Country of a Marriage

by Anthony Giardina

  After a point there’s really not much sense to locking the door at night. Whatever terrors are out there seem nothing. My brother-in-law tells me about a friend of his, a good husband, an accountant, who feels compelled some nights to get into his Le Mans and drive from Westchester into Harlem. He picks up whores. He throws caution to the wind. A while ago I heard about a guy from around here whose wife was eight and a half months pregnant. Out of the blue, he took a trip to the Himalayas to climb the highest, slipperiest mountain there. In spite of my timid soul, I feel I understand these actions, as I pour my third scotch of the night or light up my fourth cigarette. There is always the hope, the off chance, that life will prove too much for us and we’ll get out of this thing with some grace. It is the nature of terror that it not have a distinct visage, and that it not announce itself in daylight hours on the face of its prey, and so you will wonder, as you pass me, or other men like me, in the autumn, and catch a glimpse of us raking our lawns, our sons and daughters at play around us, how such a desirable life can contain such an appetite for its own destruction. But I assure you it’s there, for those few of us who are like Emma, who simply cannot sit comfortably in these lives anymore without conjuring a beast staring squarely at us, measuring us and holding out almost tentatively, if beasts can be said to be tentative, the vial of M. Homais’s arsenic.

  You will, of course, dismiss this, say I’m being melodramatic, and to a degree you will be right. The feeling comes and goes, and there’s no predicting its approach or its duration. For the most part, I am a happy man.

  It’s clear by now I’m going to be late this morning. Not that it matters. There are no appointments on my calendar until Thursday. Until then, I’m just filling time.

  I crush my fourth cigarette, but something won’t let me head for the door, not yet. This is a good kitchen. We worked hard putting it together, and the method of food preparation here is serious. I like nothing better than to watch my wife cook. On Saturday nights, when we put our daughter to bed early, I pour myself a glass of wine and watch her do something fancy, an orange sauce or chicken mole. At such moments I feel as far from the terror as I ever do. The warmth in the room is tangible, and I can say whatever I want to say. Something will uphold us, suspend us in its net. I haven’t told you much about my wife, but I don’t want you to get the impression that there isn’t a lot to tell. She is stubborn, she is mostly her own woman, and she loves me. There is the sort of intimacy between us that is the reason everyone stays married, and there is the nakedness and shame that makes everyone want to bolt. To tell the story of a marriage, I think you only need to tell one side. In learning about me, you can conjure my opposite, and I’d venture to guess you won’t be far off. I never am, at least, when I meet a spouse after getting to know her groom a little bit. You get to know their terrors and their desires, and after a while you come to understand there’s only one sort of person who could hold those particular demons at bay. So if you need to imagine my wife, think of that woman you see on the beach sometimes, more beautiful than her husband deserves. To yourself, you think: They married young.

  Still, they stay married, so something must be there. Whatever it is, it makes its appearance over our good expensive counter on those Saturday nights, and the reason I can’t quite leave this kitchen now is the chance that some part of it might still be in the air, like an old scent the oven fan can’t get rid of. We cut a hole out of the air for ourselves. It’s no more than that, really, and the reason it doesn’t survive is: What is there in the world to support bubbles? That’s all that marriages are, really: bubbles. But while they float in the air, they have an enormous attractiveness. If I put this cigarette out and head for the door, it’s only because I want to get to the next Saturday night.

  I’m on my fifth cigarette now, but I can feel the danger’s past. I’m going to go and see Sheri and Elaine and think about how we can shake the Mellon Foundation for a few extra thou. I can feel the energy for this, though I have no idea where it’s coming from, just as, later, I will have no idea where it went. At the end of the day, I’ll listen to the fighting in provinces of the Soviet Union, the BBC, and I’ll try to pay attention, try to place my moments of panic beside my moments of calm, to convince myself that life contains a balance. There will be moments—I can be assured of this—when I’ll want to send up a wild howl. But I’ll stifle that urge. Light always changes, I’ll remind myself. It only stays hard for a while.

