The Marriage Pact

by Michelle Richmond

  “Ugh, that sounds sadistic!”

  “But on the other hand, he did agree to come, right? They didn’t drag him out of the house or anything. I watched him walk to the car.”

  Another recording warns that we have only one more minute.

  “When can you leave?” I ask desperately.

  “Hopefully soon. I have a meeting with my attorney in an hour. They assign everyone a public defender. It’s crazy. I’m telling you, if you set aside the great food and the lack of people, this feels like a real prison. I’m even wearing prison garb. All red, with the word prisoner in big letters on the front and back. Nice material, though, really soft.”

  I try to picture Alice in prison gear. The image won’t gel.

  “Jake—can you do me a favor?”

  “Anything.” I want this call to last forever. I want to hold her in my arms again.

  “Can you email Eric at work? I forgot I told him I’d stay late tomorrow night to take care of some paperwork. Just make something up. His email address is on my iPad.”

  “Done. Can you call me later?”

  “I’ll try.”

  Another beep.

  “I love you.”

  “I—” Alice begins, but the line goes dead.

  39

  I can’t push away the image of Alice, sitting there in her tiny cell, wearing her comfortable red prison jumpsuit. I’m freaked out, of course. And scared. What’s happening to her, and when will she be home? Is she really okay? But I’ll admit, there’s also this: Deep down, in some small corner of my psyche, I feel a spark of happiness. Complicated. Is it wrong that it pleases me to witness this incredible sacrifice she is making for me, for our marriage?

  I plug the phone into the charger and search the house for her iPad. I can’t find it anywhere. I search every room, her bags, her dresser drawers. Then I head down to the garage. Her car is an old blue Jaguar X-Type. She bought it with the advance she received from a record company for her first and only widely released record. Aside from her music equipment and some clothes crammed into the back of our bedroom closet, it’s the only thing left from her old life. She once told me, only half-joking, that if I didn’t behave myself, she would drive the Jaguar straight back to her old life.

  The car is a mess of papers, files, and shoes, although I know that Alice considers it perfectly organized. She swears she has a system, that she can always find what she’s looking for. She keeps an extra pair of sneakers in the backseat in case she wants to stop for a walk on the beach or in Golden Gate Park on her way home from work, but she also keeps a pair of black boots—because she wouldn’t be caught dead walking the city streets in Nikes. In addition to those, she keeps a pair of black ballet flats, in case her feet have had it at work and she needs to change out of her heels into something less painful. There’s also a shopping bag containing a pair of designer jeans, a black cashmere sweater, a white T-shirt, and an extra bra and underwear, “in case.” And a ski vest, for the beach, plus a trench coat, for the city. On some level, of course, it makes sense to be prepared when you live in San Francisco; you can leave the house in short sleeves and need a coat ten minutes later, depending on the fog. But Alice takes it to the extreme. I can’t help but smile at the tangle of shoes and clothes, so maddening yet so very Alice.

  Inside the glove box, I find the iPad. It’s dead, of course, like all of her electronic equipment. It’s a pattern with her; she doesn’t believe in charging her tech items. When she finds them dead, she claims that they must have defective batteries. If I could recover all the hours I’ve spent over the past few years searching for her phones and computers and chargers and mating them all up at the outlet in the kitchen, I would be a much younger man.

  Upstairs, when the iPad comes to life, I open the email and do a search for Eric. I can’t remember his last name. Eric is a younger associate, smallish and friendly. I often wonder how he has survived so long at Alice’s firm. The place is a shark tank, where young associates are thrown in at feeding time. Eric and Alice have forged a fairly close working relationship, assisting each other on their various cases and tasks. “In an atmosphere of war, you have to have allies,” she told me the night we first met Eric and his wife at a restaurant in Mill Valley. I liked them both, the only people from the firm I don’t mind spending time with.

  Still, I can’t recall his last name. An aunt of mine came down with substantial memory loss at an early age, and every so often, when I’ve forgotten something simple, I ask myself whether I’ve reached the moment from which everything will go downhill.

