by Rita Ciresi
“Three quarters probably wouldn’t either.”
“Compromise at two-thirds?”
Lisa nodded. “Sold.”
I fetched a bottle of chardonnay lying on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. Lisa pulled down a couple of goblets from the cabinet, frowning at the water stains marring the rims. After I uncorked the bottle and poured the wine, I raised my glass and told Lisa, “To . . . um . . . us.”
“Right. You and me. And the dirty dishes.”
I smiled. “Cheers.”
“Salute, Ebb.”
Lisa downed most of her wine, then tossed me a sponge. I caught it by the soggy tip, and while she started loading the plates and silverware into the dishwasher, I scrubbed the splotches of spaghetti sauce from the stove and counter. After a little wine came a little flirtation—a few deliberate brushes against Lisa’s butt, some slightly heavier breathing as I reached around her to fetch a paper towel at the sink. I maintained a monk’s silence to make it clear that now was not the time to speak of Danny’s bad table manners, the need for a new water heater, the latest listings from Century 21—or the strict moratorium I wanted to place on BAD BOY and/or other candy conversation hearts appearing in my undershorts.
More wine, more silent flirtation.
Then I came up behind Lisa as she scoured the colander in the sink. I grazed the back of her hair with my lips and nose. I cupped her shoulder in my left hand and looped my right index finger through the apron tie that circled her waist. I pressed slightly on her hips. She relaxed. Sighed. Said “Mmm.” More pressure. “Ah.”
So I did it. I put my left arm around Lisa and my other hand went under her apron and I growled—yes, I growled like a large wildcat (as it to prove that there were all sorts of pathetic things you had to do and say to achieve arousal when you were middle-aged).
“Such a fuck,” I said, “I’m going to give you.”
And when Lisa laughed and answered in a breathy voice, “Is that right?” I heard even heavier breathing behind us. I turned. Danny stood in the doorway—forlorn and diminutive in his striped yellow-and-black pjs, which made him resemble a bee coming in for the sting. I pulled away.
“You go back to bed,” Lisa said in a sharp tone that punctured my desire.
Danny’s face scrunched up, the way it used to when he was six months old and he discovered mashed peas were on the menu. Tears followed, so big and sorrowful that Lisa immediately went down on her knees and scooped up Danny in her arms.
“There’s a Tigger in my room!” he said.
“Tiger,” I said, regretting—again—that he had chosen Pooh over Aesop.
“I seen it!”
“Saw it,” I corrected him.
“In the meer!”
“Mir-ruh,” I said.
“It had stripes!”
Five minutes later—after a thorough investigation of Danny’s room—Lisa finally convinced Danny that he had seen only his own yellow-and-black striped self in the dresser mirror. To keep the peace, I unscrewed the mirror from its wooden posts and put it in Danny’s closet, and when that didn’t do the trick—now Danny thought the tiger was in his wardrobe—I marched across the hall and propped the mirror against my chest of drawers, with enough carelessness to risk cracking the thing and bringing on seven years of bad luck.
Then I noticed how the mirror reflected the fax machine—and the tangle of sheets at the bottom of our bed. I stepped back and considered the view. Not bad, I thought. I adjusted the angle of the mirror to reflect the rumpled middle of the mattress. Even better. Now if I could just get Lisa to fall beneath me on the opposite side of the bed (before she turned off the light), my fantasy of making it in front of a mirror would be complete.
I returned to the kitchen, whistling. I finished off the rest of my glass of wine and poured another. Surely there was some delicate way to reenter the scenario I had begun with Lisa. (Now, where were we? Here? Here? Or there?) But when Lisa finally came back downstairs, the lock of hair at her forehead was frazzled and stood on end, and the look she gave me seemed to say, For Christ’s sake, the least you could have done was finish the dishes.
