Still Life with Husband

by Lauren Fox

  The room itself is a sauna, a good twenty degrees warmer than the rest of the building, and so humid I begin sweating immediately. Steam pours in through the vents. I peel off my sweater and tie it around my waist.

  One night last fall, Kevin and I attended a party at the home of our friends Rob and Karina. We spent most of the evening talking to Monica, a friend of theirs, an American who’d just returned home after a decade in Paris and was now a high school French teacher. Monica was funny and adorable, delicate and perfectly coiffed, of course, and she exuded a fish-out-of-water quality that made Kevin and me both want to take care of her. Monica and I sat on the couch, plates of hors d’oeuvres perched on our knees, and Kevin pulled a wooden kitchen chair in front of us. The three of us talked for hours, ignoring party etiquette, forgoing polite mingling in favor of this real connection we were making. Kevin’s head swiveled back and forth between Monica and me. We got along so well, the three of us, I was certain a friendship match had been made. I imagined us meeting for Saturday morning coffees, strolling along the lakefront, going to obscure independent movies together and having stimulating arguments after. At midnight, as Kevin and I were walking the four blocks back to our apartment, he tipsily slung his arm around me and said, “If I’d met her before I met you, I’d have wanted to date her.” He was effusive and clueless, and he leaned into me, probably waiting for me to agree, to confirm my own affection for, even attraction to, Monica. We had both fallen a little bit in love with her.

  That, of course, was not the point. I didn’t talk to Kevin for the rest of the night and half of the next day. And the one time Monica called, a few days later, to ask us out for a drink, I told her we had other plans and that we’d call her again soon. We haven’t seen her since.

  Only, now, this is exactly what I understand about David, this simple fact. He fits into a closed room inside of me. The Butterfly Wing of my heart. After much ineptitude on my part, it’s finally clear that nothing will happen between us, and that I’m obliged to slog through with Kevin. But if I’d met him before I met Kevin…

  David is standing in the corner, intently reading about various species of butterflies, and I perch myself on a cement rock nearby, looking around at the flying creatures. In such profusion, these butterflies are strangely frightening. They don’t just flutter around whimsically, they zip and zoom, like the flying insects they are; occasionally they seem to be aiming for my face.

  This corner of the room is secluded, sheltered by hanging tropical plants and trees. Four young boys in brown Cub Scout uniforms, accompanied by two women who don’t look old enough to be den mothers but must be, pass by. David comes over and sits down next to me; the fake rock is realistically slopey and uneven, so, as he sits on an incline, we’re the same height. He points to an electric blue butterfly with black polka dots. “I think that’s an Indian something-or-other,” he says.

  “Really? An Indian something-or-other. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of that kind.”

  “Well, I can tell you for sure those are monarchs,” he says, pointing with his chin to a cluster of five of the only obvious kinds of butterflies here. I turn to him, roll my eyes. A drab brownish butterfly zooms past us. It looks like a moth interloper in this exotic world. It pauses midflight, then dive-bombs toward a mass of foliage. A large placard a foot away tells us that if we sit very still, butterflies may alight on us.

  “I’m sitting here,” I say, “and I’m hoping nothing lands on me.”

  “They’re kind of like colorful bats,” he agrees.

  We sit in silence for a few minutes, watching them. I shoo one away from my nose with a shudder. Is this place benign or dangerous? David stares at a yellow butterfly poised motionless on a branch beside us, then turns to me, just looks at me and smiles. There’s a trace of sweat on his upper lip.

  Propelled by a combination of longing and recklessness, I lean toward him. Beautiful insects fly close to our faces. My eyes are open. I kiss him. After a second, he closes his eyes and kisses me back.

  Here is how Kevin asked me to marry him: I had been editing a manuscript all day and was taking a break. I was sitting in the rocking chair, biting my cuticles, rocking back and forth, flicking through the TV channels, edgy. Kevin walked in from the kitchen, nibbling on a bagel.

  I looked up and glared at him. “Could you please use a napkin for that?” I snipped. “I’m the one who ends up cleaning the crumbs off the floor. You don’t even notice.”

  “You’re in a good mood,” he said, cupping his hand under the bagel.

