by Richard Cox
Gloria finally looks up and sees me. She reaches forward and touches my face.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine now,” I say, which is the appropriate answer if not entirely the truth. “I thought I was coming down with a migraine, but I after I got some water I felt better.”
“Are you sure it’s gone? You looked awful in the church. I was worried.”
“It’s gone for now. Hopefully it stays gone.”
We find our car in the parking lot and head home. The sky is postcard blue, the clouds sparse and wispy—so perfect you’d think it was filmed that way. Speaking of filming, did you ever notice how marriage is sort of like a television series? Week to week things are pretty much the same, little joys and calamities come and go, but over time gradual changes occur. For instance, in the fall, Gloria and I enjoy a lazy Sunday routine: mass in the morning and football in the afternoon. I usually open my first beer when the late games start and coast into the evening with a nice buzz. I’ll grill some steak and chicken and vegetables. But whereas Gloria used to sit next to me on the couch and flip through magazines—and drink a few beers herself—now she spends the afternoon writing a blog for the Council of Catholic Women.
“I’m sorry about your head,” Gloria says. “And you missed communion again. But I guess you can make it up next week.”
I want to tell her what happened in the church, about the man in the bathroom, but I don’t. I can’t. I’ve been coming apart for a while now and I’m afraid to tell her. I’m afraid she’ll look at me differently, she’ll see me broken, and whatever thread we’ve been holding onto will snap. My arms are cold. They’re marbled with goose bumps. Out of nowhere I wonder what would happen if I steered the car into oncoming traffic. Here comes a big, white Cadillac, a ’70s-era monster with huge fins. It’s a convertible but the top is up. Would the collision be fatal? Or would airbags and crumple zones save us?
“What did you think about the homily this morning?” I ask Gloria.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean when the Father called your brother evil.”
“He didn’t say that.”
“He said homosexuality was evil. Or did I only imagine it?”
A second ticks by. Then another. I can still see the old man’s red cheeks, the spidery capillaries in his nose.
Everything you know is a lie.
“Gloria?”
She doesn’t answer me. We reach a stoplight. It’s red.
You’re a prisoner.
“The Father stood there and ranted against homosexuals for ten minutes, and you nodded and smiled like someone waiting for their crazy Kool-Aid.”
Now Gloria’s eyes glower in their sockets. For a moment she looks mad enough to spit on me.
“The situation with Michael is extremely complex,” she says, “and I won’t have you of all people try to characterize my feelings about the subject.”
“Then why don’t you characterize them for me?”
“Why are you trying to pick a fight?”
“I’m sorry,” I say, my voice almost wavering. “I’m not trying to pick a fight. But I don’t understand why you and pretty much everyone else in the congregation bought the Father’s speech so easily. It’s like you were all hypnotized. I’m not even sure why I go to church anymore.”
“Thomas Phillips! Don’t you say something like that!”
“Don’t say something like what?” I ask. “Don’t tell you how I really feel?”
“That’s not how you really feel!”
“Why are you yelling at me?”
“Baby, please don’t do this. When you came into the other room last night and kissed me and hugged me I felt so close to you. Do you know that’s the first time in months you’ve said the words ‘I’m sorry’? It made me think I mattered to you again. Like we were finally reconnecting. I thought maybe we could finally push past this.”
“I know, Junior. I know. I felt the same way.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
I should let it go. I know I should. Who cares what the Father thinks about homosexuality? He doesn’t even know Gloria’s brother. Michael hasn’t been to church in years.
But it’s not the homily. It’s not the Father. It’s Gloria. She’s different somehow. I can’t put my finger on it but I know it.
“You’re changing the subject on me,” I finally say. It’s like I’ve lost control of my own mouth. “We are not talking about us. We’re talking about your brother and the church and why it’s anyone’s business who he sleeps with.”
We reach our house. I pull into the driveway, put the transmission in park, and turn off the ignition.
“It’s God’s business,” Gloria says, looking away from me, out the window. “Everything is.”
“But why create gay people and then condemn them to Hell?”
“It’s a—”
I wait for her to continue, but she doesn’t.
“It’s not fair,” I say.
“God has a plan for all of us, but sometimes it’s difficult to see what that plan is.”
“Okay, but if your brother doesn’t stop being gay, is he going to Hell?”
For a long moment Gloria doesn’t say anything. But her eyes turn glassy, and her bottom lip quivers, and I hate myself for it. I wish I knew where we went wrong. Have I changed? Has she? Have we both?
“You’re horrible,” she finally says, and gets out of the car.
I watch her walk past the car and into the house. I want to follow her inside, apologize, but I don’t.
My mind isn’t right. I need to compose myself before I talk to her again.
I close my eyes and picture the bathroom. I watch the old man striding across the floor, headed directly for me. I think about his black and white beard and the spidery capillaries in his nose. I’ve never seen that man in my entire life.
So why on earth is his face so familiar?
