iv.
I’m stressed, but she’s stressed too. I’m tired, but she’s tired as well. I try to keep this in mind, even though the edge is off now, the ice is melting, I can feel her relenting. I’m not entirely forgiven. But I’ve done the right thing, replacing the potato, putting it on the refrigerator shelf, showing that I was thinking of her, that I’m sorry. Still, it takes a while, even after I make amends, for her mood to change, for warmth to return. This is part of living with her, an aspect of her character I’ve accepted. We’ve been here before, and we’ll be here again. It isn’t our first argument and won’t be our last.
It’s nighttime now, and I’m sitting at my desk in my attic,. I can hear her in the bathroom downstairs, getting ready for bed. The vent hums through the attic floor, the sounds of her picking up her toothbrush, the water faucets going on. A blank document is open on the computer screen before me, but I’m writing longhand with pen and pad. Sometimes this helps when I’m stuck. Typing words on the screen seems so permanent. It’s easier to work on a pad because whatever I scribble down has to get transferred at least once if it’s good, and this gives me the freedom to experiment, explore alternate avenues, scratch out false starts. Yet, I don’t know what to write about. Or no, that’s not true. I know what I want to write about, but I don’t know if it’s going to work, if I can make it interesting. I’ve scribbled a line, just one, on the pad, “This morning someone shit on our lawn.” I let the tip of the pen drift over the page.
Most of my writing is fiction. Inventing has long been more interesting to me than writing from life. But this is because I find it difficult to make myself the subject and parse what’s important from what isn’t. Nothing eventful happens to me, and I’ve been operating from a belief that no one cares what I think. What I’ve written on the pad has the air of a journal entry, but I want to write about it, the way someone shitting on my lawn first thing this morning typifies my existence, the way it seems a perfect metaphor for being middle class in the suburbs, the way it set my day’s trajectory. Or maybe that’s overdoing it. There’s no metaphor. It’s just something that happened. Something out of the ordinary. An uncommon event. Yet, I want to write about my life, to abandon fiction and let the words flow, to describe how I feel. What if I simply try to capture the way my mind works, the digressions, the flights of fancy, the contradictions, the arguments I have with myself about right and wrong, the choices I’ve made? Can this be a book?
I turn about in my chair. Three bookshelves line the wall to my right. Dark wood against crimson. I’ve organized the book according to author. There are models for what I want to do. I can see the spines of these books from where I sit—Proust, Woolf, Joyce. It’s yet another thing that holds me back, that lineage. I’m not as erudite as them. I don’t have their education, their foundation in the classics. I’m the product of a different time and place, a different system of disseminating knowledge. And if I’m going to do this, I have to contend with that, accept it, move on, try to do something new, different, rawer and less refined.
Then there’s Henry Miller. I was thinking of him this morning. There’s a row of his books on my shelf. The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, the Tropics: Cancer, Capricorn. I’ll have to contend with him too, especially if I go that direction—unrefined, raw. For who’s rawer than Henry Miller? For years, I admired him, though I reread his book this past year, the most famous one, the one that broke the mold, Cancer, and it didn’t possess me the way it had when I was twenty-two. I still admired its form, the descriptions, the way it broke rules, redefined what a literary novel could be. But he was irresponsible, selfish. He’d abandoned his wife and child, an abandonment he recounts in Sexus, an abandonment he celebrates, and I can’t condone that.
It’s not that I don’t sympathize—to feel like you’re drowning in office work, to feel like you have potential that’s being squandered, to not have the space to dream the way writing requires you to dream. There are times I worry I’ve been too heavily indoctrinated by the life I lead—responsibility toward family, work, and I’m glad that Miller existed to question these things. If I could, I’d turn my back on work, but I’m hemmed in, having to pay bills, a mortgage, and the reason I’m hemmed in is that I love my family. I want to provide for them, to give them security and comfort, and at times, this leads to resentment because it leaves me little room to maneuver. If I want to leave my job, I’d have to leave for one with a similar salary, similar benefits. There’s no stopping to pursue writing, since writing doesn’t pay. To make money writing, you have to publish a novel, and even then, you have to publish something sensational, something that taps into the cultural moment, especially if it’s literary. But I want to do something new, something different. And this is part of the problem, too. To try to be new and unique isn’t going to result in wealth. And this might be a copout, the old writing copout: You don’t understand. I’m trying to do something different. Because obviously, if I can look at my shelf and see writers who’ve done something similar, it’s not all that new now, is it?
For a while, I had the idea of writing a novel about a guy in my situation who decides to start taking his personal days from work without telling his wife. He uses the time to travel, to spend his day in parks, museums, restaurants. But this is a fantasy. My mind’s now focused on what’s happening to me in real life. I want to get it down. It’ll be a suburban novel, and there’s hordes of those. On my shelves are volumes by Cheever, Yates, both of whom I’d long preferred to the better-known suburban scribes Updike and Roth. I like how Cheever is willing to embrace the macabre, the weird, masking it with literary prose—“The Swimmer,” “The Enormous Radio”; I like the ambiguous sexuality of his novels. But Yates is my favorite. His characters are narcissists like Updike’s, but whereas Updike celebrates it, revels in it, Yates dissects their failings. And all his characters are failures, whether they know it or not; it’s harrowing, to watch his characters dream of overcoming their limitations when they’re unable to. Yet, Yates is never cruel to them—even to Frank Wheeler in Revolutionary Road, who may be his biggest fool of all. When I first read it, I cringed, recognizing traces of myself in him, the speeches he delivers in his living room about being better than he is, about his artistic ambitions, about he and his wife moving to Paris to pursue them.
