Country of a Marriage

by Anthony Giardina

  Ours is a small yard, with just enough room for a few garden beds and a set of lawn chairs. On summer nights it is pleasant to sit outside and listen to the crickets, looking up at the large house with that peculiar sense of pride new homeowners enjoy. The house is our solidity, the house and Cecilia asleep within it; all else is a transience too horrendous to contemplate. In habits such as this, I suppose I resemble my contemporaries: having lost everything in the way of surety, we cling to houses and gardens with the sort of obsessiveness Deborah Kerr once captured so brilliantly, when she used to play those fussy and straitlaced matrons who frittered about in gardens saying things like “Oh dear! Oh dear! The forsythias are running amuck!” until someone like Burt Lancaster came along to lay her and push her life into a more robust phase. I often think that what we’ve become is a nation of Deborahs fussing in the garden, waiting for Burt. Who knows what form Burt will take when he comes? Global cataclysm? Religious redemption? It’s none of my business, really; I’ll either be very old or gone, and it’s Cecilia who’ll live to find out. I only mention this because it seems to me a comfort to find oneself pitched onto history’s plateau, to be alive during one of those insignificant half centuries skipped over in history courses. It was a particular comfort to consider this on an evening when one’s wife waited inside the house to end one’s marriage. I looked up at the sky, at the clouds covering the moon, and remembered reading once how the astronomer Johannes Kepler thought he heard the lyrics to the music of the spheres, the grinding of the planets forcing out the words “Miseria. Famine. Miseria.” But tonight the music of the spheres sounded different to me. What I heard was “Oh dear! Oh dear!” These will be known someday as the Years Before Burt, I thought, and watched as the pale face of the moon slipped out from behind the cover of clouds. How cold it looked. How sad to think of a man standing up on the moon, standing in the middle of a life like mine, staring across the vastness of space at another planet, one assumed empty. Then the image crumbled as I recalled that we had been there, we had confirmed the emptiness. We are now quite certain that no one lives on the moon.

  There was a sound from within the house. I turned to see my wife, through the window, washing her wineglass in the sink. Evidently, she’d given up waiting for me. This was not to say that I was off the hook. The monster had submerged, that was all. Meanwhile, my mind, obeying some perverse will of its own, had fallen into a kind of reverie, superimposing the image of Mrs. Leaver on the woman at the sink. Immediately, I saw it was no good. I am not fool enough to believe that you can put one thing where another belongs and escape that way. My wife was drying her hands. She put her rings—removed for the dish washing—back on, looked out the window once—I knew she wouldn’t see me in the darkness—and headed upstairs.

  I went and sat on one of the lawn chairs. They are sturdy chairs, a craftsman’s chairs, though we bought them cheaply enough, sanded and painted them ourselves. This, again, in the days before Cecilia. We were quite the couple then, quite the doers-of-things-together, and, gathering this information, you will no doubt mark the birth of our child as the end of our romance. That would be the conventional view; it is, I am sure, my wife’s view. But as I sat there in the cold chair pondering the end of things, it was not the death of romance that was on my mind; rather, it was the curious happiness I had achieved with Cecilia, a happiness I now saw threatened. As I looked back on the man who had bought and sanded and painted these chairs, I detected a kind of nervousness, an edge, an unfinished quality to him as well. Though he made love to his wife and devoured her meals and lived generally the life of his time, he was, in certain ways, like the man I had imagined before on the moon, encased in an enormous solitude. For some of us, the presence of a woman is not enough to convince us we’re not alone. Only a child can do that. And once it happens, all other relations change. There is nothing cruel or deliberate about this; it is simply what happens, simply what is.

