by David Gates
Still another try: Brides of Bluebeard (which I changed to Bluebeard’s Brides because it sounded less pretentious), about the old movies I’d seen with my husband in which women found themselves married to evil men. I’d read The Runaway Bride, by Elizabeth Kendall, and this was to be its sinister counterpart. Loretta Young in The Stranger, where Orson Welles is a Nazi who’s managed to lose his accent, Grace Kelly in Dial M of course, Gaslight, Rosemary’s Baby and borderline cases like Rebecca and Suspicion and Jane Eyre—all of which had Joan Fontaine, so maybe it should actually be about her? This book would have a personal part too, but I would’ve had to decide what I thought about my own marriage, and I’m still having trouble with that. (See above. See below.)
I should throw out my notes for these projects—God only knows how many thousands of words on floppy disks, the computers on which they were written being long dead—lest anybody should read them when I’m dead, but who might that be? My brother’s home-schooled spawn? Anyway, I doubt I’ll be feeling this shame on the other side: triteness will be the least of the sins for which I’ll be called to account. “It’s always rough going at first,” my husband used to tell me. “You have to write through the self-loathing.” I hated to hear myself complaining to him, but I think he liked it; he got to be supportive and wise, without being threatened by my actually accomplishing anything. This is the version in which he hates me for being a woman—and if that’s too harsh a view of what was going on, I suppose it’ll get straightened out for me when we’re no longer seeing through a glass darkly. The other version is the one in which he knows he’s a failure too. Peekskill had been his last commission, and what was he supposed to do—sit there designing imaginary museums and concert halls for the use of imaginary people? So day after day he went in and painted, and even I could tell his canvases were as trite as my own projects: he worked at them simply to be working. If I resented his finding some pleasure in that, and there’s no “if” about it, then I guess that tells you what a bad wife I was, and what a crabbed spirit. I mean, no wonder the writing came to nothing. Apparently you need some joy in order to get anything off the ground, though I have to say that my husband’s joy—that’s what he called it, and he must have known—in giving himself over to his shapes and colors, with the music carrying him along, never made his results any better. There must have been a few hundred paintings in that storage unit, and that was back in my time.
—
During our first winter in the new house, we got snowed in for a day and a half and the power went off. “Why didn’t I have them put in a fucking generator?” he said. “Christ, we can’t even flush the toilets.”
I had some life left in my laptop, so we got in bed, pulled the duvet over our shoulders and played solitaire together, taking turns. I reached under his pajama bottoms, under his briefs, and he said, “Your hand is cold.” It was the first time he’d turned me down, which I’d thought neither of us was allowed to do. True, he was in a bad mood about the power—surely this needs no commentary—and my hand was cold. But. So I went under with my head and took him in my mouth, and our marriage was saved.
After I’d made him come, he fell asleep and I took care of myself, trying to be quiet about it. He snored awhile, then started giving out these little cries—uh, uh—which must have sounded like mighty yells to him, and I shook his shoulder to wake him. “God—horrible.” He rolled his head back and forth on the pillow. “Thank you. I guess my mind wanted to have a talk with me. Do you suppose it shuts up when you die?”
“That would be the hope,” I said.
“Some hope,” he said. “We’re fucked every which way, aren’t we.”
“Why would you expect me to be the expert?” I said.
“Oh, I’m just complaining into the void,” he said. “It hits me every once in a while, that’s all. I thought you might know the feeling.”
“Are we having a moment?” I said.
“Okay, you’re not inclined,” he said. “Distasteful subject—whatever the subject was. Did we think to bring that bottle in here?”
