Still Life with Husband

by Lauren Fox

  Meg makes a sympathetic gurgling noise in her throat.

  “And at his doctor’s appointment next week,” I say slowly, for dramatic effect, “he’s going to get his sperm count tested. Just to be sure.”

  “Oh, my God,” Meg says, not moving her hand from in front of her mouth. It comes out muffled.

  We stare at each other for a second. Then we both start to laugh. And it finally feels like the one proper response to all of this, to Kevin and his eager sperm; to David; to the fact that I almost kissed another man; to the way I seem to have messed everything up with my cheating heart and my reluctant uterus. “Oh,” I say, trying to catch my breath, “Oh!”

  Meg is snorting, the way she does, wiping her eyes. Then, just as we’re starting to calm down, she says with a wheeze, “Just to be sure!” which sends us sliding back down into whoops of laughter.

  I notice, in the midst of our hysterics, that a crew of guys, all wearing their baseball caps backward, has just exited the bar, a swell of noise and smoke emerging with them and hushing as the door closes behind them. They huddle near the wall, swaying a bit, like tipsy grizzly bears, looking over at us. After a few moments, Meg and I have finally slowed down enough that I can breathe again. My stomach muscles hurt, and I feel, without a doubt, better. I look over and see that the guys are focused on the spectacle we are surely making.

  “Girls! Hey, girls!” one of them, in a Milwaukee Brewers cap, calls out. “What’s so funny?”

  Meg and I look at each other, in grave danger of falling into the well again. Her mouth twitches a little. I shake my head at her.

  She rests the palms of her hands flat on the table. “Sperm count!” she shouts, and we’re gone again. I can tell that they’re intrigued, drunkenly interested in two women alone in the middle of a fit of out-of-control laughter, apparently struck down by the concept of semen. They probably think we’d be an easy score, thrilled as we are by a function of their anatomy. Plus, I’ve noticed, men tend to find it disconcerting when two women share a joke. They like the idea that we can let loose and have a good time, but they secretly suspect we’re laughing at them. Which I suppose we usually are.

  They approach en masse, five of them, bulky. “You ladies seem to be having an awfully good time,” Yankees Cap says.

  “Mind if we join you?” Plain Dirty Blue Cap asks, already pulling out the chair between us.

  Meg stretches her arm in front of her, holds her hand up to stop them. “Sorry, boys, not tonight.”

  “Come on,” Plain Dirty Blue Cap slurs, turning from Meg to me and back again. “Let us in on the joke.”

  “We’re really happy,” I say, “because we’ve both just completed the last round of hormone treatment for our gender reassignment procedures.”

  Meg says, “It’s been a long haul, but we’re finally free to live on the outside as the women we’ve always been on the inside.” She tilts her head up at the hulk of bodies and smiles her best, irresistible flirting-Meg smile. The five boys back away as one. They don’t believe us, or they wouldn’t if they weren’t drunk, but they’re just sober enough to know when they’re not wanted.

  “Not bad,” Meg says admiringly, after they’ve gone.

  “Thanks,” I say, suddenly remembering that Kevin and Steve are inside, waiting for us. I scrape my chair back from the table and stand up. These last few minutes have already begun to feel like a fever dream. Once again, I’ve avoided telling Meg about David, about the substance of my feelings. “Shall we reenter reality?”

  Meg stands up, smooths her hair, wipes her hands down the sides of her shirt. “Such as it is,” she says.

  When we get home, I check my e-mail quickly while Kevin is in the bathroom. In my dark office, I can see my reflection in the computer screen as the machine whirrs to life. His name is in my in-box; with surreal clarity, my face is superimposed onto its letters. The subject heading is “Why not?”

  Okay,

  I’m game. Let’s give it a try, the friendship thing.

  I have to do some research at the Museum on Friday.

  Do you want to meet me there? 2:00?

  —David

  He’s not giving me much; he might even sound a bit cold, unconvinced of the merits of a friendship with me. But it’s enough. I want to write back, “Yes! Of course! Anything to see you again! Yes!” But, with composure I’m sure I will be proud of later, I just write:

  Sure. See you then.

  —Emily

  Kevin calls out from the bathroom, our earlier tension mostly suppressed, “Any interesting e-mails?”

