Tracy lived on the top two floors of a character house off Commercial Drive, just past the point where it turned from charming locus for Italian immigrants, bohemian-leaning university students, and rowdy young parents pushing strollers past sunset, to something that resembled the post-apocalyptic: wide, empty streets and an expanse of splintered concrete punctuated by one modest community garden—which was located, for maximum metaphorical impact, in the shadow of a massive SkyTrain support pillar. She’d lived there since her parents’ divorce in the mid-nineties, when, after it had all bubbled uglily to the surface, Tracy’s newly single mother decided it was high time her thirteen-year-old daughter got to see a world beyond their smarmy, adulterous suburb. Now the deed to the Commercial house was in Tracy’s name alone, and she lived there with her long-term boyfriend, Dave.
Indefinite sublet is the phrase her mom used, with a wink.
Most of the time it felt good to not have an asshole landlord to contend with. But as Tracy arrived home late that afternoon, jiggling the door handle and eventually shoulder-checking it open, she thought about how nice it would be to have someone to yell at about all her broken stuff. Cathartic, even.
Cathartic. Her mind drifted for a few blank seconds from Aristotle, to Plato, and then to the Raphael painting of them both, which was also her mental cheat sheet for telling them apart. In the picture, each wore a loose, colourful robe and stood at the top of an ornate staircase. One of them pointed up, signifying the heavens; the other held his hand out straight ahead, signifying the Earth, the here and now, all of the objects and people we’re pretty sure we didn’t just dream up. Kicking off her sneakers, some other part of Tracy’s brain dutifully counted to fifteen as she climbed each squeaky wooden step.
“Dave?” she called, underhanding a purse full of books and cigarettes onto the coffee table. The TV had been left on, and a pear sat kebabed to the kitchen table by the larger of their two functioning knives. A small puddle of juice had spread out from under it and then half-dried in an amorphous, limb-like shape. “Dave? Are you here?”
A muffled yell came from the top of the staircase behind her: “I’m steeping!”
After a few seconds Dave came clumping down the attic stairs, bringing what sounded like a flock of medicine balls along with him. A cloud of thin smoke, or maybe thick steam, preceded him as he barreled around the corner into view. His lab coat, stained old-yellow and unbuttoned, flared out behind him. Underneath was a suit vest with a pocket watch chain poking out, and under that a T-shirt showcasing an orca whale mid-breach. He looked like a one-man matryoshka doll.
“I can barely hear you from up there, Trace. Did you yell at the corner?” he asked. “Did you? No. Because you never do.” This last bit was muttered; he softly tapped a fist against the top of the doorframe. Dave had a theory that if you spoke directly at the corner of the ceiling where the hallway met the living room, the sound would splinter precisely, then travel like sonar to the rest of the house. He said he did this in the longshot case he started to lose his hearing prematurely, but the truth was that months of listening to nothing but My Bloody Valentine—on knockoff earbud headphones, cranked to their tinniest and most compressed—had already done the kind of aural damage that the recording industry would very much like to draw your attention away from.
Dave had a lot of theories. Tracy wondered if any of them had predicted that she’d come home that day to finally break the fuck up with him.
“Take that lab coat off, you idiot,” she said. “We need to talk.”
“I told you. I am working. Presently. In my lab.”
“Oh, really.”
“Yes. Today is chamomile. It’s a bit of a madhouse up there at the moment, but some truly interesting specimens are emerging. Data that’ll rock Big Lipton to its foundations.” Dave was a fair-weather hobbyist who liked to skip around from obsession to obsession, and had lately been on a vague environmental kick. He’d hummed and hawed about it for weeks. Baby seals were too clichéd. Whales and the ozone layer were nineties problems; they didn’t even make the shortlist. He toyed, briefly, with space debris and the huge island of garbage forming in the Pacific. But in the end he settled on the unlikely target of the international tea industry, and had since become very serious about bleach in single-serving bags and something called spoiled fannings.
He sniffed theatrically as he sat down at the table next to the skewered pear. “Anyway, you wouldn’t be interested.”
Tracy bit her lip. She’d promised herself that she’d do it coolly, not rising to any of the usual bait.
Dave swirled his finger through the puddle of juice and popped it into his mouth. “Anyway, did you check out that link I sent you? The post from 8:29 last night. KISStronaught had his head so far up his ass, he was just asking to be taken down a few pegs. I mean, he had this attitude starting at the very top of the thread—you could see it building steam in little ways, just snowballing over the first few pages.” Dave scowled in vivid recollection. “That guy’s so smug. I think he’s from Wisconsin. Anyway, by the time I got through with him, the post from 2:49 a.m., that was the big one, like five users had PMed me about it. They even came up with a nickname for me: The Mad Dog. Awesome, huh? I put it in my signature.”
“No, Dave. I must’ve missed that one.” Tracy was trying hard these days not to smoke within ten minutes of getting home. This was less to prove that she didn’t need nicotine than that she didn’t need it to deal with Dave.
She hadn’t made it once in almost two weeks. “I did read the other things you sent, though,” she added. “The—petitions.”