  I looked at the house then and knew what it was I had to do. It is at such moments that I always wish I smoked cigars, even cigarettes, or drank strong whiskey. There is something pleasing, manly even, in reaching a decision but retaining the presence of mind to finish the smoke or drink in your hand before feeling compelled to act. It attests to the balance of things. But I have none of these vices; there was nothing for me to do, really, but to get up from the chair. Our bedroom window faces the back of the house. From where I was sitting in the side yard, all I could see was the blank wall housing our bedroom, the sloping roof and the eaves. It was up to me to imagine the scene within, without even the helpful scrim of a lit curtain. My wife, who ten minutes ago had left the kitchen, must by then have removed her dress and slipped into a nightgown. There was the ritual of the face cleaning, then the teeth. But I needed only get up. I needed only enter the house. It didn’t matter where I found her, really. It would all be the same.

  There were first, though, the things a careful husband does before turning in: checking the burners on the gas stove, and the pilot lights; unplugging the coffeemaker; turning down the heat and making sure the lights are out. Then upstairs, quiet against the carpet. My wife was already in bed, asleep, a surprise.

  In the bathroom, I undressed. I am either vain or only normally vain, depending on your view of such matters; I give vanity no thought at all, but I do usually take a look at myself naked before turning in. Just as the pilot lights are checked to make sure they’re still burning, so the tummy bulge is monitored, and the puffiness around the shoulders and breasts that may be the seat of highest vulnerability in the male. As much as some of us may act or seem to want to act like women, we fear turning into them. We do not want breasts; at least, I do not. I don’t generally pay too much attention to my genitals, but tonight I studied them, gazed at them like a pile of old schoolbooks I’d just come upon and knew a desire to flip through. They had done their part, like the schoolbooks. One held on to them for nostalgic purposes, and it occurred to me as I regarded them how deeply nostalgia rules our lives after a point, nearly every act a beckoning after an earlier, somehow purer act. What I was about to do was merely a recognition of this truth, an alliance with the world that holds it dear without having any notion of its being a determinant. Nature sees fit to leave us with our genitals even after they have served their function, so we are more or less compelled, for good or ill, to arrange life around their use. This is as far as we have come. Perhaps, I thought as I caught the last ghostly image of myself in the fading of the switched-off light, it is as far as we are capable of going. At least, until Burt comes. Whatever Burt turns out to be.

  In bed, I immediately lowered myself to my wife’s center. Another nostalgic act, and one I harbored little doubt about. Sex is not difficult even in the worst of times. Certain scents carry on them the film of one’s life. In the days when I engaged in this sort of thing regularly, it always seemed to me that, in entering my wife, what I was in fact doing was entering a darkened movie theater and letting the images roll past me, as if it is in sex, not death, that all the important events flash before one’s eyes. I don’t know if my wife was surprised enough to object when I began to penetrate her; her hands grasped my shoulders, in shock or pleasure I’ll never know. The lights were out. She quickly achieved the high moaning that, for me, contained her former presence as acutely as the handwriting of her earliest letters. The difficulty, if there was one, is that studying your wife’s early jottings, or her picture in the high school yearbook, pleasant as these things might be, is not the same thing as appreciating her presence now. So lovemaking had this air for me of a secondary activity, a scratching after the past, a forcible dreaming where real-life, present-tense activity offered too painful an alternative. Yet in this way, and only in this way, I knew I would win her back; the false activity was for her, as for most others, the real. No one is really interested in evolution, or not many. Already, I could feel the onset of the great thwacking orgasm I could always summon from her, loud and deep, a thrumming bass note.
And then, always, predictably, her hands would cradle my buttocks, so as to hurry me on, that I might join her in these depths of pleasure, and as I made the first sounds of my own approaching orgasm, her breath became deep and solemn, as if there were something terribly serious about a man letting loose a jet of sperm. All of this happened as it had happened in the months and years before, as if we were a pair of old troupers fallen on hard times who had agreed to repeat one of their past successes. Perhaps we would have appeared to any spectator like a pair of ghostly figures on the bed. Or perhaps anyone watching would have thought the scene only just and right: two fine bodies at work, in tune with one another. It was perfect sex, really, the kind we all aspire to. And I am just smart enough to admit that about all the important matters I may be dead wrong. Perhaps this was precisely what we ought to have been doing, and no more.

