Katie recovers and smiles again, this time at Curtis. “Congratulations on the Pulitzer, Mr. Violet. I think you probably should have won it like three times already.”
He laughs hard and loud. “My dear, I couldn’t agree with you more. You should write acceptance speeches for a living.” As she walks away, he follows her back to her table with his eyes. “Well, she’s a lovely thing.”
A Beach Boys song comes on, far too chipper and summery for any of this. Allie fiddles with her new bracelet, and my dad smiles at everyone. Anna is now fascinated by the plastic dessert menu, reading it intently.
In one of his novels, my dad compares a beautiful girl to a wrecking ball—a force that destroys everything in its path. Like most famous, white, male authors of the last hundred or so years, he’s sometimes criticized for being misogynistic, but you can’t argue with his logic as we sit here quietly at this destroyed table.
“Excuse me. I hate to interrupt. But are you Curtis Violet?”
One of the middle-aged women is standing at the head of our table, wringing her hands together. She’s self-conscious and shy and bold, wearing a sweater with a yellow cat on it.
Curtis clears his throat and smiles. “For better or worse, I am indeed.”
“I knew it. I just wanted to tell you how big of fans we all are. You’re just . . . you’re just great.”
I try to catch Anna’s eye, but she continues to study the milk shakes and assortments of ice cream sundaes. Across the restaurant, I find Katie again, sitting with her friends. Our eyes meet briefly, and then she turns away, too.
Anna and I maneuver through our small bathroom, going about our nighttime routines of brushing and moisturizing. Tonight, we’ve managed to do it in complete silence. Married silence is a specific kind of silence, typically one in which the woman goes mute while the man pretends as if it’s perfectly normal that she hasn’t spoken in hours. In the face of conflict with their wives, most men choose to remain oblivious and passive, and I’m no different. Our shoulders touch as she scrubs her face with these little medicated pads. I say excuse me and drop my used floss in the garbage bin. We could be traveling salespeople, sharing a bathroom for some strange reason.
The family walked home from Johnny Rockets, watched television, looked at some of Allie’s drawings, and watched the news, all with a glass isolation shield between Anna and me.
“Good luck, kid,” my dad said as we all broke for the night, retiring to our rooms. After dinner, Curtis found another bottle of kangaroo wine and took care of it all by himself.
As she rubs cream under her eyes, I decide to try words. Perhaps some shock and awe. “I think Curtis and my mom might be having an affair.” Things sound strange in bathrooms, like lines from a play.
Her hand stops applying for a second, but then continues again. “What?”
I tell her about my lunch with Gary, and as I do—as I commit it to words and sentences—it all sounds stupid and made up.
“Your mother isn’t sleeping with Curtis, Tom. That’s ridiculous. She’s just lonely.” Our eyes meet in the mirror, which seems like progress. “Believe it or not, wives can get lonely. It happens.”
I follow her into our room, and as she climbs into bed, I busy myself moving my laundry from the basket to my drawers. On Friday nights, we can hear M Street from our bedroom, a dull buzz of music and cheer, and I think of the word “lonely.” How could my mother be lonely? And, for that matter, how could Anna be lonely? Because clearly, that’s what she’s telling me. I consider Dr. Charlie’s pills, hidden in my side of the bathroom, and I think of Anna fucking some imaginary guy in her sleep. But the thought of the real me and the real her having sex right now is, at best, improbable, and, at worst, exhausting.
At a certain point, weeks actually become months. The distance between the last time I had sex successfully with my wife and this very second can actually be measured in months, plural. My penis picks up on what I’m thinking about and shrivels in my night shorts. If my penis were a writer/director, it would be Woody Allen—small, neurotic, and, frankly, hit or miss.
“That girl tonight,” says Anna. She’s staring into her
Runner’s World
so she doesn’t have to make eye contact with me. “She was very pretty.”
“What girl?” I ask.
“How about we don’t do that? We’re not children. You’ve never mentioned her before. But she sure seemed to know you pretty well.”
“Katie? I’ve mentioned her. Of course I have. She’s the other copywriter at work.”
On the television, they’ve gone to sports, and there are men jumping and running and tackling. It all seems irrelevant now. The financial world is collapsing and I haven’t had sex with my wife in months.
“You haven’t told me about her,” she says, little inflection. “Wives know every other woman in their husbands’ lives—at least the ones they’re allowed to know about.”
“She’s just a girl at work. There are lots of girls at work, Anna. Hundreds of them. I could print out an org chart for you. We could go over it tomorrow.”
“That’s sweet. I like it when you’re sarcastic.”
