Читать книгу Alone: A Love Story - Michelle Parise - Страница 15

Married life is good. We spend a year in a basement apartment to save money to buy our own place. It’s small and crammed with all of our stuff. Well, all of my stuff. He has nothing. I remember the first time I was ever in his room, in the house he shared with a bunch of guys. I asked, “Where’s all your stuff?” And he shrugged and said he just left it all when he moved to this city. “I like to travel light,” he said, but I didn’t understand. I mean, he wasn’t travelling at all, he was living, wasn’t he?

I love my stuff. I’m nostalgic for an old bowl that belonged to my friend’s late mother, and my grandmother’s kitchen utensils, and the first piece of art I ever bought on my own. I would never leave any of my things behind. But he could. He did. I wondered what that said about him, what it meant that he was the kind of person that had no sentimental attachment to things, the kind of person that could just up and go whenever he wanted to. Could it mean he was unsentimental about people, too?

It was a distant early warning sign I chose to ignore. Obviously, because here we are, married and living in a tiny basement apartment with all of these things of mine I would never leave. He’s brought into our marriage only his clothes, a box of university textbooks, a fishing tackle box filled with odds and ends, and thirty-five thousand dollars’ worth of student loans. We also have all the things you get when you have a big wedding like we did. My side, the Italian side, fulfilled all the traditional gift requirements. Twelve place-settings of china, cutlery, and crystal stemware. Coffee makers, blenders, tablecloths, bedsheets, towels, and luggage sets. There are so many trays and platters, I don’t even know what I would ever use them all for. But for now they’re in boxes while we save money to buy a real home.

We’re in the basement of an old house, so everything slopes. The ceilings are only six feet, three inches high, and The Husband is six foot two. He bends his head down to walk around. It’s freezing cold in there all winter long, and sometimes it gets so bad that we turn the oven on and open the door so I can sit directly in front of it. At night he fills plastic bottles with hot water and puts them in our bed so that by the time I’m ready to sleep it is toasty between the sheets. He’s gold in this way, The Husband. These little things.

There are all kinds of crazy little insects and spiders in all kinds of nooks and crannies, and when the people who live upstairs walk around it sounds like thunder. We are so happy. We hang out all the time. He watches TV and I read, both of us on the couch with our legs wound together. We play cards and talk and talk and talk. During hockey season, we walk down the street to our local bar to watch the game and eat plates of macaroni and cheese. They know our drinks, so we never have to order. We go to movies, we go dancing, we eat in restaurants all the time because our rent is so cheap and we both hate to cook.

Being married is awesome.

After a year in the basement, we’ve saved enough money for a down payment and we buy a condo right downtown. At eight hundred square feet, it feels palatial compared to the basement apartment and my little bachelor before it. And it’s warm. We spend three years there, happy, comfortable, carefree. That is, until the ultimatum.