The Fruits We Don't Eat

The papaya sat on the kitchen counter, improbably tropical in their gray Chicago apartment. Elena had bought it on a whim—'trying new things,' she'd called it, like the salsa classes and the blind date app she'd downloaded 'just for fun.' Some weeks, Marcus felt like he was living with a stranger conducting an experiment on how little she could disrupt her own life while completely dismantling his.

They'd met in the corporate bull pen at Merrill Lynch, two junior analysts competing for the same promotion. He'd won, she'd transferred departments, and somehow they'd ended up married anyway. The pyramid scheme of their romance: invest early, compound interest, pretend you're not calculating the return on every emotional expenditure.

'I don't want a divorce,' Marcus said now, the words hanging in the air like dust motes. 'I want to want you. That feels worse, doesn't it?'

Elena didn't answer. She was peeling the papaya, her engagement ring clicking against the cutting board. They still went to couples therapy. They still hosted dinner parties. They still had sex, careful and practiced, like everything else in their curated life together.

'My father used to take me to baseball games,' Marcus said suddenly. 'Before he got sick. We'd sit in the cheap seats, eat terrible hot dogs, and for three hours, nobody expected anything from me.' It was the most honest thing he'd said in months.

'That's not real life, Marcus.' Elena sounded tired. 'We're thirty-five. We're supposed to have figured this out by now.'

'Figured what out? How to want things that don't matter?' He gestured at their apartment—the West Elm furniture, the wedding photos, the papaya she was still slicing with surgical precision. 'This isn't a life. It's a really well-designed brochure.'

She stopped cutting. 'So what do we do?'

Marcus picked up a papaya wedge, bright as a sunset and just as fleeting. 'We could start by eating this before it goes bad.' He took a bite. It was sweet, faintly musky, nothing like he expected. 'That's the thing about trying new things,' he said. 'Sometimes they're exactly what you need.'

She looked at him for a long moment, then took her own slice. The apartment was silent except for the sound of them both eating, trying to remember what it felt like to be hungry.