“It’s my only defense against irrational.” I’m leaning on an old guy trick here, claiming my wife is being a typical irrational woman right as she begins saying things that I don’t want to hear.
“So, how did you do that to your face again?” she asks. “A sign? You were reading something . . . right? Very clumsy.”
Hank hops off the bed to hide out on his dog mat. He sighs heavily, letting us know that he’s not happy with where any of this is going.
“It was
nothing
,” I say, gripping my laundry. “It was . . . we went to get sodas at 7-Eleven by the office. On the way back these two jack-off construction workers started giving her trouble. Catcalling and stuff.”
“Catcalling?”
“Yeah. And so I told them to back off and—”
“You got into a fight?”
“No. Nothing like that. It was stupid. I just tripped, and I hit my head on their truck.”
She’s left her magazine behind for the moment, and her eyes move back and forth across my face, studying it. It’d be nice if, at least in this scenario, the truth actually sounded like the truth. “You hit your head on their truck? But you told me you ran into a sign. Why would you do that, Tom? Why would you lie about something if it was nothing? Seems like a wasted lie.”
“It was embarrassing, and I didn’t want to get into the whole . . . I don’t know, backstory.”
She smiles, but then returns to dutifully pretending to read her magazine. “Backstory,” she says. “A narrative used to provide history or context.”
This is why two English majors should never argue.
She turns a page so hard that I hear it tear. “I’m gonna let you in on something, Tom. When a young girl wearing a shirt that’s two sizes too small—a young girl whom I’ve never met or heard of—walks up to me in a restaurant and starts making eyes at my husband . . . context matters very, very much.”
“Jesus Christ, Anna. It was nothing.” I fidget with more laundry, busying myself in the hopes that this conversation will end. I empty some loose change into a dish on the dresser and take off my watch. It’s important to keep moving in situations like this.
“It’s kind of sad what passes for attractive these days,” she says.
“What?”
“I know the Violet men have a tendency to be distracted by shiny new things, but really? Seems a little obvious, doesn’t it?”
“What are talking about?”
“I’m talking about Katie, the
other copywriter
from your office. The one you insist you told me all about. All that eyeliner? Or the little skirt . . . and that shirt? You think she’s really into the Stones, or do you just think she likes having a giant tongue across her tits?”
“That’s a little petty, isn’t it?”
“You’re telling me, in good conscience, that you honestly believe that she didn’t stand in front of the mirror tonight in that stupid shirt and know exactly what she was doing? Oh, maybe I won’t look like a whore if I put this thrift-store jacket over it.”
“A tight shirt? That’s all it takes to be a whore?” I find her shirt from tonight, the yellow Curtis shirt. She’s left it in a little unfolded pile on our dresser. “You seemed pretty pleased with yourself tonight, showing off in this.”
“Don’t be an asshole. That’s not the same thing at all, and you know it. Curtis gave me that shirt. I wore it to be funny. Your little copywriter wasn’t being funny. She was just being a whore.”
“Oh, I see, she’s good-looking, so that automatically makes her an idiot and a whore?”
Somewhere along the way, men all got together and agreed that we’d all pretend not to understand women. For the most part, this is bullshit. Right now, as the first signs of hurt betray this façade of feminist anger, I know that she’s interpreted what I just said as me telling her that she’s not good-looking . . . or at least not as good-looking as Katie. But I’m so mad at her that I let her keep thinking it.
Her voice is different now when she finally speaks. “I don’t care how good-looking you think she is. She’s just like your stepmother. She leads with tits and ass because she doesn’t have anything else. Is that what you want Allie to grow up to be—a girl in a tight shirt calling someone else’s husband her hero.”
“First off, leave Ashley out of this. This isn’t about my goddamn stepmother. And, secondly, you don’t know anything about Katie. Nothing. You think you’re the only female in history born with a brain, Anna? Is that what you tell yourself? The fact is, she
is
smart. And she’s talented and she’s funny. You’re not calling her a whore because of some concerned-mother bullshit. You’re calling her a whore because you know that however many fucking Body Pump classes you take, you’re never going to be her age again.”
I slam my underwear drawer shut and the dog yelps.
“Would that make you happy,
Curtis
?” she says. “Being with someone young?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“No, tell me,
Curtis.
Would you actually be able to sleep with me if I was some young girl with stupid bracelets and a—”
“I said don’t call me that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not.”
The emotion that’s been shaking at the back of her throat is front and center now. “But you wish you could be. Admit it.”
