I am desperate to see the inside of your house. There is a quality to my curiosity of gawking at a roadside accident, but I don’t care. I feel vaguely like a shitty person for my ability to lie skillfully enough to enter your wife’s domain without blinking, but I don’t care enough to change my behavior. You and I have been sleeping together for nearly two months. I would be hard-pressed to pin down five consecutive minutes that you have not been on my mind. Sometimes, on the precipice of sleep, I fear murmuring your name, like some cheating husband in a B movie. I want to see the coffee cups you drink out of in the morning. I want to see your marital bed. I am so hungry for every scrap of knowledge about you that if I were permitted to watch you fuck your wife, I would. My ravenousness still exceeds my capacity for jealousy. I wear a black dress with the red strap of a bustier peekabooing under the sheer fabric, because you have touched these items. I wear boots you have licked. I am shameless. Heroin never made me this high.
“There’s nothing in the world more boring than other people’s children,” Bebe says, dragging on her cigarette holder, watching me get ready. I keep a plastered smile and think, Oh, yes there is.
“So,” Chad says as we all gather around your farm-style dining room table with the mismatched chairs and faded batik tablecloth, “I’ve been thinking. Since the baby’s a girl, we should name her Isabel.”
“Oh, come on,” Miguel says, like he was afraid this would happen. “Let’s not go overboard.”
“Isabel is a beautiful name,” Emily says. According to you, she and Chad have become very close. They talk on the phone every day, and go shopping and to lunch and for pedicures together; Chad gets his toenails buffed and shaped but doesn’t actually have polish applied. I can’t remember whether you or Miguel told me this—often, you cover the same Chad ground.
“Sure, it’s a beautiful name,” Miguel says. “And my sister Isabel is a beautiful woman. Who wouldn’t come to our wedding—after she had agreed to be my best woman, may I add—and who thinks we’re going to burn in hell. No bad omens in that or anything.”
“There’s such a thing as forgiveness,” Chad says. “It’s a virtue.”
“Excuse me,” says Miguel, “I seem to have found myself in a Hallmark card. Can someone point me toward the exit?”
You may not believe me, but this is the first time I realize my beloved brother must be a fucking bitch to live with.
I am seated between Miguel and Emily. Keep your enemies closer. Except remember: I don’t think of Emily as my enemy. I keep touching her stomach, which seems to please her. Some women are fussy about it, but not Emily. She seems proud of her body being used as a vessel in this way. A breeder—my knee-jerk reaction is to assume this means she’s no good in bed, but lately I’ve realized that a lot of these assumptions I hold about the “straight” world are either wrong entirely or could also be applied to me. Emily has no sexual dysfunctions of which I am aware. She orgasms from things that generally make people come. She doesn’t dash out of the bed to gargle with Listerine. Before this pregnancy, you fucked about once every week or two, which puts your annual fucks per year at somewhere between twenty-six and fifty. You tell me that this is lower than the national “married people” average, but for a couple married for fifteen years, it seems almost fiendishly high.
Bebe and I used to fuck at least five times a week. Alone or with others joining us—though our rule was that guests never spent a whole night; that we woke up only with each other—our sex lasted for hours, like performance art. Miguel used to roll his eyes at me when I told him about it. He’d quip, “Don’t you ever just get horny and rut around for five minutes until you’re sweaty and call it a day?” And I explained, with an earnest solemnity people don’t expect of perverts, that sex was “too important” to be trivialized in that way. Perverts, of course, are as earnest as any converts, any zealots. I worshipped at the altar of sex, though I rarely thought in terms of my own pleasure. Like a nun, what I practiced was closer to devotion.
“Where’s Bebe tonight?” people keep asking me, but I’m not sure anyone cares.
Your root vegetables are perfect. The beets don’t bleed at all into the parsnips, the onions, the celery—later, you will tell me that you cooked them separately, that that’s the trick. In the serving bowl, they look as though they’ve all come from the same place.
