The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories

by Christopher Merkner

  Days followed the holidays, and I still had meat, wine, and hearth on my teeth. I still wore sweaters. I stroked my crimped, gnarled facial hair. The house was bloated with heat. The porch complained. Windows whined. Family came over on a Sunday night.

  My wife approached the dinner table. We were waiting to eat something. Our forks pointed to the ceiling. She announced that she would like, before any of us ate anything, our son to stick a straight edge into her chest. “Up here,” she said, pointing to her sternum. “Anywhere in this region.” A nearby child was asked for the straight edge. The child had no idea what a straight edge was. “The box cutter,” my wife clarified. The child produced the tool from a belt buckle. She handed it to my wife. “O.K.,” my wife said, “let’s do this.”

  My son rolled his eyes. He made a dramatic sigh and put his hands on the table. He took a long drink from his small cup of tea. He put this down. He scratched his hair. He rubbed his face. “You see what it’s like?” he leaned over and said to his wife. He made large eyes at her. He said to her that he knew they should not have come to this house. He said that she needed to stop making him do things with his own family. He said she should stop bullying him. He raised his finger at his wife.

  This child, we love him without condition. He has always been a guru of dramatic force. He has no time for anything. I’ve never met anyone with less time. He is always “working.” Yet we have no idea what he does for a living. When he is not “working” he is in the middle of something abstract: washing something, feeding one of their kids, unplugging something. And he is pointlessly short with us. He will not answer his phone. He will not call us. The circumstances surrounding his life when he does finally call are usually so lamentable the first thing you want to say to him is “Good-bye.”

  The table fell into din. Such is family. My wife told everyone to shut their faces. She looked at my son standing there, drawing back his tea dregs. She sighed. This was hard on her. Love takes a discernible toll.

  “Pilate,” she said. She tapped her watch. “I have pork loins searing.”

  My son pushed back from the table. “Fine,” he said. He stood. He went over and took the straight edge from his mother’s hand. She pulled up her blouse. Someone asked the children to leave. There was some disagreement on this: the children should be included; the children should not be victimized; a family with secrets is a family in hell. It went back and forth. The children wanted to know what the secret was, a fair question. They were told that their aunt, my wife, was to be stabbed in the chest by her son, their uncle. The older children were appalled, and departed; the younger children wanted answers: why would he do this sort of thing? They were told their questions were tedious and they were made to leave.

  Then our son approached and stabbed his mother below the breast. She pulled it out. “Try my stomach,” she said. He stuck it in her thigh. She winced. She took it out. “You never listen”—and she popped the cutter into our son’s ear. I handed his wife a check at the hospital, in the waiting room. It was the right thing to do. I said we were sorry. We were not. My wife fingered the bandage beneath her bra strap. Because she has listened to our son’s apologies for years and knows no other sort of apology, his wife doubted our sincerity. She drew their newborn close to her and said something simple.

  WE HAVE THEM TO RAISE US

  “This sounds very intellectual,” I said to her. “Clearly, this is a game of the mind.”

  “Yes.” She had thought about it a lot during the long days and nights of nursing, she said, and she knew she had to see these men again. She was certain. She needed to see these men again, one more time, as many as would come see her.

  I turned a page of the newspaper with tremendous care. I said, “So, this is divorce.”

  She had just slid a spoonful of cereal into her mouth. She shook her head and made a face. “This has nothing to do with that,” she said. I nodded. She chewed. I waited. “Look,” she continued, “compared to the time and energy I spent with those guys collectively, you and I just don’t have a prayer. No one would.”

  “You’re fascinating.”

  “Aging is fascinating.”

  “You just want to say ‘hello.’”

  “I imagine there’s more to it than ‘hello.’”

  “I’m sleeping in a kitchen chair a lot right now.”

  “Right?”

