Slut Lullabies

by Gina Frangello

  I met Van in the Critical Theory seminar that ultimately convinced me to drop out of my graduate program. Since I could no longer work, I was tinkering with pursuing a Ph.D. Van was only auditing the class. He’s a composer by aspiration, a translator by trade, and an English instructor at UIC because, despite his utter inability to make even a dent in his own musical career, he has managed with less than minimal effort to publish two novels with a cutting-edge press in a small Illinois college town he would not set foot in for the book tours. His contributions in our seminar consisted of a drawled blur of Marxist posing and a tendency to break into occasional French that only our professor, a Derridean, understood. I used to mock Van with my best grad school friend, Tina. We drew pictures of his gigantic, fleshy mouth and got the giggles. By mid-semester, Tina was sleeping with him, and I was forced to give him rides back to Wicker Park in my car. We lived only a block away from one another. Somehow I started hanging out here, at the Artful Dodger, where he tends bar. My husband, Mark, never accompanies me.

  Mark and Van have met only once—when Van went up to Mark, pulled at the back of his shirt collar, and said, “I know this shirt is from J. Crew.” The shirt was in fact from a London shop called Next, and its label indicated as much, but nothing Mark said could dissuade Van from believing Mark “owned a J. Crew card.” Needless to say, Mark, despite not being entirely sure what J. Crew was, knew he was being insulted and will no longer agree to be in Van’s presence. Thus far, however, he has said nothing to the effect that my being in Van’s presence in any way interferes with his integrity.

  I don’t like to fly. In the past four years, I have been on twenty-two airplanes, two of which have made emergency landings. I maintain three separate physicians, none of whom know about the others, to assure always having a prescription for Valium.

  Mark’s closest friend, Diego, has a pilot’s license. He owns a plane, but it resides in New Jersey, where Diego’s mother lives. Diego lives in a German town called Garching that boasts the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, in an apartment with an ornately carved metal ceiling and numerous chunks of moldy cheese on cracked plates that rest on every flat surface. The last time I was at Diego’s, while Mark chatted in passable German to Diego’s twenty-two-year-old girlfriend, I did tequila shots with Diego on the kitchen floor beside one such plate; I kept expecting a rodent to race from under the cabinets to claim the cheese. An hour later, I fell asleep with my face on the toilet, and sometime after that, I vomited calmly into one of Diego’s T-shirts, carefully refolded it, and left it at the bottom of his bed. Nobody had seen me puke, so if I’d had the presence of mind to tuck the T-shirt into my tote, I could have left without anyone being the wiser.

  As it was, I woke at 5:00 AM next to Mark in our hotel bed, head and heart pounding, staggered to the phone, and slurred an apology to a half-asleep Diego, who said only, “These things happen.” Mark later explained to him that I can’t hold my liquor because I’m on too many painkillers for my back. Diego took me aside privately and asked if he could snag a few of my painkillers, and I gave him ten—unlike Valium, there are always more where they come from.

  Mark is a little in love with Diego. Diego’s apartment is full of photos of his adventures: safaris, skydiving, waterfalls, mountains. Mark fancies himself the kind of man who would lead a similar lifestyle of moldy disarray and life-risking excitement, if he hadn’t ended up married. Diego is more handsome than Mark, despite being more than ten years his senior, but Mark is handsome enough. They are both blond and chiseled, and Mark is actually taller than Diego, although Mark is losing his hair. They both come from educated families; Mark’s parents are scientists, whereas Diego’s mother is a professional sculptor who named her towheaded infant Diego as a sign of solidarity with third world class struggles that had never touched her. My mother is a secretary, and my father was a bartender. They each dabbled in jazz, my father playing sax and my mother singing, but that ended long before I was born.

  It is probably true that without my back problems, including the expense of alternative medical treatments and my inability to hold a proper job, Mark would have his pilot’s license by now. It’s something he’s always talked about doing. But it comforts me that even if he were to climb to the Everest base camp or jump out of a plane, he’d still see the world like a scientist. He would clinically pursue activities that give human beings adrenaline rushes; he would chart them in his repertoire of experiences and, though not visually-oriented, might even hang some shots on the wall. But he would still be Mark.

