Turning Thirty (3 page)

‘How did she sound?'

Elaine lost patience with me and threw a cushion at my head. ‘If you were that interested why didn't you just speak to her?' She took the cushion back, put it underneath her head, picked up the phone and ordered some random takeaway food. This kind of banter was typical of Elaine's and my everyday interaction. It was tiring but always entertaining, although sometimes I felt like we were trapped inside sitcom world – sometimes I wondered why we never had proper conversations like normal couples did.

‘I'm going to pick it up,' she said. ‘They said it'd be ready in twenty minutes but I figure if I go pick it up myself it'll make them speed up – I'm ravenous.' She went to the bedroom to get her coat. As she checked her pockets to make sure she had enough money she opened the front door then picked up her bag from the table. Suddenly she stopped.

‘What's up?' I asked, looking over at her. ‘Forget something?'

Leaving the door half open, she walked across the room and sat on the sofa at the opposite end to me. ‘I'm sorry, babe,' she said gently, ‘I can't not say this any more.'

I didn't understand. ‘You can't not say what any more?'

‘This,' she said flatly. ‘You. Me. Us. I . . . I . . . don't think I love you any more. There I've said it. You can go ahead and hate me now.' Much to Elaine's consternation an uncontrollable urge to laugh came over me and I let it out. ‘Are you laughing at me or with me?' she said, staring hard at me.

‘I know you're going to think I'm just saying this to get even,' I said, holding her gaze, ‘but the truth is, I feel exactly the same way.'

Then eerily, in that couple symmetry that often develops when you spend so much time with someone that you feel you must be them, we both burst into another fit of laughter then simultaneously whispered, ‘What a relief.'

‘So that's that, then?' I said blankly.

It was two in the morning and Elaine and I had been talking about splitting up from seven o'clock the previous evening. There were no tears, no histrionics, just a lot of long silences followed by a few words of bewilderment, followed by some more long silences.

‘I guess so,' said Elaine. She accompanied her words with a shrug, an odd sort of stretch and a peculiarly feline yawn. I'd always thought there was something quite cat-like about her, and more so than ever now: she reminded me of a Persian desperate for its belly to be stroked.

‘Wasn't this all . . .' I searched around my vocabulary ‘ . . . a bit too easy? A bit too . . . you know?' I finally stumbled across the right word. ‘Civilised?'

Elaine tilted her head upwards. ‘Yeah, you're right,' she said. ‘I guess you're right.'

I looked at her encouragingly because I wanted her to say something, anything, really, because I knew this was wrong – not us splitting up, that was definitely right, but the lack of drama. On the form of previous break-ups I expected a good deal more grieving, if for no other reason than politeness. Our calm and collected so-long-and-thanks-for-the-nice-time attitude troubled me. I wondered whether this was one of the curious by-products of the turning-thirty process. I'd been twenty-nine for just over six months and had long been expecting some sort of change to come upon me now that thirty was just around the corner – the ability to grow a full beard without bald patches, my elusive wine rack, a partner for life, even – but nothing had happened. Maybe this is it, I told myself. This is my thirty-power: the ability to take the end of a relationship on the chin, like a real man.

When I was twenty-seven this sort of thing would have upset me (
see
Monica Aspel). When I was twenty-two this would have had me scurrying to bed with heart failure (
see
Jane Anderson and Chantelle Stephens). But this numbness . . . this ridiculous passivity was new. But at least, if it was the gift of turning thirty, I had an excuse. Elaine, on the other hand, was still only twenty-two.

‘Shouldn't there be more . . . wailing and gnashing of teeth?' I said, after a few moments. I passed her the cup of coffee I'd made for her earlier. ‘Shouldn't one of us be begging the other to continue the relationship?'