  The search reveals emails from only two Erics. Levine and Wilson. I click on the first one—Wilson—and it immediately occurs to me why the name sounds familiar. Eric Wilson was the bass player and background singer from Ladder, the band Alice fronted before I knew her. Ladder had a short run, though not so uneventful as to go entirely unnoticed. Once, when I was reading one of the many British music magazines that arrive in the mail, I came across a reference to Ladder. A young guitar player from a Manchester dance band was being interviewed, and he cited the Ladder album as one of his early influences. When I mentioned it to Alice, she just made a joke and dismissed it, though later that week I found the issue turned to that page on our bedside table.

  Alice, when are you going to leave that loser and come back to me?

  The email is from the week before our wedding. I scroll to the bottom and see several friendly emails going back and forth, mostly about music and the old times. There are newer emails from Eric Wilson on the list, though not many. I resist the temptation to open them. It doesn’t seem right. Besides, if I remember correctly, The Manual contains quite a few items related to snooping. I fetch my copy from the living room and find “email” in the glossary, then flip to 4.2.15.

  Email snooping or spying is not to be tolerated. A strong relationship is built on trust, and spying diminishes trust. Email snooping, which is often the result of a moment of weakness or insecurity, is punishable by a Class 2 Felony offense. Repeat instances of snooping will be punished at the same level, yet with a four-point enhancement.

  I flip back to the glossary and run my finger down the e column, looking for “enhancement.” On the corresponding page, “enhancement” is described only as an exponential application of the appropriate punishment for any offense. The exponentiality of the enhancement may be qualitative, quantitative, or both.

  Who writes this shit?

  I click down to Eric Levine. I send him an email saying that Alice is suffering from food poisoning and won’t be in tomorrow as planned. I put down the iPad, bring my computer back to the bedroom, and try to get some work done. I slog away for a few hours, then fall asleep. When I wake, the sun is setting and the phone is ringing. Where did the day go? I scramble to the kitchen and grab the phone off the charger.

  “Hello?”

  “Yay, I thought you weren’t going to pick up,” Alice says. Instantly, I struggle to assess her voice, her tone.

  “Where are you?”

  “Sitting in the hallway outside my attorney’s office. I’ve been in and out of his office all day, with a break for lunch in a massive cafeteria. There were at least forty of us, but we weren’t allowed to speak to each other. The view out the window is desert and cactus for miles and miles. I can see two huge fences. Floodlights. Visitors’ parking but no cars. One prison bus. A yard, dirt track…”

  “Can you see anyone?”

  “No. There’s a garden; there’s even a whole thing for lifting weights out in the hot sun. It’s like they just bought the prison and left it exactly as it was.”

  “What’s the attorney like?”

  “Asian. Nice shoes. Good sense of humor. I get the feeling he’s like us. Maybe he did something wrong, and this is his sentence. Maybe he’s here a day, a week, a month—it’s hard to tell. I don’t think he’s allowed to talk about himself. No last name, just Victor. Most of the people here don’t even use first names. They just address each oth
er as ‘Friend.’ ”

  “Have they told you what happens next?”

  “I appear before the judge tomorrow morning. Victor thinks he can settle it beforehand, if I want to. He says the first offense is always easy. Plus, he’s friends with the prosecutor who’s bringing the charges.”

  “What are you even charged with?”

  “Lack of Focus. One count, Felony Six.”

  I groan. “What does that mean?”

  “It means, according to The Pact, I was not as focused on our marriage as I needed to be. The indictment lists three overt acts, including showing up late to see Dave. But the main thing is that I skipped out on the directive to go to Half Moon Bay.”

  The absurdity of it hits me. “Lack of Focus? That’s bullshit!”

  “You can say that because you’re not the one wearing a red prison jumpsuit.”

  “When can you come home?”

  “I don’t know. Victor is meeting with the prosecutor now. Jake,” Alice says quickly, “I gotta go.” The line goes dead.

