by C J Hribal
I managed to put the car in park at the curb. Dorie opened her door. “You coming?”
“In a while. I just want to sit here a spell.”
“Em, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. Are you okay?”
“Well,” I managed to say, “at least now I know.”
“I feel awful, Em. I didn’t mean to make you feel devastated. I thought you knew.”
“I’ll be in in a little while,” I said.
Sometime later a police officer tapped on my window. I rolled it down. “Hey, buddy. I’ve cruised this neighborhood three times the last two hours and you’ve been here the whole time. What’s your problem?”
“My wife’s not in love with me anymore.”
“She in love with somebody else?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“She messing with somebody else?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Then what you have, my friend, is not a problem. It’s a marriage. Look, if you’re trying to kill yourself, you’re doing it wrong. You gotta be in an enclosed space for that to work.” I just looked at him. He shook his head. “I’m kidding, okay? You kill yourself and I’ll have to arrest you. And the paperwork for that is a pain in the ass.”
He gestured with his chin over the roof of our car. “That your house?”
I nodded.
“Get in it. Chances are your wife is in bed waiting for you.”
She was, but I slept in the guest room that night, and things between us have gone downhill from there.
There are many family tales I could tell, tales of wonder and woe, the everyday tragedies that made us who we are, each in his or her own life—the beaten martyr, the social worker, the bookstore owner, the Indian cook, the pissed-off cripple, the drunk accountant, the tentative human resource manager. I’ve given only a fraction of them here. And I know I have done a disservice to my siblings by not telling their stories here, or by not allowing them to tell their own stories, or at least their versions of the stories I have told. No doubt their versions would be different from mine. That is perhaps a task or an enjoyment for another time—after all, there will be funerals to attend to soon enough, and we will be gathering again, in grief rather than in celebration, and in those drunken nights of attempted reconciliation and consolation there will be time enough for those stories.
Who knows, by then we may all be married to different people. But once again I am speaking for myself.
Besides, this is our parents’ story, not ours, though no doubt the reason I’ve told it is ultimately selfish. I have tried to save my own life with the truest story I could tell, even if I had to imagine or make up most of it. So be it. There is so little we can ever know of someone else’s life. Even if they are your parents. Even if she is your wife.
For now there’s merely the collective us and the collective them, and the mystery for us is this: how did they manage for so long to remain a couple? And can Dorie and I manage it, too?
Dorie’s beautiful blond head peeks around the side window. “You want company?”
“It’s a free country.”
“Not the welcome I was expecting.”
I scoot over for her. “This is like old times,” she says, “climbing roofs, sitting on a tailgate. In high school I used to climb the water tower for rendezvous up there. Or somebody always had a van or a pickup and we’d find some deserted road. Not too hard back then.”
“That wouldn’t have been with me.”
“You never asked.”
“You wouldn’t have even if I had asked.”
She fishes a beer for herself and one for me from the cooler, which I’d brought down from the roof with me. “Coulda, shoulda, woulda, Ace. Why didn’t you ask me now?”
“I thought you were sleeping.”
“You didn’t check, though, did you? How long have you been out here?”
“Coupla hours.”
She feels my hands. “Brr, they’re like ice. See if I let you touch me with those things.”
“I’m sure you could find somebody else. If you haven’t already.”
“What is with you, Ace? Do you want to talk or just throw accusations around? Because I don’t need this.”
“You don’t seem to need much of anything.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re never around. It means that even when you are around, you’re someplace else. I don’t know about you, but when your partner’s distracted and disengaged while you’re making love to her, it sort of makes you wonder where her interest and engagement are.”
Dorie laughs. “Isn’t distracted sex better than no sex?”
“I don’t know, is it?”
Dorie sighs. “You’re right, Em. I have been focusing on other things.”
“Look,” I say. “I know all these trips and the workouts and whatnot have to do with your being happy and at home inside your body, especially after the kids, but I’m wondering if someone else isn’t being at home and happy inside your body as well.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“All I know is you’ve been putting a lot of distance between us. I just figured there was someone else. Isn’t that what it usually means—a moving away is a moving towards?”
“I was moving towards myself, Em.” Dorie inhales and sighs. “You know what your problem is, Ace? You have a hard time imagining me wanting to do things completely on my own. Okay, I got involved in myself. I’m sorry if I got distracted and overcompensated—”
“Overcompensated? Overcompensated? Oh, that’s rich. That’s lovely—”
“But that does not mean I’m screwing somebody else! What is with you?” Dorie exhales hard. “Christ, I wish I still smoked. How did we get on this subject anyway? I just came out here to make nice. Look, honey, will it make you feel any better if I tell you I’m not seeing anyone? If that’s what you’re worried about, don’t be.”
