard-coloured cocoon at the turn of the century, and everything feels full of promise. Every moment feels electric, even the ordinary ones.
Eventually I begin to edit his thesis for him, for grammar only, obviously. I know absolutely nothing about physics, let alone this very specific thing he has done to an atom, or the giant machine he’s built himself in order to do it. Sometimes it takes me an hour to edit two pages, not because of the physics, but because he has no idea how to write a sentence. He has no idea how to write at all, his brain full of math and machines and experiments, not syntax. About a month into the editing, he comes up to me, there at the table hunched over his thesis, and he says to me with all sincerity, “So are you starting to get some of this?”
I laugh and tell him no, I am in no way starting to “get” any of it. He asks how I can edit something I don’t understand, so I try to explain that it’s just grammar, it’s just sentence structure, the content is irrelevant. He finds this fascinating. I find him fascinating. We’re in awe of each other, since we’re from totally different planets, since the other person seems capable of powers we can’t possess. We are total opposites. We are madly in love.
And then for reasons I’ll never understand, because we’ve never talked about it, he asks me to marry him. On September 13, 2001. Yeah, that’s right, two days after 9/11. He phones to say I should meet him at our favourite Italian restaurant for dinner. Like every journalist in the world following the attacks, I’ve just worked about thirty hours straight. I haven’t been home at all. I’m tired. And I want to get out of the newsroom to forget for a little bit the terrible things we’ve all watched, over and over again.
I don’t know what he’s thinking, at all,