  I still have files to read before tomorrow, but I can’t concentrate on my work, so I clean the house and do the laundry. I finish the household tasks that have been ignored for weeks: change lightbulbs, fix the dishwasher hose. While I’m pretty good at cleaning—thanks to a childhood with a mother and sister who were both compulsively neat—I’ve never had much talent for handyman stuff. Alice is the one who repairs broken doorknobs and assembles furniture, but lately she’s been too busy. I read somewhere that men who do traditionally masculine tasks around the house have more sex with their wives than men who clean, but I haven’t found that to be true in our case. When the house is clean, Alice can relax, and when Alice is relaxed, she’s up for anything. I think about her in that bizarre getup she was wearing when they took her, and I’m ashamed to say it gives me a little erotic thrill, reminding me of an S-and-M joint we visited early in our relationship, a warehouse space in SoMa, where the music was loud, the lighting was low, and the upper floor featured a long corridor where the rooms all had a different theme, each one more severe than the one before it.

  Finally, I hang the artwork Alice bought me for my Pact gift this month. It’s a colorful lithograph, a big brown bear holding an outline of our state, above the words I LOVE YOU, CALIFORNIA!

  The iPad in the middle of the room dings a few times, more email. I think about that email Alice had from Eric Wilson. I think about the ones I didn’t open, and I feel drawn to read them, but I don’t. Antsy, I walk down to the beach, cellphone in hand.

  Ocean Beach is windy, freezing, and mostly deserted except for the usual homeless campouts and some teenagers messing around, trying to keep a bonfire going. For some reason I think of Loren Eiseley’s brilliant piece “The Star Thrower.” It’s the story of an academic walking on a vast, long, abandoned beach. Way up in the distance, he sees a small, blurry figure, constantly repeating the same motion. When he gets closer, he realizes it is actually a boy. The boy is surrounded for miles on all sides by millions of scattered, dying starfish that have washed ashore with the tide.

  The boy is picking the starfish up and throwing them back into the water. The academic approaches and asks, “What are you doing?” And the boy tells him that the tide is going out and the starfish will die. Confused, the academic says, “But there are so many, millions even, how can it matter?” The boy leans down, picks one up, and throws it far out into the ocean. He smiles and says, “It matters for that one.”

  I wander up past the Cliff House and stop at the Lands End Lookout Café. It’s open late tonight for a neighborhood fundraiser. I buy hot chocolate and roam through the gift shop, drawn to the books with old pictures of San Francisco. I find one with a history of our neighborhood, the eerie cover showing a lone Edwardian house lost among miles of sand dunes. An empty road cuts straight through it, a streetcar waits at the end. I buy the book and have it gift-wrapped. I want to have something nice for Alice when she returns.

  Back home, I sit down again with my laptop, still trying to muddle through the write-ups from the previous week’s sessions. I hear the iPad email ping three or four more times. I think about the email from Eric Wilson, and I try to remember what he looks like. I do a Google image search. The first thing that comes up is a picture of him and my wife standing in front of the Fillmore, the marquee above them announcing, THE WATERBOYS AND LADDER, DOORS OPEN AT 9. The picture must be from ten years ago. Eric Wilson looks good, but then I may have looked good ten years ago too. If I hadn’t seen hundreds of other photos of Alice, I may not have recognized her in this photograph. A blue mohawk, serious black eyeliner, Doc Martens, a Germs T-shirt. She looks cool. Wilson does too: sunglasses, scruffy beard, holding his bass. I can’t even remember the last time I went a week without shaving.

  The iPad pings again. Even as I reach for it, I know I shouldn’t, yet I can’t stop myself. The sound of the email ping is like the telltale heart, shaking me at the very core. I punch in the password, 3399, the address of Alice’s first home: 3399 Sunshine Drive.

  The email pings are not from her ex. Of course they aren’t. No, there’s a legal newsletter, a solicitation from her alumni association, a mailer from Josh Rouse, and a response from Eric Levine at work. Hope you recover from the food poisoning soon, he writes, and stop eating in the Tenderloin.

  It’s then that I should stop reading, put the iPad down, and return to my work. I don’t. Scrolling down the list of endless emails, I find seventeen from Eric Wilson. Three of them contain audio files—new songs he has written, plus a cover of the great Tom Waits song “Alice.” I love the song, and Wilson’s version isn’t bad. It gives me chills, but not in a good way.

