The Modern Age

This is built from a writing exercise we had to do in my Intermediate Fiction class a few weeks ago.  The professor handed out a bunch of wedding announcements from the New York Times and, based on the picture of the couple and the provided information, we had to write the scene in which their marriage crumbled.  I literally got the most pretentious-sounding couple in history, and I knew they looked the type to split up over something stupid on their honeymoon, so I wrote that.

Names have been changed to protect these people I've never met (and to protect myself from a lawsuit).  I don't remember their real names, so I can't Google them to see if they've split up yet.  My money's on yes, but I just hope they're both still happy.

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The Modern Age

The night before they were to leave Saint Tropez, Lauren dug her laptop out of her carry-on bag to check the news.  Three weeks of honeymoon bliss, ignoring the HD TV and limiting yourself to only a few, furtive glances at the cell, could be bad for business.  She logged into her email, skimmed a few notes and memos, but nothing seemed especially important.  No one had posted anything offensive, no scandals to cover up on the main page.  Her temp was doing a good job of holding down such a huge virtual fort—even if she hadn’t gone to Harvard, like Lauren had.

In the next room, Lauren’s husband of two weeks and six days, Brent, was taking a shower.  She could hear him humming something, a jingle she couldn’t place.  Maybe he’d just come up with it.  Maybe he was already working on a new obnoxiously addictive farm game to inflict upon the world.  His work had been kind to him—to them both, since Lauren had become a part of his life—but there were only so many vegetable puns and fertilizer jokes a girl could take.

Lauren closed her email and clicked over to YouTube, her baby.  She hadn’t founded the thing, but sometimes, in her day to day routine as a manager in charge of the company’s PR, she couldn’t help but wonder why she hadn’t.  It seemed simple enough to come up with the idea, to get someone to code it, and then to stab said programmer in the back and take all the profits.  She lined up a few stupid cat videos to wait out the advertisements on the latest Vevo new releases.

With a burst of steam and a flurry of plush white hotel towels, Brent appeared, glistening and dripping and tossing her a smile.  It only occurred to Lauren, as she smiled back on automatic response, that maybe she should have sauntered into the bathroom ten minutes go and joined him there.  She couldn’t even bring herself to ogle him as he dropped his towel and pulled out fresh pajamas from the nearly empty armoire.  Brent would be forty-one next week, which no one would guess from his abs.  But what had seemed like a tiny age discrepancy when they’d first met at that launch party, nearly three years ago, now loomed ahead of twenty-eight-year-old Lauren like a cloaked reaper.  Was that a light at the end of the tunnel, just behind this portent of doom?  Or just the glimmer of sunlight reflecting off Brent’s growing bald spot?

Three weeks—were they already becoming a tired old married couple, using up a lifetime’s worth of sex drive in these foreign ocean, on these mass-produced sheets?  She had a flash of them sitting in a modern apartment in San Francisco in twenty, thirty years, everything cold and chrome and their passion reduced to furtive glances and heavy silences.  How long did it take for love to run its course and lust to fizzle out?

“Any better?” she asked absently, trying for domestic concern.  She wasn’t sure how to broach the subject on her mind, especially since Brent was already so sensitive about his hair.  She paused the music video on her screen and opened a new tab to navigate to her Facebook page.

“Damn sun,” Brent muttered in reply.  As he pulled on boxers and pajama pants, he clarified, “Nah, I’m still fried—ow.”

Lauren tapped in her email address and password, hardly sparing her husband a glance.  “Told you not to fall asleep on the beach.”

“Told you to wake me up when you wanted to leave for lunch,” he shot back.  “I was looking forward to the grilled chicken Panini on chibatta.”

“Over-rated,” Lauren replied.  “The pesto was better.”

“They had pesto today?  With spaghetti or the squiggly pasta?”

“Angel hair; it was the special.  What does it matter?  And what the hell do you mean by ‘squiggly’?”

Brent’s face fell as he eased himself down onto the edge of the mattress, huffing and puffing like a woman in labor.  “That’s my favorite,” he sulked.  “Spaghetti, I mean, not the squiggly pasta.  You know, the twisty ones.”  He tried to draw the shape in the air but gave up.  “Spaghetti is far superior.”

“You’re sure you don’t like lobster best?” Lauren teased, her tone just a little too cruel to be endearing.  She poked her husband’s shoulder and Brent winced away.  She couldn’t help but smirk at his discomfort, the angry red skin already stretched and hardening into a shell across his back.  She could feel the heat of the sun that his skin had soaked up and saved getting thrown back at her now, stronger than the disapproving glare he hadn’t yet mastered.  A few more years of marriage would do it, maybe.

