Dump My Slow-Mo Husband – Chapter 3 – No Fireworks

By month eight I had developed a theory.

The theory was this: Eric Davies was not incapable of seeing me. He was simply looking in the wrong direction. My job was to redirect the looking without him noticing I was redirecting it, because the moment he noticed the redirecting he would categorize it as a project requiring management and manage it efficiently and I would be back to the radiator situation.

I explained this theory to Haley.

She ate a crisp.

“That’s not a theory,” she said. “That’s a long way of saying you’re scared to just talk to him.”

“It’s a strategy.”

“It’s avoidance with extra steps.”

“It’s a nuanced – “

“Jane.” She held up the crisp bag. “How long have you been married?”

“Eight months.”

“And in eight months have you once said directly: Eric, here is something I need from you, as your wife, as a person?”

“I said the thing about the terrace light.”

“That was about the blinds.”

“The blinds affect the light.”

“That is not what I mean and you know it.”

I took a crisp.

“The strategy,” I said firmly, “is working. The Aldridge dinner. The Flemish thing. Small moments. Accumulating.”

“Into what?”

“Into him seeing me.”

“On a geological timeline?”

“Haley.”

“I’m just checking the projected completion date,” she said. “Because at current pace I estimate he fully sees you sometime around your mutual retirement.”

“You’re being dramatic.”

“I’m being accurate and you know the difference because you’re the smartest person I know and also the most aggressively in denial.”

I ate the crisp.

She was not entirely wrong.

The accumulating was real. The moments were real. But between the moments was a lot of a man who came home at seven-fifteen and asked about my day with the warm, slightly distracted attention of someone who was asking because it was time to ask rather than because the answer was going to be the most interesting thing he’d heard all evening.

I wanted to be the most interesting thing he’d heard all evening.

I had not yet figured out how to achieve this without giving the impression of trying to achieve it, which was the central strategic challenge of year one.

“What if,” Haley said, “instead of a strategy, you just – had a dinner. Like a normal dinner. Where you talked about what you actually think about things.”

“I talk about what I think.”

“You talk about what you think at forty percent output.”

“I talk at the appropriate – “

“Jane. What did you talk about at dinner last night?”

“The Asia-Pacific expansion and my seminar on Dutch interior painting.”

“Which one were you actually interested in?”

“Both, in different – “

“Which one did you talk about at forty percent because you were moderating yourself?”

I said nothing.

“The Dutch interiors,” she said.

“The Dutch interiors,” I confirmed.

“And which one did he seem interested in?”

“He asked three questions about the Dutch interiors.”

She stared at me.

“He asked three questions.”

“They were good questions.”

“About the thing you were underselling.”

“I wasn’t under – “

“Jane.” She put the crisps down. “He asked three questions about the thing you gave him forty percent of. What do you think he would do with the full version?”

I thought about this.

I thought about it very seriously and with the specific discomfort of someone who suspects they have been wrong about something fundamental for eight months.

“That’s either very encouraging,” I said, “or a coincidence.”

“Test it,” she said. “Dinner. Tomorrow. Full volume. See what happens.”

“What if – “

“Jane. Test it. Worst case you learn something. Best case – “

“Don’t say it.”

“Best case the radiator becomes a fire.”

“I told you not to say it.”

“Test it,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

The dinner the following evening was a Tuesday, which meant nothing except that it was not a Friday when Eric was likely to be more relaxed, or a Monday when he was likely to be recalibrating from the weekend, or a Wednesday which was his standard late-meeting day. Tuesday was the most neutral dinner of the week and therefore the correct experimental condition.

I made something I actually wanted to eat rather than something correct.

I opened a wine I had been saving for no specific reason, which meant it had been sitting in the rack being saved from itself for three months.

I did not check the register of the conversation before entering it.

This last one was the hardest.

He came home at seven-twenty, which was normal, and put his bag down, which was normal, and said “smells good” with the warm, evening-return quality that was also normal, and then he looked at me and said “good day?” and I said:

“I had an argument with Professor Harwick about the function of the vanitas symbol in seventeenth-century Dutch still life and I won the argument using a skull.”

Eric stopped.

He looked at me.

“A skull?” he asked.

“Specifically a skull with a pocket watch,” I said. “Which is redundant as memento mori goes but extremely useful as primary source material when your professor claims the vanitas tradition was purely decorative rather than genuinely theological in intent.”

