Joe Hill - Horns

He made his way through the room to her, past the jostle and press of bodies. He bent across the table to kiss her before sliding into the booth opposite her. She didn’t lift her mouth to him, and he had to settle for a peck on her temple.

There was an empty martini glass in front of her, and when the waitress came, she ordered another one, told her to bring a beer for Ig. He was enjoying the look of her, the smooth line of her throat, the dark shine of her hair in the low light, and at first just went along with the conversation, murmuring in the right places, only semi-listening. He didn’t really start to focus in until Merrin told him he should look at his time in London as a vacation from their relationship, and even then he thought she was trying to be funny. He didn’t know she was serious until she got to the part about how she felt it would be good for both of them to spend time with other people.

“With our clothes off,” Ig said.

“Couldn’t hurt,” she said, and swallowed about half her martini.

It was the way she gulped at her drink, more than what she’d said, that gave him a cold shock of apprehension. That was a courage drink, and she’d already had at least one-maybe two-before he got here.

“You think I can’t wait for a few months?” he asked. He was going to make a joke about masturbation, but a strange thing happened on the way to the punch line. His breath got caught in his throat, and he couldn’t say any more.

“Well, I don’t want to worry about what’s going to happen a few months from now. We don’t know how you’re going to feel in a few months. Or how I’ll feel. I don’t want you thinking you have to come back home just so we can be together. Or assuming I’m going to transfer there. Let’s just worry about what happens now. Look at it like this. How many girls have you been with? In your whole life?”

He stared. He had seen this look of frowning, pretty concentration on her face many times, but he had never been scared of it before.

“You know the answer to that,” he said.

“Just me. And no one does that. No one lives their entire life with the first person they slept with. Not these days. There isn’t a man on the planet. There need to be other affairs. Two or three at least.”

“Is that your word for it? ‘Affairs’? That’s tasteful.”

“Fine,” she said. “You have to fuck a few other people.”

A cheer went up from the crowd, a roar of approval. Someone had slid home under the tag.

He was going to say something, but his mouth was too tacky, and he had to have a sip of beer. There was only one swallow left in the glass. He didn’t remember the beer coming, and he didn’t remember drinking it. It was lukewarm and salty, like a mouthful of the ocean. She had waited until today, twelve hours before he left to cross the ocean, to tell him this, to tell him-

“Are you breaking up with me? You want out-and you waited until now to tell me?”

The waitress stood at the side of their table with a basket of chips and a rigid smile.

“Would you like to order?” she asked. “Something else to drink?”

“Another martini and another beer, please,” Merrin said.

“I don’t want another beer,” Ig said, and didn’t recognize his own thick, sullen, almost childish voice.

“We’ll both have Key lime martinis, then,” Merrin said.

The waitress retreated.

“What the hell is this? I have a plane ticket, a rented apartment, an office. They’re expecting me to be there ready to work on Monday morning, and you lay this shit on me. What outcome are you hoping for here? Do you want me to call them up tomorrow and tell them, ‘Thanks for giving me a job that seven hundred other applicants wanted, but I have to pass’? Is this a test to see what I value more, you or the job? Because if it is, you ought to know it’s immature and insulting.”

“No, Ig. I want you to go, and I want you to-”

“Fuck someone else.”

Her shoulders jumped. He was a little surprised at himself, hadn’t expected his own voice to sound so ugly.

But she nodded, and swallowed. “Do it now or do it later, but you’re going to do it anyway.”

Ig had a nonsensical thought, in his brother’s voice: Well, it’s like this. You can live life as a cripple or a lame-ass. Ig wasn’t sure Terry had ever really said such a thing, thought the line might be completely imagined, and yet it came to him with the clarity of a line remembered from a favorite song.

The waitress gently set Ig’s martini in front of him, and he tipped it to his mouth, swallowing down a third of it in a gulp. He’d never had one before, and the sugary, harsh burn of it caught him by surprise. It sank slowly down his throat and expanded into his lungs. His chest was a furnace, and a sweat prickled on his face. His hand drifted up to his throat, found the knot of his tie. He struggled with it, pulling it loose. Why had he worn a button-down shirt? He was roasting in it. He was in hell.

“It’ll always bother you, wondering what you missed out on,” Merrin said now. “That’s how men are. I’m just being practical. I’m not waiting to get married to you so I can fight through your midlife affair with our babysitter. I’m not going to be the reason for your regrets.”

He struggled for patience, to recover a tone of calm, of good humor. The calm he could manage. The good humor he could not.

“Don’t tell me how other men think. I know what I want. I want the life we spent the last however many years daydreaming about. How many times have we talked about what to name the kids? You think that was all bullshit?”

“I think it’s part of the problem. You live like we already have kids, like we’re already married. But we don’t and we aren’t. To you the kids already exist, because you live in your head, not in the world. I’m not sure I ever even wanted kids.”

Ig yanked off his tie, flung it on the table. He couldn’t stand the feel of anything around his neck right now.

“You could’ve fooled me. It sounded like you were into the idea the last eight thousand times we talked about it.”

“I don’t know what I’m into. I haven’t had a chance to get clear of you and think about my own life since we met. I haven’t had a single day-”

“So I’m suffocating you? Is that what you’re telling me? That’s horseshit.”

She turned her face away from him, stared blankly across the room, waiting for his anger to subside. He drew a long, whistling breath, told himself not to yell, and tried again.

“Remember the day in the tree house?” he asked. “The tree house we could never find again, the place with the white curtains? You said this doesn’t happen to ordinary couples. You said we were different. You said the love we had was marked out as special, that no two people out of a million were ever given anything like we were given. You said we were meant for each other. You said there was no ignoring the signs.”

“It wasn’t a sign. It was just an afternoon lay in someone’s tree house.”

Ig shook his head slowly from side to side. Talking to her now was like flailing his hands at a storm of hornets. It did nothing, and it stung, and yet he couldn’t stop himself.

“Don’t you remember we looked for it? We looked all summer, and we could never find it again? And you said it was a tree house of the mind?”

“That’s what I said so we could stop looking for it. This is exactly what I’m talking about, Ig. You and your magical thinking. A fuck can’t just be a fuck. It always has to be a transcendent experience, life-changing. It’s depressing and weird, and I’m tired of acting like it’s normal. Will you listen to yourself? Why the fuck are we even talking about a tree house?”