Of course, this was something that might change over time.
One of Chad’s kids, one of his daughters, was having a particularly hard adjustment to the new marital configuration. The daughter was twenty, which in Melanie’s opinion was old enough to roll with a few of the punches the world aimed at you, although she refrained from voicing this. The daughter’s name was Danielle. She still lived at home with her mother and attended a local community college. She was studying art history and hotel management. She was stalking them.
Chad and Melanie had been so exquisitely tactful about each other’s children. They had understood the pitfalls. They had arranged the initial introductions in neutral public places, casual restaurants and parks. They had avoided bribes and false enthusiasms. There had been assurances and welcoming gestures. Fat lot of good it had done them. Chad’s youngest girl put her hands over her ears and howled, refusing to listen to Melanie’s taking-an-interest questions about ballet lessons. Melanie’s middle son called her a big stupid slut and stomped out of the Denny’s with his mouth full of french fries. Her oldest boy relayed messages through Greg. He was writing a rap song in which she featured prominently. He was going to get a “Mom” tattoo on his biceps and then cut his arm off.
All that was bad enough, but Danielle was a different kind of problem, a plump, sad-sack blonde girl with eyes that reminded Melanie of oysters: quivering, viscous, bruised. Melanie had never seen her when she wasn’t crying, or clouded up on the brink of crying, or scrubbing her abraded eyes after a bout of crying. Chad said that Danielle had always been sensitive, always been a bit of a Daddy’s girl. Danielle phoned to say she was in the middle of some kind of attack—heart? asthma? anxiety?—and was having trouble breathing. Chad was able to talk her down from that crisis by getting her to admit she’d been drinking enough coffee to stun a lumberjack. “She gets all wound up and doesn’t think things through,” Chad explained.
One night as they were getting ready for bed there was a knock on the door. Chad opened it to find Danielle propped against the doorframe, dripping with rain, her oyster eyes swimming. “I can’t feel my hands and feet!”
They brought her inside and sat her down and Danielle held her flaccid hands up for them to see, and stretched out her legs to display her equally afflicted feet. Melanie fetched towels and tried to mop up some of the water that was streaming and puddling around her. “How did you get so wet?”
I couldn’t walk! I practically had to crawl to the car!”
“Let’s see those hands,” Chad said, rubbing them energetically between his own. “What was it, like, pins and needles?”
“Knives! Like knives stabbing me!”
“Sounds like a nerve thing, a little old pinched nerve.” Chad lifted his head to ask Melanie, “How about you fix her some hot chocolate? Does hot chocolate sound good, sweetie?”
Danielle allowed, piteously, that hot chocolate would not be unwelcome.
Melanie went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. They had some envelopes of cocoa with marshmallows and she emptied one into a mug. For herself she uncorked a bottle of red wine and poured a glass. She drank and watched the crown of blue flame flicker beneath the kettle. Chad came in and began opening cupboard doors. “Do we have cookies, anything like that?” Melanie produced a package of saltines. “Hmm. I guess I could put jelly on them.”
“Chad.”
He looked up from arranging the crackers in a circular pattern on a plate. “What?”
“There’s nothing wrong with her.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure she’s just a little freaked out. They can be pretty scary, these nerve—”
“No, I mean there’s nothing wrong with her.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Call it a hunch.”
“What am I supposed to do, send her back out into the rain?” The kettle began to whistle. Chad poured the water and took the cocoa and crackers out to the living room. Danielle spent the night sleeping on a futon mattress on the floor and in the morning Melanie fixed everybody blueberry pancakes and cantaloupe and Danielle said that her hands and feet felt nearly normal and wasn’t it great that they could all have breakfast together?
The next week Danielle’s car broke down at two a.m. and she hitchhiked to Chad and Melanie’s because it was closer than home. Then she had a fight with her mother and showed up with a suitcase. This was when Chad had a talk with her about setting boundaries and respecting privacy, and how they would welcome her visits at agreed-upon times.
