Remind Me Again Why I Married You

by Rita Ciresi

  I picked up the Times and checked the weather (a cold front—and another snowstorm—were predicted for the weekend). As I turned to the financial section to the kind of article Lisa never would deign to read—

  PLATINUM LEADS A RETREAT IN PRECIOUS METALS TRADING

  —the sweeps of Lisa’s broom grew slower and slower, then stopped altogether. I held the newspaper still and strained to hear Lisa’s lowered voice.

  “My feelings exactly.” She laughed. “I swear, they are so incompetent—”

  I cleared my throat loudly. Within a minute, Lisa was off the phone and the broom—harder, more furious—started up again. I wondered how many times Lisa would go over the same patch before she decided that some crumbs were permanently embedded in the tile.

  Lisa finally retired her broom to the hall closet and came into the living room carrying her Whistler’s Mother cup full of hot, fragrant Perfectly Peach tea—and the dreaded Publishers Weekly. I couldn’t stand when Lisa read Publishers Weekly. She pounced upon its pages the way I always (secretly) pounced on my alumni notes, her face turning lime-green with envy as she read about whichever best-selling lady author!—got whatever huge advance payment!—that if there were any justice in the world!—which there wasn’t!—rightfully should go to literati like Lisa!—if and when she ever found the time to finish writing her novel.

  I lowered the Times and watched Lisa sink into the cloth chair opposite me. She propped her feet on the wooden coffee table. Her white socks, worn thin at the sole and faded gray on the bottom, sported a large hole. Her big toe poked obscenely out.

  “How is Cynthia?” I asked.

  “You seemed pretty eager to find out,” Lisa said.

  “How—by sitting here reading about plunges in platinum prices?”

  “You clearly were eavesdropping on our conversation.” Lisa raised her mug to her mouth and immediately put it back down on the side table. “Ow. I burned my lips. And what the hell is an eave anyway? You’d think I’d know, after all this house-hunting.”

  I rustled the pages of the business section. “Why do you have to talk about men with Cynthia?”

  “How do you know we were discussing the male species?”

  “Because I heard you say the word incompetent.”

  “Har!” Lisa waggled her tongue with glee. “We were talking about plumbers. Cynthia’s upstairs toilet gets clogged.” Lisa watched me for a minute. “Why do you get so knocked out of shape about my talking to Cynthia? She’s my friend.”

  “She’s your agent,” I said.

  “But I really like her.”

  “Do you have to like her at a coffee shop?”

  Lisa didn’t answer. She pushed her foot forward on the coffee table, and a pile of women’s magazines—Vogue, Glamour, Cosmo—slid to the floor. I gazed down at one of the screaming-meemy headlines—HOW TO GET HIM TO OPEN UP TO YOU—before I said, “I’m curious what you discuss over these cups of cappuccino—which probably cost more than a decent pair of socks.”

  Lisa looked down at her holey socks; I saw her big toe curl back. “I don’t complain about you, if that’s what you’re driving at. Although Cynthia has been known to dis her ex.” She laughed. “Angus Farquhar—”

  “You know his name?” I asked.

  “I just said it was Angus. But why are you looking at me like that? It’s not like I said his trouser size.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “You know his trouser size?”

  “My guess is probably thirty-six. Cynthia said he was tall but trim. With extremely rugged good looks, like he’d been left out on the heath.”

  “The heath?”

  “He’s Scottish,” Lisa said. “A real Scot. From Scotland. Not from Staten Island. Or Tennessee.”

  “So where did Cynthia meet this real Scot?”

  “At a convention. Of the American Realtors Association.” Lisa got a faraway look in her eye, as if she were gazing back into the past and seeing the situation unfold right before her very eyes. “She met him in April. They got hitched in May. But by June, Cynthia discovered that Angus wasn’t the man she had married.”

  “Well,” I asked, “who was he, then?”

  “Somebody else.” Lisa looked at me as if I had the intelligence of a Fordhook lima bean. “Let me explain.”

  “Please do,” I said, all the while thinking: Please do not.

