“You’re the one with the noise phobia, you’re the one who works from eight in the morning to 7 at night straight,” he said, ire rising. “You talk so loud on the phone I hear every word you say. I work all hours of the day and night. You want me to rent an office and drag my computer and guitar back and forth to appease your phobia when we have enough trouble paying for this place?”
“If you stayed in your office the whole day, it wouldn’t be a problem,” she said.
“I don’t want to be a fucking prisoner in my office. That’s why I don’t wear a suit and punch a clock. And the pleasure of working at home is to work at home.”
“I’m not selling the house. You have to make more money. You’re not trying hard enough to get a job. Forget about the stupid music and get a job. You could work for an advertising agency or …”
“Maybe you have to make more money,” he said, and closed himself in his office, picked up his guitar. He played a progression of minor chords, it was plaintive but it made him feel better.
“If you retool, retool in a way that can still excite yourself, have some passion,” a rabbi counselled in a New York Times column.
Amen. Evan had lost his job and retooled. He took on music and devoted more time to the theatre and their business, which, when allowed to, he enjoyed. And he was writing what he wanted to write, essays and journalism. He enjoyed his new self, had passion for what he was doing but that was jacking up Annie’s various disorders.
Narcissism had become the media’s disease du jour. There were stories everywhere of the wreckage wrought by narcissists. They were right in Evan’s wheelhouse. The therapist had added pathological to Annie’s form of narcissism. Enjoying life, wasn’t that the object of the game? But for the narcissist he slept with, the only one with the right to enjoy the journey was her. Her new task was to make sure he didn’t have too good a time and when he did she had to browbeat him into submission.
He climbed the stairs and got into bed beside her but stayed on his side of the queen size. She moved over and put her arm around him. But he didn’t put his hand behind him and leave it on her thigh as he normally did.
“Promise me you’ll never let me go,” she said.
“I promise,” he said.
He tried to find a fantasy that would put him to sleep. He couldn’t. He slipped out of bed, got dressed, and got on the highway but not before stopping at the drug store. He would see the dawn this day, hear the first birds. And he would be happy.
He was on the back porch of the cottage he was housesitting in the Laurentians with his old friend Robert who had come to visit for a few days. They’d known each other for 35 years, since they both worked at the Gazette in their 20s. They had been indulging in a little scotch and a little hash and enjoying the cool breeze blowing off the river just a hundred feet from the house. It was near midnight.
“I think you’re amazing,” Robert said.
“Dreaming about my dick, again?” Evan said.
“You should be dreaming about my dick, you bastard! Fuck, you wrote yourself into the theatre, you taught yourself to play guitar and you got a fucking recording contract. Newspaper stories. You wrote movies. You’re incredible. Really. Here’s to you, man. I always admired you.”
“Thanks, Bob, but why can’t I make a buck?”
“‘Cause the world’s a fucked up place.”
“Why am I so fucking unhappy? Why do I let Annie curdle my blood?”
“‘Cause you’re fucked up. My friend Brian went out with her about ten-twelve years ago.”
“You never told me. Why’d he stop seeing her?”
“‘Cause she’s fucking crazy.”
“Now you tell me?”
“Would you have listened to me?”
“No.”
“You’re fucking crazy too, but I still admire you.”
She ran most mornings in a class for triathletes, a solid hour of demanding work, out of bed 6 a.m. on the coldest mornings.
Then there was the dark roast espresso obsession, the only bean that would do, sold at only one store, followed by the “Haven’t had my bowel movement” obsession. This was followed by an obsessive workday, broken up by a 7-minute lunch of thin soup eaten from the pot while she stood at the stove.
There were breaks to plant or rake or pick at the garden, time off for washing and hanging clothes.
She might take a few minutes to glance at the papers piled hundreds of pages high on the kitchen table. Somehow by the time he came down from his shower, the sections he read — business, sports — were dispatched to the green box. He ranted about it, he laughed about it, he gently inquired about it, but she couldn’t help it. It was an obsession. If it didn’t interest her, it didn’t matter. Then she started to dig through the recycling bin to find the discarded sections for him and he would tell her to forget it. Eight years in and he still couldn’t read sports or business.
He loved food. To her it was only a wine-delivery system.
“I only eat when I have to,” she said. “It wastes time.” He lost count of the afternoons he had to fetch her orange juice after her blood sugar collapsed and she fell onto the sofa, unable to move.
“How could a smart woman be so dumb?” he thought.
He usually stopped working at around 4 and pondered dinner. Then walked to Mont Royal to shop for it. It was a favourite time of day. That night was half a stuffed Cornish hen with roast potatoes and steamed vegetables. He even added a few roasted red peppers for a shot of colour, arranged it all as handsomely as he could and slid the plate in front of her. Annie went nuts. She picked it up and ran into the kitchen, her eyes wide with panic.
“It’s too much, it’s too much, I can’t eat all that,” she said, venom in her voice, and then started tearing at the half of the tiny hen with her fork and ripping it apart and sliding pieces of it into the roasting pan. The vegetables were divided and also pushed into the pot of water from whence they came.