As for Roth, I’ve never had much use for him. Every few years, I pick up one of his novels, but his work leaves me cold. I’d laughed through the first fifteen pages of Portnoy, but the joke got old. Like Cancer, it might have been groundbreaking, but it hasn’t aged well. Updike, I’d hated for a long time, perhaps affected by a generational opinion of his arrogance; yet I reread Rabbit, Run recently, a novel I’d disliked in college, and found aspects to admire; the first time I’d read it, I was nineteen and didn’t make much of the fact that Rabbit Angstrom is twenty-three. Twenty-three, with a wife and child and another on the way. Twenty-three, to a nineteen year old, seems so much older. Rabbit was a man—a grown man with responsibilities I couldn’t imagine because I was still a child. I was going to college, single, living with my parents. I read it and judged Rabbit as I’d judge any grown man who skips out on his responsibility. Yet, now I have a decade on Rabbit. A full decade and a wife and child of my own, and my judgement of him has changed. Rabbit’s a child to me now. No wonder he wants to run. He knows nothing of the world. He’s experienced nothing. That’s how it happened in the 1950s. You lived in a small town, you went to a small town high school and met a small town girl who was pretty, and you wanted to sleep with her, and if you had the chance you did and no one discussed birth control, so you knocked her up, and to do the right thing you got married, and you settled down and got a job and the scope of your world was the town limits, and you dreamed of something else and felt trapped and wanted to escape.
I’ve seen more of the world than Rabbit. I’ve traveled. I waited until I was in my thirties to get married and have kids. I slept with enough women to get a sense of variety, and when I settled down, I made my choice with more consciousness than Rabbit. Still, I struggle with it. If I didn’t have those experiences, I too might want to hit the road like Rabbit or get drunk every night like Rabbit’s wife. So when I was young, I judged them, but now that I’m older, I sympathize. I don’t think his actions right, but I can forgive them. How many marriages that begin at twenty-two last? Somehow my parents’ marriage made it. So far, at least. But there are disagreements, problems still. My dad has yearnings to travel, to see more of the world. He wants to go to Italy, to Mexico. And my mom claims she wants this too, but every time they have the chance, she finds excuses not to. My dad lived in Alaska when he was younger, he’d had experiences. Maybe these sustain him in weaker moments, moments of doubt, moments when he doesn’t like his wife or kids, moments when he wishes his life had gone differently. I wouldn’t know, he never speaks of it except to say that he’d done it, except to say it was beautiful. What does my mom have? She must experience similar dissatisfactions, bent over a load of laundry in the basement, sorting colors and whites. What does she think of then? The cross-country trip she’d taken with my father, my biological father, shortly after I was born? The three of us packed together, driving state-to-state in an old blue van, camping out? She never speaks of this either, except to say it was beautiful, the country she’d seen, the country we’d seen, though I don’t remember it. I never ask. Maybe I should. Or maybe that’s intruding. One never knows with these things. I get the sense they both dated other people. She’d had other boyfriends; my father, girlfriends. I’d glimpsed photos of strangers in my youth. My mom had mentioned other women’s names—women my father had dated—with disdain. But this was the 70s, so people did that more. For the life of me, I can’t imagine marrying the first girl I slept with. No wonder the characters in Rabbit, Run have affairs. There’s nothing else to hold onto, no wealth of experience to tide them over, nothing to retreat to when the boredom stretches them so thin they feel they might snap.
What does Justine have? Where does she go when she tires of me and Sadie? She certainly doesn’t have affairs. We never discussed our sexual history, except to say we’d been to the doctor, got tested, were clean. She knows about Darcy because Darcy introduced us. She knows about Judy too, because we’d become friends around the time I broke up with Judy. But I’ve never shared the others with her, the extent of my experience, because I know that sharing too much leads to jealousy. In the early years, I think she was, to some extent, intimidated by my experience with Darcy. It must have crossed her mind. Was it better with her? How did she compare? Only through time and my not mentioning it did this fall away. I never made that type of comparison in my mind either. There’s a difference, of course, but the difference is that I love Justine and trust her in ways I’ve never trusted anyone. So in that way, it’s always going to be better with Justine. She’s had others, too. I know she lost her virginity in her early twenties, but I’ve never asked about this.
The track lighting above the bookshelves is on, but dimmed. It’s warm enough that the stink bugs are out, crawling on the window behind me, flirting with the light of my computer screen. When we first moved in, these bugs were everywhere. The walls at the ends of the attic are exposed brick, and that’s where they get in. So, I purchased insect repellent, sprayed, and the next day, the floor was littered with their corpses. Tiny desiccating shells peppered along the beige carpet. They’ve never returned with the same force, but every once in a while, I’ll see a handful of them, and it happens now that one goes pinging against the bulbs. I watch as it moves to the other side of the room and returns, ping…ping…ping.
