Terms & Conditions by Robert Glancy Page A

failed to live up to my brilliance, I cracked. My brilliance was a fragile academic type rather than a worldly brilliance. I was a pure academic who soon found the scope of clean white examination papers muddied by real people and ethical conundrums.
    So I take her tests and she never tells me my scores and I pretend I don’t care. She says it’s not like an exam where you need to get high scores. It’s about something else.*
    * What?
    She’s so different now. I barely know her. She used to be like everyone else. She’d meet someone she didn’t like and she’d say, ‘Man, that guy’s an arsehole.’
    I got that.
Arsehole
. Everyone gets that. But now she leaves a party and says something like, ‘That guy’s such an EFTJ, with rather worrying F tendencies.’
    I guess what I’m trying to say is this: I don’t understand my wife any more. And I’m not talking emotionally. I’m not saying I don’t understand my wife because men are from Mars and women are from Venus. I mean:
I actually don’t understand what she’s saying.
And the more she talks in this corporate gibberish, the less she’s capable of understanding my own plain English. Often I say something perfectly normal and she’ll stare at me quizzically as if I’m speaking Yiddish. At times I understand so little of what she says that I feel as though I’m lodging with an immaculately dressed foreign-exchange student. Then I find myself getting over-excited when we do actually achieve the most basic understanding.
    â€˜Pass the milk,’ she’ll say.
    After frustrated hours of not understanding her, I’ll feel giddy that I understood, and pass the milk with a smile, saying, ‘Here you go, sweetie, the
milk
!’
    She’ll take it and, without looking up from her mobile phone, say, ‘Stop calling me
sweetie
. When did you start that? It’s such a P thing to say.’
    Here’s an example of one of my wife’s test questions:
    If I were a garden, I would most resemble:
    a. Wildflower Garden: carefree and enthusiastic.
    b. Japanese Garden: accurate, and detail-oriented.
    When she gave me that test question I froze and said, ‘I don’t feel like either.’
    â€˜It’s a simple question, why can’t you choose?’
    â€˜Because I’m not a garden, I’m a person, and I’m fairly sure a garden can’t be enthusiastic,’ I said.
    â€˜Well, don’t shout at me. It’s symbolic,’ she said.
    â€˜Well, I still don’t feel like a fucking garden, symbolic or otherwise.’
    I walked away and pretended to be busy doing something else. I noticed my wife looking at the test, shaking her head slowly. I made a cup of tea and from the kitchen window watched a Renault with
Medical Courier
written on the side. I thought about that car whizzing about the city with a polystyrene box packed with ice in the centre of which sat a dead-still heart, a plump fist of meat waiting to be plugged back in. That this organ can survive without us seems incredible. For a long time I stood staring out the kitchen window, searching for that dead-still part of myself that I had lost.
    What do you most resemble?
    a. Japanese garden.
    b. Wildflower garden.
    c. A heart packed in ice in a Renault Clio on the A4.
    My wife’s boss is called Valencia. I’ve never met her but I know exactly what Valencia’s latest interests and hobbies are because my wife adopts them. Bosses are the new Messiahs. First there was the cycling, then came the Thai boxing. My wife returned from work one night and said, ‘We should really take up Thai boxing, it’s the new yoga.’
    I agreed in the hope that it would bond Alice and me. When you’re in a relationship, but no longer having sex, you take up odd and painful hobbies like Thai boxing in the hope that they’ll rinse out some frustrations. However, after a month of