by Rita Ciresi
Although it made me feel like an impostor, I never admitted my literary aspirations to anyone at these parties who asked, “And what do you do, Lisa?” I didn’t dare announce, “I am a novelist!” because I knew people would reply, “Published?” or “What’s your novel about?” or “Hey, I’ve got a great story for you—let me tell you about my great-uncle Max, who was such a character. . . .” Ebb called my secrecy unnecessary, but I suspected he was inwardly pleased he didn’t have to admit he was married to a woman who heard voices (other than his own) in her head.
Once upon a time, I’d had a career that I could speak of. I was an editor at Boorman Pharmaceuticals—until Ebb, who used to be my supervisor (and now only thinks he is) got me in the family way and proved himself to be a total control freak by firing me and asking me to marry him in the same breath. Obviously, I said yes. But I had said a whole lot more to Ebb—not all of it loving—before we became an uneasy version of Mr. and Mrs., and then two of the most disgustingly doting mommies and daddies to ever push a Graco stroller on the face of this earth.
Being a wife and mother, I soon found, was kind of nice. When it wasn’t kind of . . . stifling. And stultifying. And so utterly unfulfilling that I had to retreat to the kitchen and stuff my face full of Chicken in a Biskit crackers. Occasionally the drudgery of my domestic life seemed so hopeless that, after I scarfed all the crackers, I thought to myself, Well, what’s to stop me from chowing down on the cardboard box?
You know the old story: She wanted something more. Something that would last long after her nagging voice (“Why am I the only person living in this house who picks up after herself?”) had gone silent, forever, in the grave. So after Ebb and I got married—in between burping Danny and rocking Danny and diapering Danny—I had penned an overblown, overly punctuated autobiographical opus about my previous relationships with guys before I met Ebb. When I finally had screwed up the courage to show my oeuvre to Ebb, we got into the most plug-ugly argument of our marriage. (Me: “So you’re saying Real Men! sucks the big banana?” Ebb: “I’m saying—if you would listen for half a second without interrupting, Lisar—that you are too concerned with your characters’ genitals, instead of their hearts and their heads.”)
I begrudgingly admit it now. The only good thing that Ebb could have said about Real Men! was that it was a quick read—made even quicker by his concerted effort to keep his red pen off every page. Every paragraph. Every sentence! The plot—
**girl meets boy
**meets boy
**meets boy
—probably had a few amusing moments. But when I dared to go back and look at the manuscript, I saw that the prose was purpler than a prune, the sloppy chronology zigzagged from past to present like a clock on cocaine, and the characters spouted off at one another with a regularity that rivaled Old Faithful’s. My own mercurial heroine, in particular, threatened to burst the bulb on the emotional thermometer. Her name was Deedee. She had an equine face and a long brassy mane that kept getting so whipped in the winter wind that any editor worth her salt would have written in the margin, Is this a woman or Man O’ War at the starting gate? The real men Deedee dated all had some salient repulsive characteristic—cabbage breath, brown belly-button fuzz, hirsute ears. Hope flourished. Expectations were dashed. Cocks rose and fell. Hearts got broken.
All in all, Real Men! was a most dubious debut. But because I was all puffed up with authorial pride, I didn’t realize what a bum job I’d done until I surrendered the book to Ebb to get his constructive feedback. Ebb was a swift reader. He devoured my novel one Saturday afternoon while I took Danny to the playground and pushed him, for hours, on the baby swings. When I brought Danny home asleep in his stroller, Ebb glanced up from the last page of my manuscript and cleared his throat. Several times.
“Well, Lisar,” he finally said. “This novel of yours . . . has a lot of . . . um, heart.”
I sat down at the dining-room table next to Ebb. “Oh, I was praying you’d like it.”
“But maybe too much heart.”
I bit my lip. “How can you have too much heart? That’s like saying cake has too much frosting.”
“Too much frosting,” Ebb said, “sometimes can get messy.”
I gave Ebb nothing but icy silence, then said, “I get it. You think Real Men! is a mess.”
“Not at all,” Ebb said. “But these characters always find themselves in such trouble.”
