Vintage Attraction

by Charles Blackstone

  She wrenched herself away and rolled onto her side. Her rigid back walled me off.

  My eyes, I realized then, were still closed.

  Her breathing evened out to an involuntary degree and the tautness in her muscles went slack. Izzy was asleep. I wriggled myself out from beneath the covers. I tiptoed down the hall and sprung Ishiguro from his gratuitous exile.

  u

  My first morning of marriage to Izzy began when Scott Lahey got on his treadmill at five thirty in the morning—on a Saturday, no less—and powerwashed our apartment with a relentless hip-hop bass line. After one particularly impolite stretch of ceiling shaking, Ishiguro stood up in bed. He stretched himself out, announcing, in his typical pug fashion, that he was ready to go outside. Even though the sun hadn’t completed its rising, I stepped into my jeans and socks, pulled a green argyle sweater over the Connells T-shirt I’d slept in, and followed Ishiguro to the door. I looked back at Izzy before we left the room. She remained in the position in which she’d slept, with a pillow covering her face, but I could tell, like the rest of us, she was now awake.

  By the time we returned, she had relocated to the couch. Though Scott’s marathon “training” run had extinguished itself after only fifteen minutes, Izzy lay with her eyes open, head propped up, legs stretched out on the couch. My old Ithaca blanket buried her form below her neck. A hand bearing a remote control extended out from underneath. The television screen hopscotched from one barely distinguishable morning news show to another. She acknowledged the pug and me with a halfhearted nod. This wasn’t like Izzy. Something beyond the unscheduled wake-up call was evidently bothering her. Did she harbor hard feelings about my missile’s failure to launch? Not screwing in the nuptial twilight, according to the tenets of the Oxygen network, was an unfathomable sin. It was a nightmare scenario, much the same as failing to distribute copies of the syllabus on the first day of class.

  “Do you want coffee?” I asked.

  “Yes, please.”

  I poured Ishiguro’s kibble and managed to pull myself from the intersection of pug and food critical seconds prior to certain collision. While the kettle heated, I sat down at the breakfast bar and logged onto Facebook. I sifted my inbox. The messages were mostly junk from groups I regretted joining. And there was one from Talia. I nearly deleted it along with the others. After reading the note, I wished I had.

  I’m coming to Chicago. Can I see you?

  I replied via text message from my cell phone: I can’t see you.

  Why not? she returned, seconds later.

  Because I got married.

  WTF when?

  Yesterday.

  Whoa.

  Talia, Talia, Talia. I’d suspected she could read my mind from the beginning. I’d never mentioned in our recent brief and forgettable exchanges about writing exercises that I was even dating someone, but she must have intuited where I was headed. Possibly she’d sensed I’d already replaced her the last night we saw each other at Marché. Izzy or no, Talia was completely wrong for me. She was too young, she thought she was smarter, she was crazy. She had no idea of what she wanted. All of that had been true long before I had a wife who was the complete opposite. Izzy was someone successful, someone stable, wine’s glinting, award-winning TV face. She was a deeded co-owner of property, an adult. As far as I could tell then, she’d remain so forever. Why did Talia even want to see me now? If a nostalgia-fueled tryst with an old flicker was what she sought, she was too late. With the vows I took yesterday, there wasn’t to be any future of even a second’s duration for Talia and me.

  At least that was what I’d spend the next weeks of my life trying to convince myself.

  I went back into the kitchen. The dog’s bowl was empty, cleaned with scientific precision, as though it had never once contained anything. I French pressed coffee, and brought a mug, doctored with a Splenda and splash of nonfat milk, to the living room. Izzy accepted the coffee appreciatively, bent her knees, and withdrew her legs a measure in order that I could sit down at the end of the sofa.

  “Sorry about last night,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” she said. She blew on her coffee.

  “We said we weren’t going to make a big deal about eloping.”

  “It’s not that. It’s not you. I was just kind of preoccupied yesterday.”

  “Why?”