—
We didn’t know anybody in town—the New Yorkers who had weekend places socialized with one another and the locals were, what can one say, locals—but his friends would come up from the city, marvel at the house and sometimes stay for a night or two: musicians or artists or writers or academics. These were men his age, but not all of them showed up with younger wives or girlfriends, and not all the women his age were bitches to me. One of those women, a poet who was still friendly with his ex-wife, told me he looked ten years younger. “You must be a pistol,” she said. “I wish Milt could borrow you for a week.” (This was her husband, a gray-haired sculptor who wore bib overalls under his suit jacket, apparently to hide his weight.) “I bet he’d come back a giant refreshed.” But when a married English professor brought his grad-student protégée for a weekend, she got drunk, took it into her head that I was flirting with her mentor and came after me in the kitchen. “If you want his bad breath in your face, it’s fine with me. And his three-inch cock. Just do me a favor and drive me to the train.”
The summer after we moved in, a friend of his stayed for two months in Spandau—yet another name for the basement—to work on his novel; a condo was going up across the street from his apartment in Brooklyn, and construction started at eight every morning. If he came up here, my husband told him, he wouldn’t be underfoot—that is, he would be underfoot, but. The novelist kept his own hours, ate dinner with us a night or two a week; other nights he’d take us out to the sports bar or go wherever by himself. One morning, I went downstairs to do laundry and met a woman coming out of his door, wearing a bar-length skirt. Fat knees, pretty face. I thought I recognized her from the convenience store in town, but maybe not. She introduced herself as a friend of the novelist’s—she must have thought that knowing his name made it okay for her to be here—and went out the private entrance. I heard a car start up, stepped outside and watched a little sky-blue Kia—a good name for her, I thought—go down the driveway. I didn’t tell my husband, because I couldn’t decide what attitude to take. One possibility: that Kia might have sketchy friends among the locals and that he’d better change the codes on the security system. Another: that she was just some poor girl who’d wanted to get laid, and the novelist was handsome in what you’d now call the George Clooney mode. (He had a longtime girlfriend, whom I’d met, but she’d gone to Europe for a couple of months.) And still another: Why put my husband on alert, not that it really crossed my mind to sneak down there myself. Or if it ever had formed itself into a thought, well, you could just let thoughts come and go, and at this point my husband still fucked me like a man with a younger wife he wouldn’t be able to fuck forever.
—
First thing after waking up was best for him, before he’d—crude joke coming up—pissed away his opportunity. But morning light wasn’t, shall we say, his element. As much as he kept himself cardiologically fit, the skin was loose at his belly and buttocks, though his pubic hair, for some reason, was still black and the lines on his face still attractive in a daddy way. This was a man who could remember the attack on Pearl Harbor, when he’d been ten years old. Skin tags began to appear on his forehead, but I don’t suppose he ever thought of them and, in fairness, I never suggested he have them removed. I did order light-blocking shades for the bedroom, which I assumed would flatter me, too, in years to come—years that, to be honest, wouldn’t be long in coming. But in any marriage, one trains oneself not to look, and what must he have trained himself not to notice? My too-broad forehead and too-pointy chin? Maybe my feet, with the second toe longer than the big one—an ape foot. Or my areolas, the size of fifty-cent pieces, which I suppose might have looked like Mommy watching him. The things I could do something about, I did my best to remedy. Down in the basement, on the treadmill and the elliptical and the Smith machine, I could get through a movie in two days.
Of course wasn’t it the person you were su
pposed to be fucking? And wasn’t the expression supposed to be “making love to,” or, airy-fairier still, “making love with”? He once said, “I never thought this would happen for me again,” and I didn’t ask what this was, exactly. Maybe he just meant bedding a woman with a still reasonably firm body. Certainly mine presented fewer obstacles than his for our souls to pass through, on their X-ray flights toward spiritual union. Sorry to sound so cruel, but now that I’ve crossed over into unwantable myself, I’m afraid I don’t see much besides cruelty. Remind me what the compensations were supposed to be?
