Элисон Скотч - The Theory of Opposites

“No, how old are you?”

“Oh, twenty-four.”

“And you live downtown.”

She nods.

“And you’re single?”

“If this is about a blind date, no offense, Willa, I’ve seen most of Shawn’s friends on Facebook, and I’m not interested.”

“You’re friends with him on Facebook?”

“I have 2300 friends.” She shrugs. “I mean, Shawn’s hot. Like…I don’t know.” She takes in my skirt that’s still awry, my silk shirt that should probably have been ironed. “Yeah, like, he’s gorgeous. What does he do again?”

“He’s a coder.”

“Right! Like Mark Zuckerberg? Shawn is way cuter than Mark Zuckerberg, but MZ did invent Facebook, so I’d probably give him a pass. But anyway, Shawn’s friends are like Mark Zuckerberg but they didn’t invent Facebook. So no blind dates. Thanks though.”

“Okaaay. Um, Shawn’s pretty great,” I say, not entirely sure if her statement is the worst or best back-handed compliment ever. “Okay, well, have you ever been to that new wine bar, the one on 16th Street? I think Time Out just had it on its cover.” (In fact, the only reason I’ve even heard of it is because I flipped through Time Out last week in my gynecologist’s office.)

“Oh? Grape! ? Sure. Months ago.”

“I thought it opened last week.”

“Private invite.”

“Of course.”

I hesitate and look at her, closely, intimately. She shifts in her biker boots. She is young, she is beautiful, she probably has never had to worry about fate and coincidence and life’s disappointments and her husband’s wine bar receipt when he was supposed to be at his weekly pick-up game with other young and genius Internet icons. (At least four of them were named to Wired ’s Hot 40 Under 40! Though three of them were wiry and bald, but no matter.) Izzy won’t worry, not yet, about her womb drying like a prune, about her vaginal mucus fluidity, about her peak temperature during ovulation, about sex growing stale because it feels like the only point is for procreation. ( Sex is the perfect example of my theory, my dad would say. If you hadn’t copulated at that exact moment, on that night, at the second of climax, you would have had an entirely different child! He would say this with triumph, as if every parent everywhere hasn’t already considered this. That if the wife hadn’t mounted the husband who was mostly asleep while watching some cooking show that skewed toward the female demographic but that her husband secretly loved, and insisted that this was the peak moment of conception, their bouncing baby boy could have been a less-bouncy baby girl. Or twins. Or a miscarriage. Or another month of a missing second line. Who’s to say? Well, my dad is actually, if you asked him.)

“Izzy, in your opinion, what would a married 36-year-old man be doing at Grape! ?”

“Drinking?” She looks at the clock behind me. “Twelve minutes until adult diapers arrive.”

“Drinking. Right, of course. They probably went for a post-game drink last night.”

“I guess he could also be picking up women,” she says casually, clicking on Gilt.com, paying no mind to the destruction of her words, not fully understanding the implication of what she’s imparting. “Ugh, I mean, those guys are the worst. I’d never hook up with one. Though — don’t tell anyone this — my friend Candice totally made out with some Goldman guy last week. After they slept together, he mentioned his wife.”

“Well…thank you,” I say. “This has been very helpful.”

I sip my latte and head toward my office.

“Oh, actually, now that I think of it, Willa, I did get an email from the promoters. Was yesterday Tuesday? Every Tuesday is ladies’ night. They kind of like me to go, so if you want to join me next week, I’m in!”

I linger in the doorway of my office. Of course she would get an email. Of course last night was ladies’ night. Of course Shawn wasn’t there for a post-game drink with his buddies. There are no coincidences. I hate it when my father is right.

Text from: Willa Chandler-Golden

To: Vanessa Pines

SOS. Been in mtg w/Dependables for hrs. Quick: sexy synonym 4 accidental urination?

Text from: Vanessa Pines

To: Willa Chandler-Golden

Angelic tinkling?

Text from: Willa Chandler-Golden

To: Vanessa Pines

2 spiritual. Think: Harrison Ford in diapers. What’s the 1st word?

Text from: Vanessa Pines

To: Willa Chandler-Golden

Ew.

Text from: Willa Chandler-Golden

To: Vanessa Pines

Helpful. How r u a bestselling wrtr?

Text from: Vanessa Pines

To: Willa Chandler-Golden

Luck

Text from: Willa Chandler-Golden

To: Vanessa Pines

No such thing.

Text from: Vanessa Pines

To: Willa Chandler-Golden

Bullshit.

Text from: Willa Chandler-Golden

To: Vanessa Pines

Someone just proposed “inadvertent wetness.” Kill me.

Text from: Vanessa Pines

To: Willa Chandler-Golden

U need a new job. Where’s Hannah?

Text from: Willa Chandler-Golden

To: Vanessa Pines

Out sick. Same idiot just said accidental moistness.

Text from: Vanessa Pines

To: Willa Chandler-Golden

Some1’s getting fired. And Hannah’s not sick. She needs rehab.

For the first time in at least two weeks, Shawn is waiting for me when I slink home after an epic seven-hour meeting with Adult Diapers, in which I made the grim discovery, much to their executives’ displeasure, that there really is no way to make grown-up Pampers sexy.

“Hi! I’m glad you’re home,” I say.

Shawn gulps a deep sip of his beer and nudges his chin upward as a greeting.

“Hey,” he says. “Oh my God, am I beat.”

When we first moved in together, we would meet every night at the deli on the corner or the Chinese joint down the street or some version of dinner under ten bucks within a one-block vicinity. We’d hem and haw over what to order until we would finally come to an agreement over something that we could split 50/50. We did this every weeknight without fail, and we would sit on the same side of the booth or tucked into a tiny side table, and we were shiny and new and a tiny bit smug at our coupledom — and people around us would smile, our euphoria at having found each other apparently contagious. Lucy, the cashier at the Chinese restaurant, would throw in an egg roll for free because as she said, “You be so happy. Me be so happy.”

Eventually, things (like euphoria) settled down into a low simmer, and five nights a week at a restaurant down the block became untenable. Shawn’s career exploded; natural complacency set in; we stopped trying to impress each other with twenty-minute make-out sessions to earn free egg rolls; sex became dull when everything revolved around my ovulation cycle. Now, we have reached the apex: I come home from work, and he nudges his chin up, his fist tight around his beer, and says, “Hey.”

It’s the natural evolution of things, my dad would say. “ You can’t go around screwing like banshees all the time (figuratively speaking, but literally, too), and our brains account for this ,” he’d add. So that Shawn and I meet only two times a week for dinner now isn’t of much concern. Or it wasn’t, not until Grape!

I’m so caught up in this notion ( banshees! let’s at least try to be like banshees !), that now, with him half-asleep on the couch, I say:

“Let’s run down to Hop Lee — see if we can be cutesy enough to get Lucy to throw in some egg rolls.”

“I’m so spent. I honestly can’t motivate off the couch, much less out of the apartment,” Shawn says. “Can’t we just order?”