  She sighed an inordinately lugubrious sigh. “Chef Dominique wants to go to Carbondale to shoot a segment.”

  I couldn’t decide if I should feel perturbed she’d kept something important from me. The reappearance of Carbondale in her dialogue was also unsettling. She hadn’t referenced it in months. I asked, “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I was getting married.”

  I flashed back to all the smiling. How delighted it made me to see her so unencumbered, so unguarded. The feeling of triumph that the future I’d offhandedly imagined for the two of us following our first date had actually, by virtue of who knew what, come true.

  “Of all the places, why Carbondale? What enologically news-breaking topic could he possibly want to cover in Southern Illinois? A White Zinfandel revival?”

  She muted the television and dropped the remote control onto her blanketed lap. “There are actually close to five hundred boutique wineries in the state,” she said. “Next week is Frontenac Festival and—why do I have to explain this to you?”

  I rubbed my eyes and tried to bring my campus schedule to mind. It followed no pattern I could commit to memory. It was a haphazard, illogical arrangement that one could safely assume had been generated either by a slot machine or by an incompetent adjunct coordinator. “I think . . . I can get someone to cover class for me, but that—”

  “With the camera guy and the equipment and everything, there’s not going to be enough room in the Range Rover for another person.”

  “I could drive you separately.”

  “In the ’Stang? We’d be lucky to make it to I-57.”

  “I have it on good authority that there are cars manufactured postbellum to be rented.”

  “Just stop it, okay? We don’t have to go everywhere together.”

  “We used to go to festivals together.”

  “Well, we’re married now.”

  “I’ll drive up by myself, after I’m done teaching.”

  “I don’t want you to.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because I started out there alone,” she said, “and I want to finish there alone.” She switched the television back on. “Did I ever tell you about Ernie?” she asked. “My stepfather?”

  “Foster father.”

  She threw the remote in my direction. I ducked, instinctively. It landed on the floor before it had a chance to reach my head. “Foster father, stepfather, you know what I mean.” She stared down at her hands, as though a FedEx delivery of new information had arrived at her brain, priority, guaranteed before ten thirty, and she’d excused herself to sign for it. Her hands fell to her sides. “He ran a liquor store. I used to work there, on weekends, in high school. You know, I never really thought about it before, but that was kind of my first job in the wine business.”

  “Are you sure this is a good idea? You haven’t been back to Carbondale since you moved away.”

  “At least it’s quiet there.”

  “We have the rest of the weekend together, though, right? When are you leaving? Monday?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Great,” I mumbled.

  This honeymoon was getting better and better. I felt like I should fight her decision, make her see why I, her new husband, should come. Clearly, the prospect of returning to the site of her impoverished youth was harrowing Izzy—all the more reason to have her so-called stalwart accompany her. She was supposed to now be able to lean closer to me, and not have to turn deeper into herself. At the same time, I
really didn’t want to go to Carbondale, especially not for a celebration of a hybrid grape variety of which I’d never heard, alongside a film-school crew and a chef masquerading as the director. Letting a childish emotional whim like that govern me, I realized, was not the sort of thing to which I, an adult, a man, was supposed to succumb, but what else was there for me to do? All of this hurt.

  I finished my now-cold coffee and returned to the kitchen for a refill. I purposely avoided asking Izzy if she wanted more. I poured the last of the lukewarm, glazed-over contents of the French press into my sooty mug. After a few tortured swigs, I sat down at the breakfast bar and pulled over the MacBook so I could load up Facebook. From the message queue, Talia’s profile picture thumbnail stared at me. Irony would have had no choice but to return her to me now. Was the look in her eyes, frozen in microscopic digital still frame, one offering compassionate salvation or one betraying supercilious mockery?

  “Do you want to go have brunch or something?” Izzy asked. “We can go to Milk & Honey. Get those peanut butter and banana pancakes you like. It is our honeymoon, after all.”

  I nodded. “Those pancakes you like. And I can bring you coffee with five different creamer options, just like when I didn’t know any better. Whole, nonfat, vanilla soy . . . Lactaid.”

