Country of a Marriage

by Anthony Giardina

  He took a paternity leave and didn’t see the woman for two weeks. Or call her. It was an act of cruelty, but he could not imagine leaving the house on such an errand. He cooked and did the chores and tended to Anna. The dogwood tree, a biennial, sent out its blooms in the backyard. He took it as a sign of encouragement. There was the occasional doubt—can this feeling possibly last?—but he brushed it aside. His parents visited. One night when they were staying over, the woman called. It was very late, and he was not sure his parents couldn’t hear from the foldout couch where they slept like a pair of old Indians, hollowed out. He resented the disturbance to his clarity of vision, himself as son, father, as blossoming tree. “I’ll call in a couple of days,” he promised, to get her off the phone.

  When he drove to her apartment, it was to tell her it must end. On the ride over, in the car, he rehearsed scenes and made big speeches. He felt his skin was covered by a protective layer made up of new fatherhood and good intentions. That morning he had watched Jacob nuzzle Anna’s breast, and consume so much milk, with such ferocity, that the baby had been literally knocked out by it. Theo had never seen anything so erotic in his life—to be knocked unconscious by a breast! The erection that grew as he recalled the moment seemed to have nothing to do with the woman he was going toward; it pointed back to the sheer, dizzying eroticism of daily life.

  At first, it seemed that things would go well. The woman was composed, even jovial, and offered him wine, which tasted warm and flat in the late spring afternoon. She had come home from work just for this. They exchanged office gossip. She was not much interested in his baby, more in what this one had said to that one in the confines of the HMO. He tried not to be offended by this, and looked out her window at the early leaves on the trees, wishing to be outside, to be walking in such a scene with Jacob. The woman kept drawing him back. After a while he understood her strategy: it was to render all the small, marvelous things that had happened to him in the past two weeks inconsequential, as they would be, after all, to anyone but himself. In desperation, he told her about Jacob suckling Anna (an indiscretion? yes, he thought so) and she raised her eyebrows, smiled in a way that seemed only half-interested, and said, “Well, that sort of thing will pass, won’t it? Soon he’ll be just another snot-nosed kid.” She sipped her wine and emitted a short giggle, as if what she’d just said had been a witticism of the highest order. The implication was that only what was here—emptiness, dull furniture—would endure. Well, perhaps she was right. For an instant, the thought had its old power over him. He tried to remember how he had felt in the hospital. Perhaps there had been one too many trips since to Bradlees—for nipple pads, for diapers—they had dulled his homely ardor, his poise. But that was small of him, and besides, who else was going to do it? She moved her thighs on the couch, to entice him. He had told his father he was going to the hardware store. “Can I come?” the old man had asked, dog-faced, hopeful. Certainly Jacob would abandon him that way one day, but why think about it now? He felt very tired, the wine working in him. At first, lying down as she instructed him, he convinced himself it was only to catch up on some of the sleep he’d been missing lately.

  The fault, he thought later, had been in coming here at all. He no longer even enjoyed her in the old hungry way, was assaulted now in the midst of the act (in the weeks that followed, as they continued) with visions of the achieved perfection of Anna. She had become saint-like to him in the process of second birth, the entirety of her given over. He closed his eyes and imagined it was she he was making love to, and this astonished him, that in the body of another woman he should be seeking his wife. But this was false, too, since the real Anna was not saint-like, retained needs and vanities, and only wore the halo when he was betraying her.

  In his favor, the visits did slacken. Once a week was all he could manage at first. Then back to two, finally three, their old number. It was summer by then, and the invitations had begun to pour in. His life became crowded, packed full. He joined a club of men who seemed finished, planed smooth, whose foreheads shone. The old Jews, losing hair, filling offices. They were a bright, positive crowd. They talked of the sports they played—tennis! basketball!—and vacations planned. Going home from these parties, you felt your car was full. A daughter and son, the vague smell of old peanut butter and dried juice. The woman beside you in sunglasses, ravishing, dark-haired, a matron. You rode the crest of the world—were expected to—while the subterranean, the dark, the perceived truths that, if followed, led inevitably to the destruction of these good lives, all this you were expected to ignore. He sensed the others, anyway, knew this, while he—a pariah, even in the midst of his great new acceptance—waited stubbornly for a kick in the head.

