He really is nice.
I know that I’ll break up with him as soon as we get back to LA.
I never do get around to posting the whales.
PART FIVE
June 2020
CHAPTER 20 Seth
I am a creature of movement.
I relish getting up at five in the morning to work out at my gym, and enjoy walking the two miles to my office, even in the frigid Chicago winters. (Except in the snow. I’m high energy, not insane.) I like to meet colleagues and clients for lunch at fashionable new restaurants (my treat), and to meet friends for drinks after work at the brass-bar, old-school pub around the block from my building. I like to go to the theater, the opera, the symphony, films. On the weekends, I like to hike and cycle and run long distances with Sarah Louise. I like to golf with my buddies. (I love dad sports.) I like to shop at the gourmet market and make elaborate meals, then vigorously clean the kitchen.
I like vigorous cleaning in general.
And I am a people person. An extrovert. I shoot the shit in the line at the grocery store and chat up strangers on airplanes. (I know. I can’t help it.) I love to argue in court. I’m the life of the party, and if there is not a party happening soon, I throw one. My calendar is completely booked every day from morning ’til night, and if I happen to have a free spot, I fill it as quickly as possible.
I love this life, and I thrive on it, even if I’m antsy to replace all the karaoke bars and legal conferences with dad groups and playdates. But to manage the chaos, I need rigorous stillness when I’m not moving. Silence when I’m not socializing. A refuge of calm.
I keep my condo immaculate—all unobstructed views of the lake from the twenty-ninth floor, with clean marble countertops and sparse white furniture and dark, polished floors. I keep my office so organized that my paralegals are afraid to touch anything, and they should be, because a single stray paper destroys my focus and ruins my mood. My emails are sorted to such a degree of perfection that my assistant and I are almost in love, platonically. I keep my inbox at zero and my contacts relentlessly updated. When I’m not in meetings I work in silence, alone.
Movement and people, or silence and solitude. These are my modes.
A quarantine is thus custom-designed to make me psychologically implode.
I know that I am absolutely, magically blessed. I haven’t lost anyone to Covid-19. My job is secure and I am able to work remotely in my home office. I am isolating with my fiancée, rather than alone. I do not have to homeschool children while trying to work.
But things are not ideal.
Sarah Louise sublet her apartment and moved in with me as soon as we got engaged. It would be odd not to live together before getting married. It made sense. I was excited.
I expected having to adjust to sharing my space, but I didn’t expect it to give me claustrophobia. Sarah is a big personality—exuberant and chatty. She likes cozy spaces and has filled my apartment with photographs and knickknacks and throw blankets and pillows she embroiders while listening to podcasts because she has to be doing at least two things at once. She turns on the TV while working, because background noise helps her concentrate.
Shudder.
None of this is damning. In other circumstances, it would be endearing.
But without the hustle and bustle of our previously busy lives, we’re on top of each other. We eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. She works from the guest bedroom and I work from my office. We Zoom, Zoom, Zoom. We watch television together in the evenings. We take turns on the Peloton. We talk until we run out of things to talk about.
We have run out of things to talk about.
I used to think we had everything in common. The law. Values. Exercise.
And we do.
But I also used to think we had a special spark. And for the life of me I can’t figure out what it was, or where it’s gone.
It’s not that we fight. We’re kind to each other. But we’ve stopped talking about anything that matters, except the grim, relentless statistics about Covid. We haven’t had sex in a month. We don’t make each other laugh.
And then last night, as we were both reading our his-and-hers copies of The New Yorker in bed, she turned over and gently took mine out of my hands.
At first, I thought she wanted to make love, and I felt a sense of dread wash over me, and then a sense of despair that this is how I felt about the possibility of touching my beautiful, sexy future wife.
“Honey, I’m tired—” I began.
“I need to tell you something,” she said. “Rebecca is moving out of my apartment.”
Rebecca is the tenant subleasing Sarah’s old place until the lease is up.
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “Why?”
“She’s tired of being alone in the city and she’s going to move out to her sister’s farmhouse in Wisconsin. Help with her kids.”
“Ah, wow. That sounds nice.”
It dawned on me that maybe Sarah Louise wanted to leave the city for a while, and I began rapidly calculating whether this would make things better or worse between us.
“So I was thinking I would move back into my place,” she said, so quietly it was almost a whisper.
“What?”
She took my hand and squeezed it. “I know it must sound crazy, but I think we could both use more space. And, I mean, we’re only twenty minutes apart, so it’s not like we couldn’t still spend time together.”
Twenty minutes apart! The words were at once shocking and … strangely appealing. Perversely appealing. Treacherously appealing.
“What about, um … the whole living-together-before-we-get-married thing?”
