I loved that story. Something about the burly men and that one bed that did double duty seemed like snugly tied shoes or tucked-in sheets. Their life was balanced and trusting.
“But what if one of you got sick?” I would always ask my dad.
“We never did,” he’d say.
Marguerite always made more money than I did. She used her degree to climb the rungs of finance, whereas I worked on the flat plane of insurance claims. It was my assignment to prove that as many claims as possible fell outside the range of my company’s, and its shareholders’, liability.
That day was the beginning of a new pattern of actions in my life. I didn’t buy coffee from the cart downstairs, and though I got in the elevator, I went to the sixth floor instead of the sixteenth.
Melanie Farr of the Belasco Insurance human-resources department greeted me with a smile.
“Yes? Can I help you?”
“My name is Thistle,” I said, and she smiled as many do when they hear the lisp folded into my name.
“How can I help you, Mr. Thistle?”
“I’ve worked here at BI for thirty-one years, Ms. Farr,” I said. I was standing before her desk with my hands held together in front of me as if I were being modest. “I started out as a file clerk, but after I graduated from college I was offered a position in claims. I was good at finding little flaws and clauses that helped justify our responses, but I didn’t have management qualities and so I’ve stayed in the same job most of that time.”
As I spoke, the smile slowly faded from Ms. Farr’s wide, oddly beautiful face. She was in her early forties, I figured, a decade younger than I. She was beginning to worry that I’d be a problem. I supposed that her job was like mine in some ways; people would come to her with issues, and she’d try to resolve them in such a way as to cause the least trouble for BI, its officers, and its shareholders.
“And what is your problem, Mr. Thistle?” She was typing on the keyboard of her computer, as I did whenever a claim crossed my blotter.
“No problem, Ms. Farr. It’s just that I need to leave this job.”
“You’re resigning?”
“Yes.”
“As of when?”
“Today. I know people usually give two weeks’ notice, but I have an urgent issue that needs to be addressed, and after I’m done with that I wouldn’t be coming back anyway.”
“Have you told your supervisor?”
“I’d rather you do that. Mr. Mallory doesn’t have much patience when people need time off. I’m certain that he’d send me up here if I told him that I’m—”
“You’ve worked for the company over thirty years,” Ms. Farr said, interrupting my explanation. She was reading my personal data off her computer screen.
“Yes. I told you that,” I said.
“You have built up quite a large retirement account with us.”
“Oh?”
“You don’t know?”
“I never really thought about retirement. It just seemed like I’d be at that desk until I died one day. Statistics say that I’d probably die at home or in a hospital, but I suppose I could fall dead of a heart attack anywhere — even at my desk.”
The woman’s broad face suddenly turned sympathetic.
“You haven’t considered early retirement?”
“No,” I said.
“At fifty-three,” she said, rolling her eyes upward to look at the general figures in her head, “with more than twenty-five years, you could get about thirty-two percent of your current salary.”
“OK.”
“In order to get that you’ll have to go through the early-retirement process. That would take about three months.”
“But today is my last day,” I said, with a certainty I’d rarely felt.
“That’s silly, Mr. Thistle,” she lisped. “If you leave today you would only receive the face value of the account.”
“What are you doing?” Holly Martins asked as I was putting my belongings into an empty Xerox-paper box that I got from the copy room. The sum total of my work life fit in the space it took to hold eight reams of impossibly white paper.
“Packing,” I said to the young philosopher.
She was wearing a red dress and no hose. The flesh of her arms and legs there in that otherwise sexless atmosphere made me happy.
“You moving offices?” she asked.
“Have you ever been to Italy?”
“No,” she said, giving the word one and a half syllables.
“When are you having lunch?”
“In twenty-seven minutes.”
When I got home, there were still shards of broken china on the kitchen floor. Splinters of shattered teacup were plastered in place by dried honeyed tea. When I went out on the screened-in back porch, the first thing I thought of was smoking.
I had smoked another Gitane on the walk to Samba Sam’s Jamaican Delights with Holly. I wanted another one now, but Marguerite was in the backyard, wearing a coral blouse, turquoise pants, and yellow flip-flops. She was watering the hundred or more potted plants with the long-spouted copper watering can. The terra-cotta pots were set on tiered shelving that looked like miniature bleachers at the back wall of the yard.
Seeing my wife at the zenith of her domestic bliss, I realized why she needed to quit working. She had loved her job, whereas I had never really cared about mine. Her advancement had been a source of pride for her before, and after, the desertion with Gary Knowles.
She loved her job, but as the years rolled by that relationship had gone cool. She still hoped for that early passion, but new bosses and different needs pushed her to the side, left her unsatisfied. Now all she had was a backyard that would respond and flower to her touch.
I knew for a fact that Marguerite needed to rest and heal in the safety of that footprint of terra-cotta and green. My empathy, however, was tempered by events earlier in the day. On the way to Samba Sam’s, I remembered that I didn’t have much cash, and so I went to the ATM machine to find that our joint checking account had a balance of only three dollars. Both savings accounts had been emptied and closed that morning.
Holly had to pay for our lunch.
I’d arrived home at three minutes past three.
Marguerite turned, wiping her brow, and saw me standing there.
“Jare,” she mouthed.
I tried to remember anything important that had happened in the last twenty years.
There were the children, of course, but their lives were their own now. There was the house, but I’d soon be moving out of there, with no expectation of nostalgia or feeling of loss.
Marguerite walked up to the bottom stair of the porch and smiled at me. It was a stranger’s expectant acknowledgment.
“You’re home early,” she said.
“You are too.”
“I never went in,” she replied. “I was too tired, and so I slept until just an hour ago.”
“I came home to apologize,” I said, matching her lie for lie.
“Are you going to fix the window?” she asked.
“Tomorrow,” I said, thinking, When you clean the fucking kitchen floor.
“Why don’t we sit down?”
Marguerite waved at two fiberglass lawn chairs that I’d bought eleven years before. The skeletal-looking seats had been bright red when they were new, but the years outside had faded them to a pink-tinted gray. While I went to work day after day, their luster had succumbed to sunlight.
“Sure,” I said, and we sat at a forty-five-degree angle to each other, the convergence of our stares meeting at the screen door where our marriage had finally failed.
“Are you still smoking?”
“No. That was just a bet.”
“Stupid bet.”
“Yeah. I guess it was.”
“You really scared me breaking the window like that,” she said with no real emotion.
“I got a splinter of your china cup in my eye,” I replied. Lying to her was becoming... second nature. “Had to go down to the company nurse to have her take it out.”
“I didn’t mean for that to happen,” was her apology.
I felt the stirrings of an erection. That and the lying brought about a thrumming in my heart. I turned to look at my wife. She was a new person, a whole Otherness, in the yard that I had never, ever sat in before.
“What?” she asked of my expression.
“My dick is hard,” I said in wonder.
“I hope you don’t think that I’m going to do anything about that.”
“Of course not,” I said, in a falsely reassuring tone. “You asked, and I’m telling you that my dick is hard.”
“Stop saying that.”
I stood up in front of the mother of my children, my pants displaying the outline of the modest erection. Marguerite stared in wonder. I was sure that she’d thought I was lying. Seeing it, a confused look twisted its way across her face.
“I’m going upstairs to jack off,” I said.