  “Now you know what I like. And that’s only four options.”

  I shot an index finger over my head. In Chef Dominique’s inarticulate put-on Franco-Prussian accent, I exclaimed, “Get me half-and-half!”

  It was the first time I’d heard her laugh, really laugh, in a while.

  Rustling summoned me from repose. It was five in the morning. I assessed my surroundings and found that there was only a narrow portion of the huge queen-size bed available for me. Izzy was positioned in the center. Unconsciously, she’d put her hands behind her head, as though she dreamt of lying alone in a hammock. Her arms and forearms formed forty-five-degree akimbo angles. The near elbow pointed, hovering, at my cheek. Between us lay an unraveled Ishiguro. He traced the contour of Izzy’s side with his rangy body. His even, innocuous snoring resembled a toy machine gun’s emptying of its magazine of plastic bullets back into itself.

  Driven by what had to be an intuitive canine sense of solidarity, Ishiguro soon was awake, too. He arched his back to stretch it out, just as Talia’s cat Mildred did after a lengthy spell of repose, and then vaulted over Izzy. She remained asleep, or feigning so. Ishiguro leapt out of bed. At the closed bedroom door, the pug issued a plaintive whimper.

  “Izzy,” I whispered. I nudged her gently in the side. “Izzy.”

  “Wha?” she half-spoke.

  “I think Ishiguro needs to go out.”

  Silence.

  I followed the pug along a rectangular route of the north and south sides of the block. He analyzed and catalogued a number of frozen organic and inorganic objects that littered the sidewalk in myriad textures and colors and states of decomposition. Before each item he poked and sniffed, he was immobile. I tugged on the lead, asked him politely to come so we could go home, but he refused to move forward until he’d completed the inspection. His fixity seemed a pretty clear message: every smashed plastic lighter and sodden Chase ATM receipt and greasy, stomped take-away food tin was a matter deserving of his—and my—full consideration. It made me wonder if the dog was also trying to tell me something else. Perhaps I’d been moving through this new life of mine with Izzy a little too easily, too casually, too much like a blithe-breed canine or like one of my incurious undergraduates. Maybe I needed to start sniffing more than just the wines to which my sommelier continued to introduce me. The time had come for me to stop taking the things that presented themselves along the ways of our relationship for granted. I was fucking married. I owned half a condo. I was thirty-seven years old and needed to learn how to be skeptical again and scrutinize life just as I had when I was an idealistic MFA student and still believed someday I’d end up a writer.

  When we returned to the apartment, the sun was coming up. The light flooded in through the windows here so strongly, much more so than it had ever entered my old sublet, with the necessarily inadequate vantages of the bachelor pad it was. Even in the city, where illumination, in one highway billboard form or office building or twenty-four-hour diner other, never ceased, the return to day from impenetrable night was provocative. The pug, too, appeared dazzled by it. Standing there, it was as though we were being embraced by a lion’s room-sized golden arm. I divested Ishiguro of his harness and we made our way back to the bedroom. Izzy was still fast asleep, but had narrowed herself. The pug and I resumed our poses of repose without a sound.

  7

  Ishiguro and I got up several hours later alone. Izzy was already in the living room, primed to leave. Her suitcase and messenger bag were packed. She’d put on her stage makeup and blown out her hair. A new Burberry trench cinched her waist.

  “Not even a good-bye?”

  “Hapworth, you were sleeping.”

  “So?”

  “Let’s just . . .” She looked at her baggage. “I just want to get to the part when this trip is over and I can come back. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said quietly. I thought about asking if she’d at least call me when she got to Carbondale, but I didn’t know if I wanted to hear her answer.

