Scorekeeping

In the beginning, as he remembers it, he didn’t keep score, and although she did keep score, even in the beginning, he didn’t count this against her, since he wasn’t keeping score. But over time it became more difficult not to keep score, or perhaps the score itself became easier to keep. He found himself keeping score automatically, almost without being aware of it, the same way he sometimes counted steps without consciously intending to, or calculated the proper gratuity in his head on the occasions when she paid for dinner — the rare occasions, as he realized once he began keeping score.

Although the scorekeeping became incrementally easier over time — indeed, became like second nature to him — it was never truly easy to keep score, for the simple reason that there were two scorekeepers, not one. Had there been only one scorekeeper, the score would have been whatever that person said it was. But since there were two scorekeepers, the score was compounded. Behind their respective scores lurked the true score, which though unknowable could be vaguely visualized as a pair of fractions jostling against one another, at times multiplying into a sort of super-fraction, a cipher signifying nothing but its own imbalance.

One morning he awoke to the sound of her voice. She was standing a few feet away from him talking to her gardener on speakerphone. Her gardener was saying it was time to winterize her lawn. It was early (earlier for him than for her), and he wished she would go into the bathroom or down the hall to have this conversation. At the same time, he knew that this wasn’t a big deal — nothing worth keeping score of, at least.

Later, much later, during a retrospective period when everything could be understood and nothing changed, he would arrive at several new understandings. He would see that he had in fact been keeping score all along; that in attributing the scorekeeping instinct to her he had notched the first notch in his own tally, proactively and not reactively; that he had been entirely in the wrong; that he was trash and deserved to die alone.

In the early days, though, he fancied himself wholly indifferent to the petty scales of give and take. He gave, but not as much as he should have. He took, but not as much as he should have. And though there were certain things he knew he mustn’t say, certain combinations of words which he knew were fated to spark an argument (or possibly several), these were the very things he inevitably wound up saying. Then the scorecards came out, with the little golf pencils. The leaden tallies crossed and recrossed like swords, while the fractions achieved an unprecedented absurdity, mountains of wrongdoing afloat over petulant zeroes. Mea culpa, he’d say in the end, maybe crying. But the damage was already done.