Remind Me Again Why I Married You

by Rita Ciresi

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “Let me know if you ever want to tell it.”

  I shrugged again. “I’ve always wanted a little girl.”

  “I wanted a boy,” Josh said. “But now I wouldn’t trade my two little fatsos for anything. They taught me the secret of happiness: Want what you have”—Josh pointed to my 1040—“and then get ready to have it stolen away.”

  I glanced down again at the bottom line of the tax form. I leaned my head on my hand and felt my temple pulse in rhythm with the music next door.

  “You look like you need that coffee now,” Josh said.

  He went over to the coffeemaker in the corner. I stared at the wretched black brew he then delivered to me in a styrofoam cup. “Not to be ungrateful—but can’t you see how dark and greasy this is?”

  Josh shrugged. “I made it at five-thirty in the morning.”

  “What were you doing here at that hour?”

  “It’s tax time and I’m a tax man. Besides, I always lose track of how many scoops of coffee I put in.”

  “You’re doing my tax return and you can’t even count to six?”

  “I put in seven, eight.” Josh scratched the side of his head. “I’m losing my marbles lately. About little things. Ever since I turned forty, there’s all this minutiae I can’t remember. For instance, I looked at Deb the other day and I swear I could not remember her name.” Josh disappeared into the back of the office. I heard him emptying the bad coffee into the bathroom sink. He reappeared in the doorway, then sat down beside me. “Ready for line by line?”

  After we verified that Eben and Elizabeth Strauss could claim only Daniel Strauss as an exemption and that neither party wanted three dollars of our hard-earned money to subsidize the upcoming presidential election, Josh and I immediately came into conflict. Line 7 was right. (I remembered precisely how much should be reported—to the penny—under Wages, salaries, tips, etc., because I had spent two hours the previous Saturday putting together my W-2 and all the rest of the forms we needed to support our mortgage application.) But line 12 was wrong.

  “Line 12 is—” I said.

  “You’re getting ahead of the game.” Josh stroked his tie. “Let’s go back to 8a—”

  “No, let’s stay here on twelve for a second. I don’t have any self-employment income.”

  “Well. Yeah. I know that.”

  “So why—”

  Josh cleared his throat. “Have you had a heart-to-heart talk with your wife lately?”

  “Too many.”

  “I mean about money?”

  “What money?”

  Josh pressed his fingers—I swore his fingers had gotten even fatter since I last saw him—against the table. “Aw, don’t do this to me.”

  “Do what?”

  “Make me explain. That the self-employment income is—”

  “What, fictitious?”

  “No. Lisa’s.”

  “But Lisa had no income.”

  Josh’s furry eyebrows knit together. Then he reached up and loosened his tie. “Is it getting hot in here?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Well . . . can you keep a secret—that you know a secret—that Lisa told me to keep secret?”

  I put my hand on Josh’s arm. “Tell me right now what Lisa did to earn that money.”

  “She published part of her novel in Playboy.”

  I took off my glasses, put my head in my hands, and stretched the skin on my face so taut I thought it would snap.

  “Chill out,” Josh said. “She wrote it under her maiden name.”

  “I don’t care if she wrote it with a gun to her head. She should have told me.”

  “See—she hid it from you because she knew you’d go ballistic—”

  “How would you feel if your wife wrote porn?”

  “Ecstatic!” Josh sighed. “But Lisa’s novel didn’t seem porn-ish at all.”

  I took my head out of my hands. “You saw it? Lisa showed you?”

  Josh looked down at his beefy, hairy wrists. “I sort of . . . subscribe.”

  I looked at Josh. I couldn’t believe it. He had daughters. A wife. And in his garage, all the trappings of a staid, bourgeois life—half a dozen snow shovels, two four-door family sedans, a cooler on wheels, and twenty-pound bags of weed and feed.

  “I see,” I said. “Every month Playboy just sort of lands in your mailbox.”

  “Hell, no! Don’t forget, I’m still sort of married to Deb. So I get it delivered here. At the office.”

  I took a moment to digest this information. Then I said, “Show it to me.”

  “Which issue do you want?”

  “The one with Lisa’s novel in it,” I said as I picked up my glasses from the table and put them on again.

