Remind Me Again Why I Married You

by Rita Ciresi

  “Waiting for a plumber to come.” I nodded behind me. “Cynthia and I just had lunch.”

  “Deb sent me for a dozen bagels,” Josh said. “So tell me: Did they get the onions oniony enough this time?”

  “I ordered the pesto,” I said.

  A look I could only consider reproachful momentarily crossed Josh’s face. “Well, tell Lisa I said hi.” He leaned his head farther out the window and gawked at all the snow in the lot. “Hey, who does your plowing, Cynthia? They do a shit job! If one of you two is leaving—”

  “We’re leaving together,” I said. “To look at a house.”

  “Who’s driving—you or Cynthia?”

  That hadn’t been decided, but I said, “Me.”

  “Can I have your parking space?”

  I nodded and waved an impatient good-bye to Josh. Cynthia and I began to make our way gingerly across the slippery parking lot. Behind us, Josh’s Buick shook and shuddered.

  “I didn’t know you knew Josh Silber,” Cynthia asked.

  “He does my taxes.”

  “I know him from Rotary. For some reason he always ends up sitting at my table during lunch.” Cynthia wrinkled up her forehead. “I guess he likes my cheesecake.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The restaurant where we meet always serves cheesecake. Whenever I tell the waitress that I’m taking a pass on the dessert, Josh always says, ‘Hers, I’ll eat.’ ”

  “Ah-ha,” I said. “I thought Josh had put on weight since the last time I saw him.”

  As Josh watched from his car, I unlocked the passenger door of my Audi and held it open for Cynthia. When I closed the door, I noticed that Cynthia wore pants, in some soft stretchy material tucked into her brown leather boots. I wondered if there were stirrups—that hooked around her feet—at the bottom of those stretch pants. Then I looked away, into the blinding sunlight of the half-plowed parking lot, and waved again to Josh. I walked around the back of my car and got in. As I stuck the key into the ignition, I took a couple of surreptitious sniffs to ensure that the crisp, clear air had driven the odor of the garbage bags completely out of my car.

  I was reasonably sure that the odor was gone. But I didn’t want Cynthia to think I had a major case of flatulence. I started the engine and was just about to concoct some fiction about how Danny had left some fast food rotting in the backseat of my car, when the radio blared, “According to an FAA spokesperson, the number of reported dead from Flight—”

  I flicked off the radio and told Cynthia, “I was supposed to be on that plane.”

  “The one that crashed? Are you serious?”

  I nodded.

  Cynthia looked intently at me, with those pale blue eyes that reminded Josh of the eyes of a Siamese cat—but that reminded me of those properties found on the first side of the Monopoly board (What were they? Oriental. Vermont. Connecticut. Then Jail, and the man behind iron bars . . .).

  “I can’t believe it,” Cynthia said. “You’re so lucky.”

  “I know.”

  “Lisa would be devastated. But what happened? Why weren’t you on it?”

  Why wasn’t I? Luck? fate? coincidence?

  “There was something else I wanted to get done today,” I said.

  “Like buy a house?”

  “Someone else I wanted to . . . spend the afternoon with.”

  “I’m so flattered. And so relieved! That you stayed behind just for me.” Cynthia clasped her tote bag in her lap, then said, “But you must feel . . . how do you feel?”

  My perspective definitely had changed. The Before-Eben never would have considered mentioning this brush with death to Cynthia or any other relative stranger. But the After-Eben could laugh and say, “I feel like a completely new man. Pardon my hand, please.”

  Whenever I backed my car out of a parking space, I always put my right hand on the back of the passenger seat—even when the passenger was someone other than Lisa. I am not, I told myself, doing anything different just because Josh Silber has his eye on me—and because he inevitably will go back and tell Deb, “Hey, I caught Ebb Strauss out to lunch with this sexy devil of a woman—and it sure smelled fishy to me, the way he took a pass on the onion bagel.”