  It seems to me that life requires us, as time goes on, to become masters of convincing ourselves of the simplest things. To prefer life to death, for one. I have this twelve-mile ride ahead of me this morning. I have Dvorak for consolation, and there are these dips at the side of the road it would be so easy to go over. On Saturday nights, my wife cooks wonderful chicken things. I’ll try to remember that.

  There. I’ve put it out. I suppose that means something. Barely smoked. Live or die. They say maturity is not caring so much. I wouldn’t know. I have a photograph of my wife I keep in the glove compartment of the car. It helps, I find sometimes, to take it out and look at it out of the corner of my eye as I drive. It’s a simple picture, really, taken outside a beach house we rented once. It was a cloudy Sunday. Perhaps you know the way the clouds look on a late summer afternoon on the Cape. She had developed a sty that day, and was wearing sunglasses. In the photograph, she sits on a weathered wooden chair, staring directly into the camera. Her eyes are hidden, but the expression is unmistakable. It’s nothing you can put into words. She is a woman in a chair on a late summer afternoon, that’s all. Still, I can’t look at it without thinking she is asking me to come closer. And in my imagination—at least on days like this, when one thing seems better than another—I do.

  DAYS WITH CECILIA

  My days with Cecilia are crowded with the props of the slim British novels my wife devours. Half-eaten slices of cold toast, semi-warm tea with the pale milk scud lying discouragingly on top; that sort of thing. I often parade around in ratty underwear, and when Cecilia sleeps I can most often be found combing the police log of already-read metropolitan newspapers for the details of grisly murders. It goes without saying I am perpetually behind things. I enjoy a strange identification with the spinster librarians in those books of my wife’s, those perpetually hopeful overage girls who live in a fog out of which they can’t quite penetrate to the fact of the balding pediatrician’s less than honest intentions. But in most ways we are not alike. My life, as I prefer to view it, is full of facts, closely looked at.

  I’d like to say, for instance, that Cecilia is bright, or exceptionally precocious. The fact is, I wouldn’t know how to compare her with the average child; we don’t see any. Occasionally we pass them in the park, but though Cecilia’s head always perks up in these instances, as though she’d like nothing better than to rub noses with another ten-month-old, I don’t think I could bear to get involved in one of those conversations I occasionally overhear between parents on park benches. They have nothing whatsoever in common outside of the base facts of parenthood, so what gets talked about is Justin’s progress with the walker, Julie’s teething habits and extraordinary verbal facility, and the problems poor Mrs. L—— is having with her son, who at sixteen months has yet to take his first step. Let’s not fool ourselves—beneath this seemingly casual comparison of achievement lies the most savage competition, a clawing for the superiority of one’s own over another’s barely masked. To hell with Justin and Julie, I say; Cecilia and I push on.

  She is a happy child; I think I can say that without too crippling a sense of doubt. She likes nothing better than to grasp the edge of an end table with one hand and lift herself so that she’s standing unsupported (can you do that, Justin and Julie?) and, in recognition of the feat, crow with delight. At such moments, I am superfluous. I am the man on the couch in ratty underwear, trying not to catch furtive glimpses of himself in whatever mirror happens to be lurking nearby. I am her caretaker; I clock the hours between waking and sleepin
g, with time out for naps. My wife doesn’t come home until after she’s asleep most days; I know why, and I don’t care to comment. There is a ruddy and obnoxious economist she’s taken up with, a fellow member of her department at the university. A mutual friend informed me, expecting I’d do something about it, but I haven’t, and suspect I won’t.

  By trade I am a shop teacher, part-time. My employer is a very expensive private middle school two towns away. It sits on the side of a hill on land donated by one of those families—you know the ones I mean—whose name conjures an aura of sacrosanct white privilege, but whom I cannot imagine without the accompanying vision of pristine white body parts squatting atop porcelain chamber pots. Perhaps this image is a result of the fact that Cecilia shits so much, but I like to believe that my mind is not so cause-and-effect. The red buildings of the grounds are ancient brick and smell of the exertions of generations. The place is athletic as all hell and justifiably proud of its many trophies. In a room that might have served the lathers of the eighteenth century, I train the boys to shave a block of wood straight, smooth, and square. For the satisfactory performance of this job, I am required only two afternoons a week. Shop is not a high priority at the Russell Academy.

