The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories

by Christopher Merkner

  She nodded, and she looked right in my eyes. My fake wife gave us long, deep consideration. She made a big show of her teeth. She turned, and I walked home to my real wife with my son’s head lolling in slumber before me.

  In her view of the event, I imagine, my Kimberly stood before these men and made them at ease, the way she had done when they had been younger and together in various ways. She was an easy person with whom to talk and be. She was not overly proud of her intelligence, and her intelligence was not so impressive that she suffered from self-awareness. She listened relatively well, and she was very funny. She was incredibly, strangely sharp at games, board games and social/interactive games that involved guesswork and feeding people suggestions toward a specific answer. In her mind, I imagine, she wanted to experience the rush that is putting people at ease, of making them comfortable enough to be reasonable. She had lost this, she felt, and she desperately wanted it restored. She could do a job. She could run a marathon. She could keep a budget and make more or less anything she needed to make with her bare hands. She could nurse a child. She could be married. She could make a clown good at sex. But she could not be who she had been, and that upset her, and she told me someday I would understand. But I did not understand. I do not understand so much, and I did feel sorry for myself when she contacted a few of the men directly in the months that followed, and the pieces of the sabotage fell into obvious place. It looked as clunky to her then as it looks to me now, and it feels as childish to me now as it did to her then.

  I tried to speak to her directly about all of it, but when I looked into her eyes, I found myself looking into a mirror with about thirty-six strange faces looking back at me. She studied me as one studies a fraction, and she asked me to please accept her need to end our marriage. We split our son down the middle. She wanted half, and she wanted me to have the other half. I look at him now, at the half that I have chosen, and I want to give it back to the rest of him, still having no understanding of how a person is built.

  CABINS

  1.

  Presuming he was still well married, I told one of my friends I could not imagine living near my wife in divorce. I’ve always imagined experiencing my divorce alone in the wilderness, I continued. I have a cabin. I have a boat. I can see my little cabin from where I sit in the boat. The water is slapping the boat. I’m on an elevated chair whipping lures that race across the surface of the water as I reel them back in. My wife is not nearby. In my cabin, as in my entire life in divorce, she’s not anywhere to be found or heard or smelled.

  And I miss her. I am morose and broken without her in my cabin. If I cannot have her, I can have no one and no thing except my cabin and my boat. The idea of having her part-time, it’s unthinkable. It is the galling grotesque of sitcom television. I can’t think about it. I walk and drink a lot. Sometimes I walk drunk down the road to the bar just to get more drunk. Sometimes the local girls at the bar hit on me, but I’ve been there long enough, rejected their advances so often and so sadly, they mostly just stand at the bar and call me by the name they’ve made up for me, Deer Eyes, and they feel for me as one tends to feel for roadkill. I stumble back to my cabin drunk. I cry, I sleep, I fish, and I live off money I could not possibly possess. “I’m sorry,” I said to my friend, “I’m just making this shit up.”

  2.

  A different friend had called me shortly before this and invited me to a side of town I’d never considered visiting. That night, cruising in the right lane, I spotted through the passenger window the address he’d given me: it was a hookah bar. I pulled over and went inside. He was sitting in a booth by himself. I slid across from him. “I have news,” he said.

  “You’re dying,” I said.

  “A little,” he said.

  “This is a nice place,” I said.

  He looked around the room. He said, “Yeah, man.” Then he said that going to places like this was part of his new life philosophy. He put a black rubber hose in his mouth. He inhaled, I waited, he coughed. He handed me the hose. I just held it. I looked around while he cleared his lungs. I had not seen so many young people in the same room since college. I felt very old, very ridiculous holding my hose. I gave it back to my friend. He said he was divorcing. Then he put the hose in his mouth again and closed his eyes.

  I fought the urge to call my wife. I had my hand on my phone. Instead, I got up and ordered a festive piece of cake. My wife and I had talked about these two a lot. They were not a pleasant couple to be friends with. We desired to be rid of them. They seemed to love each other in a way that made us nauseous. He always told her what to do; she always told him to fuck himself. And then they would laugh. We assumed they’d be together forever like this.

  I returned to the table and watched my cake ooze lard. My friend detailed his wife’s affair, or what he called “the pin that popped their balloon.” His wife had apparently known this other man for decades. They were friends in grade school. They had not spoken in years and then, for reasons that no one but god could understand, they ran into their souls at a nearby car dealership on a Saturday evening. After decades of being married to other people, my friend told me, his wife and this guy bumped into each other while shopping for cars and, just like that, ran into their souls.

  “Not their soul mates,” he clarified. “Their souls.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Anyway,” he added, pulling his mouth away from the hose just as he’d brought it to his lips, “You just hope for this kind of thing for everyone.” Then he inhaled, released, and coughed.

  I said, “O.K.”

  He went on to explain that his wife and her new man had each thought of one another over the years, apparently many times. They did not realize they’d lived in the same city all of this time. “Apparently,” my friend said, straight-faced, “The guy made a birthday cake for her every year to commemorate her birthday—then he’d go and dump it in a fire pit in his garden and burn it.”

  “What about your daughters?” I asked.