  Afterward, my wife cradled close to me, affectionately. I trust there is not an excess of vanity in the fact that, for me, at that moment, there was no question as to the defeat of the economist Friedman. I was aware of him fading, of the light closing around us and on this image of domestic restoration. Not for nothing do we respond as we do to the fifth acts of Shakespeare’s romances. No one, even in this unlikely age, is fond of divorce. The notion persists that certain people belong together, and I am content to believe this is so for us. I waited until she was asleep and then went into Cecilia’s room.

  There is not a lot there. We are neither of us much for the sorts of painted-ceilinged wonderlands you see in the movies when the filmmakers want very badly to let you know how devoted the young parents are. Most babies live in rooms like prisons, and gaze out at the world through the bars of a crib. None of this is accidental. Life, in fact, is extraordinarily blank: rooms have walls and floors, that’s all, Cecilia, and this is where we live, here, between these walls and floors, in these rooms, and with luck we can keep them blank, keep away the terrible scenes and fights that require us, in reaction, to pin up pleasant scenes and vistas that are all of a piece with falseness. None of this, of course, will I ever tell her. Instead, I will pat her small tender head and invent stories and tales like any other father. Only in silence will I offer the enormous thanks that is due her. This little room is my chalice, my cathedral, of course; I’m not telling you anything new in admitting to this. I will do what I can to preserve it. I will do what I must to retain my happiness.

  THE LAKE

  My name is Danny Sienkewicz. I am a firefighter in Denniston, Massachusetts, a town with just over 15,000 inhabitants and little to speak of in the way of a commercial district. Needless to say, we don’t fight a lot of fires here. Since no major highway runs through our town, neither will you find us called more than four or five times a week to assist at an emergency.

  Recently, however, we had a tragedy at the station. The wife of one of the firefighters died. He killed her, accidentally. Timmy McCandles. But right away, having said that—having used the word tragedy—I want to back off from it. When I hear that word spoken, I can’t help it, my mind goes directly back to the image of Mrs. Carney, my teacher in junior-year English at Dennis ton High. Mrs. Carney said death didn’t count as tragedy unless the person who died might have achieved greatness. And this sunk in for me, I remembered. So let me say instead, we had a sadness not long ago at the station. The men, though, all insist on referring to it as a tragedy, and I never contradict them. Though I know more than any of them what actually happened, I maintain my silence, and allow them to use whatever words they want.

  I am a married man. I did not go to college. My father was not a firefighter. Instead, he was one of those men who fought in Korea and came home and begot children and drank too much and ended up in the Old Soldiers’ Home, dying of a rotting liver and wasted lungs, both at the same time; the race was to see which would get him first. I think it was the lungs, but then, I stopped paying attention at a certain point. I have this image of myself in high school, around the time of my father’s death. I am sitting in a classroom full of thugs, and girls ready at a second’s notice to get pregnant by them, and then those few who are taking notes and preparing for college. I am not going crazy with hormones or thinking about sleeping with these girls or about going to college, either, though I suppose I could have, I was told I had the aptitude. I am, instead, fixed on a point outside the room. The life I am going to live has become clear to me; I have fashioned it, though I am only seventeen at the time. I will have a wife and children, three or four of them; I will have a certain house, with trimmed hedges, and on Saturdays you will see me out there, like all the other men, in a tee shirt and scuffed, faintly dirty khakis, trimming and pruning. I envisioned things with an orderliness I imagined my father could never so much as approximate from his chair at the Old Soldiers’ Home. I saw myself all grown up, packing the children in the car and going on picnics. And I knew, even then, how I would look in that car, my eyes staring straight ahead at all times, never quite fixing on what’s on either side of me.

