The Break-Up Clause by Niamh Hargan

Chapter Seven

They order in Thai food, and it doesn’t feel like she can say anything before the delivery arrives. It’s just not the right time.

Then the food comes, and they’re busy unpacking everything from containers, divvying up items and topping up their glasses of wine. This doesn’t feel like the right time either. Annie’s had a first date earlier in the week, and she’s recounting all the details as they eat together around their kitchen table, spring rolls and Thai ribs being passed between plates. It’s delicious food, accompanied by a delicious topic of conversation, and Fia is suddenly loath to so thoroughly change the shape of the evening.

After all, it’s not like the three of them do this nightly – or even necessarily weekly. They all moved into this apartment on 81st Street at different times, each having responded to an online ad posted by the outgoing roommate. In other words, they did not choose one another. They did not arrive here with a shared history, a pre-existing sense of sisterhood. Each of them have jobs and friends and interests outside the apartment – things that make their respective schedules ebb and flow. Their lives are not always perfectly in sync. But, gradually, there has developed a certain loose, pleasantly overlapping shape to things between them. It’s nice.

Fia waits for a break in conversation, and then – before she can change her mind – she bites the bullet.

‘So, you know how I said I was getting a summer associate?’ she begins. ‘At work, I mean?’

‘Mmm, yeah,’ Annie replies, her mouth half-full of prawn satay. ‘How’s that going? Did you get a guy or a girl?’

‘Guy,’ Fia says, her trepidation kicking up a notch even with this small acknowledgement.

Annie’s eyes seem to brighten in the way that only the friends of a single woman do. ‘Ooh, interesting. I’m imagining, like, young-Barack-Obama vibes?’

Fia can’t help but snort out a laugh at the very notion. ‘Maybe if Barack had been richer, lazier, less smart but much more of a smartass …’

‘Ugh. That bad, huh?

‘Yeah. Also, this – the summer programme, I mean – it isn’t our first time meeting. I’m sort of … I don’t know how to say this’ – she physically tenses, as though bracing for a blast – ‘sort of married to him.’

Annie seems to splutter and inhale at once – and, being mid-bite, it’s not a winning combination.

Fia rushes to pat her on the back before she chokes entirely, shoving a glass of wine into her hands merely for its liquid properties.

‘What?!’ Annie yelps, once she’s had a sip, her eyes still little watery. ‘Oh my God! You’re married?! How did this happen? And when? And—’

‘All right, just … take a breath,’ Fia interrupts, and she reaches for her own glass of wine, mostly to have something to occupy her hands. ‘I’m not married married. It’s … well, it’s complicated.’

‘Kavita, are you hearing this?’ Annie says, turning to the other girl. Fia looks in Kavita’s direction now, too. She’s uncharacteristically calm. If Fia had been asked to predict who would get loud in response to her news and who would get quiet, she’d have been proven wrong right off the bat.

‘I’m hearing it,’ Kavita replies slowly, a little frown appearing between her brows. ‘I’m just not … understanding it. I mean, what do you mean you’re not married married? I kinda think you are or you aren’t, no?’

With both her roommates staring at her now, almost literally with bated breath, Fia finds herself faltering, unsure of where to start. Once again, she wishes she didn’t have to tell them all this. She wishes she could just fast forward to the part where they already know. Alas, that’s not an option. And, in fact, what she probably needs to do here is the very opposite thing. She needs to rewind.

‘Did I ever tell you I was a camp counsellor when I was younger?’ she asks, and although she knows very well what their answers will be, she waits for them to shake their heads anyway. Buying time. ‘Well, I was. And there was this guy there.’

Across the table, Annie lets out a barely audible little sound, somewhere between a squeak and a sigh. She has an expectant sort of expression on her face, almost as though she is settling in to hear one for the ages – some grand tale of romance and angst. This, Fia thinks, will not do.

‘And just bear in mind through all this,’ she adds, ‘we’re talking about someone who’s now invaded my place of work, and whom I desperately want to be rid of, ’kay?’

