Remind Me Again Why I Married You

by Rita Ciresi

  Then I took a head of Bibb lettuce out of the refrigerator crisper and, after maniacally swirling the leaves around in the salad spinner, I started shredding each leaf—no, worrying it!—into confetti-size bits. Now that Aye-Aye actually wanted to meet me, the publication of I’m Sorry was starting to look like a real possibility. I should have been overjoyed, but I felt creepily uneasy. I tried to reassure myself that there really wasn’t that much overlap between the fictional life of Simon Stern and the real life of Ebb. I reminded myself, too, that my fear that I wouldn’t nail down certain essential masculine details had kept my pornographic imagination under wraps. At no time did Simon ever take a leak or a crap or penetrate his wife, Robin, or even his secretary, Take-A-Letter-Maria. The plot, if anything, had been overly sanitized by my insistence that everything lewd or naughty take place solely in Simon’s head.

  Inside my heart—where the story had originated and where each successive draft had lodged deeper and deeper—I felt the troublesome opening lines of my novel pounding insistently. I’d written and rewritten that opening so many times for Playboy that I had the entire first chapter memorized, and now it was all too easy to recall the passages that might cause Ebb grief or offense:

  Every evening Simon Stern took the same route home, on a once-country road full of blind curves. When he first moved to Westchester County—solo—this part of Dobbs Ferry had been heavily wooded and studded with yellow leaping-deer road signs. But gradually, behind the thinned trees, cluster upon cluster of condominiums had sprouted like mushrooms after a hard rain. Sometimes, as Simon drove home, he felt a strong solidarity with the hundreds of men heading back to these double-locked doors and lit windows that shone gold in the dark night. Other times—like tonight—he wondered what he possibly could have in common with these ordinary mortals. As Simon turned onto his own street, easing his foot off the gas pedal and letting the car slowly coast past the DEAD END sign, he wondered: Am I the only guy on earth who, whenever he’s at work, longs to be home—but whenever he approaches home, feels like fleeing back to the office?

  Simon pulled into his driveway. The car headlights illuminated the dining-room window, where his wife, Robin, had posted a picture of a friendly brown dog in a trench coat (THIS IS A MCGRUFF HOUSE!) in response to their daughter’s Montessori-school lesson on Stranger Danger. The porch lights shone with a soft, pearly glow; the car-door slam seemed to vibrate in the cold. Robin, as usual, hadn’t done a stellar job of shoveling the new-fallen snow from the walkway. The plain black mat before the front door, hastily swept, did not announce WELCOME. Bits of crumpled, long-dead autumn leaves and cobwebs clung to the doorjamb. Just as an observant Jew always touches his fingers to his front-door mezuzah, Simon had gotten into the habit of leaning his forehead against the doorjamb—to steel himself for the evening ahead—before he fit his key into the stubborn bottom front-door lock. On each of the past three Fridays he had vowed to give the lock a squirt of WD-40, and on each successive Monday it became clear that he hadn’t kept his word over the weekend.

  When Simon opened the front door, the warm aroma of tomatoes, basil, and garlic flooded toward him. A crewel sign (hung by Robin on the wall) reminded him SO IT ISN’T HOME SWEET HOME—ADJUST! Simon put down his briefcase, stepped out of his boots, and locked the door, depositing his keys on the hall table next to the neat stack of mail. He walked into the kitchen. Robin stood at the counter, madly chopping a large Spanish onion on her beat-up wooden cutting board. Even from behind, Robin was as easy to read as a Dick and Jane text—her very butt could give off bad body language. Simon scrutinized the bow at the back of her striped apron as if its jaunty loops or frazzled, untied state would give a clue to her mood. Tonight the bow was neither perky nor drooping. Her brown hair—the usual wild, static mess—just grazed her thin shoulders, which were hunched in concentration. When she turned—her long, wrinkly fingers clasped around a wicked-looking Wüsthof knife—she broke into a smile wide with pleasantly crooked teeth. She put down the knife and gave Simon a welcome-home kiss, which she instantly wiped away from his cheek with her thumb.

  When Simon first met Robin, her lips had been clean and pale as orchids. Now Robin always seemed to be dabbing away traces of her lipstick from Simon’s rough cheek. She wore the color of flesh upon her lips, a shade that did not appeal to Simon half as much as the pale pink found on his secretary, Maria. . . .