“It’s too much,” she said again and again. “It’s a waste.”
“It’s half a Cornish hen,” Evan said, bewildered. “That’s barely enough to feed a person.”
“You always make too much food. I can’t eat all that. It’s way too much.” She was spitting and anxious and near trembling. She gulped her wine.
He looked at her plate and saw the devastation. It had been a pretty plate, the start of what could’ve been a nice meal. He had seen her at dinner parties eat human-size portions without complaint. Certainly without attendant tantrums. She could control her compulsions when she wanted. When she was with him, she just didn’t bother. He told himself he would never make a meal like that for her again. And didn’t.
But there were countless table obsessions. They ate the same salad dressing that she made every day, year after year until he said no more.
“Everyone loves my salad dressing,” she shouted. “You’re the only one who complains.”
“I’m the only one who eats every day of his life.”
She wouldn’t sit down until the table was perfect. Candles, cheese plate with a little fruit, place mats, cloth napkins, wine glasses, salad bowl and dressing. The ritual table-setting compulsion was more important than the meal.
“Annie, dinner in 20 minutes,” he would call to her.
“Ok.”
“Annie, dinner in 10.”
“Kay.”
But when he served the meal she was not at the table. She had to fiddle with the table setting or bustle in the kitchen, frantically cleaning as the food chilled or she had to use the washroom. At first he would wait for her but in the end, he began the meal alone. Dinner frightened her.
In his calmer moments, during periods of grace and accommodation, he would rationalize and say the beautiful table, the well-appointed house was the price he was willing to pay for the eccentricities that provided it. He would start most meals alone and have no say over anything in the house but he would have a pretty place to live and a beautiful table at wh
ich to sit. Didn’t lots of men leave the decorating to the wives? Wasn’t that kind of sexist stereotyping? When he pressed for some say in his environment, didn’t Annie tell him he had no taste? Didn’t trying to assume some control over anything she cared about result in diminishment?
He wasn’t sure if he appreciated the trade-off but then wasn’t that what marriage was about, compromise? During less charitable times, it seemed he was doing all the compromising.
“I love beauty,” she would say time and again, so pictures were hung on closet door handles or over light switches.
“I’m living with a goof,” he’d say, as he removed a painting to get to a closet. And some days he’d find it amusing or simply tolerable. But the stress of the obsessions were mounting, tolerance sinking. “Is this how I’m going to spend the rest of my life? Waiting for the next shoe to drop and there are so many fucking shoes.”
They were trying out therapy. Facing each other in armchairs, the therapist watching them. Annie had thought this was the panacea. A therapist would set him right.
“I don’t remember half of what I say but he remembers everything and then he embellishes everything so it sounds so negative,” she told her.
“But if you don’t remember what you say, how do you know he embellishes?” the therapist asked.
In the car Annie said the therapist had a thing for him.
He did remember most of what she said, unfortunately, and he chewed on it way too long. The wounds festered. And often he roared back when a more suitable tone might have restrained the inevitable conflagration.
“You have anger issues, too,” Annie said.
“When you insult me today I’m not only reacting to today’s shot, I’m reacting to the hundred shots that preceded it. They have a context and that context is slapping and punching and continual verbal abuse and insult and bullshit.”
“You’re too sensitive. Everything I say is not abuse.”
“I was verbally abused as a kid,” he said, lowering his voice, trying to reach her soft spot. He spoke tenderly. “Annie, I’d like to think the one person that will not abuse me is my partner. And because I love you, your abuse is traitorous. It’s like you’re stabbing me in the back. You’re the one person I should be able to count on to support me and accept me.”
“So I should just blindly agree with everything you say? And everything you do. You a god or …”
“That’s not what I said. I said abuse and insult from you cut deep because I love you.”
“I didn’t think I was so bad,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’ll try to stop. I will. I love you.”
The therapist had said if he didn’t stop accommodating, he’d get depressed and angry. Too late.
He realized he was in deep trouble when he took a trip to Cuba. He needed to get away. From work, from Annie. His friends knew a guy on the island and set him up so he could spend a few days in Havana and a few days in a dirt-cheap resort for Cubans, a few miles out of town at $20 a night, breakfast included. On a beach. But it wasn’t what it appeared to be.
He was hit on continually by hookers and guys selling hookers and taxis and cigars and the salsa music at the pool started at 10 a.m. and there was no place to unwind except in his little room with the harsh overhead light. At the beach a family tried to pimp their daughter to him. Outside his stark room, a group of young Chinese had commandeered all the chairs and the volleyball net and dried their clothes on them every day, all day. His view was that of a laundry. He had left town in part to get away from Annie and in a couple of days he missed her more than anything. It was crazy. The tropics was party central and he could have any woman he wanted for 20 bucks but he kept saying no. He sent Annie e-mails whenever he could, waiting for her replies desperately. He pondered his sanity. She was counting his return in “do dos.”
“Three more do dos and you’ll be back.”
