The End of Romance

By Paul Nguyen

Lena thought she was going to die. Now she's turning her love triangle into a polyamorous relationship and she is not ready.

When Lena was diagnosed with, what was meant to be, terminal cancer, she knew there was one person she had to reach out to before it was too late: Andy, the love her of life and the one that got away.

Sadly, she survived. Worse still, her partner, Casey, found the letter, leaving him confused and heartbroken. 

For Andy, this was exactly what he needed. His marriage to Katherine was in a death spiral and this was the sign he was waiting for. 

However, neither Casey nor Katherine were ready to give up. Now, the four of them have to figure out how to love each other while hating each other, all while navigating the complicated politics of a polyamorous relationship without a self-help book in sight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Nguyen
• Release date: Mar 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393542902

Paul Nguyen

Paul Nguyen is a doctor who never wanted to be a doctor, but a writer of stories about people who make stupid, but understandable, choices. This is his first completed novel.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The introduction

Lena

I’ve always been miserable. A Daria with clinical depression. A stormy Saturday afternoon in the suburbs. A Dance without a date.

My friends and ex-boyfriends, of which there have been a surprising number considering my dour demeanour, have all commented on it at one point or another: my relentless negativity. Initially, they find it charming; hilarious, even. The sarcasm, the universal hatred of almost everyone and everything and the vicious and scathing critiques machine-gunned with wild abandon.  However, as it is with sugar and reality television, too much can become unbearable. What starts out as witty and biting suddenly becomes bitter and childish and, in no time at all, the relationship has been poisoned by the very thing it was initially fuelled by.

So the day I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer was a surprisingly unemotional kind of day. Then again, when your pessimism is so pervasive you are genuinely incapable of a positive thought, I wasn’t particularly surprised.

Casey, on the other hand, was distraught. Actually, distraught doesn’t quite cover it. He was a hurricane of tears, wailing and expletives directed at the universe. The GP looked at me in surprise, I think more at my under-reaction than at Casey’s overreaction, so I shrugged and gave him a what-do-you-expect look.

We left the GP’s office hand-in-hand, Casey gripping my hand tightly, and I stared out into the grey Melbourne sky and thought, Crap, it’s going to rain today. I knew I shouldn’t have hung the washing outside. I got behind the wheel, Casey’s vision blurry with tears and rendering him incapable of driving, and we had a wonderfully awkward and silent car ride home.

As we pulled into our driveway, Casey turned to me and asked, How are you?

You know, fine.

Fine?

I turned to him and stared with incredulity. What do you want me to say?

I want you to be honest.

I am being honest. I’m just not feeling how you think I should feel.

How can you possibly be fine with all this? Did you hear what the doctor said about the survival rate of pancreatic cancer?

7.7%. I was there too, you know.

His hands were tense claws, waving about in exasperation. How can you hear that and not feel terrified?

How the hell does terror help me? Does it change anything? Does it make that number any bigger? Fuck. No. So why bother spending any emotion on it?

Because it’s the human thing to do. He recoiled in regret. I’m sorry that...

Oh please, that response came too easily. You’re not sorry. For Christ’s sake, I’m dying. Why hold back now? I stormed out of the car and slammed the door behind me. As he followed suit, I turned and said, You know what? I am feeling something now. Anger. At you, I said, stabbing my finger in his direction. For telling me how I should feel. I’m the one who is fucking dying. Who the fuck are you tell me how I should react to my now very impending death?

I fumbled with the keys, wanting desperately to kick the front door down to save myself the agony of being in this moment for any longer. Instead, I did what I do best. Run away.

Fuck this. I’m going for a drive. I huffily stomped my way back to the car and drove off without waiting for a response. I sped backwards out of the driveway, putting any and all pedestrians at risk, before screeching down the road to anywhere but there.

My heart was a prize boxer and my chest a hapless opponent, punching and pounding it with jabs and hooks. My breathing was shallow and unsatisfying. It only took a few moments for my mind to settle from harsh static to a quiet hum, but for the next few hours I drove, taking turns left and right without any idea where I was going.

I finally had to stop at a petrol station off the freeway, which housed a McDonalds within, to refuel both myself and my car. The other thing I do well is eat my feelings. When I’m happy, I celebrate with food. When I’m depressed, I wallow with food. When I’m anxious... you get the idea. Food didn’t judge me. It didn’t tell me how to be. All it did was give me what I needed when I needed it and if I didn’t want it, I could simply reject it and move on. It’s all about the control.

