27.

We clean up, then lay in bed, Lana cuddling into me, her hand stroking my chest, and it does feel nice to have this connection. I hold onto that. This is what people want: this bonding. And maybe it’s a foundation to build on, which I’ve too often disregarded in recent year. But I query if this just another rationalization. After a while, you lose track of what’s rationalizing and what’s actual logic.

It’s funny now that I think about that when I was given the option of the doors, I didn’t even think about it. I just decided to come back because that seemed the most hopeful decision. But now that I’m back, I’m unsure that was the right decision, and maybe I needed to go through one of the doors. Which is rationalization and which is logic?

“That was nice,” Lana tells me.

I don’t remember the last time sex was nice, that it was this instinctual romp that led to some overwhelming, blissful, redefining satisfaction. Was sex ever like that? I don’t have a litany of sexual experiences – scattered throughout my late teens when I drank lot to deal with mental health, briefly in my early twenties when I was part of the world, and similarly in my early thirties. Horrible CV. But I don’t recall it being anything other than titillating. I’ve had better sessions masturbating.

“What got into you?” she says.

“I just thought it would be nice,” I say.

“You usually don’t initiate.”

“Things change, don’t they?”

She’s no doubt wondering why I did initiate – so unexpected and atypical for me, there must be some driver. And I know her well enough that she’s not going to let this moment stand, that she’s going to pull it apart to try work out why it is what it is, although maybe she has cause given the shittiness of our relationship over the last year. Or two. Or more.

“I was just wondering,” she says.

“I just thought, you know …?”

She apparently doesn’t.

“When we got together, the whole future seemed like it could be anything,” I say. “I don’t feel that so much anymore.”

“Because of me?”

“Because of everything.”

“What’s everything?”

“Work. Writing. Everything.”

“Maybe you should do something new,” Lana says. “Leave publishing.”

Editing’s the only thing I’m trained to do. I couldn’t handle a sales job if it required standing, because my foot would never tolerate it. I could do something like work in a call center. I have explored this before, although now I wonder if Lana’s not motivated by what I need, but by separating me from Autumn – Lana could totally think like that, even if she wouldn’t admit that to herself.

“I don’t know anymore,” I say, and I surprise myself more than Lana, because I’ve come back and don’t know what I am going to try different, other than this. “Sometimes,” I go on, “I feel like all the mental health stuff when I was young broke me.”

She strokes my flaccid penis like she was scratching a shaggy dog’s head. “You weren’t broken tonight,” she says.

I might be oversensitive, but it seems the most tonally inappropriate response she could offer, but I decide to leave it, because this is who I’m trying to be now: Mr. Nice and Understanding.

“I feel like I don’t fit,” I say, and imagine the stupid entendres she could shoot back.

“You just have to try,” she says drowsily.

She yawns and flips onto her side.

“I’ve always tried,” I say. “Like with my writing. I work and work at it. I’ve written so many books, and for what? Two that are published, about half a dozen that are so bad I’ll never show anybody, and a handful that Leopardus rejected.”

“It’s a hard industry.”

Just in case I didn’t know that with my thirty years as a writer, and fifteen working as an editor.

“I need to write,” I say. “I’ve known that since I was kid, since I read JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings when I was twelve. That just blew me away how he built this whole universe spanning millennia. Everywhere they went, there was history. Every character had this detailed lineage. I knew then …”

Lana’s breathing’s deepened. She’s fallen asleep – a common occurrence when I grow pensive. She says she likes the sound of my voice and it lulls her to sleep. That doesn’t help me, though, and although I used to feel insulted, I’ve decided to fuck with it because it’s a waste of energy.

It takes me maybe half an hour to fall asleep, and then I wake up repeatedly to Lana’s snoring; it grates through my ears like it’s trying to sandpaper my head from the inside out, and when Lana stretching and yawning in the morning wakes me, I’m exhausted. But she leans into, strokes me to another mostly-erection, and we have sex again. Somewhere in the world, gigolos are indifferent to my efforts.

Later, as I make breakfast, she sits in front of the television and flicks the News on.

“You seeing your mum today?” she asks.

“I’m catching up with Dom first,” I tell her.

“Oh.”

I remember that oh, so I bat down the indignation that arises. The oh fits.

“Then you seeing your mum?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“What else you gonna do?”

“Nothing,” I say. “You got the six-month anniversary dinner for your father’s passing tonight?”

She’s taken aback that I remember, but then pleased.

“Yep,” she says. “I’ll see what time we finish. Maybe we can do something tonight.”

“Sure.”

My easy acquiescence surprises her.

“It might be late,” she says.

“That’s fine.”

I bring breakfast over – an omelet and a cup of tea for each of us – and we eat sitting side-by-side on the couch, although she’s cramming into me, like she can occupy part of my space, and they could fuse us together at the thigh, hip, and ribs. It makes cutting up my omelet difficult, but I just keep eating as we watch the News.

Once we’re done, she takes the plates and cups in the sink, then turns on the tap to rinse them. I approach behind her, briefly tempted to give her a spontaneous hug. Is that a relationship thing? Spontaneous affection? It does make me think that the keys to rebuild this relationship are threefold:

 

1. Shut the fuck up often, instead of biting back at every perceived grievance.
2. Using physical affection as the groundwork to redevelop a bond.
3. She just keeps getting to be who she always is, but hopefully the changes in me will prompt changes in her.

 

I walk her to the door and kiss her on the doorstep.

“I’ll text you later,” she says.

“Sounds good,” I say.