  I race through the other emails. It’s mostly group emails, something about a band they all once knew. Eric wants to see her, but she doesn’t seem interested. It’s hard to tell. I feel bad for having opened the emails; I feel especially bad for having listened to the song. Why did I do it? Nothing good comes from such things. Nothing good comes from insecurity and anxiety. I have a frightful thought, and I quickly look over my shoulder. For some bizarre reason, I expect to see Vivian standing there, watching, disapproving. I turn off the iPad.

  I sleep fitfully. The next morning, I wake up more tired than I was when I went to bed. I call Huang at the office and ask him to cancel the day’s appointments. I know I’d be no help to anyone today. After showering, I decide to make cookies. Chocolate chip, Alice’s favorite. I’m thinking that she might need something like that when she gets home.

  As the first batch of cookies go in, my phone rings. Unidentified number.

  “Alice?”

  “Hey.” As soon as I hear her voice, I feel guilty again. I shouldn’t have gone through her email. She’s so far away, making this strange sacrifice for our marriage. And here I am, violating Section 4.2.15 of The Manual.

  “What happened in court this morning?”

  “I pled guilty. My attorney was able to get it down from Felony Six to Misdemeanor One.”

  My head is pounding. “What’s the punishment for a misdemeanor?” I think of the “enhancement” section of The Manual, how it leaves everything open to interpretation.

  “Two-hundred-fifty-dollar fine. Eight more weeks of probation with Dave.”

  I relax. Sure, it’s weird to be fined for lack of focus. Still, it occurs to me that I expected worse. “That’s manageable, right?”

  “After it was all decided, the judge gave me this long lecture on the importance of marriage, the importance of setting goals and seeing them through. He talked about honesty, directness, trustworthiness. Everything he said was reasonable, there wasn’t really anything I could disagree with, but it seemed so ominous coming from the bench.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. Alice is clearly shaken, and I feel bad. I want desperately to be with her.

  “In the end he told me to go back to my husband.”

  “Well, that’s a sentence I can agree with.”

  “
He said that I seemed like a nice person, and he doesn’t want to see me here again. It was like in real court, when they admonish minor criminals for first-time drug offenses and petty theft—only I was the one being admonished. I mean, standing where I was standing, for the first time in my life, I finally understood how some of my clients must have felt back when I was working for Legal Aid.”

  “And that was it?”

  “Yes and no. The judge ordered that I be outfitted with a focus mechanism.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Alice sounds scared, and my heart aches for her. “Look, Jake, I have to go. But Victor promised me I’ll be released this afternoon. He said you should pick me up at the Half Moon Bay Airport at nine P.M.”

  “Thank God,” I breathe. “I can’t wait to see you—”

  “I have to go,” she interrupts, and then, quickly, “I do love you.”

  40

  I drive south through Daly City, then down into the bleakness of Pacifica, up the hill and through the beautiful new tunnel. When I emerge on the other side, into a terrain of mountain cliffs, winding turns, and beaches glowing in the moonlight, it feels like a different world. And I think what I think every time I exit the tunnel: Why don’t we live here? The peacefulness is undeniable, the views impressive, the real estate less expensive than San Francisco. The smells of the artichoke and pumpkin farms mix gently with the salt air of the Pacific.

  Minutes later, I pull into the parking lot of the Half Moon Bay Airport, expecting to spend some time in the café while I wait for Alice’s flight to arrive. I’m disappointed to find everything dark, the café closed, no lights on anywhere.

  I park by the fence near the end of the runway. I’m half an hour early. I didn’t want Alice to land in Half Moon Bay and be stuck here alone, in the dark, waiting for me. I turn the lights off and the radio on and recline my seat. I roll my window down to let in the breeze and to listen for Alice’s plane. There’s no air traffic control here, no lights on the runway, and I wonder how the pilots find this narrow strip of asphalt by the sea. Small airplanes scare me, just the random precariousness of it all, tumbling suddenly out of the sky. Every week, it seems, there’s a new report of a dead sports star or musician or politician or the CEO of some tech company, some guy who decided to take his family on vacation in his private plane. It seems crazy to me, trusting one’s life to flimsy aerodynamics.