“No trouble, no story,” I said.
“But can’t your female character get a grip on her emotions? Act in a more orderly fashion? Put a stop to this . . .”
“What? Unseemly behavior?”
“Contradictory behavior. For example—”
“Yes?” I said, pulling the manuscript from Ebb’s hands.
“Here, halfway through the first chapter—”
I turned the pages so quickly, so violently that static seemed to fly off the paper.
“Stop there,” Ebb said. “First Deedee says—”
“Wait,” I said. “Where are you on the page?”
“A third of the way down.” Ebb pointed. “After the phrase his eyes were darker than a Tootsie Pop.”
I looked at Ebb’s pointing finger with distaste. “You don’t like that phrase?”
“I’d change it to Tootsie Roll. Otherwise, his eyes have the potential to be orange or purple.”
“All right. So Roll. Get to the larger issue.”
Ebb cleared his throat. “First Deedee claims she’s madly in love with this guy with the Tootsie Pop eyes, and then in the very next sentence she refers to him as a quote—big swinging dick—unquote.”
“So?”
“Well, how did she get from point A to point Z?”
“Astute readers,” I said, “will make the connection.”
“I have to tell you frankly, Lisar, that I did not.”
I pushed Ebb’s finger off the word dick. “Maybe you just don’t identify. The characters are young. And confused!”
“Yes, but you don’t want readers to say the author is too.”
Silence. Then I said, “All right. Keep going. What else sucks?”
“Does this guy who’s . . . so amply endowed . . . have to be called Magnus?”
“That’s a legitimate Latin name. Given to many Scandinavians!”
“But earlier you claimed he was German.”
“Oh,” I said.
“And not to be a prude,” Ebb said, “but in the episodes featuring Magnus, there’s entirely too much emphasis on bodily functions.”
I clenched my fist. “People sweat! And burp! And fart! And fuck!”
“But do they have to do all four things simultaneously, so the bedroom sounds like a one-man band? Lisar, these sex scenes—”
“What about them?”
Ebb lifted—not so gently—the manuscript from my hands. “Take page two—no, here, page three, don’t you think this is a bit much for page three? The phrase beginning His tongue tucked into her pulsing cunt—”
“I spent a lot of time on that sentence,” I said. “It has some very good vowel sounds.”
“But you’ve failed to explain the significance of this cunnilingus.”
“What significance,” I asked, “can be found in a guy eating a girl out?”
“For starters,” Ebb said, “why does this Deedee want it?”
“Because it feels good.”
“What is she thinking about while he does it?”
“That’s answered in the next sentence: She wondered how long she could last before blowing an aorta—”
“Does Deedee have to time him after this—what’s the wording here?—swift penetration occurs?”
“It’s integral to the pacing of the scene!” I said.
“But—not to get too nitpicky—on page one you clearly stated her Timex was digital. And yet here you refer to the second hand of her watch.”
The way Ebb pointed out these minor—and yet so major—flaws in my writing deeply offende
d me. I began to gather up the pages of my manuscript, as if his touch had contaminated it. “I just knew you’d do this,” I said. “Read my novel like a male.”
“How did you want me to read it,” Ebb asked, “like a poodle?”
“You side with the guys in the book.”
“I most certainly do not. These aren’t real men, Lisar. These are two-dimensional specimens of the male sex, which makes your novel sound like a feminist diatribe.”
“How can it be feminist if the heroine paints her nails?”
“Green?”
“Green nail polish was all the fashion in 1986, when my novel takes place!”
A more mature couple (or at least one seasoned by a marriage counselor to engage in so-called fair-fighting techniques) probably would have backed off right there. Ebb and I argued to the point of tears (mine), and then I thanked Ebb for his time and told him I planned to solicit other, more-informed opinions. This consisted of shipping Real Men! off to a dozen literary agents, bearing a cover letter that described the novel as a hip city picaresque. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I remembered how I had written, I hope Real Men! appeals to all adult readers who still think Dr. Seuss is a hoot but who also find truth in the darker vision of life espoused by Chekhov and Dostoevsky. . . .