  “Not a thing,” I yell back, and shut down my computer. The sudden absence of the machine’s low hum is the only evidence that, a moment ago, it made any noise at all.

  THE MILWAUKEE PUBLIC MUSEUM IS NOT THE KIND OF PLACE that pulsates with activity, not the sort of establishment that is often full of people exclaiming over new exhibits, accidentally bumping into each other in the throes of lively learning. Downtown Milwaukee on the whole is a pretty vacant affair. Workers in business attire exit office buildings every so often, blinking like moles in the sunlight, but then, mostly, they’re only walking to their cars. Today the museum is practically deserted. When I arrived ten minutes ago, four or five groups of children were boarding school buses outside. Now, the entrance plaza echoes like a tunnel.

  I sit down at a plastic table near the coffee shop, my left thumbnail immediately fiddling with the skin around my right one. The atrium is bright and sunny. White light reflects off white tables and chairs, off polished, unscuffed floors. An elderly couple walk slowly past, leaning against each other. They look companionable, as if they’ve been making their way through life in exactly this way, together, supporting each other, for fifty years. Then I get a good look at them, and I see that the man has an angry scowl etched into his face, and the woman looks wispy and scared, her eyebrows unnaturally dark and high on her face.

  What’s it going to look like, this brand-new friendship? I want something. I just don’t know what. I don’t even know if it has anything to do with David Keller. I’m desperately open to the world, to anything new, to a taste, a sound, a sight—anything to file under A for “Alive” in the Emily Ross dictionary.

  I feel a sudden, surprising pressure on the top of my head, and for a second I believe that the shaky old couple, who have disappeared behind me, must have mistaken my head for a tabletop or a ledge, that one of them is using me to keep from falling over. I turn, startled but cautious (since I don’t want to be responsible for anyone’s broken hip) to the sight of a man’s upper torso in a dark blue shirt; I look up and see David Keller’s broad shoulders, his unshaven face, his guarded smile. I notice that he’s wearing glasses, which I haven’t seen on him before, small round silver frames. Like a reflex, like my leg shooting out in front of me to the response of a doctor’s tiny hammer, an elevator of lust rises and falls in my stomach.

  “You are absolved,” he says softly. He keeps his hand on my head for another second, then removes it. “I absolve you.”

  “Oh!” I say. “Okay! Sure!” I stand up, clumsily, and a flicker passes between us. Do we hug? Kiss each other on both cheeks, mwah? Do nothing? David shoves his hands into his pockets: decision made. We do nothing.

  “So,” I say. Once again, I’m unprepared, but I want to make amends, to admit something true. What I say next, I think with a certain self-conscious portentousness, will chart the course of what’s to come. I’m so sorry. “I’m such a jerk,” I say, and it sounds as inadequate as it feels. A stupid little involuntary smile inches up my face.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “You screwed up. It’s not the end of the world.”

  And there it is. He means it. I know he does. He’s a good person, and he forgives me, probably not least because what we had wasn’t very much, and it doesn’t cause him pain; if it did at first give him a twinge, it doesn’t anymore. He’s over it. He’s over me. These thoughts flash through my head as we stand there, facing e
ach other, and what comes to rest, finally, inside me, is disappointment.

  I cross my arms over my chest. We’re still the only two people in the museum’s entryway, but I notice, behind David, some people milling about the first-floor exhibit, others walking in and out of the gift shop. “I’m really glad you feel that way. I’m glad you still want to be my friend.”

  “Well, we’ll see about that,” he says. His voice is teasing, gentle, his smile doesn’t fade, but his eyes are shadowy, impenetrable.

  I look down at my shoes, worn-out blue Keds. They make me look like I’m about twelve years old, it suddenly strikes me. I bought them two springs ago, right after an ill-fated shopping trip with Meg. I’d been on a quest for a swimsuit and had ended up not only without one, but depressed and a little bit shocked about the state of my pale, winter-thickened body. I bought the shoes as a pick-me-up and understood for the first time the appeal of the purchase of footwear, something Meg had been trying to explain to me for years: you can gain ten pounds, but shoes always fit. I’m thinking about that April day and having my usual reaction to stress: my mind wants to flee the scene of the crime, to travel to strange and inaccessible places. Come back. Say something. I look at David. “Why are you here?” I ask. Oops. Not quite right. “I mean, what were you doing here?”

