Probation (9 page)

H
ot damn! What’s the chance the station scanner would find this oldie but goodie pulsating down at the left of the dial? It’s radio, of course, with the lyrics scrubbed squeaky clean, no forbidden words permitted, but not even the FCC can ruin this little seven-minute masterpiece. I intend to sing along to every syllable, even if means sitting in a parked car with the engine running while my counselor twiddles his thumbs, assuming some barely sublimated hostility is the only possible explanation for my chronic tardiness.

“You’re in an awfully good mood for someone who’s been sitting on a plane the last six hours,” Matt remarks when I finally stroll into his office, still humming Prince’s brilliant chorus.

“I heard a great song on the car radio tonight.”

“What?”

“You probably wouldn’t know it.”

“Of course not. The only music I listen to is Gregorian chant.”

“Are you serious?”

“No. Are you?”

Apparently my counselor has been following the career of the Artist Formerly Known As since catching an early gig at First Avenue in Minneapolis. Well, la-di-da. This goddamn priest always knows how to put me in my place.

“So which song was it?” he asks.

“
Let’s Pretend We’re Married.”

Why did I bring this up? The arched eyebrow and skeptical smile can only mean the simple act of enjoying a song is about to be infused with portentous analysis and provide him with a perfect segue to an inquisition into personal responsibility. Yes, I insist, I was always safe during my little extracurricular activities. Of course I didn’t use condoms with Alice. Was he crazy? I might as well have branded
Unfaithful
on my forehead.

“Did you ever worry about passing along a disease?”

“I told you I was always safe.”

“That’s not the question I asked.”

“Of course I worried about it.”

“Did you ever think she suspected?”

And so on and so forth for the next fifty minutes.

Jesus Christ. I don’t know how I’m going to survive missing a week of browbeating and emotional intimidation. Next Friday is the day after Thanksgiving and I have a reprieve.

“Have a great holiday,” he says as I hand him the check.

Fuck you, I mutter as I walk out the door. What makes him such an expert on marriage?

Alice sighed and crawled into bed, a glass of chardonnay in hand to fortify herself for the challenge of plowing through the latest trade paperback selected by her book club to educate and edify. Fifty pages before lights out or else! I rolled on my stomach and grunted, too restless to sleep. I used to nod off at the drop of a hat. My wife would accuse me of narcolepsy and threaten to inject me with caffeine. That was another lifetime, before falling asleep meant having to wake up and crawl out of bed, shave and brush my teeth, put on my game face, convince the King of Unpainted Furniture I was obsessed with lumber prices and consumed with mortgage rates, higher rates equating a drop in residential home sales meaning fewer empty rooms begging to be filled with the affordable products of Tar Heel Heritage Furniture.

How the hell had I ended up a salesman? Worse yet, a
successful
salesman! The best goddamn salesman in the history of Tar Heel Heritage, better even than the King himself. Who would have believed I’d be a two-time runner-up for the national sales award by the American Home Furnishings Society? Who could have predicted I’d be recruited for a seat on the board of the North Carolina Furniture Association and chair its Government Affairs subcommittee, lobbying for protective tariffs on insidious foreign imports and testifying in support of legislation to decimate the right to collectively bargain?

It’s all Alice’s fault I’ve ended up tossing and turning in a bedroom in a suburban cul-de-sac, I thought, irritated by the dry, chafing sound of thumb against paper as she turned the pages of her novel. We should have parted ways when I started graduate school. She shouldn’t have followed me to Durham and taken that job at the Montessori School, teaching music appreciation to the precocious offspring of Duke’s junior faculty, being paid less than even my measly stipend from the Department of Comparative Literature. At least once a day, I would accuse her of resenting our shabby circumstances. She’d just laugh and say, “Not as much as you do.”

“It’s completely up to you,” she said while I pondered her father’s job offer. Always a pragmatist, he’d decided if Alice was going to be so goddamn stubborn, if she was going to insist he accept me, then at least he would co-opt me. I was floundering anyway, insecure among the pretensions of more impressively pedigreed academics, and highly susceptible to the power of suggestion. Curtis never missed an opportunity to make it obvious he questioned how a man could call teaching four hours a week “work.” Alice assumed I had a choice. The King knew better. All he needed to do was impugn my masculinity and it was good-bye Duke and hello Sales. He made only one condition. No more living in sin. We slipped off to City Hall before he could initiate the tactical maneuvers that would climax with the Big Church Wedding.