“I never had an amnio with the boys,” Emily is saying. “I was afraid it would increase the risk of miscarriage. But I haven’t had any bleeding at all, and they said at Northwestern that you can’t look at national stats for that stuff, that their figures don’t look like if I were getting my amnio in Podunk, Idaho. I feel stupid now, like maybe it was never unsafe, and I should have had one. It’s just . . . I was so much younger then, the chances of anything being wrong seemed so slim . . .”
You have Jay on your lap when she says this. You bounce him on your knee. He giggles. Your arm rests around his waist as easily as if he were part of your own body. He has no idea on earth that anyone is talking about him, or that the ensuing silence in the room is awkward, made more acute by his shrieking, gleeful laughter.
(Interior: motel room, curtains drawn.)
(Exterior: not visible from Interior, so what does it matter?)
(But: let’s say through a gap in the curtain [there was no gap in the curtain], audience can see a motel sign reading “Heart O’Chicago.”)
(What the hell, why not go for broke with an echo of Villa Moderne? We will give this sign missing letters, too, so that it reads Heat O’Chica.)
(Here in Chicago, we like our chicas hot.)
(Interior: a man—that would be You—lying on the bed in ripped jeans through which half of his right leg, bent at the knee, is visible, smoking a cigarette. In case the broken sign has not conveyed to the audience a state of retro disrepair, the fact that Hot Chica motel has “smoking rooms” ought to do it.)
Man: I’m starting to feel guilty.
Woman: (Looks unsure what to say . . . for the record, she thought that “guilt” was a given.)
Man: I didn’t think this was going to impact things the way it has. Not that Emily and I ever had an open marriage or anything—it’s not that I thought she’d be okay with my fucking around. It’s just that in a way, how is this any different from, say, having someone else’s baby? Right? No . . . I don’t mean right, like I’m asking you to agree with me—I’m not even sure I agree with me anymore. I just thought, well, some men would object to sharing their wife’s womb with another couple. Some men would object to their wife having another man’s child, to her body expanding and losing energy and feeling generally shitty in the service of another man’s sperm. But I wasn’t that bloke, you know? I don’t believe love is a thing that can be owned. I don’t think there’s just some finite quantity of ourselves and we’d better jealously guard how we spend it. Emily’s never had an affair that I know of—okay, no, she’s never had an affair—but I always thought that if she did, I’d be all right with it, maybe. I never wanted to deprive her of any opportunity for joy.
Woman: I think if not fucking another person equals being deprived of joy, there’s probably a bigger problem going on than the fucking itself.
Man: How do you mean?
Woman: I mean—duh—that if Emily felt like she needed another man in order to experience joy, then it would mean that her feelings were way too contingent on that other man, and your marriage would already be in trouble, whether she fucked him or not.
Man: (Silent a long time.)
Woman: What? You disagree?
Man: No, that’s the problem. I was just thinking how many times I . . . (a nervous glance at the woman, to see if she may be offended) . . . how often I didn’t fuck someone, you know, when I could have—some actress, some student or other faculty—all these past seven or eight years, and how I’ve felt so self-congratulatory about it. But if we’re going to go all Jimmy-Carter-I’ve-sinned-in-my-heart about it, thinking about those women, whether it was fo
r a day or weeks or a whole semester, was a big part of what got me through days. It brought me joy, when home felt like drudgery.
Woman: Is there anyone married fifteen years and raising two kids who doesn’t feel like home is drudgery? I mean, seriously—I’m curious. Do you think there is?
Man: I thought I’d drawn myself a line in the sand. Like I was allowed to get right up to the line, as close to the line as possible, but then I had to jump back, and as long as I did that, I was a good husband, a good father. I kept playing a game of chicken with myself and I thought I’d mastered it. But with you, I’m living without a net.
Woman: You used to feel like there was a net? That’s unfathomable to me. I don’t have a clue what a net would feel like.
Man: It felt pretty amazing. And also kind of awful. Like you’re acting out a script and it’s maybe method acting but still, what you’re going to do next is always already determined.
