By Lawrence Robinson - Second Place in LA.CityZine’s Charlie Bartlett Writing Competition.
“A Click Apart”
Everything changes the morning my green card arrives.
Abby is spread out on the couch with the LA Times as I walk in with the mail, a fly buzzing around my face.
“Kiss me,” she says.
“Huh?” I wave the fly away.
“I want to see if we kiss to the left or the right.”
“What are you talking about?”
She stands up clutching the Travel section. “I’ve been reading about this guy who travels the world to find out if people put their heads to the right or the left when they kiss.”
“And?”
“It’s mainly the right. Even with Englishmen. So come here and give me a kiss.”
“I go left,” I say.
“So show me.”
I lean forward and peck her on the mouth, head straight, my nose touching hers. She whacks me playfully on the arm. “You’re no fun,” she says, then sees the envelope in my hand. “What’s that?”
I use it to swipe at the fly again. “My green card.”
She withdraws her hand as if I’d just told her the letter was packed with anthrax. “So that’s it then?” she says. “We’re getting a divorce now?”
“Did I say that?”
“You didn’t have to. What about my job?” Last week she was offered a position in New York. She hadn’t seemed interested before now.
“What about it?” I say.
“Do I take it?”
“That’s up to you.”
“No, it’s up to us.”
“It’s your career.”
“But you won’t move with me?”
“My work’s here - -“
She holds up her hand. “Don’t. Let’s not pretend. It’s the easy way out, isn’t it?”
I finally squash the fly against the coffee table. It leaves a black and crimson stain on the envelope. “It isn’t like that,” I say. But it is. It’s exactly like that. She knows that with three thousand miles between us, we’ll see less and less of each other until everything withers and dies like a neglected houseplant. Part of me secretly hopes that she’s right.
Abby takes the job in New York and I stay in LA. We commute back and forth at weekends for a while but it’s expensive and always seems a long way to travel for an argument.
She calls me up one afternoon and suggests we seek guidance counselling. I laugh and suggest we get a dog instead. She likes the idea and we talk about it for several weeks but can’t even agree on that. She wants a terrier; I want a retriever. She suggests counselling again. I tell her I can’t see the point of a five hour flight followed by two hours in a church hall listening to some pious hippie in corduroys tell me I’m crap at relationships. She starts to cry and hangs up. Then she emails me with a compromise: online marriage counselling. No flights, no church halls, no corduroy. It seems better than making her cry again.
The first session consists of “listening exercises” via IM aimed at helping us “communicate more openly.” She gets annoyed because I type so fast she never knows where I am at. I get annoyed because she keeps ending sentences with a preposition.
We struggle through two email sessions aimed at “slowing the process down.” As I type I watch movies I have no real interest in and suspect she is equally distracted. She keeps going off on long tangents that aren’t particularly helpful or interesting. That’s the downside to Internet counseling. There’s no pious hippie to politely clear his throat and tell us to stop rambling.
The fourth session we complete from opposite ends of my Venice apartment. We’re supposed to be airing our complaints in “the safety of cyberspace.” We end up shouting at each other through the bedroom wall. I type “bollocks” a lot and slam the laptop shut and go out for a walk.
I stroll along Main Street, past the restaurants and boutiques. Two men kiss in the doorway of a shuttered nightclub, their heads tilted to the right. A woman in a bikini struggles to control a retriever. The dog drags her tottering past me in dangerously high heels.
Abby is curled up asleep on the couch when I get back. The sun streams through the windows, licking at her pale skin. She stirs and opens her eyes and I ask if she wants to go for a drive.
“Where to?”
“I don’t know. Just see where we end up.”
We end up somewhere off Mulholland, perched above the city, watching an old couple walk their dog. They’re wearing identical baseball caps and are so arthritic they have to lean on each other for support. Abby makes a point of telling me the dog is a terrier.
The car breaks down on the drive back to LAX. We sit outside a taco stand on Lincoln to wait for the tow truck and count the number of vehicles that nearly rear-end my Jeep.
“Maybe we should push it off the street?” she says.
I shrug. “If someone’s going to hit it, they’re going to hit it.”
She shakes her head. “That’s a great attitude. Whatever will be, will be, huh?”
“Something like that.”
She tucks her knees under her chin and doesn’t speak again until the AAA guy arrives. It takes him about thirty seconds to get the car running again.
At the airport she touches my arm. “I’m glad I came down,” she says. “I’m glad we had this weekend.”
I put my arm around her and tell her I’m willing to try more counselling. We kiss goodbye and our heads fall to the right.
I leave a message for her the next morning but she doesn’t call me back for a week. She tells me she needed time to think things over.
“It isn’t going to work out, is it?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe not.”
Everything slips away, just as she knew it would. I find a site that offers quick divorces. We have no children, no pets, so everything can be completed online. A few clicks, a signature and four years of marriage are over. It’s easier than canceling a magazine subscription.
I call her when it’s done. “That’s it, then,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say.
“I didn’t think this would happen,” she says. “I always thought we’d be different to everyone else in LA. Because of how we started. But we’re not, are we?”
“No,” I say. “We’re not.”
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