The Marriage Gap Year, page 1
Praise for The Marriage Gap Year
“I read The Marriage Gap Year in one night with a glass of wine and it was wonderful. The novel is about what happens in long-term marriages when one partner decides to take a break. It also serves as a critique of interactions between Gen X and Gen Z.”
– Astrid Edwards, host of The Garrett, a podcast for lovers of books and storytelling
www.thegarretpodcast.com
“The Marriage Gap Year is a daring narrative that challenges conventional notions of love amidst an existential blundering into the frontier of midlife. Self-discovery smacks hard for Emma and Rob as their time apart sets the stage for a series of transformative events. What makes this novel truly compelling is its beautifully nuanced portrayal of a shifting emotional landscape and clash of desires. But its real power is the poetic skill of Thoraval, a true craftsman of language and one of my favorite writers. Do not miss this book. You will laugh, cry and think forever about the characters. A story of our times.”
– Rachel Matthews, author of Never Look Desperate, Siren and Vinyl Inside (Transit Lounge)
“Yannick Thoraval shows us the truth about marriage – the suffocating weight of over-familiarity, the erosion of mutual respect, the yearning for disruption and change – then reminds us of the incalculable value of love, loyalty and deep human connection. In the age of fakery, the authenticity of this story is a precious gift.”
– Sian Prior, author of Shy: a memoir and Childless: a story of longing and freedom
“What a beautiful ending to an amazing book. I LOVED IT!”
– Katerina Gauntlett
“The Marriage Gap Year does not begin or end where you expect. A wonderful, warm and riveting read about two prickly people, this is more than a romantic comedy. It is about what happens when wisdom of experience solidifies but is not recognized at workplaces. It is about taking the time to craft something of significance as Rob the builder does. It is ultimately about how it is never too late to examine life philosophically to find meaning and joy.”
– Alice Pung, OAM author of the memoirs Unpolished Gem and Her Father’s Daughter, and the novels Laurinda and One Hundred Days
For my parents, Liesbeth and Yves, who have a good marriage, I think, though who but the individuals inside a relationship can truly know.
SUMMER
Chapter One
What if she died here, thought Emma. What if her body was found, two days later, suffocated, somewhere under all these colored cushions. Would he mourn her? Or would he just “get over it” and go back to work.
At least this part of the IKEA warehouse was quiet. Rob was less likely to wander off, “get away from the mob,” as he liked to say. He didn’t like shopping. Right now, Emma didn’t either.
There were too many living rooms all at once. She scanned the contents of another showroom, this one staged as a tidy home office. In there was a white desk, with only a cardboard laptop on it. To the side of the desk was a high-backed chair with an artfully crumpled blanket slung over the arm, flanked by a side table, a green teapot, and a newspaper open to an untouched Sudoku.
These spaces were life-sized dioramas of Nordic domesticity. Each display left Emma with the impression that the studious, pragmatic people who lived here had just left the room moments before. She might find them if she kept wandering, discovering clues to their whereabouts in every karate-chopped throw pillow or whiskey tumbler left on a sideboard. Perhaps they had just been here, sitting on this plush blue sofa, playing chess on the glass coffee table. Maybe they’d moved over there, by the vertical herb garden in the oak-trimmed kitchen. Breadcrumbs guided shoppers ever closer to the ghostly residents whose elusive, bohemian chic left its trace on every item, in every room of this warehouse, where no glass rings stained the coffee tables and no cat hair stuck to the furniture.
Emma could appreciate the marketing genius of this living catalog, but she was done with IKEA.
“Aw, bullshit!” a woman’s voice snapped behind her. Emma half turned as a young mom hurried past, a toddler bouncing up and down in the shopping cart, piled high with kitchen bric-a-brac and a tangle of plastic plants. The mom glared back at the dad, trailing several unhurried steps behind them. “Because it was your fucken’ turn,” she spat, and stormed off toward Bedrooms, her pink flip-flops thwacking on the gray linoleum floor.
“Was not,” the dad muttered to himself, slowly following the cart’s general direction.
Emma was so over IKEA. Why would a builder like Rob buy a table from here?
Her husband ran his meaty hand along the thin edge of an eight-seater Rönninge dining table, set as if ready for a three-course meal with dinner plates, small plates and soup bowls. Beside them, the lazy dad had stopped following his wife to peer inside a display cabinet, staged with candlesticks and cookbooks.
Rob squatted to look under the table. Emma had been asking him to build them a proper dining table for years, something solid and beautiful, a piece of forever furniture, an heirloom with a story, their story.
It’s a different kind of building, he’d say. Was it, though? Or could he just not be bothered?
Emma had stopped asking about it, but when the old laminate table got water damage from a burst pipe upstairs, the touchy subject of a new dining table ended with them at the IKEA superstore, where they’d spent the last hour browsing the showrooms; Skogsta, Vedbo, Voxlöv, Ekedalen, the product range like names in a Viking cemetery.