  Sometimes, a man doesn’t need to shop at J. Crew—or shop at all, since the truth is that I bought Mark that shirt from Next, just as I buy all his clothes—in order to be the type of man who would shop at J. Crew. It’s not so much that Mark is bourgeois (he is, but who isn’t?) as that he lacks imagination. In the corner of his bedroom, Diego has a sculpture of a female nude, made by his mother, wearing his girlfriend’s kimono. His shower curtain consists of laminated postcards of places he’s been pinned together at the corners. When I met Mark, he had a framed Nagel hung above his bed, which was adorned with a Crate and Barrel blue bedspread so bright it made my teeth ache. There are things we tell ourselves, but the truth is, it was clear even then where he was headed.

  The accidents happened exactly six days apart. The first time, I was daydreaming behind the wheel and drove into a guard rail. The second time, I was on high alert, but in the icy conditions, a van full of out-of-town grunge musicians spun out of control and barreled into my Tercel, knocking me off the road. That was four years ago, when Mark and I had only been married two years.

  There are no visible scars. No hook, no tracheotomy, not even a demure back brace to signal my pain, which is nonstop and which, without the drugs, is blinding, ceaseless, maddening until I pace and scream and cannot sit down at all, cannot sleep. I throw things, refuse to eat, and Mark covers his ears and shouts “I can’t take this anymore!” but never leaves, so out of pity I drug and drug, until I feel very little but can keep down some food, use words smoothly, curve the corners of my lips into a smile.

  I am not a good lover anymore. The pain in my low back inflames my entire pelvic region, so sex is excruciating. Mark doesn’t like to hurt me, so he scarcely tries. At first, I gave a lot of head—we had sixty-nine down to an art. But with all the drugs, I’m so numb I can barely feel his mouth; it’s been over two years since I’ve come. Mark solves problems for a living. He can stay between my legs long enough to build a space shuttle. It’s just that I don’t give a shit anymore. His touch, tentative, carries nuances I do not welcome, and so I shrink away. “My body is not my friend,” I tell him. “I need to feel something in my mind. I need the arousal to originate in my brain.” But he just stares, uncomprehending, my juices warm on his lips. He just says, “Don’t you love me?”

  There are things we tell ourselves. That without the burden of a wife, a man would be larger than life. That a car, derailed, can change one’s ability to love. The truth is I cheated on Mark before we even married. Our happiness couldn’t hold me in place—I was proud of that, in a way. I didn’t see what it had to do with Mark. My lovers were separate from our life together. I felt no craving to confess.

  Often when I run into old college friends, they seem shocked to find me married. “You were always such a free spirit,” they exclaim. I used to be mildly amused. What sort of woman didn’t marry? All the single people I knew seemed floundering and anxious: lonely souls pitied by married friends at worst, or living some kind of self-indulgent, Peter Pan limbo of meaningless promiscuity at best. Who wanted that kind of scrutiny? Marriage was infinitely more tasteful, more discreet.

  Pain should not be discreet. But when it becomes your lover—more intimate than the husband whose body curls beside you in the bed because it, its insidiousness, intertwines with your very breath and blood—it becomes like breathing itself. You do not take vacations from it, do not lie on a beach and decompress and laugh about it like yo
u would a tyrant boss, I’m so glad to have that asshole off my back. Instead, it accompanies you: to the Max Planck Institute, to Los Alamos, on a “second honeymoon” in the Canary Islands. It becomes the only thing you can trust not to abandon you—the possessive boyfriend none of your old friends can stand and whom they use as an excuse to extricate themselves from you. You cannot hate it, exactly; it is too familiar, too loyal, too integral. When you rage against it, there is nothing to do but cut your own skin with the tiny razor pried from inside your eyeliner sharpener, nothing left to do but ingest so many pills the lines soften between friend and foe. Your husband says, “How are you feeling today?” and you say, “I feel like crap” or “Fine,” but either way your voice is not frantic anymore but always, thank God for the drugs, calm.