‘Got it,’ Kavita says, apparently on behalf of both her and Annie.

With that, Fia takes a deep breath and begins at the beginning.

The actual wedding itself, when she comes to recounting it, is a weird one. Some substantial part of her feels like she will never be able to give an adequate account of it. Equally, though, there turns out to be some extent to which even the most basic details suffice:

Twenty-two years old.

Steaming drunk.

Las Vegas.

Was there, in retrospect, something a little desperate about that whole night? Had everyone in their gang seen The Hangover, been determined, collectively, to tick off this life experience? Not just a night out in Vegas, but a wild night out in Vegas – a story they could tell later?

Fia doesn’t get much pleasure out of telling the story now, but Annie and Kavita do seem to follow along without any great difficulty. It’s afterwards that the confusion begins in earnest.

‘You live in an apartment with two roommates, Fia,’ Kavita says plainly. ‘You go on dates – I mean, not as many as I think you should, but that’s another story. You do go on some. Having been married is one thing … how can you still be married, though?’

Again, Fia winces. This is, indeed, the worst bit of it all, the hardest bit to explain.

The morning after her … wedding, she woke up in a hotel room on top of a clean white duvet cover. Overall, the surroundings were actually a big improvement on, say, a student house in Dublin’s Rathmines, but the sensations were fairly similar.

By that point in her life, Fia had been drunk and hungover a normal amount – which was to say, quite a lot. She knew what it was to greet the day with her throat feeling like sandpaper, wondering whether everyone liked her less now than they had before, and if indeed they ever really had to begin with.

She had never, however, woken up quite like this – with what seemed to be huge black holes in her recollection of the night before. It was actually a little frightening. She dreaded to imagine what the photographs would be like when they were put on Facebook. De-tagging oneself always seemed a bit of a hostile move, but sometimes, it was the only thing to be done.

Looking down at her own body, she realized she’d taken one leg out of her jeans but not quite managed the other. Worse than that, when she rolled over, beside her in the bed – albeit actually under the covers – lay Benjamin Lowry. Fia almost shuddered at the proximity. With gargantuan effort, she managed to haul herself upwards to sort out her trousers and to survey the situation more generally. Dotted around on the floor, on makeshift beds comprised of spare hotel linen, lay three friends.

Two of them remained out for the count, but Michelle – who simply never seemed to suffer the consequences of anything she put her body through – was wide awake.

‘Crazy night,’ Fia said, her voice coming out thick and dry.

Michelle nodded, looking somewhat startled to hear from her. ‘How do you feel?’

Fia winced. ‘Do you know where Lourdes is?’

‘… No?’

‘Would you know what I meant if I told you I felt as sick as a plane to Lourdes?’

‘I guess I’d get the idea,’ Michelle replied, and she sounded sort of … dazed. Amazed? Fia wasn’t all that interested in investigating. She just let herself flop back down on the bed, curling into the foetal position.

‘No, Fia,’ Michelle continued, more urgency in her voice now. ‘I mean, like, how do you feel? About last night?’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, about the … the wedding.’

Fia snorted a laugh. ‘Whose wedding?’

There followed a strange, slightly drawn-out silence between them. From somewhere in the far corner of the room, a gentle snore continued rhythmically.

‘You’re kidding, right?’ Michelle said then, and more than her words, it was the nervous, disbelieving little laugh that followed – that was what planted the first seed of panic in the pit of Fia’s stomach.

It made her tug herself upwards again in bed. Confused, she stared across at her friend for another long moment until, beside Michelle on the floor, it sounded like another body was stirring.

‘Um, Clay, you took pictures, didn’t you?’ Michelle chirped, her discomfort entirely unmistakable now. When Clayton provided only an extravagant grunt in response, she huffed out an exhale. ‘We get it, dude – you’re hungover, it’s tragic. Just gimme your phone.’

