Page 8 of Such a Good Couple
‘Don’t read the press,’ Eva Dreyfus (yes, wife ofthatdirector and the only real friend Maggie had made since she and Fionn moved to LA) had advised sagely.
Impossible.
‘Don’t compare yourself to the actresses.’
Impossible.
‘Ignore the rumours or, better yet, don’t evenhearthe rumours.’
Luckily for Maggie, Fionn hadn’t hit the stage of a star’s ascent when the rumours tended to begin. He probably had a couple more years until his ‘golden boy’ status would sour and mutterings about affairs and substances would kick off.
Maggie crossed the palatial bedroom, shedding her white button-down pyjamas (sourced for her by Sylvia, the stylist-slash-personal-shopper the whole family used).
Her room overlooked its own sectioned-off area of the property, complete with outdoor bath and trailing begonias. Despite the slightly terrarium effect of her bedroom’s design, this patio space was totally private. What wasnotprivate was the bloody en suite shower, which was basicallyinthe bedroom with them. The slatted floor-to-ceiling screen of imported European white ash that vaguely partitioned it off did nothing.
It was such an LA thing to do – have a wide-open shower so you could have a fecking audience in the bed watching you lather up. LA people worked so hard on their bodies, it kind of tracked that they’d want to have them on view at every available moment. Maggie showered in the guest room when Fionn wasin town. She was forty-two – she wanted to soap her various puckered lumps and crevices in peace. She turned on the shower and stepped under the water, grateful to drown out thoughts of what it said about her marriage that she had taken to hiding her body from her husband.
Over the last five years, Maggie had made something of an anthropological study of celebrity marriages. Not an altogether healthy activity according to Maggie’s long-suffering personal trainer, Britney, who, quite against Maggie’s will, had also taken on the role of therapist since Maggie didn’t have one (considered the height of eccentricity in LA).
The average lifespan of a celebrity marriage according to one study (carried out by a divorce firm, natch) was seven and a half years. She and Fionn had long outlasted that already. Next month, on the 17th of August, they’d be celebrating eighteen years of marriage.Eighteen years.Though, come to think of it, they might not even be on the same landmass for it; she’d need to check the schedule.
Their elderly marriage more than doubled this gloomy statistic, but Maggie still fretted: did the clock start at the beginning of the relationship or at the beginning of the fame? Because in that case … she only had a couple of years left. Fionn’s big break had been slow in coming. He’d been thirty-nine when he was, at last, able to give up his side gig as a waiter.
At leasthisbig break had shown up. Maggie tried to focus on lathering her shoulder-length dark hair and swallowed the regret that could crowd in on her at the slightest thought or mention of her own dormant (extinct?) ambitions. Her mind strayed to the half dozen or so abandoned documents on her laptop. Scraps of scripts. Notes on the ideas that prodded at her even after a year away from theatre turned into two and then eventually into what felt like a defeated sort of retirement.
‘You should go back to writing, Maggie! You have so muchtalent,’ Fionn often tried to encourage her. This latest bit of coaxing happened only a few months before as they’d watched the live announcement of the Tony Awards nominations together. The Tony Awards were the biggest theatre awards in the world and both of them had always tuned in. It was their version of being sports fans; Maggie loved rooting for the shows she’d seen and loved.
‘I’m too long out of it,’ she’d tossed back curtly, hoping to shut down the conversation. He meant well, of course, but more and more his well-meaning words just served to underscore how far from her old self she’d drifted. ‘Anyway, I’ve forgotten all about the hero’s journey! Something something quest, something something descent.’ She tried to sound jokey, while biting back the urge to point out that if she started back down the theatre road, things would change a lot in their family.
Was there room for two big careers in a marriage? She often looked at the paired-off A-listers at premieres and industry parties and wondered how they did it. After a few years in the orbit of these people, Maggie had realised that for every John Krasinski and Emily Blunt there were hundreds of Hollywood couples where one lagged behind in the dust trail of the comet that was the other’s career. And let’s face it, it was usually the wife, especially if they had kids.
