by Rita Ciresi
“Well, then we wouldn’t have had time to stop at the Coffee Clatch,” I said.
“The Coffee Clatch?”
“We always go to the Coffee Clatch after we look at houses.”
“What for?”
“To talk. And drink cappuccinos.”
Ebb was the master of silent disapproval (when, of course, he wasn’t the master of not-so-silent disapproval). He kept quiet for a few moments, then said, “I know it’s five o’clock in the morning.”
“Not quite.”
“Which is not the optimum time for this discussion. But I was hoping that you and Cynthia could have come up with a short list of houses by now.”
“I’m looking for the perfect house,” I said.
“No house is ever perfect.”
“I want mine to be.” I stretched out my legs and touched my cold big toe against Ebb’s even colder ankle. “Besides, you were the one who warned me that we should proceed with caution. At that Valentine’s Day party, you practically stood up and applauded when Cynthia said, ‘Choose your house the way you choose your spouse.’ ”
“I don’t recall Cynthia saying that.”
“Well, I recall you replying”—I lowered my voice to imitate Ebb—” ‘Yes, this is a decision that should be made with the utmost prudence.’ ”
Ebb gave me a mild swat on the butt. “I did not say utmost.”
When I laughed, I heard my voice echo inside Ebb’s chest. “I insist—most vociferously—that you did.”
My imitation must have annoyed Ebb, because he said, “I don’t want to be critical, Lisar—”
“Then don’t be.”
“—but I wish that you and Cynthia would spend more time on the task at hand and less time on telling each other your life stories at the Coffee Clatch.”
I rolled off Ebb and lifted myself up on my elbows. “I am not telling Cynthia my life story at the Coffee Clatch.”
“Then are you showing her your novel? At the Coffee Clatch?”
“Of course not. She might spill her cappuccino all over my only hard copy.”
“Didn’t your doctor tell you not to drink coffee?”
I flopped on my back and stared up at the skylight. “I drink decaf.”
“Decaf still has three percent caffeine.”
“Well, that’s the three percent I need to keep myself from strangling Danny.” I listened to Danny snoring. “Oh, I swear, if you don’t get home early tonight—”
“I always come home early on Fridays.”
“—then I’m going to end up a headline in the Daily News. MOTHER STUFFS SON IN TRASH CAN. Sub-headline: THANK GOD DAD FORGOT TO TAKE OUT THE GARBAGE.”
“Twice I forgot,” Ebb said.
“Three times,” I said. “And you keep telling me that you’re going to fix that stubborn front-door lock.”
“This weekend,” Ebb said. “I promise.”
As Ebb plucked his glasses off the nightstand, the alarm clock kicked into action. I brought my hands up to my ears. Ebb hastily put on his glasses and reached over to turn off this obnoxious clock—a gag gift that I had purchased for him in Chinatown—which was shaped like a crowing bantam rooster. At the designated hour, Mr. Chanticleer opened his beak and squawked in an Asian voice, “WISE AND SHINE! WISE AND SHINE! WISE AND SHINE!” Usually Ebb woke up between 4:55 and 4:59, before Mr. Chanticleer even had a chance to crow. Now he turned the alarm forward—as he always did—to wake me at seven A.M.
I tapped him on the back. “Who were you dreaming about before you woke up?”
Ebb hesitated, then put Mr. Chanticleer back on the nightstand. “Stay out of my dreams, Lisar, and I’ll stay out of yours.”
“Fine,” I said. “You weren’t in mine, anyway. I was dreaming about—”
“Spare me the explicit details.”
“—a deep, dark fjord.”
“A fjord? A fjord!”
“Oh, stop saying fjord.” I wrinkled up my forehead. “How do you spell fjord, anyhow?”
Ebb sighed. “I’m getting out of this bed now, Lisar.”
“You could stay.”
“I also could be late for work. Besides, someone has to shovel out the driveway, since you’re not supposed to lift.”
I clucked my tongue. Not that I was exactly eager to strain my ripening ovaries by heaving great shovelfuls of snow out of the driveway. But I was getting just a bit sick of the way my useless eggs and clogged fallopian tube dictated every aspect of my behavior. And I confess my feelings got hurt when Ebb squeezed my hand and told me to go back to sleep. I didn’t need sleep. I needed—or at least wanted—some hot, screaming sex (the kind that would wake up not only Danny but our neighbors).
