The Theory of Opposites (3 page)

“Holy shit!” Shawn squeals. The woman in red has started shrieking, unable to control her fear, and it’s impossible to say which happens first: the vipers sense her weakness and attack, or her weakness betrays her and she was screwed before she even started.

“That is awesome!” Shawn yells, slapping me five.

I smack his palm with fake euphoria, wondering what’s more terrifying: the false reality airing in front of us, or the actual reality that might be unspooling in my lap.

3

Shawn falls asleep on the couch, his hand still clutching his phone, which occasionally shudders with the arrival of a text or an email or some other breaking alert from the Internet world that never sleeps. I watch him for a moment — breathing in, breathing out. It isn’t just that he’s good-looking. That’s the easy part. That’s the part that girls like Izzy notice. It’s also that he’s magnetic, in the way that superstars are. Enough that his handsomeness almost doesn’t matter. Vanessa calls it “the trifecta” — hotness, smarts and the elusive x-factor — even though she doesn’t like him as much as I wished a best friend would. It’s the way he looks at you, the way he’s so steely, so solid.

His phone buzzes again, and he stirs, and for a moment I’m embarrassed that I’m watching him this way, that my neediness is so ripe, that I am admiring the wave in his hair and the way that his lanky body assumes the length of the couch.

I move toward him and shake his shoulder.

“Shawn, come to bed. It’s late.”

He grunts and turns his face toward the pillows, still deeply in slumber.

“Shawn, come on. It’s time for bed.”

He flutters his eyes open and they spin into focus.

“Is today the day? Are we trying?” He reaches for his phone to check his calendar.

He thinks I am waking him for baby sex,
I realize.
Have I become the wife who only wakes him for baby sex?

“No. Just…come to bed.”

“Five minutes,” he says, though he is already falling back into his dream.

I wait another beat, hoping he’ll return to me, but he’s gone. I shut down the lights in the living room and tell myself that this alone time isn’t so bad. That sleeping in the bed on my own every once in a while isn’t the worst thing in the world. Just before I enter the bedroom, I pause at the doorframe and turn back toward Shawn, hoping this feeling’s not the start of a greater divide.

Shawn and I have been trying for a baby for seven months now. When we married, we came up with a plan — or mostly Shawn did, but I listened and approved: we literally wrote it down in diagram form because, at heart, we are both diagrammers, we both appreciate order. We agreed that we needed two to three years to settle in, to establish who we were as a couple, and then we’d have a kid, and then we’d probably have another, and maybe along the way, we’d adopt a dog, erect a house with a white picket fence, and live happily ever after.

Or something like that.

It made sense, though, at least how Shawn had mapped it out: that he could land some big contract jobs, bank money so that we didn’t have to worry, and that when the time came, I could quit my job (if that’s what I wanted, of course, he added), and stay home with the kids or maybe volunteer or work in the library or…something. I nodded my head and said yes to all of the proposed itinerary. I liked kids well enough, and though I’d never been consumed with the desire for motherhood (a trait passed on by my own overly-rational, cool-headed parents), I figured that at least half the point of getting married was to start a family. And Shawn was already a perfect uncle to Nicky; he certainly could make up for any deficits in my own parenting.

So now we were right on plan, right on schedule. Only my womb wasn’t cooperating. Seven months of nothing. Seven months of anticipation, of hope, of periods. I told Vanessa I was considering Clomid, and she regaled me with horror stories of women who promptly grew hair on their face. “Like, almost a full beard,” she said, though I was 99 percent sure that she was making it up because Vanessa is unencumbered and single by choice for now and mostly well-intentioned but also slightly selfish in the way that a best friend can accept. I told my mom, who sighed, and because we have all been brainwashed by my father, she said the words that I’d already been thinking: “Maybe this just isn’t meant to be right now.”

But then, after seven months, there was that faint pink line four days ago. And something shifted in me, like I could already sense the baby, feel its little bean body sprouting inside of me. And then, just this morning —
was it only this morning?
— my period came, and I realized how stupid I was for getting ahead of myself, for getting ahead of life and fate and all of the idiotic inexplicable things that fill up the space between the two.