I sat on a stool at the bench for lonely people, staring out the window at the cars entering the lot, gorging on a large McChicken meal and a large chocolate thickshake, my depressive meal of choice, and I let the noise surround me. Because noise drowned out the thoughts. Thoughts of loss, thoughts of death and, it dawned on me as I finished off my last chip, thoughts of regret. So many regrets. So many things I didn’t do. So many barbed insults undelivered. So many people I never got a chance to tell that I hated them. And then his name popped into my head: Russell. A name I hadn’t thought of for so long, but one that brought me an instant sense of pleasure and joy.

Russell.

I missed him.

––––––––

Anderson

I had no fucking idea what she was talking about.

I kept looking at her and I knew her mouth was moving, but all I got were letters and noises. I’m pretty sure she was speaking English, but I wasn’t sure.

Katherine wanted to come see her. She did all the Googling and checked out the forums and this was the best fertility specialist in Melbourne. She was pricey, and I mean pricey, but if it made Katherine feel better about our shitty situation, then every dollar would be worth it.

We’d been trying to have a kid for years. Day one of Project Pop ‘Em Out was our wedding night, but the thing about sex is that when you stop doing it for pleasure and start doing it cause you have to, the fun kinda gets sucked out of it. Sucking should be one of the best parts. After a while, the whole thing became like work: there was a schedule, things had to be done efficiently and you had to come on time. And like work, when it was all over, you had a smoko and felt glad that it was over for another day.

We gave it time. We took a break. Everyone said that stress doesn’t help with getting knocked up, so we tried to make it fun. At least, at the beginning we did. Eventually, Katherine fell into the Internet Black Hole and started reading blogs about how to get pregnant. Soon, every day was an experiment in baby making – herbs and sex positions and we even resorted to prayer. All it gave us was rug-burnt knees and diarrhoea.

Katherine really wanted to do it natural. It drove her crazy that she was doing all the right things and it wasn’t getting us anywhere. She beat herself up about it all the time and it made her sadder and sadder. She started sleeping more, ate less and less and just stopped loving life in general. It took a lot of convincing, but I managed to get her to go see our GP and talk about options. Luckily, we have a good one and the three of us talked for nearly forty minutes before Katherine felt comfortable enough to see a specialist.

And here we are. Three hundred dollars later, the gist of it is that Katherine is going to need to have hormone injections and, if that doesn’t work, all we have left is IVF. What made it worse was that we found out the problem: Katherine wasn’t making eggs properly. I would’ve been okay if it were me and my junk which was the problem. God knows I’ve punished my body enough with the dope and booze and one night stands. It’s amazing I’ve never had an STI before. But here was Katherine, this pure, perfect woman who’d never had sex before we got married, who looked after herself in every way, and her body betrayed her. Her body stopped her from having the thing she wanted the most.

Life is just shit sometimes.

We left the office hand in hand. I mean, she was sad before, but fuck was she sad now. I could see the colour wash out of her face, which is saying something because she was already pretty pale. She looked like she’d been kicked in the guts. In her hand, she held the prescription for the injections. More money we had to sink into this baby. She kept looking down at her feet, her long red hair falling over her face and covering up what I knew were tearing-up eyes.

You alright? I asked, squeezing her hand a little.

She mumbled something non-committal.

There was nothing left to say, so I dragged her defeated body back to the car and we drove home in silence.

When we got home, she trudged up the stairs and closed the bedroom door behind her. She wasn’t angry. She just wanted to be alone. At least, that’s what I thought was happening.

I didn’t know what to do with myself.

I stood in the hallway like a dumb arse for I don’t know how long. I hadn’t even put down my car keys yet; I looked at them sitting in the palm of my hand and decided to have some scream-singing time.

I got in the car, hooked up my phone through the Bluetooth and found my, Get These Feelings Out of Me playlist. I turned up the sound and started driving. It was full of belters: Whitesnake, Bon Jovi, AC/DC, Foo Fighters, The Killers. I used this list whenever I felt like I was trapped, like I had shoved my feelings down so hard that I’d clogged my mental plumbing. Being able to scream out some tunes, not to mention the steering wheel drumming and the head banging, made me feel free.

The family homes and shopping centres started to give way to townhouses, Victorian terraces and, by the end of my drive, skyscraping apartments. Without meaning to, I’d ended up on St. Kilda Road. I decided to pull into one of the roads that weaved in and around the Botanical Gardens and found a parking spot. The mild spring weather had brought out all the runners, ear buds in place and iPhones in armbands, so they didn’t notice me as I walked along the path, kicking the dirt up with my boots.

