Giving Up (16 page)

dear life
to the ledge of a tall building, or the hook of a towering construction crane. Maybe the hero is there too, holding onto the villain's sleeve (which is coming apart at the seam) or is slowly losing a grip on his hand, but at some point the villain realizes that it's useless, he is definitely going to fall, and the effort to keep dangling from the skyscraper or the construction crane is actually prolonging his agony – in fact, were he to resign himself to his fate and simply give in (i.e. to gravity/fate), then he may even find a sense of peace before hitting the ground. Just like this villain, who may have been a friend of the hero earlier in the movie and only now, at the precipice, is revealed to be an evil person, James is ready to let go. So he sighs and says, ‘I'm worried that somebody followed me home.' As soon as he says this he regrets it. There's a swirl of emotions happening on Mary's face. Worry over what he may have done. Fear of what may still happen. Resignation that what's done is done and whatever may have happened, there's probably nothing she can do about it. Disgust, obviously, and love, which comes across like tender, if a little irritated, concern. But most of all there is a desperate need to know. When he kept things from her, it was as if he kept her in a state of
sensory deprivation
. When he lied to her, it always felt, when she eventually found out, like she'd been watching a movie or reading a book, and had fallen asleep or dropped into a lucid state, so the film or book got mixed up and blended into her thoughts and at some point, her memories as well, to the extent that years later, or maybe only days, she may recount a scene from that movie or book and tell it as if she were the hero of the story, without realizing that the story she was telling wasn't real. When she finds out he's been hiding something, or when he admits he's been lying to her, it's like realizing that certain memories you thought were yours are in fact made up and what you thought had happened hadn't actually happened at all. This is why she's so desperate to know – to know immediately what had happened – because now she knows that every memory is possibly tainted and until she knows which ones are real and which are made up, she can't be sure how to
respond
. But why does she need to wait and find out the specifics when she already knows the basics? It won't matter what James tells her, whether it is an enormous deception or only a minor incident, because what is revealed every time he admits to keeping something from her or deliberately misleading her, and in essence lying right to her face, is that she can't believe a word he says. There are practical considerations, of course. For example if, when they started seeing each other, James had concealed the full extent of his sexual history (which he had), and even exaggerated by a number of years when he'd last been checked for sexually transmitted infections (ditto), only to reveal the truth later on, in a guilty and irritatingly coy manner, clearly more apprehensive about how angry she would be than whether or not he'd passed on an STI, then she would be obliged to get tested and to insist that he get tested as well (which she did) and maybe even to insist that they get in the habit of getting tested regularly (which she didn't) since he obviously didn't take the whole STI thing very seriously, and if he did end up cheating on her some day (that is, if he hadn't already, or wasn't currently) then she couldn't rely on him to have the courtesy to use protection, or the balls to tell her if he hadn't. So even though, in the most general sense, it doesn't matter what James tells her, in another, more particular sense, so long as she continues to live with him, and love him, and try to have a baby with him, everything that he says, and all that he doesn't, may be immediately and even disastrously significant. She can't afford to be philosophical about his pathological dishonesty. It isn't an option for her to say to herself, ‘Everything he says or doesn't say is misleading, so by definition I can't believe a word that comes out of his mouth. All I can do is trust my instincts. He lies about some things so all things are potentially lies, and there is no way for me to know what is legit.' It would have been convenient to adopt this radical philosophical position, but the reality of the situation – the real reality – was that even though she couldn't, she had to trust him when he told her something, and if he was silent she had to trust that this was because he didn't have anything to say. Her dilemma is exacerbated by the fact that, from what she can tell, there is no method or rationale behind what he decides to be dishonest about. About a year ago, as an experiment, she decided to test how often he lied to her about what he looked at online. She didn't pick this as a test because of any concern on her part over his online behaviour, but it occurred to her that because the computer kept a record of every website he visited it would be easy to confirm the truth of what he told her. She started off with something easy. She knew he jerked off to porn. It wasn't an issue for them. They didn't fight about it. And for the most part