Элисон Скотч - The Theory of Opposites

“Don’t you want some us-time? I thought you liked our weekend routine.”

“That came out wrong. You know what I mean.”

I’m not actually sure I do know what you mean, I think. Grape! That might possibly be the dumbest name for a club in the history of ever!

“Anyway, I’ll make it up to you, okay? I’ll plan something lavish and romantic and sexy, and you won’t be able to keep your hands off me.” He smiles, and I smile back, mostly because I want to believe him. It was just one receipt, one small thing, one tiny fabrication as to his whereabouts. Grape! It was probably nothing. (My dad would remind me here that nothing is ever nothing. Everything is something, and all roads lead to here, blah, blah, blah.) I pretend not to remember that Shawn hasn’t planned anything romantic or sexy in at least a year (I blame the Microsoft job — hey, Bill Gates, how do you make your wife happy?) and, frankly, not too often before that either. Which is just as well because I’m not overly comfortable with grand displays of affection. We like Chinese food. We like Dare You! . We like our couch on Thursday nights. I wouldn’t mind making out for free egg rolls, but Shawn doesn’t have to whisk me off to Bali (or whatever) to prove his devotion. Though not hanging out at nightclubs and lying about it would probably be a good start.

He reaches over and squeezes my calf, and then Slack Jones pops up on the screen to introduce tonight’s first task, which involves couples being lowered into a pit of vipers. If they manage to hold themselves perfectly still, the viper will leave them be. If they don’t, well…there’s a medical tent on the premises. (And it’s true that last year one contestant did die when he lost his wrestling match with a grizzly bear, but the network was very adamant — and thus avoided litigation — that the contestant had signed away any medical liability.)

“Haven’t they done this one before?” Shawn asks. He has stuffed the rest of the egg roll in his mouth, his cheeks bursting as he speaks. He grins unapologetically. He did this once on our second date — his chipmunk impression — and it made me laugh so hard that wine dribbled down my chin. Izzy is right: Shawn is the coding-world anomaly: his green eyes and his chestnut stubble and his jaw that rivals Slack Jones’s make him too handsome to loiter behind a screen all day.

“That was with rattlesnakes,” I answer, absorbing the cut of his jaw and the clarity of his eyes. He was handsomer than I was pretty. I never totally understood why he chose me, other than that was simply what was meant to be. Vanessa told me that I needed to see a therapist for my self-esteem, but I was content just to be. Just to know that he had, in fact, chosen me, and that’s what the universe intended. She even texted me the contact info of her favorite shrink, but it lingered in my inbox for two weeks before my phone automatically deleted it.

I suck up a lo mein noodle, and before I can even think to stop because just two minutes earlier, I swore that it didn’t matter, I say: “How was the pick-up game last night?”

“Good,” he says, his eyes back on the TV. “Shit, that woman in the red is totally going to lose it.”

“Who won?”

“What do you mean? The show just started.”

“No, who won the game? The pick-up game.”

“Oh.” He flickers back to me for a moment, and then back to the show where indeed, the woman in red is trembling with such fortitude that production may need to call a seismologist. “We didn’t really keep score. Just shot around. You know. A few guys were sick, so we mostly just blew off steam.”

“Hmmm.”

I want to say more, I want to catch him in the net of knowledge with which I’m armed. I want to flaunt the receipt in front of him and shout — a-ha! But…I don’t. Because that will open up so much, and sometimes, no matter what my dad prophesizes, it is easier to just not know. The knowing is too hard.

“Holy shit!” Shawn squeals. The woman in red has started shrieking, unable to control her fear, and it’s impossible to say which happens first: the vipers sense her weakness and attack, or her weakness betrays her and she was screwed before she even started.

“That is awesome!” Shawn yells, slapping me five.

I smack his palm with fake euphoria, wondering what’s more terrifying: the false reality airing in front of us, or the actual reality that might be unspooling in my lap.

Shawn falls asleep on the couch, his hand still clutching his phone, which occasionally shudders with the arrival of a text or an email or some other breaking alert from the Internet world that never sleeps. I watch him for a moment — breathing in, breathing out. It isn’t just that he’s good-looking. That’s the easy part. That’s the part that girls like Izzy notice. It’s also that he’s magnetic, in the way that superstars are. Enough that his handsomeness almost doesn’t matter. Vanessa calls it “the trifecta” — hotness, smarts and the elusive x-factor — even though she doesn’t like him as much as I wished a best friend would. It’s the way he looks at you, the way he’s so steely, so solid.

His phone buzzes again, and he stirs, and for a moment I’m embarrassed that I’m watching him this way, that my neediness is so ripe, that I am admiring the wave in his hair and the way that his lanky body assumes the length of the couch.

I move toward him and shake his shoulder.

“Shawn, come to bed. It’s late.”

He grunts and turns his face toward the pillows, still deeply in slumber.

“Shawn, come on. It’s time for bed.”

He flutters his eyes open and they spin into focus.

“Is today the day? Are we trying?” He reaches for his phone to check his calendar.

He thinks I am waking him for baby sex, I realize. Have I become the wife who only wakes him for baby sex?

“No. Just…come to bed.”

“Five minutes,” he says, though he is already falling back into his dream.

I wait another beat, hoping he’ll return to me, but he’s gone. I shut down the lights in the living room and tell myself that this alone time isn’t so bad. That sleeping in the bed on my own every once in a while isn’t the worst thing in the world. Just before I enter the bedroom, I pause at the doorframe and turn back toward Shawn, hoping this feeling’s not the start of a greater divide.

Shawn and I have been trying for a baby for seven months now. When we married, we came up with a plan — or mostly Shawn did, but I listened and approved: we literally wrote it down in diagram form because, at heart, we are both diagrammers, we both appreciate order. We agreed that we needed two to three years to settle in, to establish who we were as a couple, and then we’d have a kid, and then we’d probably have another, and maybe along the way, we’d adopt a dog, erect a house with a white picket fence, and live happily ever after.

Or something like that.

It made sense, though, at least how Shawn had mapped it out: that he could land some big contract jobs, bank money so that we didn’t have to worry, and that when the time came, I could quit my job (if that’s what I wanted, of course, he added), and stay home with the kids or maybe volunteer or work in the library or…something. I nodded my head and said yes to all of the proposed itinerary. I liked kids well enough, and though I’d never been consumed with the desire for motherhood (a trait passed on by my own overly-rational, cool-headed parents), I figured that at least half the point of getting married was to start a family. And Shawn was already a perfect uncle to Nicky; he certainly could make up for any deficits in my own parenting.