A/N it's another one of those "inspired by" things, this time by Radiohead. And because Taub needs more love-he's definitely the greatest member of the new team, but he's the most overlooked by us fanficcers.
It's a perfect house, neatly maintained in the pristine suburb of West Windsor. Even with the housing market sliding away, it's still worth an easy three quarters of a million. Four bedrooms, a living room, a family room, a dining room, and a study. Two and a half baths, and a foyer. A perfectly manicured lawn, with shrubbery lining the walkway to the door, and a patch of garden in the back of the quarter acre lot. The only thing that truly differentiates their house from the others on the block that calls itself Meadows of Windsor Hunt is the facade on the front. To the left is a stone fronted place, with a similar layout. Only the master bedroom is on the right instead of the left of the stairs. On the right is a house where the only difference was that the family room was at the bottom of a flight of stairs, and the upstairs hallway overlooked the living room.
All of them essentially the same, with minor superficial differences. And she always liked that. She'd always wanted to be the perfect wife to the perfect husband. And she had the perfect life. She didn't care if there was any real emotion there-she had the perfect doctor as a husband, and she was the housewife who made sure that everything superficial looked superficially perfect. She paid a good lawn care service to make sure that the lawn was absolutely perfect. She was on the Homeowners Association so that everyone else's houses would also be superficially perfect. She'd picked this neighborhood because when they had kids, it was one of the best districts in the state.
Her husband kept her looking superficially perfect, so that nothing would sag or droop and stop her from looking anything but her plasticine best. He worked long hours, and was never home, but she didn't mind. Chris was worth it, if only because of his job. He had the good job that allowed her to style everything she wore to be appropriate. She said the right words in the right order, she went to the right shops, she talked to the right people, she lived in the right place. This wasn't about living life. She had never wanted to live. That wasn't what life was to her. Life was about having everything she needed to be happy-and to her, happy was the perfect polystyrene life. Where everything was fake, just like the breasts Chris gave to his patients, where it didn't matter, because everyone else around her was just as fake.
It was a subtle competition. Who had the nicest house-who had the best fake plants, because real ones had this nasty habit of dying. But the trick was to make sure they had the imitation of life, because when they looked fake, everyone could tell, and then it just looked tacky. And tacky wasn't good. No, the goal was the most realistic looking imitation of life for her, because that was perfection, and perfection made her happy.
And for his part, Chris Taub did everything he was supposed to to keep his wife happy. He worked in a job that didn't challenge him, doing the same thing every day. The same face-lifts, the same boob jobs, but gravity always won out. No matter how many times people tried to defeat nature, and the body getting older, gravity always won, and brought down saggy breasts, wrinkles, and every other body part that could possibly sag would start sagging, leaving him to nip, tuck, and pin them back into where they had been twenty years previously.
He hated it, and he always had. He wanted to be a doctor to be challenged, to find something interesting to do with his life. It was why he cheated. Because it allowed him something real-a real emotion, a real danger, a real life. It got him away from the falsities and the niceties he shared with his neighbors, who were all the same as he was. All of them a facsimile of life, none of them actually living it. He slept with his nurses because it gave him a feeling of being alive, compared to the rest of his broken life. A wife that he loved who didn't love him back-he might as well have been married to one of the Stepford wives.
The same thing every day was wearing him thin, and he was close to his breaking point. He loved his wife, and wanted to make her happy, but it was costing him his own life in the process. And she loved her life, and would do anything to keep it. It was wearing thin on her, but this was what she had wanted to do, this was what she had spent her entire childhood dreaming of. It didn't matter if it was a wearing, trying life, it was the life she had wanted to live. And he had his vices to ignore the wear and tear that this life was giving him.
He couldn't ignore the nagging feeling that he wasn't what his wife had wanted, that he wasn't enough. It was part of the complex of reasons why he cheated. He wanted to be what she wanted, but it was never enough-he tried, dammit, but it never was enough to fit in with her idealized world, where everything was fake, and phony, but perfect. He felt almost like Holden Caulfeild, trapped in a life where everything around him was phony, but he was living it because other people thought it was good. He wanted to be the perfect husband, but his own imperfections were the weak points in the thin veneer that covered their lives, allowing the reality to poke through where neither of them wanted it to.
But his wife wasn't his wife. She was a woman that he said he loved because he was supposed to love her, he'd married her. She was someone every bit as fake as the tree that sat in front of the house, or the perfectly kept shrubs. As fake as every one of the decorations that were supposed to make the house look better. She looked like, and tasted like, and played the part of the doting wife, but it was never enough. He didn't want the same phony reality that she wanted-he wanted something real, something that wasn't just there to play a part.
He wasn't one of the fake plastic evergreens that lined the street-real ones would die, need to be watered, and if it was forgotten about, it would ruin the appearances. He was a man, a living, breathing, person, and he needed more. It was why he cheated-because it was someone alive, someone real, reminding him that not everything was just for show. He wanted reality, not this plasticine facsimile of a life. He always secretly hoped he'd get caught, if only to make everything change.