So the following evening they set the alarm and locked the door and stepped out into the muggy evening, and then they got into the Jeep and drove down long hilly bending heavily populated roads toward the Showcase Cinemas. It was an election year and political flags cluttered front lawns alongside children’s toys. Colin turned the car onto the Post Road and they passed the Lender’s bagel factory and the Sears and the Super Kmart. He said, “What about that place by the Dunkin’ Donuts?”
“The faux hunting lodge?”
“Yeah. The steakhouse.”
They pulled into the parking lot, fragrant with the smell of doughnuts frying next door. They went inside and sat in a booth. Framed French posters adorned wood-paneled walls. “Salad bar,” Kate said. “Priceless.” A blond waitress with a bouffant hairdo and a big smile took their drink order. Kate’s pinot grigio and Colin’s Guinness arrived within minutes. And soon after, the food: teriyaki sirloin and the prime rib, baked potatoes on the side.
Kate put her hands around her wineglass. She leaned back in the booth.
“I’m so happy,” she said.
The blond waitress served another round of drinks. Then dessert, Mississippi Mud Pie. They made it to the theater in time for the previews.
At home, after the movie, Kate tackled Colin at the bathroom sink. He spit Crest and saliva into the drain. “Hey, there.”
She squeezed him around the torso, and then hammered at his back. “That was fun, wasn’t it?”
“What?”
“The Rock! So good!”
“Hell, yeah.” He shook out the toothbrush and turned around. She punched him in the gut. “Um, what the fuck was that?”
“Just a love punch.”
“Love punch, huh?”
He picked her up and threw her over his shoulder.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Where do you think?”
They rolled around the sleigh bed. She gasped and moaned.
“Keep it down. It’s Saturday. Lucy’ll hear us,” he said.
“She won’t.”
“Try to be quiet.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do.”
He put his hand over her mouth. She hooked one leg over his shoulder.
“Okay, will you stop now?”
“No,” she said, from behind his palm. “I won’t.”
The following Wednesday, as Lucy banged through “Für Elise,” Kate said, “Do that thing.”
“What? What thing?”
“From the other night.”
“What?”
“That thing with your hand.”
“This?” He did it. She jammed her nails into his back. He pressed harder over her mouth.
“Oh, yeah? Is that how it’s gonna be?”
And so it went. Lucy graduated to Pachelbel’s Canon, to Mozart’s Minuet in G. Kate moaned and hung on to the bed. She murmured into Colin’s hand.
“What? I can’t hear you.”
“Mmmmmm …”
“You want it hard? Is that what you want? Is that what you’re trying to say? Okay. I’ll let you talk.”
Though normally, in the context of their shared experience, seventy percent of most everything seemed funny, in bed nothing did—not the ungainliness of genitalia, not the extremity of certain positions, not even hearing one’s spouse carry on like a porn star.
He lifted his hand.
“Yes. Hard.”
“Yeah?” Hand over the mouth again. His other hand holding her wrists. A natural, he was.
“Oh, yes. Like that.”
Week after week, the blond waitress smiled and rushed their drinks. A black man shot the white men who raped his nine-year-old daughter and a handsome, heroic young white lawyer got him off. Aliens attempted to take over the earth and were thwarted by a disenchanted scientist and a feisty young air force officer. A good guy and a bad guy switched faces and the bad guy killed the only person capable of reversing the operation. A prison transport plane was hijacked by the convicts on board and a Desert Storm vet in jail for manslaughter wrested control of the plane from the other, nastier convicts and landed it on the Las Vegas strip. Harrison Ford faced down a terrorist. “I am the president of the United States,” Ford declared. The audience laughed. Colin prodded Kate in the ribs and, crunching popcorn, whispered jokes about the Force.
One Thursday in August during prime-time repeats she reached over from her side of the couch to rub his stomach. “Not tonight, baby,” he said. “Long day. Long week. And listen, little Lucy.”
Bach jingled above.