  III

  One night, early in August, an event occurred that changed everything.

  Theo found himself standing at a party with a handsome couple—the Diamonds—hearing all about an island in the middle of Lake Champlain, very lovely, known by only the privileged few, how the Diamonds were planning to go camping there the next week—they did this every summer—and Anna had told them she didn’t think it would be a problem at all for the Augartens to join them the following weekend.

  The idea frightened him initially. They were a big, healthy couple, these two, a pair of doctors. Liz Diamond wore round, oversized glasses and, taller than Theo—indeed, taller than most men—adopted a slouch when engaged in conversation. This gave Theo the unwelcome impression of being borne down upon. Of all the men at these parties, Bill Diamond intimidated him the most. He had an open-pored, outdoorsy quality that gave to the proposed camping trip an unwelcome air of hardiness, as though it would be full of all sorts of manly activities in which Theo would be expected to perform well. They were pressing close, though, at least Liz Diamond was, while her husband remained a step or two away.

  “Jacob’s so small now,” Theo said, and, leaning back against the porch railing, thrust his hands into his pockets.

  “Oh, Anna didn’t think that would be a problem.”

  Liz glanced past his shoulder into the woods, where Anna had gone to fetch both couples’ daughters. The Mackeys, their hosts for the evening, owned land bordering state-protected wetlands. It was an ideal arrangement, except for the mosquitoes. Theo slapped at one, and joined Liz in looking for his wife. Then Bill gathered with them at the railing, moving from his pose of nonchalance to one where he seemed to care one way or the other how things came out, and this inexplicably touched Theo, and made him think better of the proposed trip.

  He excused himself and went to find Anna. He called her name at the edge of the woods. She was not very deeply in; he found her under a sickly ash tree. Apparently Jacob, in the Snugli, had gotten scratched by a low-lying branch. She was hushing him. She had worn white. The evening air was soft and the music from the party, at this distance, low, a jazz piece full of lazy-sounding, tremulous horns. When he first caught sight of Anna, what came to him was the notion of an apology, which, since as far as she knew he had done nothing wrong, would have been entirely inappropriate. Still, it was there, hovering like the dark notes he could hear at the edge of the music.

  “What’s this about camping?” he asked. It came out sounding harsher than he’d intended.

  She looked up at him in the midst of thoughts as secret as his own. She’d brushed something away from her face, and he swore she’d been speaking aloud—he’d interrupted her—and not to Jacob, but to herself.

  Then, too, there was this: tears were running down her cheeks, and the sound that came from her, as she turned away to hide from him, was a strangulated sob.

  So Anna had a secret, too, though she afterward claimed not to. Her excuse was the conventional woman’s excuse, the onset of an uncontrollable and finally unknowable emotion that overcame her at inappropriate moments. At parties. She had not needed at that instant to go into the woods to find Leah. She said she had felt it coming, the need to cry, just as the Diamonds had begun pressing her about the camping
trip. So she had agreed, hastily, and made her escape.

  They talked about it that night in bed and he was almost satisfied by her excuses. They even made love, but he had the sense it was only because she wanted to mollify him, keep his curiosity at bay; for him, it was like making love with one eye open, suspiciously. Afterward, though, he lay beside her and did not feel the compulsion to get up, as he normally did, and go and sit in his chair.

  It went on this way for several days, with him tender and questioning and her keeping him at a distance. It was nothing, she insisted, putting him off in that old, brusque, no-nonsense way of hers. But it was no good. His attentiveness was like that of a husband whose wife is ill. He might even have taken her temperature if that weren’t ridiculously beside the point. He noted her paleness, her air of quiet. Had she somehow found out about him? No, she would have said, he was certain.

  In the meantime, they were apparently going camping. Theo’s concentration on Anna, and Anna’s on her own pain, was such that by the time the Diamonds called, there was no convenient excuse to give. They had simply forgotten to talk about it.

