The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories (17 page)

Kimberly and I were introduced by friends at a small and overwrought party on the north side of
Chicago. At that point we were in our late twenties. Like most graduates of Northwestern, we started our uninspired careers in some approximation of a low-tier business position. We were both living in gritty neighborhoods on the north side. We both thought dogs were funny. We both seemed harmless enough to one another—not particularly cool, or not cool enough to be threatening, and not painfully annoying. We were both interested in being financially solvent without being obsessed or controlling about money, and that was sexy enough to get us started. I asked her on a date to a Cubs game. I hated baseball; so did she. We laughed about it. We left after the second inning. We got tipsy at a bar. We went to her place and slept together. We dated a few more times. Families were met. I proposed. She accepted. We had lame careers in promising full swing. We bought a new condo together with towering metal cabinets in the kitchen and a ceiling as high as the building itself. We waited a few years to have a baby and said to people regularly that we were waiting to have the baby until after we'd lived, having no idea whatsoever what this meant. We traveled once out of the
country, to London, and we felt that was enough travel for the rest of our lives. We made a baby. It took a lot of sex. It took a lot of UTIs. We waited and she worked with me on the sex. It happened: the baby came.

Of course I entertained violent acts. I am only human. I am subject to human pain, and I am subject to human helpless rage in the face of human pain. I did not carry the violent acts much further than picturing myself buying a gun and carrying it home to a house full of nude men who were lounging about with long-stemmed goblets of wine in their fists. This violent moment usually culminated in me just sort of standing there in the doorway with my handgun, staring at them having sex with my wife behind flimsy sheer curtains.

But, passivity is not about
doing nothing
. It has nothing to do with the absence of action. Passivity has nothing to do with
allowing things to happen
. It simply means you subordinate, make less prominent the agency of action. A great deal can be accomplished in passivity. Take the sudden and inexplicable presence of the e-mail addresses of all thirty-six men, for example. Who knows how these arrived in
my electronic invitation? Who knows when or by what means my wife dropped these into the invitation I was to send. Suddenly, they were just
there
and my job was basically already done for me.

Or, take my plans to sabotage and humiliate my wife, myself, my family, and my life, in response to my wife's needs. I'm not sure at all how that sabotage came about, but there were the plans, unfurling.

She had been clear about my role: I was to have no salient role. “Let's just keep it simple.” She'd said simpler was easier. “Guys,” she said, “like simple.”

Within two hours of my having sent the invitations, seventeen of thirty-six responses had been returned. They were interested. One of them responded with the “Hell Yee-ah!” button. The washing machine was on. Someone had poured me a glass of juice, or someone had put it in my hand. Men on the West Coast were replying to my wife's invitation at two in the morning their time. They wrote additional notes to her like “Kick Your Ass Soon!” and “You Rocking!” and “Can't wait babes!” Somewhere my son was screaming at my wife. A man named Kit wrote in his message that “Strange is for people who do not know anything other than
their own lives.” He too used the “Hell Yee-ah!” button.

“I just can't believe,” she said at some point around dawn, “how much these guys want to see me.”

“You're a fascinating person,” I said.

She began exercising. She gave me the child and a bottle of formula, and said, “Go time.”

I looked down at my son and plugged his unhappy little mouth. “Everything's new,” I said.

She started a video in the living room that promised to shred her. She was shredded by a militant dark-haired woman in almost no clothing for forty-five minutes. The boy fell asleep in my arms while we were watching his mother move rapidly, in harsh and hostile motions. I flinched whenever she had to thrust. The boy was rapt until he slept. The woman shredding my wife, she was just terrifying.

Then my wife went outside and ran down the street. I quickly put the sleeping child in a stroller and tried to keep up with her, but she was running so fast and so far I couldn't, after a while, see her in the distance. I just kept walking. After several miles, I returned the way I'd come, expecting to find her
there at home, perhaps in the shower. But she wasn't there, and she didn't appear until she hobbled into the kitchen almost two hours later. She said, winded, “Fuck.” She had her hands on her hips. She was slick and foul. She tore her clothes off and went upstairs, where she would fall asleep on the bathroom floor, the shower running. I found her there.

