When he met her he had been working the late night news desk and was on a leave of absence to teach the workshop and do a play and they had decided he shouldn’t go back to the newspaper. He’d have his nights again — movies, theatre, restaurants, friends, life — but he hadn’t yet learned to sleep again. He had got into the habit of coming home from the paper at midnight or 1 a.m. and popping a pill to sleep so he could get up early, down an espresso, hit the computer, edit a film magazine and work on whatever play or film he was writing. He worked 18 hours a day, it seemed, broken up with some guitar playing and an afternoon nap.

The newspaper job had been killing him. The cutbacks had laid waste to the desk and the job of editing a newspaper had become assembly-line labour. When the staff was trimmed, so was the pleasure. Newspapers had been his first love. His earliest childhood memories included anticipating the arrival of the afternoon paper, The Star, thick and scented of fresh ink and a marvel of words and pictures, every day but Sunday, without fail. Every morning the first thing he did was go to the front door and grab the Gazette. How could they produce this thicket of words every day? It was extraordinary. For five cents or ten cents and then 25 cents and later a whole half a buck. What better way to spend your life could there be than to be part of the great bustling machine that was a daily newspaper? But once the corporations took over, salivating at the endless profits these once family-owned broadsheets churned out year after year, they were done. It was no longer about news, it was about profits. No matter how much they made it was never enough and slowly but surely, the product was sacrificed to the god of return on investment, profits skimmed off to pay for ill timed, ill thought out corporate ventures. The cuts kept coming until the job lost all its allure. He was happy to be rid of the place, though the loss of the additional paycheque stung. And now Evan battled insomnia, trying to get off the sleep aids.

Annie was all for him quitting, he was in the theatre, after all, and he had the magazine. On good days he was an artist: “You’re not supposed to make money.” Other days she was demanding he needed another job.

“You’re not making enough money,” she said. “You have to make more money.” The problem was, he knew, she wasn’t making much herself. Her income kept slipping year by year.

But things were changing. Evan stopped listening to her. Even on the radio. She no longer entertained him. He had seen too much darkness, too much craziness. He had been punched and kicked too often, literally and figuratively. He stopped spending slices of each evening with her. He made dinner and left her to sandblast the kitchen while he repaired to his office to play guitar, write a song or work. Sometimes he slipped upstairs to read. It was cordial. But he found himself avoiding her. As often as he could he borrowed country houses and hid there. Cocaine interfered with the music and he stopped using it and stopped running to ugly motel rooms. Instead he ran to the Laurentians.

The mountains, the music and the performances became his escape, except Annie never missed a show. He would sometimes watch her from the stage. Mostly she would be looking back but at times when the songs may have cut close to her slim bones, he could see her stare out the window. Evan was happy she came but she needed to go home as soon as possible. He couldn’t eat before a show and liked prolonging the night by grabbing a bite after, let his nerves hum for a bit. She’d grudgingly accompany him and often pick up the cheque but would rarely eat and always seemed anxious to get home.

And so soon Evan would find himself still buzzing from the applause and the people and the mystery of it all, alone again on the sofa while Annie went to sleep for the next morning’s run, the next day’s work. Evan had to figure out what to do with the new direction his life was taking. Playing and singing in front of people who paid to listen to him. How the hell did that happen? He needed to talk about it, to explore it, but the only person he thought he could talk to about it was asleep. Instead he had the cat and the scotch.

The music was making him a hundred or two a night, grocery money, but not anything that would assuage her fears. She wasn’t making a lot of money anymore. But she wanted him to. And had no patience to hear making money had never been his ambition.

“We have a house worth a fortune, we have RRSPs, we have jobs, we run a car, why do we need to make more money?” he said. “We live better than 95 per cent of the world.”

“We have to stop going to restaurants,” she said.

“Maybe if you didn’t have to have two or three $11 glasses of wine with the meal, we could afford to go to a restaurant.”

“I can’t eat without a couple of glasses of wine,” she’d say. “It’s my reward at the end of the day. Besides I’m an alcoholic and it keeps me from going totally insane.”

“You’re not an alcoholic, you’re not a problem drinker.”

“It’s a problem when you really need a glass of wine and don’t want to pay restaurant prices for it,” she said.

“I sleep here, I work here, I eat most of my meals here, and I cook most of the meals and I need to get out sometime and get away, people watch.” he said. “I’m used to working in an office with people around.”

