“How about every day, say around three, we take a break and take a little walk, get some air, chat a bit, break up the day?” he said.

“I have a lot of work to do.”

“C’mon, it’ll be fun.”

They grabbed coats and scarves and boots and gloves and headed out to the park and then stopped at Metro for groceries for dinner. It was a sunny, brittle afternoon, a perfect winter day.

They talked about the latest politician caught with his dick in the wrong place.

“Who cares if he’s gay,” she said.

“I know. Some of your best friends are gay. But it’s not that he was caught with a man, he was caught with a page; the kid was maybe just 18, probably learning about government for some civics course, not realizing Vaseline was part of the necessary equipment for good governance.”

“Well, he just learned,” she said, adopting a Yiddish accent. “He learned about government.”

He laughed and grabbed her hand and they waltzed down the street, all was right with the universe.

They got home and she wrapped his scarf around his neck and said: “That was great. You’re right. I feel totally refreshed and ready to attack my computer. I’ll make a coffee. You want a coffee? I feel on top of the world. You’re so smart, my lover. Let’s do it every day. Get some oxygen in the lungs,” she sang, entering a manic phase. “Fresh air, eh Fritz, you fat cat. You can use some too. You should go for a walk.”

She looked at him as she fired up the espresso machine.

“You know darlin’, you’re going to make me a better person,” she said. “You’re good for me. Why should I sit all day like a lump staring at that fucking screen? It’s good to take a break and get out and see the world. You’d make a woman a good husband.” She kissed him, jumping into his arms.

“Okay, I got to get upstairs,” she said, grabbing her coffee cup. “Got a lot of work to do.”

The next day he asked if she was ready to head out for their afternoon excursion into oxygen and couple bonding.

“I have too much work to do,” she said. He didn’t bring it up again. And they never took a walk in the afternoon again. He went back to his solitary shopping and didn’t mind at all. It was easier. No one told him he was buying too much.

“Franklin’s coming over for the game,” he told her as he was making dinner and she stood behind him, grabbing onion and garlic clove peels as they fell to the cutting board in front of him.

“Got to clean up after you,” she said. “Cleanliness is next to … what do you mean Franklin’s coming over for the game?”

“Well, let me translate that for you,” Evan said, working to keep it light. “Franklin, my adopted brother, runs this little theatre I work with and tonight on the TV, that screen that glows in the living room …”

“He can’t come over tonight,” she said, her face hardening. “I have a lot of work to do. I can’t work with you two talking and watching a hockey game.”

“Put your radio on, you won’t hear a thing.”

“It’s a week night,” she said, suddenly seething. “It’s a work night. I can’t have anyone over here when I have to do radio tomorrow.”

“Go into the bedroom and close the door,” Evan said, trying to stay patient, ride it out, keep it from escalating to high anxiety.

“Work is more important than anything,” she said. “And I don’t want to go into the bedroom. It’s my house and my office …”

“It’s our house and your office should have a damn door on it so that I can live downstairs without you having panic attacks.”

“Why do you have to watch so much TV? Why don’t you have a TV in your office so you can close the door and I don’t have to hear it?”

“I maybe watch TV once a week if there’s a game on,” he said, dropping his precious $200 German chopping knife, the one she used to try and slice open the end of a toothpaste tube to excavate the remaining drop or two. “Why don’t you get a psychiatrist? Make your own fucking dinner.”

Work trumped life. Only after dinner and wine had finally sucked the last bit of energy from her, and after the kitchen had been returned to its pristine, glistening state, did she stop for a bit of a DVD or a chat on the sofa he finally bought or in the chairs in front of her sacred fireplace. Usually she lasted a half hour then went to collapse upstairs, read a page or two of a book and drift away. She was too tired for sex at nights and scrambled out of bed at 6 am for the dawn run. No matter the weather, no matter her health, no matter what was planned for that day. It was another obsession.