Kate grabbed his package and squeezed it. He pushed her off the couch, onto the floor, where the rug burned her elbow so badly that it bled. She got her way.
The air began to smell of apples, and squash appeared in bins outside the Stop & Shop. Darcy quit her paralegal job to begin art school. Colin and Kate continued to go to the steakhouse and a movie on Friday nights but Kate wore corduroys instead of flowered cotton dresses and the movies aspired to have more meaning. There was a John Cougar song on the radio that Kate liked and she searched for it as they drove to work or around doing errands. They built fires in the white-painted brick fireplace, which worked without a hitch or even a cleaning, and Colin’s favorite shows began to premiere. He watched the television in the living room and when he laughed Kate ran in from the kitchen or the bedroom or the study, wanting to hear the joke, wanting to laugh too. He brought her flowers on their first anniversary and she persuaded him to lick wedding cake (defrosted) from her nipples. On a public radio station Kate discovered a show that played jazz and big-band music from six to midnight on Saturday nights. She got to know the sound of Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Billie Holiday, Sophie Tucker, and the crackling of old records coming through a tiny metal portable radio Colin had received for his communion. She brought the radio into the blue bathroom while she took a candlelit bath. They shopped for Halloween pumpkins and laid newspaper down on the living room floor and carved them, and Kate giggled over Colin’s pumpkin face, which had the same personality as his handwriting, generous and goofy and sweet. They put the pumpkins on the porch and became disillusioned with them when they saw Wes’s far more spectacular pumpkin: a Byzantine production of mosaic-style diamond-shaped cutouts. Andie, who knew everything, caught Kate on the stairs and told her Wes had used a pattern. On Halloween Kate and Colin filled bowls of candy and ran to the door when the bell rang, slipping on the rugs and watching each other with the children. Around eleven they turned off the porch light and retired.
“I meant to dress up,” she said. “Oh, well. How’s this.” She tied her nightshirt up around her waist, her hair into a high ponytail, and posed at the end of the bed. “You be the captain. I’m Jeannie.”
“Wow,” he said. “I love you. I mean, I really love you. Come here.”
“Yes, master.”
She put her head down into her crossed arms and he entered her from behind. “That good, baby?” He ran a hand over her shoulders, her breasts, her back.
“My ass.”
“What about your beautiful ass?”
“Hit it. Hit me. Hit me on the ass.”
He smacked her. And smacked her again.
“Harder.”
Again. He grabbed her hips. His pelvis slapped her behind in counts of two. Their breathing ripped at the dry atmosphere, the nosebleed-making skin-cracking winter interior drought and chill.
“My hair,” she said.
“What about your hair?” He reached around and twisted her nipple. “You don’t want me to mess up your hair?”
“No, no …”
“Well, too bad, just wait and get a load of what I’m going to do in your hair when I’m done fucking you.”
“No, pull it. My hair, pull my hair.”
“Like that? You mean like that?”
He wrapped the long layers around his wrist. Her head snapped back. He jerked it from side to side.
“Yes, yes … ow, yes …”
THEY ATTENDED HIS COMPANY holiday party. For the occasion, Kate bought a red dress at the Saks in the Stamford mall. The dress, a soft jersey, fell off the shoulder in a Grecian sort of way, hugged her breasts and waist, then flared out slightly to end at her knees. She lit a candle and sat on the bed with her legs up on the bureau as she applied makeup, listening to an album of rock and hip-hop artists covering traditional Christmas music. She put on lip gloss to match the dress, sheer hose, high heels, rhinestone earrings. Then she put on a secondhand black twill coat with black soft synthetic fur at the collar and hems and went out into the bright cold night and got into the Jeep with her young, capable husband. All the way to Stamford she could not get over herself—she kept glancing in the passenger-side mirror.
Had she remembered to blow out the candle?
Yes, she had.
“I’ll give you a tour,” he said, when they got to the party. He procured punch in plastic cups. He showed her his office, petite but private, with a view of other office buildings. He showed her the kitchenette and the copiers.
“Very cool. My office doesn’t have those.”
