by Lisa Zeidner
As I walked past the reception desk and waved—the clerk only had time to look momentarily mystified—I thought, as I did more and more often, about Hitchcock, about the scene from Psycho where Janet Leigh, moments after stealing from the boss who trusted her, takes a pedestrian crossing and looks up to see the selfsame mystified boss, through the windshield of his car. It occurred to me that I was turning into the kind of woman who could show up dead in a motel or at the bottom of a lake, eyes open, skin translucent as a tadpole’s.
But the thought wasn’t alarming. Before the accident, I’d worried much more about death. In fact, every time a plane lifted off or landed, I’d had to clench eyes and stomach against the vision of a motherless son, my lovely boy feeling cheated forever because I’d left him rather than letting him decide to leave me, as is every child’s right. I could understand the Nazi commanders who shot their wives and children. In the ideal world, all families would die together, in a row, tidy bullet holes in their heads. I understood even then, even without Kramer’s gentle help, that much of the fear was guilt, self-punishment, because it felt so good to peel him off me at day care and board that plane, to sit alone in the seat and be allowed to let my thoughts drift, untethered.
After the accident, I had much less to fear. I could walk on nails, eat fire, explode, or be garotted—nothing would ever hurt as much again.
Still, in the tinny, rattling rental cars I drove for work, to and from airports and hospitals, I felt about as safe as I would curled up in a tin can with the lid cut off, the kind children use to make fake telephones. It was on highways, dodging obnoxious drivers in their sport utility vehicles, their Suburbans—all of their fake signs of strength and bounty—that I most often felt really bad. Airports were easier. I liked the impersonal bustle, the programmed security of gates. Except that air travel, of course, had been getting more difficult. The waits longer, the rows of seats more crammed. More screaming babies.
It had been becoming harder, on planes, to feel serene, buffered. I used to remember to take my vitamins—C against plane flu, E for dry skin—when the flight attendants brought the drink carts, until I had to stop that; it opened up too many conversations with chirpy-bird seatmates, all of whom wanted to sing Prozac’s praises, hold hands with strangers and make a Xanax circle. After almost fifteen years in sales, I could spot, and avoid, the garrulous manic-depressive men with their needy eyes, their onward-and-upward narratives. They were like flat tires, the drugs like those cans of air you’re supposed to keep in your trunk. Not even a patch, just a fart’s-worth of air to get them a couple of yards down the road.
My technique: I told them early on that my husband was a surgeon. If I said the word surgeon first and then quickly, before they could ask, cardiothoracic, they would almost always nod as they visibly deflated, then leave me alone.
This was necessary, I assured myself, but it did make me feel mean. And certainly unfeminine, to be so uncaring about a male ego. But I was no longer, in some sense, even a woman. I’d buried myself in work as a man would—it is a good idea, nothing to sneeze at—and rejected everything frilly, decorative. So I was no longer fragile. In fact, I felt almost armor-plated, and that’s a shame, because grief at least ought to make you empathetic.
“You’re lucky,” my neighbor declared—undeterred by my husband’s status, he’d extracted the empty-nest story. “The boys are much, much better than the girls. Give ’em the car keys and they’re out of your life. You just have to worry about AIDS. The girls wanna hang around and torture you. Teenage girls, man. God’s scourge. What are they sticking you for tuition?”
Invented son, invented sum. Before I could even utter the amount, he’d added, outraged, and that’s after-tax dollars, as I could have predicted. To him I had to be aggressively rude. Extracting the laptop wouldn’t deter him, since all frequent flyers now have computer come-ons and software bonding; for a female traveler, a laptop is as loud as a red bra spotted sideways through an unbuttoned blouse.
“Truth is,” I said, “my son is dead. So I’d rather not discuss him or your kids or your feelings about parenthood, if that’s all right with you,” which did the trick. He reared back, put both hands up palm forward like a traffic cop, and I did feel a little bad, then, to see his watery eyes in the headlights of the speeding big rig he now saw me as.
