Tender

It must be wonderful, people say when they learn that Michael’s partner is now a house husband. Not so wonderful, of course, that he’s been laid off, and a shame that his freelance photography isn’t picking up, but how great to be able to do that, not to be bothered by old-fashioned ideas. We would give anything, his female colleagues agree, for our other halves to have dinner ready and do the ironing without it being such a blow to their masculine ego.

He laughs and nods and says, yes, Matt’s a brilliant chief cook and bottle washer. Still wants to get back into work, but it’s nice having someone who can take over the domestic duties, instead of two busy commuters sharing them.

But Michael doesn’t mention that he ironed this particular shirt, like the others, or that he brought back takeaways four times last week, knowing the stove would be cold and the fridge bare. He doesn’t mention, either, the bottles of kombucha and sparkling water that seem to grow up from around the couch like stalagmites and glare defensively at him when he’s vacuuming with one hand and throwing them into the recycling bin with the other. And he bites his tongue when Belinda quips “masculine ego,” because neither of them has been neutered, thank you, though perhaps that is the problem.

All this means that he has no one to tell when he wins twenty thousand dollars on Tuesday.

It’s like he’s on the train but forgotten his stop and been passing it all day.

Matt spends all of five minutes this morning checking Wednesday’s Situations Vacant before retreating to the couch for five hours of some grotesque anime. In-between strategizing how to squeeze two loads of laundry onto their smirking balcony clothesline, prepping lunches, and cleaning the cat’s litter box (his turn, Matt emphasised), Michael stops and stares at his husband. Still gorgeous. Even in his funk. He might have been wearing the same blue chinos and white V-neck for three days, but he’s runway ready. Desirable. There’s product in his black ‘bedhead’ hair (hardly necessary, Michael thinks). His fine-haired, tanned arms shimmer on the armrest; his slender wrist, as he holds his phone, is unbearable. The peeking lick of soft chest hair flaunts his youthful maturity. The way he massages his left bicep ….

If this is how he lets himself go it’s a mockery of committed, self-indulgent miserablists. Subsiding, checking messages, scribbling in his little black notebook, brooding and inarticulate like a straight teenager. It’s been four months. Michael’s given up telling him not to worry, that he earns enough, that he never really liked his job, that this was an opportunity. Why don’t you get out your old guitar? Call Tom. Shall we eat out?

Sometimes he’s responsive. Easy for you to say. I’m not a fifties housewife. I was still good at it. We can’t all do what we love. Hmm. Later. Too many people.

Cruelly, they have even more reason, now, to spend a night on the town, to happily collide without locking horns. But he can’t say anything. All those zeros suck up the air.

Michael slams the dryer door. Matt shouts something. I’ll fetch the Bluetooth earphones you bought last week, shall I? he imagines himself hollering back. For the bloody horse-racing!

Matt appears with a package. “You forgot to open this yesterday.” He hands Michael the parcel and leaves. Did he feel it? The old lurch of electricity between them as he stood in the doorway in his undershirt like a working man home for dinner?

Michael pulls at the sticky closure before puncturing and stretching the plastic open with his fingers. He extracts the contents: gym shorts he asked Matt to order for him. “Motivation.” He holds them up to check the size and a Twix falls out. Their little joke from when going to the gym was one of many couple activities. One stick each to make it “worthwhile.” It’s easy to love someone who remembers little things like that; difficult to sympathise when they don’t get fat sitting around all day. He studies the golden wrapper, feels a hankering and thinks about splitting it with Matt. Then he reminds himself that Matt’s so opposed to sharing what he has now. He pockets the chocolate and throws the shorts in the washing machine.

At first, he thought Matt would be happy. He was optimistic as they strolled along the beach – on a weeknight! They paddled, got sand up their legs, in the car, somehow in bed. They had lunch the next day: Matt brought homemade sushi into the office – the first time Belinda sang his praises. He picked Michael up for dinner on Friday, dramatically chipper in a khaki Henley shirt and skinny jeans.

Michael wonders what he would have done. Is it so easy to dispense with one male blueprint and learn a new topography? “That’s very modern,” he overheard Matt’s mother saying on the phone in response to his plans to step back a little and make life more grounded for the both of them. “Where do you see that going?” Chris had said, innocently. Such a capitalist mindset, Matt later complained. Must everything professionally, financially, socially compute? “I suppose Michael does rake it in,” said Michael’s sister. “Like John.” Working part-time at an organic spice shop for “something to do,” and with a husband in banking, an equivalence was the worst thing she could have suggested. Embattled, Matt inveighed against work-life imbalances, consumerism, elitism, while his contributions to their joint account dwindled with no real cost to his lifestyle. Michael didn’t mind, but he had occasion to snap that just because he was paying for everything it didn’t mean that he couldn’t buy his husband dinner or take them on holiday! It’s ridiculous, he’d think. What does he have to want for? But afterwards, once he’d cooled down, he would wince on reflection and try to uncurl the proud man who had only withdrawn further into himself.