  “I hate my job. I hate editing. I hate testicles and semen and premature ejaculation and prostates! And the apartment’s a mess! I had to throw out a ton of rotten vegetables this morning. They were expensive! Why don’t we ever eat vegetables? Why don’t you ever vacuum? I hate everything.” It was a beautiful warm spring Saturday, and Meg had invited me to go to the park with her, to lie on a blanket and read trashy novels and eat potato chips. I had had to decline, in order to edit a lengthy, stultifying, practically unintelligible manuscript on erectile dysfunction in aging rabbits.

  “You’re a barrel of laughs,” he said sulkily. “I do vacuum. And I cleaned the bathroom last week.” He plopped down on the couch. I was about to say something even snottier about using a goddamn napkin, when he looked at me.

  I stared back. “What?” I asked.

  “Why don’t we get married?” He leaned across the coffee table and took my left hand. He slid the gnawed bagel onto my ring finger. Crumbs scattered onto the table.

  “Right,” I said. “Yeah, sure.” But my heart was pounding and I didn’t take the bagel off my finger. Kevin and I had agreed a long time ago that we didn’t need to get married. “We’re great together the way we are,” we would insist when some friend or family member would needle us. “Why mess with success? We don’t need a religious ceremony to be happy.”

  “Marriage improves a relationship,” people would tell us, usually newlywed people. “It deepens your commitment in ways you can’t know about until you do it.”

  “They think they know better just because they’re married,” we would tell each other smugly. “They don’t know us.” But deep down, I always sort of suspected that they were right.

  “I’m serious,” he said now, adjusting the bagel. He wasn’t letting go of my hand, the palm of which had begun to sweat profusely.

  “Are you just saying this to make me feel better?” I asked.

  “Well, do you?”

  We got married six months later, in my parents’ backyard, in front of twenty of our closest friends. We spent our honeymoon in Oregon, most of it at his parents’ house—most of it, in fact, with his parents. We had been planning on going that summer anyway, and had already bought our tickets.

  “Sweetheart,” my mother said to me last night on the phone. I had been distractedly stirring a pot of pasta and trying to figure out what to put on top of the noodles when she called. All we had in the refrigerator was a jar of apricot jam, a container of milk, and an onion, and I was just trying to decide whether those three ingredients might make a roux.

  “Mom,” I answered. “We have nothing to eat here,” I said. “I haven’t eaten in weeks. I probably have rickets.” I propped the phone on my shoulder.

  “I was reading an article in North Shore Lifestyle about a Russian immigrant who had been a physicist in Russia,” she said, cheerfully ignoring me. “And when he came here, he had to work in a junkyard. And now he owns the jewelry store next to your apartment building. Isn’t that interesting? I always thought it was owned by a woman. Also…” She pauses, takes a breath. Most of my conversations with my mother have a certain ADHD quality to them. “Your brand of tampon is on sale at Osco, I noticed. Oh, come to think of it, maybe it’s Heather’s brand. Would you like to have lunch with me tomorrow, darling? I imagine you’ll be very hungry.”

  My mother and I only meet at one place, her favorite faux-urban café, the Uptown Market. It’s a little bi
stro on the edge of the North Shore suburbs, near the lake. Whenever I walk into the bustling restaurant, I imagine for a second that I might be somewhere else, somewhere funky and full of itself, where people drink trendy imported beer in the middle of the afternoon, but then I adjust to my surroundings and it becomes clear that the clientele is mostly young mothers with streaked blond hair, real estate agents, and the random businessman looking hungry and bewildered in the midst of it all. I spot my mother immediately: she’s the only person here wearing a sequined denim dress. With her big gold earrings and chunky necklace, she sparkles in the sunny restaurant like a human disco ball.

  Since Friday, all I’ve thought about is the kiss with David: the shudder that passes through me at regular intervals is sometimes a tingle of remembering it, sometimes a heave of nausea and selfhatred. Getting the mail, bicycling to work, shopping for groceries, that kiss has metamorphosed into a thin blanket and draped itself over me, a comfort and a burden simultaneously. There’s no coming back from a decision to kiss someone who is not your husband. I may never see David Keller again; Kevin may never find out that I’ve slipped from him. But I’m somewhere else, somewhere outside my marriage, in a place where guilt and elation somehow coexist. It’s where I live now.