  Lisa set her Whistler’s Mother cup down on the side table. “Cynthia thought Angus was totally sophisticated and cultured—but then he turned out to be the type of guy who installed a miniature telly in the w.c. so he wouldn’t miss a minute of a soccer match.”

  “I see,” I said. “What else do you know about this Angus? Besides the fact that he watched the World Cup while he pooped?”

  “He has hairy shoulder blades.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Hairy—”

  “I heard you the first time,” I said.

  “Then why did you act like you didn’t?”

  “I’m just surprised, that’s all,” I said. “About the specificity. Of your information.”

  “Oh, I know everything there is to know about Angus.”

  I’d been slightly curious about the man who had won Cynthia’s heart. But now I was about to learn a lot more than I ever wanted to know. Lisa told me that Angus Farquhar cheated at croquet. Angus Farquhar refused to floss his teeth. Angus Farquhar slapped his ruddy cheeks when he donned his Royall Lyme aftershave, which woke Cynthia up far too early each morning. Angus Farquhar insisted that Cynthia prepare him a full English breakfast every day: fried eggs and rasher of bacon, toad in the hole, and baked beans on toast. Cynthia—who was no cook—came to resent the smell of the baked beans, never mind the stink of his Royall Lyme. And she grew to loathe the sight of Farquhar’s socks, which were gray with red heels, the kind that crafts-oriented women fashioned into stuffed toy monkeys.

  “Once Angus went berserk,” Lisa said, “because Cynthia hadn’t rolled his monkey socks into a neat round sphere—similar to a soccer ball—before she put them away in his drawers. Cynthia said she never felt better than the day she drop-kicked Farquhar’s socks out the front door and out of her life.”

  “No doubt it felt liberating,” I said. “Especially if he kept the socks and she kept the house.”

  Lisa clucked her tongue. “Why shouldn’t Cynthia keep the house? Farquhar is a builder. He can always put up another.”

  A wiser guy would have changed the subject. I glanced down at the Publishers Weekly that hovered ominously on Lisa’s lap—then, convinced Lisa had said something negative about me to Cynthia in exchange for all this dirt on Angus F., I foolishly plowed ahead. “You know, Lisa,” I said, “secrets are traded—not given away.”

  “Farquhar is an ex. And an ex is fair conversational game.” Lisa took a long sip of her tea. “I don’t see why you’re so fixated on what I discuss with Cynthia. I never ask what you talk about with Josh.”

  “Josh and I talk numbers,” I said. “Not women.”

  “You’re sure you never talk about the fair sex?”

  “From time to time,” I said, “we may make passing references to you and Deb.”

  “Ah-ha.”

  “But you aren’t the fair sex,” I said. “You’re our wives.”

  “Very amusing.” Lisa raised her Whistler’s Mother mug to her mouth—and, just like Mrs. Whistler, she looked resolutely off into the distance.

  “Let me rephrase that statement,” I said.

  “Right,” Lisa said. “Make a stab at it.”

  “I meant that what goes on between you and me—and Josh and Deb for that matter—ought to be considered off-limits. For instance, I’ve never once mentioned to Josh what we’re going through with the fertility doctor.”

  Lisa scrunched up her face. “I don’t even want to talk to the doctor about what I’m going through with the doctor.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So you haven’t talked about that to Cynthia?”

  “Are y
ou crazy?” Lisa asked.

  “You never talk about sex with—”

  “Are you crazy? Men are the ones who talk down and dirty all the time.”

  “That’s a myth. Perpetuated by women.”

  “Oh, go on, Ebb. Men tell filthy jokes.”

  “Granted, but—”

  “And go to topless bars. And mess around on their wives.”

  “Some of them do,” I said. “But some of them don’t. There are plenty of decent men in the world, Lisa.”

  Lisa shrugged as if to say, Show me one. Then she yawned—as if the sight of me made her tired—and opened her Publishers Weekly. I snapped the financial section back open. What was the matter with Lisa? I mean, I had been on the road a lot during our marriage. Didn’t she appreciate the sacrifices I had made? A lot of guys would have done whatever. I never once was unfaithful to her. I never once.

