Don't Make Me Stop Now

by Michael Parker

  We need them hugely. This is what I tell myself when I wonder, as I occasionally (if guiltily) do, how I managed to end up with Jess. The twelve-steppers are entirely right to suggest that we take one day at a time. Love, too, seems to survive best if parceled out in manageable increments. Of course it is not advisable to say to Jess, Baby I love you right now, in the car on the way to the grocery store, but as for what happens when we arrive at Safeway, well, we’re better off not speculating. Though I confess if Jess said to me, David, I love you today, but tomorrow isn’t here yet, I would fully understand. I am trying to talk now about the nature of love. Most men just accept its mysteries in the way that they accept without question the mystical properties of religion, jazz, baseball. But I am trying to talk honestly about it. It is enough for Jess to love me in the baking goods and school supplies aisle. It would, I’m sure, be a comfort to know that you had enough love to say, retire on, like money salted away in the bank. But circumstances crop up to drain away your savings. Same, I suppose, with love. You may have deep pockets, love left over and lying idly around, and then something happens to siphon it off.

  What happened: We were in the Safeway, in the baking goods and school supplies aisle, when someone — a woman — said Jess’s name. She was tall and striking and vaguely familiar. I assumed she was someone Jess knew from school. It was early April, finally warm out, and she wore linen pants in the manner of elegant but slightly down-to-earth middle-aged women and a blue tank top. I moved a little farther down the aisle, pretended to search for something as Jess often gets into interminable chin-wags in public, and though I routinely accompany her when she shops (she claims to hate to do it alone and it seems the least I can do), I don’t relish spending hours socializing in stores or parking lots. I was far enough away to comfortably sneak looks at this woman and not have my vision of her bare shoulders — toned and improbably tanned — ruined by the things that might have come out of her mouth. (Mundane conversation is such a turnoff. I can be attracted to a woman in passing for her physique alone, but a connection requires above-the-neck skills.) She was facing me and was a good four inches taller than my wife, and at one point she looked my way and caught me staring at her, and the way she looked at me without smiling, half appraisal and half dismissal, and the way her eyes shifted back to Jess and her face lit up at something Jess was telling her, took me back twenty-eight years to that hotel lounge. I was swamped by a wave equal parts lust and anger, a kind of combination I had not felt in years, the sort of emotion I did not want to think about my boys entertaining as they made their forays into the skirmish between the sexes. Still, I felt it in the Safeway. I was fifty-three years old, gray-templed and twenty pounds heavier than when I’d seen her last. My chest felt tight, my stomach roiled, my forehead grew hot. I allowed myself to acknowledge what I had so long denied: Annie and I were meant to be.

  I grabbed a bag of flour and studied its ingredients when Jess brought Annie over.

  “Guess who this is, David.”

  I held the box against my chest and gave Annie what I’m sure was a forced grin. The more you try to appear casual, the stiffer you become. See any posed photo for proof. Yet I needed to transmit to her the extent of my suppressed but still-vibrant desire.

  I said, playing dumb, “Hi, I’m David.”

  She said hi, then added, “Ann.”

  Jess said, “Don’t you remember Annie? She was with me the night we met.”

  “Oh,” I said, and I tried, as I’m wont to do when nervous, to make a joke. “You mean in that sleazy meat market?”

  Jess laughed her short, harsh, that’s-not-funny-David laugh. I recognized it the way you hear a car alarm bleating in a blocks-away parking lot and know it’s yours.

  “Not too sleazy for me, of course,” I said, trying to regain my footing.

  “Too sleazy for us, obviously,” said Jess. Annie smiled at this, and I remembered the way, that night, Annie and Jess had shared these conspiratorial smiles, and I realized that my life was a sham, that I had only taken Jess home to make Annie jealous, that Annie really wanted me that night, and her aloofness was proof that she wanted me still.

  “Have you been living here the whole time?” I asked Annie. Jess had lost touch with her during that first year we dated. I’d pushed her to stay in touch, but she gave up almost all her old friends when she met me. She did end up inviting Annie to the wedding, and Annie RSVPed that she’d love to come, but now her no-show made perfect sense.

  “I just moved back here to take care of my mom.”

  “She’s been in New York all this time,” said Jess.

  She wasn’t wearing a ring. Jess would know her story. I wouldn’t even have to ask; she’d spill it as soon as we said good-bye.

  Which she did, after getting Annie’s number, promising to have her over for dinner. She told me that Annie was divorced, had no children, had worked for many years as the office manager of an antiques broker, was widely traveled, had moved back to the area to take care of her ailing mother, was living in a town house down in Silver Spring.

  “You found all that out while we were standing there?”

  “I’m very efficient.”

  “So how many times has she been divorced?”

  “She just said she was divorced. So once, I guess.”

  “She could have been divorced more than once, though.”

  “You never liked her, did you?”

  It sometimes seems that life — or all our human interrelationships — can boil down to single questions, which the careless answer recklessly. I was driving, and I stalled as long as I could by studying the rear and side view mirrors as if our safety were suddenly imperiled. It was, of course, but not by anything outside of Jess’s minivan.

