Washed Up with a Broken Heart in Rock Hall

by Peter Svenson

  In his lonely leisure, Budge writes these words. Try as he might, he can only remember his wife with love. He can’t help himself; he has every reason in the world to hate her, but his emotions aren’t wired that way. Even remembering her most stinging put-downs doesn’t do the trick. If he could only hate her a little bit, he’d be farther along the road to recovery, he tells himself. It has been well over ninety days since she walked out and he still loves her as much as the day they got married.

  But can two highly verbal spouses stop talking to each other? Well, that became a problem in itself. Our silences were dangerous; noncommunication could mean that the one or the other was stewing, fomenting, withdrawing affection or—worst—getting ready to explode. Stalking separately around the house, passing each other in a room without making eye contact—it was a lousy way to live as husband and wife. The cessation of conversation seemed unnatural for two gifted talkers who shared the rapport we did. During such silences I harbored intense feelings of insecurity. What had I said or done to offend her this time? Would she stop making love with me? One summer we crossed Canada by car, and what I remember mostly from that trip, aside from the sightseeing highlights, was the arguing and the crushing feeling of inadequacy that grew within me as we got farther from home. We couldn’t agree on anything. My itinerary suggestions, reasonable as they were, irked her. Something within me, in my personality provoked her. Being myself, loving and wanting her as I did, only pushed her farther away. Everything I offered, everything I contributed seemed to end with a question mark.

  There will be no more trips for a long time, save trips to the grocery store and the gas station. Plastic, i.e., credit card nonchalance is over; the surety of his wife’s paycheck is a thing of the past. His health insurance (under her group plan) is expired. Book royalties have dwindled to next to nothing. Before he sold the boat, he sold a raft of possessions, including his motorcycle, his saxophone, his power tools and gardening equipment, plus several pieces of antique furniture that had belonged to his great-grandmother. The divorce lawyer demanded a retainer as large as a typical book advance (typical for a writer like Budge Moss, that is).

  So despite his love for his wife, Budge is scraping the bottom of the barrel, thanks to her. This can cause him to write with bitterness.

  Somehow, as a result of my confused emotions, I ignored the larger picture, i.e., the marriage itself, which I assumed would remain intact. Because I cherished my wife and couldn’t be other than completely faithful to her, I trusted her to hold me in the same esteem. We were in a committed relationship; our transient lows were always matched by transient highs. So we argued—every couple argues, I reasoned. Maybe we argued a bit more than other couples—it was just our way of letting off steam. Did we need counseling? Nah, it wasn’t that serious. One look at the stupid stuff we argued about made it plain: we had a minor league problem that would disappear over time.

  Budge sits at his desk and looks out at the bay. Love has a beginning and an end, he muses, just like everything else. His love for his estranged wife will end, but he doesn’t have a clue as to when and how. It hasn’t been an easy year. He knows he shouldn’t be too hard on himself.

  And then the events of September 11th occurred, which seemed to cast both a truce and a pall upon our relationship. My wife was at work that morning and called to tell me to turn on the television. Separately, we watched the jetliners strike, the thunderheads of burning fuel, the fragments and people falling, then the towers collapse. Frequent visitors to the city, we were stunned to see the skyline thus reduced. She came home early and we watched more of the coverage. Then, entwined naked on the bed as if we were survivors, we acting out a sad but reaffirmative grappling of grief.

  For days afterwards, we were both too traumatized and self-absorbed to argue. Three weeks, maybe four weeks went by on the evenest of marital keels. But then we had an argument in which she actually broke down and cried—a rare occurrence for an arguer of her stature. It floored me to see that I had penetrated beyond the bulldog of her intellect; I had actually hurt her. All the times I felt like crying and never did—well, here she was one-upping me, baring her pain as I had never been able to. Argument-wise, she always gave as good or better than she got, but now, for the first time, she was defeated. All of a sudden, I realized that I had gotten so used to perceiving myself as victim—the bested obliger, the patient sufferer—that I neglected to see how she was as much a victim of our disagreements as I.

  He gets up to retrieve a beer from the refrigerator. Directly outside the window, not fifty feet away, a party of four has arrived with a cooler and a tote of picnic supplies. A nuclear family, two adults and two kids, so casually ensconced in their roles—will-o’-the-wisps, he thinks—bearing their normality as if it were a birthright. Budge Moss, solitary single writer, soon to be divorced, looks up from the screen and takes a long pull from the bottle.

  At the start of the new year, our marriage changed. My wife did something she had never done before: she started bullshitting me. I had always admired her for her directness and honesty; now I felt that she wasn’t dealing me straight. Most of the time she was, of course, but every once in a while, I could tell—just by the inflection in her voice—that she was conning me, pulling the wool over my eyes. She began spending one night a week away from home on the pretext that her commute was too long (I fully sympathized—she drove fifty miles). At social gatherings, she flirted with other men (at first it was a turn-on, watching my wife act sexy). Our credit card bills showed charges that she refused to explain (hey, it was her money). Reluctantly, I took it all in stride.