he was discreet about it, so she didn't have to suffer the indignity of catching him in the act. But every once in a while he would get sloppy and leave a window open on a porn site. This had only happened a couple of times, and after she brought it up with him, it never happened again. The first time he slipped up was a turn-off, but she tried to overlook it. She'd seen porn before, but even though the internet was supposedly drowning in it, she never really noticed it, and definitely didn't seek it out. Not because she had anything against it, it simply had no appeal for her. The one time she actually made an attempt to watch it and masturbate, she had to shut it off because she kept rolling her eyes, it was all so embarrassing, so ridiculously fake, and she didn't find it sexy at all. But when she woke up one Saturday morning after they had been drinking with Tim and Ellen (she went to bed the second they got in, while he stayed up to 'have a snack'), she found the browser open to a paused clip of a girl getting fucked in the back of a cab by two guys. In this new context (watching the porn that James had been jerking off to the night before), she was much more troubled by what she saw. The girl was so
tiny
. She couldn't have been older than twenty, and the guys that were fucking her were so big, literally covered in muscles, with gigantic cocks, and they were fucking her
so hard
, in a kind of frenzy, and the fact that they were in the back of a moving cab, instead of seeming erotic and risqué, struck her as extremely bizarre. The video was like a form of insanity, but still she wasn't offended so much as disturbed by how incongruous the onscreen scene was with what she and James did when they fucked, or made love, or whatever. ‘If this is what he likes to watch on his own,' she thought, ‘then what is going on in his head when we're doing it?' These thoughts bothered her for a couple of days, but eventually the memory of the scene in the taxi lost its visceral and disturbing quality, and she even felt a bit foolish for getting worked up over something that was completely harmless and probably just a way of blowing off steam. Besides, literally millions of people watched porn, so how could there be something wrong with it? The next time he forgot to close the browser after he'd been jerking off the night before, she wasn't disturbed like the first time, only disgusted, the way she got when he forgot to flush after taking a shit, so she didn't think anything of asking him when they were on the couch together later that morning if he could try to remember to close down his porn sites when he was done with them. He didn't reply and looked so terrified that she felt as though she needed to reassure him. ‘I don't mind,' she explained. ‘I get it. Well, I don't really get it. But I know it's natural, or at least it's pretty fucking common, so I don't think it's weird. Although, do you always watch that extreme shit?' James was about to reply but she cut him off. ‘Never mind, watch whatever you like, I mean, how often do you look at it?' ‘Hardly ever,' he said. ‘Just, you know, once in a while, when I feel like blowing off some steam.' She couldn't help making a face at this, ‘How can you blow off steam watching two steroid junkies fucking some teenager into oblivion?' But she cut him off again before he could reply, ‘Never mind. Sorry. I really don't care. You don't have to defend yourself. Just please try to remember to close it down when you're done.' He promised that he would and they never talked about it again, except for when they got into a slump and she'd get suspicious that he was bingeing on porn, but even then all she would do is make a remark like, ‘You're probably too tired from watching anorexic teenagers getting pounded by hairless Neanderthals.' And he'd make some lame attempt at a joke, like, ‘That's racist.' But she knew that he was ashamed of his porn habit, so it was ideal for her
test
because he would almost certainly lie when she asked him about it. So one morning she woke up and snuck out to the computer to check its history. Sure enough, James had an epic jerk-off session the night before. From 1:43 a.m. to 2:27 a.m. he went through close to a dozen videos. She clicked on a few links to get a flavour for what he'd been watching, and was surprised to see that the first couple were fairly tame – a woman fingering herself poolside and another using a vibrator in the shower (
why the shower?
) – but a couple of the other links were more hardcore – a girl wearing a ball gag riding some sort of machine, and a Czech woman with gigantic tits getting fucked next to a dumpster while the man who was fucking her filmed it from his point of view with a cheap camcorder. Once again, she was disturbed by how the images onscreen were so
utterly foreign
to the sort of sex that she and James had. And now that she was actually tracking the specifics of his behaviour she wasn't able to dismiss it so easily. Forty-four minutes. That's how long he sat in front of the computer screen last night. How many nights every week? Every month? How many hundreds or thousands of minutes of this shit did he watch every year while she was asleep in their bed, or out doing groceries, or having drinks with her friends?