Fun was hard to come by. There could be an occasional five o’clock weekend film at a Cineplex, couldn’t be seven, couldn’t be three, and the films she insisted on were despairing and mordant, renditions of tragedy and hopelessness. Happy endings bored her. Pain and desperation entranced her, the torment on the screen instructive, she said, while Evan exited desperate for a warm bath and a razor blade.

She didn’t feel she deserved pleasure and couldn’t understand how he found joy in a cold Coke with lemon slices over ice on a hot summer day, a bagel fresh from the woodburning oven, a spicy Vietnamese soup, the trilliums on the mountain in spring. She couldn’t get it. Happiness was not only a commodity she had in short supply. She seemed to have no interest in it.

She chided Fritz almost daily because he too liked to eat. Muffins, or cheese, or scraps from the table.

“What else does he have in life?” Evan would say. “He’s a neutered cat.”

Maine Coons can grow as big as 40 pounds but Fritz seemed to be hanging in at around 18, much of it fur. “He’s going to get fat,” she said and kept trying to reduce his food intake.

If he was able to convince her to get out for Sunday brunch when he came back from the gym, a rarity, her indulgence was a single egg with burnt bacon. It seemed a trial for her most times so he stopped asking her. He ate what he wanted, where he wanted and his Sundays were stress free, as long as he stayed out of the house.

One Friday afternoon, maybe 5:30, he poured a drink over ice and turned on the news on the radio. She came running down the stairs screaming: “I’m working. I can’t have the radio that loud! What are you doing? Trying to provoke me?!” He was. He smiled to himself. He was sick of dodging bullets, jumping over bomb craters, negotiating minefields. She refused to compensate for her phobia by maybe wearing headphones or maybe moving her office into a closed space.

He had finally agreed with the therapist, accommodating every obsession was chewing away at his soul.

No one is one thing, he told himself. Parts of her were remarkable, Evan felt. He loved the story of her flying in the back seat of an F18, her laughing that she only threw up twice. Or the time she was almost taken by white slavers doing a book on Colombia and was saved by a gun-toting bartender. Good stories, but in the end not that many of them. And he loved the way she looked in jeans and a white shirt, a not-too-frequent variation of her grey trousers and nun’s shoes. And he loved the way she would talk or sing to the cats when she was happy or grab his crotch when they were in bed or sometimes not in bed.

Living with her was like being a golf addict. The times she could be playful as a puppy were like the one great shot a golfer gets over the course of 18 holes that hooks him for the next 18.

“You have to leave her,” Franklin told him one night at their favourite Italian restaurant. The theatre sent patrons there and the restaurant reciprocated by treating them especially well.

They had had a bottle of wine and a couple of martinis and were now downing the restaurant’s gift of a few shots of grappa. His head was swimming, but Evan felt good. Franklin listened well, the drinks were generous and he had the theatre pick up the tab ‘cause they always found time to discuss work.

“The woman is fucking crazy,” he said. “She’ll kill you. You know I left my wife, man, and didn’t have a dime or a pot. Took a room with these three chicks in a big place like you used to get in town for a song. I had nothing. But I was away.”

“How old were you?”

“I was … I don’t know, 38 or something,” he said. “And one of the chicks, Lucy or I don’t even fucking remember, would come into my room almost every night. It was a good deal. You don’t need to stay with Annie.”

“I’m 55. I don’t want a room with three strangers and besides, I’m not giving up,” Evan said. “She says she’ll go for therapy if I go, too.”

“She thinks if you go to therapy with her she’ll become sane?” Franklin asked.

“I love her and she’s sick and needs help.”

“You stay with her and you’re the one who needs help. Fuck! You need help now.”

“That’s why I’m getting drunk with you,” Evan said. “Can you handle another grappa?

“I want to make you happy,” she’d say over and over again. “You’re the only man I’ve ever really loved, the only man I ever wanted to spend my life with.” He was sure she meant it.

In those moments, he thought as long as there were moments, he could contend with the hours when there was no singing, when the only melody was the hum of her electric stress that vibrated through him and made him long for the highway, any highway. Or the dingy motel room where he could close the door and be away from her, far, far away from her.