He awakens, his arms still wrapped tentatively around his wife. He pulls loose without waking her and sits up, then stumbles through the half-light to the living room window.
The blinds are open, affording him enough light to see. Not that there's much here worth seeing. This place looks exactly like it did last night, the night before, last week. Boxes piled in a corner, still unpacked after all these months. Dishes abandoned on tables, cups beside chairs. CDs scattered on the floor. The furniture arranged in no particular pattern, the only difference is, tonight the furniture is bare.
This night they slept on the floor, on cushions pulled from the couch and easy chair. It's a sometime ritual, a comfort thing, in memory of their first night together. She had invited him into her apartment, apologizing for the mess, particularly for the piles of unsorted laundry on the bed. She'd been sleeping on the floor the last few nights, she said, to the familiar drone of the TV, and arranged the cushions on the floor to demonstrate. She laid on them, and so then did he, the two of them together, the only light seeping in from the window, snow falling softly, glimmering in the streetlight's glow.
That was then. No snow falling now. Hell, no snow all winter. Is this the way the weather is in Maryland? A few flurries, a smattering of ice, that's it? This is nothing like Iowa. No, this is nothing like Iowa.
In Iowa, they were in love. Weren't they? Problems, yes, blowups and fights and all matter of things. But love, above all. And some kind of future.
The future. This was supposed to be part of it. A new life, a new state, a break from the past, both of their pasts, away from everyone and everything they'd ever known. A beginning. Not an ending.
He looks at her body, tangled in a sheet, her red hair rendered black by the greenish-yellow light coming from the parking lot, her shoulders trembling upwards with each soft breath. The marriage is ending. They both know it, they just haven't admitted it yet. Something is different. It's not that the love is gone, at least not his love for her. But it's been joined by something else, ambiguity or ennui or...something.
The cat emerges from the shadows. She joins him at the window, as she often does on his usual nocturnal rounds. He can't sleep any more than an hour or two at a time, and can't concentrate enough to read, and has no interest in TV. So he paces, or sits, or stands motionlessly as he does now, and the cat always joins him, the good companion his wife somehow ceased to be. She rubs against him until she receives the attention she desires, then scampers back into the darkness.
He stares after her, watching her tail flicker, then looks out the window. 2 AM. No cars on the street, no movement in the parking lot. The suburbs really are as dull as people claim. It's Friday night. Where are the people, where is the fun, where is the life?