  That I happen to be doing this job: well, we’re all old enough not to require explanations anymore, or to believe them when they’re offered. My own shop teacher from twenty years past was Mr. Chilingerian, an Armenian rumored to have thrown a hammer from twenty feet at a wisecracking boy. Like my classmates of those days, I saw little beyond the truism that shop teachers are brutes. Either that or something less. So my boys—my Barneses and Neuwirths and Hulls—view me, I’m sure, in an opaque light. I am dim and incomprehensible in my soiled blue shop coat. The lights are caged and ancient, of a piece with Russell. Once a boy nearly took a finger off learning to use the electric saw. I saved him in the nick of time and watched how, five minutes later, laughing, he had managed to forget both the saved finger and my quick heroism—a necessary part of the job, as I see it—and would most likely soon be back to making fun of me behind my back. No matter.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I am at work, Cecilia stays with Mrs. Leaver, who charges me four dollars an hour for the service. It is a decent arrangement, and loose enough so that, after the last of the boys have left the shop for the day, I am free to linger, in the shop or on the grounds, enjoying the fading light and the last moments of relaxed freedom before going to pick up Cecilia. It is at such moments, as the low light slides in under the blinds onto the clean shop table or as I stand at the edge of the playing fields, that I allow myself my one moment of fantastic longing: for a friend like those friends one encounters in films, a short, thick-bellied, wide-faced man with a name like Colin or George, either married or in constant woman trouble, but not bothered much by either state of affairs, a fellow shop or perhaps mathematics teacher, who, at the end of the day, is always available and eager for a hop down to the pub (in my imagination there is one at the foot of the Russell grounds), where we might sit and chat about things like football scores, all the while engaging in our true business, which is what I will call a muscular and disciplined appreciation of the qualities of light and silence.

  Such a moment—altogether male as I see it, but I’m willing to be convinced otherwise—is the one thing lacking in my days. No such friend exists. Colin is an invention of the film writers. We are all busy, and have to plan even the briefest, least satisfactory of encounters weeks in advance. There is no pub at the foot of the hill. The long playing fields stretch out these days in shades of ocher and sienna, but as I stand at the edge of them I am only too keenly aware that Mrs. Leaver has been expecting me for fifteen minutes already, and Cecilia can’t be ignored much longer.

  So I hop in the car and drive the quarter mile to the two-family house where Mrs. Leaver lives with her two children in what I perceive to be a state of happy squalor. At least, she is always laughing as she clears away the line of tricycles and children’s toys that block her path to the door. I stand there, watching through the lace curtain that hangs on the other side of the glass, noticing the too-tight pants, the half inch or so of exposed midriff as Mrs. Leaver bends to move a Fisher-Price Activity Center. There is no Mr. Leaver, apparently; at some indeterminate time in the past, he headed for the hills. On the faces of the two Leaver children, a boy and a girl, barely school age, I detect the droop-jawed neediness of the abandoned. They are angry children, given to kicking walls on what seem to be the slightest of pretexts.

  Mrs. Leaver notices none of this, of course, and screams at them to stop kicking, meanwhile turning back to me with a broad smile to share a joke or to ask after my adventures in the Russell shop. Cecilia clings to me as soon as she is handed over, and I feel a certain guilt at splitting my attention in order to afford some to Mrs. Leaver, who seems to relish a bit of adult companionship at this point in the day. Certain looks and gestures have led me to believe Mrs. Leaver would like nothing better than for me to make a pass, if only for the opportunity of shrugging it off, or both of us raising our eyes to heaven as if to say, “If only it weren’t for these children, what larks!” In fact, what I am thinking at such moments is that it is only the children who are keeping us from the unbearable chaos of a shag in the half-abandoned Leaver bed. I see the two of us groping and kicking there and I want to grab Cecilia and dash for the safety of the house.