They began to get hang-up phone calls. They caught odd glimpses of Danielle as they went about their rounds of work and errands: her furtive, peering head, an unexplained wad of crumpled Kleenex. They unplugged the phone at night when they went to bed. They didn’t answer the door after dark. Danielle took to pulling her car into their driveway and idling there for long stretches of the night. If they got up to use the bathroom, her headlights illuminated the hallway. Sometimes, if the night was quiet, they heard floating bits of music from the car’s stereo, hectic rock songs rendered sweet and blurred by distance. Every so often Danielle would fall asleep in the car and in the morning one of them would have to go out and ask her to move.
The station Chad worked for was taken over by one of the big radio networks and the format changed to religious programming and angry politics. Chad stayed on—jobs didn’t grow on trees at his age—as did the control room staff and Liz, the receptionist and bookkeeper. The new shows were rebroadcast from remote studios and intruded only as aggrieved voices buzzing from the building speakers.
But other things were different. A new station manager was installed, The Kid, Chad called him, though not to his face. The Kid was a real go-getter. He liked shaking hands. He hummed along with commercial ditties. He instituted weekly staff meetings where coffee and violently sugared pastries were served. “Who’s come up with the next great idea for performance enhancement?” he’d ask, and when nobody had any, he read from the newest round of corporate directives, which always involved doing more work in the same amount of time.
Chad ate a chocolate doughnut—he was never able to resist the doughnuts—and felt his nerves twitch and jangle. “So, Chad,” The Kid said, turning to him with practiced, managerial enthusiasm. “How are the ad quotas coming along?”
“Like gangbusters,” Chad said. He had the lingo down by now.
“Glad to hear it. How about you work up a few quarterly projections, then give me a shout?”
Chad reached for another doughnut. “Roger wilco.” Sometimes he got through an entire meeting speaking only gibberish.
The Kid said that would be super. Chad filled his mouth with more doughnut and gave a thumbs-up sign. The Kid’s eyes fixed on something remote and unseen as his brain went through a sequence of calculator functions. You’d think that people like The Kid, working for a corporation representing such stalwart values, might be especially religious, or supernut patriots, or both. But no. His real faith was money.
After the meeting Chad stopped by Liz’s desk to sign out before his sales calls. The speakers were playing the current program, one of the preachers. The preacher’s voice was full of weepy glissandos that conveyed the consciousness of sin and the hope of redemption: “Oh hallelujah, hallelujah,” the speakers groaned. “Hallelujah, hallelujah.” Chad strolled out to the parking lot, and the glass front doors cut off the preacher’s plangent noise. His account quotas were in the toilet.
The problem, as he explained to Melanie, was that the network had upped the ad prices and also squeezed the local accounts into less and less airtime. He was supposed to bully his clients into ponying up more money for less exposure on the strength of the network’s proven high audience share. “Like every day is the Super Bowl. I’m embarrassed to show up in these people’s offices. I feel like I’m collecting on juice loans.”
Melanie brought him a beer and turned up the air conditioning, although they had agreed to try not to run it until the weather go
t really hot. Chad tilted the beer bottle and took a big smacking drink. “And the crap they play! It makes you realize the failure of universal public education. Anyone who attended the sixth grade should see right through it.”
Melanie made sympathetic noises, although she couldn’t help thinking he was overenjoying the chance to be eloquent about his grievances. She was coming to realize that Chad wasn’t exactly one of those guys who put his shoulder to the wheel and saw a job through in a stoic, manly fashion. “Could you do sales for somebody else? Another station?”
Chad let out an expiring breath. “There’s not a decent independent left in this town. They’re all tight playlists and canned slop. Man, I used to love radio, it was the sound track of my life. I ran the campus station back in college, I ever tell you that? We were just kids, sure, but we did edgy, eclectic stuff. Jazz, blues, progressive rock. Nobody does that kind of programming now. Hey.”