It's only worse now. Why did he have to go and win all that money? A wife would be ecstatic, he supposed, immediately phoning her friends after he’d rushed home waving the validated ticket like a golden tailfeather. But Matt …. It would be rubbing salt in the wound.

At five o’clock Michael gets in the laundry and gently tests the waters. He’s not cooking; can’t even think what to put together. Matt will play the martyr if he isn’t careful, so he places the washing basket on the dining table and sits beside his husband on the couch. “Do you fancy Chinese?” Briefly, Matt looks over.

“Yeah, that’s fine. You can order.”

Michael takes the win.

“OK. Might be nice to watch a movie while we eat? You could pick one?” He didn’t plan this, the idea just falls out, unclothed and bashful. Matt pauses, shifts his shoulder.

“We can,” he says. And then: “Don’t overorder, there’s only two of us.”

Michael rocks himself out of the pit they’ve formed in the couch, mumbling about finding the menu, trying to ignore how he forgot to look both ways and he’s somehow been run over by nothing. Again. He reaches out; gets swatted away. He wins half of Matt’s old salary overnight, but can’t indulge him. It rankles him that Matt’s so pitiably unpitiable. Imagine the offense of covertly or openly topping up their account, of pretending it’s paltry money to him.

In the draw under the printer he searches for the menu, abandons it, uses his phone’s browser. He looks up, summoning the name of the restaurant, and catches Matt in the mirror above the computer, digging out his little notebook, jotting, glancing at the TV. Seriously, since when? The inane commentary, like an over-excited auctioneer, yabbers over the horses’ seismic rumbling.

He has to leave. Drives to the restaurant. He needs the forty minutes it takes to get there, order, wait, and drive back, to somehow breathe it all out, keep his cool, be supportive and understanding, not tell his husband how to spend the money he’s supposedly so anxious about. No matter how much the last few months might suggest, he isn’t his mother.

He’s told it will be a thirty-minute wait. Saturday night. He’s got all the time in the world, like Matt, apparently, so he pays and paces around the adjoining supermarket, tossing random items into a basket. They used to enjoy this: new things to discover, inspiration, treats. He remembers the Twix in his pocket, probably melted into one big solitary and unappealing mass by now. For the first time he notices the feeble music that’s usually buried beneath the clattering trolleys, chatting mums, tannoy announcements and anxious self-service machines. It’s like home.

They watch a show about interior design, Matt excavating the leftovers, enwombed in the couch, Michael kneeling at the coffee table, blathering about colour schemes and gaudy light fittings. The notebook pulls his gaze, a black tongue sticking up from the side of the couch where Matt thinks it’s out of sight. When he shifts it buoys for attention and he pushes it back. In a moment of déjà vu Michael almost feels the lotto ticket still folded stiff in his back pocket, its stubborn bend. He doesn’t know why he bought it; he’s not the one who needs to worry about being irresponsible. But it made them equal. And it felt good to be adversarial. His yellow to Matt’s black. Spending his money how he wanted, not beholden to splitting everything down the middle in their tender little co-patriarchy.

When Matt goes to the bathroom Michael, in unpremeditated fury, snatches the notebook, releases its elastic strap, reads. He swallows. There’s that quiet croaking feeling in his throat. Short ladders of lines and lists, broken by dates, doggedly stretch over and across and forward. He is alone in the vacuum of his pounding heart – but not just because he’s fallen to snooping and his husband could return, unheard, at any second. It’s the plunge underground before the ropes catch him. His fingers keel from page to page.

In places, the ink is blurred by the speed of his husband’s left-handed script. Brief mentions chart the course of their last few months, register Michael’s small kindnesses and the shifting plates beneath Matt’s blank, beautiful shell. The writing is primitive, repetitive, insistent. Michael sees his husband searching beyond the droning TV, remembering, flitting back to the notebook and the secret, surfacing worm of a thought. In these proud declarations of gratitude he finds Matt’s distant touch, hears his tacit compunction and courage. I am grateful for. I am grateful.

The toilet flushes; the ropes lock. He scrambles to gather himself, drives the notebook back into its fissure.

“This is really boring.” Matt gestures at the TV, scuffing back into the lounge. The couch exhales as he takes his seat. “Maybe we should watch a movie after all. Your choice.” Michael flaps, reaches for his phone, realizes he dropped it on the couch. He stops. Breathes.

On some foggy level he remembers the lotto ticket, but for now it’s forgotten. More composed, he grabs his phone and makes a half-standing twirl onto the other seat. They scroll through their options. Michael rests his head on Matt’s shoulder. He smells cool and mossy and cavernous.