  My mom and I tend to spend our lunches together in companionable silence. After she’s done excavating her warehouse of gossip, Barbara will cheerfully regale me with random details for as long as possible: a strappy new pair of shoes she’s just bought; her latest idea for remodeling the den in shades of ecru; my dad’s most recent sartorial abomination (“Last night he wore your old knit hat to bed, the one with the purple pom-poms. He says he can’t afford to lose eighty percent of his body heat through his head”); some fact about my sister Heather’s life that I undoubtedly already knew. When she’s done, I’ll provide her with a few safe tidbits about my own life: a new restaurant Kevin and I tried last weekend, the movie we rented, what Dick told me the other day about frog sperm. This will peter out after a few minutes, after which we’ll both just eat our food and smile at each other. Occasionally, when one of us is moved to, we’ll start another short but pleasant conversation until that topic, too, is clearly finished, like the obvious end of a pop song, and we’ll turn back to our food.

  It’s never awkward; it’s not even exactly boring. It’s simply the relationship we’ve cultivated, my mother and I, and we are both completely aware of its contours: she loves me unconditionally and pays for lunch. I bask in that particular glow. We tell each other about how we’ve been passing our days. But I’ve never revealed my heart to her. The depths of my fears and desires I’ve always reserved for Meg and Kevin, the two people who understand and love me as Emily, not as a now-grown but still immature child. Only now, my ugly heart is private, and it’s bursting in my chest.

  For her part, my mother has never tried to usher me along the twists and turns of her private psychological trail. And the raging sixteen-year-old inside me doesn’t want her to.

  We’re sitting at a tiny round table in the middle of the restaurant, the only one that was empty when we arrived. I’m blowing on a steaming-hot bowl of vegetarian chili, and my mother is mixing her Caesar salad with two forks.

  “I hate it when they don’t properly toss the salad!” she says adamantly.

  “I hate that, too!” I say. She nods, pleased that I share her strong opinion, until she looks up at me.

  “Didn’t anyone ever teach you that it’s not polite to mock your mother?” she asks. I shake my head sadly. She puts down the fork in her left hand, and skewers a piece of chicken with the fork in her right. “Em,” she says, “I need to ask you something?” Her voice rises tentatively. My assertive mother doesn’t even ask questions in a questioning tone of voice. When she ends a sentence as if she were a teenage girl in math class, I know something’s up.

  “Yeah,” I say, against my better judgment. It comes out surly.

  “It’s probably none of my business.” She chews slowly on a leaf of lettuce.

  I resist the urge to say, “Then don’t ask me.” Instead I act like the thirty-year-old I am supposed to be. “It’s okay,” I say. “What is it?”

  “You and Heather are the joys of my life,” she says, nodding for emphasis. Oh my God, is she dying? “And I am not getting any younger.”

  I gulp my overpriced ginger ale; it barely makes it past the lump in my throat. “Are you sick?” I squeak.

  “No, no, no, sweetheart, I’m fine,” she says, too loudly. Her voice recalibrates to a whisper: “I just want grandchildren.” She smiles at me, moist-eyed and a little bit embarrassed.

  I’m holding my glass between my mouth and the table, unable to put it down, unable to lift it up. A wisp of steam from my chili wafts up between us.

  “I want to know if you’re planning on having a baby anytime soon,” she continues. She’s clearly rehearsed this. “I want you to have the joy of your life. And I don’t want you to wait so long that it’s too late.”

  I open my mouth to say something, although I have no idea what that will be, but she holds up her fork to stop me. “I’m not done,” she says, gaining confidence. “I know that this is your business, yours and Kevin’s. AND YOU KNOW THAT I DO NOT INTERFERE. But I’m worried. I. Am. Worried. Do you remember Carolyn Alt?”

  Another daughter of one of my mother’s friends, Carolyn is five years older than I am and lives in Berkeley. She studies bonobo chimps. I barely knew her growing up, since five years was an entire generation back then. Is this another famous Barbara Ross non sequitur? No such luck.

