Richard ignores my choice metaphor. He apologizes, then walks me to the lobby and asks me how everything else is going-which is a bit like asking the Prime Minister of Poland how everything else is going in the fall of 1939-you know…other than the Nazi invasion. I tell Richard that, all in all, I’m not in a bad mood-probably because I got high at a 7/11 last night.
“You got high at a 7/11?”
“Well, we actually got high in my car, and at this apartment building. But I had an amazing burrito at the 7/11 afterward. You can’t believe the pot they have now, Richard.”
“Yeah, I know,” he says. And then, he leans in and sort of wistfully, adds: “It’s supposed to be a myth, the increased potency.”
“It’s no myth.”
“No.” He smiles. “No myth.”
And then something hits me. “Wait. You smoke pot, Richard?”
“Now and then,” he admits. “When I can get it. Doesn’t everyone?”
“I didn’t.” And I tell him how it had been at least fifteen years, how I assumed that, after Lisa and I had two impressionable kids, two hypocrisy-sensing laser beams of sweetness, my weed-smoking days were long behind me.
Richard hums laughter. “Hey…I’ve got a question about that.” Then he looks both ways and leans in close. “Can you get me some?”
Outside, after the meeting, it’s cold-air crackling with the
sudden turn to late fall. Leaves are giving up, like newspapers, becoming insolvent all over the streets. I walk to the car. It was disconcerting at first, to be out in the world in the daytime, when everyone else was working. This is the first fall since I was fifteen I haven’t had a job of some kind. Sadly, I’m getting used to it. Right now the editors will be coming out of their budget meeting and the reporters will be trying to avoid their eyes, or pretending to be on the phone so they won’t get assigned a weather story (“Colder temps move in”) or a brief about last night’s trailer fire (“Suspected arson at mobile home park”) or a feature on the Eagle Scout who built a bike out of aluminum cans (“Recycled cycle leads to scholarship”).
I call Lisa from the car as I drive to Costco.
“Well,” she says, “How’d it go?”
“You know Richard,” I say, “always the optimist. Thinks we should invest in cyanide.”
Polite laugh.
“Would you have ever guessed Richard is a weed smoker?”
“How did that come up at a financial planning meeting?”
“I don’t remember.”
“So what’s his advice?”
“Well, first, we can’t panic…and second…if we were going to eat one of the children, which one would you pick?”
Lisa laughs a little more heartily; her voice always gets lower, throaty, when she thinks something is genuinely funny. It’s very hot. “I suppose the older one,” she says. “That little one looks gamy.” And suddenly I’m filled with warmth and sadness and I am rushed with nostalgia-for the marriage I’m still in. I can’t believe how much I want this woman and it kills me-kills me-knowing what I know.
This: Right before I went to 7/11 for milk last night, I considered telling her about the letter from the mortgage company. But
when I went upstairs she was asleep. I signed onto her FaceBook page (it had taken me three days to figure out her password) and saw that she’d put up a better picture of herself with her cute new pixie haircut (a picture I took) and I also saw that she’d been carrying on a three-day “chat” with an online buddy named Chuck, which, not coincidentally, is the name of her old high school boyfriend, a guy I was never jealous of before, because, frankly, Chuck sounded like a bit of a chuck, and not like the sensitive, successful guy he turns out to be, at least in the online realm. The subject of this chat seemed to be the flat parallel trajectories of Chuck’s and Lisa’s mildly disappointing lives (“ever wake up and wonder what happened”)-lives that must’ve seemed boundlessly perfect when they were eighteen, sneaking off to his parents’ lake place to squirrel their boundlessly perfect young bodies into positions that I’d give anything to replicate. And it seems clear from their familiarity that this was not the first chat between Lisa and Chuck, not the first time the sad subject of their sad lives has come up. As the FaceBook conversation continued, Lisa and Chuck went back and forth about themselves (“trying to get back in shape” “Y? U look great”) and their jobs (“not the best time to be looking for something” “but U R so talented”) people from high school (“Dana looks like a manatee-ooh, that’s mean” “U could never be mean”) and while it was all vaguely above-board, it also felt…I don’t know, intimate…and then Chuck wrote, “Temted to get all hot and steamy agin” as if the very words made him too worked-up to type straight and she ignored his misspellings and suggested two simple letters, “TM?” and either she was trademarking his stupid sexy-talk or, more likely, suggesting that he should take his nastiness to the text messaging world-agin-so she could see it right away-agin!-huddled over her cell phone, breathless, in our bed…
…while I cluelessly watched sports highlights with my buggy old father-agin-who responded to every Colts highlight by re
minding me how good Unitas was, every Eagles highlight by remarking what a slow stiff Jurgensen turned out to be-as if quarterbacks were declared extinct in 1968…
…and I saw that I couldn’t tell her about the house, at least not yet, not after coming across the trail of this crushing deception, because God knows I’ve flirted and daydreamed and committed a thousand tiny betrayals-but…this tore me up…my broken little black heart bleeding out through my mouth and my eye sockets and my asshole and…
…I’m dying here. Of emotional Ebola. And I just wish the little bugs would get it over with and gobble me all up, so that I could stop suffering, because I know the world goes on without us; my mother taught me that; it goes on and on, turning us over like broken sod. And hell, maybe it’s nothing, a little late-night nasty smack-smack talk between old lovers-harmless! But agin? Agin? And when I imagined my wife’s narrow tapering back in our bed last night, cute face bathed in the blue light of a nasty cell phone message from the boy who used to sleep with her-Jesus, it hurt more than I could bear…and that…
that…
that
…was when I went out for milk and ended up baking my wounded skull.
Of course, this is just the kind of melodramatic, twisted logic I will refuse to accept from my boys when they are teenagers. (You went out and got high with delinquents because you were jealous of your girlfriend? Do you know how stupid that sounds?) But last night I did just that, went to the 7/11 and, sulking over my wife’s flirtation with her old boyfriend and the knowledge that I was losing her house, I fried my nut with the delinquency dream team.
On the phone now with Lisa, I don’t tell her that Richard says the house is almost certain to go to the bank. And I certainly don’t mention her “chat” with Chuck. And I definitely don’t confess my emotionally retarded response. Instead, as I pull into the Costco parking lot, into this temple of buy-bulk-big-box consumerism at the opening bell of a planetary recession, I take a moment to simply pass along to Lisa our pothead financial guy’s more mundane recommendations, the long list of luxuries we can do without in the upcoming belt-tightening: “Richard says we should cancel cable and get rid of the Internet,” I say, with no small amount of conniving joy. “We sure as hell can’t afford these cell phones anymore.”
“I don’t know if I can live without a cell phone,” Lisa says after a moment.