  Unless you counted what I once had watched on the pay-per-movie TV in a Ramada Inn in Kansas—and the fantasies that had played out in my head ever since.

  It had been an innocent mistake. After a long day of meetings, I had sat on the edge of the hotel bed to watch the evening news, but I had hit the wrong number on the remote. The TV screen had melted into a haze of purple and blue, and on the screen appeared a man and a woman. The man was fucking a woman, from behind, in front of a mirror. I didn’t know what captured my imagination most—the position, the reflection in the mirror, the pistonlike rhythm of his pumping, her nipples squeezing out from between his splayed fingers, her soft moaning, his stoic silence, the way the scene seemed to unfold beyond the boundaries of time or duty or responsibility. I watched for thirty seconds. Forty seconds. I knew that after sixty seconds the fee for watching the movie would kick in and someone (like the hotel checkout clerk) would discover I had watched a skin flick. I pressed the power button on the remote control. The TV went dead with a thunk.

  I had sat there for a long time on the hotel bed, looking at the arrows on the remote control, which seemed to lead in all four directions at once—north, south, east, and west. It was 6:30 in the evening in Lawrence, Kansas, and I wanted to keep on watching. To shame myself out of it, I thought, But what would my mother think? What would my father? I was a married man. I had a child. And yet . . . and yet . . . I wanted (no, absolutely needed) something strange and shocking in my life. Watching wouldn’t hurt anyone. Nor would it count as infidelity, because all of the adulterous action was being carried out by someone else—even if I did become, in my imagination, the man fucking the woman in front of the mirror, I was only him inside my head.

  I was just about to press my thumb back on the power button when the phone rang. It was Lisa calling, “Hey, Ebb, what’s up? Hold on for Danny!” Danny’s tiny voice breathing, “Hi, Daddy! What are you doing, Daddy? I’m going to sleep now, Daddy!” filled me with shame. After I got off the phone, I had not turned on the TV again.

  Yet the image of the man and the woman in the mirror stayed with me. And more and more over the past few months—when I felt myself growing as lonely as Lawrence, Kansas, in my own bedroom—I had thought back on those forbidden fifty-nine seconds, playing and replaying them inside myself. What could I say to excuse this fascination—except, maybe, that I had grown weary of following the doctor’s orders to make love with Lisa in the missionary position only? I craved something different. I longed to give it to Lisa in front of a mirror (but somehow I had grown too shy to ask Lisa for it, as if admitting I wanted something out of the ordinary implied that what we did on a regular basis had ceased to satisfy me).

  Sometimes I wondered, too, what Lisa wanted that I failed to give her. But only just now—as I stared at her raggedy-socked feet propped on the coffee table—did it hit me how I truly had let her down. Once, not too long ago, Lisa had ventured to ask me if I wanted something different in bed, and the question had so surprised me, so embarrassed me, that I had not answered truthfully, nor had I realized what she really was asking from me: Please, please, ask me that same question back.

  CHAPTER NINE

  LISA

  Ebb’s comment—“You aren’t the fair sex”—rankled me even more than the most gruesome news reported in the “Hot Deals” column of Publishers Weekly (where every other author except me, seemingly, had received a publishing contract worth a healthy six figures). I knew that after a certain point in marriage, a husband naturally viewed his wife as less of a woman—after all, wasn’t that the underlying premise of I’m Sorry? Yet the material that made for credible fiction wasn’t exactly the same material I wanted to find cropping up in my own life. I took another sip of my now-tepid peach tea, trying hard not to listen to my negative inner voice, which said, You are fat. You are ugly. You are bloated. You are infertile. You are unfeminine. If Ebb weren’t so bound by duty, he would leave you. And if you weren’t so financially dependent on him, you probably would do a little walking too (at least down to the local Dunkin’ Donuts—and back).

