It’s a boring story of happiness. Do you want to hear all their nicknames for each other? Do you want to hear all their running jokes? One time she told him she was bringing home a special treat, and he asked Is it astronaut ice cream? She still thinks that’s cute and goofy and very him, but do you get it? Do you need to? Do you want to hear about the time they went to see Sonic Youth in that industrial park on the West Side and nothing bad happened between them, or the time they went to see Yo La Tengo at the Riviera and nothing bad happened between them? Or do you want to hear how they went to see Ben Folds at the Chicago Theatre and he thanked god they had seats, he was never going to a show where he had to stand ever again, because maybe, maybe this was the beginning of something, maybe it was nothing, but maybe it was a shift toward boring in a bad way versus boring in a good way. Maybe it’s not boring at all, maybe it’s just what happens when you’re not twenty-eight anymore and you’ve worked all day and you want to see a concert but you also want to sit down. Do you want to hear about all the art they took in over fifteen years and nothing bad happened between them, about how they always seemed to hit a wall with it at the exact same time, that their energy levels for art or more or less any activity outside the house matched surprisingly well, in spite of the age difference? (Did you forget there was an age difference?) Or do you want to hear about how he sometimes wouldn’t entertain what she had to say about art, or at least when it came to what she thought about his relationship to art, or different ways people could put art into the world, because he was the artist and he understood art and the art world more fully than she did? Do you want to know how many times they watched 30 Rock in bed and laughed and laughed and nothing bad happened between them, do you want to hear how many times she watched The Walking Dead on her iPad after they went to bed, because she was postmenopausal and didn’t sleep as well as she used to, before he decided this was a problem for him? Do you want to hear about their easy division of labor, how he, more or less, did the bills and the fixing of things and the vacuuming and the occasional evacuation of bats and how she, more or less, did the shopping and the dishes and the laundry, or do you want to hear how he sometimes pointed out how this dish or that pan wasn’t clean enough, or how he adamantly denied that she did 95 percent of the laundry? (Do you even want to get into a discussion of gender roles here, or can we accept that they both chose chores they minded least or maybe even liked?) Do you want to know how many summers they went camping at least once, how much she loved sleeping next to him in a tent, or do you want to know that one day he decided he didn’t like camping so much anymore, too much trouble, she didn’t help enough, or quite the right way, even though she pitched the whole tent herself that one time (even if it was just to prove a point), and that it didn’t seem to matter all that much to him that she might have liked to go camping again? Do you want to know about all the weekends in cute Airbnbs, starting with the very first one, so soon after they started dating, how easy it was, how much sex they had that time even though they were tired, or do you want to hear about how he came to resent that she wasn’t the primary planner of these Airbnb excursions, even though there was maybe a reason she wasn’t the primary planner of these Airbnb excursions, maybe because he didn’t like the Airbnbs she chose, and sometimes when he didn’t like the way she did things, she just stopped doing them? Do you want to hear about how these weekends, usually one or two a year, were the totality of their vacation time each year over the course of their marriage? Do you want to hear about how great their honeymoon in Taos was, how they had sex in Taos every day, all the art they saw, the food they ate, horses they rode, hikes and mud baths they took, or do you want to hear that their honeymoon was the last real vacation they took, that she let it be known many times how much she wanted to travel with him to Europe, or to an island somewhere, but due to budgets and time limits they really only ever went to see their families on vacations, which, yeah. Maybe it’s all boring, or maybe she doesn’t know the half of it, maybe she’s been in denial about what’s been going on in her relationship the whole time, maybe the whole time it’s been a story of quietly seething resentment. Do you want to hear about how many times they never fought, how they never really fought at all until after it was over? Do you want to hear about the fights that happened after? Because there were a whole bunch of those.