“Before I met you I stayed home for three or four days at a time and didn’t see anyone. I’m used to it.”

“Before you met me you lived on pasta and salad every day.”

“That’s true. You’ve widened my dinner horizons and increased the messes I clean up, too.”

He nodded. Food for her was neither adventure or pleasure and certainly not worth the bother of cleaning away the detritus of its preparation. She’d rather eat pasta and salad than deal with pots and sauce pans and cutting boards. So he began washing the pots and pans from dinner rather than listen to her bitch.

“Well, I can’t stay home every night,” he said. “I need a life outside the house, too.”

“Why can’t you just do it without me?”

“I guess that’s what I’ll do,” Evan said, a little something dying inside. “I’ll make a life without you.”

He saw the hurt in her face. Another self-inflicted wound. She would do and say things that later she couldn’t account for or reconcile and then get that far away look in her eyes, seeing something he could not imagine but knew was far from heaven. Maybe her parents, the fuse to a long ago drunken quarrel lit with a few unkind or thoughtless words? Was she hearing the rage, the screams, the doors slamming, the dishes breaking? He never asked. He went into his office, slid the door closed and picked up his guitar. He could dream. He could put it in song. It was almost as good.

Your heels come clicking down the hall

You know you never need to call

I open the door, caress your hip

You gently touch my finger tips

Let’s pop the cork and fill the glass

You always add a touch of class

Later, lying beside Annie, he developed a new tale to lull himself to sleep. In this fantasy, he hoarded a few thousand dollars, maxed out his credit cards with cash advances and stashed the money in the back of his sock drawer. “Do you have to have so many socks?” Then one night, after she fell asleep, he would take a pre-packed gym bag with jeans, t-shirts, sandals, a couple of fishing shirts, a handful of underwear and the roll of money and slip out of the house with his guitar.

He would have gassed the car and had the oil changed, the tires checked earlier that week. As she soundly slept, he’d sneak out of the house, hit the border by 2 a.m., get on US 87 and disappear south. Grab a motel outside Manhattan by rush hour.

Sometimes he’d wonder, as he lay listening to her snore softly, and sometimes not so softly, how long would it take her to realize he was gone. Probably dinner time.

By the time I get to Phoenix she’ ll be rising …

She’d go running and then when she came home she’d think he was at the gym and then get lost in work. He’d be past New York, maybe in Washington by then and in a few days, after ignoring her calls, he’d start a new life in the Florida Keys, near Marathon, north of Key West. Maybe he’d find enough gigs to make ends meet. Play from Key Largo to Key West, $50 here, $200 there. Live in a trailer if he had to. Music, sunshine, peace of mind, maybe a girl or two. His fantasy didn’t always work that well as a sleep-aid, but he lay beside her smiling. If he was still conscious after the fantasy exodus, he’d go downstairs and pour a few ounces of Grants. And ponder.

From that came the song that he opened most nights with.

I know you’re thinking

This man he’s been drinking

And yes I’ve had a drop or two

But drunk or sober

It’s a painful truth

I must be insane to be in love with you.

It don’t make no sense,

I’m dreaming of a white picket fence

but I’m bruised black and blue

My complaints are few

It’s plain I like the abuse

I must be insane to be in love with you.

“Mary says she’s crazy,” Stan told him. They were sitting on the pier, looking out at the lake, Stan’s lake. “She hates her.”

“Your sister is not the poster girl for sanity,” Evan said. “That’s why I haven’t heard from her for months.”

“Left a void in your life, I’m sure,” Stan said.

“I liked your sister,” Evan said, smiling as a fish jumped. “But I only spent a few hours with her here and there.”

“I’m glad it was there, not here. She gets nuttier as she gets older. Maybe that’s why she can’t stand Annie. She sees herself in her. You think Annie is nuts?”

“Do you?”

“You fucking live with her,” Stan said.

“Don’t remind me, that’s why I come up here, to get away.”

“You’re always welcome. She seems wound a little too tight. She’s cute and all but there’s something there, as if she’s holding on for dear life. And she doesn’t eat. I figure someone doesn’t eat, they’re nuts. But you live with her. What do you think?”

“Really fucking crazy.”

He picked the bottle of tequila off the dock and poured an ounce or two into Stan’s glass.

“You don’t have to drive.”

“Nowhere to drive to,” Evan said, and surrendered to the booze, and the embrace of the lake and forgot for a moment he was living with a crazy person.

