the bibliophile kid

The cracks appeared in the gaunt face of my young marriage when my wife asked me what the wildest thing I had done as a teenager had been. I’m nearly 30, it’s irrelevant really, everything is. It was about six months ago. They – the cracks – had been there before, whispered threats composed of incomplete sentences left hanging in guesswork amidst glottal stops and cryptic intonations, possible future occurrences, quantum-scale geneses of unfolding heartbreak, but they became visible then, when the question left her silence, these huge blots blemishing our shared frailty, suddenly so real. Their edges spread frayed like ink with time and now only they remained. I feel partly responsible because the question made me feel trivialised. She knows that I hate to talk about the past because I have a terrible memory unless it’s for a set few triggers of tender nostalgia, and I knew that the question was a thinly-veiled attempt to reflect upon how boring I had become, a truth of which I was acutely, almost debilitatingly aware. I grew into monotony over years as one does an oversized piece of clothing bought second hand. We had met as teenagers, at parties, and we first fucked drunk sitting down on a foldable garden chair in darkness and the sporadic glare of the security light that kept picking up our thrusting with its poorly placed motion sensor in a friend’s parent’s garage. The urgency of youth intensified our lives. I was probably always inclined towards tedium, it’s in the blood, encoded into my genes; it lurks under the surface of my half-cocked nihilistic pronouncements (nihilism’s the perfect cover for the boring), and I think she knew it too, but we were in love, and told ourselves that as long as we had each other then everything else would be fine. It was a weak mantra, and false. I never felt boring as such, in the way the very old feel just eighteen inside, but I am, the kid she once fucked on the chair now lost amongst financial insecurity and endlessly researched projects that amount to little at best. I can’t blame her for losing interest; I’d lost interest in me too.

Shortly after this she had started having affairs but called them encounters, somehow romanticising her daily betrayals; she was very honest about them, and explained them to me at length without invitation, which was supposed to make it easier for both of us and would probably even help us because of the science behind the human brain and the ways in which it processed information. One of her friends had told her that, a mental health nurse who she had slept with two or three times with varying levels of success. I didn’t think a nursing qualification – even with a psychiatric specialism totalling some twenty-four months of training – really put you in the best position to make assumptions about other people’s lives and relationships and reactions to complex personal information relating to fidelity and love and socio-behavioural interactions that would generally be accepted to at best be hard to deal with, but my wife seemed to give his limp theorizing – a nurse! – some kind of credence, despite the obvious bias associated with his intermittent interactions with her curious cunt. She’d always had a thing for public sector email addresses. We talked about the encounters with all the superficial politeness of work friends at obligatory drinks both attended and unwanted by all – me afraid to give any kind of reaction and so straight-backed and gurning, cheeks sunk against the effort of the gritted teeth that held my composure together, nodding her story onwards to its inevitable coital conclusion, as though her extramarital interests were the expected results of two years of wedlock, and she animated like I had never seen her – she was always so stoic with me, as though smiling were a gormless weakness she would not allow herself – her huge eyes moistened with the verbalised recent reminiscence and her whole body incorporated in expressive gestural re-enactments of the key moments of the recounted relationship, a sexual ballet performed for – but not about – me, rendered as I was the most pathetic of all voyeurs: non-consensual, involuntary, powerless.

She had taken to engaging in her encounters every other day including weekends, which totalled four fucks a week, each of which she narrated to me with the warmly evoked gynaecological precision of an all-girl coffee morning. Sometimes there would be repeat efforts with the same man – the mental health nurse being one such example – but she said that this mostly defeated the object of what she was doing, which required a different male each time. Though I didn’t find it helpful to hear about her intercourse she did seem to genuinely want to help me through it. We had drifted into that kind of relationship.