You're Married to Her?

by Ira Wood

  About my mother’s age, she was a serious farmer and a lifelong tennis player, in her younger years a professional, with a tight muscular back that tapered in a perfect V to the faint dimples in her buttocks. Her muscles fluttered like surface water pushed by wind as I ran my fingers up her spine. I had begun the massage in the same position I worked on my wife’s back, straddling her buttocks, but arched up in a panic as I felt myself getting excited, a situation my hostess was aware of judging from her smile. End of massage.

  You’d have to be a complete idiot to alienate two more friends, no less another important literary contact, by making the same mistake, and that only in order to do something you could do more comfortably, and in total privacy, the following day at home. Moreover the guestroom seemed to have walls made of cardboard. We could hear them run water, brush their teeth, pad in their slippers across the bedroom floor above us. I reached across the old bed to caress my wife and the bedsprings squealed like an angry metallic pig.

  “You don’t really want to make love now?” she said.

  I was about to make my case when a voice, as if standing next to me said, “I think I’m going downstairs to get a glass of hot milk,” but whoever said it was not in the room.

  “Not a chance.” My wife rolled away, and I lay awake for some hours listening to the wind rush up the ancient chimney, questioning this foolish attachment of mine. Why was I counting? Why did I put my wife through this embarrassment? What was I out to prove, to myself, to all those imaginary competitors totally unaware of my delusional scorecard?

  How moronic to quantify sensuality, to measure self-worth by the numbers. Preoccupied with counting every sexual encounter, every odd place we made love and every new position, there was no room for living, for feeling, only competing. How ridiculous.

  Back in those days I couldn’t imagine being contented with a simple country life, with the satisfaction to be had from a long walk at dusk along the backshore beaches, say, or working in my garden, or serious reading, or even meditation. I’m glad to say that my preoccupation with sex is over. I’m on to more fulfilling things.

  Just in this past year I walked an average of thirty miles a week, grew eighty tomato plants with fruits as big as a pound each, read well over fifty books on my Kindle, and meditated twice a day for thirty minutes. You?

  HAMMER AND FLAY

  At one time or another all elected officials are asked how they got their start in public life. I believe I can trace my own political beginnings to the night my wife and I politely declined an invitation to have three-way sex with a hunchback.

  Giancarlo Fossi was a local legend and in our small Cape Cod town, the object of almost boundless beneficence and affection, a sought-after dinner guest and an animated raconteur brimming with stories of rooming with Brando in Provincetown, living as an ex-pat in Paris after World War Two, and working for the National Lawyers’ Guild, which was attacked during the McCarthy era as being a communist front. Years later I would learn that he was named in the Venona Papers as a Soviet spy, but at the time I simply hoped Jonny, as everyone called him, might become a friend.

  Upon giving up my apartment and my restaurant job in Boston and moving full time to the Cape, I was basically starting all over again. For all the weekends I’d been visiting Marge I’d made no friends of my own and had little context in which to meet them. With no kids in the schools; no job in the fisheries, the building trades or even a real estate office; no boat, no desire to spend my mornings in a coffee shop or my nights in a bar; an unknown writer who spent all day alone at his desk, I rarely met a guy my age we didn’t hire to repair something around the house. I didn’t surf, farm shellfish, hunt, or belong to AA. Truth is, I just didn’t seem to fit in, even on a short stint working construction. On my first day I was asked, “You catch any o’ that run o’ blues up the gut?”

  “I don’t even have a fishing rod,” I admitted. “Was it a particularly good catch?”

  “Did he say particularly?”

  At lunch I subtly moved under a shade tree. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to sit in a mound of gravel and talk about the price of sheet rock but that as soon as I opened a Tupperware container instead of a wad of tin foil, I aroused suspicion. “The fuck is that red goop?”

  “Just leftovers.”

  “Of road kill?”

  “No, no, dinner last night. When the zucchini, tomatoes, and eggplant all ripen at the same time, Marge makes ratatouille.” I had to be safe here, their wives and mothers all had gardens.

  “Rat whut?”