Well, at least the job wasn’t heating and air-conditioning. And the money wasn’t bad. It certainly impressed the old man, who’d been exasperated by every decision I’d ever made, except for marrying Alice. He’d refused to contribute a single dime for me to lounge around at Duke and read paperback novels, but he insisted on fronting the down payment on the town house, not wanting to be outdone by that blowhard, the uncrowned King, J. Curtis McDermott.

I knew my wife would have been content living in a drafty old rental on the fringes of the campus of whatever liberal-arts college might offer me a tenure-track position. I was the one who’d made the very expensive, solid cherry sleigh bed we were lying in (literally and figuratively speaking, and definitely not a Tar Heel Heritage product). And Alice? She seemed happy enough to be married to the Senior Vice President for Sales and her career introducing the young scholars of the Greensboro Friends School to the glories of Wolfgang Amadeus. She hadn’t changed much since college and still thought of me as a better-groomed edition of the obnoxious, smelly boy she’d married, with his torn flannel shirts and shaggy hair, his stupid record collection and dog-eared volumes of the literature of the South. She didn’t even seem to resent that passion and spontaneity had been replaced with a purpose-driven protocol for procreation. We copulated on a strict schedule tethered to the time of the month and body temperature. Medical science was encouraging:
Millions of couples have conceived with a lower sperm count than yours, Mr. Nocera.

“Why didn’t you join the Junior League instead of that damn book club?” I teased, distracting her from her assignment. “At least we’d get a discount on the cookbooks.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” she shot back, smacking my arm with her book.

“Why do all these chick writers have three names?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask them?” she laughed.

“Seriously. You put aside Dawn Powell to tackle the latest best-seller by Susan Moore Duncan? Look at these blurbs! ‘A Radiant Achievement!’ ‘A Marvel of a Book!’ Holy shit, Lucy Patton Kline says it’s ‘A Masterpiece!’ Why are you reading this crap?”

Alice simply pointed to the television bleating at the foot of the bed and the busty coed in her underpants being chased by a masked maniac with a chain saw.

“It’s classic morality play!” I protested. “Plus I’ll know how to defend you if a serial killer breaks into the house.”

“Andy, it wouldn’t hurt you to pick up a book.”

“I’ve read them all,” I joked. “Be prepared. The
Hindenburg
is about to explode.”

“If you fart in this bed I’m going to kill you.”

“But you love me, don’t you?”

“Against my better judgment.”

“Come on, Alice. You’d never read this shit on your own. Why don’t you quit that stupid book club?”

“They’re a nice group of women.”

“I thought you hated that one. I forget her name.”

“Except for her. Anyway, February is my turn to pick.”

“That’s next month. I hope Susan Moore Duncan writes fast.”

“We’re going to read
Wuthering Heights.
”

“Oh shit. I feel for you, sweetheart,” I said, flipping the remote and flopping on my side to sleep. “They’re going to make you pay for that!”

She’d carefully frosted a three-tier red velvet cake with my favorite cream cheese icing before coming up to bed. The sparkling wine was chilling and I promised I wouldn’t forget to pick up the chocolate-dipped strawberries on my way home from work.

“So are you really going to discuss literature, or is this book club just an excuse to throw a Valentine’s theme party? Are you serving anything other than sugar and alcohol?” I asked.

“Not now,” she said, shushing me. “I only have a few pages left to finish.”

I’d already seen the Biography Channel life of Vlad the Impaler, and nothing else on television was bloody enough to engage my interest. I flipped through a few pages of the new Reynolds Price novel and, bored to death, started making notations in
Lindy’s Fantasy Baseball
, boning up for the draft in my rotisserie league. Alice sighed and closed her copy of
Wuthering Heights.