  Lisa’s idea of giving good directions in the car consisted of giving me advice like “I think you were supposed to turn left, Ebb—you know, back there?” Cynthia, however, made a great copilot. She called out “Right at the fork” and “Straight through at the light” with such confidence that we found our way to the house in no time. I let up on the gas as we approached 27 Darling Lane. At the end of the long driveway, which had been plowed to perfection, the pig weathervane glinted in the sun. The house itself, trimmed with lacy icicles, looked like some Currier & Ives print labeled in cursive: Home for the Holidays. Yet a flurry of footprints—as if a troop of West Point cadets had jogged through—marred the tranquil blanket of snow directly in front of the house. The walk was shoveled in a wider than necessary swath, exposing a long trail of goose-egg stones that reminded me of Lisa’s thievery.

  Sunday’s chill wind must have blown the Swedish love knot away, because the knocker on the green front door hung clean. Something new hung on the door latch: a lockbox. After consulting a slip of paper she had tucked in her purse, Cynthia turned the combination. We entered. The echo of our footsteps in the hall reminded me of the hollow sound that used to ring through my childhood home after my mother had taken down the drapes for spring cleaning. Looking from left to right off the hall, I realized the house had been emptied of the rest of its furniture. The muddy footprints on the floor and a solitary broom leaning in the corner were the only indications that a fairy hadn’t waved a wand over the house and whisked everything away.

  “When did this happen?” I asked Cynthia. “How did that happen? They couldn’t possibly have boxed all that stuff and taken it out in that driving snow.”

  “At Bear Mountain, the snow had stopped by yesterday morning.”

  “But here it lasted on and off all day,” I said. “And to dismantle the entire house—even if the top floor already had been cleaned out . . .” I looked around at the empty walls and ceiling. I felt like calling out, hello, hello, hello? just to hear the echo. “I mean, there was a ton of stuff in here.”

  Cynthia loosened the belt on her coat. “Half a dozen men can strip an entire house in three or four hours.”

  “You’ve seen that done?”

  “Over and over.” Cynthia pulled off her gloves. “My father was in the Air Force.”

  “I didn’t know that. Where was he stationed?”

  “Alabama. Japan. The Philippines. Germany.” She paused. “Should I go on?”

  “How many times did you move?”

  “Too many.” Cynthia wandered to the far end of the hall, which was still in shadow because neither one of us had turned on the light. She rested her bare hand on the newel post and gazed up the stairs. “I always was so envious of people who got to live in one place.”

  I walked farther into the hall and looked into the bare room that no longer seemed to deserve the name of parlor. “Did you know this house would be empty?” I asked.

  “I suspected. When the listing agent gave me the lockbox combination instead of the key.”

  “It seems like a different house,” I said. “Without the furniture.”

  “Do you still like it?”

  “Very much so. Yes.”

  Cynthia’s well-polished boots clacked against the floorboards as she moved into the parlor. She surveyed the open space with such obvious pleasure that I could tell she was selecting new furniture in her head.

  “The moment I saw this house,” she said, “I thought it was the perfect fit for you two.”

  I leaned in the doorway of the parlor. “Tell me why.”

  “Well. Do you remember that night we first met?”

  “Vaguely,” I said.

  “It was Valentine’s Day.”

  “Yes.”

  “You had jus
t gotten promoted.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Lisa told me that evening,” Cynthia said, “that you two were looking for a new home because you would have to host parties. But then you told me, Eben, that you worked long hours and that you just wanted a comforting place to return home to.” Cynthia gestured around the room. “Well, here we are. This is an ideal place to entertain. But it’s also a real retreat. No noise. No neighbors. There’s plenty of room for Danny to run around. If you have more children, there are those large extra bedrooms. And I know how much Lisa wants a room of her own to do her writing—”

  “You know,” I interrupted, “I was surprised—that evening—when Lisa told you flat-out that she was a writer. I guess she’s gotten tired, all these years, of passing herself off as just a housewife.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with keeping a home,” Cynthia said. “It requires a lot of skill.” Her face grew serious, as if she herself were contemplating a whole lifetime standing behind a deck mop or a stiff broom. Then she smiled. “Too bad the pay is so lousy.”

  I laughed—then instantly felt disloyal to Lisa. “Lisa’s hoping to make big bucks off this book she’s been writing.”