  With Izzy at the Frontenac Festival, the Biscuit Factory was somehow even more untenable. This was due, in part, to a series of absurd incidents. First, Amanda, from the garden apartment, distributed “warning” memos under each of our doors. She cautioned the residents against “suspicious activity”—enterprising kids selling ice creams and tamales from their grandparents’ ramshackle carts. According to her handwritten and Xeroxed screed, this sort of unlicensed vending could only contribute to the overall decline of public health. She entreated us to abstain from patronizing. The illiterate propaganda’s philosophical underpinnings thoroughly disgusted me. We lived in Pilsen. Xenophobia wasn’t supposed to be an urban pioneer trait. Amanda’s note also offended me grammatically. The resident comp teacher “anonymously” corrected and graded his copy. I returned it to her doorstep wadded into a ball. Yet most disconcerting was how insensible she was of the dangers on the very premises. Amanda had suggested we call the non-emergency 3-1-1 police line whenever children were being “obstinate” and couldn’t be “shooed away.” Could I call 3-1-1 on Casshole? He’d taken up driving a foot-powered red and yellow plastic toy car inside the loft. The Laheys had recently bought the Little Tykes Cozy Coupe for him. Even though he’d abandoned hammering, for those beneath the highway, it was to be death by a thousand excruciating tiny stomps. Again and again, I planned to put Ishiguro in his crate and go to Mamacita’s for the evening. There I could drown my grievances in a few hours’ worth of tequila. By the time I’d return, Casshole’s gas tank would have been empty. But I didn’t leave the loft. Running, the Laheys were ever reminding us, only worsened matters. Plus I had no interest in going out without Izzy. I missed her. Her abrupt and bewildering departure left me listless. Were my wife and I unraveling already? How could a marriage begin and end so quickly? To compound my unhappiness and confusion, I’d let myself fall into a messages-long Facebook conversation with Talia. At the end of it, we’d agreed to have a drink one afternoon.

  We met at Third Coast, a wine bar on the Near North Side. I’d gone there a lot after I moved back to the city in the mid-nineties. We sat at a table in the back where she could smoke. I inquired about Mildred, the calico cat she promised to leave in my care before she went to grad school. I asked after the stack of my beloved cellophane-wrapped Modern Library editions she’d absconded with to Iowa City. That was pretty much all I had left to say. So I let her talk, while I stared at her. She’d lost a considerable amount of weight, and, as a result, had gotten older. Her face was more angular than I’d remembered. Her baby-fat cheeks had pulled taut. I concentrated on her pale eyes, more gray here than they were blue. I
could tell she hadn’t washed her hair, now dyed blonde throughout, since she’d been back from Iowa, but I wanted to reach up and inhale it nevertheless. Under an unbuttoned man’s flannel, she wore a tight wife-beater, which revealed a suitably provocative amount of cleavage. I wondered if Talia approved of the Prada shirt, two-hundred-dollar Diesel jeans, and black blazer from H&M I had on.

  As we drank our glasses of Malbec, I imagined that afternoon last year, when we first succumbed to each other. There was snow on the ground, just like now, and raw coldness in the air. I’d never be able to get that ride in her red Jetta with out-of-state plates out of my head. In my brain’s nose was the scent of waxy, paper-covered crayons the upholstery exuded and the Exclamation perfume on her skin (I knew what kind it was from her earlier fiction’s foreshadowing). I watched us hurry into the bagel place in a strip mall near campus. We got coffee and she gave me the story. She claimed to have spent hours on it. Discussing the two double-spaced pages of disjointed exposition was our purported purpose for meeting. We only got through a sentence before the context took an unrecoverable turn for the ill-considered. I was beyond the teacherly point of caring. I just wanted to fuck her.

  “How are things with Izzy?” she asked now. She’d been going on about Iowa and her workshops and her untalented undergrads while I reminisced, and seemed content with my participating in no more significant way than nodding. This question brought me back to the conversation. “You were kind of weird on the phone.”

  “I’m fine. Things are fine,” I said.

  “You don’t sound too convinced.”

  I sighed. “We’re going through something right now. Domestic disturbances.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Our neighbors are terrible. Upstairs, downstairs. We’re sandwiched between two slices of hell.” She looked at me like I was being ridiculous. “It’s a strain on things.”

  “A strain on you?”