I watched Ebb stand up and pluck his bathrobe from the top of the monstrous pile of clothes he had discarded on the armchair. He put on his robe and then padded—bare feet on cold carpet—into the bathroom that separated our room from Danny’s room. I grabbed his pillow and hugged it against my body. After that, I held my breath. And listened. To the awful sound of a forty-one-year-old man valiantly attempting to complete his mandatory morning push-ups on the bathroom tile. Oh, the huffing. The puffing! That last desperate grunt before Ebb hit the floor with a final thud.
I pulled the covers over my head and wondered why Ebb thought I had no pride or shame or sense of decency. I would never admit to Cynthia that I was married to a man who couldn’t even complete two dozen push-ups. I would never reveal that whenever Ebb took off his socks at night, he merely tossed them in the general direction of the laundry basket (rarely scoring two points)—or that once Ebb (whose head had been buried between my thighs) had mistaken a paper jam in our fax machine for my admittedly loud moans of pleasure. I would never confess that Ebb’s marriage proposal had made ample reference to that ludicrous study issued in 1986 that claimed a woman over the age of thirty had more chances of getting blown up by a terrorist bomb than of getting hitched with Mr. Right. And I never, ever would admit that after we had conceived Danny accidentally, Ebb and I had been so puzzled, and repeatedly disappointed, to find we couldn’t get pregnant a second time that I had begun to think: Maybe Ebb and I should get divorced—but keep on fucking each other like crazed weasels in heat—and that way we might just get pregnant and have to get married all over again.
I knew Ebb thought that Cynthia and I had gone straight from “Hello, how are you?” to “Is your gynecologist, like mine, a real prick?” But I hadn’t gone straight. It had taken me all the way until the end of February before I obtained the name of Cynthia’s gynecologist (and why shouldn’t I ask, since a good physician is so hard to find?) and all the way up to Saint Patrick’s Day before I wheedled out of her the name of her hairdresser. Although I bitched about myself to Cynthia, I never once complained to her about Ebb. And why should I? Cynthia had everything under the sun that I wanted—a well-paying job, great clothes, good looks, a swell house. The only thing she didn’t have was a husband. A good husband. I wanted her to envy me for something.
So I kept all my stories about Ebb inside. Instead, it was Cynthia who opened up to me during our little tête-à-têtes at the Coffee Clatch, Cynthia who (over the obscene gurgle of the espresso machine) complained about men, Cynthia who told me the sad tale of her relationship with her ex-husband, Angus Farquhar. I listened. Perhaps too closely. As any would-be novelist would. Oh, please don’t tell me this, I silently begged, when Cynthia revealed that Angus had hairy shoulder blades, that Angus had a crooked cock, that Angus routinely threw his orange peels into the side of the double sink without the garbage disposal. Oh, please don’t give me a single slice of information that I would be tempted to swipe and stick in my fiction! But Cynthia kept on delivering. And so I kept on listening—noting a detail here, a detail there—about Angus Farquhar’s rakish behavior.
“He leched after my friends,” Cynthia said.
“Gross,” I said. Then I looked down at my wrinkled khakis and scuffed loafers and said, “Do you think he would ha
ve leched after me?”
“Lisa, he went after anything in a skirt! And then he even carried on a shamefully indiscreet affair. With his trashy-assed little secretary.”
“Uh-oh,” I said. “I wish you hadn’t told me that.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s what happens in the novel I wrote. The guy in my book gets the hots for his secretary—”
Cynthia sniffed. “That’s so typical.”
I blushed. “I guess it is kind of an overused plot.”
“But a realistic one,” Cynthia said. “Men just love their secretaries.”
I licked the last of the foam off my coffee mug. “Ebb hates his. He’s always complaining about her.”
“She does sound odd on the phone.”
For a second, I felt hot jealousy flame up inside me. “You call Ebb?”
“Just to check in with him once or twice a week,” Cynthia said. “But I hardly ever get through to him.”