  “My folks are divorced,” he answered.

  I nodded. “So, you’ve told them about all this.”

  “They know.”

  I nodded.

  He took another long drag from his hose and looked up at me. “Single parent,” he said, short of air. “There’s a lot of street cred in that these days.”

  “You’re kind of blowing my mind right now,” I said.

  He exhaled. “Yeah,” he said. He didn’t cough. He began studying the hookah, as if he hadn’t realized this huge futuristic tower had been there between us the whole time. “Well,” he said, “I basically just want to kill myself.”

  3.

  I took him to my car. I acted cool. I called my car a name. He laughed. He seemed fine. In the car, however, as I drove through his neighborhood, he began knocking his head against the passenger window. I studied him from my periphery. I began talking about my heart attack the previous fall. He said he had heard about it. He was sorry. He wasn’t interested, but it seemed right to continue talking about myself. I believed I was offering us both some greater context for our rather narrow sorrow. I told him in detail what I could remember about the catheter. When I pulled up to his house, I extended my hand. “Thanks,” I said.

  He didn’t move. He didn’t take my hand. He just stared straight ahead.

  “You still living together?”

  He nodded.

  “That hurts,” I said.

  “You would think so,” he said. Then he invited me in. He said he had some beer in the fridge.

  I said I needed to call my wife first.

  He clicked his teeth. “Ah,” he said. He wagged his finger in my face.

  “I know,” I said, “I know.” I forced a light laugh. I looked at my phone.

  He didn’t move.

  “I’ll be up there in just a minute,” I said. “You can leave the door open.”

  “I don’t want to be left in that house alone with her anymore.”

  I
dialed my wife. She didn’t pick up. The machine came through. I left a vague message about being on my way and withheld any expression of love I might have shared were there not a divorced friend sitting beside me.

  We walked up to his house and went inside. It was dark. “I can’t see anything,” I said.

  “She’s in here somewhere,” he said.

  4.

  In bed the night I made the remarks on my divorce cabin, I rolled over to look at my wife. She was reading a book on the history of crochet and needlework. I said, “If we divorce, who gets the baby?”

  5.

  The next morning, I played basketball with a third friend I’d presumed married. I told him about my recently discovered divorced friends. I told him I couldn’t understand people divorcing. “It seems,” I said, “like an incredible amount of work.” Then I shot a layup.

  My friend was silent, until he told me he’d always believed marriage was for the brainwashed dickheads of a Hallmark psychological takeover. I passed him the ball and said, “I think Maya Angelou’s cards are actually pretty cool.”

  “That’s because you’re gay,” he said.

  I tried to be cool about this. He hadn’t gone to school, this particular friend. I had always thought him to be a rough but decent sort—a simple man with values and priorities that approximated my own. But I didn’t really know this to be true. I said, “Aren’t we all?”

  He drained a left-hander from the short corner and looked at me. He shook his head. “No,” he said.

  “I bet your wife loves your marriage,” I said.

  “Not unless she’s fucking it,” he said. Then he said, “We tanked it last year.”

  “No way,” I said.

  He was dribbling the ball between his legs. “I was like Helen Keller on drugs in that marriage. I beat the shit out of everything in that house. That marriage was costing us both a fortune. I broke like ten thousand dollars in walls.”

  He drove the lane. I did not contest this. He rolled the ball over the rim. I’d met this guy about the time of my heart attack at that same gym. The first time we’d shot together, he brought beer to the court and made me try to finish the case with him. We might have pulled it off, had he not broken his leg trying to grab a rebound before it went into the small set of aluminum bleachers near the emergency exits. I had to drive him to the hospital. Both of us were drunk, and I became more drunk as I sat there in the waiting room with his wife, a cool woman. I talked to her for a long time while her husband was in surgery. Then I fell asleep. When I woke up, she was gone. I was just sitting alone in the hospital lobby. I thought she had perhaps gone off for coffee. I sat there for two hours. I checked the nurse’s station. My friend had already checked out.

  I shot from about six feet. The ball hit the rim and came right back to me. I shot again. “What do you do now?” I asked. “Are you dating?”

  He told me he was doing my mother. He snapped the ball off the glass and ran the length of the court. He ran back. He stood in front of me. He told me to take that look off my face. He told me I made him sick. Marriage, he said, made him sick. Then he walked off the court, taking the ball with him.

  6.

  It’s a good cabin. I think about it a lot. I go there a lot. The walls are wood planks. I collect these planks from the back of the mill, where they dump the rejected wood. I throw the planks in the back of my old truck. The truck has no muffler. I drive the planks back to the plot of land I’ve bought from the state. With a hammer and saw, I build the planks into walls. I make my cabin. It takes me a summer and fall. I sleep on dirt until I’m finished. I eat berries. I eat the perch I can catch from the shoreline. In the first winter after the divorce, the average temperature is ten degrees. I drink a lot. I work on insulating the walls of the cabin and drink. I sometimes walk into town drunk and go to the bar to become more drunk. I talk to no one. I think only of my wife, and when I do talk to someone I talk only of her. I say she is the love of my life. I say she means more to me than living. I am told I need to shower. I am told I need to have my cheeks looked at. I am told my nose is turning black from frostbite. One night a man approaches me at the bar. He says he would like me to look after myself. He tells me I have a lot of people worried about me. “You have good friends,” he says. “You have a life,” he says. “You’re an important person in the world, no matter who your wife may be.” He tells me I have a choice: I can move forward with my life or I can sit here in a bar in no-man’s-land and lament one broad in a million. I stand up. “My wife is my life,” I say.

