by Rita Ciresi
Lisa thought I loved my job more than her. But if only she could have seen how wearily I brushed the powder from the windshield and roof of my Audi. If only she could have seen how slowly I drove the quiet back roads into work and felt how far my heart dropped when I pulled into my reserved parking space, stomped my snow-ridden boots on the black rubber mat, and stepped into Scheer–Boorman LifeSciences by the back door—as if I were entering a prison.
I didn’t want to tell Lisa any of this, because I was afraid she’d write about it. But lately when I signed in with the security guard, I looked down at my own name as if it weren’t really my name. And I felt old—and stuck in a rut—when I looked down at the hallway carpet and realized it had been replaced—three times—during the ten years I’d worked there, in the same tired shade that I would call tan (and that Lisa probably would call clay or ochre).
As I passed through the crescent-shaped lobby, I averted my eyes from our new CEO’s idea of artwork: an overblown photograph of a freshly lit match blazing with a red flame. ATTITUDE IS CONTAGIOUS. IS YOURS CATCHING? asked this motivational image. I hoped not. Maybe it was just Friday—and my constipation was talking—but I had arrived at the office with enough bad attitude to burn down a barn and then some.
I took out my keys and unlocked the door to the office suite marked EBEN STRAUSS, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT FOR INTERNAL RELATIONS. How could I tell Lisa—without making her feel guilty—that I had accepted this position not because I wanted to be Mr. Big Shot but because I wanted to do the right thing by my family? Formerly I’d been in new-product development—a fine job (as my mother once said) for a bachelor. But the moment I got married—or, rather, the moment I became a father—I started to realize what a toll it was going to take on my home life to be away for days at a time visiting labs and university research centers. Danny had spiked fevers and developed ear infections while I was nowhere near home to relieve Lisa from the round-the-clock job of comforting a peevish baby. He had said his first word (baba for bottle) when I was scurrying through an underground tunnel in the cold of Toronto, and he had sprouted his first tooth when I was sweating through my wool coat waiting for a cab back to the airport in the blistering heat of Phoenix. Meanwhile, Lisa kept ovulating while I was in Raleigh or Seattle or San Diego.
I knew I couldn’t keep up the traveling much longer. And so last year, when Scheer LifeSciences swallowed Boorman Pharmaceuticals in a hostile takeover (and emptied three quarters of the executive suites), I had considered myself lucky that the new CEO tapped me for the demanding job of making B blend together more successfully with S. I now did what a chief administrative officer did (at half of his pay): managed home base.
I actually enjoyed most of the responsibilities of corporate reorganization—the reconfiguration of sales territories, the consolidation of our accounting operations—but there was one part of my new job that I had come to hate: handling the so-called sticky issues formerly within the realm of the Human Resources Director (whose position had been collapsed, right after the merger, into my own). Over the past month, I had brought in psychologists and fashion consultants to expound upon how casual-dress codes affected employee productivity and morale. In response to demands for more vegetarian and heart-healthy entrees in the employee cafeteria, I had hired registered dietitians to revise the lunch menu (then took serious flak when Funny Bones and Ding Dongs disappeared from the dessert section). During final planning for the new wing of our headquarters, I had supervised a lengthy survey on employee workplace satisfaction (discovering the following fascinating fact: forty-nine percent of those at SB thought the building temperature was too hot and forty-nine percent thought it was too cold, with two percent expressing this precise or similar opinion: Why do you jerk-offs even ask what we want, when you’re not going to give it to us anyway?) I had fingered Sherwin-Williams paint chips as I listened to interior decorators talk about the psychology of color (blue soothed, red stimulated) and even suffered through a presentation—complete with transparency overlays—from a La Leche League representative called in to advise the architects on the proposed lactation station in the day-care center. For nights after that discussion, my dreams were populated by clogged nipples and mastitis-blue breasts.
A Yiddish blessing bestowed upon the bride on her wedding day said, May you be mother of millions. As EVPIR, I now personified Mama to an enormous family of disgruntled employees who expected me to settle every petty squabble they had with the organization. Instead of wearing a suit and tie to work, I should have donned an apron whose front placket read: FOR THIS I WENT TO COLLEGE?