She handed her coffee back to me and got down on her knees. ‘Stay with me, Matt! We can't split up! How will I ever live without you?' She attempted to stand up again but was barely able to for laughing. ‘You're right. It does feel kinda lame for me to go, “I think we should break up,” and for you to go, “Okay.”' She laughed gently. ‘It's not like I don't love you,' she said, looking at me with a mixture of earnestness and irony. ‘I do. You know I do. I can't have been with you, made a home with you this last year and a half without loving you – that's just . . . stupid. It's just that, well, you must've felt it like I did these last six months. The passion has gone. We've been more like . . . I don't know . . . brother and sister, really.'

‘Peter and Jane,' I suggested.

‘Hansel and Gretel,' she retorted.

‘Donny and Marie,' I countered.

‘Exactly,' she said, taking back her coffee. She took a moment to sip it. ‘Recently when I've looked at you I don't so much want to tear your clothes off as give them a good ironing.'

‘You're right,' I replied. ‘I mean, I love you too, but I have to admit I'm not
in
love with you. It's like I'd see you first thing in the morning getting ready for work, there you'd be, searching desperately through the closet for something to wear and I'd find myself mentally dressing you with my eyes. By the time you've decided what to wear I have you sporting a chunky-knit polo-neck jumper, a knee-length overcoat and a scarf.'

‘What do you think this all means?' she asked, as if she genuinely wanted an answer. ‘Do you think it's normal to be so civilised?'

I shrugged. ‘I don't think so. I mean, every time a relationship finishes for one of my friends at work and I ask both sides what happened they're always like “It was mutual”, as if it'll earn them some sort of Brownie points. But I think this is a first – the first mutual break-up in the history of the world.'

‘This is spooky,' said Elaine. ‘Where did we get this power and why didn't I have it when I really needed it, like when I was fourteen?' She stood up and disappeared into the kitchen to return with a packet of Oreos, which she consumed one after the other. When she was half-way through her fourth she suddenly shouted, ‘I've got it!' and waved a partly consumed biscuit and its attendant crumbs over the coffee table.

‘You've got what exactly?'

‘The answer,' she replied. ‘It's biology. Even at a cellular level we're programmed to perpetuate the species, right?'

I nodded.

‘And despite your mom's encouragement we have no urge whatsoever to perpetuate with each other, right?'

I nodded again.

‘That's why we're not upset. Biology is telling us there's no point in crying over spilt milk.'

It was eleven o'clock on the following Saturday morning, and we'd just finished breakfast. Five days had elapsed since our decision to split up and I was now sleeping on the sofa (a.k.a the Sofa from Hell), which explained why my neck was killing me. On Tuesday I'd told Paul Barron, my boss at work, that I wanted a transfer out of New York and preferably out of the USA altogether. While I'd enjoyed my time there and made a few friends, I knew I didn't want to stay now that Elaine and I were over. A move was definitely what I needed. ‘Matt,' began my boss, by way of an answer to my request, ‘at the kind of level you've attained here, as a software design team leader, the world is your oyster.' Roughly translated, he meant that because I was good at my job, which I was, I had the choice of all of the company's European offices: London, Paris, Milan and Barcelona. ‘Thanks, Paul,' I'd replied. ‘That's . . . that's nice.' He then asked me where I wanted to go and that was when I looked really stupid. ‘I don't know,' I said. ‘I just know I want to go.' He'd smiled and told me to think about it and get back to him.

I looked at Elaine across the empty breakfast plates. I hadn't told her that I was planning to transfer yet. I think I was waiting for the right moment, but right now I didn't feel this was it. Elaine was wearing her slob-around-the-apartment garb: a marl grey T-shirt that she used to wear to her yoga class and a pair of brown shorts from the Gap she'd bought the year that brown was the new black. She had nothing on her feet and she was picking at the dark red polish on her toenails. No one seeing her now would've guessed that she worked for one of New York's coolest public-relations companies albeit in the lower echelons. Monday to Friday she did her work uniform of fashionable-yet-stylish very well. Saturday was her day off.

‘What are you thinking?' she asked.

I'd obviously been thinking a little too hard about my transfer. ‘What brought things to a head for you?' I asked, as a way out of confronting the transfer. ‘I mean, was it any one thing or was it lots of things combined?'

