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 were 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 welclass="underline" 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.”
“Right,” I said, “you’re the first person who ever got drunk and wet the bed. You should donate your body to medical science.”
“Better,” he said. “Now that’s you. Ah—here they are. I did have a lot to drink, didn’t I? Maybe we should try to forget this gruesome episode? Assuming I don’t put on a repeat performance?”
“You’ll be telling this on yourself when you’re ninety,” I said. “Adventures of your misspent youth.”
“Don’t jolly me along too much.” He opened the bathroom door. “But I do appreciate your making the effort.”
—
His daughter was going to put us up at her house, but after what happened in Montana, he called her to say we’d decided to stay at a hoteclass="underline" I was used to his snoring, he said, but lately it had gotten so bad that he was afraid of keeping them awake. She must have thought I was being a princess about their foldout, or just being weird.
Madeleine turned out to be a short redhead about my age, with milky skin like the daughter’s, smiley crow’s-feet like mine (though mine weren’t smiley) and breasts that swung free under a man’s plaid flannel shirt; you could see why an old man might be hot for her. Why a young woman might too. At the door, she went up on her toes to kiss his cheek. “I love the beard,” she said. “Very manlike.” She gave me her hand.
“So where’s your friend?” he said.
“Getting stuff for dinner. I expected her back by now.”
“We were going to take you out.”
“I’ll let you guys argue about that,” she said. “I think she’s got something special up her sleeve.”
“As do you,” he said. “God, it’s good to see you.”
She threw up her little hands. “Why, Hopsie, you ought to be kept in a cage.” The two of them seemed to be amused by this. “Let’s go sit. Can I get you some tea or something? Now you,” she said to my husband, “you probably want the something.”
“I think tea, actually. It’s a bit early.”
She looked at me. “What have you done to this man?”
“We’re still on East Coast time,” I said.
“I thought that was three hours later,” she said. “Sorry, I shouldn’t be pushing drinks.”
She was putting the tea ball into a round blue-and-gold teapot that must have been a Hall—my mother had collected them—when I heard the kitchen door open, a voice I knew calling “A little help?” and I found myself on my feet and through the archway, with Madeleine behind me.
“Let me,” I said, and picked up a bright yellow canvas bag with “Nature’s Way” printed in red; she had two more bags on the doorstep, all bulging, one with stalks of celery sticking out.