“This’ll do,” said Rob, tapping his finger on the cold Nordic Pine of the Rönninge table, dressed with a piano-key table runner and towering salt and pepper shakers, pale as icicles. “Decent piece of timber,” he said.
Emma wanted her table, not this cheap thing. Something beautiful, made to last. Made with love. She wanted the big table she’d always imagined having, encircled with hardwood chairs where friends and family would sit and talk into the night about things happening in the world. The table where they’d have Sunday dinners and birthday dinners and Christmas dinners in the presence of extended family and the interesting friends they’d accumulated over the years, like the souvenirs they collected from the exotic places they’d been.
“I’m not putting that in my house,” she said.
Rob was taken aback. He thought this was exactly the kind of thing Emma was looking for. She was always bugging him for a new table, had shown him pictures of the things she liked, tables that looked pretty much like this one. Now it was all wrong? “It’s an eight-seater,” he added, tilting his head to look at the angled legs. “Ten, if you put chairs on the ends and people don’t mind banging a few knees.”
Emma felt a flame grow inside her. She was just some problem to him, now. Like one of the clients he eye-rolled about while talking on the phone.
Rob crouched down to have a closer look at the Rönninge table. It was a lot of money for flatpack furniture. “Do we even need one this big?” he said, his back twinging as he straightened up. “We’d probably be alright with one of those smaller ones from over there,” he pointed to a section of the shop they’d passed earlier.
Emma knew the area he meant, the one with the cheap, laminate furniture that didn’t get its own showroom.
Rob shrugged. “A smaller table could make the dining room feel bigger.”
Was he trying to be cruel, or did he really have no idea? This was worse than cutting the vacation short, worse than forgetting her birthday. “You know,” she said squinting, unable to even look at him right now, “maybe you’re right.”
Rob’s lips tightened. Here we go. Couldn’t go more than a few hours without pissing her off these days. When did she get so uptight?
“Maybe we don’t even need a table at all,” she said, her eyes getting larger.
Rob scratched his chin. It calmed him, kept him from making a face she’d get mad about. There were a lot of places he’d rather be on a Sunday. But he was here, wasn’t he? “Why are you being all weird?” he said, trying to quieten things down.
“I mean,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard what he said, “it’s not like we really need a table, right?”
Oh, thought Rob. She wasn’t going to let this go. It was going to be one of her lines in the sand.
He knew Emma had some fantasy about him building them a dining table. Did she have any idea how long it took to make one? A properly handmade wooden table? Solid wood, no metal, not even screws? Thirty to fifty hours, he calculated, and that was after you sourced the timber, not including time to varnish and dry. Who had that kind of time? Or space? His backyard shed couldn’t hold a slab of wood that size. Besides, she always had a precise idea of what she wanted. He’d get it wrong. Jesus Christ, it’s not like he was Jesus Christ – a literal carpenter. He wasn’t a joiner or a furniture maker. He was a commercial builder; a high-end table wasn’t just something he could magic up. She always assumed everything was easier than it was.
“Could you please lower your voice?” he said, moving closer. “You’re getting a little—”
“No, I don’t think I will, Rob! Thanks all the same.” She was not about to be hushed. “I think I might even have to get louder,” she said, raising her voice and making jazz hands.
Rob sensed people slowing down to look at them. He felt self-conscious; shoppers were stealing glances at them with a kind of amused superiority, the way tourists cringe-watched drunk Australians in Bali.
“Emma,” he said sharply. “Please!”
“No,” s he continued. “Really. I mean it. Why bother with a table? I’m asking seriously. I mean, why not just get hospital trays? Then we can finally eat right in front of the TV, and not just look at it from the sides of our faces.”
“Okay, can you settle down?”
“Ooooh. Am I making you uncomfortable, Rob? Touching a nerve?”
Rob glanced behind him. People were looking. “Emma,” he pleaded.
Emma saw she’d pushed him too far. Rob valued composure and she almost felt guilty using it against him.
“Right,” she nodded. “Let’s just go.”
“Em,” he said, but she wasn’t even looking at him anymore. They started walking, Emma half a pace in front.
She couldn’t look at him. He really thought this was just about the table, didn’t he? Emma was haunted by a vision of them, wordlessly shuffling around in a house that no one came to visit, unable to escape this man who resembled her husband, but had grown fatter and grumpier and more distant by the day.
They used to dream and do things. Now they just walked past each other, spoke only of what was necessary: of schedules and bills, shopping lists, or about their son, Will, and what he needed, for school, for camp, from the pharmacy, for university. And Emma felt certain that if she did nothing, if she kept living as they had been, that Rob would eventually smother her, consume her, and sap whatever spark and ambition remained in her with his proselytizing, his disapproval and negativity. If she said nothing, did nothing, for one more day, he would suffocate in her the very essence of her being as sure as if it were consumed by flame.
Rob slowed his pace. Why try to catch up. There was no bringing her round from this mood.
He was tired. Tired of fighting, tired of work. He’d spent a lifetime in construction only to end up with a bad back and two blown knees. There was more time, somehow, back when he was younger. At least you’d get a weekend. Nowadays, people wanted everything yesterday, didn’t care about quality, just wanted it now, cheap and fast. Even Emma, with her table. It took time, the things she wanted. And he was always pushed for time.