“And the skull proved – “

“That it wasn’t decorative. Decorative skulls don’t have pocket watches. A pocket watch is a specific, intentional symbol of time’s passage. It’s theological anxiety rendered in still life form. Harwick has been wrong about this for eleven years and now he knows I know he’s been wrong.”

Eric was quiet for a moment.

“How did he take it?”

“Professionally,” I said. “Which is to say, badly and politely.”

He looked at me.

And then the laugh arrived –  not the small, brief one I had been collecting for months like a person conserving warmth, but a fuller one, the kind that produced a visible change in his face, something unguarded and genuine.

“Sit down,” I said, already feeling the specific, slightly dangerous elation of someone who has taken a risk and received the right response. “Tell me about your day. Include something interesting or I’ll pivot back to the pocket watch.”

“The pocket watch is more interesting than my day,” he said.

“Impossible. Tell me.”

He told me.

And the dinner went an hour over where dinners usually ended, and I did not moderate my responses once, and he asked four questions – four, I counted, I absolutely counted – about the vanitas tradition and we ended up at the table at ten-fifteen with the wine finished and the food long since cleared and the conversation still running and I thought:

There he is.

The man who asks four questions about pocket watch symbolism at ten-fifteen on a Tuesday.

He has been in there the whole time.

I have been talking to him at forty percent.

The problem with a successful experiment is that it makes you want to run it again.

And again.

And the third time I ran it, approximately two weeks after the skull dinner, something different happened.

We were at a drinks event –  one of the rotating business-social occasions that populated our calendar with the pleasant, slightly relentless frequency of people who had organized their social world around professional relationships. I had been to fifteen versions of this event. I knew the circuit. I knew which conversations to have and with whom and for how long.

I was standing with Eric and a man named Patterson who was a client and was discussing something that was the correct thing to discuss at this event, and I was present and appropriate and saying the right things, and then Patterson said something that was not quite accurate about a property his company had recently acquired, and I had the information that made it not quite accurate, and I gave the old version of me approximately three seconds before I opened my mouth.

“The acquisition included the heritage land covenant,” I said. “Which limits what you can do with the north section. The previous owners tried to build there in 2019 and got stopped at planning. It’s in the land registry.”

Patterson looked at me.

Eric looked at me.

“How do you – “ Patterson started.

“Art history is a broad discipline,” I said. “Heritage architecture comes up.”

It did not come up in art history. I had looked up the property because I had been at the previous event where Patterson had mentioned it and I found property law interesting in the way that I found most things interesting, which was completely and with excessive follow-through.

Patterson, it turned out, had not known about the covenant.

Patterson also, it turned out, was extremely grateful to know about the covenant before he made a planning application that would have been rejected.

Eric, it turned out, watched this entire exchange with an expression I had not yet seen on him, which was the expression of a man encountering a version of his wife he had not previously been introduced to.

In the car home:

“The land registry?” he asked.

“I look things up,” I said.

“You looked up Patterson’s property?”

“I was curious.”

“About property covenants?”

“About the property. The covenant was subsequent research.”

He was quiet.

“Patterson would have made a very expensive planning error,” he said.

“Yes.”

“That information was worth significantly more than a drinks conversation.”

“Probably.”

“Why did you tell him?”

I looked at him.

“Because I knew it,” I said. “And it was useful. And it was the right thing to do.”

He looked at the road.

The city moved past.

“You’re interesting,” he said.

The words were simple and direct and delivered with the specific, slightly surprised quality of a man reporting something he had just discovered, as though interesting were information rather than a compliment.

I looked out the window.

I did not let him see what his face did to mine.

“Thank you,” I said. “So you are. Sometimes.”

“Sometimes?”

“The quarterly projection conversations bring the average down.”

He looked at me.

“Those are important conversations,” he said.

“They’re important and dull,” I said. “Both things are true.”

Another look.

And then the smile – the real one, occupying his face before he could manage it back to neutral.

“The pocket watch was more interesting,” he conceded.

“Everything is more interesting than quarterly projections,” I said. “I include root canal procedures in that assessment.”

He laughed.

We drove home.

I thought: I am going to have to be careful.

Because interesting had produced a response in me that I had not fully anticipated, which was not the warm satisfaction of a strategy working but something more immediate and less manageable – the specific, slightly panicked feeling of a woman who has spent eight months waiting for a man to see her and has just been seen and does not know what to do with the being seen.

I thought: this is going well.

I also thought: this is going to be a problem.

Both things were true.