  When he mentioned this to the woman, she laughed out loud. “You? Camping?” It was hilarious to her. They were in bed, and naked, so his defenses were limited. She seemed to consider all such family outings objects suitable for scorn, and him within them a laughable character. What did she do with her weekends? he often asked. She’d raise her eyebrows rakishly and allude to a life she kept private.

  They left to go camping on a Friday. The weather was fine, and Jacob complied with their wishes by falling asleep as soon as they were on the highway. This was rare, so Anna took advantage of it by closing her eyes. Very soon she, too, was asleep. Theo tried to interest Leah in playing some highway game, spotting red cars and such. She had a stack of books beside her and treated them like a fat roll of Oreos, to be devoured one after another. So he was on his own. Look at these hills! he thought, unaccountably depressed by the sight. For miles, nothing changed. A while ago, Theo, spotting a bird with what seemed an unusually broad wingspan, had pointed up and turned to Leah excitedly. “Look, a hawk!” She had looked, more to appease him than out of any interest of her own. And who was to say it was a hawk, anyway? And what, to take the question as far as it could go, was a “hawk” that everyone should be so excited in sighting one?

  Just as they were beginning to close the distance to their destination, Jacob woke up and began screaming. Anna opened her eyes, but ignored the child for the remainder of the drive, didn’t even turn around until they had arrived, fifteen minutes later, at the stopping-off place. By then they were all sweat-soaked and miserable, and so barely able to appreciate the body of water, marvelously blue and sparkling, before them. The little ferry waited for them in its slip—passengers only, no cars on this island!—a small crowd already onboard. Healthy people in good, expensive sporting clothes, and the Augartens among them, feeling out of sorts, as though they didn’t belong on this boat, and how had they possibly gotten here? Their ears were still ringing from the ordeal in the car. The little ferry took off, rounded the tip of the cape, then opened onto a scene so astonishingly beautiful that Theo felt the rigors of the trip falling off him almost instantaneously. The island they were heading toward appeared smoky, ash green in the distance. “This is the forest primeval,” Theo thought to himself, and chuckled. The hills bordering the lake, quite distant now, seemed Tyrolean, fairy-tale. With the heel of his thumb, he brushed the sweat off Anna’s forehead, then kissed it. Kissed Jacob, too. What the hell, kissed all of them. He looked around the boat again, this time feeling one with the privileged others. Wasn’t this a presentiment of sorts, a reminder that whatever might be true on the little domestic front, there was always this big lush world waiting to absorb them? And why not let it?

  Theo amused himself, as they limped across the strait, by imagining the woman, his woman, onboard this boat. There was no place for her here, and that was what seemed marvelous about it. He could just see her, frail shoulders, little blond head, and skin too delicate to withstand this much exposure. She’d be sullen, critical of everything she saw, and in that way the physical world would achieve its triumph over her. Because—look!—if this—lake, mountains, air—wasn’t better than what this woman had to offer, he didn’t know what was. He was proud of his little family, whose skin could take the heat.

  The Diamonds weren’t there to meet them on the dock—they’d said they probably wouldn’t be—but the woman at the information booth gave them directions on how to get to the site. They lugged their gear and found it easily. Liz Diamond was waiting with her youngest child, a girl, nearly two. The older children were off fetching water for the night, and Bill had gone for a run.

  The first problem was to find a place for their tent. Exposed roots rose all over the place, and the widest, smoothest clearing was directly under a tree. Theo hammered in stakes, doubtful that he’d made the right choice.

  The tent was up and they were unrolling sleeping bags when Bill Diamond returned from his run.

  “Do you think that’s wise?” the Doctor asked.

  “What?”

  “Right under the tree? Suppose there’s a storm?”

  “Then we’ll stay dry.” Theo laughed, excusing his blunder. The Doctor was unamused.

  “That branch right above you looks dead.”

  Theo glanced up. Many of the branches had failed to flower, but the one poised directly over the tent looked most ominous. Would he have to pull up stakes?

  “Well, at least the forecast is good,” the Doctor said, letting him off the hook. “Care for a swim?”