In Maggie’s mid-thirties she had definitely gained some ground in the London theatre scene. She hadn’t made much money but her shows were favourably reviewed. However her achievements seemed so insignificant compared to Fionn’s. It made more sense to prioritise his dreams.
Theatre directing and playwriting was such a different animal to acting. Was there such a thing as a big break in theatre? Kind of, but nothing compared to making it in Hollywood. When Fionn was cast as the lead in a relatively small Irish TV show, she had just been commissioned by the Abbey Theatre to write anew play but had pressed pause to look after the twins and travel with him while he shot scenes in Ireland and Italy. It was a solid opportunity for Fionn but she hadn’t thought it’d be particularly life-changing. When it aired during the first lockdown of the pandemic, no one could ever have anticipated the global impact.
People everywhere were mesmerised by this quiet, understated drama about a doomed love affair, and quite literally overnight (sometimes clichés are bloody clichés for a reason) Fionn had been catapulted into the stratosphere.
You could be successful in theatre, even famous, but Hollywood didn’t even occupy the same solar system: it was a different galaxy. Maggie had never pressed unpause on that commission; the beginnings of the idea languished on her laptop along with the other false starts of the last five years.
Maggie rinsed her hair as her mind spun into different, equally dreary, territory.
Fionn didn’t refer to the fact that he’d never seen her use the tits-out, bits-out washing area.He probably knows why, she thought darkly. He couldn’t have not noticed the huge disparity in attractiveness that had developed between them ever since 80 per cent of his job had become staying rock hard and jacked up to feck. There was a gym in all the homes they owned (LA, London and Dublin) and all the homes they rented (New York, Paris, Saint-Tropez). Fionn used his gym-time to run lines with his assistant Brody and watch movies.
Maggie cleansed her face with the $400 gel Eva swore by and made a concerted effort to think about the days ahead.
In their twenties, their gang had always gone on holidays together, but they had been camping trips or music festivals mostly. They did the odd package holiday, money permitting. They were broke but it was a normal level of broke for their age.
In their early thirties, with slightly better jobs, they’d graduated to Airbnbs down the country at home in Ireland.
But for the last few years, Maggie and Fionn insisted on paying for everything on these twice-yearly trips with their friends because it had just gotten to the point where it was insane not to.
It was mad for them all to go to Sherkin Island and be piling into an Airbnb just a fraction of the size of one of Fionn and Maggie’s actual homes when Fionn and Maggie had the means to rent out the entire island, never mind the Airbnb.
After a lot of awkward cajoling, their friends had finally agreed to accept this. But just because they’d come to an agreement didn’t mean it felt entirely normal. Maggie knew that when they all converged on Boston later that night, there’d be some initial awkwardness as the first wave of extravagance hit her friends. The first millionaire moment would no doubt be the yacht that had been chartered to bring them all across to Provincetown. Maggie had implored Brody to find something reasonably restrained.
Just thinking of the lavishness made Maggie cringe as she adjusted the temperature of the shower. Still, she’d come to a place where fighting it seemed pointless. Why pretend that they were who they used to be? Sure, she’dtryand be her normal self with Clara and Annie and Conor and Ollie; they needn’t know that in the lead-up to the holiday, her self-care consultant Antonia had created a timetable of treatments – Botox, filler, peels, laser, transfusions, enemas. Maggie, on a sort of autopilot, just made her way to the various salons as dictated by the appointments in her calendar.
Maggie’s friends also wouldn’t know that Maggie wasn’t even packing a bag. She’d bring her Kindle and phone and charger in her handbag but Sylvia had already purchased and arranged the family’s holiday clothes, to be sent ahead. While her friends unpacked that night, Maggie would just open the garment bags hung in her room and check out the outfits Sylvia had puttogether based on the various fashion spreads and Insta outfit posts she’d sent Maggie.