I entered the outer office of the EVPIR’s suite, turned on the lights, put down my briefcase, and took off my trench coat, hesitating a moment before the brass coat rack. I didn’t like sharing this coat rack with my new secretary. It made me feel married to her. No doubt she felt similarly hitched, because (claiming the brass pegs were extremely harsh on our outerwear) she had decorated the rack with two hand-knitted hangers, one pink and the other blue. When I failed to use my blue hanger—resorting back to the brass peg or simply tossing my coat over a chair—Ms. Victoria Wright took the liberty of rehanging my coat, going so far as to button the entire placket and tie the belt, as if she were a department-store window dresser doting over a mannequin. Just the thought of her presumptuous fussiness made me want to stuff either the pink or the blue hanger—or better yet, the happy couple!—into her electric pencil sharpener and grind them to bits.
Some guys dreamed about having torrid affairs with their secretaries. I fantasized about giving mine the ax.
“I don’t get it, Ebb,” Lisa said when I complained—probably ad nauseam—about my secretary. “You chose Victoria. You could have had any of the senior secretaries. You could have slapped your hands on some hot little number right out of the Empire State Secretarial School, and yet you ended up choosing the one woman in the corporation who would drive you nucking futs!”
Actually, Victoria drove me futs nucking—not because she was too loyal or too organized or too efficient, but because I had come to know all too well her most annoying personal habits. Which were, as follows:
**Victoria drank Postum.
**Victoria sucked too loudly on Jolly Rancher candies.
**Victoria stabbed with a white plastic spork at her fat-free yogurt in weird flavors like boysenberry.
**Victoria spent the rest of her lunch hour stationed at her desk, whipping up cross-stitched pillows emblazoned with folksy mottoes like SEWING AIDS THE DIGESTION!
**Victoria eavesdropped on every verbal tussle I had with every whiner in the corporation and every low-level quarrel I had with Lisa on the phone.
**Victoria knew whenever I stepped out of the office to use the men’s room (and how long I spent in there).
It was bad enough that Lisa knew me like a book—but to have Victoria on my case made me feel like I had absolutely no privacy whatsoever. So the more Victoria wanted to micromanage me (“You can’t go there, Mr. Strauss, because you need to be here!” “You can’t call him, Mr. Strauss, because you need to call her!”), the more I started feebly lying to her, the way a guy committing adultery told transparent lies to his wife. “I’m getting some coffee,” I told Victoria, when really I was headed for the john again. “My real-estate agent is taking me out to look at another house,” I said whenever I had an appointment with the fertility doctor.
I was sure Victoria—with her censorious looks and comments such as “I’m having difficulty keeping track of your comings and goings”—suspected I was up to no good with some wanton woman I’d met at the last Kiwanis luncheon. As if a guy in my position—who had an in-box so full it strained my back to lift it!—had the time to chase skirts. Get real, I wanted to tell her. I barely have a moment to make it with my own wife!
Lately I’d fantasized about . . . well, doing away with Victoria. Relocating her. Deporting her back to Information Systems, where for five years she had worked side by side with those rumpled
, bearded, B.O.-derous gnomes in ponytails who maintained our computers. Yet I could not. Victoria was just as indispensable to me as she was annoying. In the miles of files archived in the basement, she could locate a memo dating back to 1963. 1954. 1945! When the pointer froze on my PC, she freed it herself or immediately commanded one of the aforementioned ponytails to stop whatever he was doing to come and fix it. She never bitched about the heavy amount of work—or the short notice—I often gave her. Unlike Lisa, she never, ever said, “You want it when?”
Yet she was always there! always suspicious! always smelling of Postum’s main ingredient: molasses! Thus I wanted—needed—these first solitary morning hours at work, where I could cruise through the contents of my in-box without having to listen to Victoria uncrinkle yet another watermelon Jolly Rancher wrapper or chide me (just like Lisa) to remember appointments and responsibilities, which I inevitably disremembered, with these stern words: Don’t forget . . . don’t forget.
I flicked off the lights in the outer office and stood there in the dark, trying to imagine the bliss of having Victoria call in sick. Then I sighed. Back in October, Victoria—proclaiming herself a “very hearty soul”—had passed on her free flu shot. She hadn’t missed a day of work in years. Short of spiking her Postum with arsenic, there was no getting rid of her—or the cross-stitch behind her desk that greeted me every morning.