I kept thinking about fairness. It didn’t feel fair. None of it felt fair. It definitely wasn’t fair on Katherine. She didn’t deserve to suffer my bad fortune. My whole life, it’s like a storm cloud just hovered over my head all the time, pelting everyone around me with rain and lightning. I know I wasn’t a good kid. I was rowdy and angry and there wasn’t anyone I wouldn’t piss of just for the fun of it. I got dealt a shit hand in life and I made it everyone else’s problem. It’s a wonder anyone stuck around.

My foster parents. My mates. Katherine.

But once I was out on my own, I tried. I mean, fuck me, I tried to be a good guy. I was the guy who would always help you move house or who would shout you a beer. I was the guy who stood up for you and always told you that you were awesome. But man, that cloud. No matter how good I was, something shit always happened. I stood up for you in a fight? I got punched in the face. I helped you move house? You broke your ankle trying to move a couch down the stairs. I tried to give you a baby? The one thing you’ve wanted more than anything in your whole life? You end up sterile.

I had no idea how long I had been walking for. All I could see what the sun sinking down to the horizon and the glare burning my eyes. I looked around me and realised that I didn’t know where the fuck I was. I tried to find something I recognised, but I’d been so caught up in my thoughts that I hadn’t paid attention to anything but the ground and that sure as fuck wasn’t gonna help me.

I decided to just start walking back along the same path, hoping I’d run into my car by accident.

Life doesn’t give a shit about fairness.

––––––––

Casey

I hate hospitals. Even hospital adjacent clinics fill me with dread.

You see, my dad died of bowel cancer when I was about three years old, so I have no real memory of him other than what I’ve been told or what I’ve seen from pictures. Mum used to say that whenever we would visit dad in hospital, like after his bowel operation, I would scream bloody murder until I was fed, fell asleep or left the grounds entirely. It was like I could sense death and the fear of it emanating from the occupants within, like when animals scatter in the forest.

Like any real man, I avoided seeing doctors, because you never see a doctor for a casual chat, do you? Every consultation runs the risk of something awful being found and I decided to favour ignorance over information. I once shat myself in the shower and thought, Eh? What are you gonna do? You’d think I’d know better, what with my genetic lineage and all, but clearly intelligence skipped a generation.

Then it was my mum’s turn to face the dreaded Big C. Or, more accurately, the Big BrCa. Breast cancer. You know the one that you buy pink stuff for once a year to show you care without actually going out of your way to care? That one. I was fourteen when she was diagnosed the first time and after a lumpectomy and a few months of radiotherapy, she had beaten it. She was in remission and was feeling fitter than ever. But have you noticed that when doctors give you cancer stats, they always talk about a five-year survival rate? There’s a reason for that. Once you’ve made it past five years, your chances of living become significantly higher. Any earlier than that and you’re at the mercy of chance.

Chance did not favour us.

At eighteen, she had a recurrence but this one was more aggressive and spread through her body like wildfire, burning everything in its path. A double mastectomy and intensive chemo did nothing but slow it down and after a few months of vomiting, exhaustion and burning limb pain, mum was done. The palliation team was called and reviewed her case, but they needn’t have bothered. Once she gave up, she was gone within a few days.

So when the doctor told us that Lena had pancreatic cancer, the first thing I felt wasn’t grief; it was déjà vu. Followed by something worse: guilt. I felt like somehow I caused it, like I’m emitting some sort of cancer-attracting beacon. I looked over at Lena as we drove home and hated myself for what I had wrought upon her. The tears just started pouring after that. I’ll be the first to admit that it was a bit over the top, but when memories of guilt and grief are involved, the amplification of emotion is somewhat justified.

Her storming off wasn’t much of a surprise. She did this. A lot. My answer to feeling emotionally overwhelmed was to talk to someone or to write it down in my journal. Her answer was to run away. To her credit, and to the credit of our relationship, she always came back. You’d think I would’ve learned after four years of being together that I shouldn’t push her to talk before she was ready, but my psychologist brain always kicked in whenever difficult emotions were involved. It just couldn’t help but try and prod out a feeling.

I went to the study we shared and pulled out a red Moleskine notebook from the bottom drawer of our antique mahogany roll-top desk. I felt no need to secret it away. Lena knew about it and she could’ve read it at any time, but she always said that we each deserved to have private thoughts and private space. I sat down in the leather swivel chair and pulled out a fountain pen from the stationery cup.

