Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

Brian loved the fact that two of his friends got engaged the same month he did. I didn’t like his sly pride in conforming, but it was relaxing to know he understood the business of living. And I would break down his defenses over time. He would stop protecting himself from me the way he protected himself from the world by hiding behind its rules. I would be so grateful to be the sole trustee of his full self that I would no longer desire Jared or anyone else.

—

When Brian and I were walking in Central Park one evening, a little girl stopped dead in her tracks in front of us. She pulled on her mother’s hand and stamped one foot. “But I’m ser ious!” she said. The father scowled. “You’re five. You’re not serious about anything. You don’t understand how anything works yet.”

Brian chuckled as we scooted around the crying girl. “What a relief to hear a parent with some balls,” he said. I swung the hand he was holding, looking at the sky, turning away from his harsh pronouncement just as I turned away from my body in the presence of his polite, hardworking mother and quietly dignified (Brian’s phrase) father. I knew Brian would want kids and I hoped I would, too, someday. I liked the idea of being needed. But I could already imagine myself cringing when Brian called me “the mother of his children” with pride and bitterness, the same pride and bitterness he would feel for forgoing the chance to fuck his female underlings at work, consigning himself for life to the bombed-out ruin of my vagina and saggy, stretch-mark-riddled stomach and nipples sucked into long, inflamed, livid daggers. I begged my brain to shut up when I had thoughts like this. Brian was going to be a good husband. He put his hand on my lower back and steered us out of the park.

Since getting engaged, I’d become serious about Fifi again, in my way. I wanted something that was mine. On the days I wasn’t working at the bookstore, I would set myself up at my desk — coffee, notebooks, giant Larousse dictionary — before Brian headed out to the office. But as soon as he closed the door behind him, I often got back in bed with a novel, giddy with the ease of being alone. An hour before he was due home from work, I would drag myself back to the desk, plow through French words without feeling them, just so I could tell my fiancé that I’d done my five hundred words for the day, and he would believe in me, in my project.

—

I met my friend Laney for coffee and told her I was scared of getting married. We’d gone to high school together and reconnected through Facebook. She wore crimson lipstick and platform boots that laced up to her knees. A helmet of black hair framed her taut, bluish skin. Her ripped T-shirt ended just below her pointy breasts. Sipping her large mocha soy latte with an extra shot, she told me about the guy she’d met at a party the night before. “He had this rape-and-pillage vibe going on,” she said. “I knew he would be all—” She pumped her hips in the air and then made a circular tossing motion with her hands, like a sailor throwing a bag of spoiled rice overboard. “I don’t think we even spoke before we got in a cab together. I just stared at him across the room and told him with my eyes: I am totally buying what you’re selling.” She took a long swig of her coffee and told me with her eyes that she had totally bought what he sold. Then she looked away, sighing so loudly that the sound was offensive rather than poignant. “I don’t think anyone else hates men and fucks them as much as I do. Marriage couldn’t be worse than that, right?”

“Yes it could,” I said. “It could be that, just with less fucking.”

“Oh, darling, every lady needs a husband,” Laney said, affecting a British accent and smoking an imaginary cigarette. “It’s our cross to bear.” We played rich Brits for the rest of the morning.

—

Laney was always inviting me to dance parties in warehouses or burlesque shows on roofs. Brian had tried to be nice, but after we got engaged, he told me frankly that he never wanted to see her again. “She seems really damaged,” he said.

“Anyone who’s made it to thirty without getting damaged is barely alive,” I said. “And besides, damaged people are funnier than other people.” I told him that Laney had recently said to me, “I’m pretty sure the only reason I’ve never been date-raped is because I was always willing to do whatever the guy wanted.”

“That’s sad,” he said.

“But it’s also funny.”

Brian and I started fighting nearly every weekend because I wanted to go to some concert or beer garden or friend’s party, and he was working or tired from working. I liked being alone on the nights he worked late. But if I was going to be forced to be around another person, unable to lose myself in daydreams or loud music or books, I wanted to at least have fun. I erupted at him one night when he canceled our plans to go to an all-night dance party on a boat. I’d gotten us tickets weeks earlier. “I’ll pay you back,” he said.

“You are willfully boring,” I said. We were walking home from dinner. We paused in front of the Brooklyn Museum and screamed at each other on the majestic steps. He called me vitriolic. I felt a quiver of excitement at his word choice. We exhausted ourselves and started walking toward our apartment.

“This is the same fight my parents have been having for forty years,” he said as he hung up our coats.

“I don’t want to have this fight for forty years.”

“So let’s not.” He took my hand and led me to our IKEA couch. We sat side by side in the dark. The sky was pretty through our bay windows. Fluid black shapes swam through a still-blacker canvas. Brian wrapped his arm around my shoulder. He tilted my chin back with his index finger. My mouth kissed his mouth. My shoes sat beside the couch, side by side, empty, the insoles coming loose at the heels. I’d bought them for four dollars at a stoop sale one Sunday afternoon. I was so glad when I spotted them, gladder still when I asked the price. Now they stared up at me, alive with need, animals waiting to be fed. I buried my face in Brian’s arm.

The next weekend, he canceled a series of Friday meetings to take me to Cape Cod. We slept a lot and drank a lot of not bad wine and walked on the beach. No one could say we were not having a nice weekend. It was April, far too cold for swimming. One night at sunset, I pulled off my clothes, ran and dove, emerged shrieking. “You’re crazy,” Brian said, grinning at my blue, goose-pimpled flesh in a way that looked physically taxing.

—

Brian didn’t want to know I was cheating on him. But he was often cold to me after Jared’s visits, perhaps sensing my inaccessibility as I caught up on sleep and readapted to calmer days. His coldness felt only right to me, until he failed to invite me to a party for Obama’s inauguration. I learned about it on Facebook, where he posted a photo of his coworkers standing before an enormous projection of Obama’s face, each raising a glass of champagne.

“You didn’t tell me your office was having a party today,” I said when he got home from work. “I had to watch the inauguration all alone.”

Brian shook his head and dropped his bag on the couch. “Please don’t start. I’m starving.” I followed him into the kitchen. “What, you didn’t get your fill of the champagne and hors d’oeuvres at the party? It looked really fun. Judging from all the bragging you did on Facebook.”

He took a bag of Tostitos out of the cupboard and started eating from the bag. “It was really fun. Mostly because we finally have a president who cares about things that matter. But it was an office party.”

“There were spouses in the photos. And you knew I wasn’t working today. I even asked you last night if you thought you could come home early to watch the—”