Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.

I should have known something wasn’t quite right when he told me his favourite band was Meatloaf. Over the years there were so many warning signs, little moments I pushed to the back of my mind in favour of the narrative I’d written for us. But that’s the danger of viewing life as a story I guess; you can’t just edit out the parts that don’t fit. You only get one draft.

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I met Luke in a bar. My best friend had just broken up with her boyfriend of two years and she needed a distraction. I remember a full bottle of scotch, a Carol King record played on loop in her tiny bedroom and little else of the early evening. The phrase ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ didn’t exist back then, but if it did I imagine Stevie would have thought it a compliment. She believed in free love, that monogamy was a construct made to trap women. She pretended not to for her conservative boyfriend, but now she was free to love however and whoever she wanted, if only for an evening.

Usually I played the dutiful friend; beleagured and luckless in love. That night, however, I was trying to be bold so while Stevie flirted with a young couple I made my way to the smoking area. I’d seen Luke wandering about the edges of the dancefloor, alone. When he made his way outside I followed, practising pretenses in my head; ‘Oh, I just thought you might like some company... That is sooo funny!... What’s that, you wanna marry me -’. I was fairly drunk.

He wasn’t particularly handsome; his eyes were too far apart for that and his back hunched slightly to compensate for his height but I was intrigued by him. He was the only other person in the smoking area. I stood next to him and watched as he brought a lit cigarette up to his lips and desperately inhaled the smoke, his eyes closed in concentration.

‘What?’ he said, breaking my focus.

‘Me? Nothing, sorry, nothing I just umm...’ I said.

He brushed his hair out of his eyes and smirked.

‘You want one?’ he said.

‘Okay.’ I said.

He pulled a crinkly packet out from under his sleeve. I coaxed a cigarette from the pack and drew it to my mouth. I cupped my hands around his lighter as he brought a small flame to my lips, and we stood in silence smoking together.

‘I love this song.’ I eventually said.

‘Me too, it always makes me laugh.’ He said.

‘Not me, I think it’s kind of heartbreaking.’ I said.

‘Really? Paradise by the Dashboard Light? What’s so tragic about sex?’ He said, peering hopefully into my eyes.

‘It’s not the sex, it’s the marriage. That two people could grow to hate each other that way.’ I said.

‘Isn’t that how most marriages go?’ he said.

‘Not mine.’ I said. ‘I mean, whenever it happens, I’m single right now.’

‘Damn straight. I kind of think that even if people aren’t in love, as long as they remember to love each other, they can still be happy together, y’know?’ he said.

‘I guess.’ I said, not fully grasping what he meant.

‘I’m also single right now.’ he said. ‘Just in case you thought I missed that subtle comment.’

I laughed, looking down at my shoes.

‘I’m Luke, by the way.’ he said.

‘Annie.’

‘Do you maybe wanna dance?’

‘Sure, I have to keep an eye on my friend in there anyway.’

‘It’s a good thing you like Meatloaf.’ he said, interlacing his fingers with mine. ‘They’re my favourite band.’

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Despite his seeming bravado, he was rather sweet. He said that he wanted to take things slowly, to really get to know me. It was five long months before we had sex. I remember him shaking as we undressed, whether from excitement or the cold I couldn’t tell, but I thought it so endearing that I made him nervous. The act itself was bad; creaky and wooden like a broken rocking chair, but I didn’t mind. The part of sex that I enjoyed was the intimacy - the vulnerability that came with sharing my body and the trust that came with him sharing his with me. When it was over, I told him that I loved him. He held me in his arms and told me three things; that he’d never been with a woman before; that he knew right then and there that we would spend the rest of our lives together; and that he was completely and utterly in love with me. Only two of these statements were true.

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We married a few years later. He cut his long hair short and gave up his dreams of joining a rock band. He worked in the same office for twenty-five years, but we were content. He didn’t seem to mind settling. We were rarely intimate, at least physically, but that didn’t matter either. He regularly told me that I was beautiful, that I was the perfect woman, the perfect wife, but there was always a hint of sorrow in his tone when he said these things.

After our first child, he started staying later and later in the office. I never suspected an affair, no women worked in his department and besides, he was hardly a sexual creature. No, I never suspected him of that. Even though there were parts of himself that he locked away, even though he sometimes gave me reason to doubt. Every couple of weeks he would come home after midnight, his head held low, his eyes avoiding mine, and walk straight to the shower without saying a word. I knew on those nights not to ask him what was wrong, that prying would only make him more distant. The only thing I could do was hold him in my arms as he fell asleep, and pretend not to feel his tears running down my arms.

I don’t mean to imply that we were unhappy because we weren’t. Every couple keeps secrets from each other. Everyone is occasionally upset by issues too personal to share. The only time I remember him being uncharacteristically upset was when a work colleague of his died. He quit his job a week later, and was inconsolable for months. I thought it must have been the shock of it; Brian was young and healthy, if AIDS hadn’t taken him he probably would have lived a long life. We had him over for dinner once. I remember thinking he might have been gay, I rather respected him for it actually, I knew how difficult Stevie found her fluid sexuality. I didn’t dare ask, though. It wasn’t the sort of thing people talked about at that time. I honestly thought Luke too oblivious to notice. I thought that when Brian died, Luke was upset because he in some way blamed his friend for his death - that was the dominant discourse in the media at the time anyway. I realise looking back on it that Luke was scared.

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It’s been almost a year since Luke died. He was right, we really did spend the rest of his life together. It took a long time to gather the strength to move his things; to take our photos off the walls and put them in a scrapbook, to pack his clothes away into boxes, to start sleeping in the middle of the bed. It was only two months ago that I found his letters. I was clearing away his shirts and found a loose panel in the back of the closet. Some were dated from before we met, but most from the time we were married. Twenty-eight of them were to Brian, the rest to two other men I half-knew. The last letter in each series asked for his letters back so he could get rid of them without anyone finding out. I read them in order, trying to match the timeline of Luke's love against mine. He spoke about adoration and longing and lust in a way I didn’t think him capable of. He wrote of ecstacy and muscles and torment and laughter and caresses and passion and envy and guilt and our children and me.

I should have known. If I had paid more attention, if I had just said something all those nights he slept in my arms, then maybe things would be different. Then again, maybe things would have been worse. Maybe it was meant to be this way, maybe it was better that we lived a lie but lived together, maybe it was only better that way for me. I keep replaying what he said to me the night we met; ‘Even if people aren’t in love, as long as they remember to love each other, they can still be happy.’

We were happy. I know we were.