  “Carolyn Alt has been trying to have a baby for four years,” my mother says, still munching on her salad between her invasive exploratory surgical procedures into my private life. “But she cannot. She and her husband have just been through their fourth round of in vitro, and they can’t afford to try anymore. They’ve used up their life savings. Also, Paul Mancuso and his wife, Renata, I don’t know if you remember them; Paul was two years ahead of you and come to think of it, they didn’t even live in our district; I think he went to Deerwood High School. He and Renata met in Los Angeles and got married last year and do you know, two months later Renata was told she had to have a hysterectomy—”

  I sense that this is my cue—“hysterectomy,” the magic word!—and if I don’t stop her now, I’ll still be sitting here in the Uptown Market in twelve years, listening to horror stories of infertility, too old to bother, too washed-up to care. “Mom.” I shake my head at her. “Mom, I do appreciate this.” I don’t. But even in shock, I know some things about strategy. “I do. But you have to…” I want to say something about letting me live my life. “You have to…” I want to say something about trusting that I will make the right decisions, that she raised me to make the right decisions, that life is more complicated today than it was when she and my dad got married. “You…”

  And then, just like that, my resolve is gone. It doesn’t weaken or wilt or slowly abandon me. It’s just gone. In its absence, I slump in my chair. I’ve lost my appetite. I swallow the dried spit that’s collected in the back of my throat, and I look into my mother’s brown eyes, my eyes, and I say, softly, “Kevin and I aren’t doing too well.” Then I lower my head, run my finger up and down the raised geometric pattern of the tablecloth. I concentrate on just breathing, prepared for the worst.

  My mother is oddly unmoved by my announcement. She’s still fiddling with her half-eaten salad. She doesn’t say anything. For three long minutes, we’re both just sitting there, fiddling. While my life burns.

  “A person doesn’t always end up in the situation she thought she would find herself in,” she says finally. Her voice is thin and quiet; it travels to me under the din of the restaurant. She puts down her silverware with a clink and lays both hands out in front of her, palms flat, a certain inevitability, a that’s-that quality to the gesture. “A young girl marries and expects perfection, despite what she sees around her. But, my darling, that is not how life works
. And sometimes we are forced to make the best of what we have.”

  I can feel my adrenaline rising. My face gets hot. I take deep breaths through my nose; I feel like a bull, ready to charge. What does she know? Who does she think she is, my mother who is trapped in her car wreck of a marriage, paralyzed under tons of emotional steel and broken glass. Does she think she can offer me a dose of sound psychological advice? She can’t even connect with my father in a meaningful way, and yet she can’t leave. I see them! I’m their daughter, my DNA a concoction of equal parts Len and Barbara. I know!

  But today she is bent on having her say, regardless of my pink face, my trembling fingers. “I believe that the passion one feels at the beginning of a relationship”—oh, please, don’t let my mother have just said the word “passion”—“changes, later on, into the passion one feels for one’s children.” She’s locked her gaze with mine and refuses to look away, probably so that I won’t interrupt. “Do you know who you married?”

  “Huh?”

  “Sweetheart, do you know who you married? You married a kind, gentle, intelligent man who doesn’t seem to place much value on the fine art of communication. Darling, you married your father. Perhaps you could have done better. But believe me, you could have done worse.” She sighs.

  Of course I married my father. Does she think this is a revelation to me? Only, here’s the difference, Babs: Kevin may resemble Dad, but I am not you. I’m not paralyzed, a suburban insect frozen in the amber of her own newly decorated living room. Nope, that’s not me.

  I just can’t do it, can’t accept my mother’s offer. I know what she wants from me; she wants me to reach for her from across the divide and admit that, yes, we both live here: we are proud pioneer women who must make our own happiness from within the harsh plains of our own imperfect marriages. But I won’t do it. “If Kevin is Dad,” I say lightly, “then we definitely shouldn’t be having children.” I wipe my mouth with my napkin. “Do you want dessert or something?” Before she can answer, I push my chair away from the table and make my way to the pastry counter, in search of something sweet.