“This is fantastic,” he said happily as he ate the eggs and gobbled the bacon. She reached outside her door for the newspaper and then handed it to him.
It was the perfect lazy Saturday morning, and she would have loved to go back to bed with him and make love. They hadn't made love since the week before. Sometimes they missed a week, when one of or both of them were too tired, or sick. Most of the time she loved the regularity and dependability of their love life. They knew each other well, and had had a great time in bed with each other for the past four years. It would have been hard to give that up. There were lots of things about him she didn't want to lose: his companionship, his intelligence, the fact that he was a lawyer too and was usually interested in what she was doing, at least to some degree, although admittedly, tax law wasn't as exciting as what he did.
They had a good time together when they saw each other, liked the same movies, and enjoyed the same food. She liked his kids, though she saw little of them, maybe a few times a year. And whenever they went out with her friends or his, they seemed to like the same people, and had the same comments to make about them afterward. There was a lot that worked about the relationship, which was why it was so frustrating that he didn't want more than they had. Lately, she had thought that she might like living with him one day, but there was no chance of that. He had told her right from the beginning that he was interested neither in cohabitation nor in marriage, only dating. And this was dating. It was more than enough for him, and had been for her for four years.
Lately she felt a little too old for this kind of arrangement of nearly total noncommitment. They were sexually exclusive, and had a standing weekend date. Beyond that, they shared nothing. And sometimes she felt she had been dating for too long. At thirty-eight, she had dated too many people for too many years, as a teenager, a student, a law student, a young lawyer, and now a partner of the firm. She had moved up the ranks in business and life, but she still had the same kind of relationship she had had when she was a kid at Harvard. There was nothing she could do about it, given Phil's stubbornness on the subject and the firm boundaries he set. He had always been completely clear about the limits on the relationship he wanted. But doing the same old thing year after year made her feel like she was trapped in the twilight zone sometimes. Nothing ever moved backward or forward. Nothing ever changed. It just hung in space, eternally, while only she got older. It seemed weird to her. But not to him. In Phil's mind, he was still a kid, and he liked it that way. She didn't want babies and marriage, but she definitely wanted more than this, only because she liked him, and loved him in some ways, although she knew he was selfish at times, self-centered, could be arrogant and even pompous, and had different priorities than she did. But no one was perfect. To Sarah, the people she cared about always came first. To Phil, he did. He always reminded her that in the safety video on the airplane, they told you to put on your own oxygen mask first and help others later. But tend to yourself first. Always. He considered that a lesson in life, and justification for the way he treated people. The way he put it made it hard to argue with him, so she didn't. They were just different. She wondered sometimes if it was the basic difference between women and men, and not anything particularly deficient about him. It was hard to say. But there was no hiding from the fact that Phil was selfish, always put himself first, and did what was best for him. It gave her no wiggle room at all to ask for more.
After breakfast, he went off to do his errands, while Sarah made her bed. He had said something about staying there that night, so she changed the sheets, and put fresh towels up in the bathroom. She did the breakfast dishes, then went out to pick up her own dry cleaning. She never had time to do that either during the week. Single working people never did. Her only day to do errands was Saturday, which was why Phil was doing his. She would just have liked to do them together. He laughed at her when she said that, made light of it, and then reminded her that that was what married people did, single people didn't. And they weren't married. They were single, he always said loud and clear. They did laundry separately, errands separately, had separate lives, apartments, and beds. They came together a couple of days a week to have fun, not to join their two lives into one. He said it to her often. She understood the difference. She just didn't like it. He did. A lot.
Sarah came back to the apartment to put her dry cleaning away, and after that she went to the photography exhibit at the museum, and found it beautiful and interesting. She would have liked to share it with Phil, but she knew he wasn't crazy about museums. She went for a walk on the Marina Green after that, to get some exercise and air, and she was back at her apartment at six o'clock, after stopping at Safeway to buy some groceries. She had decided to cook Phil dinner, and maybe after that they could rent a video or go to a movie. They didn't have much of a social life these days. Most of her friends were married and had children, and Phil found them incredibly boring. He liked her friends, but no longer liked their lifestyles. The people they had met together in the beginning of their relationship were now all married. And he said he found it depressing to try and have an intelligent conversation, while listening to their toddler and brand-new baby screaming either for their dinner or from earaches. He said he had done all that years before. His own friends now were mostly men his age or younger who had never been married, or who had been divorced for years, liked it that way, and were bitter about their ex-wives, or their kids who had supposedly been corrupted by their despicable ex-wives, and the men hated the spousal support they were paying, which they always insisted was too much. They were unanimous in the belief that they had gotten screwed, and were emphatic about not letting it happen again. He found her friends too domestic these days, although he had liked them in the beginning, and she found his superficial and bitter, which limited their social life a lot. She noticed that most of the men Phil's age were now dating seriously younger women. When they went to dinner with them, she found herself trying to have conversations with young women who were barely more than half her age, and she had nothing in common with them. So lately she and Phil had been keeping to themselves, and for the moment that worked well, although it isolated them. They saw fewer and fewer friends now.
He saw his own friends during the week, either at the gym, or before or after for a drink, which was another reason he had no time to see Sarah during the week, and objected to her trying to take his weekday independence from him. He was very open with her about the fact that he needed to see his friends, whether she liked them or not, or approved of who they dated. So weekday nights were his.
Phil didn't call her on her cell phone all day Saturday, and she assumed he was busy, so she didn't call him, either. She knew he'd turn up at her apartment when he was finished doing what he had to do. He finally walked in at seven-thirty, in blue jeans and a black turtleneck that made him look sexier than ever. She almost had dinner ready for him, and handed him a glass of wine the minute he walked in. He smiled, kissed her, and thanked her.