  There were others, to be sure, who did not fit the mold: lanky preppies slumming for a year before grad school who straddled the beams of the cathedral ceilings like circus performers; nonplussed alcoholics who could frame a wall or fall off it with equal detachment; but they had an expertise that bought them acceptance. Back then I posed a problem for men in the building trades. Everyone on the Outer Cape grew up with an understanding of homosexuality. Provincetown, like San Francisco and Greenwich Village, was a Mecca for gays. But metrosexuals, guys who liked women and Bruno Magli slip-ons, were an as yet unidentified species on construction crews. Had they asked me to write ad copy for a spec house, or to prepare a pesto bruschetta that would feed the entire crew for lunch, I would have proven my worth. But the first time they saw me try to frame a window I elicited the kind of testosterone-fueled contempt that aroused the mountain men in Deliverance to sodomy.

  Since most of my city friends had been in the anti-war movement, I figured I’d have luck finding the same on the Outer Cape, which for the better part of a century had been a magnet for lefties. They’d run the gamut of political affiliations: communists, anarchists, socialists, Trotskyites, pacifists; and all had found a haven in these remote summer colonies where everyone knew their politics but didn’t care as long as they stuck it out through the winter.

  At the time there was a large group of progressives who’d come of age during the Great Depression, raised their children in the radical enclaves of the Upper West Side and the Hudson Valley and retired out here. In the Outer Cape off-season they met in study groups to learn Yiddish and read ancient Greek. They took on the local political boss, debating him at town meeting, mocking him in letters to the editor, and eventually brought him down. I enjoyed their erudite conversation, their urbane style, and dinner parties. Two bourbons could restart a forty-year-old argument about the Spanish Civil War. I called them our friends but it never really worked. My wife got sick in the presence of heavy cigarette smoking, which they viewed as a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Asking anyone not to smoke in her presence, in our house or theirs, was as troublesome as the mention of feminism, which caused men of that generation to leap on table tops, their eyeballs rolling counter clockwise and their ears burning bright blue while steam blew out their asses.

  I was therefore surprised one Saturday morning to see Marge in front of the bank on Main Street engaged in conversation with Jonny, the unquestioned darling of that very group. With a trim gray beard, a leonine profile and imploring brown eyes, Jonny was a delicately handsome man who had been deformed by childhood polio and suffered a curvature of the spine that emerged from his back like an outcropping of granite. His legs were stick-thin and twisted, causing him to bend forward from the waist while walking, which he did with the aid of a cane. He was so short that to speak with him obliged one to hover above him to hear. Indeed he had his arm around Marge’s shoulder, pulling her closer still. Jonny had already begun to hobble off when I reached them but Marge was clearly troubled. There was a proposed change in the zoning laws, he had told her, one designed to decrease the number of new homes being built in town by increasing the size of buildable lots. As she could afford it over the years, Marge had bought a number of small lots surrounding her home. According to the proposed change in the law, those lots would become unbuildable, and therefore worth much less.

  She didn’t know any more than that, she’d find out what she could, she
told me. Jonny had invited us over for dinner that evening to talk about it.

  He lived in a modernist-style cottage provided him for life by a wealthy socialist friend in one of the most splendid locations on all of Cape Cod: the lee side of a grassy dune that reared up like a great white mountain of sand between a freshwater kettle pond and Thoreau’s Outer Beach. To get to Jonny’s you drove cautiously over a single-lane sand road with steep sides that fell off precipitously into a marsh. It was imperative as you were driving to memorize every turnout, every clearing or driveway you passed, anyplace you might back up and pull into if you came upon a vehicle traveling toward you. Local custom provided that the car nearest a turnout would yield; but you could never know if the oncoming driver knew the custom or didn’t care. It was not uncommon for one driver to feign ignorance while the other backslid off the road entirely or for two cars to face off in a bumper-to-bumper war of wills, each waiting for the other to blink.

  Jonny was reclining on a couch in front of a well-lit fireplace when we arrived. He tinkled the ice cubes in a tall glass of bourbon by way of greeting and urged Marge to fix herself a drink. Patting the cushion next to him for her to sit down, he peered at me with a mystified expression. Marge immediately resumed the morning’s conversation, having made what inquiries she was able to on a Saturday afternoon. “There’s no provision for grandfathering any of these lots,” she said. “People who own them stand to lose their investment.”