He realized he had talked his way into an Idea. Well, why not? Well, money. But he was tired of money being the answer to everything. Where was passion, where was delight, wasn’t this the brave new self he’d hoped to inhabit?
He might persuade some of his ad customers to get behind him. The crew at the station wasn’t crazy about the new regime. He thought he could get the guys to volunteer a few hours a week, lend a hand, sort of like helping to build a treehouse. After some negotiations with Diana, Chad was allowed to visit the garage of his former home and carry off three cartons of his old records. They were even more peculiar and varied than he remembered. There were piano rags and show tunes, ancient Mississippi bluesmen who sang accompanied only by the squeak of porch rockers. There was folk music and hard jazz and a cache of early rock and roll, the album cover photographs picturing the now-famous bands as baby-faced tough guys.
Melanie pointed out certain fiscal realities. Chad said he’d get a bank loan and give himself a year to turn the station into a moneymaking proposition. After that he’d go back into harness in some kind of sales job. He just wanted a crack at it. In a surge of love and dread, Melanie cosigned the loan application. She wanted Chad to be happy, sure. But why wasn’t he already happy, or why hadn’t he resigned himself to being a grown-up and settling for finite amounts of happiness?
Now when Melanie drove around town she could tune in to Chad’s broadcast, to Gaelic trios or robotic synthesizer music, or sometimes it was just Chad talking. He kept up a chatty stream of commentary, welcoming people to the show and introducing the music and remarking on the weather or whatever stray thought came into his head. “I’ve been thinking back to when I was ten years old and I had rheumatic fever and had to spend the whole summer in bed.” He did? He had? Melanie was sure he hadn’t told her about it. Wasn’t it the oddest thing in the world, Chad sitting in a little room by himself and sending his words far and wide. Although not too far or very wide; the station didn’t have much wattage. If Melanie drove past a certain radius, the signal fizzed out and was lost. She found it disturbing that he was talking to all these unknown people, sharing himself with them. It felt a little like the old days of their affair, when she’d been forced to be jealous of Diana.
“I wonder if any of us can ever make decisions without second-guessing and regrets.”
She heard his radio voice say this clearly. Her heart froze. She’d been maneuvering through an intersection and hadn’t been paying complete attention. Now the music started up again, hillbilly bluegrass. Had he meant her, the two of them? Moreover, did she have regrets of her own? Maybe. Yes. Sometimes.
She turned the car around and headed for the studio. On the way she stopped at a deli and bought sandwiches and potato salad and sodas. The studio was a storefront on a narrow, edge-of-downtown street. Melanie stepped carefully along the uneven sidewalk, past the bricked-over entrances to disused warehouses, and entered the cramped little office.
Chad was visible behind the glass panel that housed the broadcasting apparatus. He waved her on back. Melanie waited until he had finished speaking (“Let’s see if anybody else out there remembers the Coney Island Whitefish”) and cued the music before she went in.
“I brought us some lunch.” She held up the deli bag, an offering and an excuse.
“Wow, thanks. Is this roast beef? Can I have it?” Chad was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, his new work clothes. Melanie missed his salesman’s suits, his beautiful crisp shirts and silk ties. There was something irritating about a man who went native. They settled in to eat and every so often Chad leaned over the console to play an ad or introduce a new song. “So, what do you have to do this afternoon?” he asked her.
“Oh, this and that.” She really had nothing to do, or at least nothing urgent. She felt forlorn. A thin stream of air conditioning came from the clanking wall unit and she tried to maneuver herself beneath it. “Hey. Can I ask you something? Do you ever talk about me when you’re on the air?”
Chad was surprised. “Well, maybe once in a while, sort of. Like, ’Last night my wife and I had pizza for dinner.’ Why?”
“I don’t want you to.”
“What, I have to pretend you don’t exist?”
“No, just don’t…tell everybody in the world what you think of me.” He frowned; she could see him shaping denials, working up resentments. “Never mind. Don’t tell me either. If I was some kind of big mistake, I don’t want to hear about it.”