You and me both, I thought, then said, “His secretary is kind of overly protective of him.”
“So was she the inspiration for the secretary in your novel?”
“Oh, hell no,” I said. “Vicki’s totally undesirable. She must be around the same age as Ebb, but she’s one of those churchy old ladies who . . . well, have you ever driven by those huge craft stores on Route 9? And wondered who shops there? Vicki knits and crochets. She does needlepoint and crewel. She makes samplers.”
Cynthia shuddered.
“For all I know,” I said, “she even gets weird with pipe cleaners.”
“That must be wonderful.”
“What, the pipe cleaners?”
Cynthia shook her head. “Being married to a man you actually can trust—to go to work and not wander.”
I wanted to tell Cynthia that Ebb had wandered—so far away from me that when he was in Boston or Cincinnati or even just downstairs while I was upstairs, I sometimes needed to remember why I still loved him, and so I buried my face in his shirts and jackets and breathed in his cool, clean smell: a combination of Edge and Sure and Zest. I wanted to tell Cynthia that even though I felt lonely when Ebb wasn’t home, sometimes when he was home I felt even lonelier.
But I simply said, “Oh, Ebb . . . Ebb . . . Ebb works too hard to think about wandering.”
“In the fifties,” Cynthia said, “women would have called him a good provider.”
“What do you suppose they’d call him now?”
Cynthia smiled. “You call him, Lisa.”
“No, you.”
“A keeper?”
My face flushed with pleasure. “I’ll tell him you said so. The next time he forgets to throw out the garbage.”
“If that’s his worst fault—”
“It isn’t.”
“Then what is?”
I thought about it for a moment, then laughed. “There’s so much to choose from! But if I can fault Ebb for just one thing, it’s this: He’s just so busy being Mr. Successful that he never takes the time to consider that I really want to make it too. I really want my book to sell.”
“It’ll sell, Lisa. But I wish you’d listen to me. I wish you’d get an agent.”
I must have felt the caffeine kicking in, because I blurted out, “I already have one.”
“You do?”
Cynthia looked so impressed that I couldn’t resist piling it on. “A Norwegian one.”
“Norwegian!”
“Well, sort of faux-Norwegian. Manufactured in Minnesota, not Oslo. I think Ifor’s parents or grandparents came over to till the wheat on the Great Plains.”
I knew I had piqued Cynthia’s interest when she sighed and said, “He sounds very . . . sturdy.”
“Sturdy is not the word,” I said. “Ifor looks like a big bad bohunky sailor. No, I take that back. He looks like a Norse god. Plus he’s single. Not that I’m on the market.” I glanced around the Coffee Clatch—caught the eye of a too-cute college boy at the counter who was ordering an espresso—and then sighed. “Cynthia, my agent is so hot—so totally on fire—that he already got me—”
Cynthia’s blue eyes shone. “Published?”
I waited until the espresso machine stopped gurgling before I nodded, leaned across the table, and whispered, “Swear you won’t tell Ebb. But I’m in Playboy. This month. My words, if not my breasts.”
Keeping secrets from your spouse was supposed to spell disaster for your marriage. But in my case, secrecy kept my marriage on track. Ebb would have had a cow—no, he would have given birth to a whole herd of Holsteins—if he knew what I really was hiding from him.
Last year—determined to make it as a Lady Author—I had sent off a query letter, synopsis, and the first fifty pages of what was then Number Two to a young hotshot literary agent whose photograph I had spotted—and swooned over—in Publishers Weekly. I don’t know why Ifor “I. I.” Iforson (whom I secretly had rechristened “Aye-Aye”) had fished my hopeful envelope from the vast ocean of manuscripts that flooded his desk. I only knew my lungs felt punctured of air when I picked up the phone and this deep, bullish voice growled, “Lisa D. Strauss. I. I. Iforson. Tell me about this novel of yours.”
My throat suddenly felt dry. The entrepreneurial skills I’d learned in Girl Scout Troop 482 (“How about a box of Trefoils—which freeze really well—to go with your Thin Mints?”) failed me, and I stuttered out to Aye-Aye the most retarded sales pitch of the century. “My novel is about . . . a man.”
“More specific.”
“A man,” I said, “in midlife crisis.”
