“How did it go?” I asked.
“Department meeting,” she answered, still not looking up. “The usual shit.”
“Did you eat lunch?” I asked, in my mothering tone.
She told me what she’d eaten, and then some departmental gossip. For her, there is still the illusion to be maintained that these late evenings are caused by work. I helped dry her off, a process I enjoy, in large part I think because it reminds me of drying Cecilia. Then she ate the pork chops and drank the wine I’d poured her, and the two of us took out the foldout couch and lay there watching a Michael Caine spy movie from the sixties. It was of the genre where the filmmakers tried very hard to distinguish their man from James Bond, with thick glasses and such. I believe they called this at the time a Greater Realism. In other words, there was absolutely nothing unusual about this night except what happened midway through the spy picture. My bathrobe happened to be open, unintentionally, and at the point where Michael Caine was about to be tortured my wife reached over and lifted my penis. It is quite a long one (or so I’ve been told), and as she held it there, limp but extended upward by her grasp, it bisected the image of Michael Caine’s grimacing face. She held it for the length of time it took for the torture to be completed and then put it back in place. A commercial came on and we lay there in a kind of awed silence. As soon as the movie came back on, I began reporting on Cecilia’s day, my concern about an incipient ear infection. My wife listened, quite patient and interested, but not as though this information being imparted was anything she was going to have to act on. In a short while, before the movie was finished, she fell asleep, then roused herself and went upstairs to bed. I stayed up awhile. I checked on Cecilia. It was early spring but it had snowed during the night and outside our windows I could see it falling. I was trying to connect things, and having a hard time of it. In my mind was the image of Bruce Friedman thrashing away between my wife’s thighs in a manner I imagined as resembling the behavior of a crazed member of the college crew team. Then there was the holding of my penis. In her little room at the top of the house my daughter slept, and outside was the snow, gentle and unthreatening and more a reminder that winter was over than that some new and tremendous difficulty lay ahead. I planned my lesson for the next day, and then I, too, got into bed and fell asleep.
Cecilia was up early the next day, so I changed her and fed her a bottle. Then I sat her on her high chair and let her play with some teething things while I fixed my wife her eggs. It seemed to me as I did these things that something was noticeably different. I went through these rituals trying to put my finger on it and failing. Each time I tried to affix this difference to a specific prospect—would my penis finally stand? would my wife stop seeing the economist Friedman?—I found these things to be insignificant and unworthy of the larger pleasure I was experiencing.
I pondered all this while Cecilia gummed her Mr. Happy toy and the yellow eggs bubbled on the grill. My wife was late for her first class and barely had time to gobble the eggs, kiss Cecilia, and dash out the door. I got no kiss. I had a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette and read the obituary of a man who had been influential in the Eisenhower administration. At ten, Cecilia slept, and at noon I drove her to Mrs. Leaver’s and then went myself to the shop, arriving fifteen minutes before my class, a decent interval, and began laying out materials for the day’s lesson in soldering.
It went fairly well. Hot metal is quite a pleasant thing to work with, but dangerous, and Barnes, Neuwirth, Hull, and the others never appear so vulnerable as when they first hold the hot soldering iron in their hands and begin moving the liquid metal around. There are moments in the day—this was one of them—when their faces, ravaged as they are by the crocus shoots of incipient puberty, seem to strip back to the point where they appear as babies again, naked and innocent as Cecilia, with powdered bums and fingers like the pincers of crabs. My wife has a friend, a woman from the university, who comes to dinner occasionally. One night we got to talking, in the manner of people who have perhaps spent too much time in college towns, about the nature of reality. “I don’t suppose we live it,” my wife offered. “People in New York live it. People in the streets.” I had nothing to offer on the subject—perhaps if I had it would have been something to do with Michael Caine and the heavy-rimmed glasses he wore in the spy picture—but I remember the woman smirking at the end of my wife’s comment. “You’re being sentimental,” she said. “You know how sometimes in the afternoon, you take a nap, at two or three, and when you wake up it’s never the way it is when you wake up in the morning? There are several seconds—they’re delicious—when you have no life. The facts have to catch up with you.” She picked up her fork and started eating again. “That’s reality. The moments before the facts catch up.” I remembered that comment as I watched Barnes, Neuwirth, and Hull grapple with the mysteries of soldering. Soon they would be skilled enough to draw erotic figures in hot metal. I have seen them etch enormous phalluses and breasts in wood; it seems to be their primary joy, once they have mastered a skill, to impress one another with the lewd purposes to which it can be put. But they were not yet at this point with soldering; that is, the facts hadn’t caught up, and they stood at their places, holding their irons with a kind of wondering detachment.