Woman: Maybe you just don’t like that Emily’s less available to you now that she’s busy being a saint for my brother and Chad. Men need a lot of attention. Maybe you just aren’t getting the attention you’re acclimated to getting from her, so—voilà—you crossed the imaginary line and lost your imaginary net.
Man: Men need a lot of attention? No offense, beautiful girl, but I’ve never met a woman worth knowing who didn’t need five times the attention any man does.
Woman: You don’t get out enough.
Man: (Laughs.) Well, maybe you’re right! Like, the other day, I did feel angry about the baby—though it was the first time. Both other times Em was pregnant, I wanted it to be a girl. I don’t mean I was walking around calling the fetus my little princess—I’m not even sure I admitted it to anyone. But I wanted a daughter. Obviously once the boys were born, I wanted them, not some other replacement kid. I wanted what I had. But now, my wife is having a baby girl, and giving it away, and I felt kind of . . . sick. Like, grief-stricken. I was jealous. It didn’t make any sense.
Woman: You just explained it. You always wanted a girl.
Man: No, I just mean it doesn’t make sense because here my wife is, pregnant, and I’m jealous I can’t keep the kid, and kind of pissed at her for doing that to me—but meanwhile I’m shagging another woman like some John Edwards piece of shit.
Woman: (Cracking up, then looking away, ashamed of herself.) What’s with the politician analogies tonight? Emily doesn’t have cancer. She chose to get knocked up—it’s not a disease.
Man: But she’s pregnant with this . . . philanthropic spawn. (Flings himself back against the flimsy pillow, hair—like copper on fire—askew.) Anyway, if she had cancer I might still be here with you. Do you see what I’m saying? I reckon I’m just not a very good person.
Woman: You’re talking to the wrong guy.
Man: (Laughs, but reluctantly.) It’s not even just the pregnancy, or the “we have kids” thing . . . it’s not even just kids kids. It’s . . . Christ . . . Jay.
Woman: I know. I’m sorry. I understand the complexity of that.
Man: You know what my problem is?
Woman: That you’re madly in love with me?
Man: Yes, well, that too—god, yes, that too. That’s a problem I wouldn’t trade. But I meant . . . it’s dangerous, thinking we’re entitled to things. Thinking the rules don’t apply to us.
Woman: I don’t know. Thinking you’re not entitled to anything—being some martyr, living solely for other people, thinking we’re lesser and our happiness doesn’t matter, that’s not any better, is it? Everything’s dangerous in extremes.
Man: So, a life in moderation, eh?
Woman: I don’t understand moderation.
Man: It’s what I wanted. Growing up in the theater, my parents always thinking they were Dick Burton and Liz Taylor, all their messy affairs and reconciliations and my dad running back and forth to Dublin and London thinking he was such a big shot—it wasn’t until I lived in London myself that I realized nobody knew who the hell he was, he was some character actor, the biggest fish in our pond so we all swallowed it whole, even my mum, even when she was disparaging him, it was always like . . . he was still the king. She idolized him, no matter what he did. I couldn’t stand to see it. The way he strutted around. I hated how she’d even named me for him.
Woman: It’s a good thing you were obsessed with Fitzgerald instead of, like, Melville, when you changed your name!
Man: Call me Ishmael, baby.
(Another cigarette has been lit, is being passed back and forth.)
Man: I admit it happened sooner than I’d have liked—Miles, I mean . . . I don’t know that Emily and I would have stayed together if she hadn’t turned up pregnant. But the thing is, maybe we would have. We might have ended up in the same place. It wasn’t some shotgun wedding. I wanted to be a good family man. I thought I was happy.
Woman: If you believed you were happy then you were happy.
Man: Now it all seems black and white, though. I mean in black and white as opposed to in color. Muted instead of loud.
Woman: I know what you mean, you goof.
Man: I’m sorry I’m talking so much about myself.
Woman: (Cuffing him in the head.) You’re a fucking idiot.
Man: (Passes her the cigarette.) I am a fucking idiot indeed.