Shit. I hate it so very much when my dad is right.

Alone time. Maybe there is more of that in our future than we anticipated.

I close the bedroom door and reach for my laptop. It whirs to life, and I rearrange the pillows on the bed and settle in between them, then quickly run through my list of bookmarks.

I click on Facebook, my pulse tangibly quickening, like clicking on something as mundane as Facebook is illicit, like I should know better. Maybe, actually, I should.

Atop my homepage, Theodore Brackton’s friend request glows like a firework, a nuclear bomb. Because even though Shawn is my fate, I do wonder, every once in a while (and recently, it seems more often than that), if fate couldn’t have been different. If I hadn’t somehow misread the stars, or if they’d aligned differently, if everything couldn’t be different.

I hover my mouse for a moment.

Accept.

Deny.

Ignore.

I hear Shawn stir in the living room. He must have flipped off the TV because the background noise slips into nothingness.

“Shawn?”

No answer.

I consider trying to rouse him again. Bring him to bed. But Facebook beckons, and besides, there’s also now my doubt, the seed of mistrust planted. I consider Izzy’s innocent musing —
I guess he could also be picking up women! I’d probably give Mark Zuckerberg a pass!
— and I wonder, apropos of nothing, if Mark Zuckerberg’s wife is on Facebook, and if so, if she’d mind if I emailed her and asked her what she would do in my situation.
WWMZWD?

I stare out the window at the street lamps.

It’s true that Shawn had always been faithful, had never given me any reason to worry. And it’s also true that I should probably have just been more forthright, just
asked
him why he was at
Grape!,
instead of poking around with my vague questions while he was already sucked into the vacuum of
Dare You!.
But ours wasn’t a marriage of confrontation. Ours was a marriage of convenience. (Which makes it sound very Russian bride-y, but I don’t mean it that way.) What I mean to say is that Shawn is my Point North; he’s the thing I don’t question because I was raised by a man who taught me that questions lead nowhere, that answers are murky and misleading and whatever is going to happen is going to happen anyway. So why bother asking? I didn’t ask too much of Shawn because he was mine. That was my answer. The fact that maybe I wondered if I didn’t deserve him, with his handsomeness and his wild success and his
Wired 40 Under 40!
was almost beside the point. Vanessa would note (and has noted) that this is entirely the point (of a visit to a therapist), but therapy, to me, was like answers: a distraction from the journey. The path was already chosen. Why think too hard about it?

Shawn and I met on Match.com six years ago, before he blew up in the Internet world, back when he and I were just Shawn and Willa. He sent me a note with the intro:
what are two normal people like us doing here?,
and it made me laugh, so I ignored my instincts that Internet dating was for weirdos and cyber-freaks, and I wrote him back and said:
Just tempting fate.
Which I thought was super-clever given my dad’s theories that fate is what happens to us, not something we have any influence to tempt. I pressed “send,” and then wondered why on earth I was mixing my dad into my dating life. Shawn missed the reference (or didn’t google me right away) and replied within the hour.

I scanned Shawn’s profile, and I could see why he thought we’d be a good match. We were both middle children; we both liked reading classic novels; we both listed “people who argue just to argue,” as a turn-off; and we both listed, “someone who is in charge and confident” as a turn-on. When asked what country he most compared himself to (Match.com urges you to complete their two-page questionnaire “to give potential interests better insight to what makes you
you,”
and no one dares run the risk that his or her future spouse misses out on
you
because you stupidly opted to skip the questionnaire…so everyone fills it out), he cited Switzerland. And I thought:
omg! I’m totally Switzerland too!

And he was. And I was. And together, we were Switzerland on turbo, Switzerland on crack. Which works very well for a marriage, actually, until it stops working because one spouse finds a receipt from
Grape!,
and can’t help but wonder if the other spouse is actually, perhaps, North Korea. Or…something.

Accept.