When the class was over, I went into the teachers’ room and had a cup of coffee. I hadn’t been inside this room since my first day at Russell, when the headmaster, in the midst of a tour of the facilities, had insisted I step inside and “meet the staff.” Two women speaking French in a corner of the room had scared me off that day. I’m almost ashamed to admit this, since by now you will have guessed that I am a sensitive type, but it is no exaggeration to say that these two rare birds showed contempt for me that day. We’d caught them in the middle of a discussion. They were discussing Flaubert’s “Un Coeur Simple,” as I recall, and did not take to being interrupted. Oh, they were very civil, but when you’ve been around academics as long as I have—especially low-grade academics, the not-yet-tenured, the private-school types—you begin to sort out the ones who are afraid of you. God knows where this fear comes from—perhaps it’s my very shagginess, the air I seem to give off, with my long hair and my soiled blue shop coat, of being a rough guy, that makes them fluff their feathers and nest more defensively over the egg of their pretensions. Or perhaps it is not fear at all, but something else. Whatever, they gave off a skunkish stink that day, and I have kept away ever since. So you can imagine the degree of confidence—the extent of my good mood—as I sauntered into the teachers’ room this particular day and sought out the cup with my name on it that had been gathering dust on the shelf for over a year.
I was wearing my blue shop coat still—no shame there—and, well, if you must know, I was hoping to find Colin. It was not until I’d poured the coffee and sat down to drink it that I noticed there was only one other person in the room. A woman sat on the edge of a sofa puffing great blue streams into the air from slender brown cigarettes. She peered at me through this haze, and said, after a point, “You’re the shop teacher, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
She stared out the window.
“Teaching Thomas Hardy is very difficult,” she said.
It was all she said. Her smoking was languid, and highly studied, of a piece with the fold of her legs and the high severe neckline of her dress. I wondered what the proper response was: “Teaching soldering is likewise a bitch”? Would that have started us off on a stimulating interdisciplinary chat? I’ll never know, because I said nothing. Instead, I began thinking of Mrs. Leaver, who was in any case never far from my mind during these stolen moments after the close of shop. What would Mrs. Leaver have made of such a comment, among her toys and the persistent smell of urine? At the moment, I felt a silent communion with Mrs. Leaver, knew a desire to join up with her, put my hands into the muck of child rearing, to smell the soft wet smell and draw to my nose the small astonished body of Cecilia. There was nothing for me in this roo
m, I understood, and was about to go when a new man entered. Obviously in a hurry, he shouted, “Hello, Peg,” quickly poured himself a cup of coffee, and bolted it, standing stiff and upright before the urn, taking it black. He was a thin man, with suede patches on the elbows of his jacket, and the sort of head that seems to make itself over after the age of forty, so that no trace of the youth he might once have enjoyed remained. Once he noticed me, he stood staring for several seconds, rapidly blinking his eyes in the manner of a man trying to wake up quickly, with no time to enjoy the fuzzy-headedness of waking.
Finally, as if something had just occurred to him, he half-shouted, “Shop, is it?”
I nodded, he checked his watch and ran for the door, and that was the end of that.
When I picked up Cecilia that day, I was more than usually solicitous of Mrs. Leaver, which led her to offer me something, a cup of tea or a drink. I declined but Mrs. Leaver went ahead, poured bourbon over ice. Cecilia was more or less content in my arms and we watched Mrs. Leaver drink.
“Your wife teaches, doesn’t she?” Mrs. Leaver asked. She already knew this, and was just making conversation, but I answered that yes, she did, and yes, Cecilia was my responsibility, day in, day out. It must be difficult, she said, and I answered, no, it really isn’t. With your wife away all the time, I mean.