On a crisp evening in mid-May, after dinner, I had been just about to take a shower—felt I needed one, after having grilled tuna and cleaned up—when Ken stuck his head into the bathroom and commanded, “Put that dress back on. And come outside.”
He had changed into a bathing suit. Did not seem quite warm enough for that. From his urgent tone I assumed there was a problem. Raccoons in the trash. “Not those,” he added, pointing to my underpants. He led me out into our fenced backyard and looked for the place where we would not be exposed in the glare of the neighbor’s harsh garage floodlights. Chose a tree to lean me up against.
I appreciated this. The dark felt good and so did the air, just the right temperature. The dark, and the air, seemed related to the perfect meal we’d just enjoyed, which I could still taste in his kiss—a Beaujolais at the peak of its short life’s curve; the fish precisely pink. His hand went right under the dress with its cheerful floral print to find me wet. This is all a terrible cliché, I am fully aware, but hey, so is spring.
He pushed up the dress so we could get a little chest-onc-hest action. Me on tiptoe to reach the tall man’s mouth. “Turn around,” he instructed. I did, the tree providing a branch at the right height to grasp.
I thought this was all very good of Ken, who had had a particularly arduous day. I tried not to be too alert for the slam of the refrigerator door in the neighbor’s kitchen, the high school kids down the block clattering out for some one-on-one on the asphalt. Or too distracted, when I opened my eyes, by the tulips—headless, already goners—in the elaborately terraced bed that Ken had gotten planted, in the spot that had held our son’s climbing apparatus, which Ken had gotten taken down and put in a remote corner of the basement, packed up tight as a tent, ready for the new child whom we had thus far failed to conceive.
At the time, I was not thinking these things. Was merely aware, as how could I not be, that he was making an effort to do things my way. “Naturally.” As opposed to by the instructions of one of his esteemed colleagues, who had recommended six months of birth-control pills to regulate my irregularities, followed by a six-month “holding pattern” of elaborate record-keeping, then a program of fertility drugs that might, he warned—talking as doctors often do to women, even to doctors’ wives—“make you a little nutsy.”
Just what I needed.
I had hated birth-control pills when I was young, and dating. They gave me headaches; they made me dry. These were, I understood, minor side effects, especially for a woman who had lost what might well turn out to be her last viable reproductive years to a trance of grief. But the irony felt like the bridge too far: I was supposed to take birth-control pills now, in middle age, in order to get pregnant?
So I appreciated what Ken was doing. No calendar. Just trees, stars, and a wife taking it from behind, ass glowing in moonlight. It would befit the occasion for me to come efficiently, exuberantly. But I could tell that was not going to happen. Ken would certainly do what was required. The man always cottoned to a project. Eventually there would be some kind of release. Many of my orgasms, however, had had a distant, thrumming, Novocained quality. Almost not worth the trouble.
I’d basically decided to fake it. Not exactly lie; no prostitutional theatrics. Simply not to have my eyes on that particular prize. Just to enjoy the night, the air, my husband’s unexpected ardor. (“It’s the thought that counts.”)
But Ken surprised me. He stopped, pulled out. Turned me around by my waist and got me draped the way he wanted me on the tree, one hand thoughtfully behind my back to keep the bark from abrading me. Then just began to work on me with his other hand, staring at me almost sternly, the eye c
ontact a challenge: Concentrate! I did, best I could. Then surprised myself by coming in a smooth parabola that put me in mind of how perfectly cooked tuna separates when you hit it with a fork, those striated curves.
I was pretty pleased for us. We could have been any old couple, doing the yeoman’s work of keeping desire alive—bent over to shovel coal into the damn thing. Marriage like an old-fashioned train. Huffing and puffing, little engines that could.
As Ken finished I said, in gratitude, “Very nice.” Then, in the way of the praise any man deserves, especially a middle-aged one, “You been practicing? Bonin’ up?”
And he responded, voice cracking, “Only once.”
This was the special moment that my husband selected to reveal to me that he had been unfaithful.
Unbelievable, really. I mean, he was still inside me.
