Элисон Скотч - The Theory of Opposites

“Okay.” The air seeps out of me like a deflated balloon. Like this wasn’t a big deal, like him running down to Hop Lee and kissing me until we got free food wouldn’t have been a grand gesture.

And maybe he senses my discontent or maybe he hears me exhaling my disappointment, but he says: “Oh, screw it!,” and thunks his beer down on the coffee table, leaps over the couch and wraps an arm around my back, dipping me like Astaire would Rogers.

“Can we go to Hop Lee?” I ask, my head still tilted toward him, his hand still pressed against the small of my back.

He pecks my neck and flips me upright. “That was my maximum energy expenditure for the evening. But I didn’t want you to think I couldn’t make the effort.”

“Duly noted.” I smile and bite my lip, delighted at his playfulness, like maybe he read my mind. “Good day?”

He plops right back on the sofa.

“Not terrible, actually. Got the job with Tech2Go. They matched my fee from the Microsoft job. How did it go with the pooper pants?”

“Shitty.”

“Ha!” He angles his face back toward me so I can see his genuine laugh. He doesn’t do that as often as he used to — sink into his laughter. He’s always tired or working or hunched over one of his various laptops or devices that demand more than I do. You have forty-seven new messages and you have to answer them all immediately or this phone will blow up like a grenade in your hand! Don’t worry; your wife will be there in the morning!

“You’re cute when you laugh, you know.”

“Laughter is the best medicine,” he replies, reaching for the remote and scrolling through the channels.

I dig through a kitchen drawer for the Hop Lee menu. “Oh, do you have cash? Because you canceled my credit cards, right?”

“I called. No new charges — it probably wasn’t stolen. You must have lost it.”

I search his tone for something close to judgment: Shawn has never lost his credit cards, never would lose his credit cards. He’s too stream-lined, too meticulous for that. He was the child of MIT professors. He was raised with order, with linear thought, with to-do lists that ensure safe passage from one cushion (Choate) to the next (Harvard). He’d never leave his bag half-zipped or zone out to his iPod on the subway, which I’ve been known to do from time to time, but only because ‘80s metal rock is my guilty pleasure, and I’m too embarrassed to listen to it anywhere but in the company of strangers. No, Shawn was secure, predictable, and for these reasons, he would never, ever lose his credit cards.

I watch him on the couch, already sucked back into some National Geographic documentary on African tribesmen. And then I remember: Grape! Perhaps he’s less anal, less risk-averse than I thought. He and his friends, kings of the coding world, out blowing their IPO-funded wads of bills on lithe women wearing tank tops a size too small. It didn’t seem like Shawn, but then again, there was the receipt.

I stare at the ceiling, so fervently wishing we could just go down to Hop Lee and earn those egg rolls. Finally, a little too sharply, I announce:

“I didn’t lose my wallet. Someone took it.”

“Willa, you’ve been known to lose it.”

He’s not wrong: I have lost my wallet three times since we’ve been together.

Before I can leap to my own defense, Shawn’s phone comes alive with the seemingly ever-present buzzzzzzzz of a text (if a site crashed in the woods and a coder couldn’t text about it, would the site have actually crashed in the woods?) and he falls silent, reading, then typing.

Hello, hello, were we not just having a conversation? Why is your phone more important than egg rolls?

“Amanda wants to know if we can take Nicky this weekend.”

“But we…um…okay…”

He is already typing her back.

“Shawn!” I say, more firmly than I mean to, or maybe exactly as firmly as I mean. His flying fingers abort, and he snaps to.

I say, more kindly: “We haven’t had a weekend to ourselves in a month. I mean, I don’t want to be the bad guy here, but…”

“Will, we’re all she has. And you love Nicky.”

“I do love Nicky,” I agree. But I think: but not as much as I used to. Pubescent twelve isn’t nearly as great as adorable seven. And then I hate myself for even giving voice to conditional love and what it might say about both me and my own prospects as a mother.

“… Mister Card. Is. Calling. Mister. Card. Is calling.”

“Who’s Mister Card?” Shawn asks.

“MasterCard,” I say. My face points down but my spirits buoy upward — I knew it was stolen! I knew I didn’t lose it!

I grab the receiver.

“This is the fraud early warning department. Is this Willa Golden?”

Golden is actually Shawn’s name. When we married three years ago, I was desperate to shed the moniker — Chandler — that had followed me around like a shadow, my dad’s shadow, for so long. And though I knew Shawn was my destiny, knew he was my “meant to be,” I’d never quite adjusted to the switch. Golden. I wanted so desperately to slide into it without a hiccup, but the truth is that I still hesitated when someone called out “Mrs. Golden!” in a restaurant, still looked twice at my driver’s license to ensure the proof. Shawn was mine. I was his. Willa Golden. Like the “Chandler” part was maybe just the in-between phase of my life.

“Yes,” I say to the MasterCard agent. “This is Willa Golden.”

“We have some suspicious activity on your card, and we’d like to go over the charges with you.”

I look at Shawn and pump my fist ( my card was stolen! I knew it!) , and he looks at me and shrugs.

I turn back toward the phone.

Yes, I think, I was right. I win.

And then the moment passes, and I remember how much I love Shawn, that Grape! can’t be what I think it is, and my dad wouldn’t call this a win. No, in fact, he might even chalk this up as a loss.

Later, Shawn and I settle into our Thursday night routine: our Chinese food and the highest-rated network reality show, Dare You!, in which contestants are goaded on by the opposition and the host, a chisel-jawed blond named Slack Jones who has gone on to fame and notoriety thanks to the decade-long gig. If you land all the dares, you win $100,000. (There is a small portion of the population who devote their lives to preparing to be contestants. Google it. You’ll find the forums. It’s strange, but I suppose not the strangest obsession out there.)

Though I’d never admit it aloud, I watch the show to assess what can go wrong due to the forces of gravity and nature or engine speed or torque or rope slack while simultaneously assessing what can go awry due to human nature: can the contestants control their fear enough to abate their shaking fingers as they clutch a wire while belaying across a skyline? Can they calm their tempers enough to get through a task in which their frustratingly inept partners are responsible for pulling their own weight up a volcano? Can they tiptoe quietly enough not to disturb mountain lions; can they repress their gag reflex when forced to drink a smoothie made of urine?

The push-pull between what’s in their control and what isn’t is what makes Dare You! so fascinating to me, though inarguably most people watch it just to see a lot of stupid people do a lot of stupid shit.

“Listen,” Shawn says, when they break for a commercial. He wrestles an egg roll from the box on the coffee table and bites off the top, the greasy crumbs landing on his chest. “I know that Nicky is going through his awkward phase right now, and I know that you want some us-time…”