Well, here is the juncture where things become problematical, because though I find it difficult to talk to the Pegs and the coeurs simples of this world, there are fine distinctions in any life which they might be able to receive with less effort than Mrs. Leaver. You see, I had an answer for Mrs. Leaver but wasn’t sure I ought to give it. Was it difficult with my wife away all the time? Well, no. The birth of children brings on a kind of winnowing, as I see it, like the selection of the swim team, where some are going to make it and some are not. Or no, perhaps that’s wrong, though the diving metaphor is probably right. We are brought to the edge of a cliff and asked to dive. It’s perfectly natural that some will prefer not to. In most cases, though, one of the partners will be willing, and the other left to find some distraction somewhere. The roles get sorted quite satisfactorily, and the only problem comes when, at the end of the day, the two meet and try to proceed as though everything is perfectly rational. What can there possibly be to talk about over the stir-fried chicken when one has been diving off a cliff all day, while the other has been operating a staple gun or conjugating French verbs? That we try to communicate at all is where we run into trouble, and consequently it is all a story of abandonment and betrayal, a fact Mrs. Leaver would readily understand if I could find words simple enough. My wife would like me to make wild love to her every night just to assure her that my day has been like hers. But I find I cannot; the act has become inessential. Would Mrs. Leaver comprehend any of this if I made the attempt to speak, or is it better to leave it alone, unspoken and therefore brought closer to its true weight in the world? It occurred to me just then that Mrs. Leaver is my Colin, this ratty house of hers our leafy pub. And as I watched her down her bourbon, I thought: yes, all right, it’ll do. She’s my man, my silent compatriot. I wrapped up Cecilia and drove home.
My wife was there already, a surprise. Her little Volvo sat parked in the driveway like a note left there for me. Inside, she was cooking. It was clear right away she had come home to save her marriage. I imagined somewhere on campus the economist Friedman running hard laps to sweat off the effects of his deprivation. It was angel-hair pasta she was cooking, with zucchini and prosciutto. Lovely. A recipe from the old days, before Cecilia, when my wife still liked to cook.
I kissed her and busied myself with Cecilia. Already I could see I had done something wrong. My wife was pouting as she lay strips of prosciutto on a plate. That she was here, she believed, ought to have altered things more than was presently visible. What I wanted to tell her was that the rhythms of a baby’s day are eternal and weather events more climactic than an errant wife’s return. As the lifeboats were lowered off the Titanic, I imagine all the mothers onboard opening their little jars of baby food; six o’clock is six o’clock, iceberg or no iceberg. I fed Cecilia and felt my wife’s presence, and thought of the spurned economist under the shower, the hot gush of water parting his thin hair (mine is marvelously long and thick), sloping over his beard like lather, then down his broad chest and off the spout of his ridiculous genitals. In my mind’s eye, the water became hot metal, and there was a soldering gun in my hand, which I used to part his pale, humbled cheeks … well, enough of that. I hadn’t known I was this jealous, and I’m not sure even now whether it wasn’t an effect of the imbalance caused by my wife’s sudden appearance. I could smell the butter and cream now. Some sensual promise seemed to hang on the air, but what I ought to do, what action to take, eluded me completely.
During dinner, I was, as usual, solicitous of Cecilia. It’s what she’s grown used to, after all, my presence at dinner, humming and murmuring shy endearments. These annoy my wife, which is one of the reasons her returning late has never bothered me. She kept refilling my wineglass like an underappreciated husband eager for his wife’s attention, and I kept resisting these pleas, turning to Cecilia and making up reasons to fuss. To tell the truth, I was up against one of those black holes, those unexpected places where the lines of one’s behavior go underground. If you were to ask me even now why I was resisting my wife, I could offer you any number of explanations, but none of them, I am sure, would be even close to the truth. As far as I could tell, the problem was fairly simple: we wanted different things.