Of course
he would lie about watching all this porn. It was obscene. She crawled back into bed and lay there thinking, careful not to touch him, until he woke up. ‘Were you watching porn last night?' she said, as soon as he opened his eyes. ‘Well good morning to you too,' he said, with a sleepy grin on his face. ‘Well, were you?' He draped his arm over her and she rolled it off. ‘Um, did I leave something open?' he frowned, apologetically. ‘What do you think?' He raised himself on his elbow, ‘I think that you're upset that I look at porn, which I totally understand. It's just something I like to do to blow off steam after working in the basement. But if it bothers you I'll stop.' She'd expected him to lie, but she realized that she'd come on too strong and gave herself away. Now she was curious to see if he would come clean, or whether he'd try to hide the
extent
of his habit. ‘So what? Like five minutes at the end of the night? A clip or two and then you come to bed?' ‘Exactly,' he said, ‘I'm not some sort of depraved pervert.' ‘So last night you watched what? Five or ten minutes?' He lay back on the pillows and sighed, as if she'd already been questioning him for an hour and he'd answered this question many times, ‘Yeah, something like that.' ‘And what were you watching?' She was sitting straight up and studying him closely, trying to spot any tics or ‘tells' so she could watch out for them during the next test. ‘Jesus, Mary, I don't know. It's pretty normal stuff. Girls fingering themselves. That sort of thing.' ‘So,' she leaned back, almost relaxed, ‘you didn't watch videos of gagged women getting fucked by machines for forty-five minutes?' James got dressed in a rage, throwing the sort of tantrum that usually would've come off as comical, but, all things considered, was just kind of sad. They made up later that night, but Mary knew that from then on he would always be careful to wipe the computer's history. ‘Or maybe,' she had thought, ‘he might give it up.' Either way, she let it drop. She couldn't blame him for watching porn, or if she did there would be millions of other people she'd have to include in her blame, and she certainly couldn't blame him for lying about it when she had questioned him in a way that encouraged him to lie. For the next test she would pick something so banal that there would be no good reason to lie about it. Lying about watching porn – the type he watched, and how much – was predictable. These sorts of lies weren't the problem because she could anticipate them, which is to say that whether he lied or told the truth she'd be able to guess at what he was up to, and plan accordingly (like get tested for STIs, or make enough noise when she woke up to go to the bathroom that she wouldn't catch him masturbating). The bigger problem was that he might be lying about the most random details and events of his life, and that this randomness made it impossible to predict with any degree of certainty what was actually going on in their lives. What he ate for lunch? The last time he spoke with his parents? Whether he got any work done when he was down in the basement? There was nothing that he didn't try to distort. ‘Did you get that link I sent you?' she would ask. ‘I haven't checked my email yet today.' But when he'd go to the bathroom she would check the browser history and see that he'd already checked his email three times. Why would he lie about something that was so inconsequential? In what way could it matter to him whether or not she knew if he'd checked his email and seen the link that she had sent him? What exactly was it that he was concealing? It had just been a link to an article about a restaurant they had eaten at recently, one they didn't like. The reviewer praised the restaurant extravagantly, slavishly, and – in Mary's opinion – was clearly in awe of the celebrity chef and the ostentatious décor and pretentious menu. This was typical of the reviewer's previous articles, which had all been displays of cultural illiteracy. If a restaurant was a sham, an incoherent mishmash of styles and influences, then it would be praised for its originality, whereas a beautiful restaurant serving an eloquent cuisine composed with masterful simplicity would get panned for being uninspired or unoriginal, or both. So whenever they wanted to go out to eat she would check to see if this reviewer had written about the restaurant and she and James could tear the review apart. They would talk over dinner, or later as they sat on the couch, about the crass and inept similes, the overwrought and often incomprehensible prose, and they would both get so worked up and exasperated over what they perceived as an offense against good taste that they might even plan on starting a blog of their own to take revenge by posting comments made in the privacy of their living room that would be devastating to the reputation of the reviewer if they were ever made public. She liked how worked up James would get, though at times they got so worked up that they would start to argue, even when they were in complete agreement. She got excited at the idea