Unsatisfiable
by Emily Rose

            Perhaps it’s because the sun doesn’t come out. July 3 and the sun hides behind the familiar gray clouds, shrouding our valley in shadows, keeping our skin white as the snow that never falls here, painting our lives gray as the rain that always does. Perhaps it’s his statement again last night that he wants to be a surgeon, the confusion and fear that rises in my heart at these words. If only our roommate weren’t a surgeon, if only I didn’t know what it’s like: lifetimes of allegiance, every hour of the day, all hours of the night, spouses raising children alone, weekends at the hospital, four-a.m. procedures, flying to Europe for the weekend to give talks. Very prestigious. Lots of money. Awards, honors, action, heroics. Fine if that’s what he wants, but what about me? I should have more to do, he says. I should get out of the house, I should make more friends. Also I should make him cookies to take to his team. And it is nice when I do his laundry. I put other words in his mouth and make him demanding and contradicting when it is me, really, who is demanding and contradicting. It is me who makes my life difficult, and no matter what profession he chooses, I will continue to make our lives harder than they have to be.

            If he’s a family doctor I will worry that he’s bored, that there’s not enough money or not enough action, that we can’t travel as much as I want, that he has too much time to make nice with the mothers and the ladies of the city who come to him with their physical ailments, their soft skin and their ample bosoms. If he’s a dermatologist I will pronounce him shallow, accuse him of caring only for money and boats and not being idealistic enough, not even a real doctor, just in it for the wealth and the lifestyle, lacking substance. If he’s a radiologist I will complain he’s becoming boring, sitting alone in a room all day, talking to no one but the janitor and machines. I will worry that the radiation is getting to him, and when he wants to play video games at home I will claim his brain has really dried up, his capacity to interact on a human level totally deteriorated. If he’s an ER doc I will charge that he feeds off adrenaline, feels himself too much a hero due to the fast pace and the excitement. I will wonder if all that energy doesn’t swell up in certain members of his body, and whether—since he has to stay at the hospital for long hours at a time without me—he doesn’t make new friends, new paramours, with his fellow doctors, with nurses, and relieve himself of his sexual urges in broom closets, patients’ rooms, empty offices, like they do in certain TV-doctor dramas. I will get annoyed with his constant retelling at dinner parties of life-or-death procedures he’s performed, of the wild wounds that have come to him to be remedied. I will worry that nothing slow and solid is interesting to him anymore, may claim that it never was, will feel myself getting older, safer, prosaic in comparison to his hospital life, his real life. I will wonder whether he even knows what’s real anymore, and I will consider whether or not I know what’s real but will believe I can control myself. I will think him far more dangerous than my own imagination, this entity central to my existence, over whom I have no control, limited power, questionable understanding. None of the options will be acceptable to me, the unsatisfiable one. Why shouldn’t this man, who has wedded his life to mine, choose an intense and difficult profession? He’s chosen that kind of wife.