GOD GRANT ME THE SERENITY
TO ACCEPT THE THINGS
I CANNOT CHANGE
I entered my office and sat down at my desk. As always, the framed photo I kept next to my in-box made me smile. It showed Danny and Lisa on the banks of the Croton Reservoir: Lisa squatting and pointing at some geese, Danny with his hand in the paper bag, ready to draw out a handful of stale Italian bread to feed these ravenous hordes. I loved this picture less for the actual moment I had captured and more for the one I had missed. Had I snapped the shutter a moment later, I would have caught Lisa scolding the entire flock of geese as Danny fled in fear from a particularly aggressive gander.
The silver Tiffany clock on my credenza—a gift from Lisa, for our first wedding anniversary—chimed a subtle six A.M. A moment later, my private line lit up.
I picked up the phone on the first ring.
“Bad Boy?” Lisa asked, in a peeved voice.
I cleared my throat. “Speaking.”
“Remind me again why I married you.”
Maybe I just had tinnitus. But the moment Lisa posed that question (so rhetorical it didn’t even require a question mark), a faint ringing similar to the high-pitched whine of the Emergency Broadcast System began to hum in my ear so I could not hear, even within myself, the wild Babel of answers that came from my heart and head.
Finally the ringing stopped—only to be replaced with another odd sound. “What’s that weird gnawing?” I asked.
“I’m eating your BAD BOY heart,” Lisa reported. “And grinding it to bits.”
CHAPTER FIVE
LISA
Ebb scolded me so hard, I thought he’d have a coronary. “Take that heart out of your mouth, Lisar,” he said. “The sugar will throw off your body temperature.”
I drew the blankets up to my chin, swallowed the last bits of the BAD BOY heart, and glanced at the nightstand, where the pastel pink case holding my basal body thermometer seemed to glow beneath the lamplight. “You already threw off my body temperature,” I said, “by setting the alarm for six instead of seven. Besides, it doesn’t matter if my temperature spikes today.”
“Why not?”
“It’s Friday.”
“I don’t follow.”
My forehead grew hot. “Friday nights we always.”
Ebb paused. “We do?” He paused again. “I guess I hadn’t noticed.”
I held the cordless phone away from my ear and looked at it as if it were an evil invention. Even Alexander Graham Bell’s first words to his same-sex assistant—“Mr. Watson, come here! I want you!” (or was that: “I need you”?)—seemed more romantic than Ebb’s.
When Ebb’s voice finally came back on the line, it sounded like he was talking to me long-distance from Fargo or Grand Forks or some other cold, forsaken place. “I meant to say—”
I brought the phone back to my ear.
“—I didn’t notice we had such a distinct pattern.” Ebb cleared his throat. “You think this constitutes a problem?”
“Constitutes?” I asked.
“That’s a legitimate verb.”
“We’re talking about fucking,” I said, “not We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union.”
“Just answer the question, Lisar.”
“It’s not a problem,” I said.
I stated—in part—the truth. Sex on an unspoken but regular schedule had its advantages. Ebb and I both knew when to thoroughly brush our teeth (and scrape our tongues). We knew when to shut the bedroom door to guard against any interruptions from Danny. And I knew I should wait until Saturday morning to change the sheets (although years ago, if someone had warned me that after I got married I would think about laundry and sex in the same breath, I probably would have elected to stop breathing altogether).
What I didn’t want to admit to Ebb was the downside of our Friday-night trysts: they seemed as predictable as the calls that came from telemarketers just as we sat down to dinner. It was fine to inform these folks from AT&T and Chase Manhattan Mortgage, “I’m just not interested,” but how could I say the same to Ebb? I was interested. Yet I felt like it would bruise his feelings if I said, Could you get back to me on Monday . . . or Wednesday . . . or Thursday . . . at three o’clock or four o’clock or any other unpredictable o’clock? That I loved Ebb but didn’t know how to tell him that I wanted to make love to him at crazy, unexpected times and in even crazier, unexpected ways made me sad. Only once had I broached the subject by asking Ebb, “Do you ever want something different in bed?” Ebb had hesitated as if he had come to a four-way stop in the road before he said, “I want . . . the same.” (Not even more of the same: That was quintessential Ebb.)