“So, you finish?” I asked, having been successfully distracted from my deliberation on who to select for the Hot Corner.

“Yep.”

“All prepared to lead the women of Virginia Dare Court on a safari to the heart of darkness?”

“Maybe.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked, slightly unnerved by the sad, faraway look on her face.

“I’m just thinking.”

“About?”

“About a hundred years from now.”

“We’ll be dead.”

“That’s what I’m thinking about.”

“Jesus.”

“Don’t you find it comforting? The thought of the two of us, buried in a quiet church yard, lying side by side for eternity?”

“Shit, Alice. Maybe the book club should stick to Susan Moore Duncan.”

“I’m serious.”

I knew it wasn’t the time for a wry aside, a sarcastic remark, an amusing joke.

“Come on, honey. Don’t be morbid. We’ve got a lot of years before we need to worry about our final resting place,” I assured her as I turned out the light. “Roll over.”

She spooned into my body and I grabbed her hand and squeezed.

“I love you, Andy.”

“I love you, too,” I said as I drifted off to sleep.

The literary lionesses had been going at it since seven o’clock. The occasional shrill laugh wafted up to my hideaway. One flight below, red velvet cake was beckoning. Or what was left of it. Cupid wouldn’t discourage sinful indulgence in empty calories on the eve of his feast day. The prospects of Alice saving me even a small, pitiful piece were dwindling. I yanked on my jeans and pulled a sweatshirt over my head. It wasn’t as if I’d been banished to the bedroom; I didn’t need a secret password to cross my own living room. I’d be damned if those harpies were going to polish off the last of my cake.

If I’d been expecting a hearty welcome, I would have been disappointed. Melissa from next door looked up and wiggled her fingers to greet me. Two young blondes, sisters if I remembered correctly, sat on the sofa gripping their knees, tense smiles threatening to crack their faces. Carolyn, Alice’s colleague at the Friends School, was trying vainly to keep the peace. My wife didn’t even acknowledge me as I pussyfooted to the kitchen. I recognized the tightly coiled posture of Alice in combat, poised to strike. Her nemesis had sucked the air out of the room, fueling her grandiloquent gestures with infusions of stolen oxygen.

A forlorn wedge of cake awaited me in the kitchen. Six dead soldiers, twenty-four dollars a bottle, were lined up on the counter. I was rooting in the fridge for milk when I heard Alice, slightly tipsy, go on the offensive.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about! You’re confusing love with raging hormones. A good relationship is based on compatibility, companionship, not on how many orgasms you have a night!”

Her adversary was an unlikely missionary of the gospel of base animal chemistry. Short and squat, her hair cut in a limp pageboy that accentuated her bulging eyes, she resembled an officious box turtle in Donna Karan eyeglass frames.

“Well, Alice, if that were true, we should all marry our hair-dressers.”

I faked a few snores, hoping I’d fool her into thinking I was asleep when she came up to bed.

“Are you awake?” she asked, ensuring that I was.

“Did you have a good time?” I asked, rubbing my eyes as if she’d roused me from a deep slumber. “The cake was terrific.”

She was obviously agitated, unable to close her eyes and drift off to sleep.

“Do you want to watch some television?” Maybe the late-night chat fests might distract her.

“No. I think I’ll read,” she said, opening the copy of
Wuthering Heights
she’d brought to bed with her.

“I thought you finished that last night?”

“I did. I’m looking for something,” she said, flipping through the pages. “Here it is.
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
You believe that’s true, don’t you?”

“Sure. Of course.”

“You feel it, don’t you?”

“What’s brought this on?” I asked, feigning blissful innocence.

“I don’t know. Sometimes I feel you’re holding something back.”

“Like what?” I asked, as if the idea was preposterous.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m not holding anything back,” I assured her, still a half-truth since all the transgressions, the infidelities, the bald-faced lies wouldn’t begin until sometime in the not-too-distant future.

The good husband I was, I knew it was the perfect moment for the cuddle, best appreciated without the necessity of a request. I sat up and banked my pillows and she snuggled against me.

“So what are the ladies reading next month?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Why not?”

“I’m quitting.”

“I thought you loved the book club?”