“Ha, ha.”
“Really, honey.”
“I’ll show you how it works.” He stuck his hand on the screen and made a copy and handed it to her.
“I’m awed by your technological prowess.”
“We have different-colored paper too. I’ll show you.”
“I’m wet already.”
“Come on.”
She blew him in the supply closet.
WINTER SETTLED into the town off the highway. Colin picked Kate up at work and they drove home through a bad neighborhood and pulled up to the apartment; then, half an hour later, the house was warm and Colin was in front of the TV with a bourbon on the rocks and Kate was in the shabby little kitchen with an apron and the Sabatier knives, teaching herself to cook. She consulted recipes and made pork chops with apples, Hungarian goulash, tagliatelle with raisins and chicken. She made meatballs and meat loaf and flank steak and mashed potatoes and creamed spinach and veal tonnato and couscous with raisins and pine nuts and duck with green olives. She made mole sauce and red Thai curry and tandoori lamb. She threw lemons down the disposal and lit candles to protect her eyes from the onions. Waving a broom in front of the smoke alarm, she recalled Ella Anderson. She opened windows and the door to the yard. Then the smell of Andie’s incense drifted down the back stairs to Kate and Colin’s apartment and mixed with their garlic and candles and coffee, Wes’s lamb chops and cats. Wes’s furious phone calls continued. Kate was amazed that after months of this, he still had the energy to be so angry. Often he shouted, “Liar! You’re a liar!” Kate asked Andie what the issue was, exactly. Why couldn’t they share Lucy, as they’d been doing? She said that the ex-mother wanted to move to Oregon with her new boyfriend and take Lucy with her.
On the first Thursday of every month Brice and Colin went bowling and Andie and Kate met at one or the other’s apartment and talked and drank wine and ate Terra Blues potato chips. Andie was going to an acupuncturist named Tamara whom she described as “the most spiritual person I’ve ever met.” She made references to a mysterious illness but Kate couldn’t figure out what it was and she didn’t want to ask because she was afraid Andie had already told her and she’d somehow forgotten. Andie said that sometimes she cried, getting her treatments; that certain memories were stored in the body and the needles woke and released the memories along with the pain. Kate asked her if she and Brice considered themselves happy. Andie said that happiness was not something she ever thought about. She’d accepted the fact that adult life was just a long process of healing the damage done to you as a child.
“What happened?” Kate asked. “I mean, to you?” Like a psychiatric patient, she reclined on her living room couch while Andie sat cross-legged but upright in an armchair.
“I was raped.”
“You were?”
“I’m okay,” Andie said. “It was a long time ago. But yes.”
She told the story: a sleepover, the friend’s older brother, a forced “confession” to the family priest, a subsequent rejection, later in life, of the Catholic Church, etc., etc.
“It’s why I keep the weight on,” Andie said.
“Why?”
“I used to be thin. But I didn’t like men looking at me. Now they don’t.”
“Doesn’t … Brice look at you?”
“Brice?” Andie shrugged. “He’s my husband. He’s my best friend.”
“Nothing like that ever happened to me,” Kate said.
“No trouble? Ever?”
“Nothing much. My dad was strict. But I needed that.” Kate sat up suddenly. She reached for a potato chip and looked at it. “I don’t know why I feel so strange sometimes.”
“Even massage can help,” Andie said. “Come up tomorrow for a session. On me. You shovel the walk.”
So Kate climbed the stairs to Andie’s apartment and stripped down to her underpants and lay on a foldout massage table in the kitchen. Andie dimmed the lights and lit candles and put on Enya. She rubbed oil between her palms and dug into Kate’s back. “Let go,” she said.
“Of what?”
“Let your mind wander.”
“Okay. Going to try.”
“What are you thinking about right now?”
“Thinking about … bills. Have to pay ’em. Tonight. Ugh. And about how good this feels.”