I go back to scribbling notes.
There’s so much to reckon with, so much that’s come before me, so much that’s good, even great. Is it always like this? Is writing always an act of overcoming influence, intimidation? More and more people are writing now, so there’s little room for a new voice and maybe no newness anyway. It’s enough to make you want to quit. A certain naivety is required to begin. One has to both acknowledge and ignore that anyone’s done anything before. Intimidating isn’t the right word; paralyzing is more like it. Yet, people go through the kinds of things I’ve gone through today all the time. I’ve just never seen them set down, not like I experienced them, not even in the day-in-the-life novels I’ve read, the ones lining my shelves. Those books are never about anything this mundane, this petty—an argument over a potato, a daughter’s head cold. Does it have to be dramatic? How can I make it interesting? Of course, I can’t do it all in one sitting, so I take notes. I arrange bullet points on the page. I write as fast as I can:
- Commute/Mr. SEPTA/Cute girl smiling at me
- Flu shot/tripping over newspaper ribbon/free will?
- Horton e-mail/changing nature of job/the rewards vs. sacrifice
- Douchebag in Audi/hatred of driving/watching deer get hit
- Dr. Barnes/going to doctor in my youth/intense fear of physicals
- General pervasive sense of malaise/anxiety attacks/getting older
But really, I want to write about Justine, about what happened between us. I want to investigate that. But can I? Can I?
There are times I consider giving up writing altogether. If only I could give it up, I think, I’d settle down, become a better husband, father. I’d be happier. Whenever I’m miserable, if I examine my unhappiness, it always has its roots in writing. If I don’t have time to write, I think about writing. If I’ve written and it’s gone badly, I’m moody, irritable. The only time I’m not moody is when I’ve had a productive day, when I put down something I’m proud of. And I’ve tried giving it up once or twice. I’m going to stop writing a while, I tell myself. Take a break. If I’m compelled to come back, I will, but maybe I won’t. Usually I do this when writing becomes overwhelming, when things are going badly, when everything I write sounds like shit. And I give it up, and I intend to give it up fully for weeks, months, even years. But every time I make this vow, I get an idea. And when I get an idea, I can’t sit on it. I have to start writing again. And it goes well for a time, but eventually I get back to where I was. I don’t understand it, this compulsion, this addiction. I have friends, a family who loves me. I’m dissatisfied with my job. So what? It pays enough to sustain my lifestyle. So, why this incessant drive to write, to publish, to reach out to strangers in hopes of cultivating adulation? Most people don’t care, even if you write well. But this isn’t why you do it. You do it to say something about life, to capture ideas, ways of living. After all, narrative art outlines potential ways of living, potential ways of approaching the world, even if only on a small scale. No work contains the whole, no matter what the artist aspires to. Yet, this is what the author wants, to make some definitive statement, to diagnose life, to prescribe and cure, to create a work that allows us to better understand the world, even if only a trifle better than we understood it before. We want the audience to look at what we’ve done, and say how complete, how perfect, which translates in our minds to how complete and perfect we are. To write and share what you write is a pathology, a sickness. Maybe once you realize your limitations, you scale back, and rather than trying to encapsulate the entirety of life, you take on a piece of it, try to say something about that piece, something modest. About childhood or friendship or fatherhood or marriage, hoping your statement has resonance for others, however modest.
I play with my wedding ring, a nervous habit. I grip and spin it around the finger. I’ve lost weight since we married, and it’s loose. I’ve never gotten used to wearing it. It feels odd, out of place. The ring is white gold, simple, two divots running around a smooth polished surface, a quarter-inch across with the date of our wedding inscribed on the inside. We married when I was thirty-one. She was thirty-three. We’d bought the house first. It seemed more of a commitment, putting our names on a mortgage. But our wedding day was memorable, Justine ravishing. She’d worn a strapless, tea-length dress, a sheer white vale over her hair, and a light purple sash about her waist. She made her bouquet, cloth flowers rather than real. They were light and dark purples, with green cloth-cut leaves, and she’d made one for me to wear as a boutonniere. It was white, and I saved it. It sits in the top drawer of my dresser where I keep my ties. She’d insisted I buy new shirts. She had, in fact, purchased them for me—French-cuff dress shirts—and she’d designed and crafted cufflinks for me, typewriter keys, the letter “J.” I didn’t wear a tux, but a simple black suit. She’d grown out her hair because I like it longer, and I’d had mine cut because she likes mine short. She’d pinned hers back beneath the veil, and the dark brown curls hung tightly above her shoulders.