that they might somehow develop these bitch sessions into something that other couples might read and talk about over dinner, or while they hung out with friends. But she wasn't delusional, she knew that they would never start a blog, that these high-strung responses to the reviewer were simply a way for them to sort out the confusion and envy they felt whenever their opinions were contradicted or refuted in the media, that it was a harmless pastime but in other ways crucial to their fragile intimacy, so even though it was bewildering for James to lie about checking his email, it was hurtful all the same, and she was determined to find out what it was he thought he was hiding. ‘I did sign in,' he explained when she confronted him later over dinner, ‘but I was waiting to hear back from Dale about next weekend. I saw that you had sent me something, but I didn't look at it.' ‘But that's not what you said,' she said, thrown by this lawyerly horseshit. ‘You said you hadn't checked your email when you'd already checked it three times.' ‘Well, first of all,' he was speaking with the same tone of barely contained rage that he used whenever she challenged one of his lies, ‘I'm still trying to understand why you're spying on my online activity. But I don't even know if I want to talk about that right now. Frankly, I don't know whether I should be offended, or concerned. But I guess I said it that way because I hadn't checked the email you sent me yet and I didn't want to have to explain to you that I was only checking to see if Dale had got back to me. I knew that if you knew that I had checked my email that you would want to know why I didn't check out the link that you sent me, and that you wouldn't leave me alone until I did, and I just didn't feel like reading a fucking review and then getting into one of our bitch sessions about how much of an idiot the reviewer is.' ‘So it's my fault you lied?' she exclaimed, hurt by the way he described their conversations about the restaurant reviewer. ‘Kind of,' he said. After this fight she noticed that he got into the habit of clearing the history on the laptop every time he used it. If she wanted to catch him in a lie after that she had to wait for him to slip up. As it happened, an opportunity came up only a few days later when Mary was emptying the recycling bin under the sink. She noticed a balled-up plastic bag as she was transferring the recycling into the blue bags. ‘I use these for my lunches,' she said to herself (pissed at James for carelessly throwing out the bags that he knew she used for lunches). Besides, she thought to herself, were you even allowed to get rid of plastic bags like that (putting them in the recycling bin that is), even if the only alternative, which struck her as perverse, would be to throw them out? As she was putting the bag into the drawer full of plastic bags, she felt a piece of paper through the plastic – a receipt for takeout food from a restaurant that they had often talked about going to, but whenever the opportunity came up they bailed at the last minute, worried that the food wasn't going to be as good as what they had been led to expect from the reviews and their friends. ‘People go crazy for that shit,' she would say, ‘and it never ends up being as good as they make it out to be.' ‘It's true,' James would agree, ‘I don't know what it is about places like that but the moment people get inside they lose the ability to taste the difference between good food and total garbage.' It was the conviction in his voice that would convince her to play it safe and order from one of the takeout places that they trusted and had been using for years. Now, here he was, going to this new restaurant that all their friends had been talking about, and doing it behind her back. She stood at the kitchen sink, stunned with hurt, and tried to understand why he would want to go to the takeout place without her, why he preferred to have the experience all by himself even though trying out new restaurants was something they always did together, and, more importantly, why he wanted to hide it from her and keep her believing that this was still a place that they would try out one night when they finally stopped worrying over whether it was overrated? It was hurtful that he chose to go on his own but it was disturbing that he intended to keep her in the dark after the fact. What was he going to do when they eventually went there together? Was he going to pretend that it was his first time? She saw herself sitting there waiting for their order, talking about the menus, criticizing the counter setup, and there he would be, going along with it, agreeing with her suggestions and even saying that it might be a good idea to use one of those pagers that beeped when your table was ready so they wouldn't have to stay crammed in the doorway blocking the entrance. She experienced a falling feeling. Not as drastic as the horrific free fall in her dreams – more muted, but surprising, like missing the first step on a staircase. So she called down into the basement, something she was supposed to do only when it