I'm Thinking of Ending Things(7)

—If you have nothing, there’s nothing to lose.

—Yeah. Nothing to lose.





I think a lot of what we learn about others isn’t what they tell us. It’s what we observe. People can tell us anything they want. As Jake pointed out once, every time someone says “Pleased to meet you,” they’re actually thinking something different, making some judgment. Feeling “pleased” is never exactly what they’re thinking or feeling, but that’s what they say, and we listen.

Jake told me our relationship has its own valence. Valence. That’s the word he used.

If that’s true, then relationships can change from one afternoon to evening, from hour to hour. Lying in bed is one thing. When we eat breakfast together and when it’s early, we don’t speak a lot. I like to talk, even just a bit. It helps me wake up. Especially if the conversation is funny. Nothing wakes me up like a laugh, really, even just one big laugh, as long as it’s sincere. It’s better than caffeine.

Jake prefers to eat his cereal or toast and read, mostly in quiet. He’s always reading. Lately it’s that Cocteau book. He must have reread it five times by now.

But he also just reads whatever’s available. At first I thought he was quiet at breakfast because he was so into whatever book he was reading. I could understand that, though it’s not how I operate. I wouldn’t ever read this way. I like to know I have a good bit of time set aside for reading, to really get into the story. I don’t like reading and eating, not together.

But it’s the reading just for the sake of it that I find irritating. Jake will read anything—a newspaper, a magazine, a cereal box, a crappy flyer, a take-out menu, anything.

“Hey, do you think secrets are inherently unfair, or bad or immoral in a relationship?” I ask.

He’s caught off guard. He looks at me, then back to the road.

“I don’t know. It would depend on the secret. Is it significant? Is there more than one secret? How many are there? And what is being hidden? All relationships have secrets, though, don’t you think? Even in lifelong relationships, and fifty-year marriages, there are secrets.”

On the fifth morning we had breakfast together I stopped trying to start up a discussion. I didn’t make any jokes. I sat. I ate cereal. Jake’s brand. I looked around the room. I watched him. I observed. I thought: This is good. This is how we really get to know each other.

He was reading a magazine. There was a faint white film or residue under his bottom lip, concentrated in the corners of his mouth, in the valley where the top and bottom lips meet. This happened most mornings, this white lip film. After he showered, it was usually gone.

Was it toothpaste? Was it from breathing out of his mouth all night? Was it the mouth equivalent of eye boogers? When he read, he chewed very slowly, as if to conserve energy, as if concentrating on the words slowed his ability to swallow. Sometimes there was a long delay between the last revolution of his jaw and his swallow.

He’d wait for a bit and then dig out another overflowing spoonful from his bowl, holding it up absentmindedly. I thought he might drip milk onto his chin; each spoon was so full. But he didn’t. He got it all into his mouth without a single drip. He rested the spoon in the bowl and wiped at his chin, even though there was nothing on it. It was all done distractedly.

His jaw is very taut and muscular. Even now. Even while sitting, driving.

How can I stop myself from thinking about eating breakfast with him twenty or thirty years from now? Would he still get that white residue every day? Would it be worse? Does everyone in a relationship think about this stuff? I watched him swallow—that prominent Adam’s apple, more a gnarled peach pit stuck in his throat.

Sometimes post-eating, usually after a large meal, his body makes sounds like a cooling car after a long drive. I can hear liquids shifting through small spaces. This doesn’t happen so much at breakfast, more often after supper.

I hate to dwell on these things. They’re unimportant and banal, but now’s the time to think about them before this relationship gets any more serious. This makes me crazy, though, right? I’m crazy for thinking about this stuff?

Jake is smart. He’ll be a full professor before long. Full tenure and all that. This stuff’s appealing. It makes a good life. He’s tall. He has his clumsy physical appeal. He’s attractively misanthropic. All things I would have wanted in a husband when I was younger. Checks in all the boxes. I’m just not sure what any of this means now that I’m watching him eat cereal and hearing his body make hydraulic noises.

“Do you think your parents have secrets?” I ask.

“Absolutely. I’m sure they do. They’d have to.”

The weirdest part—and it’s some pretty unalloyed irony, as Jake would say—is that I can’t say anything to him about my doubts. They have everything to do with him, and he’s the one person I’m not comfortable talking to about them. I won’t say anything until I’m sure it’s over. I can’t. What I’m questioning involves both of us, affects both of us, yet I can only decide alone. What does that say about relationships? Another in the long line of early-relationship contradictions.

“Why all the questions about secrets?”

“No reason,” I say. “Just thinking.”





Maybe I should simply enjoy this trip. Not overthink it. Get out of my own head. Have fun; let things happen naturally.