We’d held the ceremony at an inn, an old white stone building with a colonnade porch and slate roof, green shutters. It was performed outside, next to a creek under a canopy of trees. Neither of us have any religious convictions, but we’d discovered that in our State, one of our friends could get ordained online and conduct it. So, we asked one of her oldest friends, a friend who, over the course of our relationship, had become my friend too, and he agreed. And my brother stood as best man, and her sister was maid of honor. We’d practiced beforehand, not only the march and vows—which Justine had tasked me with writing—but the first dance. Justine had wanted to dance to Sinatra, and although we hadn’t taken a class in years, I pieced together a couple moves from the foxtrot, and we cleared the furniture out of our living room and put on “Love Is Here to Stay,” and I held her and we danced around.
Even then, I played with my ring, twisting it on my finger, sliding it up and down. I’d take it off and look at the date inside and smile. I was married. It was one of those things I’d always wanted but never thought would happen, and now I’d found someone who loved me so completely that she wanted to bind her life with mine, and there had never been a doubt in my mind that I wanted to be with her. And that day, we sat at a small round table at the center of all the other larger round tables, and everyone watched us, and we watched each other, and we didn’t care what happened around us. We’d been together four years, and they’d been good years, happy years, and this felt like the next step. And it seemed that day that we were of one mind, one accord, that nothing could divide us. Yet, so much has come along since to change us. To make us different people.
I pause a moment and bring up pictures of our wedding day. In one, I’m standing beside her, her eyes are closed, her head on my chest, an arm around my back. In another we’re dancing, I’m staring down into her eyes, our foreheads pressed together. When was the last time we stood like that? Love was easy then. And four years might seem a long time, but if you plan to spend your lives together, it’s only the beginning. There are so many questions crossing my mind. If I’m going to write what I want to write, it’ll be about her, about our lives. It isn’t just my life. We have separate streams of thought, different approaches to childrearing. But our lives aren’t our own anymore. They’re communal, we share them with each other, with our daughter. Three separate lives have become one, and though they might split again someday, we’re now integral to each other. Whatever one does affects the others. We’re ground down by routine, mundanity, and we have to be conscious to not let this diminish how we treat each other. And the questions march through my mind: do I know how to love her? Is she happy? Was she ever happy? Is she still happy? What does she think about all day? What does she think about our situation? Will she ever be happy again? Will we? Am I unhappy? I don’t think so. I love her. That’s one thing I know. I love our daughter. That’s another. But who are they? Will I ever know? Probably not. Probably not. And they’ll never know me. Never know what I’m up here thinking. I guess we have to accept this. But I hope I never stop asking. I want to know them, the people I care for most. Sadie’s a child, of course. But growing fast. And as she grows, she keeps changing. She’s a different person every day. Is Justine? Am I? Or have we stopped growing? And if we’ve stopped, can we find a way to start again? I can remember them, the stages our daughter’s heading for. Adolescence. Puberty. Teenage years. Full of curiosities and elation and pain. Investigations into life. Into what the world means and who you want to be. That’s all stopped for me. Or has it? Am I falling into a trap, anticipating living vicariously through my children? But that’s another stage, isn’t it? Watching them grow, watching them experience their lives, taking pride in their accomplishments, helping them when they fail, when they hurt? I would say there’s hardly time to think, but that’s all I do. The problem is that I don’t have time to act, to do anything other than the essentials.
When we arrived home from the doctor’s office, Justine wasn’t in, so I set Sadie down in front of the TV and put on a pot of water to boil and pulled a container of pasta sauce from the freezer and set it on the stove above a low flame. When that was done, I opened Sadie’s lunch bag, took the twice-baked potato, and placed it on the second shelf down from the top, the one right in Justine’s line of sight.
We’d purchased a cheap thin fridge after moving into our house to save space in the kitchen, but our family’s needs are straining the limits of that space. Not so much the refrigerator but the freezer, since most of our dinners are stored there, as well as the pancakes, waffles, and muffins we pack for Sadie’s lunch. Also, the cheap plastic shelves inside the doors are cracked and held together with silver tape. I’d pushed back the other items on that shelf—Tupperware containers of half-cut bell peppers, black olives, a transparent quart of Parmesan cheese. I wanted the bag with the potato in it to sit foremost on the shelf, to be viewed in plain sight when she opened the fridge.
I turned back to the stove to watch the pot of water come to a boil. I watched it, not out of impatience, but in case Sadie wandered in and took an interest in the stove. If I put up the gate at the door, she’d come to it and whine at me, so I had to stand there, guarding the stove, so that she didn’t pull the boiling water down on herself. I set the timer for nine minutes and took the handle of the pot with the melting sauce, swirled the red brick of pureed tomato, and watched it slide around the silver surface, leaving a thin watery trail in its wake.
The reason we hadn’t bought a bigger fridge was that Justine didn’t want it next to the stove, so the two are separated by a thin white cabinet with a gray marble top that stands waist. I’ve often wondered if it makes a difference to have the fridge and stove side-by-side, but the counterspace that the marble countertop provides is convenient, especially when I’m cooking something new and need ingredients close by. The next closest surface is the island behind me—or not so much island as peninsula since it abuts the back wall—and that’s halfway across the room.
I considered adding frozen peas, but Sadie doesn’t like peas. She used to eat anything as a baby, but now she goes nuts if she finds a hint of green in her bowl. Except baby spinach. She still eats that. But she throws a fit with anything else, and I couldn’t handle a fit right then. I could have cooked the peas separately, in a separate pot with separate water. But even this was too much effort. I was wiped out, trying to preserve something of my energy to go upstairs and write when this was done.