  There are only the two of us in the station wagon on the ride home, myself behind the wheel, Cecilia in the plastic car seat, and it does seem at those moments as though we are negotiating a kind of minefield, while Cecilia hums one of those secret melodies which signify to me that, for her, the minefield is limited to Mrs. Leaver’s rooms and halls.

  There was a woman before Mrs. Leaver. Mrs. O’Connor. She disapproved of us. Babies belonged with their mothers. That the world had seen fit to discard this truth constituted the basis of Mrs. O’Connor’s argument with the universe, and the argument had settled like a pall over the modest day-care business the woman conducted from her home. “Poor baby,” she would croon, as soon as I handed Cecilia over to her, and I stood racked with guilt for the hours afterward, as I attempted to explain the principle of going with the grain to Barnes, Neuwirth, and Hull. “She barely ate, poor thing,” Mrs. O’Connor would tut when handing the baby over, and in that tut was contained something akin to the moral furor of the Nuremberg judges.

  The cruel truth is that perhaps men don’t, after all, belong with babies. I’ve thought this myself, wondered why, if the idea were such a good one, we seem to be the first people in history to have thought of it. And lest you come back with a counter-argument too quickly, let me remind you that we are also the first people in history to have come up with aerosol cans and magazines with titles like Self. The rigors of advanced capitalism force us into odd and twisted postures, and this notion of men as nurturers may be just another one of them. I was recently in a diner in some nearby town, feeding Cecilia her favorite lunch of mashed banana and Cheerios, when the local execs started trooping in. One man in particular was noticeable. He could not get a knife clean enough, kept sending them back. Then he started on the forks. There was a pronounced tic in the man’s facial gesture as he sent back utensil after utensil, a kind of astonished blinking. And as I mused on what horrors of unnatural activity had forced him into such neurotic behavior, I noticed myself mashing bananas and Cheerios together with a pronounced rhythm that might, from his table, have looked at least equally strange. The only reason I hesitate to carry this argument further is that I might find myself agreeing with Mrs. O’Connor, and no thanks, I’d rather not.

  One night last week my wife came home at her usual time—nine o’clock—and headed straight for the bath, her usual practice. I generally have something simmering on the stove when she gets home—this particular night I had cooked pork chops in olive oil and rosemary, with a roasted pepper dressing—but I make sure it is something that will keep and not dry out during the ritual
bath taking. I don’t want you to think that she is one of those women—or ours one of those marriages—constructed of cold silences and an ironclad respect for the Unsaid, though on the surface that might be what appears. I think of it as a peculiarly living thing, and for that reason don’t need to bother her as to the lateness of the hour or the lack of interest she displays in Cecilia’s welfare. By this time, Cecilia is snug and in her crib, wrapped in a double diaper and a woolen yellow sleeper. In her bath, my wife washes out what there is to be washed out of her, the leavings of the economist Bruce Friedman. I could ask after him, and after a pause and a considering lift of the eyebrows, I’m sure my wife would tell me everything, without tears or mortification. I like that aspect of things, and for that reason have never felt compelled to ask. I waited this night outside the bathroom until she’d done what she had to do and then stepped in.

  The bath is not quite full-length; it’s a bit cramped, if the truth be told, so a body lying full-length looks somewhat less resplendent than it ought to. My wife’s breasts have long since returned to their pre-pregnancy shape (she quit nursing at three weeks), but her middle retains a pleasing lumpen aspect, the last of Cecilia’s nesting. She’s a good-looking woman whose body, unfortunately, leaves me cold. Has since the day she brought Cecilia home. Hence, Bruce. So we can leave that subject and move on. But this one night I sat on the toilet and stared at her and waited for her to acknowledge me. She was soaping her breasts at the time. I was wearing a blue bathrobe that had seen better days. (Get on with it! you charge at this juncture. Fix yourself up and perhaps your life’s problems will be solved!)