I find that the most therapeutic kind of journaling is called stream of consciousness, where you don’t plan your words in advance or try to emulate conversation. You simply write and write and write, disregarding sentence structure, grammar and sometimes even coherence, all with the intention to pull back the layer of emotion that clouds you and find the true meaning beneath all of it. This is what I wrote:

I’m so tired of losing people. I’m exhausted by the idea that somehow I’m bringing on all these cancers and that it’s all my fault and how can it be my fault? I don’t know. I don’t understand why this keeps happening to me because all I want to do is care for people and instead I seem to be hurting them why can’t she just look after herself? Why can’t everyone just look after themselves? Why am I always responsible for their wellbeing. When did I start becoming the carer? I don’t want to be a carer. I don’t want to have to do things for other people because it’s better for them can’t everyone just stay the same? Can’t things be easy and simple and not be lost? I hate change I hate uncertainty I hate that I try so hard and karma gives me the middle finger. I want control. I want to have a plan A plan B plan Z so that I know what to expect, but who ever knows what to expect from life?

And there it was. Control. It’s always about control.

––––––––

Katherine

There was meant to be an order and I followed it every step of the way, just as my mother taught me.   I was chaste and sweet through my schooling years and wait to find a proper man in university.  I took up a course that was both stimulating and promotable (Art History), but nothing I couldn’t give up once the time came to do so. I met a virtuous and kind man through appropriate means (mutual friends at a mutual celebratory event) and we would be wed within  three years and pregnant by the first.

I almost got there. I was so close. All was going to plan. Anderson was charming, forthright and most importantly, devilishly handsome and I knew we would make a beautiful couple with beautiful babies.  My mother would've been impressed. Then it all fell apart.

I don’t know what went wrong. I did all the right things. I read all the books you’re meant to read, I gave up so many of my gastronomic loves and yet after 2 years of trying I was without success. I didn’t want to go to the doctor. Doctors only ever tell you bad news and I didn’t want to know. I knew deep in my soul that all I had to do was try harder, to want it more and surely it had to happen.  I followed the rules. I did what I was told and yet, I was mired in failure. I only conceded because Anderson insisted.  He recognised my despondency and said that he only wanted to help.

I wish I’d never listened. I wish I had ignored him. I wish I had not done my research and found the one universally beloved fertility specialist in Melbourne. But I found her. She was thorough, compassionate, gentle and most importantly, credentialed. So when it turned out that I was the problem, there was no disputing it. There was no way to put it down to incompetence or dismissiveness. She was undeniably good and, sadly, the facts were undeniably as well.

I understand now the bliss of ignorance. I commend those wise enough to shut out the world for fear of learning about the awful truths that threaten our existence. From an early age, I was taught that being educated is important, but looking educated is easier. I never understood that until now because being educated has left me with nothing but an unmaskable hollow feeling.

Even once we were home and I lay on the bed, emptily staring at the ceiling, I knew I had to wait. Better yet for me, I knew I wouldn’t have to wait long. Anderson tolerated silence poorly, so when I heard the front door close and lock, that was my moment.

A waterfall of tears gushed from my eyes, taking on a black hue as my mascara was caught in the flood. Like a petulant child, I started to scream and kick the bed, cursing God for unfairly afflicting me with infertility. I don’t know how long this went on for. I don’t know what time Anderson came home. I transitioned from screaming to sleeping without interlude. By the time I woke up, it was morning. I was still wearing my clothes from the day before and Anderson’s arm was wrapped around me as I lay on my side.  I was spent.

More to the point, I had no clue how I was to go on knowing that it was my failure that brought us here. The prescription lay upon the floor beside me. It must have still been in my hand when I fell asleep. I knew, logically, that having a baby was not out of reach; that I was not devoid of options. But this was not how it was meant to happen. I was good. I did the right things. I did not deserve this.

Chapter 2

The history

Lena

Casey always says to me that I’ve led a privileged life. He was raised by a single mother, who was a police officer half the time and an exhausted but engaged mother for the rest. Though he spent many a night at his neighbour’s house, never knowing when, or if, his mother would come home, when she was home, she was present. Casey was loved and adored, right up until the day she died of breast cancer when he was eighteen.

He tells me that I should be grateful that I wasn’t abused or abandoned. This is all true. I have never faulted his logic.

And yet.

I hate it when people tell me to be grateful. I know that this is inherently the product of ungratefulness, but just because I don’t have someone else’s problems doesn’t automatically mean that my problems no longer exist or aren’t causing me grief. Sure, I could gain some perspective and, yes, I am not some Jane-Eyre-type tragedy magnet, but I feel how I feel and sometimes I just can’t help it.

It’s like when I was a kid and my mum would insist I finish my food because there are starving children in Africa who don’t get any food. While my youthful guilt and desire for peace drove me