Lauren turned back to her computer and scrolled through the comments on the wedding pictures she’d made sure to post to her wall before they left on their trip.  Each one was better than the next, trying to outdo earlier notes about the bride and groom, and she luxuriated in answering each one, personally, about her dress, her shoes, her hair.  She stretched out across the duvet to fully appreciate her magnificence, leaving Brent to his own devices.  He managed to get to his feet and toddled across the room for his iPhone, probably to check his waiting email notifications.

Half an hour later, when the well wishes had been answered, one by one, and her mother had been reassured that she was having a good time—yes, really—Lauren returned to the Facebook news feed.  She checked her application notifications, specifically, and heaved a weary sigh.  This one had poked her.  That one wanted her to play Tetris.  And there, the most offending of them all, was a waiting message from Brent Kelly, begging her to join Farmville and send him some desperately-needed firewood.

Lauren sat up.  “What the hell is this?”

“What?”  Brent shuffled over, phone still in hand, to read the screen over her shoulder.  “Oh, yeah, just trying to get more people onboard,” he said.  Unconcerned, he looked back down at the possible merger waiting in his inbox.  “We rolled out some updates and I thought you might want to try it out now.”

Lauren turned to face Brent, pushing his phone out of his face and jabbing his bare chest to make her point.  If only he’d fallen asleep on his back earlier that day!  “What did I tell you about Farmville?” she demanded, eyes narrowed.  “I’m not some fourteen-year-old with nothing better to do.  Go ahead and create all the crappy addictions you want, but don’t get me involved.”

He pushed her finger away.  “Oh.  All right.  Because game development is such a juvenile business, not worth your time.”

“You make games where people grow corn and harvest horse crap.”  Lauren crossed her arms over her chest.  “Yeah, it’s juvenile.”

“I forgot how high and mighty you were.  Cats on Roombas are definitely changing the world—excuse me.”

“YouTube defends the rights of people—”

“To post copyrighted material and laugh at skateboarding dogs,” Brent interrupted, giving her a double thumbs-up.  “Got it.  Awesome.  Way to go.”  He turned away to plug his phone back into the wall to charge.

Turning pink with rage, Lauren set her teeth and kneeled on the bed, drawing herself up to full height.  “You’re contributing to childhood obesity!”

“You let people post those stupid videos where you have to get close to the screen and then the creepy screaming lady face shows up and scares the crap out of you!” Brent argued back.  “Tell me that isn’t sending Gen Y into therapy.  Get off your pedestal before you fall and break something.”  His phone chirped and he picked it up again to answer a text, glancing up at Lauren as he typed.  “You’ve got such a problem with me?  Maybe you should’ve married Mark Zuckerberg when you had the chance.  I’m sure you two self-righteous ego-maniacs would have gotten along splendidly.”

“Oh, God, this again?”  Lauren’s voice rose in shrill defense.  “It was one time!  I made out with him once, and that was all.  I threw the kid a bone.”

Brent sneered.  “I bet he even let you on Facebook in its beta stage for that.”

He had, as a matter of fact, and it had sucked.  But Lauren held her tongue on the point.  “At least I didn’t ask for a cut of his tomato crop.”

“In exchange for what?  No one would want anything you have to offer up.”  Brent set his phone down on the bedside table, then knelt beside his monogrammed suitcase to start packing.  “For the record, you haven’t minded the chunk of change my tomato crop has been bringing in these last few years.”

Lauren sat back down on the bed and looked at the ceiling.  “I married Mr. Potato Head.”

Brent paused in his work, clutching a T-shirt in one hand and a mismatched pair of socks in the other.  He exhaled through his teeth before looking back to Lauren.  “You know what?  Maybe my parents were right all along—you are too young for me.”

“You just can’t keep up,” Lauren huffed haughtily in reply.  “Old man.”

Brent stuffed the socks in with a few leftover pairs of underwear and then tugged the shirt on over his sunburn, wincing as he did so.  He bent carefully to pick up his bag, settled it on his shoulder, and turned to face his wife.  “You look like a horse,” he bellowed, before storming out of the room and slamming the door behind him.

Lauren hardly had the time to be offended, as she heard the key card in the door lock a beat later and Brent returned.  He crossed the room, grabbed his forgotten phone, and looked Lauren up and down.  “You still look like a horse,” he said.  “And LonelyGirl15 was stupid.”

“We don’t produce the content,” Lauren shouted back.

“No—you just make sure the crap goes viral.”  Brent paced to the doorway, paused at the closed door to turn back to Lauren, as if to say something, then turned back and opened the door again.  “I’ll text you when we’re back in the States.”

Lauren jumped at the second slamming of the door.  She sat in the silence of the hotel room, deaf to the rolling waves mere steps from their private terrace, ignoring the lazy turning of the ceiling fan overhead.  Eventually, she looked at her computer again and woke it from a light doze to find Facebook still waiting for her.  No little red numbers greeted her, even after she’d refreshed the page twice.  She deleted Brent’s Farmville request.  Then, she changed her relationship status from “married” to “single” and waited for the notifications to pour in.