A frown flickers across her face, because she genuinely is puzzled why I’m being so nice and accommodating, but I think she must decide to invest in some goodwill – at least for now – and see where all this goes.

“Talk later,” she says.

She gets into her car, backs out of the drive, then drives off.

And I stand there and have no fucking idea if this is what I’m meant to be doing.

 

28.

I brush my teeth. Have my Words shots. Letters in both games: H, R, K, T, I, E, and O, and R, R, S, T, I, E, and A – not great letters but at least playable. I then shower, dress, and go meet Dom at the café, this time getting there earlier – but, again, he’s already there, waiting.

“Hey, mate,” he says.

I think about how I would tackle this, if there’s some true, uplifting, constructive way that’s going to yield a result, going to produce a positive, but I feel like over the years I’ve tried to handle this every meaningful way, and I always end up with the same outcome.

Then my gaze falls on Dom’s tattoo – FAMILY – and that triggers a whole new stream of thought. My other long-time friends are all divorcees. Here’s somebody who’s not, for whom family’s paramount, and then that makes me think of me: it doesn’t exist within my family, but I did once believe I could with Lana, that we could be something, I could be a stepparent despite my years of mental health issues, and we could build toward something.

This aside in my thinking juts square into the middle: if I was to believe in things happening for a reason, then I might be sitting here with Dom at this very moment because I could learn something from him. It’s not something I’ve ever considered. But now it makes sense – well, if I buy into the logic that things happen for a reason.

For now, I do.

“Can I ask you something?” I ask.

He stares at me, wide-eyed, like a puppy eager to perform some trick so that they can be rewarded with a treat.

“Sure,” he says.

The waitress arrives, but this time I don’t look at her, other than to convey my order. Once she’s gone, I try to settle into my thoughts, but they’re fractious – well, more so than usual, and I feel like there are shadows encroaching me, although that’s not entirely unusual. Years ago, I experienced something similar, and an optometrist told me it could be a detaching retina – there was no way to know, though, until it actually went. Given it never did, my GP framed that it might be coming from my chronic neck problems. Why do I stick this random interlude here? Because a lot of shit goes on with my body.

“You’ve been married thirty years,” I say. “How’d you know your wife was the one?”

Dom chuckles – he has a litany of chuckles that he fires out before he speaks, like they’re advance soldiers buying him time to get his thoughts in order.

“I didn’t,” he says. “Not like one-hundred percent.”

“But you went ahead and got married. It wasn’t …”

“Wasn’t what?”

“You know?”

“Know what?”

“Like, she wasn’t pregnant?”

“When we got married?”

“Her being pregnant wasn’t the reason you got married?”

Dom chuckles again just as the waitress arrives with our beers. I take a big gulp of mine because Dom’s Big Gulp Territory. If I wasn’t driving, I’d race through three or four beers as preparation to absorb this.

“I loved her,” Dom tells me, “she loved me, so we went ahead and got married. I didn’t know if it was gonna turn out. But what do you do? Wait until you’re certain? I’ve got a mate, Bobby, he did that – she got tired of waiting and left him. Now the poor bastard’s working at a service station, going home to an empty house. He tells me every time I should’ve asked us. ‘Dom,’ he says to me, ‘what was I thinking? Why didn’t I ask her?’”

There’s a very good chance no such Bobby exists or, if he exists, that Dom’s embellished this story somewhat. But his point is still salient because I could imagine myself pumped up with regret. I’ve already got it, this reflection about the years of mental health shit that curbed my teenage years and early adulthood.

“And you’ve never doubted it?” I ask.

“What for? It’s not gonna change things.”

“You argue a lot?”

Dom chuckles again – in fact, I’m not using chuckles again. He chortles. That’s what he does.

“Sometimes I’m worried what the neighbors hear,” he says. “At the end of the day, though, we’re always good. Or we try to be.”

“And you’ve never strayed?”

Dom responds as if I threw my beer in his face – it’s such an overreaction that it makes me wonder if it’s a reflex to cover some truth he doesn’t want to unearth.

“Nah.”

“Never?” I ask.

“Uh uh.”

“Not even close?”

“Well, what’s close? I’m at a bar and some woman talks to me? Or somebody wants to blow me?”

“The first one.”

“Yeah. Happens.”

“The second one?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“No.”

Too emphatic. Although that could be me reading too much into this. He could just be indignant that I pressed the question.

“And her?” I asked.

“Has she cheated on me?” Dom snorts. He’s got all the nonverbal responses happening. “Not that I know. She tells me if somebody hits on her. Like she told me somebody came into the store, some guy, and started chatting her up, started talking about how much money he had and his car, and then he asked her for a coffee. She told him no.”

Again, there’s a good chance this never happened.

“She tells me lots of stories like that.” Dom lifts his hand and waves it, like he’s dismissing all these possibilities. “But I’ve gotta trust her and she’s gotta trust me. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

This is such a simplistic insight I’ve tried to glean into long-term relationships, but in the end it really comes down to a binary outcome: does it work or doesn’t it work? And I’m still in the middle there, so fixated on this as the be-all and end-all that I don’t even know why. My single-minded, obsessive-compulsive focus? Or some other factor I haven’t considered?

“Why do you ask?” Dom says. “You gonna ask Lana to marry you or you breaking up with her?”

“As an outsider looking in on my relationship,” I say, “which do you think is the likelier possibility?”

Dom leans forward, like this is a secret he’s going to share with me. “I don’t know,” he says.

“Thanks, mate,” I tell him. “One more thing?”

“Yup?”

“Read that fucking script, and don’t bullshit next week when we talk about it.”