  As I shredded the last leaf of Bibb lettuce into oblivion, my abdomen started to feel raw, as if I had swallowed art and real life in one big gulp and now they were waging war inside my stomach. Simon’s route home from the office was . . . Ebb’s route home from the office. Our main drag bore leaping-deer signs. Our street, a DEAD END sign. Our condo, a MCGRUFF HOUSE sign. Our front hall, an ADJUST! sign.

  Wait, I thought. Please let me revise all that. But it was too late now. Or was it? Aye-Aye had said he wanted to suggest a few changes. I poured myself a big glass of forbidden wine. As I took a gulp huge enough to make me cough, I thought, I’m Sorry sucks so badly that I ought to throw the whole manuscript down the sewer for the rats to consume. No, it’s so perfect that I wouldn’t change a word—in fact, I’m going to retitle it STET.

  Headlights faintly lit the darkened dining room as Ebb’s Audi crunched through the thin layer of snow left in the driveway. In spite of the forecast (which called for more snow), Ebb would leave his car parked outside, because neither of us had called a handyman to fix our fickle automatic garage-door opener. Our condominium was supposed to be maintenance-free. Yet our last Mr. Fix It had been dismissed by the homeowners’ board for being “too forward” with women. I wondered which of the attractive women on our street he had tried to seduce. Then I wondered why he had never shown the slightest interest in dropping his tools in our front hall and overpowering . . . well, me.

  Ebb cut the engine. The car door slammed. I hastily jettisoned the rest of my wine into the sink and rinsed out the glass. It would have been wifely to greet Ebb at the front door (Let me take your coat, let me pour you a drink, let me be your sexual slave, etc.), but I wanted Ebb to have the interesting experience of trying to insert his key in the front-door lock. I listened. Ebb’s key scraped. The tumbler of the lock refused to turn. Ebb muttered, “Fuck.” He tried again, and on the third attempt the lock gave way and Ebb burst into the front hall accompanied by a blast of cold air.

  He set down his briefcase. I listened, with trepidation, as he riffled through the mail I had left on the front-hall table. Along with a couple of women’s magazines whose headlines expressed these sentiments: LET HIM KNOW YOU LONG FOR HIM! GIVE YOUR MAN THE SEX HE WANTS! the mailman had brought me the latest issue of Publishers Weekly (which I knew I’d plow through tonight, growing sick with envy as I read about every other author’s six-figure advance). Ebb had received a stack of stiff white bills, half a dozen charitable appeals, and a thick crimson periodical that I called The B School Brag Rag. I had glanced at Ebb’s alumni notes and noticed that he had failed to report his promotion. Maybe he didn’t want the development office hitting on him for a bigger contribution. Or maybe he was just so successful that he had ceased to care if anyone else thought he was or not.

  Still in his gloves and coat, Ebb entered the kitchen. I knew he was constipated again when he held up the tie that Danny and I had knotted around Snow Man’s neck and said, “This was one of my better neckties.”

  “Really?” I kept on chopping with my knife. “I ranked it among your ugliest.”

  “We have a small difference of opinion, then.” Ebb tossed the tie onto the microwave cart and pointed to my cutting board. “Aren’t you slicing that cucumber too thin?”

  I pressed my lips together. “Last time I made a salad, you said the slices were too thick.”

  “Did I?”

  “Indeed you did.”

  “Oh. Well. Wait here—I’ll get a ruler.”

  I waved Ebb away. He retreated to the dining room. Because I knew he was going to drape his trench coat ov
er a chair, I called out, “At the risk of sounding rude—”

  “I know,” Ebb said. “There’s a wonderful invention. Called the hanger.”

  “You stole the words,” I said. “Right out of my mouth.”

  Ebb took a long time hanging his coat in the hall closet. He probably was gazing with longing at the front door—and maybe even considering going back out again. But then he returned to the kitchen and leaned against the opposite counter. I sneaked a peek at him out of the corner of my eye. He wore a gray suit that I had helped him select at Jos. A. Bank (sexy) and an impeccably starched white shirt (also ooo-la in my book). But to his immense discredit, he also wore a tie the color of cow’s liver. God! I couldn’t believe he had gone out in public wearing such a shiny, slimy thing. Undress! I wanted to command him. Immediately! Or there shall be dire consequences tonight!