Now the wise-and-shine rooster clock read long after midnight. I lay naked next to an also-naked Lisa, listening to Danny snoring like king of the universe across the hall. Half an hour before, Lisa and I had made love . . . well, not at all badly, if you ignored one minor glitch. Leaving on the lamp, I had managed to gently pin Lisa in exactly the right place on the bed, but when I looked up, I realized all my plotting had gone for naught: I couldn’t see a damn thing in the mirror because I had taken off my glasses. The only reflection I caught was the fleshy blur of our bodies, until the pleasure grew so intense I had to shut my eyes. Then a sheet of pale blue and silver stars fell like snowflakes behind the curtain of my eyelids.
Afterward, I switched off the lamp and we lay in the dark listening to the wind scatter the dead leaves across the roof.
“Ebb,” Lisa finally whispered.
“What?”
“I about plotzed.”
I smiled. “Me, too, Lisa.”
She put her hands on both sides of my head and kissed my cheek. “Listen—I forgot—but will you come look at a house with me and Cynthia tomorrow? In the afternoon?”
“Sure,” I said. “Whatever you want.”
Within minutes, Lisa fell deep into her usual purring, postcoital sleep—and I found myself staring at the black rectangle of the skylight, waiting for the sandman to sprinkle his dust over me. But by 12:48, sleep had made no welcoming overtures. I listened to the low, guttural snorts coming from across the hall. During the first week of Danny’s life I had discovered I was the kind of dad who was convinced my child was singled out for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Each time I had approached Danny’s bassinet, I had prayed that I would find the bundle inside warm and breathing, not stiff and still as the body of a possum tossed by a car to the side of the road. Now I reminded myself that every whistle and snuffle coming from Danny’s room was a blessing. He’s alive, I told myself. He’s alive! Yet I still had this crazy fear that my child might die at any moment, a fear that grew more intense the longer Lisa and I continued to prove that we lacked something between us—a healthy sperm or viable egg, the timing, the love—that would enable us to conceive another.
I rolled out of bed, groped for my bathrobe, and felt my way downstairs. On the dark and chilly first floor, the Frigidaire droned. Everywhere shone tiny points of green and red light—the digital clock on the VCR, the answering machine, the smoke detector, the battery recharger on the cordless phone. My eye then caught the green eye of the security system’s keypad, which shined and winked by the front door. In the center also glowed a red button labeled PANIC!, which you were supposed to hit if you were ever taken hostage in your own home.
Why did I have the urge to press my thumb upon it?
A gust of wind shook the sliding glass door and made the walls creak and pop. I poured myself a touch more wine—which glowed in the goblet—then went into the living room and switched on the three-way lamp to fifty watts only. I sat on the couch, and my feet, which I propped on the coffee table, pushed aside the Times and Publishers Weekly to reveal the edge of a library book with a call number in the 700s. The seductive red spine was stamped with a strange title: Feng Shui.
I turned it over. In black bullet points, the back cover asked:
Do you feel
**your house is claustrophobic?
**you cannot win the war against household dirt and excessive clutter?
**you bring home problems from the office?
**you’d rather not be in the same room as other members of your family?
**you cannot control what happens between your own four walls?
**that if only you lived somewhere else, you’d be happy?
Dust, muddy footprints, and marital and professional woes will follow you wherever you go. Do not fight your fate—but deflect it with the ancient Chinese art of restoring
the balance and order in your home. Feng shui can help you create a harmonious atmosphere where your inner light shines and the essence of All collects. Through careful design of your interior and exterior landscape, you can find the ch’i in your home.
I flipped through the pages, examining the photographs of serene interiors. Then I skimmed the first chapter. By the time I read the phrase the serenity you create without creates the serenity within, I managed to convince myself that Lisa—who never had expressed an interest in things Asian beyond the wise-and-shine alarm clock—was using this book as material for her novel. But what if she wasn’t? What if Lisa felt as dissatisfied at home (and with her job of keeping the home) as I felt with my work at SB?
My stomach rumbled.
Ordinarily I might have sympathized with ancient Taoist wisdom and acknowledged that I, too, wished to facilitate a smoother flow of the life force known as ch’i. But at one o’clock in the morning—a desperate glass of wine in my hand, my feet propped on a pile of three-day-old newspapers, and the sharp edge of one of Danny’s Lego deep-sea divers piercing my thigh—I found the concepts of order and balance about as obtainable as the stars. Restless, I rose from the couch cushion. As I wandered into the dining room nursing my drink, I felt those alumni notes—no, I would not read those alumni notes!—drawing me like a magnet.