“About Fridays,” Ebb said. “I guess I’m just tired. During the week.”
“I know,” I said. “Really. I’m tired too.”
“I have a lot on my mind.”
I nodded. “I have a lot of laundry.”
“I know I need to leave the office at the office.”
I looked across our sloppy, cluttered room at the PowerBook sitting on my desk. “I sleep, dream, write, and make love in what’s supposed to be your home office,” I said. “But don’t tell the IRS.”
Ebb laughed. “We should make some time,” he said. “To be with each other.”
I bit my lip. I didn’t want to make time. And I didn’t like forcing Ebb to rearrange his busy schedule so he could come home on his lunch hour on that fateful day, once a month, when my stubborn, impenetrable egg began its sluggish journey. I was tired of schedules. I wanted to be taken by surprise! I wanted Ebb—or some other unknown, muscular hunk—to burst through the front door, stride purposefully into the kitchen where I stood preparing dinner, click off the stove burners, yank off my apron, and growl something manly like “You know you want it!” while he . . . well, did me . . . on the kitchen counter . . . in the sink . . . no, up against the refrigerator (so hard that my lusty butt bumped up against the automatic ice dispenser and a flood of cold cubes clattered to the tile floor).
I sighed. I stretched out my still-sleepy bones first on my side of the bed (warm) and then on Ebb’s (where the sheets felt decidedly cooler). I cradled the phone between my shoulder and ear, as if cuddling with the cordless brought me closer to Ebb.
“Sure,” I told him. “We could make time.”
I knew Ebb was smiling—kind of sadly—when he said, “So remind me.”
There were plenty of other things I wasn’t exactly pleased to keep nagging Ebb about—like taking out the garbage and oiling the front-door lock. So I told him, “I’ll be happy to remind you.”
“I want you to be happy, Lisar.”
I hesitated a long time before I said, “I want . . . the same. For you.”
After Ebb bid me his customary good-bye (Have a good one, Lisar—as if I were a business associate instead of his wife), I put the cordless phone down on the nightstand and reached for my basal body thermometer, thankful I couldn’t cry my usual whopper hormonal sobs with a thin glass tube stuck in my mouth.
I was supposed to record my temperature—before I got up to urinate, brush my teeth, or eat breakfast—at exactly the same time every morning: seven A.M. But I’d been cheating mightily with the BBT method ever since I began. On weekends I always slept later than seven. On weekdays I dreamed really hot dreams and kept hitting the snooze bar on the rooster alarm clock to prolong my pleasure. Sometimes, regardless of the day of the week, I awoke and thought, I just can’t face that thermometer—even if I’m not using it rectally!—until I get some forbidden caffeine coursing through my system. Other times Danny burst into the bedroom and forced me to take the thermometer from beneath my tongue to explain, “No, I’m not sick—but I feel miserable, anyway.”
As I lay there with my lips pursed around the thermometer, I stared at the ceiling and wished I were the kind of wife who gave her husband Old Spice aftershave for his birthday instead of a venereal disease that rendered them both infertile. I wished I were the kind of wife who could keep a tidy house—instead of always resorting to this lame excuse: “You simply cannot write a good novel and maintain a clean toilet.” I wished I were the kind of wife who vented about her marriage to her girlfriends—instead of writing a three-hundred-page opus devoted to that same dangerous topic. Most of all, I wished I wasn’t the kind of wife who was always waiting for another man—a Norwegian man—to call her.
The rooster alarm read 6:08. I wrinkled up my nose and looked down, cross-eyed, at the thermometer sticking out of my mouth. I am tired of mooning around this house, I thought, like a lovesick woman in the midst of a dangerous extramarital affair—leaping to answer the phone, pining to hear Aye-Aye’s voice, drooling (no, absolutely slobbering like a slavering hound!) over his photograph in Publishers Weekly. Aye-Aye has had the complete manuscript of I’m Sorry This Is My Life for weeks now, and if he doesn’t call me today with good news—bad news—any news—then I am going to call—