  “I’m helping one of our reporters with some research,” he says, “for an article on town planning in Milwaukee. I had an appointment with one of the curators.” He is very serious, more formal than he’s seemed to me before, less approachable. Well, naturally.

  I suddenly feel like I should be home, working on something vastly important. Oh, yes, me, too; I myself am writing an article about challenges to the Constitution. A think piece.

  “Oh,” I say instead, looking back down at my shoes. This is going nowhere. My throat feels tight. I’m about to say that I’ve just remembered another appointment, something I have to do, somewhere I must be immediately, when he reaches over and touches my arm.

  “Emily,” he says with a little shrug. “I want to hang out with you.” I meet his eyes again. He’s smiling. This time the kindness in his voice has traveled up to his eyes, lightening them. “Should we explore?” he asks. I nod. We make our way over to the big map of the museum and stand, gazing at it. First floor, Peoples of the World, Our Living Oceans, and my favorite, the Streets of Old Milwaukee. Upstairs, the Butterfly Wing, Native American Powwow, and Aztec Market. The Milwaukee Public Museum has a charming, small-town, amateurish quality about it, which includes its excess of lifelike mannequins. Virtually all of the exhibits feature model people going about their papier-mâché business, as if history would be inscrutable without fake Guatemalan villagers selling plastic acorn squash. Which, come to think of it, it might be. At the Powwow, Native American mannequins revolve around on a giant lazy Susan, accompanied by tape-recorded drumming. On the Streets of Old Milwaukee, you wander around, peeking into shop windows where a mustachioed mannequin barber shaves his mannequin customer, a glass-eyed butcher hacks away at a bright orange sausage. If you’ve been here once, you’ve been here a thousand times. And I’ve been here a thousand times.

  David leans in toward the map, squinting. “Peoples of the World,” he says.

  “Is that where you want to go?” I ask.

  “Not necessarily. I just thought it said ‘Beagles of the Wild.’ Until I looked more closely.”

  “Beagles of the Wild,” I say. “I’ve heard of them. Famously undomesticated breed. Known for stealing children and then licking them to within an inch of their lives.”

  “Not as savage as the wild golden retriever,” he says, shaking his head.

  “Really?”

  “Oh, the puppies are the worst. They wield their cuteness as a weapon and can throttle you with their waggy tails.”

  “Their waggy tails?” I say, laughing.

  David gives a grave, exaggerated nod. “How about the Streets of Old Milwaukee?”

  “Good.” We head toward the exhibit, down the quiet hallways, past Peoples of the World, past the Buffalo Hunt, a diorama of nineteenth-century Native Americans on horses, their spears held aloft, chasing frightened taxidermy buffalo. The exhibit is particularly surreal to me; I’ve been coming to this museum since I was a small child, and the scene has never changed: the stuffed buffalo are in a perennial state of terror, the hunters’ expressions fierce but vaguely sad, too, as if they know they will never make their kill. On the edge of the exhibit, there is a small stand covered in real buffalo hide, which you can touch; the patch of fur has been rubbed almost bald, like a beloved teddy bear. It gives me the shivers now, this opportunity to touch the soft skin of something long dead.

  David keeps his distance from me. I think of our walk by the lake, just a few weeks ago, but somehow seasons ago, eons ago. I think of the way we leaned toward each other then, the physical space between us a gap to be bridged. We were like two magnets drawn together, but I’ve altered the force field, and now we’re pulled apart, repelled. I feel repellent, unbeautiful in the face of this change. I’m suddenly aware of every flaw: my frizzy hair, my short-waistedness, my ungroomed eyebrows. Being desired, like a makeover, had made me pretty. Its absence uglifies me.

  We wander around the corner to the tunnel-like entrance of the Streets of Old Milwaukee. “I remember coming here as a kid,” I say, absently trying to smooth my hair. “I was a little bit scared of this exhibit.”

  “It is dark,” David agrees. “And there’s some resemblance to a haunted house.”