  That’s all I remember because I pass out. When I wake up, I am in my cabin. A beautiful Nordic lady is washing the kitchen counter with a white cloth. The room is glowing with soft light. She has made a fire in a fireplace I have no memory of building into the planked walls. She has decorated the cabin with lovely red and blue fabrics and floral tapestries. She has an apron on. She has a scarf on her head. She brings me a mug of hot cocoa. She says she is the Swiss Miss girl all grown up and has come from the hills to take care of me and become my wife. She is in love with me. She knows this is sudden. She says, “Oh, Deer Eyes!” But I stop her. I tell her I am sorry. I am. I’m already married.

  7.

  The fourth well-married friend I discovered divorced was my former neighbor. He was driving by his old house, as he often did, and he’d seen me weeding in my front yard and pulled over. He rolled down his window. He told me he was on his way to the state penitentiary. He told me he had started a therapy group for inmates who were, had been, or feared they would soon likely be divorced from their partners and spouses. He said, “You should come.”

  I went over to his car. I laughed. I said, “You’re the fourth person to talk to me about divorce in the past few days. What’s up with that?”

  “You should come with me,” he said.

  “Why would I do that?” I asked.

  “Empathy,” he said.

  My friend is not a therapist. He is a dog surgeon with a specialty in genetic eye disease. He and his wife were our neighbors for several years. They divorced just before they moved out. They were extraordinarily public about their divorce. They fought brutally in their home with the windows open, and they made love brutally in their home with the windows open. Even the discrete neighbors in the area talked about them. They often shouted the word divorce at one another. You could hear that word on the wind so often it became a sort of third person in their arguments and lovemaking sessions.

  “Listen,” I said. “When did you guys know it was time to get divorced?”

  “When we first got married,” he answered.

  8.

  That night, I tell my wife about all my friends who are suddenly divorcing. I tell her about our former neighbors and my afternoon at the state penitentiary. I tell her about the dude at the gym. I have my head in her lap. I look up at her, and she is sleeping.

  She is very pregnant. She is deep into our pregnancy. She is sleeping even when she is not asleep. I keep talking. I tell her about the first guy to tell me he was soon to be divorcing, and how he was still living with his wife. I tell her that the first thing I wanted to do, when he told me this, was to tell her. I tell her that I didn’t know, at first, what to say to a person in his position. I tell her that I didn’t realize so many people were divorcing in the world. I tell her I do not know what I would do if we divorced.

  I let these remarks flitter away into the silence of our living room, and I look up again at my wife. She is a pretty sleeper. “Anyway,” I say, “I tried to call you. You didn’t pick up. So I went with him into his house. He asked me to follow him into the kitchen to get a beer. And I did. I asked him if I should take my shoes off. He laughed. I asked if we should turn on the lights. We went into the kitchen and stood across from each other at his center island. We kept the lights off. The moonlight from outside lit his face. He just stared at me, or he seemed to be. ‘You all right?’ I asked.

  “‘Sad,’ he said.

  “
Then he turned around, flung open the refrigerator, and wrenched a beer open with his hands. He drank back on it and then slid it over to me. I looked at it. He said, ‘You want one of your own?’ He went back to the fridge, pulled out another beer, palmed the bottle, and almost started to open it for me, but then he stopped and stood stock still.

  “I said, ‘What?’

  “He whispered, ‘Listen.’

  “I said, ‘I hear the house fan.’

  “‘I hear her breathing,’ he said.

  “I said, ‘O.K.’

  “‘I hear her breath,’ he said.

  “Then I heard something too. I heard footfalls on the staircase. It was quiet at first, then his daughters pattered into the kitchen. It became suddenly very noisy. We flung on a light. There were his girls, beaming. They looked at me and talked to him. They were so happy he was home. They were so happy that they could have breakfast in the dark. They asked him why we smelled like smoke.”

  9.

  “I got into his car. I asked him how he got hooked up with this therapy group, and he told me he’d decided to do it all on his own. He said he just drove past the prison one day shortly after he and his wife ended their marriage and thought, You know, there are probably a lot of single guys in there feeling just like me. He told me he just went up to the front gate, asked to see the warden, and when the warden appeared asked if he thought anyone inside might be interested in getting together to talk informally about love and its absences.

  “The warden laughed, apparently. My friend told me that the warden laughed and said that he doubted it, but that my friend could get a day pass and sit down in the field during a thirty-minute outdoor lunch to see if anyone came over. Then my friend said, ‘And guess who now joins my little group of forty-five inmates every week?’

  “‘The warden,’ I answered.

  “‘That fucker,’ my friend said. He looked wistful. ‘I love that fat fucker.’