  Budge remembers how this was when she decided she wanted to move to New York City. The announcement came out of the blue: she thought it might be best if they lived apart for a while. And she didn’t want to live just anywhere in Manhattan; she wanted to live in Battery Park City, in the shadow of the recent devastation. “I want to give something back,” she said. “I feel as if I belong there at this point in my life. You can join me on weekends if you wish.”

  It was not an invitation. It was a strange mental mechanism that linked her to the aftermath of the terrorism, an identification that reportedly was quite common in those days. She would join the crowd at Ground Zero and take part in rebuilding the community. My presence was immaterial. A weekend husband? How long would that last? She’d pare down my presence to a weekend a month, then none at all. It was just her way of breaking the news gently—only it hit me like a ton of bricks. Like a skyscraper falling.

  With a snort of hindsight, Budge recalls the marital denouement over the weeks that followed. There was some talk of him moving upstate, not more than an hour by rail—the greater Poughkeepsie area, say—and taking the train into the city to visit her. She encouraged him to check out Kingston, New Paltz, Rhinebeck, Red Hook. He did as she asked him, but came back unmoved. For his part, he tried to talk her out of lower Manhattan, mentioning the rents, the noise, the crime, the particulate matter that was injurious to the lungs, the inconvenience of schlepping groceries. She scoffed at what she termed his paranoia. He then urged marriage counseling—something he had heretofore been too manly to consider. He spoke with utmost sincerity: her medical plan covered a certain number of counseling sessions, so maybe now was the time to avail themselves of this service. She declined joint counseling, but added that if he wanted to get some for himself, it was fine with her. He got mad at her for saying that and told her to go fuck herself.

  She slept in the guest bedroom for a couple of days, but came back on my birthday. She undressed in the dark, and lay down on her side of the bed without the slightest remonstrance of interest in what was about to transpire between us. She wasn’t cold or stiffened in body, but she had turned off her mind. Her flesh was yielding and pliant, warm and scented as always, replete with its secrets and detours and rewards as it had ever been. She let me touch and caress her at will. With lips and fingertips, I explored every facet of her voluptuous supine stature.
Her passivity aroused me to thunderous pitch. My blood boiled like I had the bends. At the moment for entering her, she parted her legs with a tired willingness that made me reflect on the thousands of times we had had sex together. Skip the love, focus on the sex. This woman I knew so completely, so intimately, was offering herself as a specimen of what I would be physically missing—and she knew what she was doing and was in full control. There in the darkness, her attitude was unmistakable. As I moved within her and we rocked together toward the completion of our coital prerogative, I felt her detachment. She was way ahead of me; I was still luxuriating in our marriage, but she was already getting over it.

  It was pretty much upstairs/downstairs sleeping arrangements after that, although she did join me every few days in that same fashion. It nearly drove me crazy.

  Budge pauses here to masturbate. He has taken up the habit lately, though it seems wholly undignified for a man of 55 to need such urgent relief. He walks into the cottage’s bedroom, lowers his shorts, lies on his back (sandals and shirt still on) and gets it over with quickly. His climax is scientific, not sensual. Far in the back of his mind is a tinge of adolescent guilt; he hasn’t done this in years, he hasn’t had to do it on a regular basis since he was in the Peace Corps back in the 1970s.

  Then, one Saturday morning, not a week after Easter, she moved out. I was at the supermarket, buying groceries for the two of us, and when I went through the checkout, my credit card was declined. “Your account is closed,” said the clerk.

  I pretended to be unconcerned. Thumbing through my wallet, I handed her another card. “Here, try this one.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, this account is closed, too.”

  She looked at me with suspicious eyes. I did my best to conceal my shock, mumbling something about how the bank must’ve screwed up and I’d look into the matter right away. I didn’t have my checkbook, I didn’t have enough cash. Other customers were queued behind me; their impatience was mounting. The clerk exhaled sharply, as if to say, “What the hell are you gonna do now?”

  I was so embarrassed that I momentarily froze. We all stood there—the guilty party, the inquisitor, and the irritated onlookers, several of whom were shunting to alternate checkout lanes. Finally, I mustered the courage to fake it. “Would you set these aside for me, please?” I asked. “I’ll go to the bank and get this straightened out.”

  Looking out at the portajohn and the water beyond, Budge remembers how he went right home. He knew he had to confront his wife immediately, do his utmost to pull her back from the brink before it was too late. If they couldn’t do some serious talking now, their whole world would fall apart.

  But when he arrived home, three cars were backed up on the lawn with their doors and trunks open. She had enlisted helpers and was already in the process! Besides embarrassment, he now felt humiliation; she had robbed him of his dignity. She hadn’t even had the decency to warn him.

  I cornered her in the kitchen as she was packing up her silverware. “What are you doing?” I asked angrily.

  “It should be pretty obvious what I’m doing.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because it’s not working out between us. It’s over.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “None of your business.”

