The Three of Us

by Ore Agbaje-Williams

I have to clarify which person this is. She’s seeing a few different guys and she gives them nicknames rather than calling them by their real names. If I tell you their names you’ll get attached, she says.

She is probably the only person in my life who has never wanted something from me, only for me.

Her father earned the job he has, though—she made a point of telling me that when she explained that she was not rich, even though she is.

I woke up every morning and chose violence. I woke up every morning and chose myself, before everyone else, no matter the consequences.

My husband has a work function coming up, one of those where people bring their spouses and try to figure out who has been lying about how attractive theirs is.

Then she said that honestly men are as stupid as the heterosexual monogamy that forces us to be with them.

We can find that unlucky idiot together. Go on the apps or whatever, find your one true love and do the fairy-tale wedding thing if you must. It doesn’t have to be all, Oh look, the human personification of A4 ruled paper, let me tether myself to him for life.

It may sound like a role and maybe in a way it is, but it’s one that doesn’t involve any acting. In fact it barely involves any effort at all.

I was skeptical about anyone who expressed interest in me, mostly because Temi always reminded me that none of them were good enough for me, and also because they weren’t.

Ever since I’d known her, Temi said that men were not part of her plan. They are too weak to survive the inevitable apocalypse, so there was no reason to engage with them in any substantive way, she said when I asked her to explain what she meant.

Men are like those pans that say non-stick and then you fry one egg and the whole pan is ruined, she said once.

She shrugs, unconvinced. Why do you even want a baby? Why not. It’s not like I’ll have to take care of it anyway. His mother will move in, even though I have explicitly requested that she doesn’t, and she’ll do everything for me.

I understand your whole wanting boys/men/males thing, I do, but husbands want wives and wives are a different species to single women. Single women are concerned only with themselves and get to eat dinner and put on weight and lose it whenever they want. Having a long-term boyfriend or a husband is like having another set of parents. Ew. No, not like that, obviously, but it’s just one more person who wants a piece of you. A piece of your time, a piece of your money, a piece of your body when eventually they are ready to breed and stick you with the children all day. She patted my hand. One day, it will make sense.

She always references the Kardashians when she thinks I’m being irrationally annoyed about something, and her quoting them irritates me more because (a) she’s quoting the Kardashians, (b) she thinks my annoyance is irrational, and (c) her questioning my annoyance makes me question it too.

Kim, there’s people that are dying, I repeat to myself.

I took her apology for what it was, a way to end the conversation and avoid explaining herself, which I also took to mean that she doesn’t always want me to know why she does or says certain things.

Our bedroom is big, bigger than makes sense now that I think about it—even though my wife always thought it was too big, and mentioned it to me multiple times when we were discussing it with the architect.

Wealth will either be hated or admired depending on how it’s presented, and although I am clearly not a poor person, there are levels of obnoxious wealth that make me cautious about how I express or communicate mine.

I believe that women should have equal opportunities to men, equal pay and rights, free tampons—all of that stuff. Equally, I am all for being the breadwinner, and I am more than happy to be the only person in the marriage who works.

A sad, pathetic pursuit that involves frivolous relations and retellings of stories about dates (I have overheard dozens of them) that I am one hundred percent certain have been embellished to make her unfortunate little life seem more interesting than it actually is.

I quoted the Kardashians three times like a prayer and then resolved to move past the situation for my own sanity and to avoid prison.

I hate a lot of things about my wife’s friend, but the thing I hate most is that, more and more, she makes me look twice at my wife.

Then her friend will look at me, smile like someone who’s just fired you but used the phrase “a mutual parting of ways,” and sip whatever happens to be in her hand.

All the surfaces in our house will be perfectly un-arousing, no one will have sex on them, ever. In fact our children will remain chaste until marriage, and once they’re married they’ll only ever have sex in their own beds and not in other people’s houses.

But I could tell she had told her friend about it, because the next time she came over and my wife wasn’t in the room, she raised her glass and winked at me.

I truly believe that if I decided to, I could make anyone like me. I have a talent for getting people to believe anything I say. I have read numerous highly regarded journals that have gathered scientific data to prove that men are evidence of an anatomical mistake.

Men are instruments, not partners. Their presumed superiority over women throughout history has made them complacent and stopped them from adequately evolving, and so now they are no longer fit for long-term use. They serve a purpose and then they expire, and I need the excitement of new shiny things at least once a month, if not every two weeks.

But our friendship is sacred and important, and I have to hold out hope that she’s still in there, that she just needs a little reminding.

I will commend him for one thing, and that’s that he went to the effort of forgetting my order, a move I would have made if I had not yet gone through puberty. But for him, for someone of his mental capabilities, it is an achievement. For maybe fifteen seconds, I respect him.

It was difficult to see my friend, this wise and beautiful woman, fall in love—or something adjacent to that—with this . . . person, without questioning whether her goals—which we once shared—had changed.

The reasoning for wanting to have a child evades me. Why would you willingly invite an alien being that sucks the life from you into your body, house it for months, then once it has violently ejected itself from your body, continue to support it for at least eighteen more years? Why would you want to shoulder the emotional burden of another person and have to teach them how the world works? When you could just get a dog and be done with it?

The whole thing is like a weird little transaction where my card always gets declined and his has no credit limit.

So I was of course disappointed when my friend/sister/partner/rib/extension-of-self told me that she was going to go on a date with the human equivalent of a Bic pen.

It’s important that her husband believes this moment doesn’t bother me, because it is his life’s work to do so.

She is realizing that I know there are two kinds of intimacy in her life, and I know exactly where she has ranked ours.

Doubt and truth are so close that it’s sometimes impossible to tell them apart.

In these moments of fragility I can tell that he is wondering who to believe—the woman who always says what she thinks, or the woman who rarely says anything at all.