She was a woman who had contempt for women and was easily frustrated by her body—cramps, its tendency to fat, its sensitivity to cold. She came like a man: quickly, usually before him. She spoke plainly when she wanted time to herself, and was good at sending him away, not just when she was angry, but when she was tired, or stressed.
She quit her teaching job in the same way: bluntly, almost accusing. Lesson-planning and calling parents cut into her evenings and weekends; she had no time to “write.” She thought it would be easy to find a desk job, not entry-level and not management. He admired her decision, her ability to leave her career behind. Her writing, so rare and ornamental when she’d had a regular paycheck, after weeks of temping and false leads, seemed like a petty thing to tinker at.
He tried to make plans for the few nights she was free, but she would come home, wash her face, and crawl into bed, hair sticking to her wet forehead. He couldn’t even get her out on Halloween. He understood, he told her; she hadn’t had a night off in weeks. Privately, though, he felt she could have rallied for their holiday. Last year, still new to each other, they had stood and watched the parade, making out through most of it. He had worn goggles and a cape and too-small footed pajamas that swelled in front as he pressed against her.
They argued; about the clutter she left strewn around, the cooking she never reciprocated, the sex they never had. He summoned memories of old girlfriends for relief: the girl he’d hooked up with while he backpacked through Slovenia, girls he’d brought home from parties in college. Tank-topped and smiling, they never gained weight, never cluttered his space with socks or unopened mail. They just accepted the frothy plastic cups he brought them and folded pliantly under him, disappearing in the morning, grateful and ungrudging.
Out of loyalty, he tried to use them only as supplements: her face and old self with the other’s legs, in place of the less-solid ones she folded under her as she scarfed a late dinner. His heart still lifted when she came home, hoping she’d have some good news that day.
But her face was always crumpled by the packed trains or some slight at work. He wasn’t always sorry when she went to bed, leaving him to his movies or whatever work he’d dragged home. As she receded from him, the girls in his memory became more and more lifelike. He made a game of recalling details about them: their favorite foods and books, their sisters’ names, the particular clench of each as he slid inside them. He began to feel like a collector, mulling over the impossible loops of his ex’s Celtic tattoo or the smell of that raver girl’s neck inside its neon orbit. They weren’t her at her best—not by a long shot—but she was almost unrecognizable now, her prettiness cloaked by exhaustion and bad food, her sense of humor choked.
He looked over at her, barely visible under the bedspread. At least she was safe and warm for another night. He would wait out her infirmity, sustained by the lean, lively golems who smiled on him, eerie and pleasing, like a candle out the mouth of a carved pumpkin.