What I wanted was to watch the video I had picked up on the way home from Mrs. Leaver’s. The Train, with Burt Lancaster. Burt plays a French Resistance leader determined to prevent a Nazi train containing hundreds of absconded masterpieces from reaching the German border. Paul Scofield is the Nazi who’s got to keep Burt from succeeding. Why I am partial to movies like this is another black hole, but there’s no denying it. I had looked forward to getting Cecilia to bed and popping the video into the recorder, then lying back and watching Burt and Paul fight over paintings, using the terse, witless, but perfectly functional dialogue characteristic of the classier sixties films. I would lie there, feeling splendid, wholly absorbed in the action, and my wife would join me after her bath, yawn once or twice and ask me to fill her in on the plot, then fall asleep before the final shoot-out. I’d cover her and fall asleep myself after rewinding the spool. Such evenings, fruitless but oddly satisfying, are the dark heart of any smoothly running domestic existence. The point is to beat slowly. The point is to remain unexcited, to run at a steady pace. This was the wisdom I had attained after years of trial and error. And here was my wife with the dinner and the wine and I knew I might as well forget The Train.
When I brought this up, she gave me one of those looks: yet another of your dreary movies, which you watch only to avoid having to deal with me. She was quite certain she could see right through me, and I knew it would serve no purpose to point out that what she was seeing was only the mirror of herself: what such behavior, if she were doing it, would certainly mean. We live in an age and time, besides, where it is virtually impossible to admit without shame that one might prefer the derring-do of Burt Lancaster to the white thighs and ruby lips of a wife. As I prepared Cecilia for bed, I began to dread the scene that awaited me. The snow of the night before—that subtle indicator of change endured—now seemed not so benevolent to me, and the lifting of my penis—an act I had regarded as a mutual recognition and appreciation of irony—struck me as something quite different.
She was sitting at the kitchen counter when I came downstairs, and the dishes, my one remaining distraction, had all been stacked in the dishwasher. The only thing left for me was to add the lemon-scented powder and turn the thing on. Before her was a glass of red wine—a Spanish vintage, highly recommended by our local wine merchant—and the image of her right away struck me as a pose of mourning. It was then that it occurred to me she had come home not to save her marriage but to end it.
I have no idea what my body was doing as it took in this possibility, but I do know that my mind began conducting one of those enormous image-rushes that have always signified to me the onset of panic. Suddenly, a flood of images shot upward, most of them having to do with my old friends, abandonment, and betrayal, until one attained dominance: a vision of the economist Friedman, not as I had most recently imagined him, a pale diminished creature under a hot punishing shower, but hale, hearty, and well-fed at his own dinner table, enjoying a final meal with his wife and two sons, harboring his secret and thinking, as he sopped up the last of the chicken in his wife’s good garlic sauce, of the suitcase he would soon pack, and the parking lot of the strip shopping center where he and my wife had no doubt planned, after the twin leave-takings, to meet. Off they would ride into the April evening, most likely to an off-campus motel notorious for its between-classes assignations, to spend a mildly sobering but nonetheless fulfilling evening of committed sex before rising to teach their morning classes.
My great desire at this point was to get out of the room. It was not so much the facts I was resistant to as the melodrama that seemed about to unfold. The garish and eye-popping mode of contemporary domestic warfare has never suited me. It seemed to me altogether better that I should pop into the next room while she composed a note outlining her intentions and estimated day and time of departure. I prefer the thing written, that’s all, and ambiguity thereby skirted. If my wife, for instance, is about to say the words “I’m leaving,” what will she really be saying? “Fight for me”? “Don’t let me go”? There’s no true way of knowing, you see, and in order to find out, I’d have to humiliate myself in one of those endless groveling scenes I detest. Whereas if the thing were written down, typed even, I’d have no choice but to accept it.
It would have been a mistake, though, to try to avoid the scene by preempting her and saying the words myself. I might have been wrong in my guess, though I didn’t think I was, and any mention of the issue at all would have necessitated our Getting into Things. Leave it covered until you are forced to uncover it, I say. Meanwhile, as I indulged in all these speculations, my wife had done nothing but take a single, maddeningly slow sip of wine. Before the glass had been replaced in front of her, I announced that I had left some of Cecilia’s toys in the side yard, and used that as an excuse to get outside.
Country of a Marriage Page 3