“When I was living with Margaret, my son’s mother, the last few years, I was having an affair with the marketing woman at the office. She was great. Margaret, on the other hand, hated me. She knew but didn’t want to know and was hell to live with …”

“Which was probably why you were having an affair with the marketing person at the office.”

“No, I was having an affair with the marketing person because I’ll fuck anything that breathes, and I’m not even sure they have to be breathing. But Margaret, she was always on my case. Yelling, insulting, I guess abusive. I’m not up on the psychobabble, but she fucking knew how to dig the knife in and give it a good twist. And I was making dinner one night and she was chopping or slicing something, doesn’t matter, and I was reaching over to get a carrot or an onion but she had this huge German chopping knife in her hand and she just slammed it down on the cutting board. I’m sure she was aiming for my hand, and I pulled it away at the last second and she damn near split the cutting board. Could’ve taken my whole fucking hand off.”

“Time to pack,” Evan said.

“You’d think, eh? But I must’ve been dense or something or pussy crazed with the chick in the office ‘cause I didn’t skip a beat. But we had separate rooms. I started locking the door to my bedroom. She hated having sex anyway but the thought that I was enjoying myself with someone else really made her crazy. You and Annie still getting it on?”

“Yeah, sometimes, I think she thinks by having sex she’ll hold on to me. Though the sex is not really about me or even us.”

“She any good in bed? The freethinking feminist?”

“No.”

“Really? Shit. What’s the fucking point?”

“I don’t know,” Evan said. “I think it has something to do with love.”

“Love has nothing to do with it. That’s just the first chapter. You have the whole rest of the book to deal with. I figure it’s like running a marathon, lot of pain, lot of patience, lot of training.”

“Sweat,” Evan said.

“If you’re lucky. Best keep sharp objects away from her.” They laughed and looked out at the lake. “Crazy woman you have to watch your back.”

“Unlike crazy men.”

“Yeah,” Stan said. “We’re sane … even when we’re fucking nuts. Listen, Evan, I look at it like one file in a drawer full of files. There’s the marriage file, the work file, the money file, the friend file, the mistress file, kids, groceries, whatever. And you take it out when you’re dealing with it and put the file back and go to something else and leave the rest of the files in the drawer. You’re up here, forget about her, put Annie in the drawer.”

“She’d probably fit.”

“Kinda small, isn’t she?”

“Truncated. What happened with Margaret?”

“She suggested we take a break. So we did. I went to live with my brother for a bit. Came back one day, she had changed the locks. Couldn’t get in. Lawyers did real well. Lawyers always do real well.”

Lost in the glow of everlasting love and renovation hell, Evan overlooked the fact he was putting a lot of cash into a house he didn’t own. He said he’d need some kind of paper and she said: “No problem, of course.”

“You got anything on paper?” Stan asked when they were in the thick of plaster dust and were staying at an empty cottage Stan owned near the lake.

“No,” Evan said.

“That’s not too bright.”

“No, it’s not.”

He never saw the paper. But the prospect of domestic bliss in a reformed home that they would share seduced him ten-fold. And their love was forever. So why did he need a piece of paper?

They went through reno hell with her losing it only a few times but making sure he had no say in any part of the process. She seemed to have a curious affection for Michel the contractor whose prices were outrageous but, as far as Annie was concerned, could do no wrong.

“Fourteen hundred dollars for a door for your office?” Evan said. “Fourteen hundred dollars?”

“It’s special,” she said.

“That’s crazy. You can buy a hollow door for 75 bucks at Reno Dépot.”

“This has a window in it.”

“For fourteen hundred bucks it should have a motor and transmission. You got to tell him ‘no, it’s way overboard.’”

“No,” she said. “It’ll be nice.”

Annie and Michel made the decisions, Evan’s desires were met with umbrage. He forked out tens of thousands of dollars in cash to Michel, counting out tax-free hundreds in the passenger seat of his van.

“I want the counters higher,” he said.

“No way,” Annie said. “They’ll be too high.”

“You don’t cook. They’ll be too low, it’ll kill my back.”

“It’ll look ugly,” Annie said, eyes turning dark, anger starting to simmer.

Michel was immediately consulted. He agreed that Evan should have the counters higher. Not as high as Evan would have liked but Michel and Annie came to terms on the height as Evan watched.

“What’s with you and Michel?” Evan asked one night. “You have an affair with him?”

“No, we were just friends,” she said. “Had dinner a couple of times.”