  I twisted around to check behind me before changing lanes.

  “You know your car has a whopping blind spot,” I said.

  “You just never drive it.”

  “It’s there whether I’m driving it or not.”

  “But I’m used to it. I know to look.”

  “I’m just looking out for your safety, baby.”

  “You didn’t, did you?”

  “Do what?”

  “Annie. You never liked her.”

  I turned off the parkway into the neighborhood. If I said no, I never really liked her, chances were that Jess would arrange to see her away from the house. I’d see her only rarely if ever, not because Jess wants to spare me from those friends of hers with whom I have some problem but because she doesn’t have to listen to me complain. She knows it’s not worth it. She knows I can maybe keep my mouth shut, but keeping my mouth shut doesn’t mean I rise above it. When I’m around someone I have problems with, my frustrations come out in gestures and expression and posture and even gait: Jess claims I walk differently.

  If, on the other hand, I said I liked her, Jess might see fit to bring her over to the house a lot, which would suit me fine except the more Annie was exposed to the both of us, as a couple (insofar as we behave like a couple, however couples behave), the less likely she’d be inclined to act on her long-smoldering desire.

  “I don’t really know the woman,” I said. “It’s been over twenty-five years since I’ve even laid eyes on her. I was only around her a half-dozen times. Seems to me you guys drifted apart right after we started dating.”

  “Mostly what Annie and I did together was go out,” said Jess.

  “To sleazy bars?” I said. We were in the driveway, unloading groceries.

  “That wasn’t funny, by the way.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be funny. It was true. That bar was sleazy.”

  “Of course it was meant to be funny. When you don’t know what to say to people you try to make jokes.”

  “It’s called breaking the ice.”

  “Okay,” said Jess. I started to unload the bags, but she sent me out to fetch the rest. “We’ll finish this conversation later,” she said.

  Of course, we didn’t literally finis
h the conversation, though our marriage is characterized by conversations truncated and carried on wordlessly. Perhaps every marriage is this way: You have a disagreement, one party clams up for the sake of peace, but the argument looms in corners and edges. Layers of unfinished business pile up so that everything — a dresser drawer left open, the click of a television remote — seems an embodiment of the impossible task of squaring two fiercely separate realities. I don’t buy the notion of marriage — or any sort of love — as the merging of souls. I merge into traffic on the interstate, but I don’t become one with the tractor trailer belching black gas behind me. Sure, I can get outside myself long enough to put my needs on hold, but I can’t check out of my own skin to inhabit Jess’s or anyone else’s, for that matter. Man might not be an island, as the poet claimed, but we all receive, at birth, our very own zip code. The beauty of this life: we all get to govern our very own municipality.

  Jess met Annie—or Ann, as she seemed to want to be called—for lunch a couple of times during the next three months. I pumped Jess for as much information as I could, but Jess wasn’t very forthcoming about these lunches and it wasn’t like I could come right out and ask the things I wanted to know. It moved glacially, but I couldn’t very well ask Jess to invite Annie over to the house without arousing suspicion. Besides, I had grown used to the slow burn of my life. It took years for any significant change to take place. There were things I wanted to change, but my ambition was suppressed by the dreary catalog of daily things that could, if not distract, occupy me, and I would look up and another year had passed, and I would accept the pace of my life, however dilatory, as my own.

  Five months after we ran into her at the grocery store, Annie showed up at the house for drinks. When Jess told me that morning she was coming, I said, “Why’d you invite her over for drinks? Drinks is something you usually reserve for people you aren’t sure about. Like neighbors or coworkers you don’t want to spend a whole evening with.”

  Jess was just back from the Y, dressed in spandex from some sort of class, aerobics, Pilates, I could not keep them straight. To be frank, she’d been working out three or four times a week for the past ten years and I could not see much of a difference to look at her. Middle age had settled weight around her hips, which was hard to hide. I’m heavier myself, and don’t get nearly the exercise I need, but what woman expects a middle-aged man to have a flat stomach?

  “Honestly? There’s something sort of cold about Annie. It’s like she’s not quite there. Maybe it’s just that we haven’t seen each other in forever and we’re different people now. At least I hope I’m a different person now than that night when I met you. Anyway, I just can’t seem to be able to connect with her the way I used to.”

  I made a noise—“huh” — which of course she translated into a paragraph or two.

  “What? You think I never should have started up with her again in the first place? That was then, this is now? Or, I forgot, you never liked her, did you.”

  “All I said was huh, Jess.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning what time is she coming?”

  We had drinks on the deck. Our neighborhood is old for Gaithersburg, so much of which exploded into repetitive cul-de-sac suburbia in the seventies, but that evening, looking across the neighbor’s lawns at their ugly metal storage sheds, their concrete birdbaths and aboveground pools, I saw our place through the eyes of someone who had lived for years in Manhattan. What losers we must be to her, having stayed here in the place where we met. Everything in our lives seemed shabby or fourth rate. The clothes we wore. The cheap plastic stackable lawn chairs I’d bought from Home Depot. The wine we drank.