Month nine arrived with the specific, quiet momentum of things that are changing without announcing the change.

Eric started asking questions.

Not the polite, agenda-driven questions of the previous eight months. Real questions, with the genuine curiosity of someone who has updated their category for a person and is now recalibrating what information to expect from them.

“What do you actually think about the Westfield project?” he asked, at dinner. “Not the appropriate thing. What do you think?”

I looked at him.

“The landscape plan is technically excellent and aesthetically boring,” I said. “It’ll look correct and feel corporate. Which is fine if corporate is the goal but seems like a missed opportunity for a property that size.”

Silence.

“The design team presented it last week,” he said carefully.

“I know. I saw the boards when I came to the office.”

“You looked at the boards?”

“They were visible. I have eyes.”

He looked at me.

“What would you do differently?” he asked.

And I told him.

For forty minutes I told him what I would do differently, with the specific, fully-engaged enthusiasm of someone who had been looking at landscape design for three years by proximity and had Capability Brown opinions and an art history degree and a genuine interest in how space communicated feeling, and he listened with the specific, focused attention of someone who was receiving information rather than waiting for their turn.

And then he said: “I’m going to ask you to meet with the design team.”

“Eric – “

“As a client representative. Your father’s interests in the company are sufficient basis.”

“I don’t want to – “

“Jane.” He looked at me. “You just told me things my senior design consultant hasn’t told me. I’m asking you to meet with the team.”

I met with the team.

The team updated the plan.

The plan was better.

Aldridge, when he saw the revision six weeks later, said it was the first landscape design he’d seen that felt like it had been conceived for a specific place rather than applied to one.

Eric told me this on a Thursday evening.

I received the information with the appropriate composure of a person who was definitely not internally executing a small, private celebration.

“Good,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

He looked at me across the kitchen with the specific quality of a man who is revising something – not dramatically, not with any visible indication of the revision in progress, but with the particular, slight attention of someone whose previous understanding of a situation has been updated and who is sitting with the update.

I made tea.

He watched me make it.

I handed him a cup.

Our fingers touched on the handle.

He did not move his hand away immediately.

I did not move mine.

It was three seconds.

In three seconds I ran the following thoughts: this is something, don’t make it something, it’s nothing, it’s definitely something, don’t look, look normal, tea is normal, this is a normal tea exchange between two normal people who are married and sometimes touch hands.

He moved his hand.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Welcome,” I said.

We drank our tea.

I thought: nine months in and my husband touched my hand for three seconds on a Thursday and I am having a cardiac event about it, which is either a sign of how far we have to go or how far we have come, and I cannot currently determine which.

Both things.

Again, both things.

I want to tell you about the moment I realized the performance was over.

Not the formal ending – there was no formal ending. But the moment I understood, clearly and without self-deception, that the measured version of me had a shelf life and the shelf life was approaching expiration.

It was a Sunday. Late. Eric was in the study and I was on the sofa with a book I wasn’t reading and the television was on something I wasn’t watching and I was thinking, quietly and honestly, about the nine months.

The planner. The FT. The measured volume. The calibrated smiles and the appropriate responses and the continuous, exhausting maintenance of a version of myself that was better-behaved and less interesting and considerably more tired than the original.

And the skull dinner. The land registry. The design team meeting. The three seconds on the kitchen handle.

The moments when I forgot to perform and he leaned in.

I put the book down.

I thought: the formula is visible.

The formula is: be Jane, and he pays attention. Be the performance, and he is warm and present and elsewhere.

The formula had been visible for a while. I had been refusing to act on it because acting on it meant accepting the risk – the risk that the full version of Jane, deployed consistently rather than in carefully managed beach ball moments, would be too much. Too loud. Too there.

Too Jane.

But the three seconds on the kitchen handle were still in my body, warm and specific, and I thought:

He asked four questions about a pocket watch.

He asked me to meet with the design team.

He laughed – the real one – more in the last three months than in the six before it.

And I have been giving him forty percent.

What would he do with the rest?

I did not know.

I was going to have to find out.

The performance was ending.

Not because I decided to end it dramatically, with resolution and intention.

But because it was becoming impossible to maintain in the face of evidence that the thing underneath it was what he’d been responding to all along.

I kept waiting for our marriage to start feeling less like a very expensive appointment.

And sitting on that sofa on that Sunday, I understood for the first time that the appointment was running because I had been scheduling it.

The moment I stopped scheduling it, something else would have to fill the space.→  I was about to find out what.