  I looked up from the paper. She smiled and shook her head while she crunched her cereal. Our child was sleeping in his swinging apparatus upstairs. We were not to let the child sleep in this or any other swinging apparatus, so we were pretending the child was awake.

  I went outside, turned on the spigot, and began watering a patch of yellow lawn near the front porch. Days after she’d given birth, she had mentioned a few of her former lovers by name. But I hadn’t listened. I wasn’t focused on that kind of thing. Things like that didn’t matter to me. The new baby had made me unusually thoughtless. I went to the grocery store about five times a day. When she said our son’s eyes reminded her of Benjamin, the boy tucked like a football under her arm, nursing, I was running out the door to get kefir and organic fruit. I said, “Yeah,” and I locked the door behind me.

  The lawn had dried badly. It would not take the water. It pooled as though on cement. After Benjamin, she’d mentioned a few other names too, wistful. Charles came up when it became clear we would need to buy our son a swimsuit for the baby pool—a little infant swimsuit—because Charles used to have the most interesting swimsuits. Charles she would like to see in his swimming trunks again, preferably in Cape Cod, where they had first swum together years ago, when she was nineteen and twenty. And she could also remember him in his navy T-shirt. He had incredible pectorals, Charles, but more importantly he had a way of listening to her talk for hours at a time, a way of making time seem so light and spacious you felt that you’d transcended it. That was Charles, and I’d really not listened. I went back inside.

  “I’m worried,” I said to her.

  “Me too.”

  “Your worst enemy might be doing this badly. Maybe I could do a magic show for all of you.”

  She seemed to give this a thought. She looked out the window. Our mutual appreciation of my sense of humor had really degenerated. She said, “I don’t know if you’d be here at all, would you?”

  “I don’t play the oboe,” I said.

  “I mean, it might be weird to have you two here. I’m not really sure this would be about you or him or us.”

  “Right,” I said. “I understand.”

  “Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  I did not understand. I do not understand.

  I was sleeping in the kitchen chair in those days. At night Kimberly would be up handling our screaming son five, six, ten times. I couldn’t distinguish the first handling from the last. I didn’t know dawn from dusk. I could achieve consciousness instantly, leaping to gather a cloth or a soft thing or an electronic mechanism for her, her voice summoning me from rooms of the house I felt I barely knew, and then I could fall away again in the kitchen chair, uncertain that I’d ever left it, uncertain that I’d ever given her the thing she’d needed. Sometimes she would just materialize across the table from me. I would open my eyes and she would be sitting there across from me. She liked to say, “Are you feeling sorry for yourself?”

  Kapler was another early name, Kappy. She had told me, I believe, that our son’s flesh smelled the way Kappy smelled after he’d washed himself. This Kappy apparently used to take exceptionally long baths in a large claw-foot tub made of green porcelain, and he’d had the ability to create these enormous suds of soap that went by a name she could no longer remember. To this too I said nothing, nodding, I imagine, as though she’d made a comical remark about my hair. It’s astonishing in retrospect. My wife went on to say that, like our son, this man could smell like delicious soap all day. She said she wished she could remember the name of that soap. “God,” she said, “I loved that
soap.” Then she smelled our son deeply and closed her eyes.

  Sometimes at work my colleagues drop by my office and say things like, “Can you believe Reynolds is folding?” Or they say, “Can you believe that, in like two months, we’ll be eating Turkey, Ohio, with spoons?” I always say “I know” to this sort of positing of the future, because while I cannot believe such things in the present moment, having been burned in the past by things that were not what they’d seemed, I trust that I will entirely believe them after they occur. “I know” is my way of acknowledging that I know how hard it is to believe something that seems likely to happen, but has no god-given assurance of actually happening. If one of these young tycoons had swept into my office and said, “Can you believe your wife is going to ask you to write the invitations asking her lovers to come to your house?” I would have said, “I know,” because nothing whatsoever in that period, with a new human having ruptured our lives, nothing in that period would have indicated that she might not, in fact, ask me to write these invitations.