Emma stopped in her tracks. “I’m not going home,” she said.
“What?” Rob caught up to her, mindful of people in his peripheral vision. “What do you mean?”
She turned to face him. “I can’t do this anymore.”
“Do what? What are you talking about? We’re looking at tables because—”
“I need space.” She breathed audibly, closed her eyes.
“Space? What for? What kind of space?”
She opened her eyes. Everything looked gray under the fluorescent lights. “I don’t know. I just can’t…”
He shifted his weight to his other leg. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t know!” She dragged her palm slowly down her face. “Christ. This is not how I wanted this to come out.”
“What to come out?” He moved closer. “What’s going on?”
“It’s…” She was already second-guessing what she wanted, less certain than she was this morning. “I just need time. I need some space. I need a break, a gap, like…a gap year!”
“Gap year? What, like a trip?”
Emma rubbed her eyelids. “I don’t know,” she sighed. “I just know I need—”
“Well, why don’t you just—”
“I don’t want to hear it, Rob. Sorry, that sounded harsh.” She looked at him at last. He was a fight-or-flight kind of guy and she couldn’t tell from his frown which way he was leaning. “I need to remember who I am, other than someone’s wife and someone’s mom.”
Two women walked past, canvas IKEA bags slung over their shoulders. They both gave her and Rob a wide berth.
“Didn’t you ever want to take a gap year?”
“No.”
“Didn’t want to see the world?”
“I’ve traveled.”
“We went to Fiji one time for a wedding. That doesn’t count.”
“Well, I didn’t like it.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you ever wonder what if?”
“If what?
“I mean, don’t you ever just wonder what it might be like, if we’d never met. How things might’ve been different. How our lives might have worked out.”
“What are you saying?” He moved closer. “You want a divorce?”
“No.” The word came out like a reflex. “Don’t be so dramatic.”
“Well, you just said—”
“Look, I don’t know. I think what I’m asking is, what if we just took some time off?”
Rob looked puzzled, the crease between his eyes deepening. “Like, what if we took some time out for a year and lived apart for a while, just to see what it was like?”
“A year?”
He stood like a big kid who’d been told to stay back after class. Emma softened toward him. This must have hit him hard. She had been thinking about this for ages, the deep and empty space between them.
It was out now. This thing she’d rehearsed so many times. But it was happening differently from what she’d expected. She’d expected to feel relief. And she did. But she’d not expected fear.
Rob looked over his shoulder before leaning toward her. “What are you really saying, Emma? You want to see other people?”
“I don’t know…maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Yes, maybe. That’s not what this is about though.” She blinked repeatedly. There, she’d said it. She needed change.
“Fucking hell.” Rob shook his head and headed for the quick exit that skipped all the displays.
“Rob.” Emma trotted behind him. “I’m not saying I want out of our relationship.”
“Right.” He glanced back over his shoulder and kept walking.
“I’m not.” She stopped following him. “Can you please just stop?”
He did and stood in the aisle with his back to her.
Emma walked over. “I get it.” Emma took a breath. This had all sounded more reasonable when she’d rehearsed it in her mind. “I just want see what it’s like if I’m by myself for a while.”
“By yourself, but also fucking other people?”
“Rob—”
“Jesus Christ, Emma. You’re forty-eight, not some fucking teenager.”
“Well, maybe that’s it then? I never got to be a teenager. I didn’t have boyfriends or go out to parties. I was too busy working to help my parents out and putting myself through university.”
“Oh, here we go.” He set off again.
“What do you mean, here we go?” She sped up behind him. “Fuck you, Rob. I had to take care of myself.”
“Oh please. I took care of plenty.” He pushed open the door to the carpark. “Who paid off your student loans? Who kept the lights on and food on the table when you couldn’t get a job? Or when you wanted to stay home with Will for two years.”
“Wanted? I didn’t see you volunteering.”
“Em, you’re not a victim here, okay.”
“Oh, so I should be grateful, is that it? Just stay quiet?”
“Enough with the drama!” He fished his keys out of his pocket as they got to their car. “What have I done exactly? What have I done that was so bad?”
“Nothing,” she sighed, and got in the passenger seat, the vinyl uncomfortably hot on her backside. It was boiling in here. She fanned herself with her hands.
The car wobbled as it took Rob’s weight.
“Well then, what the fuck, Em? You tell me you want to sow your wild oats or whatever and I’m supposed to be happy about that?”
“Can we please just stop.”
“Stop what?”
“All of this. The fighting, the treating each other like shit. I’m not even sure you’re mad right now.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I thought you might actually be relieved I said something.”
He scrunched up his face.
“This,” she said, as she moved her hand between them. “This whole situation, there’s no love in here. It’s like we don’t even like each other anymore. Am I a burden to you? Is that it? Like one of your clients who just needs to be put off for a while, placated? I asked you for a table—”