After Real Men! had garnered a full dozen rejections—which I could only compare to repeatedly not being asked to the high-school prom—I melodramatically ran the entire manuscript through our paper shredder, stuffed the curlicued papers beneath a cheater log in our fireplace, and tossed a match. (The gesture was merely symbolic, as I had several copies backed up on computer disks.) Once Real Men! went up in flames, I stopped writing—for all of twenty-four hours. I dusted the furniture and vacuumed the carpet and scrubbed the toilet so pristine that I hesitated to defile it with my own urine.
Then the house grew messier and messier. I had begun my second novel. In my latest untitled opus (referred to by Ebb as Number Two), I vowed to keep myself out of the realms of autobiography and pornography. So I gave myself a little distance. I wrote about not me but Ebb.
Now, you may ask: Why did I make my husband into a character when I had to live with the real thing? Good question. To which I had a sad answer: I wrote about him because I felt lonely. Ebb used to travel for his job so much that I prayed every night his plane would never crash. But then when he was in town, he was so preoccupied with all the mess at the office that he might as well have been a million miles away. I knew that saying this made me sound like one of those whiny wives reporting her side of the story in that magazine column “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” But I had to say it: Ebb was there, but not really there for me. Because he never really talked to me. About the F word. His feelings.
So when I started writing Number Two, I made up a man who had very deep feelings and who didn’t mind confessing them. I thought it would be a snap to write about my Ebbish hero—a mildly Jewish man in a gray flannel suit. Yet the more I wrote, the more I realized my own husband was a stranger. What was going on inside Ebb all day? I didn’t know. So I had to imagine. I had to give my main character, Simon Stern, some tragic flaw that I myself could understand. Which meant I made Simon the kind of man who sometimes wanted to be married—and other times did not.
In my heart I believed that Ebb wasn’t really Simon (after all, Ebb was happily married! to me!) and I knew for certain that Simon truly was not Ebb. Simon was more like me (in male drag) when he wasn’t a composite of every creature on earth who got up in the morning and pulled on a pair of trousers and knotted a tie over his starched white shirt. So I hadn’t been lying to Ebb when I told him that the man who figured so prominently in Number Two was many men indeed.
Too bad there was only one author—She Who Was Me—to catch all the flak.
As Ebb and I moved through the reception line and got our respective nonalcoholic drinks, I tried not to get too down-in-the-dumps about my situation. But there I stood in the Starlight Ballroom, fantasizing about the thunderous applause that would follow my Nobel prize acceptance speech (I owe it all to Chicken in a Biskit . . .), when in reality everyone was crowding around to congratulate not me—but Ebb.
“Great job.” “Way to go.” “Nice work.” Don’t get me wrong—I was happy that Ebb had just gotten promoted. But I also was jealous that Ebb was a Somebody whose name had appeared just that morning in the “Who’s News” section of The Wall Street Journal (Eben Strauss, 41, formerly vice president for new-product development at Boorman Pharmaceuticals, was named executive vice president for internal relations at the newly merged Scheer–Boorman LifeSciences). Ebb was a winner. I was a loser! And it made me feel like all of two pfennigs that Ebb’s professional star just kept on rising, while mine had sunk below the horizon, probably never to be seen again.
Ebb gave my hand a squeeze. “I’d like you to meet my wife, Lisar. Lisar, this is . . . I’d like you to meet . . .”
I instantly forgot the name of the beefy Husband who Ebb introduced me to. I also failed to catch the name of his Wife—who was so monstrously pregnant that I almost blurted out, Shouldn’t you go home and rest in bed? Or, better yet, whip out a metric ruler and measure your dilation?
Mr. Husband congratulated Ebb on his promotion, then asked me, “So how does it feel to be married to Mr. Who’s News?”
“Like a million bucks,” I said.
“And what about you—Lisa, was it?” asked Mrs. Wife. “Do you work too?”
“Lisar’s home right now,” Ebb said.
I am not! I felt like saying. I’m standing right next to you.
Mrs. Wife, of course, automatically assumed I was “home with the children,” because she asked, “Oh, how many children do you have?”
