17 Abbott Adds a Key to the Ring
Abbott does not consider the broken doorknob on the seldom-used front door a high-priority repair, or even a problem. “So we can’t get out,” he says to his wife. “People can’t get in. It’s kind of a nice feature.” “But what if there was a fire?” his wife says. She is a very skilled wife. This afternoon, during the child’s nap, Abbott drives to the hardware store to purchase a doorknob. He stands in the doorknob aisle for fifteen minutes. Faced with a choice between many seemingly identical doorknobs, Abbott purchases the second most expensive one and takes it home in a bag. The installation is supposed to be easy, but it is not. The doorknob and the screwdriver become slippery in the moist air. The dropped screws clatter and vanish. Eventually, Abbott replaces the doorknob, then makes small noises and gestures of completion until his wife says, “Looks good. Nice job.” Since Abbott did not replace the deadbolt, which was not broken, he now has two different keys for a door he does not use. He puts the new key on his ring, which has become heavy and crowded. What is that blue one for? It was only seven years ago — no, six — that Abbott left Texas in a small moving truck, after completing his lease and donating his Plymouth Reliant to an organization that teaches troubled teens to fix transmissions. At that point he had no keys. Not one. A putative adult with an empty key ring. He had forsaken the air-conditioning on his drive out of Texas. He had opened the windows and let the hot wind blow freely through the cab. The last time he told this story to his wife, she laughed and said, “Why don’t you just tell me about a woman you enjoyed having sex with?” Stepping onto his porch with his screwdriver and jangling keys, he recalls the story of the empty key ring with a powerful sense of boredom. He closes the front door and tests the new doorknob and the lock. He turns and pushes, turns and pulls. He listens for the click, and he hears it.
18 Abbott on the Couch
Tonight Abbott is a generality, a tendency, a convention. He is an indistinct and featureless lump beneath a thin blanket. Tonight he is Husband on Couch. The battered cushions sag beneath the weight of his unoriginality. He is complicit, he knows. Nobody can make you be Husband on Couch. Wife in Big Bed can’t. You always have choices. Abbott could hop a freight train, ride the rails, build fires in trash cans. Or he could be Husband on Air Mattress, just for the principle. The fight was painfully stupid. Abbott, lying in bed, asked his wife if her novel is any good. She said, “Oh, you know.” Then he asked what her novel is about. He didn’t even care; he was just making bedtime conversation. She said, “Oh, you know.” He studied the title, the cover. He tried to peek at the author photograph. He said, “I do know. It’s about marriage and secrets and faith. Am I right? And the strange settling sounds an old house makes at night? And that angle of light in the winter?” Abbott’s wife did not say anything. Abbott said, “Loss of youth. Estrangement. A nice meal ruined by the truth. A long walk during which it becomes shockingly evident that the natural world is violent and ruthless.” Abbott’s wife said, “Are you done?” Abbott said, “Passion. Memory. Forgiveness. Seething things beneath a placid surface. A tree cleft by lightning.” Abbott’s wife closed her book and said, “Is there something you’d like to talk about?” Abbott realized that he was spoiling any chance of a good night’s sleep for his wife, but he knew if he stopped now it would appear that he knew he was acting poorly, and that was not an admission he was prepared to make. He was operating by a strongly felt but dimly understood sense of correctness. “The smell of the cut grass, the feel of the cut grass on bare feet, the memories of walking on cut grass with bare feet in simpler times.” Abbott’s wife said, “Stop yelling.” Abbott said, “I’m not.” Abbott’s wife said, “If there’s something you’d like to say to me, then say it.” Abbott said, “She lives in upstate New York with her husband, her two children, and her two horses.” Abbott’s wife said she didn’t care about the novel but he was being an ass. And of course she rolled over to face away from him. It had taken Abbott, without premeditation, something like two minutes to wreck the night. Then, apropos of nothing beyond his own insensitivity, he said, “I know about the water in the basement.” He found a tone to make it cruel. He got out of bed and stood up. Abbott’s wife held her book with her index finger marking her place. She did not move and did not speak. Beside her, on her nightstand, that small porcelain dish filled with earplugs. He left the room and arrived unimaginatively on the horrible family-room couch, a stained and cat-tattered mound of soft dough. The dog came with him, but then returned to the bedroom after a few minutes. Abbott does not anticipate falling asleep anytime soon, but the next thing he knows his wife is shaking his leg. He opens his eyes to see her holding her novel and a steaming mug. The lamplight makes him squint. He rubs his eyes, pats the listless cushions for her to lie down with him. “This is my spot,” she says. Abbott extracts himself from the couch and limps down the hallway, dragging his thin blanket like a vagabond. That’s way too fast, he thinks, hearing a car drive past his house.
19 Abbott and the Sticky Shit All Over the Fucking Steering Wheel Again
Gone are the daydreams of academic notoriety and glistening vulvas and whatever else. All Abbott wants right now — the only thing — is to be knocked unconscious by the long wooden handle of a lawn tool.
