Still Life with Husband

by Lauren Fox

  “HEY, BABE-A-LICIOUS AND MR. LICIOUS!” HEATHER SOUNDS like she’s shouting into a megaphone on our answering machine. “Tell the maid to fluff up my pillows and make sure there’s plenty of whiskey in the liquor cabinet. I’m a-comin’ home for Thanksgiving!”

  Ever since my mother and I had lunch together and she served up her all-you-can-eat buffet of cautionary tales—age-related infertility, emergency hysterectomies, and other tales of childless woe—I’ve been thinking: what exactly will I leave behind? Will the genetic buck really stop here, with me? In deciding not to have children, I must surely be breaking some serious biological rules. I wonder if I even have the right not to reproduce. Here I am, the living by-product of generations of jealously guarded DNA, thick ancestral lines of beloved children brought up with tenderness and care so that they would survive to adulthood in order to have more babies…and I, Emily Ross, have the gall to say, “That’s the end of that”? Because of me, the big quilt of our family, the shimmery, gossamer threads of history interwoven with the bright yarn of the Ross family, that’s just going to unravel, blow away in gorgeous, impermanent wisps, until there’s no more solid flesh, until there’s nothing left of us but air? Because I say so?

  Well, there’s Heather, of course. I suppose I could count on her to reproduce. But I’ve never been able to count on much with Heather. We’re two years apart, but there are a thousand miles between us.

  As soon as she graduated from high school (while I was about to start my junior year in Madison as a serious, studious English-literature major), Heather fled to Minneapolis. Ostensibly, this was so that she could attend the University of Minnesota, but she only lasted three semesters. She’s smarter than I am, but she’s a dilettante; her most consistent lifelong pursuit has always been boys. As soon as she dropped out of college, she moved in with her first in a long series of what Kevin and I call the TIBs, the Totally Inappropriate Boyfriends. “Heather has a new TIB,” I’ll tell him, or, “That TIB didn’t last long.” Her first live-in TIB, when she was just nineteen, was Bill, a twenty-eight-year-old slacker/punk who, I’m pretty sure, hit her. She never confessed, but when she came home for a weekend visit in October, she had a nasty bruise on her cheek from, she said, walking into a wall. My parents drove to Minneapolis a week later and helped her move out. Bill the slacker/punk was definitely the worst of the TIBs; after him, they’ve mostly been harmless, usually nice guys, and Heather’s always the one who calls it quits. She told her mechanic boyfriend that she couldn’t be with someone who didn’t have a more intellectual job, and then she hooked up with a lawyer. Six months later, she broke it off with him because, she said, “he walked around with his big lawyer head up his big lawyer ass.”

  I love Heather, and we go through periods of relative closeness, by which I mean we talk on the phone once a week. But then one of us does something: I make an (accidentally) condescending remark about her (incredibly) irresponsible choices, or she calls me stodgy, boring, criminally analytical, and then one of us storms off, figuratively, in a huff. That’s the problem with sisters, or at least with Heather and me: we think we have every right to judge each other’s life. Even as we’re doing it, we both know we’re just trying to make our own choices feel like better ones, and it back-fires every time. After a few months we always come back together. (Although once it took us an entire year, after a particularly nasty screaming match. It began as an argument about whose turn it was to drive to Chicago to pick up Aunt Mimi for our dad’s sixtieth birthday party, but it diverged and hit its ugly nadir when Heather admitted that every time Kevin started talking she fanta-sized that she was somewhere else, and I told her that I was fantasizing right at that moment that she was a normal adult with an actual job and a boyfriend she’d been dating for more than two weeks.) Our relationship is four parts thick sibling love, and one part volatile, fundamental, often deliberate lack of understanding.

  People say that Heather and I look alike, but this is what I think: I’ve seen photographic experiments where the right and left sides of a person’s face are halved and then digitally recombined, so that there are two pictures of the same person, one a combination of the two right sides of the face, the other a combination of the two left sides. One photograph is always subtly but significantly more attractive than the other, because, it seems, our faces are asymmetrical and actually quite disparate. This is Heather and me. Heather is the pretty right side, with her straight nose and her brilliant smile. Even her hair, although as dark and curly as mine, is somehow smooth and orderly, falling in Botticelli ringlets to just below her shoulders. I, of course, am the left side—on a good day, I look interesting. Heather gets by on her looks in a way I never could, even if I wanted to. And who knows? Maybe I would want to.

