The Theory of Opposites Read Free

notion ( banshees! let’s at least try to be like banshees !), that now, with him half-asleep on the couch, I say:
    “Let’s run down to Hop Lee — see if we can be cutesy enough to get Lucy to throw in some egg rolls.”
    “I’m so spent. I honestly can’t motivate off the couch, much less out of the apartment,” Shawn says. “Can’t we just order?”
    “Okay.” The air seeps out of me like a deflated balloon. Like this wasn’t a big deal, like him running down to Hop Lee and kissing me until we got free food wouldn’t have been a grand gesture.
    And maybe he senses my discontent or maybe he hears me exhaling my disappointment, but he says: “Oh, screw it!,” and thunks his beer down on the coffee table, leaps over the couch and wraps an arm around my back, dipping me like Astaire would Rogers.
    “Can we go to Hop Lee?” I ask, my head still tilted toward him, his hand still pressed against the small of my back.
    He pecks my neck and flips me upright. “That was my maximum energy expenditure for the evening. But I didn’t want you to think I couldn’t make the effort.”
    “Duly noted.” I smile and bite my lip, delighted at his playfulness, like maybe he read my mind. “Good day?”
    He plops right back on the sofa.
    “Not terrible, actually. Got the job with Tech2Go. They matched my fee from the Microsoft job. How did it go with the pooper pants?”
    “Shitty.”
    “Ha!” He angles his face back toward me so I can see his genuine laugh. He doesn’t do that as often as he used to — sink into his laughter. He’s always tired or working or hunched over one of his various laptops or devices that demand more than I do. You have forty-seven new messages and you have to answer them all immediately or this phone will blow up like a grenade in your hand! Don’t worry; your wife will be there in the morning!
    “You’re cute when you laugh, you know.”
    “Laughter is the best medicine,” he replies, reaching for the remote and scrolling through the channels.
    I dig through a kitchen drawer for the Hop Lee menu. “Oh, do you have cash? Because you canceled my credit cards, right?”
    “I called. No new charges — it probably wasn’t stolen. You must have lost it.”
    I search his tone for something close to judgment: Shawn has never lost his credit cards, never would lose his credit cards. He’s too stream-lined, too meticulous for that. He was the child of MIT professors. He was raised with order, with linear thought, with to-do lists that ensure safe passage from one cushion (Choate) to the next (Harvard). He’d never leave his bag half-zipped or zone out to his iPod on the subway, which I’ve been known to do from time to time, but only because ‘80s metal rock is my guilty pleasure, and I’m too embarrassed to listen to it anywhere but in the company of strangers. No, Shawn was secure, predictable, and for these reasons, he would never, ever lose his credit cards.
    I watch him on the couch, already sucked back into some National Geographic documentary on African tribesmen. And then I remember: Grape! Perhaps he’s less anal, less risk-averse than I thought. He and his friends, kings of the coding world, out blowing their IPO-funded wads of bills on lithe women wearing tank tops a size too small. It didn’t seem like Shawn, but then again, there was the receipt.
    I stare at the ceiling, so fervently wishing we could just go down to Hop Lee and earn those egg rolls. Finally, a little too sharply, I announce:
    “I didn’t lose my wallet. Someone took it.”
    “Willa, you’ve been known to lose it.”
    He’s not wrong: I have lost my wallet three times since we’ve been together.
    Before I can leap to my own defense, Shawn’s phone comes alive with the seemingly ever-present buzzzzzzzz of a text (if a site crashed in the woods and a coder couldn’t text about it, would the site have actually crashed in the woods?) and he falls silent, reading, then typing.
    Hello, hello, were we