  I am like one of those church women with the artificial smiles. Everything I say has become a lie, because affect is more important than words, and my affect has been off since I became a Norco junkie, or maybe before that, when I was so blindsided by pain people seemed like noisy props solely intended to plague me. Mark knows I’m lying, but he has to believe me if he’s going to stay here out of anything more than pity. Being a scientist, he cannot be held by pity alone. He buries himself in his work. We exchange pleasantries. Many of his geeky colleagues maintain a similar congenial estrangement with their wives, always in separate rooms, on separate computers, keeping separate bedtimes. As long as we’re here in Chicago, far away from Diego and his safari photos and his nubile, long-legged girl sitting cross-legged on rumpled sheets scowling at us for dragging him from their bed—as long as he stays away from Van and pretends I am out with Tina, that I am just a social butterfly . . .

  We used to be so happy my jaw ached from smiling. But that never lasts, even in the absence of tragedy or error. Even the luckiest people, in time, begin to forget.

  Van says to me at the Dodger, “I’d love to hog-tie you and belt you till you lose that cool. You have a very spankable ass.”

  “You’re such a dork,” I sigh. “Hog-tie!” I start chortling; I am drinking Jameson, and my alcohol tolerance, even after years of alternating Vicodin and Norco, is still for shit. “Likening a woman to a hog—does that get you lots of action?”

  “Conrad hog-tied this woman the other night at the apartment,” Van whispers. “And then he just fucking left her there. It was trippy. I came in—I’d snorted some H after my shift—and there she was, naked on the couch. Bartók was sleeping right on the curve of her hip—she couldn’t move, so she was just lying there. I was all, Hey baby what’s goin’ on, and she was just like, I’m waiting for Conrad, do you know where he is?” Van’s nose is runny. I wonder if he’s done more H tonight.

  He grabs my arm for emphasis. “But I’d seen Conrad here! He was here getting high with the other bartenders. So I go back and find him, right, and he’s all, Man I panicked—I didn’t know what to do with her so I just came back here. It was fucked up.” He shrugs. “So I went back and fucked her and untied her and sent her home. She was really pissed.”

  I stare at him, aware that maybe I’m getting his message wrong.

  “At you?”

  “At Conrad.” He looks at me as if I’m not following the story. “At Conrad, who left her hog-tied in the apartment like an idiot? Shit, I had a hard time getting it up—I was pretty high—but the situation was so extreme, I managed.”

  “Oh.”

  His brows narrow further. “Girl, you’re not driving tonight, are you?”

  I shrug.

  “Why don’t you eat something? You don’t look so good. You wanna go for some barbecue?”

  I’m laughing again; I can’t stop.

  “You know,” he says, “I’ve been thinking. Like how much I love Bartók—like, would I love him as much if he were a fish? ’Cause, you know, you can’t touch a fish. Do you think you love things according to a scale—I don’t mean a fish scale, I mean a scale scale, like a weighing, balancing . . .”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Like, love measured on a scale of how much you can touch something? ’Cause I don’t think twice about eating a fish, but I’d never eat a cat—why is that?”

  “You can touch a cow,” I say. “You eat cows. They eat dogs in China.”

  “I dunno,” he says. “Maybe I’m wrong.”

  “Touch is a luxury,” I say. “So is love. If you were hungry enough, you’d eat Bartók.” I want to say, Or high enough, but I don’t, because it’s more petty than true, and I’m not even sure why I’d bother being petty anyway.

  “You look hungry enough to eat me,” he says, and he snickers.

  I have never slept with Van. His immature blatancy notwithstanding, I’m not sure why. Maybe because if he can barely be civil to Mark now, I’m afraid of what he’d do if I actually went to bed with him. Maybe because his affairs tend to go horribly awry in messy, embarrassing ways. He’s been stalked by two women since I’ve known him. One busted up his car.

  “Did you know that Faulkner wrote dozens of letters to this married woman he was in love with, but they never consummated their attraction?” He is pouring me another Jameson I didn’t ask for. “You wanna do H with me later? Conrad’s sticking around.”