“Good, good. Standard rules apply: if you don’t sign them, I’m leaving you for someone younger.”
And here was the real reason Tracy hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to break up with Dave. From very early on in their relationship, they’d adopted a kind of banter based on the mock-premise that the joker was always on the verge of dumping the jokee. It came from an offhand comment made on their very first date, when Dave was so nervous about letting any kind of silence hang between them that he brusquely announced that if she didn’t love the tiramisu at the café they were walking to, if it wasn’t god-help-him perfect tiramisu, he’d never go out with her again. Tracy was caught off guard, and laughed so hard that she broke out into a coughing fit. The exchange quickly hardened into classic, go-to material as they went exclusive and then moved in together, to the point that their friends began describing other couples making similar comments as “Daventracifying,” a nickname that shouldn’t have caught on but somehow did.
The problem, of course, came when either or both of them actually were at wits’ end, and the other couldn’t tell if they were really having what, to all appearances, looked like a fight. Tracy was never 100 percent sure when Dave was genuinely threatening to move out, and Dave never knew for sure if Tracy was serious about catapulting his every last possession onto the train tracks. Should they go into full relationship-save mode, or keep the banter going?
Once Tracy had guessed wrong. It was a few months after Dave had moved in, and she broke down crying after he raised his voice to auctioneer levels and said there was no way he could reasonably be expected to live with someone who didn’t appreciate the genius of shoegazer. She’d hugged his knees together, sobbing from a deep and vulnerable place inside her, and said she’d try to listen again, really she would, if it meant that much to him. Then she looked up, nose running, lenses fogged, and all he’d been able to do was meekly back away, embarrassed for both of them but still not sure how to make things right. He spent the next five days puttering around the corners of the house, eating marmalade from the jar and mutely rearranging his record collection. They hadn’t mentioned it since.
Tracy looked across the table at Dave, who was picking shards of pear from around the knife and rattling off the subhuman conditions in which chamomile was grown and harvested, taking a long detour into the Nepalese workers’ revolution he was helping to indirectly orchestrate with some of his buddies from the forum. Picturing all of the ensuing chaos she was about to set into motion—the crying, the fights, the is-this-really-a-fight fight, the divvying up of the furniture, the changing of passwords and locks—made her feel exhausted. Lately it just made more sense to ignore the problem and focus on the manageable stuff, like what to eat for dinner, or next week’s readings. Neither of them was happy, she knew that. Dave’s tea crusade kept him upstairs for more and more of the day, and when they were together he seemed to increasingly regard her as an irritant—not to mention an organics naysayer, vampirically trying to suck the passion from his cause. And to think, she’d been the one to first tell him about fair-trade coffee and the arctic seal hunt, all those years and commitments ago. It seemed a parallel universe from here.
On the other hand, for things to get any better—for either one of them—first they’d have to get much, much worse.
“Dave,” she started, already feeling an entire night’s worth of tears pressing against the dams of her eyelids. “You know I—”
“What?” He looked at her distractedly.
“You know I want only—only the best for y—”
“Come on, Tracy. Speak up already!” Ah, yes. The other side effect of Dave’s cavalier music-listening habits was the occasional episode of tinnitus, which drowned out all other sounds completely, the way radio static swarms car speakers when you bump the dial. He tried to cover these attacks, even from Tracy, still, by pretending to be enthralled with some banal object—as he did now, picking up a ladle and studying it intently.
Tracy could already feel the adrenaline slowly subsiding, and something oddly resembling relief taking its place. Sometimes Dave was such a big, commanding personality, she thought. The kind of guy who charmed baristas, professors, and most small animals without even trying. The kind of guy who could instantly transform a dozen strangers into one rapt audience.
But sometimes he was just a sad, overgrown child, plugging his ears and waiting for the world to re-shape itself around his latest harebrained scheme.
She lit a cigarette—0 for 13 and counting—and plopped down in the chair opposite him. Not today, she thought. Then, because why not, she repeated it out loud. “Not today.” Dave still didn’t look up from the ladle. With each pull of her cigarette Tracy took extra relish in the cloud of tar that was no doubt whirlwinding through her lungs; she thought dark, sulking thoughts. Then, since she was apparently stuck with him for a little longer, she decided to announce a few more hidden grievances, the slow-burning kind that inevitably touch nerves and really aren’t worth bringing up for the fight they’ll set off. The kind of complaints that take years of gathering evidence to see the pattern.
“You never wash between the fork tines,” she said, looking straight into the distracted whites of Dave’s eyes. His hearing was still pure fuzz. “It grosses me right out. You can’t walk down the sidewalk in a straight line. You ball your socks up weird.”
Each tick of their kitchen clock pounded in the fall air. The only other sound for several minutes was the persistent glass tinkle of a hobo rummaging for bottles in the dumpster outside.
That evening they crawled into bed together and slept facing opposite walls. Meanwhile, their toothbrushes sat wet and foamy in the bathroom cabinet’s stainless steel cup, kissing like vintage film stars.