  You have to admire me for this, I achieved my goal. When I was done with Cadet School, I began looking at girls, and not until then, at least not with any seriousness. I went on living with my mother after Cadet School; my two older sisters were married, the opportunities were not great. I loved my life in those days, my rituals, swimming at the Y every night, but it was hard to meet girls. So here is an embarrassment: Sharon, my wife, lived two doors down the street; I’d known her since childhood. What I knew about her at that time was that she’d become a nurse and gotten engaged, but something had gone wrong, the galoot she was going to marry got in a motorcycle accident, lost some vital function. Sharon held on for a while, but it was no good. In the neighborhood, we knew such stories of loyalty and hard luck. Watching Sharon go in and out of the house in her white sneakers and hose I felt a pity in my heart, and in my imagination began to place her inside the picture I’d formed in high school: the trimmed shrubs, the packed car. I started going over to her house, I found excuses. I don’t remember love, but that did not seem important then. When we first slept together, I thought this woman exuded milk, it was like being an infant again, and the sensation I had was of dipping myself in an enormous, brimming bowl. She was, at the beginning, one who was prone to cry after lovemaking, and I did not ask, but assumed this was grief over the lost motorcyclist. I felt, holding this crying woman in my arms in the backseat of my car, that something quite natural was going on, a transference: if I held her and said nothing for a long enough time, she would stop loving him and start loving me—or she would, at the very least, and good enough, accept me—and that is what I believed, for a long time, happened.

  Our girls are three and four. We’ve rested now, but next year we’ll have a boy. I know this as certainly as I once knew I would reach this life of mine. We have boys’ names picked out. Duncan or Griffin or maybe just Joe. I joke with Sharon about this, how the classrooms in four or five years aren’t going to have any normal names left. “Let’s do our part,” I joke to Sharon. “Let’s people the world with Joes.” She laughs and goes along with me, but then she gets that look that tells me she’d be fine stopping here, with just the girls. It’s a snag we’ve hit, Sharon and I, and though I don’t believe this is an obstruction that will last forever, I would be a fool not to admit that Lisa’s death put it there.

  Timmy, Lisa’s husband, has been my best friend since high school, when he shone at baseball and I failed to distinguish myself in the hundred-yard dash. I knew Timmy’s flaws early, though I forgave him them. Or maybe it’s truer to say I never considered them as being separate from him. He was always more handsome than me and less capable of sustained effort, more prone to sullenness and moods, which around here, given his Irishness, always meant that he would drink hard. Lisa chose him when he was at his peak, when he still had his fastball, his redheaded good looks, and a breezy, young man’s confidence that could knock you over. It soon became their joke, at the high school cafeteria table, to confide in the rest of
us just enough of the details of their passion to drive us all crazy. “Was it cookies or cake this weekend?” someone would ask them at Monday lunch, “cookies” and “cake” being, of course, code words for the two basic things teenagers knew to do then. Lisa wore a flushed look in those days, her maturity starting up in her, and she had a way of looking across the table at Timmy, as if knowing even then that he was going to fuck up, going to be her burden in the years to come, but this had been her training: to find some flawed man and carry him.

  As for me, I sat and studied them, as if they were light-years away from me, as if what they had together was only possible for certain rare species, and even for them would always be touch-and-go. The bulk of my affection—certainly my attention—at that time was reserved for Timmy’s father. He was the fire chief. He knew how to drink in moderation and had a passion for watering his lawn. I stood and watched him, every chance I got, because in the look of his resting old man’s face as he moved about his yard in the summer dusk, in his careful and methodical manner with the hose, I felt as close to a form of teaching as I have ever received from any man. I think he was aware of this, too, and allowed me to see, those nights, the core belief that kept him steady in his days: the purest part of life, its aching, gorgeous center, was a thing deeply mired in the past. It was useless to try to seize that sweetness, because it was already, at the moment he and I were born, played out. But distillations of it, of the life some lucky bastard had once gotten to live, came down from the air sometimes, onto lawns, into backyards, in certain kinds of light, and your goal as a man must be to position yourself so that these landed on you.