She says this so calmly, so reasonably that I want to be calm and reasonable myself. But I can’t do it. I open up my mouth to speak, and it comes pouring out of me—the rage, the fear, the jealousy, the despair. “Not seeing anyone? Not seeing anyone! You kick me in the balls, and then you think you’ll make me feel better by telling me you’re not seeing anyone?”
“When did I kick you in the balls?”
“ ‘I’m not in love with you anymore, Em. I love you, but I’m not in love with you.’ What’s that? A postcard from the house of happiness?”
“So that’s what’s making you so angry? Look, I said I was sorry I ever said that. I’m sorry I burst your bubble. If I’d known you were going to feel destroyed by that, I never would have said anything. Lots of people in marriages aren’t in love with their partners anymore. That doesn’t mean they don’t have good marriages.”
“Is that why you told me you weren’t in love with me? To demonstrate the strength of our marriage?”
“Look, Ace, do you want to call it quits? Is that what you want?”
“Not so loud. You’ll wake up our parents.”
“Like they haven’t been in conversations just like this.”
“That doesn’t mean they have to hear ours.”
“Fine. You have the keys? Put this thing in drive and let’s go.”
We do. The Nomad has a floor shift, and it’s rather delightful working a clutch again. In a few minutes we’re shooting over hills, driving out to where the land flattens by the river north of St. Genevieve’s. It’s marshy here, a mix of scrub trees and waterlogged fields. Half-mile gaps between houses—it’ll be a while before they get around to putting in subdivisions here. Finally, on a long stretch of empty road, I pull over. There’s a house tucked into a clump of woods on the other side of the river and an abandoned bridge that no longer connects this road to the access road on the other side. We haven’t said anything for a while. The sky is absolutely clear above us. I drop my hands to my lap. “What’s happening to us, Dorie? What in God’s
name is happening?”
“I don’t know, Em. Some things you can’t explain.”
She puts her hand over mine, but I don’t grasp it. “I thought we had a good marriage. I mean, if anybody had a decent marriage, it was us, right? So how could this happen?” I’m someplace between crying and laughing. “Why did you say you weren’t in love with me?”
“Because I wasn’t, Em. It comes and goes. Haven’t there been times when you weren’t in love with me?”
Like right now? I want to say, but I remember Nomi’s words: Some things are best left private. So I say instead, “But I would never say so, and you know why? Because it would hurt you. So why did you tell me? Because you wanted to be honest? Please. It’s why I keeping thinking you had an affair. I want a reason for all this unhappiness, something I can point to and go ’j’accuse!’ or however the French do their finger-pointing. But it’s more elusive than that. You probably don’t even know yourself why you said it, but you did, you can’t unsay it, and I go around with this kicked-in-the-balls feeling of incredulity: how has this happened to us?”
Dorie looks at the sky and sighs again. “Christ, you’re even more sentimental than your father.” She lifts her beer from between her legs and sips. “Okay, truth. In the past year, year and a half, I have spent time rethinking the marriage. I have thought of getting out. No doubt that was why I said what I said. I wanted to hear what it sounded like. But haven’t you noticed, Em, that lately I’ve been trying to make nice? I don’t want to call it quits. I’ve got too much invested in this marriage. Besides, you’re a nice guy and the world is full of creeps. You’re not a creep. Who else would make love to a pregnant woman when her breasts were big and sore and she felt like a balloon?”
“I don’t know if I want to be known simply as the noncreep in your life.”
“Well, there isn’t anybody else I’m auditioning for the part. C’mon.” She squeezes my hand, gets out of the Nomad. Once I’m out, too, she hugs me from behind, kisses me behind my ear. This is the closest we’ve been in years to a “moment.” “Look, Em, you’re my husband. That isn’t going to change, okay?”
“You’re still not in love with me, are you?”
She squeezes my belly, a marital Heimlich maneuver. “Give it time, Em. I’m trying. And it’s not easy. You’ve been distant, too.” Another squeeze. “You know what I think we need, Ace? Enthusiastic marriage repair.” She snuggles up to me. “It’s too bad I was pregnant with Henry when you first brought me home to tell your folks we were getting married. Remember that? We were so desperate to find a place to make out, we were like a couple of teenagers—”
“We’re not teenagers now.”
“We weren’t then, either.”
I know what she wants to do here—buy my silence with her body—but we haven’t talked out things that have gone too long not being talked about at all. She is trying, and I’m being a petulant bastard, but I can’t stop myself. The event to which she’s referring—Dorie and I parked in front of Wally Jr.’s shed, which we thought was out of the way, and we were half-naked in the backseat when he came home from working a swing shift. He wanted to put his truck away. So he slid into the front seat of our car, announced, as we were scrambling to cover ourselves, “I didn’t see nuthin’,” moved our car ten feet, parked his truck where he wanted it, and went into his house. Never said a word about it again to either of us. And we were horny enough not to let that stop us from finishing.