THREE
One of the reasons Gloria and I have been struggling is because we don’t see each other that much anymore. She’s been spending a lot more time at church, helping run this council and volunteering for all sorts of fundraisers and charity events, and I’ve been working on my new screenplay. I don’t think I mentioned it yet but that’s what I want to do with my life. Write films. I’ve made some money at it but not enough to quit my job. I’ll tell you more about that later.
Right now I want to talk about Jack. This is the Jack I mentioned before, the one who dated Gloria before I did. She left him to be with me. I guess you could say I stole her from him, if you want to be negative about it, but I didn’t do it on purpose. I mean I didn’t set out to do it so much as it just happened. You can’t help who you love in this world.
Not surprisingly, Jack was unimpressed with what I considered fate. He didn’t give up on Gloria easily, and even after I proposed he swore he would win her back eventually. For a long time I worried about him, about his resentment, but after we were married he faded from our lives. In time I forgot about him.
Then, three years ago, Gloria took a job at the same company as Jack. She didn’t bother telling me he worked there until deep in the interview process, long after I could mount an opposition campaign. She claims she didn’t know about it herself. To make matters worse, three months ago she accepted a promotion that means she now works for him directly. Can you believe that? I mean, honestly. Has Jack really been plotting his revenge for thirteen years? Or is this another one of life’s infamous coincidences?
Either way, every time seven o’clock arrives and Gloria’s still not home from work, I grow a little angrier. Wouldn’t you? She sees him every day. She sees him more than she sees me. And then when I ask about her day, how things are at work, Gloria tells me I’m being obsessive. But all I’m doing is asking about her job. We end up talking about Jack by association. He’s her boss, for heaven’s sake.
Isn’t he?
Or am I hallucinating that, too?
I keep hear
ing the old man’s voice, the guy in the bathroom. I keep seeing his ruddy face and hearing his ominous words, but we all know I can’t say for sure if it really happened. Just like no one else saw the blue orb. I clearly hallucinated that. And once you accept you are hallucinating, how can you say, really, when it stops? When you have a bad dream at night, it ends when you wake up. But when you’re talking about a real-life, daytime hallucination, how can you ever know for sure when you are back in true reality again?
There’s a very good chance I hallucinated everything in the church today: the blue orb, the old man, the improved sexual equipment.
Which means I could still be hallucinating. I may not even be writing to you right now.
And you may not be reading.
Think about that feeling you get in nightmares, the blazing, irrational fear. That’s exactly how this feels. If you can’t trust what you see with your own eyes, what you hear with your own ears, how can you trust anything?
If my brain had a reboot button, this is when I would push it. I need to shut down and regain some kind of balance. What I really want to do is go to sleep and make all of this disappear. But as soon as I close my eyes, I imagine the car is moving, like I’m no longer sitting in my driveway but fleeing across the desert, followed by a couple of gunslingers. I imagine my car slamming into something, and then I’m falling, my life flashing before me. I’ve had this dream before. I can’t remember when. It’s as if I have the dream and then forget about it.
Everything you know is a lie, the old man said.
But what does that mean exactly? Even if this very moment is a hallucination, there must have been a previous moment that was not.
My heart is racing. I can feel blood pulsing in the tips of my fingers, in my ears. The world seems to shimmer. Everything is blurry. I’m breathing too fast. It seems insanely hot in this car.
I wonder if I jumped out the door and ripped off my clothes, if I tried to rip off my very own skin, if anyone would try to stop me. I’m not sure it matters anymore. For the first time since my dad died nine years ago, I feel like crying. If you can’t have faith in the most basic information about the world—facts you take for granted every minute of every day—how can you live from one moment to the next?
I have to go inside. I don’t know what else to do. I’m scared to death that I’ll say something crazy to Gloria, that she’ll finally realize how lost I am, but I’m even more afraid that if I sit in this car by myself any longer I’ll drift so far away from solid ground that I’ll never be able to make it back.
Do you think Gloria would listen if I tried to explain how I feel? If I told her I’m seeing things? How do you explain to someone that your mind isn’t working right without them automatically thinking you belong in a mental hospital?
It seems absurd that I would ever keep anything from her. There was a time when the two of us were so close it seemed like we communicated telepathically. Even the first moment I saw her, when she stood in front of me at that fraternity party and asked for half a giant Twinkie, somehow I already knew she was the one. It was strange and wonderful, almost as if I’d met her before. But lately it feels like someone has turned off the connection, because we’re never on the same page about anything. And the worst part is I don’t understand how it happened. Gloria doesn’t seem like the same person to me anymore. She would probably say something similar about me, and maybe she would be right, because more and more I think I really do belong in a mental hospital. Like right now I am thinking that.
And I’m also hearing numbers in my head again.
9…7…9…3…pause…2…3…8…4…
I think they must be special numbers. Something very special is happening to me, like a gift, and all I have to do to receive this gift is finally let go of my fake life, let go of Gloria and my stupid job and everything that has been holding me back, and embrace the one, true reality.