The next thing Fia knew, the other girl was clambering up beside her, phone in her outstretched hand. Fia took it, looking down at the screen.

‘Oh Jesus Christ,’ she breathed out, her mouth falling open.

The photograph before her was small and low quality, but nonetheless, it made the basic situation clear enough. Standing in front of a vaguely familiar-looking altar, there was a pretty good Dolly Parton impersonator.

And there was Benjamin Lowry.

And – could it really be true? – there was Fia.

Beside her, Michelle’s voice seemed to warp, the details of the room falling away. Fia had no idea how long she spent just staring, as though she’d been plunged headfirst into a tunnel – just her and this photograph, remnants of recollection beginning to come at her like a gruesome hallucination.

Then, at some point, her eyes began darting around frantically. It was as though she’d realized, suddenly, that she was trapped – that she’d wasted vital minutes already, that she should have been looking for an escape all this time. Quickly, her gaze landed, as luck (or lack thereof) would have it, on the mahogany dresser a few feet away from the bed. A document seemed to have been abandoned right there, beside a few half-finished bottles of Blue Moon. Fia stumbled towards it instinctively. The heading read: CLARK COUNTY, NEVADA. Below that, in slightly smaller lettering, it said: CERTIFIED ABSTRACT OF MARRIAGE.

In a split second, something in Fia’s body took over from her brain. She strode over to Benjamin, still sleeping like a baby, and began shaking him violently.

‘Get up! Benjamin! Ben!’ She was shouting like a woman possessed. ‘Get up right now!’

He awoke, bleary-eyed, his hair sticking up at odd angles, and Fia gave him no catch-up time whatsoever before she thrust the piece of paper into his hand.

He took one look at it – his eyes widening, his brain engaging – before he ran to the bathroom and vomited right into the sink.

Because of all this vomiting (him) and screaming (her), it was at least another hour before they made it downstairs for breakfast. In the dining room, the others in their group looked greasy and ashen-faced. Nonetheless, galvanized by coffee and one another, they soon summoned the energy to review recent events.

Questions, sympathetic arm rubs, more than a little laughter, and – horrifyingly – the occasional additional photograph all hurtled relentlessly towards Fia. More memories were still coming back to her in fragments, and by now she wasn’t sure if she was trying to grasp for them inside her own mind or actively repel them.

Nodding along with the barrage of advice from everyone around her, she had the undeniable impression that a lot of these people would categorize the present situation as some exclamation-mark drama! rather than as a full-stop crisis. One by one, they inspected the wedding certificate, as though it were a suspicious-looking mole and they each were competing medical experts. Everyone agreed that it was utterly impossible that the document before them could be genuine, could have any real-world effects. Surely it was essentially a souvenir? A printout from the internet, like the certificates handed out liberally on school sports days?

‘I don’t even remember there being vows,’ someone said. ‘I’m pretty sure there was some kind of, like, aquarium in that place. I fed some leftover bar snacks to a Siamese fighting fish. There’s just no way you can go from that to any type of … actual legal shit.’

Over by the pancake station, Brittany the future diabetes nurse was in floods of tears. ‘At least they can get divorced!’ Fia could just about hear her telling Michelle. ‘Big deal! People get divorced all the time!’ She pointed at the inflamed, objectively terrible tattoo on her arm. ‘I’m going to have this for the rest of my life!’

Benjamin, meanwhile, was positioned about as far away from Fia at the breakfast table as it was possible to be. Perhaps it was on account of this distance that the two of them were presently managing to maintain any level of civility. Perhaps the other people in the dining room were now functioning as something of a diluting agent – or, more likely, both Fia and Benjamin simply found themselves lacking the fortitude for any more fights. Fury, confusion, and lots and lots of blame – all that had already been mutually expressed back in the hotel bedroom, in the moments when Benjamin’s head was not in the toilet bowl. Fia couldn’t help but think that his whole handling of the matter, digestively speaking, had been markedly inconsiderate. After all, she herself had been feeling so ill as to be almost unable to function. The last thing a person in that condition needed was the nearby scent of someone else’s sick.