Anyhow, he wasn’t without vanity. At first I was impressed that he did his own laundry—what a male feminist. Eventually I figured out that he was privately bleaching away the yellow stains on his briefs, and this also helped explain why he slept in pajamas; I’d assumed it was a generational thing. He’d warned me he was a light sleeper, that he might get up during the night to read in another room. But I’d hear the toilet flush and found the saw palmetto pills in his sock drawer. For a while, he was able to hide the Viagra too; he’d slip the pill into his pocket an hour before he had to put up or shut up. So when I’m called to account, as I surely will be, for my own deceptions and evasions, let’s remember that I wasn’t the only one harboring little secrets. The bad version is that we spent years hiding from each other in that beautiful house. A happier way to look at it is that this is what marriage is—mutual accommodation, tolerance and forgiveness. Or is there a distinction?
—
A computer infested with miscarried books—they never made it to stillborn—a husband whose body was beginning to bother me and whose mind was running out of fascinations—and more to the point, I suppose, a body and a mind of my own that I was beginning to despise. Now what would you expect me to do? Yes, thank you: find yet another man to fasten on to. The George Clooney in the basement was long gone, back to his apartment and his girlfriend; when his book came out, it had an acknowledgment to us for giving him “refuge in my hour of darkness” and got a mostly good review in the Sunday Times. (Poor Kia, pseudonymized again, had unwittingly sat, or rather bent over, for her portrait, though I don’t suppose she ever knew it.) But the world was full of men who liked to think they were in their hour of darkness and that a woman could grant them refuge. A woman, that is, whom they didn’t already have, preferably younger than themselves, and younger than the woman they did have. If I was no longer twenty and toothsome, weren’t there still men who’d be perfectly glad to use me and whom I’d be perfectly glad to use? You know—that perfect gladness. It was just a matter of getting out of the house and hopping a train to the city. Instead, I had enough originality to take up smoking weed again.
I’d shied away from it ever since my first husband and I had shared a slender joint one of his basketball buddies gave us for a wedding present; he’d had to reason me out of going to the emergency room. But one night when the pianist and the drummer had come to the house to work out some new songs, my new husband brought them upstairs afterward, got out whiskey and glasses and put on a record by somebody named Bill Evans. (Yes, I understand now that everyone’s supposed to know who Bill Evans was.) “Oh fine,” the pianist said, “make me feel like shit. Anybody want some of this?” My husband put up his hand and said, “But feel free.” When the wooden pipe came to me I said, “Maybe just one.” I could tell what my husband’s look meant: one hit would make me dangerous and sexy and I’d get fucked tonight; any more would frighten him. Not that this wasn’t a temptation, but just the one did it for me: I was able to get through the first few minutes of panic—the whiskey must have helped—and found myself in a remote yet easeful state where the music sounded like the best thing I’d ever heard. “Is this jazz?” I said after a while. It was probably still that first song. “Indeed it is,” the pianist said. “Don’t tell me we’ve made a believer out of you.”
Had my husband betrayed to his friends the secret that jazz made no sense to me? But I mustn’t start worrying about that. “It’s like a garden,” I said. “Actually, that’s crazy.”
“No, no, you’re exactly right,” the pianist said. “Earth and flowers.”
While that wasn’t what I’d meant, it made me see that different people had different minds and that this was all right.
“Can I pour you a little more?” my husband said. It was so obvious that he wanted to bring me down from this place he couldn’t get to.
“I’m okay,” I said, meaning both that I had enough in my glass and that I was handling this. And I did get fucked that night, like the high and wicked girl I was. Turn out the light, baby.
The next day I got the pianist’s number out of my husband’s book. “Could we sort of keep this between us?” I said.
“We did make you a believer,” he said. “I don’t know, it puts me in a funny position. I thought I was picking up a little disapproval. I don’t want to cause dissension on the home front.”
“You wouldn’t,” I said. “If anything, you’d be helping out. Sort of like a marital aid.”
“Thanks for putting that picture in my head,” he said. “I guess he’s a lucky man. This is really just between us?”