  I have never done heroin either, although as an opiate it can’t be that different than the other opiate derivatives constantly in my system. When Van was in high school, he used to make tapes of the music he’d composed and pipe them into headphones to guide his friends through their first acid trips. Nobody ever had a bad trip under his tutelage, he swears. But I don’t know if I can do it: snort H and then kneel in front of a toilet and let him hold my hair. I don’t know if I can go home to Mark and act normal afterward, even though I want to know if some drug can numb me out enough to let me feel.

  “Conrad gives me the creeps.”

  He doesn’t say that we can blow Conrad off; he knows what I’m telling him. He has three lovers right now: a wine broker, a married forty-year-old flutist, and still Tina occasionally, though she and I haven’t spoken in over a year.

  “Call your husband and tell him to walk over here and drive your ass home,” he says. “What the hell kind of guy is he anyway, letting his wife wander around fucked up with the likes of me?”

  I want to say: a saint. What I say is, “One looking for an excuse to leave.”

  While I was in the emergency room in Windsor, Vermont, Mark showed up, though he was working a forty-five minute drive away and I had our rental car. I never did find out how he got there, only that the moment he appeared beside me, I was looking the other way and making a joke to one of the interns, and when I turned the other direction there was Mark, standing with an expression of disbelief while out of my mouth escaped the residue of a treasonous laugh. I expected him to say something like Bitch, and to stalk out of the hospital, where no doubt his ride would have left, so he’d begin the walk home in those white Nikes he’d had since college, plowing blindly—how long would it take?—through the snow.

  Instead he said, “I’m glad you’re OK.” He touched my cheek. I remembered then that the baby had not seemed real exactly to Mark—that he was no good at speculation or loving things he could not see. I wasn’t showing yet. Maybe he didn’t mind much, even. His own mother told him in high school that if abortion had been legal in 1967, she’d have had one—“nothing personal,” she’d added. She did experiments on rats. Rats were her passion. He’d never particularly wanted kids.

  Ironically, after the accident, he seemed to take for granted that we would “try again.” My pregnancy had been accidental; we’d been married for only two years. We wanted to travel. Mark was in the final year of his Ph.D. and already he’d had the chance to do research and present papers around the globe. I had not craved a baby. The accident that had totaled my car and killed my unborn child had left me with only a mild concussion and a profound case of relief.

  It occurred to me only briefly then that perhaps the accident was some kind of retribution fo
r what I’d done—that maybe I was meant to have died, too. I contemplated this the way one makes sure to worry sufficiently about a plane crash before flying, to hedge my bets, because if you worry about something, the worry carries its own negating effect.

  Six days later, I got into Accident Number Two.

  Mark is in his last year of funding at U of C. He has a NASA grant, like he did during his Ph.D. years, to do research on the earth’s magnetosphere. Specifically, he researches the impact that a spacecraft has on the magnetosphere—on the plasma waves the spacecraft generates. Mark takes the data from this disturbance and turns it into pictures that can be read at a glance. When people find out that Mark is a rocket scientist (usually this happens when they say, “Wow, you’re practically a rocket scientist,” and Mark says, “Uh, I am a rocket scientist”), the next question is usually whether he ever wanted to be an astronaut. I asked this question when we met. But the answer is no. Mark may want to jump out of the occasional plane, or fly one himself, or climb to a really high peak and look down, but he wouldn’t want to build a life around it, so to speak. He is both too low-key and too high-maintenance for that. He has, for starters, never gone more than three months without owning an excitable mutt he allows to make out with him and practically hump him even in public. He loves crème brûlée and expensive cognacs. He masturbates nearly every morning, regardless of how often he is getting laid, and cannot stand to sleep in anything more confining than white briefs. He is positively addicted to The History Channel. If he is forced to be in a crowd for more than a few hours at a stretch, he is known to have fits of spontaneous narcolepsy—I have seen him fall asleep in the middle of a rave while the cops were breaking the place up. Space life would not suit him.