When we can, my wife and I stay in bed on the weekends, while our youngest children, ages 11 and 14, read books or, more likely, play video games in the living room or watch YouTube, and while the 17-year-old reads in her bed.
I make coffee and we sit up in bed to read.
Only that at first my wife usually reads the newspaper on her iPad, recounting the news aloud. “Hey, check this out.” I turn my head and listen, but my focus is on reading my book, so I only half listen. She then asks me questions about what she has read aloud, and I fumble at my response, and she stares at me coldly. Or I ask her to repeat the question, but that draws the same response followed by, “Why are you not listening?”
“Um – .”
I can’t think of what to say, and after a moment of tension I resume reading, and she does too.
There’s a deathly silence.
That’s what makes me want to know what she’s reading. I ask her and she gives me the abbreviated version, without any of the initial dramatic flare, as if to indicate that after not listening to her in the first place I should mind my own business.
I want to ask her something, anything, to break the spell so that she will talk to me heartedly, or at least call me a dumbass or something.
Then she speaks: “Coffee?”
I get out of bed and make her another cup, and bring it back.
“Thanks,” she says, taking the coffee. And then: “Be a star and fetch me my phone.”
I go.
But in the living room I call back to her for a clue on where it could be. She says it’s in her purse.
I look around and then ask, “And where’s your purse?”
“In the living room … or the kitchen, maybe.”
I find it in our bedroom, under her coat on the chair that’s only purpose is to hold discarded clothes. And purses with phones at the bottom amid receipts more than a year old.
I give her the phone and she says thanks.
Then she asks for her book.
“Where is it?”
She doesn’t answer and I don’t ask for indications this time. Eventually I find it under the pillows on the sofa.
“What took you so long?” she asks
“Um – .”
She doesn’t continue her interrogation. She opens her book and starts to read, and lifts her coffee mug to her lips and takes a sip.
I stand there and think, Why do I do all this?
I ask her.
She stops reading and looks up at me and says, “Because you love me.”
I guess she has a point.
She resumes reading.
I get back in bed and start reading my book again.
She finishes her coffee and asks for another. I get out of bed and while walking to the kitchen I think that making love in the morning is a funny business. Tiring, yes, but it’s not something that I would trade for anything at all.
