“Not right now,” she said. “I just wanted to, you know, wake you up.”
“Well, you did. Now—”
“Now I’ve got to go shopping,” Janine said.
“What? It won’t keep for half an hour?”
She shook her head. “Not enough hours in the day as is, not when I’ve got the day job. We’ll see what happens after dinner.” She fluttered her fingers and hurried off.
Because she had the nine-to-five, Marshall did a lot of the shopping. He didn’t know what she had to get that was more urgent than fooling around. Muttering to himself, he tried to pick up the story again. He wouldn’t have been so irked if this were the first time she’d teased him while he was writing and then not come through. She’d done it twice before, though. That wasn’t good. That was a trend, and not one he liked.
You had to get used to certain things when you started living with someone. Marshall grokked that. Janine hated peas and zucchini. Okay. Marshall knew his world wouldn’t end without them. She folded towels and T-shirts in ways different from the ones he’d learned. He could deal with that, too. He could even handle her squeezing toothpaste from the middle of the tube, no matter if he heard his father growling inside his head whenever she did.
Cockteasing, though… That was harder to handle, especially when it was cockteasing that interrupted his work. He wondered if Janine knew she was doing it, or how badly timed it was.
He also wondered if he wanted to make an issue of it. She went on and on about how controlling Paul was, and how that drove her nuts. Wouldn’t she think Marshall was acting the same way?
He scratched his head, mumbled, and eventually got back to writing. He was making up his story as he went along. He was making up living with Janine as we went along, too. He’d had girlfriends before, but the only people he’d lived with were his folks and, for that freshman year, the Korean guy he’d roomed with at the Santa Barbara dorm.
Janine, on the other hand, got what she knew about living with a man from her time with Paul. Marshall wasn’t just like her ex. That was one of the reasons she’d dumped Paul for him, or it should have been. But she’d got Paul to pay attention to her by yelling. So she yelled at Marshall, too, often snarkily.
That wore thin even faster than getting teased while he was writing did, because it happened more often. Finally, Marshall said, “Hey, you don’t have to go on like that, you know? I was already taking care of it.”
His new squeeze looked astonished. “You were, weren’t you?”
“Um, yeah,” Marshall said. The dishes had been going from the drainer into the cabinet. As soon as that got done, the silverware would go into the drawer, and the glasses into the cupboard over the stove. If you noticed what was happening and what was likely to happen, it should have been obvious before you started yelling.
“Whenever Paul would do stuff—and he didn’t do much—he’d crow like a rooster or like he wanted a medal for it,” Janine said. “You just went ahead and did it, and it, like, went under my radar.”
“I’m not Paul,” Marshall said pointedly. Trying to soften that with a joke, he added, “I’m not even the walrus.”
“The what?” Janine didn’t get it.
“Never mind.” Marshall didn’t bother explaining. He was fuzzy on the details himself, anyway. The Beatles were a band from long before his time, a band people older than his father listened to on oldies stations.
“You come out with the weirdest shit sometimes,” Janine said.
“Yeah, well, that’s what you get for messing with a writer,” Marshall said.
“What else do I get?” She grabbed him below the belt. She didn’t tease all the time. The silverware and the glasses went into the drawer and the cupboard later than Marshall’d thought they would. Since Janine didn’t bitch about them any more, that didn’t bother him.
She did keep coming on to him and not following through while he was writing, though. She thought it was a hoot. He was less amused. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said at last. “It’s like… I don’t know… like grabbing somebody’s arm when he’s driving.”
“Nobody drives any more. Not unless you’re in a bus or a truck.” Was Janine missing the point because she was dense? Or was she wiggling around so she wouldn’t have to argue about what bugged Marshall? He wasn’t sure himself. He wasn’t sure she was sure, either.
He made a couple of sales not long after he moved in with her. That felt mighty good. He didn’t want her saying he brought in no money. He wasn’t going to make as much as she did, but he needed to make something. He didn’t want to think of himself as her kept man, and he didn’t want her thinking of him like that, either.
The day-to-day grind ate most of his life, the way it eats most people’s lives most of the time. He was happy enough. Was he happier than he had been while he was still living with his dad and stepmom and little half-sister? He was getting laid a lot more often, which certainly didn’t hurt.
He rarely had the time to ask himself Do I want to be doing this for the rest of my life? He did sometimes wonder. From the looks Janine sent his way every so often, he suspected she sometimes wondered, too. He was still trying to figure out what a relationship was and how you kept it going. She’d just had one blow up and sink.
“It wasn’t your fault, Marshall.” She said that a lot. “I was already in the water, and you were a life ring.”
“Glad to be of service,” he would answer. In a way, it was reassuring. He didn’t want to blame himself for her leaving Paul—for her kicking Paul out of this house, if you wanted to be exact. Her ex still had boxes of junk in the garage. Marshall left them severely alone.
He didn’t want to blame himself, no. But every once in a while he did wonder what would have happened if he couldn’t have gone to help old Mrs. Lundgren move. Would Janine and Paul still be together? Would she have found herself some other life ring instead? Would that different life ring be living here now? Would he be asking himself these same unanswerable questions?
Or would he just count his blessings, figure Janine was more than cute enough and not impossible to get along with, and go from there? Most of the time, that was what Marshall did himself.
Rain came down as Kelly got out of Colin’s Taurus at the airport. It could rain any old time of the year in L.A. these days, but winter was still the season with the most wet stuff. She leaned back in to kiss Deborah in the car seat. “’Bye, Mommy,” Deborah said tragically.
“So long, sweetie,” Kelly said. “I’ll be back Monday.”
Colin got out to haul her carry-on out of the trunk and to hug her and kiss her before she went into the terminal. “I’ll miss you, too, you know,” he said.
“Well, I hope so. And I’ll miss you,” she answered. “But I’m not going to Helena or any other part of the end of the world this time. It’s just Chicago, for the geologists’ convention.”
“It’s winter,” Colin said. “In Chicago, it’s really winter.”
“That’s why they have it this time of year,” Kelly reminded him. “Since the eruptions, everybody holds conventions in the summertime, when it’s—”
“Warmer,” Colin finished for her.
“Well, yeah.” She nodded. “But hotel rates and everything are a lot cheaper this time of year, and the convention committee really got its rocks off on that.”
Her husband winced. “You’ve stuck around with me too long.” He turned back toward the open driver’s-side door. Traffic wasn’t a fraction of what it had been once upon a time. “See you Monday. Have fun with all your scientific buddies.” One more hug and he was gone.