The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories

by Christopher Merkner

  But the earliest construction of sabotage took shape in half-consciousness at our kitchen table in the middle of the night. Our son was screaming upstairs. A woman approached me. She had three men flanking her. She was dressed in a barista’s smock. The men wore burlap coffee sacks. She winked at me and said, “How do, Simple?”

  I winked back at her and said, “I like it simple.”

  That’s when I came to, my wife at the table staring at me, midsentence. “Did you hear anything I just said to you?”

  “Yes.” I rubbed my face. She nodded. It became obvious how to ruin her expressed needs.

  Good old Jamie wrote, “I cannot wait to hold you again.” He was the single “Can’t Say Fo Sho” and had now switched to a “Hell Yee-ah!”

  I remembered Jamie. Kimberly had told me several times before the baby about Jamie, and that Jamie was the best kisser she’d ever dated. She’d said that, for all his problems, and she never said what those problems might have been, for all his problems Jamie always knew how to kiss. And she used to tell me that Jamie had told her that she kissed very nicely too, and because she had kissed a great many people in her life, had experienced some of the worst kissing any human had ever experienced, she knew what good kissing was, and when a good kisser compliments you, you know you’re getting high praise.

  This was a tricky one, because I didn’t exactly think Kimberly was a great kisser. She had a dry mouth and a small, coarse tongue that always felt, I thought, too insistent. My wife had many outstanding qualities; kissing wasn’t on the top of that list. I imagined that either Jamie was lying to take advantage of my wife when she was younger, or he was in fact not that great at kissing at all, which would probably mean that she liked Jamie for reasons unrelated to kissing and either couldn’t accept this or wasn’t fully aware of it, or was fully aware of her expansive interest in Jamie and needed, somehow, to express it indirectly to the man she had actually chosen to marry.

  Thirty-six men were coming to my house to see my wife, because she had asked. She had simply asked if thirty-six men would like to fly from around the country to celebrate her thirty-first birthday, and thirty-six men said they would like to do so. “A great many men like your mommy,” I said to our son. I was trying to make the child belch but not vomit. I had him pitched over my shoulder, and I could feel the burning in my legs as I bobbed up and down. I tried to make a little song out of it, trying over and over again to think of the word that rhymed with “mommy.”

  I was alone with our son more often, and he became increasingly unhappy with my company. He was developing mistrust. The mother would hand him to the father, and the father would never hand him back. My son did not like that. His dislike intensified. He stopped falling asleep while eating. He would drink the entire bottle I offered him, top to bottom, just suck the hell out of that thing in long, angry drags, and instead of closing his eyes, he would become increasingly alert as he drank, increasingly anxious and angry, and when that bottle was emptied he would burst into a scarlet song that could devastate windowpanes.

  And sometimes Kimberly would just walk past the two of us like this, and the child would smell her and immediately stop his singing. He would whimper, and the whimper would precipitate well-documented physiological realities that Kimberly had hoped to shred, she’d said, and she would flee the room then, and the child would begin singing again, and it came to a point, about mid-July, where Kimberly would ask me where I planned to be with the child and for how long, so that she could plot her life around this.

  Airplane tickets had been purchased and electronically expressed to each boyfriend, after not just a few hundred hours of e-mails and communiqués securing necessary travel information from the strange men on the other end of the wires. Hotel reservations had been made. Dietary requests had been received, processed, and forwarded. I felt extraordinarily grateful that the limousine company had thrown in a fourth vehicle without charge for the weekend. In total, preliminary estimates seemed to point toward a weekend costing just under one hundred thousand dollars. I slid these figures across the table to Kimberly, who studied them and said, “But when you consider how much we’re getting, though.”

  Someone at my office had suggested I might put in for a better-paying position that had just opened up. I hadn’t really considered needing more money until that time. The sabotage would double the cost of the arrangements, and I wondered how people who didn’t have money managed to hold together a marriage with children. I wondered what someone like, I didn’t know, a teacher did with marriage. Being married was expensive. It perplexed me for a while, before I fell asleep, how the rest of the world could afford to stay married.

  The sabotage of course required a destination, a simulacrum of ours, and I found a nice five-bedroom rental outside Madison without too much difficulty. My coworkers loved the idea of a party so much they willingly and eagerly dolled it all up, helped pull the catering, drinks, and music together. When it comes to parties, young singles don’t ask many questions. Not many single people worry about the logistics of planned social events. The men from my office would blend in with my wife’s lovers. My specific roots are northern Midwest, settlers near Green Bay, and while we know our way around the labyrinth of deception, because we are half the time misleading ourselves, we are not actually well prepared genetically for the confined chambers of overt and sustained lying. We don’t have the energy for it. Yet, this all came together so seamlessly, so naturally, it took the breath away.

  Ten days out, I took on some troubleshooting from work:

  Kit could purchase sandals in a store not far from the house, yes.

  Matthew could be driven to see his great aunt in a relatively nearby city, yes.

  Patrick and Steven T. would not find the humidity terribly high at night.

