Mating for Life by Marissa Stapley Page A

right now,” and she thought that meant something great about him, like that he was, unlike anyone else she knew, exactly who he was. Really what it had meant was that Johnny took everything literally.
    She had wanted Johnny with a hunger that had never truly been sated—and at least they still had that. Their bodies fit together in a way that she hadn’t imagined possible but that he was clearly used to. He hadn’t said to her, the way she had to him, This is the best I’ve ever had , or All I can think about is making love to you . Instead, in response, he had smiled and said something like, “Yep, it is pretty good, isn’t it?” If there was one thing Johnny knew, it was his way around a woman’s body. A woman’s mind, though: that was another story. Especially a woman like Myra, it would turn out. “The others weren’t like you,” he had said to her once. She hadn’t been sure if this was a compliment, but it did make her feel slightly comforted, and also superior and safe from being filed in the same folder as these other women. Pretty, blond, unintelligent, gone.
    She had decided to take the fact that he considered her different from the others as a sign that perhaps he was interested in having her encourage him toward self-improvement. So she began: “Do you ever want to go back to school?” “Nope. I’m forty-four. That would be stupid.” He had gotten up from the table, leaving his supper unfinished. And that was that. She had tried to ask again and he had snapped at her to drop it. Later, she would learn he barely had a grade ten education, but also that there were reasons for this.
    She had never told Johnny what it was that she’d wanted. She had never admitted to him that when her former friend Wendy had said that women would come to live with Johnny and end up pregnant she had thought, with the misdirected clarity only a drunk person can have, that perhaps she had found her answer. That night, through the distortion of too many cosmopolitans or margaritas or whatever they were, she had seen a way to leave it all behind: the disappointment of the city, the starkness of the fertility clinics, the embarrassment, yes, embarrassment she had felt when the doctors had said there wasn’t a problem with her, per se, and nor was there a problem with Colin, but that they couldn’t really understand why she wasn’t getting pregnant. In Johnny and the marina and the boys she had seen a way to avoid witnessing the inevitable dissolution of her marriage to Colin, too. (Oh, and technically, they were still married. Technically, they had been in the midst of a trial separation when she had, as he put it, run off to the woods. But it was such a tepid dissolution that neither of them had bothered to do anything about it. Three years, and she hadn’t heard from him. She supposed she had always figured that as soon as she got pregnant, she’d get in touch about a divorce. And that in the meantime, if he ever met someone or decided he needed closure, he’d do the same. But nothing had happened in either direction. And she had not told Johnny about Colin at all, at first because she had been nervous about mentioning it and later because she had realized how pointless it was. It wouldn’t matter to Johnny. He was never going to ask her to marry him anyway, so her being technically still married to someone else was of little consequence.)
    Once, Myra had said to Johnny, “We should go to the city.” It was fall, not yet winter, and the leaves on the trees in their yellows, reds, and golds made her think of fresh starts even though they weren’t really, even though what the changing of the leaves really signified was a last-ditch attempt at being something before the ultimate descent into nothing.
    â€œLike, for a weekend?”
    â€œNo. We should just go. We should sell this place and go. You’re a natural