“So an Everyman,” Aye-Aye said.
“Not every man—”
“Yes, every man goes through that tiresome midlife shit.”
“Oh,” I said. “Do you think my plot is . . . um, tired?”
“It’s definitely been written before. These pages you sent me are intriguing—”
“Oh, thank you, thank you!”
“—but the whole opening moves slower than a turd from a tortoise.”
I hesitated. “I guess I can step up the pace a bit.”
“A lot. Not a bit. I want you to boil these fifty pages down to five—”
“Five!” Some little voice inside me—which sounded suspiciously Ebbish—said, Temper, temper, Lisar. But I didn’t heed the warning. “I spent hours writing those first fifty pages.”
“Well, spend another minute chucking them into the wastebasket,” Aye-Aye said. “And get on with the story. Now, give me your plot in two sentences or less.”
I swallowed. “Simon Stern—who up until this point in his life has been decent, dependable, and dull as pie—wakes up one morning and realizes he no longer loves his job—or child—or wife.”
I heard the scritch of Aye-Aye’s pencil on paper. “And then?”
Shit! I only had one sentence left! I swallowed. “Well, after Simon attempts to . . . um . . . break free from his life by . . . um . . . getting it on with his secretary . . . um . . . he realizes he can’t escape his destiny—” I cringed. “No, scratch that.”
“Scratch what?”
“Aren’t you taking notes?”
“No, I’m scribbling down my lunch order for my assistant. Hold on.” The phone clattered. A chair squeaked, and then Aye-Aye’s muffled voice said, “No seeds on the kaiser. Light on the oil and vinegar. And absolutely no banana peppers.” The phone clattered again. “You were saying?”
“I forget.” I paused. “Didn’t you get the synopsis I sent you?”
“It’s sitting right in front of me. On my desk.” I heard Aye-Aye shuffle through some papers. “Or at least it was a moment ago.”
I wanted to throw the phone across the room. How insulting! demeaning! humiliating! Aye-Aye had used my synopsis as scratch paper. He had written, Bring me a turkey sandwich, slave! and dispatched it in the hands of his lackey to the corner deli. And I had devoted hours to crafting that summary—until I had memorized the damn thing and could have (and should have) repeated it word for word to
Aye-Aye:
This is a modern morality tale about an ordinary man who wakes up one spring morning dissatisfied with his life and who dreams of ditching it all and starting over. But the more he fantasizes about getting rid of his job, his house, and his family, the more he becomes consumed with guilt. Simon Stern wants to prove that he is a good son, a good husband, a good father, and a good company man—but by almost succumbing to the charms of his secretary he finds himself on the brink of becoming the type of guy he most despises: a man without a moral compass.
“Didn’t you get a chance to read my synopsis?” I asked Aye-Aye.
“Of course I skimmed it. But tell me: Is Simon based on someone you know?”
I scrunched up my face. “Sort of.”
“Are you married?”
“I’m hoping to stay that way. But maybe I’m just a dreamer.”
“Have you shown this novel to your husband?”
“Of course not. He’s so hypercritical.”
“Ah. Just like—”
“No. Not just like, sort of like—”
“—this fussy Simon Stern.” Aye-Aye laughed. “God, I just love the stuff you have here about his constipation.”
“Ebb isn’t constipated,” I said. “I mean, maybe he could stand to eat an extra prune every now and then—”
“And the way he wears those lousy-looking ties. And refuses to cheat on his morning push-ups. But does your husband really lie to the IRS?”
“Well, we do have this fax machine—at the bottom of our bed—so we can claim a home office—”
“So would we need a legal vetting?” Aye-Aye asked.
“Huh?”
“For instance, would your husband’s lover sue if she saw herself in this book?”
“Wait a second,” I said. “My husband doesn’t have a lover.”
“Oh yes, he does,” Aye-Aye said.
“Oh no, he doesn’t.”
“Honey, he’s nailing—or at least thinking about nailing—this Take-A-Letter-Maria in your novel, and for most people that’s good as gold he’s porking his secretary in real life.”
“But I’m his Maria,” I said. “In real life.”
“Wait. I’m confusing the dramatis personae here.”