  “Peut-être.” He raised his glass in a mock toast to fortune. “C’est la tragédie de vie.” He launched into a description of a long lunch he’d had with Sophia Loren at the bar of the Crillon Hotel in Paris in the early 1950s. The apparent connection as far as I could figure out was Marge’s long dark hair, which he idly touched while discoursing on the high life he was able to live in France after the Second World War and the authors he’d hung out with. Allen Ginsberg. Gregory Corso. William Burroughs. I was especially taken with his description of the buffet menu at the hotel bar and very aware that I smelled nothing even remotely like dinner cooking.

  If Marge was flattered by Jonny’s attention, she didn’t show it, and remained focused on the problem at hand. “I think we can fight this,” she said. “We can organize.”

  Jonny chuckled at the idea and tossed it off. “Man the barricades. Take it to the selectmen.”

  But again, Marge was on point. “Not the planning board?”

  “Well, then the planning board,” he said with little interest, and toddled to the bar to fix himself another drink. Marge had suffered a lot of drunks in her time. She respected Jonny and was enjoying his stories. “Perhaps it’s time we ate,” she said in a hopeful attempt to salvage the evening.

  But Jonny preempted any notion of food with a nostalgic recollection of his favorite Parisian neighborhood, Pigalle, which even I knew was an infamous red light district, and a woman he used to know. “Marie-Lourdes. Ma fille délicieuse.” Jonny relished each syllable of her name, his eyelids fluttering, his tongue, like an adder’s, flicking the air, all the while inching closer to Marge until his head was lolling on her shoulder, his palm on her knee.

  “Look,” she said firmly. “I don’t really think this is a good idea.”

  Jonny purred, “Why ever not?”

  “Well, for one thing,” she lifted his hand from her knee. “My husband is right here.”

  Jonny sat upright, as if shaken from a dream. Yes, damn it all. There I was indeed. “You’re married to her?”

  “Bingo.” I waved from the corner.

  He peered at Marge with a wicked smile. “Perhaps he’d like to join us?”

  “Only for dinner,” she said.

  Jonny sighed, as if this was nothing new to him, and was apparently just getting down to work. “You find me hideous, don’t you?”

  “Of course not,” she said.

  “Ah, but you do.” His voice was the sympathetic vibration of a well-tuned violin. “You find me detestable, a gruesome deformed freak.”

  “Not at all,” Marge protested, edging off the couch and dropping to a knee. I thought I remembered the same dialog from Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.

  “But you do or you would stay.” He played it for all he was worth, his voice cracking, his head rolling from side to side in an anguish only deepened by Marge’s denials. I realized I was in the presence of a pro. My wife grew up on the streets of inner city Detroit and had lived in Paris, Manhattan, and San Francisco. She had turned away pimps, gropers, jocks, professors, stalkers, flashers, pompous editors, beat poets and particle physicists. But here was the king, the pasha, the irrefutable czar of sex for guilt.

  “It’s just not going to happen,” she said tenderly.

  “Because I repulse you.” He had managed to expel one enormous teardrop, the size of a soft gel capsule of vitamin e, which twinkled gold in the firelight then disappeared into his beard. “I’m an abomination.”

  “No, no at all!”

  “A feeble cripple with disgusting twisted legs.”

  “But. . . ,” Marge stroked his cheek and uttered a line I will remember until the day I die, “such a beautiful head.”

  Jonny lowered his eyelids. He basked in the warmth of the compliment, then thrust his face forward, tongue first, holding her chin in place as he probed her throat with a long wet kiss.

  I pulled Marge out the door, down the driveway, back to the car, and reversed full throttle into a mud puddle two feet deep. We took a wrong turn at the pond, came head to head with an oncoming jeep, backed over a log and lost the muffler. The exhaust roared like a chainsaw as we searched the highway for a late-night place to eat. We’d been duped, trapped, and humiliated and silently faced each other across a picnic table, eating greasy hamburgers and swatting mosquitoes with the understanding that this miserable evening was only the prelude to the next. The Selectmen met on Monday. night.