  Josh went over to his long row of file cabinets and pulled out his key ring—deftly answering all my unasked questions about how he kept his Playboys secret from Deb and from the nighttime cleaning lady (if not from his part-time receptionist). He unlocked the last file cabinet. The magazine he set before me was the February issue. A MONTH OF LOVE! it proclaimed—and featured, on the cover, a pouty-pussed buxom blonde scantily clad in just the type of lingerie I sometimes wished was still an integral part of Lisa’s wardrobe.

  I wanted to loftily tell Josh, I can’t even remember the last time I looked at a skin magazine. But not even my spotty memory was that faulty. Six months ago, on my first visit to our fertility specialist, I’d held a girlie magazine in my hands—and my subsequent actions did not lend validity to that tired American male myth: Hey, I read Playboy for the articles, man.

  I’d sooner die than tell Josh about my initial humiliating encounter with Dr. John Goode. I had dreaded—and twice rescheduled—my first appointment, and when I finally was ushered in to an examination room (fifty-five minutes after my scheduled time), I had been tempted to leave by the emergency-exit door when the nurse told me, “Everything off, and leave this robe open in the front.”

  “In the front?” I repeated.

  “Yes,” she said. “That means: not in the back.”

  Although Lisa had warned me that Dr. Goode had the bedside manner of a lizard (“He doesn’t even have the decency to warm the speculum beneath the heat lamp, Ebb”), I still was surprised when Goode barged into the examination room twenty minutes later, issued a brusque “Good afternoon,” and proceeded to place his cold stethoscope on my chest and back. I didn’t expect Goode to feel up everything on my body, from my throat glands to that stubborn roll of fat—thick and bulbous as a chocolate eclair—that lately had clung to my abdomen.

  “Now for a quick glance at your genitals,” Goode warned, flipping aside the robe. After letting off a satisfied grunt, he ordered me to get dressed and meet him across the hall in his dark-paneled office, where—amidst his tony diplomas and framed photos of his own grown brood of children—he subjected me to a string of mortifying questions (my favorite: “Any erection problems—getting one, keeping one?”).

  “During her fertile period,” Dr. Goode asked, “how often do you have relations with your wife?”

  I cleared my throat. “Well,” I said, “we certainly try to maximize our opportunities.”

  “How often?”

  “I honestly can’t pinpoint—”

  “An educated guess will do.”

  Eager to neither highball nor lowball, I went for what I thought was a credible, respectable number.

  Dr. Goode flipped back some pages on Lisa’s chart. “That’s not what your wife reports.”

  The office grew silent. From the anteroom, I heard the ringing of phones and the shrill laughter of a nurse as she walked by.

  “Your wife reports you’ve traveled a lot. And that sometimes these trips have coincided with her fertile period, is that right?”

  “Well. Yes. That has happened two or three times—or maybe four or five—over the past couple of years.”

  “You can’t let that happen. You need to schedu
le your schedule around her schedule. Are you with me?”

  I wished I were anywhere but. For the next two minutes, Dr. Goode delivered a string of stern warnings that made me feel as though I finally had achieved my worst teenage fear: being sent to the principal’s office. I was: not to drink! not to smoke! not to use recreational drugs! not to sit in a hot tub or sleep beneath an electric blanket! not to assume any—eh-hem—interesting positions! but always give my wife an orgasm—if possible, after my own ejaculation—because the resulting spasms drew the semen farther into the vaginal canal and facilitated bonding of the ovum and sperm.

  “Any questions?” Goode asked.

  Yes, I thought. Can I strangle you now?

  I shook my head.

  Goode scribbled some notes on my chart, then jotted instructions on his Rx pad and tore off the top sheet. “Then I’ll turn you over to the nurses.”

  Down the hall, I delivered his illegible note to a gray-haired woman in whites. “We need your blood,” she said. “And—well, come with me.”

  She led me into an alcove and ordered me to sit in a chair. She donned a pair of rubber gloves, put a tourniquet on my left arm, swabbed the inside of my elbow with a mustardy compound, and palpated my vein. As the needle went in, she murmured, “You make an easy target.”