  They walked down to the water’s edge. The Doctor was wearing green and black bicycling shorts, the kind that were supposed to breathe but that always looked suffocating. Also, it had to be admitted, the kind that made a virtual advertisement of the wearer’s genitals. Theo’s trunks were Hawaiian print, and loose.

  It was clear, cold water that felt invigorating and safe. You wouldn’t drown here, because there was a long shelf. As far out as they swam, and they might have swum 500 feet, he could still touch. He knew this because he kept putting his foot down, to be sure. There was no place like this. For miles, it seemed, the lake stretched out, pale and absolutely still in the late-afternoon light. Then hills rose. Where in the world were they? The Doctor stopped and treaded water. (He would have to stop thinking of the man as “the Doctor.”) Theo smiled, paddling in place. This was what was expected, he guessed, to smile and shut up. Meanwhile, the thought arose, unsolicited: teach me how to live.

  “We saw a hawk on the way here,” Theo said, as though discussion of hawks would be just the thing now.

  The Doctor—Bill—looked at him, one eye closed and—if Theo wasn’t mistaken—suspicious.

  “At least, I think it was a hawk.”

  The Doctor went under. Theo was left with what now seemed his ridiculous statement. He had never cared for hawks in his life, and to act now like an amateur Audubon was foolish. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come.

  Bill surfaced fifty feet away. A marvelous swimmer. He submerged and came up like a dolphin, wide brown shoulders glistening. He had given up on Theo as a companion—that hawk remark had really cemented things all right! He swam conspicuously past Theo and headed for shore.

  That night, they ate hamburgers cooked over the enormous fire Bill Diamond had started in seconds, using the dry wood his children, the two older ones, had gathered during the day. In the next site, a young couple Theo remembered from the ferry had set up housekeeping. They were blond and quiet and looked like they’d been together all their lives.

  After supper and the ritual tasks, they got into their sleeping bags early. Nestled in, inside the tent, Theo’s family seemed sad, as though they’d been waiting all day for an event to occur that hadn’t, finally. Perhaps he was projecting. There was no way of knowing. They were all quiet and polite around the Diamonds, like children who had no power to say what should h
appen next. Theo knew he was very far from sleep, not even tired, really, despite the day’s exertions. He reached his hand out for Anna. Was it beyond the bounds of possibility that they should make love there in the tent, with Jacob in his carriage and Leah asleep at their side? Yes, probably, but he felt the need to rub up against Anna anyway. She was already asleep, though. “What are you doing?” Leah asked, disturbed. “Nothing, go to sleep.” Against the roof of the tent he thought he could see the shape of the dead branch, swaying. “Go ahead, goddamn you, fall,” he thought. He continued holding Anna’s hand while his memory ran back over their earliest times together, and it seemed to him—the thought was very strong and appeared to have grown out of nothing—that he had never been fair to her, and always, even as a young man, a little panicked, as if he’d known what small capacity he had for love was going to be used up quickly. It had resulted in an urge, from the very beginning, to make love to her often, to distract her from seeing this weakness of his. Now it seemed that he had hardly looked at her during all those lovemakings, so frightened had he been and unsure, and when he looked at her now, at her profile in sleep, it sunk in that she was getting old, and that it was too late for something.

  When Leah fell asleep—he could tell by her breathing—he got out of the tent and was surprised to see the lantern shining in the Diamonds’ tent. He went close, but not too close, until he could just hear Bill Diamond’s voice. The children were still up; their shadows pressed against the blue fabric of the tent, while their father read to them. Bill’s voice was steady and unanimated and the scene had all the soberness of ritual. It made Theo want to go and wake his family so he could read to them. But such a scene was impossible to imagine; he would never have gotten the idea on his own. What was truer was to see them as they were, his family: three little strangers he had abandoned, and for what? The tent of the couple in the neighboring site was lit from within as well. He imagined a scene as idyllic as the Diamonds’, a whole island full of cave dwellers perfectly content to huddle together and read from sacred texts. That was sentimental, and he knew it. He went and found a place to pee.