  Selectmen are members of a town council. The term originates in eighteenth-century New England, the ascetic home of Puritan repression, Cotton Mather, and the public torture of sexually active women accused of being witches. But within minutes of shyly edging my way into the back of the Board of Selectmen’s meeting, I was hooked. It had little to do with the zoning issue; that was quickly referred to the planning board (and eventually Marge did lose much of the worth of those lots). No, it was all about the stories.

  I wrote fiction all day every day, creating characters and narrative that couldn’t compare to the conflicts that raged before the Board. The most miserable misanthropic hermit in town demands a guarantee that if she collapses in her kitchen only those members of the rescue squad whose names she had scotch taped to her screen door would be granted permission to resuscitate her. There was the man indignant about his arrest for shooting his friend in the foot when the friend insisted he didn’t mind being shot and the father who ran naked from the shower to chase the neighbor’s pit bull away from his daughter. You could not make this stuff up. The restaurateur arguing that the Senior Center was stealing his business because it served coffee; the mother who refused to come down from a tree on the town green because her children were told by the police not to climb it. I became a regular.

  My presence did not go unnoticed. I was considered a fresh young face. The fact that I washed and shaved it regularly was a plus, as was the fact that nobody could actually place it. An election was approaching and in due course I was summoned to a meeting of the town’s power brokers, a dozen retired businessmen in their eighties whose politics were so wildly dissimilar that they would never have remained in the same room if they weren’t too deaf to hear what the others were saying. I wore my tweed sports coat and a bold rep tie and they eyed me like a suspiciously low-priced used car.

  “Gentlemen,” I began. “I’m flattered. But I have to admit that I have no opinions on town matters, no knowledge of town history, and no name recognition.”

  A long weighty silence ensued during which they came to a consensus. No problem! Everyone else they
asked had refused to run.

  I was one of five candidates in a race for two open seats. The serious competition consisted of a religious school teacher named Eulalia Hammer and a native born oysterman from one of the oldest families in town. My sole advantage was the fact that the town’s demographics were changing and we had one of the largest per capita populations of retirees in the country. The bulk of my supporters were new people in town, former suburbanites retired to live year round in their vacation houses and to them I represented a heartwarming reminder of home, the frizzy-haired Jewish kid who smoked pot with their daughters in the basement.

  As to the issues, I was advised to avoid them and concentrate on the one strength that differentiated me from the other candidates, an unctuous desperation to be liked. It turned out that no one actually cared about my political positions, only that I listened to theirs, a strategy antithetical to Mrs. Hammer’s, who viewed every question as a rare opportunity to converse with someone more than 10 years old and whose every answer sounded like a warning that Jesus was watching to see if you washed your hands after using the potty. The oysterman was armed with statistics about the environmental damage caused by the building of houses by all the new people in town but this only pissed off all the new people in town, while the natives’ attitude was summed up by one old man who said, “All that may be, but your great uncle knocked up my grandpa’s sister afore he ran off to World War One, so you can go to hell.”

  And so I was elected with a large plurality, followed by Mrs. Hammer, and we joined a Board that dedicated itself to reforming town government by humiliating and, when possible, firing everyone who worked for it.

  The Board was chaired by an erudite woman with soldierly bearing, Mrs. Flay, the daughter of a Canadian Air Force Major General who dressed herself in a uniform fashioned from an Orvis catalog: red wool blazer, twill slacks and riding boots. At first she seemed to me detached and coolly dispassionate, as on the night she sat at rigid attention in the presence of the totally soused owner of the pit bull. “You’re Nazis, all of you!” he railed at the Board. “Can anyone prove those bite marks are from my dog’s teeth? As soon as that little hypochondriac gets out of intensive care I demand DNA tests, do you hear me?” It had never occurred to me that Mrs. Flay might be as shit-faced as the petitioners themselves until she began to telephone me every evening at happy hour. “Oh, Ira, I do hope you have a moment.” Her overture was a breathy supplication, a hostess in a velvet caftan crossing the carpet with a tray of cocktails. Loaded myself by 5:30 in the afternoon, I welcomed these disembodied flirtations, tentative but alive with suggestion, like the accidental brush of a hand on your bottom, as we proceeded to shop the latest town gossip.