  “The story sounds fascinating.”

  “Doesn’t it?” I said. I stared down at the rock salt crusted on my loafers and waited for Cynthia to reveal the rest of what she knew about Lisa’s novel. When she didn’t indulge me, I said, “Of course, the plot does seem a little over the top.”

  “Well, I guess most love stories have to be exaggerated.”

  “So you’d call her novel a love story, then?” I asked.

  “Don’t you remember that Lisa called it a romance of sorts?” Cynthia reached up and wiped a bit of dust off the mantel. “I’m dying to read it. Especially since Lisa told me she based the main character a little on my ex-husband.”

  “Your ex-husband!”

  “Yes. Angus unfortunately was a—”

  What was Cynthia about to say? A ladies’ man? I didn’t know. And I would never find out, because her pager suddenly beeped. As she dug through her tote bag, I looked down—then saw my pager wasn’t attached to my belt. I had left my leash to the office back at the office.

  “I’m going to use the phone in the kitchen,” Cynthia said. “If it’s still connected.”

  I nodded.

  “Take your time looking around,” she said. “I’ll be right behind this door. If you want me.”

  As Cynthia retreated into the kitchen, I found myself staring at a solitary nail left in the wall between the front two windows of the parlor. “Twelve-over-twelve,” Cynthia had called these panes of glass, leading me to believe that the founding fathers of our country liked their feng shui too—or at least they valued order and symmetry. My hollow footsteps measured the floorboards of the parlor. I ran my hand along the mantel and tried to see myself sunk deep in a big leather chair in front of a crackling blaze in the fireplace. I walked back into the hall, gazed up the staircase, and imagined Danny—against our orders—sliding down the oak banister. I pictured Lisa sitting in the dining room—not presiding over a dinner party, but hunched over some thick manuscript, scratching out a string of words only to write the same words all over again.

  The dining room connected—by yet another swinging-door—back to the kitchen. In her soft voice, Cynthia was arranging to meet someone later that evening. I ignored the pull I felt toward the kitchen and went upstairs, listening to each step creak and settle beneath my feet.

  In the hallway outside the smallest bedroom—which obviously was intended as a nursery—I noticed a hatch in the ceiling. I reached up and pulled down the cord. The hatch door surrendered with a groan, and a set of steps, like a staircase leading nowhere in a surrealistic painting, lowered toward me. The stairs locked into place and practically beckoned me to climb where Cynthia’s lover had gone just the week before. I only went two-thirds of the way up—enough to peek my head over the lip of the attic and survey the piles of pink fiberglass that padded the floor, the dormers that gave out onto the tops of trees, and the unfinished rafters. I wondered where the owl, that weird bird whose head swiveled all the way around as if it could see into the past and the future, had roosted. Had the owl called out who? who? when Cynthia’s lover released it into the forest?

  The attic was dusty. I coughed as I backed down the stairs, released the lock, and pushed the entire staircase back into the attic. Concentrate on the house, I told myself. You’re here to evaluate the house. But as I wandered into the master bedroom (cold and uninviting without the cheval mirror and the braided rug and the four-poster bed) and then wandered into the master bath, I could only listen to Cynthia’s voice waft up through the vents and question what I was doing here without Lisa. It wasn’t like me to tell Cynthia, “Show me that house right now.” It wasn’t like me to place a bid on a piece of property priced at three quarters of a million dollars without asking more detailed questions about the boundaries. Yet I deliberately had put my checkbook in my pocket before I left the office—before I accidentally-on-purpose left behind the SB pager.

  I just couldn’t believe that I had left behind the pager. I should have been worried that it probably sat buzzing away on my desk. Instead, I grew almost light-headed at the thought that, for the first time in a long time, no one knew where I was. No one could reach me. Only I knew that I stood upstairs, alone but not alone, in this empty house. Here I was not EVPIR. Here I was not the husband whose nickname evoked low tide. Here I was no one’s daddy. Here I had no relationship whatsoever to the character in Lisa’s novel.

