“Like painting?”
“Yes, painting. And drawing. And, I don’t know, collage. Whatever I feel like.”
“Who’s going to pay for that?” he asked sharply, and now I knew he was angry. He never questioned the way I spent money—probably because I hardly spent any. My joy began to fade and the room grew darker around me. Phillip paid the bills. If he didn’t want to pay for it, he didn’t have to, and who was I to object? This is why women should have their own jobs, their own money, I thought. This is why I want my own. Like my grandmother had.
“I don’t mind working,” I said quietly. “I wanted to work. You were the one who didn’t want me to.” I could have argued a dozen things, compared myself to the women I knew who shopped their boredom and their pain away. But this wasn’t a financial reckoning. This wasn’t about fair. This was about control.
He didn’t respond. Instead, he looked around the kitchen and said, “I’ve been waiting. I’m starving. You should call if you’re going to be late.”
“Wait, what are you talking about? Did we have plans? How am I late?”
He sighed in frustration, as though I were asking for clarification on some basic tenet of our relationship. “Past dinner time.”
“I’m sorry?” I wasn’t entirely sure what I was apologizing for. I sat down on the arm of the sofa, as though I were only staying a moment.
“If you’re not going to try, Madeleine, I don’t know why I’m bothering.”
“Try what?” I asked. I was becoming genuinely confused. It was as though Phillip were having an entirely different conversation and not letting me in on it.
“This.” He lifted his hands in frustration. He was standing behind the island in the kitchen. A bottle of wine, a half-empty glass, the opener, and the cork were lined up beside him in a tidy row. Everything about Phillip was so neat. It was fascinating, in a way, as though he had been molded from plastic. When we were first married, I had watched him endlessly, wondering at the way his hair fell perfectly into place as soon as he brushed it and stayed that way the entire day, how his suit jackets remained unwrinkled, even at the insides of the elbows, and how he never seemed to spill anything when he ate, whereas my every encounter with food was a battle in which my clothing was likely to end up as collateral damage. “Us. This relationship. You can’t go running off to—I don’t know, move in with your mother or become a painter or whatever every time you have a bad day.”
“It’s not just a bad day. It’s every day.”
“That’s my Madeleine. Always complaining about something.”
“Phillip, you don’t even like me. Why did you marry me?”
“Of course I like you,” he said, scoffing. He spun the corkscrew on the counter and it made an irritating rattle. “You’re my wife.”
“Those two things don’t have to go together, you know. I know tons of married people who hate each other.”
“I don’t hate you.”