“Well. Think about the bills if you need to.” Andie kneaded and pushed. Kate thought about the bills. She thought about a café she used to spend time at in college, about the dusky pink walls and the radiator at her knees in her favorite seat and the lattes and the Billie Holliday the owner had obsessively played. She thought about a life-drawing class she took her senior year and about her college boyfriend, who’d cheated on her with the model. She thought about a deer hanging by its legs in the garage in Galveston.
“Relax,” Andie said. “Every day is a task. But at night, count your blessings. Don’t think too much. Don’t look too hard. Let your life find you.”
THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, Kate and Colin’s second since the wedding, Darcy came to visit wearing glitter and bangles and heels, grime in her enhanced hair. She got off the train full of stories and energy and drama. “He can’t commit to anything,” she said about her new guy. “I mean, in other ways he’s been great. He’s been to shrinkage with me. He’s been communicating. He bought a new mattress and everything, like I told him to.”
“Mattress … ?”
“He was fucking around. I told him I wouldn’t fuck him on the same mattress he’d been fucking around on.”
“I see.”
“It’s not as if I’m like, ‘Marry me, marry me.’ But there comes a time, you know? So I’m giving him an ultimatum.”
“Another one?”
“One last one.”
“You’re a catch,” Kate said. “I would marry you. If he won’t marry you … I’ll divorce Colin and I’ll marry you.”
“Fun!” Kate turned off the highway. Darcy squeezed her thigh. “Well, at least if Jesse and I break up I won’t ever have to eat Indian food again. We go out for Indian food three times a week. I get chicken or shrimp or vegetarian. Jesse, every time, the same lamb vindaloo. The same! He would eat lamb vindaloo every single day if he could. I’m starting to smell like Indian food. My body odor, everything. They plop down this disgusting meat, and this pile of greasy rice, and he just plows right through it … astonishing. And he wonders why he’s getting a gut.”
They sat in Kate’s living room drinking wine.
“What is it like?” Darcy asked. “Being married? Is it fun? Is it weird?”
“I don’t know. Both.”
“I love your bracelets!” Darcy cried. Kate had taken to wearing silver bangles. “Oh, I miss you!”
Her visit reminded Kate and Colin that New York was not so far away. So when Colin picked Kate up from work on a Friday instead of going home to t
he apartment they would drive to the station and catch the six twenty-two.
The train would be crowded, going in. By Stamford sometimes all the seats were taken. Then Kate and Colin would stand by the doors and lean into each other against the rail. He would put his arms around her and rub her back and she would lay her head against his chest and look through the grimy glass doors at the inner-city kids playing basketball in cement lots, their bodies loose as water, skin like coal brushed orange in the summer dusk—then, when the weather changed, dark in sweats and snug knit caps. Kate saw a house built into the bay, a restaurant she’d gone to once with her father, over Fourth of July weekend—they’d watched the fireworks and talked about the constellations right there at the far table on the back patio with the train overhead, maybe some other girl watching them, seeing them from the window, briefly, swaying raptly in transport. Maybe that other girl, watching Kate and her father, had wanted her guy as badly as Kate wanted Colin, holding on to him on the rickety train, one hand exploring his neck, his face, his head, his vanishing hair.
Another year went by and the blond waitress disappeared and the movies became less interesting and there was nothing left to hammer or hang or build or organize and Kate and Colin wandered from room to room like bored teenagers. Kate lay with her body half on and half off the bed and noted how long it took her to fall and whether Colin pulled her back up and onto the bed before this happened. She rearranged the candles on the sideboard and he checked on the basement or watched golf or went to get a sandwich. Though neither said anything about it, both realized that some of their penchant for each other—so alarmingly quickly!—was falling away. The sex got rougher, as if to compensate. And every once in a while they would fight, badly, fights that recalled the Liam fight, and the center, the object, of their fights would shift, frustratingly, so that neither Kate nor Colin could determine later what the fight was really about. They screamed at each other, not caring at all that Wes and Lucy and Brice and Andie could hear them. Kate broke a plate and Colin broke a horrible wooden fish given to them by Kate’s Philadelphia relatives.
Games to Play After Dark Page 5
