Country of a Marriage

by Anthony Giardina

  After that, whenever I made love to Lisa, certain feelings I’d had inside her body, real but until then somehow ignorable, grew large, as though they wanted very much for me to see them; as though, too, they knew they were in danger of being lost. There were moments, inside her, when I had the sensation of surfacing on a lake, my skin wet and supple, opening my eyes and surveying a spread of water and a setting of hills I could not recall having actually seen in my life. Maybe I was there in childhood and was only now recalling it, but I didn’t think so. In fact, I seemed to know, in some bottled-up part of my brain, just what was happening to me, and what the lake was.

  Almost as soon as Sharon recovered, another thing happened. Timmy and I were sitting in the station one day. I’d been moved to Denniston just a few months before, so we shared a shift now and then, not often. I was studying for my promotion exam in Kirk’s Fire Investigation, had the book open to a certain page, and Timmy came over and ran his finger down the page, made a long smudgy crease in the middle of it. He was standing behind me, rubbing up close against my back, so close I felt this impulse to shove him away, and while I was experiencing this feeling and looking at the smudge he’d made, I got it. I got what was happening. It was like he knew, too, because he moved away, he began talking to somebody else. I watched him, saw the slant of Timmy’s body against the light coming in through the firehouse window, and I became afraid. If Timmy could do that simple thing to me, it seemed there was nothing he couldn’t do. I was afraid if we had to go to a fire he’d find a way of killing me there. I went back to the book, I tried to study the page, but it was no good. The whole story was in front of me now, the way what Lisa and I were doing was wrong, the way my surfacing on the hidden lake was one side of a movie set, on the other side of which Timmy expected to find somebody who was never going to meet him there. I looked at Timmy and tried to love him the way I once had, and though this was difficult, it awakened something in me that I think was glad to be awakened.

  Lisa and I had to begin talking then. We had to begin discussing. I insisted on it. We talked first about Pete, and she told me something she’d never said before: how Pete had been born out of a wrong guess, that she’d stopped loving Timmy by the time Pete was conceived and so had never learned to love Pete properly. She was afraid he’d die because of it, she’d seen that sign on his forehead all his little life. We stopped talking then, for a while, it was too sad, too dark. I think we embarrassed ourselves with it. But soon we had to start in again, this time about Timmy knowing, and what that meant, and each time we had that conversation I’d get out of bed and stalk the room, and always when I did that I’d put something on, but she’d stay in bed, naked and not ashamed to be. That was Lisa: she wasn’t afraid to see things just as they were, but me, I always wanted to make them into other, safer things.

  Finally, what happened was, one afternoon, just over four months ago, I told Lisa I wouldn’t be coming anymore. She bit her lip and said, “I know,” but at the same time did not believe me. So I kept coming for another week. I had lost conviction, though, and I pushed away the image of the lake and kept my eyes open and saw instead the sheets, curtains, the way her face was aging and how hard it would be to love a woman for just this, when the facts were age and death. When I thought this, the lower half of my heart felt submerged in something acidic. I had the vague sense of going against nature and that this was possible, a choice. “Of course, we couldn’t,” she said once, and I was glad to hear it, to hear her thinking that way, too; it made me believe the old world, the world of the cafeteria table, could be restored.

  What I did in the end was just stop coming. Sharon was well enough now, and no longer needed the help, so there was no longer the problem of Erica, who had anyway stopped taking naps. I went ahead and sewed up my life. I thought about conceiving Joe, the process of which had begun in a haphazard fashion. At the station, I even announced it once, at lunch, said we might be trying again and we wanted a boy, and Zgrodnik, a twenty-year veteran, said, with his mouth full of egg, “It’s who wants it most.” I raised my eyebrows. “What determines the sex. If the man wants it more, it’s always a girl.”

  One night I happened to be home watching television with Sharon when the phone rang. It was raining hard, and what I hoped was that I wasn’t being called in to work because someone had gotten sick and the crew was short. It was Lisa. She was crying, or in a state like that. Maybe not crying. She was alone. Timmy was working. She said she needed to see me.