  My memory of this place is fixed and sensory. The cobblestone streets, the working water pump, Olinger’s Sausage Company and the knife-swinging mannequin butcher, it all washes over me like a strong scent. David strolls over to the butcher shop, with its grotesque hanging plastic animal carcasses. I peer into the candy shop two doors down, the jars of bright sweets gleaming. The cobblestones are bumpy beneath my feet.

  “That was my niece, by the way,” David says. It takes me a second to figure out what he’s talking about, and then I remember, the little girl he was walking with outside Meg’s school. The girl with the untied shoes.

  I turn to face him and nod. “I wondered. Not that it was any of my business,” I say.

  “Yeah.” I don’t know if he’s confirming that the little girl is his niece, or agreeing with me: yeah, none of my business.

  “I was helping my friend,” I say. “She’s just getting back into teaching after a break, and she needed a hand. She teaches kindergarten,” I add.

  “Rachel’s in first grade.” I wait, peer intently back into the candy shop as if discovering something: oh, look, a fascinating nineteenth-century lollipop! David walks over to me and faces the glass, looks inside. I hear him exhale. He’s next to me, close, but I don’t look at him. “So,” he says.

  “So.” Prices are handwritten in frilly script on the outsides of the jars. Mints, one cent. Fudge, two cents. We’re alone on the Streets of Old Milwaukee. “There’s no excuse for what I did,” I say softly. I’m talking to the shiny glass window. My breath makes a cloud of fog on it, dissipating and reappearing. David doesn’t answer. I finally turn to him. “I know you’re over it, and I’m grateful for that, but I want you to know…” I trail off.

  “I do,” he says. “And I still like you.”

  Still likes me? Still likes me how? Stop it.

  “I guess my marriage is sort of troubled at the moment.” I feel sunken, admitting this. Flattened down like there’s a weight pressing on my head.

  “Troubled doesn’t mean doomed,” he says.

  “No.”

  David clears his throat. “How about the butterflies?”

  Huh? I smile as if I know what he’s talking about. An obscure Zen reference to struggling marriages?

  “How about we go see the Butterfly Wing?”

  “Oh, sure.” As we head toward the elevator, some of the space between us closes. I begin to relax into the day, into the actual, surprising friendship we just migh
t make work. I feel grateful and happy. Being with David is starting to feel comfortable, practically like hanging out with Meg, I think. And I almost manage to convince myself of it.

  A child’s screech echoes from down one of the hallways, followed by a short silence and then tragic sobs. “When you’re thinking about kids,” I say to David, without really considering what I’m about to tell him, “about having them, or not having them, they’re suddenly everywhere.” The wailing gets louder as we walk, then slowly diminishes, the toddler Doppler effect.

  David looks at me, surprised. “Really?” he says. “Is that something you’re thinking about?”

  “Oh,” I say, my stomach suddenly tightening. He must think I’m a freakish collection of neurotic symptoms, first dating him, then confessing that I’m married, finally admitting to thoughts of childbearing. Lovely. There should be a wing for me in this museum, a mannequin Emily lounging in a replica of my apartment: Twenty-first-Century Psychological Mess. This species of American female was known for muddling her love life beyond repair. Fortunately, she did not reproduce. “Not really,” I say. Backpedal! Backpedal! “I mean, no.” Then I remember: we’re trying to be friends. “It’s one of the sore spots of my marriage,” I admit.

  “That must be rough,” David says. I note that he makes no effort to offer advice or try to fix this problem, the way every other guy I’ve ever been friends with has done when confronted with some murky emotional detail, as if it’s a busted carburetor. We’re standing at the elevators now, waiting. “I went out with a woman for four years,” he says, “and we ended it over that very issue.” He looks at me, waiting for a clue that I want to hear the rest. I nod. “She wanted kids, and I wasn’t ready.”

  “Maybe she just wasn’t the right person,” I say.

  “Probably not.”

  The Butterfly Wing is the most crowded spot in the building. A small collection of people huddles around, waiting to enter the room full of live exotic butterflies. This may be an actual line. David and I take our place at the back of the group. To get in, you have to walk through one door, let it close behind you, then wait in a short hallway for a green light and a buzzer to allow you to go through the next door. This is so no butterflies escape. It makes me feel like I’m in butterfly prison.