Chapter 78
Most nights, I come home from work hungry and tired.
Korgy’s gotten into cooking, so half the time he’ll have something already prepared, beef tacos or salmon limone or pasta bolognese, his aunt’s recipe.
He’ll take off his apron, kiss me on the cheek, and scoop whatever he’s made onto my plate while we unpack the grievances of our days—me complaining about an unruly customer, him complaining about some passive-aggressive text from Gwen or how hard it is to find a good divorce lawyer.
“I’m bracing myself for a hellish custody battle,” he’ll say, shaking his head. “So stressed I can hardly eat.”
And then he’ll take a bite of bolognese.
On days he doesn’t cook, we order in, a process with a gestation period of an hour.
We can’t help it. That’s just how long it takes to order food.
We’ll scroll through Uber Eats, trying to find “something new,” using keywords to search for something that sounds good, “Vietnamese” or “Mediterranean,” a moot point really because we already know that what sounds good never looks good and that we’re gonna land on one of our three tried-but-true spots—Lahn Pad Thai, Bear Tooth Grill, or Jersey Mike’s.
We eat while he talks at me about some new development in his novel or an article he read in The New Yorker or how he thinks he’s stumbled on a very succinct way of describing free will, actually.
After we eat, we cuddle up and Korgy pops on a movie he wants me to see, some arthouse movie or foreign film that he reminds me we’d never be able to watch if not for his Criterion Collection subscription, as if the subscription is something exclusive you have to be invited into and not just something that costs eleven bucks a month.
While we watch, he relays his thoughts like they’re the director’s cut commentary and I struggle to keep my eyes open.
It is inhumane to be expected to read subtitles past 10 p.m. A week ago, I made a joke about sometimes wanting to shut off my brain and watch Survivor, but the joke didn’t go over well, so we watched Buffalo ’66 instead.
We eat cold cereal at the kitchen counter as a midnight snack then make our way to the bathroom where we squish together at the single sink, pretending we don’t notice the food particles and balls of plaque that fly off of each other’s strings of floss and hit the sides of the sink bowl, or, on unluckier occasions, smack onto the mirror, waiting to be wiped off with a crumpled bit of toilet paper and a little shame.
Afterward, we fall asleep in each other’s arms. Or, rather, Korgy falls asleep, and I lie wide awake until three or four in the morning, my thoughts cyclical and whirring like the rickety fan that spins on the ceiling above me.
The mundanity is crushing. The routinization of domestic life, excruciating. A never-ending pile of bland logistics and interchangeable exchanges, each day bleeding into the next, nothing differentiating them.
To stave off the boredom and whatever lies underneath it, I’ve gone back to my shopping binges.
I load up a big cart or two every night, at least a dozen sale items per cart, and wait for the multiple shipments to arrive while I nurse that all-too-familiar feeling of anxious uncertainty mixed with delusional optimism.
That feeling that this thing might be the thing that makes all the difference. A feeling of hope. A feeling I miss.
But then the things arrive, and they’re all disappointing, and the stitching is bad, and the fabric is see-through, and they go back in the bag for me to return, my head hung low with regret.
I also find other ways to bring some element of newness to my days, “healthier alternatives” to shopping and Cheetos.
Not that I think the good will cancel out the bad necessarily.
Just for some variety. I apply for a manager position at work and get it.
I buy a gym membership at The Alaska Club and go once or twice a week.
I take up journaling. I even consider asking Frannie to meet up, but I don’t.
Don’t want to reignite something that’s done.
She’d been reaching out pretty regularly at the start of summer, and I’d blow her off, and then she’d reach out a little less regularly, and I’d blow her off, and then she just stopped reaching out at all.
It’s funny, I thought our friendship would end dramatically, the insults we’d been saving up for years shot back and forth, tears and snot streaking our faces.
But instead, the ending has been uneventful, petering out with almost no noise at all.
Maybe that’s how you know it’s really an ending.