White Matter

Twelve months earlier

At some level, I believe I recognized the anomaly the moment Monica walked through the door.

"Hi honey, I'm home."

Whether it was a visual clue, and I acquired it subliminally, or whether it was something in her demeanour that gave it away, I couldn't say. It may simply have been the fact of her being late that left me with a feeling of some discrepancy in her that had previously gone unnoticed.

Monica slumped down on the sofa, letting her bag fall to the floor beside her.

"Long day?" I asked.

She nodded, pulling her legs up beneath her and wriggling into a more reclined position. "How 'bout you?"

"Long too. Perhaps not in the same way."

"No progress, huh?"

I shrugged. My lack of recent output was hardly breaking news.

She cocked her head so that an ear rested against the back of the sofa, reflecting my scrutiny back at me for a moment before closing her eyes in contented weariness.

My apartment would have been considered large, for a single man, were it not that the master bedroom had been converted into an art studio. That left the open-plan living area and a small spare room that provided my sleeping quarters. It was some months now since Monica had moved in, a change that took place with my complicity but not, as I recall, any conscious invitation. Possibly I'd made some casual remark – about the inconvenience of her maintaining separate wardrobes, home and away, about her cache of shower jels and lotions in my bathroom – but nothing more than that.

It was my habit at the time to go out in the afternoons. Fed up with battling the canvas for no reward, I would take myself out to walk the streets or to drink a solitary coffee, somehow to occupy a few hours before going to visit Kohei, say, or for an after-work beer with a friend. Later I would return home to find my laundry done for me, my evening meal prepared, in one case my shirts ironed. Even a man will notice these things after a while.

Like her upgrade from frequent visitor to permanent resident, these acts were something that happened entirely on Monica's own initiative. Where others might have seen the Little Woman act as demeaning, Monica was a child of her time, caring little about what victories the sisterhood may have won in the past. To her this wasn't submission; it was self-expression. She was so new to adulthood, so impatient to test out all its different permutations – and for some reason this housewife act, this embrace of domesticity, was at the top of her list. But it was just role playing, like a party dress to be put on for her adornment and amusement, worn for as long as it fulfilled some purpose, then replaced with something else.

On some level I recognized this. And if it worked for her, I was happy to let it work for me – happy to gloss over the occasional culinary disasters, shrunken knitwear, and singed collars that accompanied the change and let myself be beguiled by this sudden and unexpected mothering. I do believe, however, that she felt a touch of frustration at the reversal of our roles, with me staying at home while she went out, not to work, but to her classes at the university. This wasn't something she said, just a sense I had. A crucial detail that stole the authenticity from her experience.

It was a little later, as she stood up to go to the kitchen, that the point of difference crystalized in my mind.

"Monica? Have you been painting?"

"What?"

"There's paint on your hands." I took one of her hands in mine to examine the fingers more closely. She pulled it away."

"Yes, I've been painting. So what?"

"Here in the studio? But when?"

"No, not here. Somewhere else."

"But how come? You never wanted to paint before. Why didn't you ask me to help?"

"I painted before we met. Then I stopped. Now I've started again, that's all. Don't make a big deal out of it."

"You used to paint? But you told me you didn't."

"Well I did. There are still some things you don't know about me."

I tried to get her to tell me more, but she blocked me out. Told me to leave her alone because she was busy preparing dinner.

We ate in silence, seated at ninety degrees to each other around the kitchen table. Pasta, done with cold meat from the deli and sauce out of a tin. Later she claimed it was my fault.

"You intimidated me, okay. How could I be expected to paint with a professional artist looking over my shoulder?"

"But I offered you use of my studio, everything you might have needed. I could have helped you improve."

Apparently being helped by me was not what she had wanted.

"I've seen you," she said. "It's the first thing you think when something new comes along. 'Is this a threat?', 'How can I conquer it?' How could I function in an environment like that? Why would I want to?"

I could make no sense of this. She had never behaved this way before. She looked down at her plate and the rest of the meal passed the way it had started, in aggrieved silence.

The next morning, after Monica had left for class, I found myself standing in the living room, my hands wrapped around the warmth of my coffee cup as I stared out the window, wondering how best to fill the day in lieu of going into the studio to work: inspiration comes easily when it comes – when it doesn't come there's no bargaining with it.

I had never thought of Monica and I as engaged in some battle of the sexes, but if we were the time order seemed ominously backward: beginning with her unconditional surrender, then shifting back to amicable truce – as symbolized by the home-cooked meal – and now, as of last night, armed neutrality.

Across the room, in a haphazard pile by one of the armchairs, was her collection of women's magazines. Could one of these have prompted last night's outburst, I wondered? In between the fashion and the gossip and the tips on achieving the perfect orgasm, there were, I knew, articles probing the intricacies of girl-boy psychodynamics. Perhaps it had been some piece of relationship psychobabble that had inspired Monica to her peculiar behaviour. I walked across and picked one from the top of the pile, exchanged blank looks with the model on the cover, and scanned the headlines: Erotic aerobics: Tone up as you turn on – Red light beauty tips: You'll be surprised what you can learn from the pros – Has your boyfriend been replaced by a shape-shifting space reptile? Six tell-tale signs that will confirm your worst fears.

Suddenly weary, I put it back down again. After all, I told myself, to rifle through her magazines like this would be tantamount to reading her diary, had she kept one. I returned to the kitchen to refill my coffee cup.

So for a time I ignored it, whatever it was, and let life go on as usual, which it did.

Mostly ignored it: from time to time I would check – but whenever I looked her hands were clean.