There was his conundrum. He needed to get away from her but life without her was hell. Since phone calls from Cuba seemed impossible, it made him crazier. He was an addict going cold turkey. He drank cheap rum in his room, hiding from the pounding salsa, the hookers, the pimps, the players, the drying laundry and the families of feral cats that haunted the grounds and hissed at his door when they smelled food.
He found salvation at the airport where he was met by jackhammers. But there was a pharmacy. He asked in his broken Spanish if the pharmacist had anything for nerves. His were shot.
“I have Valium,” she said.
Valium without a prescription? He smiled. This was paradise after all. She sold him 20 for a few pennies. He took four and, for the first time in weeks, relaxed.
Annie shone at dinner parties and it became one of the rare times he still appreciated her or liked to listen to her. He would watch her perform at table and yes indeed — her madness was selective.
He planned and executed most of the dinners; they were a way to bring some life to the house and break the monotony of work and worry. He planned the menu, made the phone calls — “You know I don’t like calling people, you call them” — did most of the shopping — “I have too much work to do” — and the cooking.
The first appetizer was immutable — stress. She’d witness the shopping bags brimming and the fridge overflowing and panic.
“There’s way too much. You bought way too much food. It’s all going to go to waste. We’ll just throw it all out.”
This was a familiar mantra and he had learned to ignore it.
By the night of the dinner she would be running from the guests to oversee the food preparation and the panic would set in again as she saw the plates he was preparing.
She started tearing lettuce leaves and putting them on little plates.
“Why are you doing that?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said and dropped the lettuce.
“Get out,” he said with a smile. “Go keep our guests company.”
In truth, he liked the people over but he preferred the busyness of the kitchen to the talk of the living room. She went to leave, but stopped at the two baguettes sitting on the wine rack on the counter. His extravagant purchase of two baguettes instead of one was more cause for anxiety.
“We’re just going to throw it out.”
Over dinner he asked Stan: “How many baguettes you buy when you have people for dinner? One or two? Annie says I’m wasting bread if I buy two.”
“I always buy two,” he said. “Besides, who gives a shit? They’re only two bucks. Feed them to the birds.”
When everyone went home and Annie had reverted to her secret self, sipping another glass of wine and madly scrubbing and scouring and washing and rearranging because they couldn’t go to bed until the house was pristine, she said: “Thanks for embarrassing me.” Her fears about too much bread had been aired and she was embarrassed at being perceived as cheap.
Evan kept telling himself he was not going to wear her obsessions that defined much of the relationship. But he wondered if when a relationship is toxic, diseased, you go into the same denial one exhibits when cursed with cancer. It’s not really happening, I can beat it.
They were in Madrid for the book they were thinking of doing: “Why not do it together?” she had said. “You’re a good writer and fast and we can be together and I won’t have to spend all my time alone dragging my ass from one hotel to another. It’ll be fun.” Plus they could write it in English since it was a larger market and maybe they could make a few bucks.
The distributor had paid for the airfare and hotel. But Annie insisted they take subways or walk, taxis were too expensive.
“Annie, why the fuck do I want to fly overseas to travel underground? I want to see the damn city. We’ll take a cab.”
“We can’t afford it,” she bristled. “We need to take the subway.” They started to bicker and, as always, Evan waved the white flag. It was too exhausting. And they had to spend the first day walking all over town trying to find the right black coffee bean for her morning
fix. She didn’t like the coffee in the city’s two million cafés and needed to be home to drink her coffee and wait for her bowels to get going. Evan dragged his aching back across town from coffee retailer to coffee retailer trying to find the bean that would make her mornings flow. His back nagged but accommodating another obsession was the price of love. On some trips they had to drag an extra suitcase around with a coffeepot and filters and beans to hotel rooms so she could have coffee and wait for the call of nature in the comfort of the room. He would be expected to leave so she could evacuate privately. In Madrid, he found a more than hospitable waitress at the café on the corner and the mornings when Annie was perched on the toilet in the little hotel room, his joking with the waitress as they tried to learn each other’s language was the best part of the trip.
The card read: “I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?” It was his birthday and she had rushed into the house, face glowing, and handed him a card. They hugged and kissed and were happy. His niece planned an engagement party and they prepared guest lists. They had never been happier. It was going to work out forever.
Evan asked his 22-year-old niece, the repository of the world’s knowledge: “Niece, I don’t have money for gold or silver or diamonds or sapphires, what should I get her?”
“Write her a song,” she said. So he did. He called it Baby’s Arms and it rocked and he was going to play it in front of a house full of people, something he had never done before. His first real performance.
I feared the future, I mourned the past
But it blew away in a flash
I got time by the tail
In my baby’s arms
Here the weather never change
And all my worries are out of range
The light never fades
In my baby’s arms.
He played the song at the party, sweat soaking his shirt, heart pounding, thinking: “You’re making an idiot of yourself,” and everyone cheered and Annie hugged him. Their life had turned a corner and he could see they would make it. They were in love and forever was in sight.
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