This weekend, we have an excerpt from This Can Be Easy or This Can Be Hard, by Mike Heppner, out now from Thought Catalog Books. In this story, which I first encountered years ago via Small Anchor Press as a little stand-alone object, Heppner explores the reality of sleeping together when reality can be too hard and too easy to bear. —Matt Salesses, Good Men Project Fiction Editor
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The first time they slept together, neither of them minded the adjustments needed to get through the night, and even when the strain of holding each other resulted in cramps and numb extremities, they both remained perfectly still, as if posing for a sculptor.
She’d tidied the place up an hour before he came over for dinner. The sheets were clean, and she’d arranged Pier 1 candles on top of the dresser. It had been a year since she’d slept with anyone, and she was nervous about letting him see her room. The mosquito netting over the window looked too girlish, it now seemed to her, but it was too late to take it down.
That night, they finished a bottle of red wine, undressed in the dark and slipped into bed. It was summer; the window was open and the netting breathed like a membrane in the wind. When he woke at six a.m., his arms were still around her. He couldn’t believe that he’d managed to fall asleep.
The next weeks were spent adapting to each other’s work schedules. Hers was more structured than his, so he made an effort to go to bed when she did, though she assured him he could stay up as long as he wanted, and even gave him the keys to her apartment so he could let himself out if he decided to sleep past seven. This always made him feel guilty—staying in her bed while she drove twenty miles to work, half-finished with her day by the time he’d gone back to his place across town. At times, his unconventional job made him feel like he was being paid to do nothing since he worked at home, didn’t have a boss, lacked the visible proof of an office or an ID badge to confirm his place in the world. There was no penalty for sleeping in, for taking the day or the week or the whole month off. Her job was more unforgiving, and she spent many hours before bed worrying about staying up too late, drinking too much, enjoying herself.
Like many new couples, they’d tried holding each other all night, but soon found it difficult to maintain the same position for more than a few minutes. Complicating matters were her three cats that used the hours between two and four a.m. to wage their noisy territorial battles. Before they’d started dating, he’d told himself that he could never sleep with a cat in the house; he didn’t like the idea of this other, animal consciousness, fully awake, prowling the halls at night. “Get used to it,” became his new slogan, and within a week, he’d learned to distinguish among the cats in the dark. There was the 30-pound diabetic who liked to sleep beside him, its body stretched-out like a furry seal; then the wheezy kitten whose moist sounds of respiration signaled its approach. The third cat could only be determined through powers of deduction—it was neither one nor the other, its personality defined in negatives.
In addition to the cats, he’d come to appreciate the sounds she made, a steady grumble of snores that lessened whenever she turned on her side. The things she said were invariably hostile: “Who the hell is Becky?” “Don’t fucking look at me!” “Why didn’t you answer the phone?” even though the phone hadn’t rung in six hours, and when he pointed it out to her—he himself barely awake and not making much sense—she would respond with a confused “…hunh…?” and nod off again.
Neither slept consistently throughout the night, and they were always disturbing each other by moving an arm or a leg or getting up for a swig of tap water, which they kept in plastic bottles in the refrigerator. The important thing was to maintain physical contact with the other person at all times. He liked it when she wrapped one leg around his lower body and held him there; it made him feel pleasantly trapped, and his feelings toward her softened into tenderness at the thought of her greedily protecting him like a child holding a blanket.
As they became better acquainted, they no longer took the same care around each other when they went to bed. She began to sleep in her sweat pants instead of something sexy, like the camisole he’d bought for her birthday. This made him feel neglected, the same way she felt neglected whenever he let days go by without shaving. Even so, the bedroom—and the bed in particular—remained a special place. She’d returned to Pier 1 three times to buy new candles. They’d tried different scents, different sizes and shapes and colors. Spring Rain. Ocean Breeze. The candles from Pier 1 were getting to be expensive.
Inevitably, they began to compare each other to people they’d dated in the past. Her longest relationship had lasted three years, with a guy who liked to wake her up by giving her oral sex. This always bothered her, she said, because it made her feel indebted to him for the rest of the day.
Dazed, they slept, woke, slept. Their bodies had learned to respond to each other even in the absence of conscious thought. His arm, her arm. Legs grouped in a bundle. Breathing, breathing. Always half-awake.
Then one night, she told him that she was going to have an operation. I’ll have a scar for the rest of my life, she said. I’m going to lose all of my hair—eyebrows and eyelashes, too. I may not be able to have children. For three hours, she tried to convince him to leave her. I won’t be pretty anymore. I’m going to look like one of those women. I’m going to be nauseous and tired and irritable and I won’t want to have sex. I might even die. I don’t want to die. Am I going to die?