  I don’t know what Annie and Jess were talking about because I wasn’t listening. I was watching Annie talk, studying her eyes, her arms, her long lovely legs. Her coldness, her distant attitude toward Jess, had been all the proof I needed. It was obvious on the deck how she was physically present but emotionally elsewhere. Clipped would be the word to describe her conversation. We talked about Gaithersburg, for God’s sake. People she and Jess used to know. I mostly sat there sipping bad wine and every once in a while tossing in an ironic comment.

  She left after two glasses of plonk.

  “See what I mean?” said Jess.

  “Well, okay, she’s kind of hard to talk to. But I think it’s important to hold on to friends from ages ago. I mean, I wish I’d done that. I just burned through people. I don’t keep in touch with anyone from high school or college or my old single hound-dog days.”

  “So why should I?”

  “Because you have the opportunity. I haven’t run into anyone in the grocery store that I used to be best friends with.”

  “They have telephones, I’m sure.”

  “Not the same at all. It’s awkward, calling someone up after twenty years. Much better to run into them on the street.”

  “She exhausts me. Also, I think she’s a snob.”

  “Why? Because she lived in New York for so long? There are lots of unsophisticated idiots in New York, you know.”

  “She’s neither unsophisticated nor an idiot. She’s just like up above everything.”

  “She’ll come down to earth once she gets comfortable again. It must be hard for her, coming back here to take care of her mother after all those years away. Is she seeing anyone?”

  “How should I know? We talk but we don’t really talk. She’s never really ventured anything about her private life, and I certainly got the feeling that it was not something I ought to ask about.”

  This bit of information warmed my belly like a shot of whisky, radiating its heat outward through my veins until it reached my heart. Everything fit. All I had to do was figure out how to get her alone.

  I should say here that I had never, in the twenty-eight years we’d been together, strayed from Jess. Despite my early barhopping, hoping-to-get-lucky days, I need to connect deeply with a woman, intellectually as well as physically, before I can truly engage. I’ve not felt that with anyone besides Jess. I don’t think I ever considered that I’d fallen out of love with Jess when Annie came back into my life. It’s just that Annie touched parts of me I had not felt in so many years, and I figured she was put there to bring those long-dormant parts of me back into play. I even considered the notion that it would be good for my marriage to have some passion reintroduced into my life.

  Annie’s number was in the Rolodex, so a couple weeks after she came over for drinks I made my move. I told Jess I had business in the city after work, and I called Annie from my office around five thirty. She didn’t seem surprised to hear from me—her voice was as arid and distant as always. I’d rehearsed a half-dozen dialogues, most of which involved Jess wanting me to drop something off—which I was counting on Annie recognizing right off as a ruse—but what if I was misreading the signals? What if she hung up the phone and called Jess immediately to thank her? Every reason I could come up with, every excuse, seemed shot all to hell with holes. In the end I decided to have a little faith. I called her up and told her I was in town late and would she like to meet me for a drink.

  “Okay,” she said. “Where?”

  I named a bar I knew in Bethesda.

  “When?”

  It seemed she’d been waiting for my call.

  A half hour later we sat in a dark corner of an Irish pub, drinking Pinot Grigio. I confess the conversation was halted and awkward for the first five minutes at least.

  “I wanted to see you alone,” I said after a torturous silence.

  Her iciness had not melted, but she smirked a little at this, which I took as a good sign.

  “I wonder why,” she said.

  “You know why.”

  “Tell me why, David.”

  “I’ve always wanted you. Since that night.”

  “Well, I can see why.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Married to her.”

  “Jess is her name.”

  “Right. I kne
w her before you did, remember. She’s just as annoying now as she was back when we used to hang out together.”

  “So why did you hang out with her, then?”

  Annie shrugged. “Seemed like the right idea at the time. Plus she always drove. And when I was too broke to go out, which was often, she always offered to pay. She had the means. But of course you know that.”

  It was true. Jess’s father’s family owned much of what became the commercial strip of Gaithersburg. They’d been hand-to-mouth farmers only a generation before, and then the exurbs spread north from the city and the cornfields formerly farmed by Jess’s forebears became strip malls with names like Oakfield Crossing and the Shoppes at Cornwallis Creek. We would never really have to worry about money, though this is not at all why I married my wife. I said as much to Annie.

  “Why did you marry her, then?”

  I twirled the stem of my wineglass around on the napkin. It seemed that sleeping with Annie would be far less of a betrayal than the next words out of my mouth.

  “Why are you here?” I said.

  “Because you asked me to come, silly.” She’d warmed up a bit, seemed almost flirtatious, but I didn’t like the way she looked at me. “Anyway, I asked you a question first.”

  “Why did I marry her?”

  “That’s the question.”

  “Can we go back to your place?”

  “If we’re going anywhere, we’re going to get a hotel room. But first I want you to answer my question.”

  “Why do you care? It would seem to me that the last thing you’d be interested in talking about would be Jess.”

  “Well, you’re wrong. What I’m interested in is how you could fall for someone so boring. Not to mention stay with her for, how long has it been?”