The sun was getting low through the windows, and I turned on the lights in the oven hood to watch the sauce. When the water came to a boil, I dumped in the rotini and gave it a stir. I hadn’t turned on the kitchen lights, the overheads, just the hanging lamp over the table in the breakfast nook. I preferred this to the glaring overhead lights, the muted glow. It made the room warm, homey. The walls are supposed to be mint, but they’d turned lime once the paint dried. Justine had wanted to redo them, but I asked her to wait a few years. It isn’t that I love the color, but I didn’t want to drop another hundred dollars on paint. Besides, in low light, one hardly notices.
I heard the keys sliding in the front door, the clank of deadbolt, the exhalation of wood as Justine entered the house. I liked that sound, the sound of my wife coming home, even if I didn’t know what mood to expect. I’d considered sending her a text saying that Sadie was all right, but I figured if I didn’t text her, she’d have to talk to me, if only to ask. Sadie was in the living room, where I’d left her, watching TV. I’d put on Frozen, and she hadn’t moved. I peeked around the corner of the kitchen, and she was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, her neck craned back, a glazed look in her wide brown eyes.
“Sadie’s okay,” I called to Justine, as she hung up her coat. “It’s a cold. Rest and fluids.” She acknowledged this by nodding. She stopped next to Sadie, leaned down, kissed her on the forehead. The timer went off, and I went back to what I was doing. I took the colander out, drained the pasta, tipped the colander full of plain pasta into Sadie’s plastic bowl and dumped the rest back in the pot. I slathered ours with sauce and used a wooden spoon to mix it. Justine was still mad. Of course, she was. I hadn’t apologized, and she hadn’t seen the replacement potato. Still, I was hurt she hadn’t acknowledged me, hadn’t done more than nod. After all, I’d left work to get our daughter, take her to her appointment. But she was just in the door, what did I expect? Cartwheels? She’s always taken a while to decompress. Even when she isn’t mad.
I was standing at the kitchen sink when I heard her come in. She was silent. I wasn’t sure she’d looked my way, but I heard her open the fridge and pour a glass of water. She’d see it now, forgive. Or would she? Would I have to say it? I still didn’t want to. The potato was my offering, me saying it without having to say, Please accept this. For a moment, she stood, the door open. Then, she closed it.
“Hey,” she said. Monosyllabic, but still a word. And her tone wasn’t one of anger. Had she seen? Was this the acknowledgment? Was it even an issue anymore? Did she care? Or was she simply tired? Like me?
“Do you want me to do your cheese?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Could you hand it to me? It’s in the fridge.”
The Parmesan was behind it. I figured if she hadn’t seen it, she’d see it now. And as she opened the door, she paused. She didn’t say a thing, but turned and handed me the container.
“Thanks,” I said.
She nodded. It was such a slight response, but I knew her well enough to know she saw it now. She was revising her thoughts, her anger melting. It would take some time. She never let things go at once. I sprinkled the pasta, tossed it, and brought the bowls to the dining room table.
We’d purchased our table from a college student at Drexel who had just graduated and was in the process of moving and didn’t want to take it with her. It was our first joint purchase, the first household item we bought together. We paid seventy dollars, hauled it back to our apartment. We’d used the Philly car share program and taken the car the wrong day, so we’d had to pay a fee. We already had a bed. The bed was hers. I’d gotten rid of mine. And even though I slept in it and it was considered mine now too, I hadn’t had a hand in its purchase. It was simply that hers was nicer than mine. I’d ditched my TV and we bought a new one, but I didn’t think of a TV as domestic, as the product of sharing a life. But a dining room table, this was a step toward solidifying our relationship, though we wouldn’t have framed it that way. We’d simply needed somewhere to eat. The table had four chairs with fraying fabric seats that Justine had reupholstered—two more than needed, but two we thought we’d need in the future. There was also an extension leaf. We could pop a few nodules in the center and pull it apart and plunk down a wooden slab that made it longer for guests, but we kept that slab in the closet most of the time.
The walls in the dining room are bright. Aside from Sadie’s room, where Justine painted a cloud and sky and placed two orange kite decals on the wall, these are the brightest in the house. The top is azure, the bottom a light, sandy tan, the portions separated by a panel of white. Like sky and earth, even more so than the nursery, the room catches the light through two windows that open toward the east and face a hulking sycamore. We’d had our first argument painting the walls here. Or, we hadn’t reached the stage of painting. We were priming, spreading a layer of white on the walls so the paint would hold. The room had been navy on the top and copper on the bottom, but that was too dark. So, we’d chosen the current colors to brighten things up. And Justine hadn’t liked the way I was using the roller. I can’t remember why. Not uniform enough or going too fast and laying it on too thick. I’d tried to take instruction, but she kept correcting me, and finally, I left. That was what, four years ago? The trajectory of our fights hasn’t changed much. I do something she doesn’t like, something she thinks I should do differently, and she doesn’t tell me so much as shout, and I get angry at her for talking to me that way, and sometimes she’s right, and sometimes she’s wrong, and we make up and maybe talk about it, and everything feels resolved, and both of us believe it won’t happen again, and a few months later, it happens again. At what point do you accept that these are the flaws in the person you married and let it go? At what point do you say, this isn’t going to break our marriage, I’m okay with her being the way she is, with me being the way I am?