  “It’s better if you do it,” she said. “Less awkward.”

  “You’d like me to invite your BFs to your BFP.”

  “Are you sixteen?” Then she explained that she wanted me to write the invitation from her perspective. She said she wanted me to write the invitation in such a way that it seemed to be written by her—a direct solicitation—but that if pressed she could say she didn’t have “the balls” to write it herself, that “a friend” had written it for her. This would give her the freedom of conscience that she said she needed to be able to look these men in the eye.

  “Big Fucking Party,” I said. “You’re pretty sure they’re going to jump at this.”

  “Oh,” she said, “they’ll come.”

  Where was our child during this exchange?

  I told her then that I would be really touched to have the opportunity to drum up the invites, but I mostly wondered if maybe she didn’t simply want to sleep with other men, if this weren’t all one unnecessarily elaborate ruse, if perhaps she felt she needed to go to these lengths to more gently convince me she wanted out of our marriage. I have never been good sexually, and it would not have shocked me to hear her say it. I have a prodigious sense of humor, but I am woeful in sex, I have long known, and certainly I would have been keen on the matter right at that time, right in that stretch following the birth of the child, when the thing that most defined me were the consequences of sex. For her to go to these lengths—it all seemed so unseemly, so executive and corporate. And yet I didn’t blame her. I’m not great with giving pleasure or blame to others. It’s all too direct.

  She handed me the empty electric bill envelope sleeve with a list of thirty-six names enumerated on the back—enumerated. I could not be certain if they’d been numbered in terms of chronology or importance. There were names on that list I hadn’t heard of; there were several names I knew well and was surprised to see included.

  “I thought Travis was just your brother’s friend,” I said to her.

  She gave our son her breast. “Please don’t judge me,” she said. “Most women my age have lists that could roll out the door.”

  “Thirty-six?”

  She tipped her head to her shoulder. “Don’t judge me.”

  “What do you want with Travis?”

  She blew on our son’s hair.

  “Maybe,” I said, “we should bring in my old girlfriends, really break this thing wide open.”

  She laughed. She really started laughing. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh like this since the baby was born. She had a wonderful laugh, and when she really laughed an honest and vulnerable ghost of our pasts emerged. But then the laughter angered our son, and he pulled away from her breast and wailed. That was that. My wife swore at the child and left the room with him.

  I had at that point never created an electronic invitation. I have since that time done many, many electronic invitations. I have become quite capable with that technology. I remember that in my first run, the creation of the invitation was neither difficult nor easy, neither pleasing nor horrible. I remember it was more satisfying, when it was all completed, than I’d expected. The primary image of the electronic invitation, which pleased me above all else, bore a clip-art image of businessmen and one businesswoman collaborating on a project in an office cubicle. The woman was sitting behind the computer, her hand on the mouse, with a team of suited men hunkering all around her, behind her, gazing at her work on the screen. One man had his hand on her shoulder. They were all huddled very close. Most were smiling as though a joke had just been told. One or two looked very, very serious: they were not at all amused to be working on this project: “You’re invited to come to my home to see me again—Kimberly!”

  Kimberly and I were introduced by friends at a small and overwrought party on the north side of Chicago. At that point we were in our late twenties. Like most graduates of Northwestern, we started our uninspired careers in some approximation of a low-tier business position. We were both living in gritty neighborhoods on the north side. We both thought dogs were funny. We both seemed harmless enough to one another—not particularly cool, or not cool enough to be threatening, and not painfully annoying. We were both interested in being financially solvent without being obsessed or controlling about money, and that was sexy enough to get us started. I asked her on a date to a Cubs game. I hated baseball; so did she. We laughed about it. We left after the second inning. We got tipsy at a bar. We went to her place and slept together. We dated a few more times. Families were met. I proposed. She accepted. We had lame careers in promising full swing. We bought a new condo together with towering metal cabinets in the kitchen and a ceiling as high as the building itself. We waited a few years to have a baby and said to people regularly that we were waiting to have the baby until after we’d lived, having no idea whatsoever what this meant. We traveled once out of the country, to London, and we felt that was enough travel for the rest of our lives. We made a baby. It took a lot of sex. It took a lot of UTIs. We waited and she worked with me on the sex. It happened: the baby came.