In any case, their predicament was such that they couldn’t stay apart for long. After breakfast, they marched grimly to the hotel’s business suite, armed with their sheet of paper and determined to ascertain its veracity once and for all. They studied it. They googled it. Mortifyingly, they asked at reception. The woman there barely batted an eyelid. She just pushed a plastic binder towards them, stuffed full of attorneys’ business cards.

‘Ten per cent discount if you quote the name of the hotel,’ she said, and finally Fia and Benjamin flopped down onto a leather sofa in the lobby, exhausted and hideously hungover and – apparently – legally wed.

It was just the two of them now, and while, of course, Fia couldn’t say she relished his company, she found she was glad to be free of the group. The hysteria, the analysis by committee, hadn’t been helping matters one bit. And could it be that Benjamin, too, seemed a little relieved, somehow? Back in the dining room, with everyone else, he’d managed to resurrect a bit of his usual humour and horseplay. However, it had seemed much more half-hearted than usual, at least in Fia’s estimation.

‘Why is your name spelled like that?’ he asked then, looking at their wedding certificate with a little frown. Fia followed his gaze, staring down at her own name in its official form: Fiadh.

‘Oh. It’s Irish. That’s just how it’s spelled,’ she replied, a new wave of nausea and exhaustion washing over her. In the circumstances, she found she lacked even the energy to roast him over his ignorance. Something about the question just seemed to throw the reality of their situation into ever more stark relief. She and Benjamin Lowry had spent one summer together, mostly in large groups of other people, mostly trading inconsequential barbs. They had failed to gather even the most basic facts about one another. Yet now here they were: husband and wife.

For another few moments, they just sat together in the lobby, neither of them saying anything. Inexplicably, all around them, other hotel guests appeared to be going about their days as normal. Over in the corner, there was a tour guide in a baseball cap, rallying her group for a trip to the Pinball Hall of Fame. It was true what people said: there really was nothing to do in Las Vegas in the daytime.

‘Well.’ Fia sighed eventually, flipping through all the business cards before her. ‘That’s it, then. I suppose we’ll just get divorced. Or annulled or whatever.’ The precise terminology didn’t much matter to her, so long as the upshot was the same.

‘Right,’ Benjamin agreed – until a moment later, as though the reality of this was now hitting him anew, too, he winced.

‘What?’ she asked, her voice rising. ‘You want to make a go of it? Have a couple of kids? Yeah, cool.’ She put a sarcastic smile on her face. ‘You’d probably really like Dublin once you got used to it.’

Uncharacteristically, though, he didn’t rise to the bait, didn’t try to best her. ‘It’s just, I … sorta have this situation right now,’ he said. ‘With my mom.’

‘What kind of situation?’ Fia replied, trepidation creeping in. Her first thought, honestly, was that his mother must be critically ill. It was hard to put her finger on what exactly the difference was in him – some small shift in the tone of his voice or his body language maybe – but one way or another, throughout the summer, she’d never seen Benjamin quite the way he suddenly seemed now: unsure of himself. It would sort of make sense, she thought, if this was the moment he’d choose to reveal his secret pain, bare his sensitive soul.

In fact, he did not do that at all.

‘She’s running for AG of North Carolina,’ he said. ‘Attorney General. That’s like—’

‘I know what it is!’ Fia interrupted. This was a lot less on account of having just recently completed a law degree herself and a lot more thanks to having watched scores of American law shows on television. From these, she had gathered that the Attorney General was the top prosecutor in each US state and that the position was an elected one, voted for by the public in the same fashion as a political office.

‘If this gets out,’ Benjamin said, gesturing vaguely between the two of them, ‘it could seriously hurt her campaign. Even kill it, maybe.’

Fia was sceptical. ‘Do people really care that much about her kid’s …’ She trailed off, unsure how to finish the sentence. Horrendously, the phrase ‘love life’ came to mind, which did not seem quite appropriate in the circumstances. ‘… Well, about this type of thing?’