I looked at Justine across the table. I sat with my back to the windows, facing her. Sadie sat at the head, in a booster seat, and Justine angled her body so that she was facing Sadie. She wasn’t looking at me. The thing about having a kid when you fight, you still have to interact, you just don’t have to face each other. You can look at the kid, both of you focus on something else so you don’t have to focus on each other. Which is how it always is after a kid is born. Even when you aren’t fighting, you’re looking elsewhere. How often do we see each other anymore?
I’ll have to work on that, I thought. Try to see her more frequently, more clearly. But I’d made this vow before. I should just be nice to her, I thought, all the time, regardless of how she treats me, see what she does. But I’d thought this before. It was easier to think than to do: to be magnanimous when met with scorn, to not let it hurt your pride.
Sadie was eating her pasta piece-by-piece, and I watched her eat, if only to do what my wife was doing, to feel what she was feeling. Sadie used to eat sauce, and she made a mess. I didn’t like cleaning the mess, but I liked the way she’d manage to spread the sauce across her face in the search for her mouth. Her lips and nose were smeared, sometimes her forehead.
“Remember when she used to eat sauce and get it everywhere?” I said.
Justine glanced my way and gave the briefest smile.
This was what I’d resorted to, nostalgia for six months ago, but I was searching for connection, response. I needed to reestablish communication, and this was the only means available. It was shamefully obvious. Yet, I had no shame when she was against me. I was willing lay my ego down, and she hadn’t been derisive. She’d nodded, smiled.
Maybe I’ll start going to bed the same time she does, I thought. Before her even. So that when she comes in, I’m there, and when she lays down I can hold her, or if she doesn’t want to be held, rub her back. Or if she doesn’t want that, I’ll be nearby, there, a reminder that I still want to be close to her.
But of course, that time had arrived, and I didn’t go to bed but came up to the attic, to sit down and write. What had happened to my resolve, before I left work, to simply say I’m sorry?
I can hear her in the bathroom below me—closing the door, running the sink. The clack of toothbrush against porcelain. The exhaust vent, which runs through the attic out the roof, hums to life. If I leave now I can go down, get into bed, wait for her. Not for sex, but to talk maybe. But I’m not done. This is part of the difficulty. There are three versions of me. The father and husband, the worker, the writer. The first is required. To maintain the image I have of myself I have to engage, put in effort. It’s important to be a decent father, a devoted husband. And the worker makes money. The writer makes none. So, the writer is relegated to stolen moments in the attic. And since work is work, and family is work, and writing is work, I’m never not working. And because my time—not just to work, but to be alive, here and now—is limited, I’m hounded by the compulsion to maximize each moment, and when I don’t, I’m overcome with guilt. I have trouble sanctioning breaks. What could I do if I didn’t have to work at my office, have a day job? If I was just a husband and father? If I could just write?
I pause and listen for Justine. I like her sounds, knowing she’s in the house, knowing they’re both in the house—Justine and Sadie. Though Sadie’s sleeping. When Justine twists the hot and cold faucets, there’s a brief hiss as the water comes on, a warm sound, steam escaping a valve, and then they go off. The exhaust vent goes off. The bathroom door opens. A clack, both wooden and metallic. The knob turns, the latch slips loose. A step on the hardwood floors, the boards creak. Late at night they’re louder than during the day, in the absence of background noise. I have our upstairs hall by heart. I’ve mastered my walk. It isn’t graceful, but it’s effective—effective meaning Sadie doesn’t wake.
There’s a spot at the top of the stairs behind the banister where it creaks loudest, and when I wake at night and have to go to the bathroom, I avoid stepping there. Hitting a foul spot and making it creak can turn a bathroom trip that should have taken two minutes into an hour if I wake Sadie. So, I’ve learned to walk like a duck—legs split, feet hugging the outer edges of the hall. It’s odd, but this method makes the least amount of noise. And I never close the bathroom door fully, not at night, as the clack that Justine just made is sure to rouse Sadie. And then if it does, I have to rock her back to sleep and only have an hour or two before waking for work and I’m exhausted all day. Maybe I doze on the train and dose myself with coffee, but the best course is not to wake Sadie. Now that we’ve bought her a bed and she sleeps in the back room and not the nursery, she’s less prone to waking. But it doesn’t matter. I still tiptoe.
Tonight Justine gave her a bath and I’d done the bedtime routine: stories, song, tucking her in, saying “Good night, I love you.” I cap all my interactions with Sadie and Justine with this, “I love you,” an impulsive need to reach for them, to touch an arm, a shoulder, to make sure they’re there. While doing so, I blurt this—“I love you”—sometimes a whisper, sometimes in my regular tone of voice.