  Of course I entertained violent acts. I am only human. I am subject to human pain, and I am subject to human helpless rage in the face of human pain. I did not carry the violent acts much further than picturing myself buying a gun and carrying it home to a house full of nude men who were lounging about with long-stemmed goblets of wine in their fists. This violent moment usually culminated in me just sort of standing there in the doorway with my handgun, staring at them having sex with my wife behind flimsy sheer curtains.

  But, passivity is not about doing nothing. It has nothing to do with the absence of action. Passivity has nothing to do with allowing things to happen. It simply means you subordinate, make less prominent the agency of action. A great deal can be accomplished in passivity. Take the sudden and inexplicable presence of the e-mail addresses of all thirty-six men, for example. Who knows how these arrived in my electronic invitation? Who knows when or by what means my wife dropped these into the invitation I was to send. Suddenly, they were just there and my job was basically already done for me.

  Or, take my plans to sabotage and humiliate my wife, myself, my family, and my life, in response to my wife’s needs. I’m not sure at all how that sabotage came about, but there were the plans, unfurling.

  She had been clear about my role: I was to have no salient role. “Let’s just keep it simple.” She’d said simpler was easier. “Guys,” she said, “like simple.”

  Within two hours of my having sent the invitations, seventeen of thirty-six responses had been returned. They were interested. One of them responded with the “Hell Yee-ah!” button. The washing machine was on. Someone had poured me a glass of juice, or someone had put it in my hand. Men on the West Coast were replying to my wife’s invitation at two in the morning their time. They wrote additional notes to her like “Kick Your Ass Soon!” and “You Rocking!” and “Can’t wait babes!” Somewhere my son was screaming
at my wife. A man named Kit wrote in his message that “Strange is for people who do not know anything other than their own lives.” He too used the “Hell Yee-ah!” button.

  “I just can’t believe,” she said at some point around dawn, “how much these guys want to see me.”

  “You’re a fascinating person,” I said.

  She began exercising. She gave me the child and a bottle of formula, and said, “Go time.”

  I looked down at my son and plugged his unhappy little mouth. “Everything’s new,” I said.

  She started a video in the living room that promised to shred her. She was shredded by a militant dark-haired woman in almost no clothing for forty-five minutes. The boy fell asleep in my arms while we were watching his mother move rapidly, in harsh and hostile motions. I flinched whenever she had to thrust. The boy was rapt until he slept. The woman shredding my wife, she was just terrifying.

  Then my wife went outside and ran down the street. I quickly put the sleeping child in a stroller and tried to keep up with her, but she was running so fast and so far I couldn’t, after a while, see her in the distance. I just kept walking. After several miles, I returned the way I’d come, expecting to find her there at home, perhaps in the shower. But she wasn’t there, and she didn’t appear until she hobbled into the kitchen almost two hours later. She said, winded, “Fuck.” She had her hands on her hips. She was slick and foul. She tore her clothes off and went upstairs, where she would fall asleep on the bathroom floor, the shower running. I found her there.

  All thirty-six invitations had been Received within twenty-eight hours. No one had pushed the “So Sorry” button. One wrote to communicate that he “Can’t Say Fo Sho.” They were all very excited, very spirited, and very capable of dropping everything in their middle-aged personal and professional lives to see my wife. My wife was very flattered by it all. I discovered her in the middle of a regrettable conversation with her sister one afternoon. She said, “I doubt he remembers that.” Then she was silent as her sister spoke. Then she laughed in a way that seemed, frankly, a little hurtful.