  After she took two vials of blood, she drew a lidded, plastic cup from the enamel cabinet and began scribbling my name on the label.

  I cleared my throat. “I used the men’s room just before I came in.”

  She handed me the cup. “Ejaculate,” she said briskly. “Ejaculate is what we need.”

  I turned and only then noticed the room behind me was marked

  COLLECTION ROOM

  DO NOT DISTURB

  “Does this door lock?” I asked.

  The door had a very secure lock, the nurse assured me. And no one would interrupt me. But two seconds after I had closed the door and turned the lock, a sharp knock shook the door.

  “Mr. Strauss?” the nurse’s muffled voice called out. “I forgot to ask. Did you have sexual intercourse last night?”

  “I can’t say that I did.”

  “What was that?”

  “No!”

  “Have you ejaculated—under any circumstances—within the past forty-eight hours?”

  “No again.”

  “I’m sorry. But we need to know. It affects the quality of the sample. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to come back and repeat the procedure. Although . . . do you know? I can’t read Dr. Goode’s handwriting here—do you know if Dr. Goode wants to do the hamster?”

  I unlocked the door, startling her. She pointed to the cup I held in my hand. “This first sample is for the count and the mobility,” she said. “But if he already knows it’s low, Dr. Goode will ask for the hamster penetration test.”

  “The what?”

  She reached into the cabinet and handed me a paper leaflet. “This explains it.”

  I closed the door—locked it—and as I listened to her shoes squish down the hallway, I leaned against the door and read through the brochure, becoming more nauseated by the second. For the zona-free hamster oocyte penetration assay, human sperm cells are placed in a sterile incubation dish with hamster eggs. The number of the infertile man’s sperm that can penetrate the egg then is compared to the number of sperm from a fertile human donor. Rest assured, the sperm cannot fertilize the hamster eggs nor can a real embryo develop. Humans and hamsters are not genetically compatible and cannot create a new species. . . .

  I felt my lunch lurching around in my stomach. I flung the brochure into the wastebasket. The room was sparsely furnished, with a church-pew–like bench covered with sterile paper and a low table holding magazines so neatly arranged—in a precise and enticing fan—that I had to wonder if a gay man had been in here before me. I knew if I succumbed and picked up one of these publications that I would return it to exactly the same place in which I found it. The janitor who cleaned this office after hours probably was not so scrupulous.

  I sighed and sat down on the bench. A holier man would have prayed. I, however, could only think about how looking at such magazines would disappoint my mother. I knew it also would make me disloyal—by default—to Lisa. I also knew that if I only waited ten years to satisfy my curiosity, I’d find similar magazines stashed beneath Danny’s mattress.

  But in the meantime, I had to get my mind off those hamsters.

  I placed the collection cup on the bench and leaned forward. Sandwiched between Hustler and Screw, I found the much milder Playboy—and took more than a few minutes to peruse the models’ preposterously big breasts and unlikely firm butts. Finally—when all thoughts of rodents were completely banished from my mind—I put down the magazine. As I went about my business, I dreamed of Lisa . . . well, a woman who sort of looked like Lisa, only with . . . blond hair . . . lush lips . . . swollen tits . . . a full, soft, squeezable rump with cheeks that clenched in and out, in and out . . . and bright blue eyes that met mine in the mirror as her velvety voice moaned, Do it . . . do it . . . do it to me forever. . . .

  That worked—so fast—that after I screwed the lid on the plastic container, zipped up, and heeded the instructions pasted on the back of the door—PLEASE WASH YOUR HANDS BEFORE LEAVING THIS ROOM—I figured I had a minute, maybe even two, to look at the Playboy once again.

  When Josh surrendered the magazine to my hands, I riffled slowly through the pages.

  Josh cleared his throat. “Lisa’s story is on page forty-eight.”

  I turned to forty-eight.

  HE LEFT HIS HEART AT THE OFFICE

  by Elizabeth Diodetto

  “God in heaven,” I murmured. I swallowed. And started reading. And immediately began thinking, this isn’t me, this cannot be me, and yet this seems like . . . me. This looks like our MCGRUFF HOUSE sign, our not-so-welcoming welcome mat, Lisa’s apron, Lisa’s Wüsthof knife, and Lisa’s lips. The only thing described that I did not recognize were the lips of this va-va-voom secretary nicknamed Take-A-Letter-Maria.