The next month was a dream. Once (it must’ve been about two in the morning), he woke to find himself alone, two of the three cats occupying her half of the bed, and when he got up, he discovered her in the kitchen, drinking cold white wine and making an arugula salad. Another time he found her in the living room, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, watching a Liza Minnelli concert on videotape. More recently, he’d come upon her in the bathroom, just crying and crying, a chair pulled up to the window, eyes fixed on the gloomy street below, and when he asked her to come to bed, she looked at him fiercely and said, “But I’m a good person! Why did this happen to me? Why?” and when he tried to come up with a reasonable answer, she released him with the faintest of smiles—perhaps recognizing that she was being petulant and unfair—and said, “It’s okay, I just need to be alone for a while,” and he returned to bed, feeling that maybe the least selfish thing for him to do would be to go home and sleep in his own place (but he knew she didn’t want that either).
After the surgery, the only way he could hold her was around the waist; if his hand inadvertently crept up a few inches, she would grind her teeth, the pain excluding him from her for the time it took her body to return to a kind of simmering ache. During that time, he could only apologize, but it was like apologizing to God, and so he edged back to his side of the bed, reluctant even to touch her until she reached for his hand and, in her mercy, said, “No, I like it when you hold me.”
Always a narcissist, he preferred to sleep naked beside her, though lately she’d refused to take off her shirt because she no longer liked how she looked, and he felt like a bad person for pulling the shirt up over her head, but at the same time he felt if he let her keep the shirt on she might think he didn’t like how she looked either, and he didn’t know which was more cruel, letting her keep the shirt on or taking it off. He even made a point of kissing and running his tongue along the place where it hurt just to prove how beautiful she still was, but on reflection this seemed self-serving and insincere. He wanted to say, “Look, it’s your choice if you want to keep the shirt on or not, but I’d prefer it if you took it off because I think you’re beautiful,” but this also felt wrong because it unnecessarily shifted the focus from her needs to his. Even his own nakedness was inappropriate. He had nothing to hide, but she did, and he was a bad person for calling it to her attention.
Staring down the neck of her blouse one day, she looked up with blue tears in her eyes and said to him, “I look grotesque!”
Things got worse once her treatment began. The drugs the doctors gave her made her sick for weeks. One of the injections was a red, viscous liquid, so thick that the nurse literally had to massage it into her veins. By Thanksgiving, her hair had fallen out, as she’d told him it would. Most of her other predictions came true; everything about her, in fact, seemed to change. Her skin looked cracked and dry. She no longer had the energy to do anything fun. For fun, they watched movies. They watched Meet the Parents, Big Momma’s House, Dr. Doolittle 2, The Original Kings of Comedy, Shrek, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and Dude, Where’s My Car? To make it easier for her, he brought the television into the bedroom and set it on the dresser, pushing aside all of the half-melted candles from Pier 1.
They slept through much of the winter, both going to bed earlier than two people in their early 30s ought to. The kitten died in December, absurdly enough. It was an orange cat, but as the vet put it to sleep, its skin turned blue, so that the blue color seemed to bleed through its orange coat. He couldn’t help thinking that it looked kind of neat.
Once, while supposedly on vacation, she got sick and had to be hospitalized for four days. The doctor was kind enough to let him sleep in the room with her. She was under quarantine, so she had to wear a paper mask over her nose and mouth. When the doctor told her that she would have to stay an extra day—she’d been hoping to get out in time to enjoy some of their vacation—she cried so hard that her tears made her eyes look blurry. “I’m ruining everything!” she said.
A second round of drugs followed the first. The doctors gave her a steroid that made her tongue swell up and turn white. It soon became difficult for her to swallow. Eventually, she developed a yeast infection inside her mouth. And so on.
Her friends tried to remain supportive. One sent her a self-help book as a gift. The name of it was “Coping With Healing: A Survivor Tells Her Story.” Inside, the friend wrote, “You are in our thoughts and prayers.” She glanced at the book and—almost snickering at it—put it on a stack of similar titles that other friends had given her. “Fuck you,” she said.
After so many months, he began to resent the notion, expressed by her friends, that staying with her was an act of goodness, as if he’d knocked her up, been a man about it, done the right thing. It wasn’t goodness, it was need. In fact, he realized—and the idea made him hate himself a little—it was easier to love a woman who was sick than one who was healthy. It allowed him to be passive; all that was required of him, at least for the time being, was simply to be there. Her sickness became the answer to questions that deserved better answers—why she loved him, and why he loved her—and he worried about what would happen to them after the sickness went away.
The winter that year was shorter than most. The groundhog had predicted six more weeks of cold weather, but this—as she reflected on a balmy Sunday in late March—had been a lie. It was hard for her to see the good in anything. Funny movies made her angry. She drank a lot and so did he. Every night, they retired to the same room, slept in the same bed. The mosquito netting still hung over the closed window, only now it blew gently, as if caught in a draft.
Another month. March, then April. Gradually, she got a little better.
One Thursday, they went out with some old friends whom she hadn’t seen in some time. Seeing the friends again saddened her; it reminded her that she’d lost touch with nearly everyone. They went to three bars, then returned home, where she passed out in bed. She’d had more to drink than he had; then again, she was a lot sicker than he was. He spent an anxious five hours watching over her. Finally, at seven o’clock, he fell asleep. When he woke, he could feel something wet and sticky on his leg. She’d had her period; the sheets were covered with menstrual blood. This was a good sign. It meant they could still have children when they got married.