Something I though of writing after a conversation I had late at night yesterday. Again, I couldn't sleep. I did sleep eventually, but I didn't rest. Maybe this story was in my mind too much, unquieting me, maybe it was just another normal night of insomnia.
That's what I wrote:
He always though it was probably a bad idea, what they did. Get married. Build a home. Pretend they are a normal, suburban couple. He should have listened his (rather sexist) friends. Instead of getting hitched with the smart woman that would challenge him in everything she felt like challenging, that would correct him both in public and in the safety of his own home, that would dismiss him for work and never look at him when she was writing, lips purse and eyes glued to the laptop screen.He should have married a girl like Liza. Oh, uncomplicated Liza. Her biggest problem was thinking about what she would dress for a dinner party. She would never get a red pen out of her purse when he gave her one of his drafts like Claudia did. She would never shush him if he wanted to talk and she was working. Hell, it is even hard to picture Liza working outside of the house-wife sphere.But then Liza bored him. When he wanted to discuss something about science or the human brain or foreign politics, Liza would just squirt her eyes at him and try to understand what he was saying (or better, why was he ruining a perfectly nice evening with those complicated issues). Claudia? She would jump at an argument like a starving mountain lion. She loved the dispute, she love to make a point, she loved to convince him and he had to admit, that although sometimes they took it too far, it was fun to have someone that would make him think, jog his brain, every now and then.But it was hard. Claudia was hard because she was an equal. Maybe she was smarter than him, there was always that possibility, a scary one as it is. She could, at any moment get tired of him. She would look for a man that could laugh at her nonsense, that wouldn't let her be right, that would smash her ego, put her in her place. The rightful place of a woman. A man that would treat her research, her books, all that made Claudia Claudia, as the hobbies of a bad behaved housewife.And he would be with a Liza. Easy to deal with, easy to get complements from, easy to be around. Never fight over first or second drafts, never discuss the situation in Middle East. The only Kashmir she would ever talk about is the cashmere pullover she would give him for his birthday.He looks at Claudia, intently looking at her laptop screen. She has music on and a glass of wine by her messy notes, almost staining some of the papers. She doesn't notice him. She doesn't notice her notes are about to be stained.He says he will buy cigarets in the corner store, she answers with an unintelligible sound, just to prove him she is not really listening, absorbed, consumed by what she is writing. That's just the way she is.While Gordon is leaving the house, taking no more than his wallet and cell phone, he thinks of the irony of what he is doing, and a smirk creeps on his face. Claudia once wrote the history of a woman that was left by her husband, and in that story she discusses about the classical move pulled by several men through history, of saying that they will simply buy cigarets, and never coming back to their wives.Well, he didn't intended to disappear and never come back. He wanted his freaking half of the house, he thought, while he crossed the street in front of Claudia's house. But for now he would make himself absent and find himself a Liza. 20 years younger than him, blond and stupid.