You’re wondering why I didn’t have an affair with the pianist, since it amounted to that anyway, and of course he’d called my husband a lucky man. But really, I wasn’t the fuck-dolly you must think I am. Here, I’ll count up my partners. Collaborators. Whatever word you like. I make it an even dozen, up to that point: we’ve got the two husbands, the Newsweek writer, the man before him—my only bar pickup, so handsome that I preemptively gave him a wrong phone number in the morning—and that girl from the gym, then the starter partners, two during high school, both male, five at college, two male and three female. And I’d engaged in the usual half-dozen different activities and passivities. So what would you say? About average for an American woman of my age and background? A hair above? A hair below? At any rate, neither maidenly nor unselective, and never out of control.
In the early afternoons, then, when I’d finished my thousand words, I’d take my one little hit—what I got from the pianist was far more fearsome than what I’d smoked at my mother’s knee—and amuse myself, not that “amuse” is the word, for the three or four hours, just about the right length of time, before my husband appeared, summoning me sometimes to a seduction, more often to the first drink of the day. In good weather, I’d take a walk, staying on the roads so I wouldn’t get lost, though I’d sometimes think I’d gotten lost, or recline on the deck in a lounge chair, looking out at the river and the mountain and listening to music on my headphones. I could never get back to whatever peculiar pleasure I’d found in that one jazz record that night—a garden, for God’s sake?—much as I felt I owed it to my husband to try. I only wanted to hear what I’d gotten high to as a teenager: the Pointer Sisters, Fleetwood Mac, Donna Summer, Carly Simon—all that sexy sheen. When I had to stay indoors, I listened while playing computer solitaire. Only once did I make the mistake of trying to read over what I’d written in the morning: I was too high to follow from the beginning of a sentence to the end, but the falseness and glibness revealed itself so plainly that I couldn’t bring myself to write the next day. Maybe by this time you know the tone I’m talking about?
One stoned afternoon on the deck, I saw a UPS truck coming up the driveway—my husband was expecting stuff from Pearl Paint—and I ran into the house to hide in my workroom. I heard a chime so angelic that I had to try to find the note with my own voice; by then I’d forgotten someone must be at the door, and why I’d come in here. I lay down on the bed—the narrow brass bed I’d insisted on bringing from the house in Rhinebeck—and kept singing. Hours later, when we were sitting on the deck, having our first drink and watching the sun go down behind the mountain, my husband said, “I heard you in there this afternoon. You sounded so happy.”
—
For our fifth anniversary, he took us back to the same hot spring in Montana—this time we flew—and from there we wer
e to go on to Portland, stay overnight with his daughter and her partner, then back with a stopover in Cleveland, where he wanted to show me a library he’d designed in 1971, now ruined by a new wing, done by a young architect who’d once studied with him. There must have been some method of bringing weed on an airplane—wrap it in layers of plastic and hide it in your underwear?—but with all the new security I was afraid to try. Anyway, much as I might’ve liked it out in that hot pool with snow falling, I didn’t want to be high around my husband, and how would I get away from him? It was just as well: the first night at the resort, he pissed our bed in his sleep.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I was dreaming that I was pissing and I just—Jesus Christ. Maybe I had too much to drink. How can you go on living with me?”
“It could happen to anybody,” I said. “Let’s just get some towels and then—”
“Right, and then what? Jesus, it went right through to the mattress. Am I dying, is that what’s happening?”
“Of course you’re not dying,” I said. “You had an accident.”
“That’s what they say to children.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and covered his face with his hands.
“If you’re seriously worried about this,” I said, “you should see a doctor when we get back.”
“Who’s going to tell me what? ‘Welcome to old age’?”
“You’re only seventy-two,” I said. “Why don’t you to take a shower and change into your sweatpants.”
“And that strikes you as not old?”
I sat down next to him and put an arm around his shoulders, which seemed to be the thing to do, little as I wanted to. He stood up again. “I’ve done you a disservice,” he said. “I don’t intend to drag on for twenty more years like this.”
“Now you are being a child,” I said.
He was on one knee, pawing through his suitcase, and I looked away so as not to see his wet pajama bottoms. “That’s a new tone,” he said. “I thought I knew all your little ways. I guess we’re entering into unexplored territory.”