Our bedroom felt hot and stuffy when I finally went back upstairs. I dropped my robe to the floor and climbed back into bed next to Lisa’s inert form. Just as I was falling down into sleep, a muscle spasm grabbed my calf. I winced and sat up with a start, remembering that I had forgotten to fetch Danny’s lost tooth and slip a dollar under his pillow. I massaged the charley horse out of my leg, rose once more, and stumbled over to fetch my wallet from my chest of drawers. The room was pitch-black—no moonlight came through the skylight—and it was difficult to tell the denomination of the bills in the dark.
I pulled out a bill from the front of my wallet where I kept the ones and took it across the hall. Danny gave a hot snort as I slipped the bill beneath his pillow and collected his tooth in return. I wondered what I should do with his tooth. To save it as a souvenir seemed sick. But it seemed callous to put it in the trash, and worse still to flush it down the toilet. I took the tooth across the hall, shoved it under my own pillow, and resumed my place by the still-sleeping Lisa. Like the princess who could not sleep on a pea, I tossed from side to side. The tooth was unnerving me. My back felt sore. My head ached from the wine. And my stomach longed for something.
Half an hour later, I stood at the kitchen counter, eating a sandwich that consisted solely of Grey Poupon smeared on two slabs of rye. The clock on the range read 2:12 A.M. In spite of the ungodly hour, I retired to the half-bathroom and spent an unsuccessful thirty minutes on the throne, reading those blasted alumni notes from cover to cover—confirming that while I spent the day listening to women whine about toilets, my cohorts were walloping the pants off Wall Street.
SATURDAY, MARCH 21, 1992
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EBEN
In the pale blue light of morning, I woke and found myself pinned to the mattress. Was it Lisa—or a succubus? I cracked an eyelid. Danny’s hot little face was in my face. He gave me a gap-toothed smile. Crumpled in one fist was the bill I had slipped beneath his pillow the night before.
“Ouch,” I whispered, as Danny’s sharp elbow caught me in the chest. “Move over. Shh. You’ll wake up Mommy.”
“Mommy’s already awake,” Lisa said, in a cross voice. She poked her head out from the covers and squinted at the Mr. Chanticleer clock. “Seven-thirty!” she said, and let out a crow of protest. “Danny, didn’t I tell you last night not to bother us until eight?”
Danny crawled onto Lisa. “Look what I got from the tooth fairy.”
Lisa took the bill. “Ten dollars?”
I winced.
“That fairy needs new glasses,” Lisa said.
“It was dark,” I said.
Lisa nudged me with her toe. “Shh. Ow. Danny, get offa me—”
Danny rolled off Lisa, knocked into my shoulder, then dived between us under the covers. “Hey,” he said. “You guys are naked!”
What could I say to explain what I did next? I must have resented (more than I knew) the way that Danny kept coming between Lisa and me, because I sat up, put on my glasses, grabbed Danny by the waist of his bumblebee-striped pajamas, set him down on the carpet, and marched him across the hall. “How many times do I have to tell you not to come in our room without knocking?” I asked. “Stay here until I tell you to come out.”
I exited Danny’s room with as much dignity as having a bare butt in a cold house would allow. When I firmly shut our bedroom door against the sound of Danny’s protests—first a sad coyote’s howl, and then melodramatic sobs meant to wrench my heart—Lisa’s mouth thankfully was full of her basal body thermometer, which precluded any comment.
“I’m sorry,” I said as I climbed back into bed. “But he pissed me off.”
She nodded and scooted closer. I sighed and gave her hand a squeeze. Nothing better strengthened the bond between Lisa and me than a united front against Danny—unless it was sex or illness. Sometimes this troubled me. Marriage, I felt, should have a deeper and more spiritual dimension that didn’t rely upon screaming orgasms, projectile vomiting, or two voices in unison commanding a toddler, “No broccoli, then no dessert!” as a measure of success.