  I heard that and I listened to the rain on the roof and wondered, in my detached way, how long the roof was going to last and when we were going to have to go in for the expense of repairing it. I have this way of thinking double, when there’s something I don’t really want to hear, and I put it to use. In the other room, I heard the TV, the comedy, the laugh track, and waited for Sharon to say, “Who is it?” and then, when she didn’t, thought of her sitting there, absorbed in some little comedy full of people in bright clothes and plastic hair, while here was Lisa, desperate on the other end of the line, and all I could think was how Sharon’s world was preferable—watching TV, staying in our lives, these things were better. Lisa needed to see that, the whole pitch of our lives just needed to be adjusted, that was all, like turning a knob and bringing things into a clearer, better focus.

  “Park away from the house,” Lisa said. “Please, Danny. On the road.

  “Away from the house,” she repeated, and I thought that was strange.

  “Why?”

  “I think Timmy’s got somebody watching. Just turn off your lights and I’ll be looking for you.”

  That sounded calculated, and when I put it alongside the hysteria I almost didn’t go. What could happen, after all? Sobs, tears, and maybe a blow job. It had descended to that, that’s how cold I felt. I didn’t want to see Lisa anymore. But I went. I believe my excuse to Sharon was that a couple of air packs had been misplaced down at the station and I couldn’t direct the men to them on the phone. Something that lame.

  When I reached the house, I parked a long way down the road. Maybe she wouldn’t find me and I would have my excuse. “I was there, and you didn’t find me.” I could see through the woods the lights in their house. They were the only lights around. I was sitting in a parked car in the dark, listening to the rain, and wondering if my car would get stuck because theirs was an unpaved road, muddy and deserted. And I have to say this, too, because it was a part of the night: I’d begun to feel safe again. I’d begun to feel that things were going to be all right, restored. Lisa was going to be hysterical for a while, and then she was going to be Lisa again. I remember thinking that, and though it was rainy and dark, a kind of warmth started up in me. I sat there and I thought she would probably come, probably find me, we would have some sex but it wouldn’t count, we were on the other side of all its weight and importance. I could barely remember the lake. As I thought that, I remember smiling, almost like I was anticipating the sex, and I did this thing, embarrassing to admit, I cupped my balls in my hand and looked down at them, just interested and anticipatory, and at that moment something came into my mind, a little shadow came flying in and perched there, a contradictory shadow that told me the way I was thinking wasn’t the way it was. When I looked up, it was like Lisa had risen directly out of this sensation, so that I couldn’t force it away but had to stare right into it. If I’d stopped to analyze things, I might have wondered why her face was lit that way, but I didn’t ask that, of course. I just saw. And what I saw was Lisa wet and excited, running toward Danny. Toward Danny. I had to take that in, maybe for the first time. That I was loved. For a single moment, before I had the chance to stop myself, I was ready to have my life change, and hers too, because of it. I lifted toward that sweet thing there in the car, and felt a dark place in me start to open. And then the whole reason Lisa’s face was lit announced itself: it was a car coming.

  My first thought was: it would pass, we’d both go back to what it was we’d been ready for
in the moment before, the little leap we’d both been preparing to make. This was an intrusion, that was all—blink, and it’d be over. Except the car didn’t pass. Instead, it slammed into Lisa—her face knew enough to be frightened for a moment just before—and I saw right away it was Timmy’s truck. She had disappeared from my sight, I was looking at the taillights of Timmy’s truck and the nozzle of a big gas can leaning over the side. I saw Timmy jump out of the cab and then I heard the amazing sound of Timmy howling.

  That sound was like nothing I’d ever heard before, not like the howl you hear when people think they’re going to die. More like the sound inside caves, that sound of essential, bedrock loneliness. I didn’t stop to think it was strange, the way that howl made everything else take second place. It was like, after hitting her with the truck, the first thing he wanted to offer up—to me, to her—was an intimacy greater than any he’d offered either of us before: this is how much I feel, you bastards. I’m still here, and I feel this much.