I thought I had misheard. But no, he pulled his bathing suit up for a halting confession that was going to include the date and place of the regretted betrayal. “I’m—” he said. “God, I’m so—”
I straightened up. As one would expect. Dress falling back into position. Stared at him. Said, “Thanks for sharing.”
At this point he began to yell at me. He was sorry. But. My sarcasm typical, etc.
What he said then, and what he revealed in the series of painful conversations we would subsequently have, in which he’d carom from apology to anger, either thanking me profusely for being reasonable or enumerating the occasions on which I had failed to show proper feeling, I could not say. The only accusation that stuck was fucking zombie.
Back inside, my work phone was ringing. I heard the answering machine pick up in the den, then the tone that indicated an incoming fax. I stopped in the kitchen to get a Kleenex, to wipe the sperm that had dripped out onto my inner thigh. No Kleenex. Box empty. Used a paper towel. Before I could get to the fax machine, another beep, less familiar. I went in to find the document cut off, incomplete, and a message: “Paper roll empty.”
This failure was what made me cry. Or it just hit me then, in a time lag, what Ken had said. Or both.
One of my post-traumatic stress symptoms had to do with fax machines. Ken knew about it. I did not like to load fax paper. I did not like the oily feel of fax paper, the smell. The car accident that took my son’s life had happened on a not-too-busy street less than five miles away, when a housewife—not drunk, not even speeding—turned right on red legally and went into a skid in a light rain. I had just picked up my son from day care and was coming from Staples with a bag full of home office supplies. A box of fine-point felt-tip pens. Post-its. Thermal fax paper—there is a deeply ungratifying purchase.
Ken came in the room and put his arms around me, stroked my hair, murmuring apologies, while the phone fired again, as whoever it was attempted to resend the aborted message. Then tried again.
He led me out of the room and closed the door, so I didn’t have to listen.
The next day he managed to find time to leave the hospital and buy me a plain-paper fax machine, so I would never again have to load thermal paper through that guillotinelike aperture. Over dinner told me all about how he had made his consumer choice, the various available features, how much the plain paper copiers had come down in price. This was not an evasion. In our marital tug-of-war, in fact, it represented a gesture of goodwill, that he was not going to be “pushy” about us confronting the issues, parsing out blame.
Still, it was annoying. Ken tended to spend money at emotional junctions. His purchases were often smoke signals. This is not unusual, I suppose. Women get new haircuts; men buy small electronics. Cars and major appliances spell big trouble.
“Well, I am very touched,” I told the man who, early in our courtship, had showed up at my doorstep with not roses but pans—he’d found my cooking equipment woefully inadequate. “I guess I should have figured out you were having an affair when you bought the espresso machine.”
“If you’d been paying attention,” he noted sourly.
I didn’t want to even set foot there. We had been down that landmined road already. Up a good part of the night, in fact, numbly going over the timetable. His reasons, my reactions.
“Look, I’ve already officially forgiven you,” I said. Had even made a joke of it, best I could—bad things happening in threes. This ought to do us. Satisfy our little family’s quota for taking it up the ass.
“‘Officially,’ yes.”
“But it’s going to take time, Ken.”
“As opposed to everything else.”
“Exactly like everything else.”
“We should go back to Kramer. Help us talk it through.”
“We can talk all you want,” I said. “But it’s still going to take time.”
“More time.”
“More time. Right.”
“How much time do you think we’ve got?”
More than he could spare. Less than I needed. I just let it go. “I’m only saying, upgraded office equipment aside, I don’t think we have much of an immediate future in Outdoor Copulation.”
Which was a shame. I’d eventually taken my shower the night before, fishy and swollen-eyed from crying, to discover, hosing myself down, that despite the fresh trauma there was all sorts of stray sensation left. If Ken had managed to control the need to confess, he could have joined me there. Backyard, bathtub—Ken had the instincts, if not the follow-through. He had managed to make actual desire well up in me. It had not altogether subsided, even yet, in the bland hotel rooms. It was not, however, exactly attached to Ken. More free-floating.
I was sad about the dress. A cheap little flippy dress, machine-washable, but I’d liked it. I wasn’t going to be eating tuna again for a while either. This had all been over two months ago. We were dealing with it now, along with everything else.