I like it better now that Justine does the baths and I do stories and songs. We used to do it the other way, but Sadie was breastfeeding then. We needed to switch things up, to ween her, so we bought her a twin bed, a bed that’s too large for her, but this was our preparation for the second child, who’ll inherit the nursery. Sadie’s growing, and won’t fit the crib much longer, and this was our way of transitioning, making her not expect it, making her forget.
She’d stayed in the nursery a few months after this. I’d started reading her stories. We’d sit in the glider and read books like Guess How Much I Love You and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and she started to repeat some words with me, and when she couldn’t say the words, she made sounds. But now in the twin bed, in the back room, she sometimes stops paying attention, flits about, does headstands, strange contortions. And on days when I’m stressed, this makes me uncomfortable—me winding down while she’s amped. I threaten to leave if she won’t sit still, to take her stories away. But these threats are idle. I don’t like to take her stories away because I’m taking something from myself—time with her, time with her being small, the way she fits in the crook of my arm as I hold the book open, the way she leans her head, still damp from the bath, against my chest and leaves a darker spot on the fabric of my shirt. These moments are fleeting, like all the best moments in life. Yet, I also feel the pull of the attic, of my writing, and I’m divided. The time after she goes to bed is my own again, the coveted personal time, and some nights I rush the stories, compelled by the prospect of getting upstairs, of sitting by myself and letting my thoughts run wild. But she’s supposed to mean more than that, and I’m shortchanging us both by not forgetting about the day and letting the rest of the world fall away, so that I can be there with her fully. But some nights I do put it away, some nights I’m present, and these are glorious nights, nights when I ask her about her day, and she’ll maybe tell me about a friend at school. And I’ll ask her questions and she’ll do her best to answer. And I picture us older—her, a teen; me, verging on fifty, talking like this. Me asking questions and her begin open, telling me about her life, me being interested, intent, empathic. Then another one comes—a difficult day—and I want to get away from everyone, from Sadie and Justine, and take refuge in the attic as I have now.
Justine, at least, had talked to me during bath time. “Could you get the towel and washcloth?” she’d asked. And I’d gone into Sadie’s room and brought them to her. And while Justine knelt at the edge of the tub, I stood at the threshold and watched her bathe our daughter. There were toys in the tub, a rubber duck. I’d made sure Sadie had a rubber duck and other toys, a plastic boat, a turtle, a frog. I’d named the turtle and frog: Susan, Sallie. All the tub toys had “S” names like Sadie. And Sadie giggles when I fill them with water and squirt it on her. Some nights, I take over for Justine because her back hurts, because bending down like that over the tub is hard on the knees. But tonight she didn’t ask. Maybe she was all right with it, maybe her knees and back weren’t bothering her. She’s a good mother. I’ve always thought that. Even in the moments I’m mad at her, far from her, I admire how much she cares for Sadie, the way she washes Sadie’s hair, the way she dries her off, the tenderness. Sometimes she can get a bit rough, brushing her hair, when Sadie won’t stand still, but I understand this. And whenever we’re together, we’re good about reminding each other to exercise patience. I sat there watching, thinking of how we’re good together, the three of us. And when she got Sadie dressed and I read her stories and tucked her in and said good night and walked to the door, I looked at the two stairways, the one that leads down to the first floor where my wife was, and the one that leads to the attic where I am. And I opted for the attic. But now I’m second guessing this choice. I should be with her. I should shut this down and go talk to her.
Our bedroom is at the foot of the attic stairs, and I can hear her there now, undressing. I’ve always liked to watch her undress for bed. I watch and appreciate. She turns to the wall when she does it. She takes off her shirt, removes her bra with her back to me, and I only catch sight of the sides of her breasts as she leans forward and lets the straps slip down her arms. She’ll pull on a tee-shirt, something old and worn, her breast loose in its folds. She’ll slide her pants off, and I’ll look at her legs, beautiful legs, long and slender. She never wears frilly underwear. Hers are simple, one color, black, pink. But they fit well. They hug the curves of her ass, and I like her ass. She’s sexy. She’s always been sexy to me, and I never find her more sexy than these moments, to see her turn and stand there in a loose tee-shirt and panties. She looks nice dressed up, ready for parties, in dresses; she looks nice in jeans; but she’s sexiest now. And when I wake next to her in the morning, I like to roll over and take her in my arms and rub her bare legs or hook an arm around her belly and let my hands slide across her skin, to not touch her breasts directly but feel their presence against my forearms, to place my nose at the nook in her shoulder, to kiss her neck. And when she stretches her arms above her head to yawn, in waking, and her breasts stretch taut beneath the fabric of her tee, I run my hand along her flank. I love nothing more than this, the feel of her body right then, attenuated, reclined. Why aren’t I down there now, to watch this, to indulge in something I enjoy so much, the sight of my wife, the sight of her at her most casual, her most relaxed, her sexiest? It’s always allowed, something she’s never denied me, the sight of her like this. So, why refuse it? We only have a limited time for this, too. A limited time while both our bodies hold the shape of youth.