  Ebb cocked his head toward the tomato sauce bubbling in the pot. “Smells good,” he said.

  I kept whacking away with my Wüsthof.

  “All right,” Ebb said. “I’m sorry I offended you . . . and your cucumber.”

  “Forgiven,” I said, and handed him a cucumber slice wide as an Oreo cookie. Ebb bit into it, and I smiled, knowing it would haunt him five minutes later in the form of an irrepressible burp.

  “Where’s Danny?” Ebb asked.

  “Fell asleep upstairs,” I said. “When he wakes up, ask him to smile.”

  “His tooth finally came out?”

  I nodded and fetched what looked like a worn pebble from the back of the counter. The tooth cupped in my hand probably had been the very first white stump to appear in Danny’s bubbly, saliva-ridden mouth—yet it seemed like just yesterday that I had gently rubbed the rice cereal off its surface with a washcloth.

  “This tooth made me weep,” I said.

  Ebb blinked, then cleared his throat. He pointed to the winking light on the answering machine. “I don’t understand why you can’t pick up the phone while you’re writing.”

  “I’ve told you a million times. It breaks my concentration.”

  “Did you listen to these messages?”

  “The first is from Law and Order,” I said. “When I heard her voice, I thought she was calling to find out how our for-sale sign got dented. Did you see? It looks like somebody lobbed an iceball at her picture.”

  Ebb shrugged. “Danny, probably.”

  “I had my eye on Danny all day long.”

  “Maybe the paperboy did it.”

  “The paperboy is an old man,” I said—although, as far as I could tell, the guy who tossed the Times onto our front porch from his Chevrolet station wagon was all of fifty. “Law and Order wanted to know—again—if we’d be willing to put our front door on a lockbox so other realtors can get in.”

  “We’ve already discussed that,” Ebb said. “A lockbox makes you a prime target for intruders.”

  “But, Ebb, I want our place to sell—”

  “Case closed. It just isn’t safe.”

  Ebb’s voice sounded far too bossy to please me. So I was pleased to report, “The next call is Victoria, leaving us the name and number of a good Christian handyman.”

  “What for?” Ebb asked.

  “To fix our front-door lock.”

  “I’m fixing the front-door lock.”

  “Are you?” I asked.

  “Yes. This weekend. With two squirts of WD-40.”

  “Well, I need some guy—Christian, Jewish, or voodoo—to fix the garage-door opener too.”

  Ebb winced. “Why do you have to tell Victoria about all our household problems?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “She noticed the front-door latch wasn’t working right when she came by to pick up some old clothes for some refugees.”

  “Victoria came here? And you let her in?”

  “What was I supposed to do? Chase her off the premises with a shotgun?”

  “But, Lisar—why can’t you understand? I hate the way that Victoria gets into every little corner of my life. And now you’ve probably given her some of my shirts and jackets—”

  “A few ties too,” I said.

  “—and my pants. I can’t stand that she has my pants.”

  “Relax. It’s not like she’s going to wear them herself.”

  “But everywhere I turn, she’s there. I have no privacy whatsoever.” Ebb swallowed down a cucumber-induced belch. He reached up to loosen his ugly tie. “God, what a day. I got pounded.”

  “Tell.”

  “Only if you—”

  “Oh, Ebb,” I said. “How many times do I have to promise? I swear I won’t write about it.”

  Ebb looked down at my hands—and after he determined my fingers weren’t crossed, he said, “SB women want more stalls in the new cafeteria bathrooms. So I had to call this town meeting on potty equity.”

  Ebb looked at me hopefully. When I failed to laugh, he said, “I was counting on you to be amused.”

  “What’s so funny,” I asked, “about women wanting the same things as men?”

  Ebb took a pass on that question. He went over to the cabinet, took down a glass, and drew four or five ounces of water from the automatic dispenser on the refrigerator. He slugged down his water, then left his empty glass on the counter. I repressed the urge to say, Put that glass in the dishwasher—or at least the sink!