Still, I knew I had lost my cool. Overreacted. I took off my glasses—as if this would make me deaf instead of half-blind—and then buried one ear in the pillow to muffle the sad sounds of Danny’s distress.
Lisa slipped the thermometer from her mouth. “You’ve never made him cry like that before, Ebb.”
“I know.”
“He’ll never forget this.”
My heart felt sick at the thought. But I said, “Good. Maybe next time he’ll remember to knock before he barges in.”
“We should put a lock on the bedroom door,” Lisa said.
“I don’t want a lock,” I said. “I want him to learn a closed door is a closed door.”
“Was it closed?”
“Of course it was closed—we made love last night.” Then I remembered I hadn’t reshut the door after I performed my duties as the tooth fairy—nor had I closed it when I came back upstairs after reading my alumni notes from start to finish.
Lisa carefully returned her thermometer to its pink plastic case. “Can you stop by the hardware store this morning?”
“I don’t have time,” I said. “I’m going over the taxes with Josh at ten. And didn’t Dr. Goode tell you to keep that thermometer in for a full five minutes?”
Lisa let forth a scornful poof! “I can’t breathe—never mind talk to you—with that thing in my mouth.”
“What’s your temperature?”
“Still too low, Dr. Goode’s a jerk, and there’s a True Value in the mini-mall right by Josh’s office. Stop there and get a lock.”
“I don’t like that hardware store,” I said. “A cowbell rings when you open the front door.”
“Beats fighting off the crowds at the House Warehouse,” Lisa said. I had to agree: Last time I set foot in House Warehouse, I had almost gotten brained by a guy swinging around a pair of plantation shutters as he asked his dissatisfied wife, “Make up your mind, you want ’em in the white or the almond?”
Lisa picked up the pen she kept on her nightstand and leaned over to record her temperature. “This ovulation graph is so embarrassing.”
“It’s just your body temperature,” I said.
“It is not. I have to draw a circle around the days that we fuck! And then I have to show the chart to Dr. Goode, while he stands there clearing the snot and the phlegm in his throat and murmuring, ‘I see, yes, I see.’ What does he see?”
I didn’t care to contemplate. It galled me to realize that Dr. Goode had discovered (long before I did) that Lisa and I had an established pattern of letting ourselves go on Friday
nights.
Lisa tossed her graph and pen onto the nightstand. “Don’t forget Cynthia’s got us on her calendar for two o’clock. She says she’s got a great house to show us.”
“Did you preview it?”
“I didn’t have time. It’s a brand-new listing. Cynthia’s going to pick you up here around one forty-five and I’m meeting you at the house at two.”
“Why can’t we go together?”
“I have to drive Danny across town to a birthday party.”
“Why can’t he make friends in the immediate neighborhood?” I asked. It seemed like the only children Danny chose as buddies always lived at least fifteen miles away (and always scheduled their birthday parties in the most squalid weather conditions).
“Just remember that after we look at this house,” Lisa said, “you have to pick up Danny from his party.”
“Why?”
“I told you at dinner last night,” Lisa said.
“Refresh my memory.”
“I’m seeing this new hairstylist.”
“Can’t you go on a weekday?” I asked.
“His name is Ricardo.”
“That answers the question?”
“You have to wait weeks to get an appointment,” Lisa said. “The only reason I got in was because Cynthia arranged it. God, Cynthia has great hair. So you absolutely have to pick up Danny, so my hair can look just as great.”
I closed my eyes. Whenever I thanked God it was Friday, I never stopped to think that the next dawn of the sun brought dreaded Saturday. What was supposed to be a joyous time to reconnect with my family turned into a day of loathsome errands. But at least I wasn’t on call for the weekend and forced to run all those errands while wearing the SB pager. I rolled out of bed, put on my glasses, donned my flannel bathrobe, and went across the hall to readdress the Danny situation.
I knocked. “May I come in?” I asked. When no answer was forthcoming, I violated my own rule and entered Danny’s room without permission. Danny was nothing more than a lump hiding beneath the blankets. I sat down on the mattress, pulled back the cover, and smoothed the tuft of hair at the back of his head that always cropped up during the night, making him look like a woodpecker.