  It’s stupid to say it made me forgive him, but the thing it did that I have trouble understanding is the way it stood between me and what he had done. For several seconds, I was outside of any thought of revenge or anger. I was just listening to him.

  I did get out of the car finally. I went and watched how he was holding her, and it was like those nights I used to drop him off after drinking. Like it was their lives, after all, and I had no business. I could see that Lisa was dead, but I still shouted did he want me to make the call. He just motioned for me to get the hell away, so there was no arguing with him. He did it over and over again, and I knew there was no place for me there anymore.

  So I got back in the car and only on the ride home did I start to think of the realness of it, of Lisa being dead. I felt ashamed of myself when I realized how long it had taken me to think about this. And there was something else, too: while I’d been listening to Timmy howl, there had been another thought, one I could barely admit to. I kept batting it away, but though it had been there only for a second, it had lodged in my memory. I might almost call it gratefulness, for what her death meant, what it meant I didn’t have to do.

  I wasn’t going to tell Sharon when I got home. I couldn’t imagine speaking anything of it, or doing anything but lying down and falling into a deep, blank sleep. Sharon was still watching television, though, and I was lucky: only ten minutes after I got home the call came from the station, saying that Timmy McCandles had accidentally run over his wife, in the rain, outside their house.

  So we went to a funeral. We left our little girls with Sharon’s mother and I put on my one black suit and Sharon a dark blue dress and we sat in the fourth row at St. Ignatius’s. There was all the predictable sobbing and a lot of grim men who were firefighters. Friends of Timmy’s, friends of the Chiefs. In the front row, Erin sat next to her father. Someone had fixed her hair up carefully, in dark barrettes. Timmy had done the following: after I’d driven away that night, he’d taken their second car, the Bronco, and parked it where my car had been. He claimed Lisa had left the car out there and was going to fetch something from it when he’d come upon her, unaware, and slid into her. He was just coming home, that was all. He claimed his whole intention had been to pick up some spices, some hot sauce and Worcestershire; he was due to cook that night, for the men. Somehow the trackings in the mud managed to match up to that story. Or maybe they hadn’t looked hard enough. It had been a rainy night, remember, and ours is a county with strong, old allegiances. So it was a tragic accident, you see.

  For me, by this time, Timmy’s howl had ceased to make the terrible sense it had made that night. By now, I was able to see the calculation in what Timmy had done, though I would never, ever speak of it. I couldn’t see what good it would do anymore, and Timmy, since the night of the accident, had aged to the point where he looked as old as his father. So I knew some kind of punishment was going on.

  Every once in a while I would think of Lisa as she had been in life, and how, because of me, she was dead. There was nowhere to go with that thought—it was just a dark place inside me that I knew I would have to learn to live with. I knew, too, though I couldn’t guess yet what effect it would take, that Lisa’s death would finally put a mark on me as great as the mark it had put on Timmy.

  Last night—it’s been three months now, it’s already summer—I went out to take care of the lilacs. The blooms are gone, and I’m just getting the lime in. It’s late for that, but I have to do it, and it’ll be in for next year. I have three beautiful lilac bushes in my backyard, a dogwood, a mountain ash. I have the yard I always wanted, the yard I dreamed of when I was a boy, and as I sifted around the roots of the lilac, I had this moment of remembering. It was a June night, I could hear kids somewhere not far off. I was scratching in the earth and I was aware that the clothes I was wearing, the tee shirt and khakis, the pose and the physical attitude, these were nearly exactly what I’d once envisioned for myself in the old, hopeful, planning days, and I thought in that instant that if I could have gone back and been, at the same time, the boy dreaming this life and the man living it, how happy I’d have been.