I didn’t look at Mrs. Wife (or her big belly). I didn’t look at Mr. Husband. I didn’t even look at Ebb. But I felt Ebb. He didn’t touch my arm, he didn’t re-squeeze my hand, and yet I sensed something quintessentially Ebbish leaning into me to show his solidarity.
“One boy,” we said in unison.
“How old?” asked Mrs. Wife.
“Almost five,” we both said.
Mr. Hub gave Ebb a playful punch on the arm. “Time for another?”
I pressed my clutch purse against my inexplicably aching stomach, then smiled too politely—which only made my stomach hurt even more. After I had endured my requisite three minutes of small talk with Wife and Hub, I finally whispered to Ebb, “I’m heading for the ladies’.”
Ebb nodded.
The ballroom was festooned with pink and white streamers dotted with red foil hearts. The band was playing some medley of cardiac-related songs—“Heart and Soul!” and “My Heart Beats for You Alone”—as I managed to make my way across the carpet without stepping onto the heels of any of these punch-bowl-owning women or pressing up too tightly against their well-suited men.
I reached the end of the red-carpeted hallway and entered the door marked LADIES. I was the sole woman in the rest room. Still, as Ebb had predicted, I managed to find trouble there. The last stall bore a plaque that seemed to suit me: HANDICAPPED. I looked over my shoulder to make sure I wasn’t being followed by a woman in a wheelchair before I clicked my heels into the handicapped stall and locked the door. I yanked up my skirt and slip and peeled down my control-top panty hose, then practically cracked my tailbone as I sat down—too hard—on the unnaturally high toilet.
It was then that I discovered my stomach had been hurting for the past quarter of an hour with good reason. A glob of blood, gross and bulbous as a brown toad, sat in the crotch of my underpants. I let out a sigh. Then I blinked back tears. This would make the subject of a great novel, I thought, if it didn’t hurt my heart so much to write melodramatic lines like Each month the blood that stained her underwear seemed to come from an inner wound no medicine could ever heal. . . .
Like most other would-be writers, I had followed the advice doled out by authors of books such as Start Your Novel Right Now (And Try Not t
o Strangle Your Spouse Before You Finish It). I had made my life my material. But even I had a limit. I already had vowed to myself that I never would write about the problem that now had come to dominate my marriage. It was just too humiliating, too ridiculous, to admit that Ebb and I had conceived our sweet little son, Danny, by accident, but now that we wanted another child, I couldn’t get knocked up if my life depended on it.
And it was all my fault (or at least all signs pointed to me as the guilty party). Before I got involved with Ebb, I had messed around with more than my fair share of guys, and somewhere along the line I had picked up a disease that sounded like a root vegetable—chlamydia—which had sat silent inside me, undiscovered, until my gynecologist finally asked, “You’ve been trying to get pregnant for how long?” How I broke the bad news to Ebb that I had a venereal disease that scarred my tubes is a story too long to go into. Suffice it to say that misfortune does not always draw a couple closer together. Although Ebb had done the gentlemanly thing and told me, “I could have given the chlamydia to you, Lisar,” his subsequent silence on the topic seemed to state with most Aesopian overtones: For every bad action there is a corresponding bad consequence. No good can ever come of recklessness.
I now had only one functioning fallopian tube. And Ebb and I were failures as lovers. At least I felt like a failure, sitting there in the handicapped stall with my head in my hands, when I remembered how hard Ebb and I had tried to conceive that month: six sweaty, desperate shots in a span of forty-eight hours, until Ebb—who must have known I needed a good laugh—finally whispered in my ear, “I won’t even ask if that last time was good for you, Lisar.” I had laughed—what else could I do?—but inside I’d been thinking, God, this is so tiresome! I swear I would pay you! never to touch me! ever again!
So another month had passed, and nothing whatsoever had come of all that effort. I swabbed the blood off my underwear with toilet paper and reached into my clutch purse for the sole super plus I always carried (the way some guys carried an umbrella—to ward off rain on a cloudy day). I stuck the tampon into my uncooperative body. Then I flushed the toilet and went over to the brown marble sink to wash my hands.
