I am the doer. At the heels, in the wings, right-hand-man, stage left, you can count on me amigo, brother, comrade. I will do your dishes, read that draft, pick up trash that isn’t mine, feed the dog, renew my prescription on time. 

These are admirable qualities. My students like me. My girlfriend likes me. The woman I am sleeping with likes me. The neighbour’s cat doesn’t like me, but there’s no accounting for taste.

The affair could be cast in several lights. Queer love as an act of resistance? Resistance to monogamy as a celebration of anti-capitalist rhetoric? Rhetoric to justify doing something wrong? Something wrong? Yes, probably. 

***

Mari and I met in university. She had the sort of beauty that made other people want to please her. Mari was tall, which struck me as unfair. She was already commanding, with wide, intelligent eyes and the bony architecture of her shoulders; the height was an unnecessary accumulation of power. We started seeing each other after I wrote an article about her. She was in the final year of her economics degree and ironically performed at poetry readings. I volunteered for the university paper and wrote earnestly about them. The reading took place at a former donair shop that had been turned into a community arts centre. The lingering smell of seasoned lamb and fresh paint mingled. Her poem had something to do with a car-mangled doe, in which she was the driver. 

I moved into her apartment after I graduated. She framed the move as logical: having graduated three years before me and gotten a job at an international bank, she could already afford her own apartment. She worked hard to get the job, and had an office next to her father’s. My literature degree failed to replicate these results. 

At the time I kept a meticulous journal. My main income came from tutoring school students whose parents would email multiple times a day to move their session back, and then forward, and then back again, in twenty to thirty minute increments. I started writing in pencil. Being broke, and reliant on the poor reading comprehension of twelve-year-olds for things like renting an e-bike, I didn’t feel I could complain. 

My body had a natural affinity for the horizontal and I spent hours at a time on the couch scrolling on my phone. This is where I first saw Elise. Or not Elise, but Elise’s work. Gargantuan canvases bursting with bulging, writhing shapes. Her art was not attractive and neither was she. I found both endlessly compelling. 

I orchestrated a meeting after stalking her on the internet. I had no intention of sleeping with her. Her art was strange and sticky; I thought about it for days after I’d seen it. The art gallery was large and concrete and had no one in it. In person, I found Elise’s art even uglier than it was on my phone screen. A woman in her mid-twenties with pink hair and two nose rings entered through a side door. She was considerably more attractive than Instagram had suggested. 

***

The first time we had sex was in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave, the second since March. The backs of my knees were damp with sweat. She knew about Mari and liked to ask all sorts of cruel and invasive questions. I had to answer as I was the one doing something wrong. She asked who was better at sex and I said it was her, Elise, and she laughed saying she meant between me and Mari. My face got warm and I said Mari. I used the bathroom and ran cold water over my wrists until I felt less dizzy. 

Once, Elise asked me what Mari’s salary was. I told her and she stopped talking to me for a week. 

Mari’s habits stopped annoying me that summer. I didn’t care that she tracked dirt inside or that she never made the bed. When Madame, our eel-like grey Whippet, barked, I let him outside without trying to wake Mari first. She worked early in the morning and I did not— it only seemed fair. Besides, she paid for the apartment and almost all our expenses; a fact she never once held over me. I felt a constant low-level guilt at my financial dependence on Mari. Every time she tapped her card for groceries, a hot, stiff feeling spread over me. When I finally brought it up, she said she’d never noticed.

I became maniacal about the dishes. Their soap sud baptism was my greatest triumph. I knew the curve of each needy tine and greasy plane. My journal inflated. Each day was broken into hour-long slots. Each hour-long slot was filled with increasingly complex tasks like: engage in lurid tryst (check emails while Elise gets harness).

I would be good. Perfect, even, like a sculpture or a dead body. 

Dark circles bloomed under my eyes and my skin became dull and bad. The schedule was rigorous but I found it impossible to deviate. I would think something normal, like leaving the laundry balled up in a warm nest in the dryer for an hour or maybe two, but the thought itself felt like a transgression, a tearing at my own seams. After twenty minutes of staring at the unfolded pile, a blotchy pink rash bloomed along my wrists and forearms. I hadn’t been on the couch in weeks. Mari kept making jokes that I was trying to trick her into proposing to me by being a good little housewife. I pointed out I earned money of my own and then went to the bathroom and vomited. Foamy mucus and coffee thinned with saliva swirled around the gleaming bowl. 

Elise said I seemed tired too and suggested I attend her friend’s experimental yoga class. I looked it up online and it cost $75 per session. I closed the browser. 

***

Madame pranced along the sidewalk, sleek and masculine, attracting all sorts of attention. I glowered at him. What if someone saw the perverted way I hunched over my phone to text? Surely they’d know I was doing something sick. I jerked his leash, tugging him around the corner from our street. Elise’s name sat under my thumb. I was trying to think of something clever and vaguely sexual to say as an email notification pinged. MISSED SESSION PLS REPLY. 

Something small and cold moved through my chest, like a fish darting under ice. I tapped to open the notification. My thumb made a soft noise against the screen. Madame pulled on the leash. 

Tina’s parents wanted to know where I was; the session started 20 minutes ago. I clawed the journal out of my bag. Tina Sui - 2:30. A map of the subway lurched into my mind; it would take 45 minutes to get there. My hands spread limply across the paper. The skin had become so dry it formed a white veil across my knuckles and around my cuticles. They didn’t look like they belonged to me. I watched them tremble slightly, two separate objects that had nothing to do with my body.

Explaining to Mari why I’d missed the session felt impossible. What would I say? That I’d lost track of time? The journal was a testament against it. Any lie would collapse under its own piggish weight. There was a lot of saliva in my mouth. I texted Elise. She responded quickly: 

lol

rich girl can’t get tutored

how will she get into harvard now haha

want to come over?

Madame licked my calf and tugged again on his leash. I felt tired, like Sisyphus if someone had told him there had been an elevator the whole time. I threw the journal in a curved metal bin.

***

Hark! The failure. Layeth upon a flat pack IKEA couch. Dishes piled in a spire from the sink, a recreation of Babel, groaning and clinking in their own tongue. Sticky spots of apple juice, tacky-surfaced tarpits. Unanswered texts. Missed calls. Dog whining in the corner. 

***

I hadn’t moved in several hours. 

Mari walked into the room, work phone buzzing in her hand. She had taken a voluntary demotion at the bank to a position that let her work two days per week from home. As a result, she was in more meetings and worked longer hours. One month in, her role had been ‘restructured’; she was required to come into the office full-time. The meetings and extra hours stuck anyway. 

She silenced the phone; one final brrrrp like a death rattle before it was smothered into quiet. 

My head was pushed into the cushions. I could only see her upper half. Her eyes were open and gelatinous like a Robert Campin painting. Her face looked down on me. 

I raised my head to see all of her. She was still wearing her coat and outdoor shoes. Beads of rain sat on the leather. 

Mari said something kind that I didn’t deserve. Her mouth formed the words carefully, as if she were speaking to a child. She dragged a quilt over my body, snagging patches of skin, and tucked the edges of it under my bare feet.

My face broke apart like a cracked egg. I began to cry.