  What I did, though, is I looked up and saw Sharon staring at me from the porch. The porch loses the light early and she was standing in shadow. I caught her face, though. I tried to smile and she didn’t smile back. I’d caught Sharon thinking. It’s a way she’s started to look lately, a pensiveness that’s set in in the months since Lisa died. It was automatic that I looked from her face to her belly and wondered if Joe was in there yet. It was very clear at that moment—I’m not sure why—that he wasn’t. I went back to her face. We stared across a great space at one another and I wondered what she might be thinking. But it has become Sharon’s determination, these last few months, not to let me know. She went deeper into the shadows. I hesitated a moment. I looked around my yard and saw my hand white from the lime, and I thought, very clearly, of the game of my life as being lost. But then I went on, as I do every day, just as if it wasn’t.

  LOVE, YOUR PARENTS

  I am thirty-four years old. Two weeks ago, I came home to live with my parents in the big house they built for themselves on the banks of the Severn River. I brought with me two suitcases of clothes and the ’81 Datsun I drive. Everything else, I threw out when I left Belchertown, where I lived once with my wife and son, and then more recently with my girlfriend. There is a joke somewhere in all of this, and any minute now I expect to get it. When I do, I will release one of those tiny hiccuping laughs of mine, short and to the point. My girlfriend used to tell me it scared her to hear me laugh like that, and my wife went further, said I had a sociopath’s laugh, that I didn’t know how to let go but always kept my eyes open in the midst of laughter, so that no one, not even the jokester in front of me, could get the better of me.

  All of which may be true, but it doesn’t concern me.

  It’s wet outside as I sit here, a morning in late May turning hot after last night’s rain. Downstairs, my mother will already have breakfast on. She won’t keep me company, though, when I’m ready to eat it. It’s hard for her to sit in the house with me now, in my come-down-in-the-world state. Pretty soon I’ll hear her pull her car out of the garage; then I’ll know I’ve got the house to myself. What I’ll do is I’ll call my girlfriend—you see I don’t waste time: sixteen days home and already I’ve got one—and arrange when we can meet today, and where. I do let go one of the hiccuping laughs when I think about this. I imagine my girlfriend Cathy describing what we’re having as a “whirlwind courtship.” What other way is there for her to talk about this guy who comes to her out of the blue and wants to see her every day? I told her I’m a screenwriter here to do research. “A love story set on the Maryland coast,” I told her. She’s my therapist’s secretary, so someday she’ll find me out and this will be over. But I imagine I have a while to go; these guys are supposed to keep their patients’ secrets, and my hunch is that Dr. Petticord takes this sort of injunction very seriously.

&n
bsp; I’m doing the therapy based on Currey’s advice. Currey was my supervisor up north. He told me it had been helping him get through the most difficult time of his life, and he believed it might help me too. (Actually, his words were a bit stronger, and included the phrase “to avoid criminal prosecution,” which I have to say, in Currey’s favor, came out sounding all garbled and insincere.) I arrived here with 800 bucks, and though technically this is supposed to go for child support, my wife will have to fight me to get it. By the time the long arm of the law reaches my outpost on the Severn, I’ll have spent most of it; sixty bucks a shot on therapy, gas for the car, insurance, meals with Cathy—these are my expenses. When it’s all used up, I’ll be in that tight spot where I have to ask my parents for money. But I won’t think about that yet.

  Though all this money business might sound lousy on balance, in fact I’m hurting no one. My wife comes from money. The demand for child support is her way of getting me to pay for something that doesn’t need to be paid for. She wanted a child. But somehow that isn’t enough for her. My wife wants me to have wanted one, too, and the fact that I never did is what keeps her fired up. A man who doesn’t care about his own kid—or doesn’t care in a way she can understand—is not a man she could have married. The converse, I guess, in her view, is that if I pay the support I become caring. Some part of her will settle for that, anyway. But the truth is a shade different. A little hand shot out of her when she started with me, started grabbing things. The wild little grasping hand that rises directly out of hunger. She’s ashamed of that now, wants me to tell her, by my actions, that things were different. But that’s not my way.