  Link could not expect to have oral sex again while high on cocaine, no, but Kimberly really missed those days too, and only in the stark contrast of her present life can she take pleasure in what was, for her, a very difficult emotional time.

  David had to realize that he was not the only man being invited to the event, and could not therefore expect to take one of his “special drives” again.

  Benjamin had a great memory, and he was welcome to bring photographs, of course, but Kimberly did not actually remember the time they had fallen asleep in the hotel sauna in Gainesville, was he sure it was her?

  It did not seem likely that Kimberly would be able to have a private dinner with Ken, Rick, or Steven L.

  Christopher should be grateful he had a wife and family, and there was no need to denigrate them in writing (or in speech), and he should keep his personal shit private or else he would find himself disinvited.

  No, Dick, Kimberly did not hang on to that sweatshirt of his, she doesn’t think, but she could buy him another one on eBay if he wants. She is sorry about that.

  Some of the basic ground rules permitted that I could answer in the affirmative if I were asked if I was her husband and the child’s father—she said she could not bear the thought of me having to lie about this—but I was not permitted to bring the matter up with any of the guests. And, generally speaking, I was discouraged from being around at all. I was to remain in the bedrooms upstairs throughout the scheduled events. I was not to feel that I had to remain upstairs—she said she could not bear the thought of me feeling as though the child and I were being imprisoned in our own home, locked in some attic like mental invalids from literature—but Kimberly had been clear that I should feel as though it would be best for her if I were to minimize my interaction with the events. If I did come downstairs, with or without the child, I would be encouraged, she said, to not overdo the protective husband thing. Don’t say things like, “We’ve been happily married for, et cetera, et cetera.” That’s annoying. “Don’t spoil this for me.” And I was not to let them gaze at the child. “Keep the child out of sight as much as possible,” she said. She had typed up and printed many of these considerations, and number fift
een was phrased, “Do not go out of your way to stress my relationship to either of you.”

  I took the e-mail addresses from the women who responded to the paper-plate tags I posted in the grocery store. Seventeen females and three males responded. I created another electronic invitation, this one with a clip-art image of a girl dancing in a shower of ticker tape, and invited them for interviews at the Madison simulacrum. They each arrived on time, and they each interviewed for twenty minutes. I took down information with pen and paper. I told them everything about the evening. I told them what the expectations were, and what they were not. I told them that they should only think about this as a chance to meet some new guys, pretending to have known them without really stressing that knowledge. “It’s been, in some cases, fifteen years,” I pointed out, “so you can basically just keep saying, ‘I have no idea,’ and go from there.”

  Not one of them flinched. I felt a cinder block in my stomach and imagined my knuckles coursing against a sidewalk throughout these interviews, but not one of my candidates flinched at the prospect of openly lying to deceive the wife of a complete stranger. It all seemed entirely appropriate to them. It all seemed like something they’d done before, something they would likely have to do again. And in the end, the woman I chose was the woman who said to me, “Look, I’ve been married for eight years, and I’m just looking to bring a few options back onto the table for myself.”

  “You understand thirty-six men will be in the room for the specific purpose of talking at you.”

  “I understand that, yes.”

  “Do you want to know why we’re doing this?”

  She laughed. “Your brain is worth eight thousand dollars cash, and mine isn’t.”

  The night before the men were to arrive, Kimberly tried on dresses. It was nearing ten o’clock. She was spinning and turning, looking at herself in the full-length mirror. She had lost the weight she’d gained from the pregnancy, and more, actually, though she didn’t think so. She kept pressing on her stomach. She was saying she hoped this was a good idea, but I watched her and openly doubted that she was seriously questioning her event.

  “Hormones hatch some crazy shit.”

  “I could cancel this thing in an instant.” I snapped my fingers.

  Kimberly just turned from side to side and looked over her shoulder in the mirror. She didn’t say anything. And I didn’t continue asking. Our child sucked on her bra straps on the floor.

  The men were varied, mostly dark haired. They struck me as older than I’d expected. They appeared to have aged much, much worse than I had. When they approached me at the airport (I had a sign I was holding outside of Security), I asked the more attractive and assertive ones how they were doing. I couldn’t help myself. I had been told not to speak with them at all. But I felt it would have been irresponsible to have followed this advice. Part of me thought my wife, deep down, would have wanted me to do this against her expressed will.

  I asked James, a tall man in sandals, from Des Moines, if he was looking forward to the weekend. James said he wasn’t sure. He said he found the whole thing surreal. “It kind of blows my mind,” he said. When he received the invitation his first thought was, apparently, “Yes, absolutely,” and it was only after he’d accepted the invitation that he realized how odd it was. “She’s probably married and divorced,” James said. “I hate divorced women.”

  “Seems like you have a lot you want to share,” I said.

  James slapped me on the back.

  I piled him into the limousine with about a third of the other men. I told them to have a few drinks, compliments of the lady, and that they could freshen up at the hotel before they were taken to the house.

