The Comfortable Ceiling

Nothing is wrong, which is why they are having this conversation at eleven at night for the fourth time this year.

"I'm not unhappy," says Reuben.

"I know."

"I want that on the record. I'm not unhappy. I'm — " He stops. He has never got past this point in any of the previous three.

"Say it," says Dalia.

"I think this might be it," he says. "Not it as in the end. It as in — the ceiling. I think we're at the top of what we're going to be."

---

Eleven years. No children by choice. A flat they own most of.

She is a good person to live with. He has done the comparison, unfairly and repeatedly, against friends' marriages, and theirs comes out well: they do not shout, they are kind about each other in public, the money is uncomplicated, they still have sex about as often as anyone tells the truth about.

There is no villain. That is the whole problem. He has looked for one, including in the mirror.

---

What he cannot say, and what Dalia says for him at about half past eleven, is this:

"You think there's a version where you're more."

He does not answer.

"You think there's a Reuben who would have been — I don't know. Bigger. And you think he's on the other side of a door that has me in front of it."

"That's not—"

"It might be true," she says, and this is why he married her. "I'm not saying it isn't. I'm saying it out loud so we can look at it, because you've been carrying it around since March."

---

He goes to the kitchen and comes back with water neither of them wants.

Here is the shape of the thing, as best he has managed to think it:

He is forty-three. This life is good. It is measurably above average and he is aware, in the way one is aware of a fact one cannot feel, that a great many people would take it immediately.

And it is finished. That is the part. He can see the next thirty years from here with reasonable accuracy. The flat, the jobs, the two holidays, the friends they already have, the slow business of parents getting old. Nothing bad. Nothing new.

Whereas a version of him at thirty had a great many possible lives fanned out in front of him and could not see the end of any of them.

He has not lost anything. He has simply stopped being able to see very far, and it turns out that is a kind of loss.

---

"Do you want to leave?" says Dalia.

"No."

"Reuben."

"No. I've checked. I've genuinely checked — I've sat with it. I don't want a different person. I don't want to be single. I've imagined it in detail and it's worse and it's also smaller, which is the thing that surprised me."

"Then what do you want?"

And he says the true thing, which he has not said to anyone including his brother:

"I want to stop feeling like the fact that this is enough is a failure of ambition."

---

Dalia is quiet for a while.

Then she says: "My mother had six children and a bad husband and she used to say the worst thing about her life was that nothing ever happened."

"That's not the same."

"No. It's the opposite. She had chaos and no possibility." Dalia pulls her feet up. "You have peace and no possibility and you've decided the peace is the thing that took it. It might just be — " she shrugs " — forty-three."

---

They do not resolve it. There is no resolution; that is the fourth time it has not resolved.

What happens instead is that at about half past midnight she says something about the neighbour's extension, and he laughs, and they go to bed.

And in the morning it is a Wednesday and he makes the coffee the way she likes it without being asked, and she says thank you, and it is entirely ordinary.

He notices himself noticing that.

He has decided not to say anything about it, and to see whether the noticing comes back on Thursday, and it does.