In Columbus, I pitched equipment to a dialysis lab, then went straight to my hotel. Took the elevator straight up to the room for which I’d saved a key card. It didn’t work. No housekeepers were visible. One floor down, I stopped in front of the parked cart in the hallway. Poked my head in and waved to a young woman twitching a rag at the furniture.
“Hi,” I said, wheeling my suitcase toward the closet. “Don’t mind me. I’m just going to—”
“Haven’t done in there yet,” she warned.
“That’s fine. I’ll be right out. Just going to throw on my bathing suit.”
She looked mildly puzzled, but not suspicious. I did my half-second pantomime of sisterly fatigue as I hung up my jacket. She smiled, said she’d come back.
A line you cross, a better sanity test, perhaps, than asking someone to recite the year, month, and current president: whether you will use a hotel soap that someone else has unwrapped, dry your face with a towel still damp and balled-up from use by a stranger. I’m not claiming that I was ready to eat the wrinkled tail ends of hot dogs resurrected from public garbage cans. But I felt no disgust toward the damp bathroom. If anything, I felt the smugness of the ecologically sound: why splatter the planet with that much Clorox when some poor fellow had rushed out, as I had so often myself, right after his wake-up call?
The pool actually had a guard posted, checking key cards. I’d forgotten mine, but the woman on duty recognized me, and waved me through. “Is your husband up there?” she asked, to my surprise; turns out she was more concerned with my getting back into the room than with my marital status. Good point. I’d pulled the door shut. It seemed risky to pad around the hotel in a wet bathing suit, looking for a trusting housekeeper; risky as well to try the front desk. What was I doing?
I took the elevator straight to the basement, where I was pretty sure I’d find an airless employee lounge with vending machines and smokers on break. I was right. “Can I talk with you for a second?” I asked, poking my head in, to the woman closest to the door. She met me in the hallway. Not only was I locked out, I told her, locking my legs together beneath the towel, but I’d just gotten my period. Didn’t really want to parade through the
lobby dripping blood on the carpet. She grinned, and marched me right to the freight elevator. “Got what you need now?” she asked as she let me in, and I felt like hugging her.
Room service, obviously, was out of the question. And the door, it was clear, would lock automatically behind me. It took a good half hour of surreptitious fiddling with the mechanism to figure out how to jam it. I went to a place nearby with a newspaper. I hadn’t bought it, incidentally. Part and parcel of my homelessness: I got my folded newspapers from the pockets of the airline seats in front of me, from lounges and lobbies. Still not from trash cans, but close. This is a very different feeling from that of home delivery, the illusion that the whole world arrives at your doorstep at dawn. What scraps of news there were felt veiled, coded, as if they were meant for me alone, came to me like messages in bottles.
The article I read over pasta, from the Style section of The Washington Post, a stop on someone else’s route, was about Tiny Tim of “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” fame. Now an old man, but still quixotically upbeat, he was staging his comeback from a boardinghouse room in Minneapolis, so poor he ate only beans from cans but still faithfully colored his flowing locks with Clairol. I took this as a cautionary tale that whatever I was doing, I would not be able to do it forever. But then that went without saying from the onset. The only question, really, was when it would end, and how.
Something had begun to happen to me, so subtle that I had not even yet identified it, though I would later carbon-date it to the airport in Pittsburgh. I saw things about people, instantaneously. Especially at airports, where everyone was ripped from context, people’s souls would glow phosphorescent, as if X-rayed by the baggage-check machine. Hot spots molten, clearly defined as keys or loose change.
At a gate, awaiting the boarding call, I would sit with my eyes trained on the crowds and watch people pass in suspended animation, frame by frame. In a flash I could tell who loved their wives, who loved their work. Who had gotten laid and who had just spent huge sums of company money in lieu of getting laid. Who was smart as a fox, who dumb as dirt. Who was lonely, empty, afraid. Almost everyone was afraid. Stunning, how much fear was out there. Not fear of anything tangible—danger or death—so much as a fear of being exposed, seen through.