Melanie marched out before he could answer. She knew she was being childish, unfair, and later there would have to be tears and apologies. She sat in the car for a few minutes to collect herself. When she started the engine and turned up the radio, Chad was saying, “This one goes out to a special lady, she knows who she is.” There was a blip of static, then the music started, Janis Joplin singing “Turtle Blues”: “Oh I’m a mean, mean woman, I don’t mean no one man no good. I’m a mean, mean woman…”
As Melanie drove away she thought she saw Danielle’s car parked on the corner but she wasn’t sure and it would have depressed her to go back and find out.
Melanie decided she was being mopey and fearful, qualities she did not admire in others, and that she should not lose sight of her own goals and sense of individuality in this new estate of couplehood. She resolved to move forward. She made further advances to her children and patiently allowed them to abuse her. She began a diet plan. Her own business needed attention. She sold her import products online, from a website, dispensing jade Buddhas and teakwood salad bowls to people who desired them in places like Tennessee and Minnesota. She had never visited the faraway countries where the merchandise was produced. (For that matter, she had never been to Tennessee or Minnesota either.) She’d bought the business from the woman who’d started it, slid right into the driver’s seat. The Internet made it unnecessary to go anywhere anymore. Besides, she’d never been much of a traveler. She was squeamish about insects and diarrhea and discomfort and the general unsanitariness of that part of the world. But she was aware that much of life there was difficult beyond her imaginings. At times she fretted that hers was a largely frivolous existence, lived out in a too-narrow channel. Doting on Chad was not taking up as much of her energy as she had imagined it would.
So that when the letter reached her from Miss Poona Chumnoi of the Christian Relief and Rescue Center, based in Pattaya, Thailand, she read it with attention and then showed it to Chad. Miss Chumnoi sent respectful greetings. Her organization had as its mission the rescue and retraining of women forced to work as prostitutes. The sex trade flourished notoriously in Thailand. Women and girls from poor rural districts were lured to the brothels under false pretexts, then exploited, subjected to horrific violence and deadly disease. They had little hope of ever returning to their families. The CRRC offered safe haven, education, medical treatment, and instruction in skills such as hairdressing and embroidery. Miss Chumnoi knew firsthand the degrading lifestyle and hopelessness that were the sex workers’ lot; she herself had endured it until the CRRC had come to her aid and told her of Our Lord Jesus
Christ’s message of faith and redemption. She offered her personal story as testimony and hoped that Melanie would be moved to aid the CRRC in its important work with a generous donation, she asked it In His Name.
Chad said, “Oh yeah, Thailand. You can book special tours there, sex tours they call them. Never mind.”
“They look so young,” said Melanie, examining the brochure included with the letter. There was a picture of laughing, sparrow-delicate girls in modest smocks, preparing a meal in a tidy kitchen.
“Could be a scam.” Chad had a more jaundiced view of organized religion after his forced acquaintanceship with the radio preachers. “Why do those guys always have their hands out?”
“Well this is actually helping people,” argued Melanie. “Not building some kind of megachurch. Besides, I looked them up on the Internet, they’re for real. OK, they have a website.”
Chad told her she should do what she thought was best, and so Melanie sat down and wrote an e-mail to Poona Chumnoi, congratulating her on overcoming her difficult circumstances, and mentioning that she was sending a donation of five hundred dollars to the CRRC via international mail. Miss Chumnoi answered almost immediately, thanking her in the most affecting and heartfelt terms. “You will receive a blessing,” Miss Chumnoi declared.
Melanie loaded the dinner dishes in the dishwasher and tucked the leftovers away beneath plastic wrap. She felt buoyed by her virtuous deed. It was sobering, really, to think how seldom she did anything altruistic. What must it be like to live one’s life in the pursuit of good works, trying to make the world a better place? Instead of selfish gratification and underhanded, hurtful behavior of the sort, she had to admit, that had characterized her and Chad’s furtive courtship. She was not at all religious, but she did believe in guilt.
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