  Heather’s current boyfriend is the least Totally Inappropriate of all the TIBs. He’s a TAB. Sam is her age, twenty-eight. He formed his own Internet start-up company when he was just out of college. It was supposed to be a virtual community for political liberals, a place for all varieties of left-leaning Web surfers to come together and brainstorm about changing the world. The problem was, he called it “e-ville.” E-ville. Poor Sam. It’s all in the execution. Instead of the peacenik Web surfers he’d hoped for, e-ville attracted all manner of devil-worshipping loonies and Goth ne’er-do-wells. The company went bust three years before the rest of the Internet economy collapsed. Which, in the end, was a good thing for Sam: he found a new job before his geeky, ambitious competition hit the pavement. Now he’s the computer guy at a big Minneapolis nonprofit environmental agency. I’ve never met him, but he sounds great, and he loves Heather. They moved in together in June. She’ll probably sabotage it within the next six months. She tends to cheat on the really nice guys.

  Come to think of it, maybe our genetic code should just quietly sputter to a halt, like the used, rusty 1985 green Ford Escort we shared in high school: useful enough for short trips, but not so reliable in the long run.

  “Heather is definitely coming home for Thanksgiving,” I tell Kevin as we wander around the empty rooms of an ugly house in an ugly subdivision ten long miles from our apartment. If it’s Sunday, this must be a split-level. Suffused with guilt, I readily agreed to accompany Kevin on today’s housing safari. Last Friday, while I was kissing another man, Kevin was busily arranging appointments with Tom Lindermeyer, friendly real estate agent with Glenbrook Homes.

  “Heather?” Kevin asks, unconcerned. “That’s nice.” He knows Heather’s visit means both that she will stay with us for a night or two, leaving a trail of wet towels and dirty dishes in her wake, and that my sister and I will probably have a big fight. But he likes Heather; he likes her spunkiness, and he doesn’t know that she finds him boring. He’s smitten by my sister, in a brother-in-law sort of way, and he’s untroubled by our troubled relationship.

  I flick the light switch in the kitchen on and off a few times, illuminating the green Formica countertops and dimming them; I watch, mesmerized, as they go from an unappetizing shade of lime to an equally revolting avocado, lime to avocado, light to dark, until Kevin pulls my hand away. Then I begin fiddling with the faucet, pretending to be interested in the water pressure. There must be an art to buying a house, but I’ve certainly never learned it. “Home equity” has always sounded to me like the idea that everyone should have a house. Vague ideas about property taxes and water heaters rattle around in my mind, bumping into each other like the big, colliding retro polka dots on the curtains that hang in the kitchen windows, but I have no idea what sorts of questions a person is supposed to ask when she is considering shackling herself to four walls and a roof for the next thirty years. Maybe, “Where’s the escape hatch?”

  “How old is the roof?” Kevin asks Tom Lindermeyer, who has been shadowing us like an eager puppy as we’ve traipsed around the eerily deserted rooms, a few remnants of another family’s life, like the psychedelic curtains, still lingering in this empty house.

  “Well,” he says brightly, “that
’s a very good question. It’s been here since the current owners moved in. So it’s at least six years old. Could be just six, could be older! I can find out for you!” Tom Lindermeyer says everything like he’s announcing a bargain over the loudspeaker at a discount store. “Attention, K-Mart shoppers! Plastic wrap is on sale for ninety-nine cents a roll in aisle seven! The floors underneath this brown all-weather carpeting are oak!”

  “Oak, huh?” Kevin says, his interest piqued. He’s a sucker for a nice wood floor.

  I don’t know what I’m doing here. It’s my life’s refrain. I don’t know what I’m doing here, walking purposefully through somebody else’s abandoned house and contemplating a thirty-year mortgage, half-listening to the cheerful yipping of the real estate agent. And I don’t know what I’m doing here, with Kevin, my scrabbling, oblivious husband, when in my mind I’m still kissing David Keller.