  I thought my wife looked younger, standing there in the stunning disaster that had been her plans. The caterers were whispering. I’d called her several times over the course of several hours to let her know that no one had come through the security checkpoints. I had by then dropped off most of the men at their hotel and driven back to our home. The musicians were rehearsing and then sitting silently, looking at their strings. A handyman we’d hired quietly fiddled with the hanging lanterns. Kimberly just stared off. She had read the e-mails I sent to the men. “But how could no one have seen your sign?” she wanted to know. “Is it really possible they would all simply take advantage of the free airfare and ignore the signs?”

  “They’ll call.”

  She looked at me. I knew she knew something was amiss. I didn’t care. I told her I would go back to the airport. She seemed to know something was wrong, but she seemed grateful to at least hope that she knew nothing. I did not understand. I could not understand. So I left under the ruse of the airport and followed the sabotage.

  I remember that at first I felt I needed someone who looked like my wife to pull this off. My wife has a sort of fair-haired Swiss Miss Danish princess look, and I found it excruciating to approach women with an eye toward their physical similarities to my wife. The woman I ultimately chose was blonde, but she did not look at all like my wife, not really, not now and not in the years she would have known quite a few of these men. I remember hoping the men had forgotten what she looked like. I really bit my nails about this. But I don’t know what I was thinking. I could have brought in a Hungarian farmer from the eighteenth century.

  Twenty-nine men fill a room in an unpleasant way, I discovered on that Friday evening, and the remaining seven men, who trickled in later, made it even worse. The idea that I should leave my wife alone among this hot throng struck me as impossibly naïve. Most of the men seemed uneasy but eager. The woman I’d hired to be my wife seemed not at all affected. She was speaking with a small group and laughing, and touching their shoulders, touching her hair. She was introducing them to one another. She was talking about what they’d done together, when, where, and the extent to which it pleased or horrified her. She was somehow very natural at this, and it occurred to me that what I’d asked her to do was not really that different from courtship, where most of what you communicate are heavily sutured falsehoods.

  Most of the men were more than pleased to help her where she made mistakes in their histories. Most of the men seemed to know immediately this woman was not Kimberly, my wife. But if they did know, they didn’t care, or they were willing to overlook it. They drank heavily, and they ate everything they could eat. They swam in the rented pool. They began making phone calls. They played with my son’s fingers and they surprised him with peek-a-boo. They shook hands with my coworkers, and they chased after other women and men I’d invited from the office.

  I tried to see my wife in this context. I tried to see her touching her hair and touching the shoulders of these men. I tried to ask my son if he liked seeing Mommy having so much fun like this, and he cried.

  I approached my proxy wife and interrupted her conversation with Link and Jess and David M. She looked at me suspiciously. She looked worried. She tried to take the hands of my son, who was pinned to my chest in the Björn, but I turned to my side. I said, “Hi.”

  She smiled and tried to turn back to the guys who were, in odd manners of masculinity, reaching to shake my hand and introduce themselves to me. I kept my eyes on her, however. I thanked her. “This,” I said. “This was a really special idea.”

  She nodded.

  The guys around us agreed, though they looked at one another then, with some strangeness. I apologized for interrupting them, and I asked what they’d been discussing. They seemed not to know. So I said, “What’s it like seeing all your boyfriends again?”

  “It’s better than planned,” she answered.

  “I remember,” I said, “when I first started dating you.”

  She just looked at me, shifting back on her hip and taking a sip of her drink. She seemed to concede that she had not known who I was or what I would be capable of.

  I put my hand on her shoulder. I looked her squarely in the eyes. She had delightful, lively eyes. She looked, in a way, frantic. In another way, she looked
exhausted. “I feel,” I said, “like I don’t know you. I feel like, standing here looking at you, maybe I’ve never known you.”

  Some of my coworkers were looking at me. They’d met my wife. They tried to conceal their fascination. They thought, surely, that no one could remain what they’d always been. People change, they surely thought. Surely they thought, How bizarre, monogamy. And as though I somehow stood at the foot of all things reliable in their lives, surely they thought, What the hell comes next?

  “Well,” she said, “we were never as close as you thought we were.”

  The men liked this. They whistled and rallied behind her. I laughed. She was a good sport. I said that her trampishness was so complete I doubted very much if there was a man in the room who could say he didn’t feel as though she knew him better than he knew her.

  She nodded. “Last time I checked,” she said, “that’s the way men prefer it.”

  “Are you married?” I asked her.

  She shrugged.

  The men cheered. I noticed Steven T. was growing anxious. He had something he wanted to say.

  “Listen,” I said to her. “Let’s go. Let’s get out of here. Let’s leave this B-squad here to give one another handjobs, and let’s just stop pretending.”

  She looked confused. She considered it. I felt it then, and I feel it now. She really gave it some sincere thought. I don’t know what she would have done with me had she left. But Steven T. didn’t like it. He had heard enough, and he came between us, and he looked in my face. “Take that fucking baby out of here,” he said.

  I laughed. My son had fallen asleep. I went in to give my strange employ a kiss, and Steven T. pushed me away from her. The room bristled. My coworkers started moving in toward me and Steven T. There was some pushing. I stood my ground. “Kimberly,” I said. “Come on. Come with me. These guys are not for you.”