I’m done with this, and so I turn off the overhead light, leaving Anna sitting there, bolt upright, the blankets pulled to her waist and her hair back in a sloppy nighttime pile. There was a time when we promised we’d never go to bed angry. There was a time we were making homemade pasta in her little apartment in Dupont Circle and we had sex in her kitchen hallway while garlic bread burned because we couldn’t
not
be touching each other.
I’m lying on my back, and she’s lying on her side, turned away from me. The TV is flickering blues and greens, and even though it’s late for people our age, M Street is still wide awake. If I listen closely, I can hear laughter, and somewhere in the city Katie is awake, too. I imagine what it would be like to be at a concert together, just the two of us. Maybe we’re holding hands. Maybe she’s leaning against me.
“Have you ever thought of her like that?” says Anna, facing the wall, reading my mind.
“What?”
“Have you ever thought of being with that girl?” she asks.
But I don’t answer. Instead I turn off the television and roll onto my own side. Outside, somewhere, a glass breaks and someone is yelling, and we’re lying together in this room with our backs to each other.
I
t’s very, very
early—too early to be awake, and so I pretend that I’m not. Zippers are being zipped, and things are being stuffed into other things, sorted. Anna is packing for something. Where is she going? She’s going to Boston. That’s right. A conference in Boston. The Northeastern Conference on Literacy in Schools, or something like that.
“Tom,” she says.
I hear her, but I sort of don’t hear her. This could easily be a dream.
“Tom. I’m leaving.”
When I open my eyes, she’s sitting on the bed, looking down at me. She’s in her gray suit, her hair back, with heels and makeup and the whole works. “Wow. How long have you . . . been awake?”
She doesn’t respond, and I think about how I must look—a sleepy man in old gym shorts and a T-shirt, my face and hair a wreck. It doesn’t seem fair. She should have told me she was going to dress up for this particular departure.
“Do you want a ride to Union Station?” I ask, knowing that she won’t. She prefers the Metro.
She’s looking at me, and she looks sad.
“I’m sorry about—” I start to say, thinking about last night. But I stop because I’m not actually sure that I am sorry. Again, I’ve had no time to prepare.
“What’s happening to us?” she asks.
“I’m not sure,” I say.
She makes a go at straightening my bed hair. I want to take her hand and hold it, but I don’t. I simply let her flatten away in vain, and I realize that I
am
sorry. I feel like I should take a quick shower and go with her. Curtis could handle Allie. He wouldn’t mind. If we were alone together somewhere else, it might help. I could roam around Boston while she attends her nerdy conference, and then we could do whatever people do in Boston at night. We could quote
Good Will Hunting
and I could be charming. “How do you like them apples,” I’d say, over and over again in a bad Boston accent until she laughed. Maybe that would fix things somehow.
This momentary surge of energy is fleeting though, and I sink back into our sheets. “That’s a big bag,” I say.
She looks around our room at the walls. She’s wearing perfume, and the bedroom smells like the nape of her neck. “You never know what the weather’s gonna do up there.”
“I
am
sorry,” I say.
“Are you going to be OK?” she asks.
“If I run into trouble, I’ll just take Allie to Johnny Rockets.”
“I’m not worried about Allie, Tom. She’ll be fine. I’m worried about you.” Hank leaps onto the bed and settles between us. He’s making this little weeping noise that he makes when he sees luggage. Sometimes when we leave a suitcase open overnight, he’ll climb inside and burrow down beneath sweatshirts and boxer shorts. She pets his head absently, fiddling with his misshapen ears. “The last few weeks you’ve been acting like someone who’s about to do something stupid.”
I pretend to be mystified by this, but it makes perfect sense. It sounds like something a character would say in one of my dad’s books—books that often feature men sprinting toward their own, entirely self-orchestrated demise. “I’ll be fine,” I say.
“I’m taking your book with me.”
From the side pocket of her giant roller bag I see the dog-eared pages of my manuscript. “Don’t call until you’ve read it, OK?”
“What?”
“Well, I mean, don’t call until you’ve at least read enough to have an opinion about it. If I talk to you tonight and you tell me you dozed off on the train and you’re only ten pages in . . . well, just don’t, OK?”
As reasonable as this sounded knocking around in my head, the original meaning has gotten scrambled somewhere between my mouth and my wife’s brain, and she stands up. “I’ll read it. Don’t worry. Good-bye, Tom.” And then she’s gone, and I’m alone in our bedroom.
“Jesus,” I say. “What
is
happening to us?”
Hank licks my face in one foul-smelling little swoop. And then he turns and looks at the window, his ears tense, as Anna’s footsteps on the sidewalk outside get quieter and quieter.