Which recalled the sage advice of her instructor in a metalsmithing class she took yonks ago. The woman said that in art your limitations are also your strengths. What you’re not good at, what you can’t think of, even the mistakes you make all contribute to your personal style. To have no such constraints is to be shapeless, she said, and to have no voice. This dictum helped explain Kay’s growing identity crisis. She had been good at too many things: design, engineering, municipal government, all that. She had visited too many places and become “best friends” with too many people. As a result, the molecules of her disposition were spread so thin that her character was no longer solid matter but more like a formless gas.
Kay glanced dully around the sitting room. After about this interval she’d usually be getting ideas for another renovation. Although by all appearances this was still the same house, every joint, lintel, sill, door, and panel of plasterboard had been replaced multiple times. But now even her chronic dissatisfaction had exhausted itself.
As a perpetually peaceable coexistence would have been soporific, she and her husband tried to generate a few conflicts as a discipline, so maybe a trace of testiness this afternoon was all to the good. She wished she could return to the original exhilaration of watching her beloved age in reverse—but exhilaration by its nature is not an emotion one can sustain, and surety that her husband’s face would always look that creaseless and his long legs would always remain that shapely made these attributes seem less dear.
They’d talked about getting divorced—and not in a state of raging hair-tear, but matter-of-factly, even frivolously. Like Oman, getting divorced was prospectively just one more thing to do. It was a matter of plain biological fact, much discussed because anything at all that there was to discuss had been much discussed: human beings were by nature serially monogamous at best. More marriages had gone the distance in the olden days because life was so savagely brief. Had Kay and Cyril married in 1841, when records began in England and Wales, actuarially Cyril would have died before forty, Kay by forty-two. (They’d looked it up. They’d looked everything up.) Thus their wedded bliss would have needed to last just sixteen years, and that was assuming Kay didn’t die in childbirth. This was what, untampered with, the animal kingdom had in mind. But now? They didn’t know a single other couple on a first marriage. It was not uncommon for people to have wed a hundred times—although “till death do us part” had been quietly dropped.
The Wilkinsons’ secret, if you could call it that, wasn’t being so supremely well suited or forging a love that was so fiery and true. Rather, they’d both come to the same pragmatic conclusion. All around them people were romantically mixing and matching, as if running through a set of mathematical possibilities that might seem countless but that, with a finite population, a computer could calculate quite precisely. Theoretically, then, in this game of musical chairs, Kay and Cyril could both marry everyone else on the planet and eventually come back to each other, running out of options and having to repeat the sequence much the way they had just run out of map. Moreover, the freshly formed couples they encountered consistently seemed to recreate pretty much the same relationship as the last one, and the one before that. Why, look at Roy, who reliably found some woman, or man, or something in-between, depending on his mood, off of whom he could mooch and whose generosity he could abuse. So why bother with the change-up?
And it wasn’t as if the Wilkinsons hadn’t experimented. Oh, with newly nubile bodies, the sex had been ace at first, and neither wished to stray. But—surprise!—the sense of rediscovery didn’t last. (That did seem to be the overall lesson: human beings now lasted forever, but nothing else did.) They agreed, tentatively at first, to explore an open marriage—which proved occasionally titillating, but most of the time gross. They tried three-ways, but someone always felt left out, and no one ever seemed to know what to stick where. With mutual permission, they both dabbled on the other side, though after Kay’s awkward affair with Glenda the friends avoided each other for months.
They also went through a phase of changing sex, for transgenderism had become recreational. Kay quite liked having a penis, though Cyril admitted that he missed his, and he found breasts more exciting on someone else. Meantime, other people were getting tits and penises, or vaginas and phalluses side by side so you could poke one in the other and have intercourse with yourself; or they’d get three breasts, or two penises, or an extra anus, but it all stopped being interesting (pornography was dead; rather than watch a lithe young Thai ass-fucked by a donkey, most men preferred to do the crossword), and, in the end, the Wilkinsons swapped back to their original equipment. For only one thing did not get tired: sleeping in each other’s arms. If there really was a secret to their marriage, that was it.
Kay roused herself from the sofa with the arduousness with which she’d stood up at eighty, although the struggle was motivational. “So what do you want for dinner?”
“I don’t care,” Cyril said.
“What have we agreed?” Kay said, swinging round and pointing an accusatory forefinger. “No apathy.”
“Sorry,” Cyril said, as he always did. “I could die for your wild mushroom fajitas! And how about a side salad of buffalo mozzarella, heirloom tomatoes, a sprig of fresh basil, and that fabulous balsamic glaze?” The fervour was fake, but even theatrical enthusiasm beat all too sincere ennui.
“Crikey,” Kay