  Or maybe I did. Because suddenly I wanted nothing of what I had and lusted after all I could never obtain. That is to say: I wanted to go downstairs and fuck Cynthia.

  Eben Strauss placed his large, manly hand upon the swinging door and strode into the kitchen, where his lovely real-estate agent was sitting cross-legged on the clean counter.

  “Oh!” she said. “You startled me!” As she slid down from the counter, her boots hit the tile, and she helplessly dropped the phone to the floor with a clatter.

  Eben capably stepped up to the kitchen counter. He clasped his mouth upon her luscious pink lips and urgently thrust his tongue into her initially unwilling mouth. . . .

  “No!” she cried, before she cried, “Yes!”

  Pearl buttons scattered across the tile as Eben tore open her blouse, yanked down her lace bra, and nuzzled her comely breasts. She arched her back with pleasure as he dropped his trousers, parted her legs, and lifted her away from the kitchen counter. Then it was nothing but one thrust after another as he carried her from room to room and her moans of “Fuck me! Fuck me! until I grow so ashamed I can never show my face at Rotary Club again!” reverberated so loudly throughout the empty house that Eben thought the floor would collapse, the walls tumble down, and the roof beams cave in. . . .

  I leaned my head against the cold pane of the window. This fantasy was ridiculous. Shameless. Immoral. Full of bad dialogue. And yet so arousing that I felt a killing stiffness in my pants. Lisa obviously wasn’t the only member of the family who could pen pornography.

  I gazed down at my rough, spotted hand and caught my own reflection in the gold of my wedding band. It was like looking at myself in a spoon: my face seemed bloated, as if I had the beginning of mumps or some childhood infectious disease; my nose was blurred into my mouth; and my eyes, behind my gold-rimmed glasses, were sunk too deep in my head to even distinguish their color. That can’t be me, I thought. I could never be a home-wrecker. A heartbreaker. Yet I already had slept with Cynthia in my dreams. And surely something was going very, very wrong between me and Lisa, or else I wouldn’t be standing here in this empty house without her. A little voice inside me, which I was trying very hard not to hear, was whispering: Anything can happen. Anything can happen, so why not? Why not?

  Down in the parlor, I deliberately made my steps heavier to warn Cynthia I was coming. I cleared my throat and knocked before I cracked
open the swinging door.

  Cynthia, who was leaning against the counter, beckoned me in and hung up the wall phone. “I just called the office of the listing agent,” she said. “She’s on her way out here between two and three to post the for-sale sign. She’s making this a talking house.”

  “A what?”

  “Talking house. It’s the latest selling tool. There’s a special gadget attached to the for-sale sign. When potential buyers pull up in the driveway, they can tune their car radio to get recorded information on the property.”

  I leaned against the doorjamb and stuck my hands into my pockets. “Let’s stay until she gets here.”

  Cynthia gave me an inviting smile. “We could do that.”

  “We could . . . well, we could tell her the house has spoken to me,” I said. “And doesn’t need to speak to anyone else.”

  “Oh, Eben.” Cynthia held out both hands—to congratulate me? or embrace me? I was about to step toward her when I heard something else talking. But it wasn’t my sense of right or wrong. It was the pesto bagel and vegetarian cream cheese and the large coffee I had consumed for lunch. My stomach rumbled. The thought that at any second I could be in Cynthia’s arms was so unsettling, so disconcerting, that my intestines seemed to shift inside me, and a bubble of gas threatened to explode in my trousers.

  I took a step backward. “Would you excuse me for just a moment?”

  Cynthia—a hurt look in her eye—said, “Certainly.”

  I backed out of the kitchen. Since I didn’t dare use the half-bath on the first floor, I bolted up the stairs, charged into the master bathroom, dropped my pants, and committed the most unspeakable crime in Lisa’s house-hunting etiquette book: lowered my butt upon the throne. Thank God the last person out of the house had been the wife—kind, considerate, and a consummate housekeeper to the very end. She had left behind a full roll of toilet paper. And good thing. Because after five days of walking around in a constipated fog, I plotzed the longest and messiest turd of my life—what Lisa would call a double flusher.