We used to have sex every morning, before we went to work. This was in the first two or three years of our relationship. This was when we lived in an apartment and shared a bedroom and a soft sun woke us through the curtains. We didn’t speak, but reached for one another across the expanse of the bed, beneath a simple sheet in summer, beneath the sheets and comforter in fall and winter. Every day. To think of that now seems unbelievable, impossible, that we wanted each other that much, needed each other, that we had to feel our bodies bound like that, each day, and that the days were wonderful because of it, because our bodies needed it, yearned for it. At night, too, we made love; not every night of course, but it felt like every night. We’d go to parties and mingle, interact, hold down our end of a conversation, all the while wondering when it would be okay to go home and undress each other. We’ve been together eight years, and we must have made love a thousand times, even with things slowing down in these past few years. Have we burned out? Had enough of one another? Our passion has lasted five years, more than most people get. But I don’t want it to end. Five years of passion might be more than most people get, but I’m greedy and it isn’t good enough. I’m turning thirty-six next month. If I live another forty years, I don’t want them to pass without passion. And I don’t want the passion to come from somewhere else, another source. I don’t want to discover it in a hobby. I want it with my wife, but how?
When you first meet, you speak without judgment. You listen the same way. Or maybe you judge, but you don’t judge too harshly because you want this person in your life. But as you continue, the judgements become harsher, character flaws accentuated. There’s no longer that consideration, the sensitivity to what might offend. And after marriage, you say it—whatever comes to mind—regardless of how the other person will interpret it. Would our marriage have been better if we’d retained the niceties we’d observed in our first meetings? Is there a trade-off? Less knowledge but greater respect. In some sense I’m always, in my mind, trying to get back to those first conversations in Rittenhouse, late at night, sitting out under the city lights. It’s delusional to believe we can get there again, turn the clock back. But is it? In terms of the way we treat each other, is it so impossible to focus my attentions back on her and try? Try to show her the same attention, those same considerations? Courtesies? Is this so hard? Does the drift I feel, the daily confusion, the sense of apathy, come from this? The lack of focus? Do I have to put down the writing, accept that work is going to be unfulfilling, and focus entirely on family? It’s one idea, and it doesn’t seem a bad one. But can I?
My dad did it. His dad before him. And they’re men I’d call successful. For as much as I might lament their lonely walks to and from work, the crushing monotony of their jobs, they were successful. They were family men, devoted to their wives and children. They came home, turned their attention to the tasks that needed handling—sports practices, dance recitals, homework—and whatever yearnings they might have had, they didn’t seem to struggle. And if they struggled it was all internal. They never showed their dissatisfactions. But I’m not built like them. Which doesn’t mean I can’t try. Even after two years, I’m new to fatherhood, new to being a husband. Making the pieces fit might take a little longer. Maybe I have to stop measuring my life by the books I read, the number of words I write each day, let it come naturally, shift focus, whatever that means. But what if I can’t?
I put the pen down, stop scribbling. I stand and go to the stairs and turn out the light. At the foot of the stairs, I go to our room and slide into bed next to Justine. It’s dark, the shades are drawn, my eyes adjust. I can tell she isn’t sleeping, though her eyes are closed. She’s facing the opposite wall with her legs curled beneath her, hands balled into fists near her chin, a human question mark. I slide in and mold my body to hers, taking her form in mine. I place a hand gently on her arm.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
She laughs.
“I saw that you got me another one.”
“It was the least I could do.”
She’s warm in my arms, and I like that warmth. I like the rise and fall of her chest against my arms, the smell of her hair in my nose. I put my lips to the nape of her neck and kiss her there. I slide them over the soft tender part above her shoulder and kiss her again. I hold her tightly. She relaxes into my embrace. If I’m going to try, that means she’ll have to try, too. But maybe if I try, she’ll see it and meet me halfway, and we’ll get there together.
“It was a person,” I say. “Who shit on our lawn this morning.”
I’m not sure why I say it, but she laughs again.
“How do you know that?”
“They used a paper towel to wipe their ass and stuffed it in our bushes.”
“That’s gross.”
“Oh, I know.”
It’s another minor incident among many. This day, without my writing it, will be forgotten. And even if I write it, tomorrow will be the same, a host of small incidents that, if I don’t write them down, I’ll lose. I can’t write all the days. Not even the vast vault in my brain can retain them. They’ll fade from memory, these minor incidents, my mind sifting the useless out. And yet, accumulated, both the useful and useless make a life, mine and hers. It gets difficult, in the midst of all this, in the stream of life coming at me, to see what has meaning and what doesn’t, what matters and what doesn’t, yet I like to think I know.
There’s nothing more to say, so I hold my wife. I’d like to sleep beside her like this all night, but it isn’t comfortable, not like it used to be. My bones aren’t what they were. They creak in the morning. If I stay in one spot too long, they ache the rest of the day. Still, I hold her a while. And as her breath gets slow and steady, I let go and roll back onto my side. The bed is warm, comfortable, the blankets soft. I tuck the pillow beneath my head. I hear the clock tick, and my thoughts begin to stir. In the still of the night, amidst the quiet and dark, with my wife and child asleep, I whisper the words: “I love you. I love you all so much.” And I hope that this matters.
I hope it’s enough.