Summerlong by Dean Bakopoulos Read Free Book Online Page B

married.”
    “I think so,” Don said, though he didn’t think that at all.
    “Do you think people will laugh about it? If we get divorced?” Claire said. “I think a lot of people—even my own mother—thought this was a big mistake.”
    Don had not known this, though he suspected it. By twenty-three, in rural Iowa, you were plenty old enough to be married,and none of his family or childhood friends would have batted a proverbial eye; but Claire, having been raised in Manhattan among a crowd of academics and artists and activists, understood marriage in an entirely different way. It was what you did when everything else on your life list had been accomplished or was at least under way. What united them in their view of marriage was this: their parents, both sets of them, had been miserable with each other and had ultimately divorced, and so there was not exactly a good road map for them to follow.
    This had made the idea of marrying young a little, well, thrillingly rebellious; Don remembered how sometimes Claire’s voice would rise with a kind of glee when she would tell her New York friends— Well, I’m getting married. Yes, to a guy from Iowa!
    But they’d been fighting a lot, already, less than a year into the marriage, and Don knew this was probably normal, but then again so was divorce.
    “Would we care if people thought this was a big mistake?” Don said. “I mean, do you care what people think?”
    “I suppose not,” she said.
    “I never do. I never care what anyone thinks.”
    “How can that be true?” she said, her voice rising almost violently. “Everyone cares what people think. Even people who say, ‘I don’t care what people think,’ want other people to know they don’t care. So in a sense, they are caring what other people think just by saying that they don’t care what people think.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Fuck off.”
    “I never understand you,” he said.
    “Because I married a fucking idiot.”
    He remembered she went to sleep on the armchair then—it was a small studio apartment and so he could still see her from the bed—and in the morning, he woke up with a terrible headache and she was next to him, spooned against his back, her hand on his hip. The apartment was alight with morning, though thosewindows never got quite enough light to be impressive, but right around nine A . M . they sparkled with it.
    He stirred but did not turn toward her.
    “Do you want me to call a lawyer?” she whispered, her eyes still closed.
    “It’s Sunday. Let’s talk to a waiter who’s serving brunch instead.”
    They finished the unfinished sex of the previous night then, and never did call a lawyer. Sex had solved many of their fights in the past, and Don supposed this was not uncommon for couples, though it was the kind of thing you could never really be sure about, the sex lives of others. You could wonder about it, as he often did. Claire was the only woman he’d ever slept with and he wondered how it might be different with other women just a few months into their marriage. This too may be normal, but no one would admit it.
    Then, that Monday, she received a letter accepting her into graduate school.
    “It looks like we’re going back to Iowa,” she said. She was crying tears of joy and despair all at once.
    Iowa! Who knew the pull it would have on them, for better or for worse?
    The second time the possibility of a divorce shadowed their marriage was shortly after Bryan was born. Perpetually sleep deprived, sexless, unshowered, and, yes, back in Iowa, they fought an epic fight that began like this: Don had lit a match after using the bathroom in their small apartment, hoping to mask the smell of shit, and he’d left the match on the edge of the sink where he’d already left a week’s worth of post-shit matches. Claire had gone into the bathroom after him and called him a horrible wreck of a slob and begun weeping. “I feel so lonely” was one of the only