Woman: But you’re right. There were enough years between Miles and Jay. If you’d wanted to leave, you would have. You must have been happy. You stayed. A lot of people don’t stay.
Man: Oh, I don’t know. I thought about leaving plenty of times.
Woman: (Sitting up. She is wearing a vintage 1940s-style dress unbuttoned down the front, through which her black bra—which fastens in the front and is unfastened—can be seen.) You’ve never told me . . . you thought about leaving Emily, getting a divorce? Way before me?
Man: For over a year, I was just waiting for Miles to start school, and then I was going to tell Em, yeah. You know, that we’d given it a go but it wasn’t how I wanted forever to look. I presumed we’d share custody of Miles, and go on our way, you know, lead separate lives as self-consciously hip divorced parents or whatnot, begin the sheer agony of dating again, and it would all be sad and thrilling and terrifying in a perfectly ordinary way. Then Miles started school and I didn’t . . . go anywhere. I told myself I wasn’t in a hurry. Why not wait a bit longer? Then we got pregnant with Jay, and it was . . . I don’t want to imply that I didn’t leave because of his condition. That’s not true. I’d had my chances and didn’t take them. I knew from the time Emily told me she was pregnant that my window had closed, and I made my peace with that before—my decision isn’t on Jay. Still, once he was born . . .
Woman: You’re the best father I’ve ever seen. You’re so natural with the boys. I can’t imagine any adult actually really . . . talking to me, when I was young, the way you talk to them. The way you all laugh together. It’s like a foreign country.
Man: Here’s the thing they don’t tell you. A great deal of parenting, especially when they’re young, is acting. People get confused on that point. They think they’re meant to be totally genuine and authentic, for the sake of intimacy. But if you go that route, you’re furious and frustrated, because kids are maddening and impossible half the time, so you’re dragging round your own baggage, shouting and projecting your own tangled needs and issues everywhere. You try to be authentic all the bloody time and you end up a tyrant or a basket case. A lot of the intimacy is only possible if you know when to shut your mouth at other times, when they’re driving you mad, and act the role of the good parent. For better or worse, I’m a good actor.
Woman: I’m an excellent actress, too, as it turns out. God, I really should have gone on more auditions—
Man: What’s the point, though? Of your acting to get through your life? I’m not trying to be an asshole, honestly, but if you and Bebe aren’t happy anymore . . . well, it’s not exactly easy living a double life, being a liar all the time, is it? If you could get out cleanly and just live hone
stly, why do you stay?
Woman: I still wouldn’t be honest—I’d just be a single woman clandestinely fucking a married man. (Stubs out cigarette, then, seemingly without thinking, fastens bra, begins doing up her buttons.) Right now I’m staying because of us, in part. I look less predatory as a coupled-up lesbian, right? It’s a decoy. It’s better for you if I stay. (Grins widely but unnaturally.) I’m like a double agent.
Man: (Deadpan.) That’s not a good reason, Lina. I don’t want to be responsible for your being somewhere you don’t want to be.
Woman: I’m where I want to be right now, here.
Man: You know what I mean. I can’t give you a whole life. I want you to live your life fully, not just . . . in some motel. I don’t want to be the excuse for your not expecting much the rest of the time.
Woman: (Standing up, fully dressed now, turning in a half-circle as though confused about her body’s intentions.)
Man: Are we going somewhere? Are your legs twitchy? Do we need to walk?
Woman: (Facing him.) So what are we?
Man: Oh, sweet girl. I don’t know. Revelatory? The most beautiful thing that’s ever happened to me outside of my sons? The surprise of my life? An adventure? A free fall?
Woman: Seriously? You’re giving me the “I don’t know” answer?
Man: I know we’re best friends. Very . . . strange best friends.
Woman: (Doesn’t even know how to format a script, anyway, so fuck off.)
Woman: (Tears in her eyes, unimportant since they can’t be seen by the audience.)
Woman: (Touching the man’s shoulder—please tell me that I’m right, that at least I touched you before my next line.)
Woman: Or maybe all I really am to you is another kind of moderation.
GRETCHEN
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