  His lips were as soft as I expected them to be, and just a little bit salty. David was surprised at first, and for a second those lips were slack, and I almost pulled away, mortified at my miscalculation, but after that momentary pause—if I ever wanted to tell myself that he kissed me first, to try to justify any of this, I would only have to remember that pause, that indelible, unarguable pause that declared, “You, Emily Ross, started this”—after that blink of an eye, David reacted; he kissed me, and I knew that he wanted to as much as I did, and we inched our bodies closer on the fake rocks, and we kept kissing. He put his arms around me, and I touched his face, his rough jaw; my fingers lightly grazed his neck. I breathed him in, and we kept kissing. I thought, Oh, and then he moved his tongue a little bit inside my mouth and then I thought, I understand how it’s supposed to be, and we kissed some more, and then we stopped. David moved his head away from mine and put his hands on either side of my face and looked at me for a moment, and he said, “Oh, boy.”

  I said, “Oh, boy,” back. My heart was thumping so hard I could hear the blood pounding behind my eardrums.

  David got up then and took my hand, gently pulled me up beside him. “I should go,” he said softly, and I didn’t say anything back this time. We just walked hand in hand through the Butterfly Wing and out the dark hallway to the museum’s exit. He kissed me right outside the door in the bright, surprising sunlight. It was as quick as a handshake, but he put his hand on my face again and said, “Bye, Emily,” and then we went our separate ways.

  “Is anybody in there?” Kevin asks. He’s sidled up next to me and interrupted my reverie, and I feel my face grow hot. Luckily, it’s dark in the foyer, where I hadn’t even realized I’d wandered. Kevin slips a hand into the back pocket of my jeans and gives my butt a little squeeze, a gesture that takes me by surprise. Reserved and somewhat formal, Kevin doesn’t usually act in public like we are two people who have sex in private. I still feel warm, but now some of the warmth is transferred over to my husband, which is both confusing and appropriate.

  “I was daydreaming,” I say. And then I lie, “Just trying to imagine what it would be like to live here,” which, as I say it, is no longer a lie. There’s a master bedroom upstairs and one other room painted Pepto-Bismol pink, which I imagine belonged to a six-year-old girl named Danielle who probably aspired to be a ballerina or a mermaid. I superimpose a vision onto her, startling in its vividness, its utter psychological distance from everything else I’ve been feeling for the last few months: we live here, Kevin and I and our own six-year-old girl. Her name is Norah and she’s a tomboy; she insisted we repaint the bedroom bright green and has filled it with books about botany, and an ant farm, and her pet gerbil, Leopold. Kevin is a little bit scared of Leopold, and we laugh about that, and we laugh about our grubby, fearless girl and her affection for worms and leaves and rodents.

  “Me, too,” Kevin says. “The kitchen is nice. But the whole place isn’t much bigger than our apartment, is it? And I don’t trust Tom Lindermeyer’s answer about the roof,” he adds in a whisper. I’m snapped back from reverie number two, in which we are a happy family in our cozy house. I’m no longer kissing David Keller; I’m no longer brushing my daughter’s tangled, unruly hair. I’m just here, in the dark foyer of somebody else’s house, unbelievably scared, watching the walls close in around me.

  LAST NIGHT, WHILE KEVIN WAS AT THE LIBRARY, I sent another e-mail to David Keller, asking if he’d like to see me. Asking if it would be all right if I went over to his place one night this week.

  If I were on trial, now would be the moment that I would throw myself upon the mercy of the court. I knew exactly what I was doing last night, in my dark study, a stubby blue candle flickering beside me, the window open a crack so that the flame bobbed and quivered and tossed gaudy shadows around the room, and I was thrilled and horrified to be doing it. I have never invited myself over to a man’s apartment: not when I was single, and certainly not since I’ve been with Kevin. I had to think, before I hit “send,” I had to think, This is it. I knew what I was doing: I was quite possibly sentencing my marriage to death.

  I love Kevin. Is it possible to do something so awful and so obviously wrong and so deliberate, and at the same time to feel heartbroken for the victim of your own crime? I think so: that’s how I felt.

  Another layer of my not-so-pretty self falls away: I felt sympathy for Kevin, pity, and piercing guilt, but that was nothing close to the way I felt for myself. Sparks of energy ran over my skin like squirrels across a telephone wire. I had invited myself over to David Keller’s apartment to seduce him, to sleep with him, to consummate whatever strange, amazing, banal, glorious relationship we’ve found ourselves in.