  Oh, she was seething and unapproachable. If she had a pang of regret or remorse, she didn’t show it. Our endgame, with its intermittent sexual favors, was finished. She had evidently played the last straw; she would no longer suffer my presence. Now my entreaties were altogether in vain. It was as if I was speaking to her in a language she no longer understood.

  Budge looks out at the bay, shaking his head. A punctured married life collapses quickly. She didn’t give him her new phone number. She’d talk business with him only by e-mail. They agreed that she would keep the car and he would keep the boat. They agreed to put their house up for sale and he’d live in it until it sold, although with two mortgages and some personal debt, there’d be no payoff to speak of. Fortunately, the real estate market was booming; the house went under contract within two weeks. Budge had 60 days to straighten out his affairs. What he didn’t sell or simply throw out, he moved to the boat. Coincidentally, he started getting interested in Rock Hall—the idea of it, the idea of arriving by water and beginning a new life.

  Now he is transplanted, lonely, low on cash, inspired to write of his grief, and forcibly getting used to his new surroundings.

  Chapter 3

  Faux rock cinderblock originated in the 1920s, when the molded replication of chiseled granite was thought to be more visually arresting than the mundane block itself. Nowadays, faux rock looks cheesy; it’s artificiality offends the eye. It’s clearly not what it pretends to be. Its rough-hewn surface accumulates grime that accentuates the industrial fakery. Moreover, I’ve learned from past experience that cinderblock dwellings, as a rule, lack insulation. Come wintertime, I may rue the faux rock for practical as well as aesthetic reasons.

  But it’s a stout cottage—that can’t be denied. It won’t fall down anytime soon. Its asphalt shingled roof peaks steeply on all four sides, the eaves gutterless (thus accounting for the dirt penumbra along the bottom two feet of wall). The interior consists of a living room, two small bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen in which a stacked washer and dryer take up half the floor space. Countertop and cabinets are booby trapped with poison bait for cockroaches, ants, and mice. The other night, I had to deal with a bat flying through a hole in the ceiling that I subsequently sealed with duct tape. Window sashes need to be propped open with sticks, the screening’s useless. I’ve placed a fly swatter in each room. After a fashion, everything works.

  Budge is off to a good start, although he won’t admit it. If he weren’t feeling so sorry for himself, he’d see that he has landed on his feet with his health, his sanity, his necessary possessions, and his pet (who is taking to the new digs with feline aplomb). What Budge doesn’t have now is a wife who was going to leave him sooner or later.

  Yet despite a marital past far more rocky than rosy, he pines for the life he left behind—the big house, the social calendar, the lawn he cared for as if it mattered deeply in the great scheme of things, the no-limit shopping. He misses the big car with its leather interior and cloud-like suspension. He misses the lineup of tools and leisure toys along the walls of his garage. He misses the whine of the heat pump compressor concealed within the privet. He misses the neighbors who confirmed his existence with lives that closely mimicked his own, bracketing him with barbecue smells and barking dogs and pool-splashing squeals of delight and leaves to be raked (or blown) as they dropped off the well-pruned trees, and so on throughout the suburban infinitum.

  Then, too, he misses his wife—even the least aspect about her, like the way she put the laundry in the dryer and emptied the dishwasher. The way she arrived home late in the afternoon, sometimes too exhausted to do anything for the first half hour but sit down with the newspaper and a reheated cup of coffee. She did work hard, he’ll give her credit for that. Financially, she kept them going. But he worked hard also; many nights after supper he returned to his desk for two or three hours.

  With morose clarity, he remembers the good times they had. The big trips and little trips. The parties, theirs and others’. The many cultural events they attended, the movies they saw. The restaurants they dined in enough times to refer to as “favorites.” And the galaxy of goings-on they shared in the bedroom: dressing and undressing, solving crossword puzzles, watching DVD movies, reading news magazines to each other, and—always lastly—making love. Foreplay, wordplay, replay—he can’t get the memories out of his brain.

  It’s all gone, he reminds himself. The pining is pointless. Healing hasn’t just begun; it started on the day she walked out, which is over three months ago.

  Budge struggles to adjust his mind to the current reality. He’s come to a place as good as any and a lot better than some. A waterman’s hamlet since the early 1800
s, Rock Hall is an incorporated town situated between a series of coves called necks. It’s contemporary trade and traffic, geared toward tourism and pleasure boating, includes seven marinas offering hundreds upon hundreds of boat slips, six charter fishing services, five motels, four B&Bs, nine restaurants, three bars, an old-time soda fountain, a fudge shop, two historical museums, six or seven emporia specializing in antiques and crafts (the number fluctuates), and four realty agencies. From the picturesque rubber-tired trolley, all this was fresh and captivating when he first arrived. Already, the novelty is wearing off.

  That damn trolley passes right in front of the cottage—ding! ding!—after discharging and picking up beach-goers. I have no cause to complain or be critical, but it can be annoying at times. I find myself wishing I were a tourist, a carefree half of a couple sashaying through town, laughing, spending money freely, surfeited with delight. Instead, I’m a penny-pinching renter peering through my screen door—never to ride, always to watch.