  The thought that Ebb and I might end up as yet another statistic was so unsettling—and so unsavory—that I felt my dinner back up in my throat. The heat hummed on, the registers along the floor began to shudder, and the newspaper that Ebb held open began to ruffle against his lap. Ebb finished reading the last page, lowered the section, and immediately leaned forward to put all the sections of the Times back in their proper order. Ebb’s methodical-ness would have maddened me if I hadn’t found it comforting. This is not the sort of man, I thought, who would ever throw a couple of BVDs into a duffel bag and then bolt for Tahiti.

  “I’m going to give you my novel,” I impulsively announced. “For your birthday.”

  This news caught Ebb so off guard that he placed the financial section before the weekend section. “Well, that’s a nice surprise,” he said.

  “I know how much you want to read it,” I said. “So I’ve decided to lead you out of temptation.”

  “What temptation?”

  “I heard that wild eep before dinner.”

  Ebb cleared his throat. “I happened to be standing next to your desk when I took off my suit, and my jacket sleeve brushed against your computer.”

  “A not-so-likely story.” I smiled. “At least in my book.”

  “What is in your book?” Ebb asked.

  “Oh,” I said, “all sorts of bad-boy behavior. Lies. Subterfuge. Lust.”

  “Lust,” Ebb repeated, as if he had never heard the word before. He looked down at the Times, realized the sections were out of order, and immediately began to rectify the situation. “I take it this lusty main character of yours—who is in possession of a penis, you said?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sticks it somewhere where it’s not supposed to go?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry to disappoint you. But no.”

  Ebb was quiet for a moment—probably trying to figure out how else a lusty man could express his bad-boy-ness. Was my main character a gambler? A drunkard? Or simply he who failed to call his mother every Saturday night? I watched with mild fascination as Ebb (who ordinarily couldn’t be bothered matching two socks that came out of the dryer) turned the Times into a bundle so tight it may as well have been executed by the number-one employee of a Chinese laundry.

  “It must have been hard for you,” he said. “To write about a man.”

  I wanted to claim that it had been a piece of cake. But it hadn’t. The more I had written, the more I worried that I was painting Simon’s emotional landscape in a female palette—the blue and bruised purples of loneliness and self-doubt, the washed-out grays of depression.

  “I did struggle,” I said as I put my Whistler’s Mother mug down on the side table. “During certain scenes.”

  Ebb waited. Then he said, “Which?”

  I searched inside myself for the scene from I’m Sorry that seemed least likely to resemble a chapter from Ebb’s own life. “In the fifth chapter,” I said, “the guy wants to go—but then he decides not to go—to a gentleman’s club.”

>   “Why doesn’t he go?”

  “Because he feels guilty,” I said. “Leaving his wife.”

  “For another woman?”

  “Leaving her at home. Where—ironically—she rents porn movies. Because she gets lonely. While he travels on business.”

  Ebb propped his feet on the coffee table. Then he swallowed, as if my words were remnants of the cucumber that had caused him such heartburn after dinner. I bit my lip and wondered how much his chest would hurt when he read the scene in I’m Sorry in which Simon Stern comes back from a business trip to Atlanta on Friday evening and discovers that his wife has left a soft-porn video sitting in the VCR: Simon felt so embarrassed for Robin—as if he had caught her touching herself at night, or murmuring the name of another man in bed—that he had slipped Tricks for Chicks back into the VCR and pretended he never had found it. And for the rest of the weekend, he was careful to avert his eyes when she slipped off her blouse before bed or even asked at the dinner table, “More asparagus?”

  “Is that autobiographical?” Ebb asked.

  “The loneliness?”

  “The blue movie.”

  I shrugged. “I did rent a video once. Strictly for research.”

  “I see.”

  “You were out of town,” I said. “In Charlotte or Richmond or one of those Southern cities. And so I drove ten miles to that independent video store on Route 9 and I rented exactly the kind of movie that I imagined Robin would want to watch.”

  Ebb looked baffled for a second. “Who’s Robin?”

  “That’s the name of the wife in my novel.”

  Ebb paused. “Robin is a man’s name.”

  “It is not,” I said.

  “In Winnie-the-Pooh—”

  “What does Pooh have to do with it?”