20 Abbott and the Utopian Community
With his helpmeet Abbott establishes one early-summer evening a small utopian community in a seventh-floor room of a Boston-area La Quinta. After checking into the hotel, Abbott and his wife and daughter ride the elevator to the seventh floor, stopping at the second, fifth, and sixth floors because Abbott let his daughter push the buttons. Inside the room, Abbott says, “This is OK,” and his wife says, “Yeah, it’s fine.” While Abbott holds the child on the window ledge overlooking heavy highway traffic (“Truck! Bus!”), his wife spreads out a picnic dinner on the comforter of the king-sized bed. There are peanut butter and honey sandwiches, sliced carrots and cucumbers, a sandwich bag of Fig Newtons, one ripe banana, and a large bottle of a sports energy drink that they all pass around and dribble onto the comforter. After dinner, Abbott puts a rusty barrette in his daughter’s hair and the family rides down the elevator, walks out of the lobby, and discovers a tiny plot of grass by the parking lot. Nearly all of this utopian grass has been killed, either by dog urine or grubs. A high chain-link fence separates the play area from the busy highway. Abbott runs wildly in small circles, and his daughter chases him, stopping occasionally to put Styrofoam cups and blades of dead grass on a fire hydrant. Abbott’s wife is too pregnant to run, but she watches and cheers and exclaims. Then they all return to the elevator and ride back up to the seventh-floor room. Abbott and his wife work together to put their daughter in pajamas, to brush her miniature teeth and wash her face. They turn out the lights, close the curtains to block the glow of the setting sun, and place the girl, along with her stuffed pony, in a playpen/crib in the corner. “Goodnight, sweetie,” they say, moving a large utopian chair in front of the playpen/crib. “Have good dreams.” But the child gets teary and is obviously not going to sleep, so Abbott moves the large chair and lies down on the floor next to the playpen/crib, the vinyl mesh siding of which allows him to speak to his daughter and to see her in the dim light. She rolls to the edge of the playpen/crib with her stuffed pony and says, “Dad’s down.” She says, “Dad’s on the floor. There’s Dad. See Dad through the hole. Hi, Dad. Dad has two knees. Airplane far away.” Abbott says, “It’s time to go to sleep.” His daughter says, “Dad through the hole. Sunblock tastes bad. Toast is food. This is Popo. Show Popo to Dad? Hi, Popo. Mama’s driving. This is a different blue one. We saw lions!” She begins singing the alphabet song, veers into “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” then returns triumphantly to her version of the alphabet. “Good night,” Abbott says, rising to his knees after fifteen or twenty minutes. His daughter says, “Dad? Dad, lie down! OK? That’s fine. Dad through the hole!” So Abbott lies back down on the floor and talks to his daughter through the vinyl mesh of the playpen/crib. He feels as if he is either giving or receiving confession. His daughter says, “Dad’s tired. Dad’s rough. OK!” Once more he tries to get up and once more he is ordered to stay. The despot behind the mesh weighs less than a bag of dog food. Seventy minutes after being placed down, Abbott’s daughter falls asleep, and Abbott creeps away from her, silently replacing the large chair in front of the playpen/crib. He finds his wife sitting cross-legged on the floor in the closet-and-sink niche outside the bathroom. The light from the bathroom is just enough for her to read a celebrity and fashion magazine. Abbott sits beside her, and they share a Hershey bar and look at dresses and purses and DWI mug shots. They’re both too tired to be sardonic. Later, in the king-sized bed, Abbott wants to attempt late-term utopian intercourse, but his wife does not, so they compromise on a hand job. This is just fine with Abbott. He understands that compromise is a vital component of marriage, as is, though to a lesser extent, the hand job. In fact, as he approaches orgasm — or more likely, much later — he realizes that the hand-job-within-marriage, while no substitute for vow-renewing egalitarian coitus (from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs), nevertheless does have a legitimate place in the utopian scheme. He rubs his wife’s swollen belly as she does it. Afterward, she brings him a washcloth. They kiss goodnight, then roll to distant regions of the enormous bed. The next day is a disaster. The amazing furniture clearance is not amazing. There are too many other people and too many other people’s children. Abbott’s wife sits on every couch and makes the same look, as if she’s offended or as if the couch has lied to her. “Well, it sort of has,” she says. “You have to imagine you’re not pregnant,” Abbott keeps telling her. “I wish you knew what a ridiculous thing that is to say,” she says. Abbott and his wife bicker all day and are constantly reminded of each other’s most regrettable qualities. There are no good couches, but they pretend the real issue is their spouse’s poor taste or unreasonable requirements. “Comfort is not an unreasonable requirement,” Abbott’s wife says, causing Abbott to wonder aloud whether they are wealthy enough for comfort. Abbott’s daughter behaves like a two-year-old in a furniture store. She spills apple juice in a deluxe modern showroom, narrowly missing a divan. The child’s stuffed pony is lost, discovered by a virtuous sales associate, then lost again. Abbott’s wife’s ankles hurt. She sits on couches and does not want to stand back up. The utopian community disintegrates, almost upon sunrise. All told, it lasted roughly thirteen hours, six of which Abbott spent sleeping. Like all other utopian settlements, including Robert Owen’s New Harmony Community on the banks of the Wabash River in 1825, this La Quinta venture dissolves into chaos and fails. Still, Abbott considers while hiding from his family amidst the leather sectionals, all the nonutopian communities have dissolved into chaos and failed, too. So big deal. So try again.