  Josh had met Victoria once (and whispered to me, “How soon can you divorce her?”). Nevertheless—just to make clear I had no designs on Victoria—I said, “I’d rather die than kiss my secretary.”

  Josh snorted. “I’d rather kiss the butthole of a goat!”

  I kept on reading. But really I was just skimming to find anything else incriminating in the rest of the piece. I was looking for . . . I don’t know what. Some clue, maybe, as to why Lisa and I couldn’t seem to talk without invisible exclamation marks punctuating almost every other statement, some secret beyond a blocked fallopian tube that had resulted in no results for us no matter how hard we tried, some hint as to why I felt like we were moving apart at the same time I felt like we were more and more hemmed in together. I sought a reference to real estate, or a sly nod to Norway. Yet I found nothing in this story that shed light on my own problems—because the conflict Lisa described on the page simply seemed the conflict of being alive, and getting older, and realizing that time was slipping by so fast that you wished it was something tangible so you could reach out and grab all the wasted minutes, hours, and days, do the things you should have done, say the things you should have said. What person—man or woman—who had been born when there were only forty-eight states in the union could not claim, as Lisa claimed about Simon: He had told himself that he would not succumb to depression about what he had failed to do and focus more upon what he had accomplished. Yet the moment he had rounded the corner into his forties, he began to feel the blues. Sometimes he wandered about his own house, wondering who really lived there. Other times he woke in the dead of night, thinking, Where am I? What time is it? Why can’t I sleep? When he paused over an old photo of himself, it was all he could do to keep from murmuring, Who was this person? Who had so much hair? Who seemed so happy?

  My reaction to Lisa’s story surprised me. I didn’t mind—too much—what she had written. But I did mind where she had published it. Witho
ut asking Josh’s permission, I pressed my hand down on the spine of the magazine and quickly ripped out the first page.

  “Hey!” Josh protested. “What are you doing?”

  “I want to show this to Lisa.”

  “But she’s already seen it! And the picture on the back isn’t half-bad!”

  I turned over the page. Take me for a ride. . . . implored the big-busted naked woman straddling a Harley-Davidson.

  “You like this kind of woman?” I asked.

  Josh shrugged. “Her boobs look kind of . . . I don’t know . . . comforting . . . almost maternal. . . .”

  “But they’re totally fake,” I said.

  “So what? It’s fantasy. It doesn’t hurt anybody.”

  “But you have daughters.”

  Josh wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Yeah. Well. I also have Deb. I mean, I love her and all . . . and I’d never dream of doing anything . . . I mean, she’d kill me! But you know . . . we’ve been married a long time. Besides, I’ve never been with anyone else.”

  If I had given it any thought before (which I hadn’t), I could have guessed that goofy, sloppy, yellow-toothed Josh—who’d gotten married right out of college—never had slept with any woman but Deb. Still, I managed to muster forth a surprised “Oh?”

  Josh rested his hands on his big tummy. “Pathetic, isn’t it? In this day and age? And don’t tell me it’s sweet—that I can’t stand hearing!” He gestured at the Playboy. “I figure—compared to what a lot of other guys do—that this is pretty harmless.”

  I folded Lisa’s story in half, quarters, then eighths. As I tucked it into the breast pocket of my shirt, I admitted, “I guess you’re right. In comparison to what other guys do, this is mild stuff.” I pointed to my 1040. “Let’s get to work.”

  We continued reviewing the taxes. But I could hardly concentrate. I kept asking myself: If what Lisa wrote was good, then why did I feel so bad? Was I just as depressed as this Simon Stern? Was I depressed because people would think I was depressed? Had I really aged so much that Lisa—never mind this Simon!—would hardly recognize me in an old picture? Did I not want to be the husband of Elizabeth Diodetto? Or was I just afraid that readers of Lisa’s novel would think my emotional innards had been spread on the table for public viewing, the way all my receipts and canceled checks and financial statements would be laid across the table if ever I got audited by the IRS?