  “You know,” he said, “at this potty equity meeting—which lasted an hour and a half—not a single woman got up to use the john. Meanwhile, I stood stoically at the podium, praying my bladder wouldn’t break. After a while I got so bored, I started cataloging in my Filofax all the euphemisms for toilet I could think of.”

  “How many did you get?”

  “Close to a dozen.”

  I put down my knife. “I can do loads better than that,” I said, heading for the hallway.

  “Where are you going?” Ebb called after me.

  “To get your Filofax.”

  “I left it at the office—”

  “Bull-dinky,” I called out as I knelt on the hallway floor and snapped open Ebb’s briefcase, revealing a mess of papers and folders inside. I clutched Ebb’s thick black Filofax. “You never go anywhere without your calendar,” I said as I toted it back into the kitchen. “Half the time I’m surprised you don’t bring it to bed.”

  “You’re my calendar in bed,” Ebb said. “These days.” He cleared his throat. “Before I forget, what was your temperature this morning?”

  “The same as yesterday,” I said, and put his Filofax down on the counter, almost knocking Danny’s lost tooth to the floor. As I turned to March 20, I tried not to get pissed at Ebb. But bells—and angry whistles—seemed to ring and shriek in my ears whenever I considered how methodical he was about everything. I’m standing right next to you, I thought. So close I can practically smell the office—a strange, sexy combination of Xerox toner and forced heat—upon your jacket. And I want another child as much as you do—but I don’t want to lose a lover along the way. So why do you have to wait to hear if my temperature has spiked before you even touch me?

  I looked over at Ebb. As usual, he was totally oblivious to what I was feeling. His eyes were transfixed upon that cucumber on the opposite counter. Waging within him, I knew, was a great moral struggle: eat more (and rue it later) or eat none (but spend the rest of the evening lusting after it). Finally, against his better judgment, he reached for another slice.

  I sighed and turned to March 20 in Ebb’s Filofax. Sometimes I worried that Ebb was becoming a total suit. It did my heart good to see that he still was capable of engaging in a subversive act worthy of the lowest of eleven-year-old boys. During this potty-equity meeting, while the SB women probably had buffeted about worn phrases like unequal rights, hidden animosity, and hostile atmosphere, Ebb had been standing at the podium scribbling down head and throne and porcelain God—not to mention john and crapper.

  “You forgot loo,” I said, plucking a pencil from the front of Ebb’s Filofax and scribbling beneath his list.
“And privy. And plain old pot. And prayer box.”

  “Lisar, you should have been there. These women were all over me—”

  “How about piss post?” I asked.

  “I felt like I was in that Greek drama where the women shred the man to bits—”

  “The Bacchae,” I murmured, then blurted out, “The reading room. The thunderbox. And in Shakespeare, King Lear—or maybe it’s the jester—calls it the jakes. Then you yourself call it the warshroom—why, when your mother calls it the powder room?”

  “My father taught me it was polite.” Ebb hesitated. “Why does your mother call it taking a walk?”

  “I told you, she grew up plotzing in an outhouse.”

  Ebb repressed a burp. “How many times do I have to tell you that plotz doesn’t mean poop? It means to burst your seams—spontaneously combust—with excitement.” Ebb held out his hand. “Can I have my Filofax back now?”

  I scribbled heaper. Then dumper.

  “My Filofax, please.”

  I turned to Saturday, March 21, and under Ebb’s already long To-Do List, I wrote Eat a—

  Ebb grasped my fingers before I could scrawl prune.

  “Put a pen in your hand,” he scolded me, “and you go right out of control.”

  “This is a pencil,” I said. “You can erase it.” I pointed to the ten-thirty-A.M. slot for Saturday. “What’s this JS?”

  “I’m seeing Josh Silber to go over the taxes.”

  My heart thudded as I remembered my Playboy income. “Don’t you trust Josh?”

  “Of course I trust him. I gave him the job, didn’t I?”

  Then why don’t you just sign off on the return? I felt like asking. But I already knew the answer. Ebb probably owed more in taxes this year than I had earned in my entire life. Of course he would be careful to make sure he didn’t overpay the IRS. And of course I had been careful enough to say to Josh, “Could you keep the origin of my income secret? At least until I get around to telling Ebb?”