  So many voices echoed in my head before I finally sent the e-mail. It was a Greek chorus in there. I heard my mother: “Darling, the passion we feel for our spouse changes into the passion we feel for our children.” Kevin: “We need to make an appointment with a mortgage broker. Do you have time on Wednesday? Bring last year’s W-2.” Meg: “I’ll regret what I did with Pay-ter Yo-han-sen for the rest of my life!” Louise Aslanian, my former adviser: “Life is the petri dish for Art.” Heather: “Go for it, sistah!” My father: “Did you realize that Marie Curie was Polish? I was not aware of this. Obviously, I was under the impression that she was French.” And David. I heard David Keller among the clamor, and he was whispering, and his soft, one-syllable word hummed at a frequency below all the others, quieter, more persistent. And that one word was “yes.”

  But when the cacophony of competing voices and whispers finally quieted, what I heard in the end wasn’t even a voice. It was my own heart: its familiar thump-thump, the rhythm of its stubborn desire. I listened to the steady beating of my heart and found it to be heightened, louder just then than it had been in years. That was what I heard. It was the sound that convinced me.

  FOR SOME TIME NOW, I ’VE BEEN WORKING ON A BOOK of poetry. It’s a series of love poems to fish called Sole Mates. I’m trying to carve out a niche for myself as a writer of love poems to nonhumans. If amphibians had disposable income and marketing clout, I might be on to something. As it is, it keeps me amused. Next on the agenda will be a volume of romantic verse dedicated to a more varied cross section of marine life, tentatively titled Sealed with a Kiss. I’ve outlined the whole cycle. From marine animals, I’ll most likely move on to the vegetable kingdom with Tomato, My Tomato, or possibly, if my poetic vision shifts toward the star-crossed, Lettuce Be in Love.

  So I’m in the middle of “My God, What a Cod,” when Meg walks into White’s. In fact, I should be finishing up an editing assignment. I’m supposed to be proofreading Hooray for Plate Tectonics!, a fifth-grade science textbook for the children’s-book publishers I freelance for (I did Three Cheers for Photosynthesis! last week), but I’m having more fun sorting out rhyme schemes and tweaking “When You’re Feeling Crappie.” I’m in the middle of struggling with the last verse of “Cod”—

  So swim to me—quick!—you clever cod

  I’ll feast my eyes on your intriguing lips

  I long to caress your sc
aly bod

  Your fate: much more than fish and chips

  (notes: does “scaly” have unromantic connotation? is last line too Borscht Belt?)

  —and I don’t notice Meg until she throws her arms around me from behind. I manage to surreptitiously shove my neon pink notebook under Hooray for Plate Tectonics! as she plants a kiss on the top of my head and sits down next to me. She looks sparkly; her cheeks are flushed.

  “What’s the good word?” I say. I hear myself spout this Len Rossism; as I grow older, it’s just one of the many ways I find myself unwittingly channeling my parents. One day soon I’ll be strolling around in the summertime in Bermuda shorts with black socks and dress shoes, greeting strangers with a hearty salute.

  “The good word,” Meg says, barely able to contain herself, “is ‘pregnant.’ The two good words are ‘I’m pregnant.’”

  “Meg!” I say, and I throw my arms around her and hug her tightly, and then I think, maybe you shouldn’t hug a pregnant person too tightly, so I loosen my grip and say, “I’m so happy for you,” and I mean it.

  “I just found out this morning,” she says. “I did the test first thing, before Steve woke up, and I started yelling from the bathroom, ‘Steve, come quick! Two lines! Two lines!’ and Steve thought I was having a nightmare about two lions, and he came running in, and he slipped on the bathroom rug and cracked his front tooth on the edge of the sink. Can you believe it?” Meg is out of breath, rushing her words together. She looks horrified and then laughs, and then looks horrified again. “He’s at the dentist now.” She clasps her hands together, as if she’s praying. “He gets a discount from other dentists. Did you know that?” My best friend seems different to me. I recognize this as a cliché, but it’s true. Her light brown eyes shine like bright amber, and her lovely skin is even clearer than usual. “Besides Steve, you’re the only one who knows,” she adds.