‘I think it was that film we watched at Sara and Jimmy's last weekend,' she said, still playing with her toes.

‘
The English Patient
?'

She nodded. ‘It just got me thinking, you know? That poor English guy's wife runs off with that German pilot and that was supposed to be romantic. I mean, affairs they're so . . . sleazy, they're so yuck. By which I suppose I mean that . . . Well, you know Emily?' Emily was one of Elaine's workmates. ‘You know she split up with her boyfriend, Jez, because he went all funny 'cause he didn't think he'd done enough with his life?'

‘I think you'll find that what Jez wanted to “do” – and, in fact, actually was “doing” – was more women.'

‘And she was having a gadzillion affairs with anything that had a hairy chest and a gym membership card.'

‘Gadzillions?' I asked, pulling a face.

‘Millions of gadzillions,' said Elaine. ‘Millions.' She paused. ‘It's just so horrible, isn't it? They obviously just got bored of each other but were afraid to call it quits when their time was up and because of that they put themselves through months of misery dragging the whole thing out . . .' She let her sentence hang in mid-air momentarily, then picked it up. ‘The thing is, Matt, you've got to have known we were at that stage.'

‘Were we?' I tried to catch her eyes but she wouldn't look at me. Instead she was back to playing with her toes.

‘Well, maybe not
that
stage exactly. But we were definitely at the stage where we'd start looking at other people – me, the cute motorcycle delivery guy with the dreadlocks who always smiles at me when we share the elevator; you, the girl in the deli with the belly-button ring, who gives you extra filling in your sandwiches because she thinks you look cute.'

‘Which deli girl?'

Elaine narrowed her eyes at me. ‘You'd better believe I made her up.' She giggled. ‘Before either of us would realise, looking would lead to longing, which would inevitably lead to doing, and I'd hate for us to finish that way. Absolutely hate it. We're better than that. This way we keep an element of control. We can split up with dignity.' She went on thoughtfully, ‘You know, I never was your dream girl, was I? And you certainly weren't my dream guy. We just sort of drifted together. And you've got to know that if things had stayed the same and my dream guy had turned up—'

‘I would've been in the way.'

‘And vice versa.'

She'd made a very good point. I'd always thought that Elaine (whose opening gambit to me was, ‘Hi, I have a thing for British men') would've been far more suited to someone taller, more manly looking, with big hands, a boarding-school education and perhaps a family connection to a minor member of royalty. As for me, I suppose I looked like I should've been with someone a bit creative, a singer, an artist, a dancer – the kind of woman who's a bit mad. Not barking mad, but Janis Joplin mad. The kind of woman who walks around without shoes on in the summer and attempts suicide on an annual basis. Joking apart, she had a point.

‘So you mean to say that if we'd rented
Pride and Prejudice
like Sara wanted instead of
The English Patient
we'd still be together? Now, that's a weird one.'

Elaine laughed like I'd really tickled her. ‘No,' she said, when she'd recovered, ‘it still would've happened. But instead of all that
English Patient
stuff I would've realised that you were never going to be my Mr Darcy.'

‘Or you my Elizabeth Bennet.'

‘I mean, we've been struggling since the dawn of time,' said Elaine plaintively. ‘We do
waaaaay
too many things that annoy each other.'

It was 7.30 a.m. and Elaine and I were walking along the street towards the subway on our way to work. Four weeks had now gone by and my back was considerably better because I was now sleeping in our bed. Elaine, however, had decamped to the Sofa from Hell because she felt guilty about my bad back. Paul Barron had taken me out to lunch earlier in the week to tell me that my transfer request had been confirmed and that I would be free to leave as soon as I told Human Resources where I wanted to go. He even spent an hour trying to persuade me to stay, which was both flattering and embarrassing. I told him I'd let him know where I wanted to go as soon as I'd made up my mind. He gave me a weird kind of shoulder squeeze that I think was meant to say, ‘It was good to have a guy like you on the team,' but which came across as a Vulcan death grip. For hours afterwards I had twinges down my back.