6…2…6…4…pause…3…3…8…3…
Those numbers are like a path for me to follow. They lead somewhere very important, if only I could—
A loud, thundering sound shakes my numerical world, jumbles everything, and my eyes flutter open. The sun is white and overpowering. What the hell?
“Thomas,” someone says. “Are you going to sit out here all day?”
It’s Gloria. I’m in the car. Gloria is standing outside the car looking in at me.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“I don’t know what happened.”
“It looks like you fell asleep. Why don’t you come inside? The neighbors are going to wonder what you’re doing out here.”
“Okay,” I say. “Give me just a sec—”
“It’s all right. I’m going back inside. Just don’t be too long, baby. Okay?”
Shit. I was dreaming all that. Maybe I’m not going crazy. Maybe I’m just exhausted and getting worked up over nothing. Maybe I can go inside and talk to Gloria and everything will turn out to be okay.
Maybe.
FOUR
But when I walk inside, my house feels like someone else’s. There’s an unfamiliar smell, as if someone besides Gloria and me was recently here. I feel like I’m intruding. I know that doesn’t make any sense.
I go into the kitchen and get some water from the refrigerator, gulp it down in giant swallows. Get more and gulp that down, too.
Gloria is in the study. I can hear her typing, probably already working on her blog. I don’t want to interrupt her but we need to talk. I need to tell her I don’t feel quite right. That maybe I’m depressed or mixed up a little, that maybe I’ve been seeing things that aren’t there. As I reach the study she stops typing and clicks on something with the mouse. When she looks up at me I notice her eyes are red, as if she’s been crying.
“I’m sorry about what I said in the car. About your brother. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I don’t understand, Thomas. Every time we’re doing a little better, it’s like you sabotage it. It’s like you don’t want us to work. Is that it? Do you not want to be in this anymore?”
“Of course I do, Junior.”
“Then why do you try to hurt me?”
“I don’t…I didn’t…I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”
“It’s hard to know how to feel about Michael. It’s confusing. I’ve thought about this a lot, about what God has written, and about how much I love my brother. I don’t know what the right answer is, baby, but I know us arguing about it doesn’t help anything.”
“I just…a lot of things don’t make sense to me anymore.”
“Like what? Like going to mass? Like our relationship? What doesn’t make sense?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t feel very well lately.”
“Thomas,” Gloria says. “I know what it’s like to question your faith. You know I almost left the church when we were in college. Meeting you helped turn me around.”
“You almost left the church because of Jack.”
“And meeting you helped turn me around, I said.”
The numbers in my head are back. A woman recites these numbers against a constant pattern of static and noise, interrupted by occasional crackles of distortion, and underneath it all I can almost hear a melody of some kind. Haunting strings, dissonant…possibly electronic.
2…7…9…5….pause….0…2…8…8…
“I was in a terrible place,” Gloria says. “Jack made me feel awful, like I was such an idiot for believing in God. Like I was a child, like it was all just a fairy tale. I hated that.”
“He doesn’t make you feel like that anymore? You see him every day.”
“We don’t talk about that. We talk about work.”
“Work can’t be the only thing you ever talk about. You’re there all day long.”
“Don’t do this,” she says.
“Don’t do what?”
“Please. I don’t want to talk about Jack again.”
“We never talk about Jack.”
“You have to l
et it go, Thomas.”
“I’m not the one who brought him up just now. You did.”
She looks at me strangely, as if I’m not making sense.
“Baby, I didn’t bring up Jack just now. You did. Don’t you remember?”
I don’t remember that at all. I try to rewind the conversation to the point where Jack was introduced, but Gloria interrupts me.
“Baby, this isn’t going to work.”
“What?”
“I can’t do this anymore. I can’t fight with you anymore. If we keep doing this it’s going to make me want to leave and not come back. I love you to death and I want to spend the rest of my life with you, but I can’t do it like this.”
“Junior, what are you saying?”
“I’m asking you for the last time to let it go. Let Jack go. You are my husband. I love you, not him. Yes, I loved him once, and I know it’s bizarre and uncomfortable that I report to him now, but I’m with you. You’ve always been my rock, baby. You’re my solid ground. I love that about you. So trust me and find some peace about this. Please?”
“Okay,” I say. “I promise not to bring him up anymore.”
“Thank you. Come here and give me a kiss.”
I walk over and bend down and touch her lips with my own. I know she’s right. We can’t go on like this.
I don’t know when I’m going to tell her about what I saw today.
I don’t know if I should.
These lips don’t feel like Gloria’s.
FIVE
I grab a beer from the fridge and sit down to watch the game. It’s been on for a little more than an hour, so I start at the beginning and watch it in high speed, fast forwarding through the commercials and only watching when the Cowboys are on offense. It would be nice if real life were like this, wouldn’t it? Skip through the boring parts? Only live the highlights? I wonder what would happen if I could fast forward to this evening or tomorrow or next month? What will Gloria and I be doing then? Are we going to make it? It’s Sunday and she’s in the study and I’m in the living room, and though I know all couples have their routines, we weren’t always like this.