Dorie shakes her head. “Christ, whatever happened to Wally Jr.?” She shakes her head again. “Your family,” she says. “It’s even more fucked up than mine was.”
“That’s a definition of family, isn’t it? I mean, look at us—two brothers in AA, one who ought to be, the whole lot of us with dispositions in that direction, we’ve got four divorces among us, not including you and me if it comes to that—”
“It’s not going to come to that, Em—”
“Things break down, Dorie. They do. You don’t mean for them to, but they do. You start off in one place and you think you’re heading towards Y and you end up in X. And you have no idea how you got there, how you ended up in this other place.” I think about how Cinderella’s marriage ended, after we caught Okie cheating on her, and it was clear, too, he was beating her up. Each of us took one of her kids; Dorie and I got Okie II, her oldest. Skinny kid, haunted eyes, always crying about something. We thought we were saving him. We thought we were saving everybody. Cinderella had broken from Okie, and it was just a matter of time before her kids were returned to her. Then Okie Jr. started stealing from us, and we said, Well, he’s going through the lurchings of adolescence. He was a sensitive kid, Okie Sr. had really whaled on him, he was bound to act out. The other kids were going through their own lurchings as well. Only this permanent smirk seemed to take up residence in Okie Jr.’s mouth and nothing we said seemed to get through to him and we ended up shipping him off to Mom and Dad. And he stole from them, too, and as soon as he could leave he left and hasn’t been back. The last I heard he was in California laying carpet alongside former dot-com moguls. Supposedly he’s got a wife and two kids now himself. And our mom, the original “you will always have a home to come home to” lady, has two—two!—great-grandkids she’s never seen, never met, never held. And she isn’t likely to, because Okie Jr. is so damn much like his father it’s not funny.
I sigh, my chest filled with disappointment. “Remember what happened with Okie Jr., Dorie? And you remember what happened when Cinderella’s Amy got pregnant and wasn’t intending to marry the father? Mom said, ‘She didn’t do anything anyone else in this family didn’t do, she just got caught at it.’ ”
“And this has what to do with us, Em? What are you saying?”
I’m somewhere else now. I’m not even trying to answer her. “I mean, think about it. Our parents together fifty years, yet more than half their kids manage to marry so badly they get divorced. And you and I—after what, a decade and a half?—we’re on the outs, too—”
“You could be in if you wanted to be, Ace.”
“—Or how about this: our parents move us out of the burbs because they aren’t safe, and you and I plunk our kids down in the middle of a city, in what’s politely known as a ‘transitional’ neighborhood. You think about it, in our family we’re either reversing trends or taking them to their logical extremes.”
“Em, are you okay?”
“You know what the problem is? All those stories that try to end themselves with a wedding. They kiss, fade out, and that’s that. They want us to believe that time itself stops right then: And they lived happily ever after. As though there was nothing more to be written, as though nothing else could happen.”
“So stuff happens, Em. What’s your point?”
I want to say something to her about how people experience a marriage at different rates, and the secret is not getting caught up in any one moment and thinking that moment is the whole. How that probably explains why my first marriage didn’t last: we couldn’t imagine the unhappy times ever ending. We were twenty, twenty-two. Time spread out before us like a galaxy. Spend all of it with one person? What on earth were we thinking? And yet that’s exactly what I want to do with Dorie. I want to tell her how it’s tearing me up inside that maybe she doesn’t. That maybe she’s bored with me, tired of the whole thing, and she’s having tryouts on the road to stave off the ennui of being with me. I try telling her that, but I end up babbling, “I can’t help it. I still feel like I’m losing you.” And there it is, the nub, the very heart of it.
“Honey, you want to fool around? I’m getting leg jitters, look.” We’re sitting on the tailgate, our legs doing lazy pendulum swings. I look down and she’s right. Her legs do this sometimes, a little dance of their own, and they can’t stop. It’s like she’s had too much coffee. “The only thing that distracts me enough to get it to stop,” she says, “is good sex.”
“So what happens when you get jittery legs on your bike trips?”
“But not now,” I say, running my hands from her hips to her breasts and back again.
“No, not now. Right now it feels very, very good.” She has her eyes closed.
“This isn’t going to be a pity fuck, is it?”
“You’re going to drive me away, Ace, you really are. You know that, don’t you?”
“You wouldn’t tell me if you had fucked somebody, though, would you?”
“No, if you must know, I probably wouldn’t. But I don’t see how that matters, seeing as how I haven’t.”
“I found the diaphragm, Dorie. And the nightie you pack in your saddlebag.”
She sits back. “Christ.”
“You want to tell me again you weren’t fucking anybody?”