‘Anything that’s distracting is good news for her opponents, basically. When she ran for District Attorney, they spent six months debating some stupid paper she wrote in undergrad about fossil fuels. “Candidate’s son in drunken Vegas wedding”?’ he tossed out. ‘“Candidate’s son in quickie divorce shocker”? Yeah. That’s a lot more interesting than fossil fuels.’

Fia didn’t know what to say to that, so she said nothing at all.

‘It’s just kind of a … high-octane vibe in the Lowry house right now is what I’m saying,’ Benjamin continued. ‘This is really not the time for me to come home with more drama. If we could just … wait.’

‘Wait?’ Fia repeated sharply.

‘I just don’t want to do anything that could jeopardize her chances. She’s already … well, it’s already a tough race in North Carolina, let’s put it that way. And it’s really hard to get elected for anything as a woman.’

Fia paused, let that sink in. Then, she cocked an eyebrow wryly. ‘So, hang on, you’re saying I have to stay married to you for … feminism?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Not forever, obviously. Believe me, I want to be done with this as much as you do. Just for … a while.’

‘How long?’ Fia asked, and it was only once the words were out that she realized: she must actually be considering this.

Benjamin thought for a second. ‘A year? She’ll be in office by then – or, y’know, not in office. One of the two.’

It was Fia’s turn to pause, to try to weigh up the ramifications of his proposal. Truthfully, she was broke. She was, in two short weeks, supposed to be moving into a new flat-share in Dublin and starting her professional legal training at a fancy firm called Zelnick, O’Leary and Abbott. More administrative and financial burdens were the last things she needed right now.

A little bit of time to cool down from the heat of this utterbin fire, to research some options, save up some money … she had to admit, none of that necessarily sounded like it would be such a terrible idea. That way, she and Benjamin could deal with the matter discreetly, with a nice big ocean in between them – and without the need to involve anyone’s parents, her own included.

She squinted over at him. ‘One year?’

‘Yes. In fact, look …’

She watched as he produced a pen from his rucksack and reached for one of the tourist leaflets piled at the far end of the coffee table in front of them. This one suggested they Visit the Grand Canyon and was accompanied by a glossy photograph of a helicopter from which Fia could well imagine plummeting to her death. Benjamin turned the leaflet over, scribbling away for a moment on the expanse of white, before handing it to her.

August 15, 2016 – get divorced, he’d written, with his signature down below.

She raised an eyebrow. She’d give him points for brevity, if not elegance, of expression.

‘Now, you sign it,’ he said expectantly.

And, somehow, taking the pen he offered her, Fia found herself doing just that.

‘There,’ he said, once she was finished. ‘Now, we have a contract.’

‘Hardly,’ she replied sceptically. She hadn’t paid huge amounts of attention in her contract law class, but phrases were suddenly dislodging themselves from the back of her mind: offer and acceptance, consideration, Carlill versus the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company.

She said none of this aloud and, in any event, Benjamin seemed typically unconcerned by specifics. The constituent elements of a claim, the relevant case law – none of that would mean anything to him.

‘Sure we do,’ he countered. ‘Haven’t you heard about people being held to, like, agreements they made on the back of a beermat?’

And, truthfully, Fia was pretty sure she had heard of such cases. Whether for that or for some other reason, she elected not to question him any further on the matter. Instead, she just looked down at the piece of paper before them, as though it might suddenly combust.

‘So, what?’ she asked. ‘Will we write out another one, or do you want to Parent Trap this thing or what?’

Benjamin smiled, and it was undeniably the smallest bit pleasing – the unspoken way that he seemed to get the reference.

‘It’s okay,’ he said, handing the leaflet to her. ‘You just hold on to this. I will contact you, Fia, exactly one year from today.’

And something about it – about the evenness in his voice, the steadiness of his gaze – felt like a promise.

But it wasn’t one he kept.