—
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 supposed 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?”