Deny.

Ignore.

My finger twitches over Theodore’s friend request, and I tamp down my instinct to click on any of my options. (“
Instinct is nothing more than a human’s misguided attempt to think that he has some semblance of control.”
— New York Times bestseller
Is It Really Your Choice? Why Your Entire Life May Be Out of Your Control, p. 33)
Maybe it doesn’t matter which I choose — I’d lived my life telling myself as much. And yet still, the prospects loomed:

Accept.

Deny.

Ignore.

When did Facebook become the analogy for the rest of our lives?

—

I startle awake at 4:12 a.m. The lights still on, the laptop still perched on my stomach. Shawn still asleep on the couch, I assume. We never used to do this — sleep one without the other — and as I reach to flip off the bedside lamp, I wonder when our habits started shifting.

He’s tired,
I think.
Working all the time. He was named to Wired’s 40 Under 40 for God’s sake!
I can’t expect him to be present in all ways in all places at all times. I bet Mark Zuckerberg sometimes falls asleep at his office too.

My light flips off with a loud click, and I squeeze my eyes shut, hoping sleep will come, hoping that my anxiety won’t win the battle over my fatigue. But before I can even hope to drift into slumber, my phone beeps twice.

Beep beep.

Beep beep.

I slide my index finger over my home page to discover a text from my boss Hannah. A photo actually. Or at least I think it’s her. It’s a close-up of her breasts, of two fat, overflowing, sweaty cantaloupes with a crevasse between them. They could be anyone’s breasts, quite honestly, or anyone who is well-endowed enough, but the necklace charm — the four-leaf clover she never removes — identifies the bosom.

For a moment, I worry that this is some sort of penance she is making me pay for the disastrous Dependables meeting
.
I consider typing something back, something that says: “Adult Diapers can never be sexy! Adult diapers are about assurance and stability, not flash and come-hitherness!”

I gaze up at the blackness of my ceiling and suddenly realize that my marriage might be a bit like a box of Dependables.

But before I even type my snappy response to Hannah, I lose my nerve. Overt confrontation was never really my thing. Maybe she doesn’t know how poorly the meeting went. Maybe she’s just on a bender, and it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie.

So instead I type:
Don’t think this was meant for me?

And say a silent prayer that in fact, it wasn’t. Maybe there are such things as accidents. My dad speaks to the big, overarching push-pulls of life: that all is as it should be. But does that mean that my boss can’t mistakenly sext me? And if so, where do these happy accidents begin and end? With a missed connection on Facebook? With a false positive on a pregnancy test?

I roll my fingers over my laptop and it breathes to life.

Google: EPT false positive

Google Search results:

Livestrong: how to take a pregnancy test

Amazon.com: 20% off all EPT tests!

The Wendy Williams Show: I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant!

BabyCenter.com: 3 False positives/Ept faint line??????

Bingo.

From
@iluvbooboo:
Here’s the deal: I peed every day since day five after sex and each time it showed a line. But maybe that was just a pee line? How am I supposed to tell the difference between a baby line and a pee line?????? Can anyone help?????????

From:
@mamabear:
The same thing happened to me! EPT sucks! I want to kill EPT. They get my fucking hopes up every time, and then I always get my Aunt Flo. Aunt Flo, I hate you as much as EPT!!!!

From:
@dreaminofbaby:
Ladies, let’s start a petition against EPT. EPT: do you actually stand for Essentially a Piece of Trash.

From:
@iluvbooboo
I am IN!!!!!!!!! Where do I sign?

From: NurseEllen: dear
@iluvbooboo:
false positives are very rare. I suggest you consult your doctor for a blood test. Or maybe this is all part of God’s plan for you.

From:
@iluvbooboo:
Nurse Ellen, respectfully, both you and God’s plan can go fuck yourself.

I try to log on to add my encouragement to @iluvbooboo. Something simple like: Y
ou go girl!
Or:
Who are you to say what God has planned?
Or: S
o only people who are lucky enough to have a plan with God get a kid?