All thirty-six invitations had been Received within twenty-eight hours. No one had pushed the “So Sorry” button. One wrote to communicate that he “Can't Say Fo Sho.” They were all very excited, very spirited, and very capable of dropping everything in their middle-aged personal and professional lives to see my wife. My wife was very flattered by it all. I discovered her in the middle of a regrettable conversation with her sister one afternoon. She said, “I doubt he remembers
that
.” Then she was silent as her sister spoke. Then she laughed in a way that seemed, frankly, a little hurtful.

But the earliest construction of sabotage took shape in half-consciousness at our kitchen table in the middle of the night. Our son was screaming upstairs. A woman approached me. She had three men flanking her. She was dressed in a barista's
smock. The men wore burlap coffee sacks. She winked at me and said, “How do, Simple?”

I winked back at her and said, “I like it simple.”

That's when I came to, my wife at the table staring at me, midsentence. “Did you hear anything I just said to you?”

“Yes.” I rubbed my face. She nodded. It became obvious how to ruin her expressed needs.

Good old Jamie wrote, “I cannot wait to hold you again.” He was the single “Can't Say Fo Sho” and had now switched to a “Hell Yee-ah!”

I remembered Jamie. Kimberly had told me several times before the baby about Jamie, and that Jamie was the best kisser she'd ever dated. She'd said that, for all his problems, and she never said what those problems might have been, for all his problems Jamie always knew how to kiss. And she used to tell me that Jamie had told
her
that she kissed very nicely too, and because she had kissed a great many people in her life, had experienced some of the worst kissing any human had ever experienced, she knew what good kissing was, and when a good kisser compliments you, you know you're getting high praise.

This was a tricky one, because I didn't exactly think Kimberly was a great kisser. She had a dry mouth and a small, coarse tongue that always felt, I thought, too insistent. My wife had many outstanding qualities; kissing wasn't on the top of that list. I imagined that either Jamie was lying to take advantage of my wife when she was younger, or he was in fact not that great at kissing at all, which would probably mean that she liked Jamie for reasons unrelated to kissing and either couldn't accept this or wasn't fully aware of it, or was fully aware of her expansive interest in Jamie and needed, somehow, to express it indirectly to the man she had actually chosen to marry.

Thirty-six men were coming to my house to see my wife, because she had asked. She had simply asked if thirty-six men would like to fly from around the country to celebrate her thirty-first birthday, and thirty-six men said they would like to do so. “A great many men like your mommy,” I said to our son. I was trying to make the child belch but not vomit. I had him pitched over my shoulder, and I could feel the burning in my legs as I bobbed up and down. I tried to make a little song out of it, trying
over and over again to think of the word that rhymed with “mommy.”

I was alone with our son more often, and he became increasingly unhappy with my company. He was developing mistrust. The mother would hand him to the father, and the father would never hand him back. My son did not like that. His dislike intensified. He stopped falling asleep while eating. He would drink the entire bottle I offered him, top to bottom, just suck the hell out of that thing in long, angry drags, and instead of closing his eyes, he would become increasingly alert as he drank, increasingly anxious and angry, and when that bottle was emptied he would burst into a scarlet song that could devastate windowpanes.

And sometimes Kimberly would just walk past the two of us like this, and the child would smell her and immediately stop his singing. He would whimper, and the whimper would precipitate well-documented physiological realities that Kimberly had hoped to shred, she'd said, and she would flee the room then, and the child would begin singing again, and it came to a point, about mid-July, where Kimberly would ask me where I planned to be with the child
and for how long, so that she could plot her life around this.

Airplane tickets had been purchased and electronically expressed to each boyfriend, after not just a few hundred hours of e-mails and communiqués securing necessary travel information from the strange men on the other end of the wires. Hotel reservations had been made. Dietary requests had been received, processed, and forwarded. I felt extraordinarily grateful that the limousine company had thrown in a fourth vehicle without charge for the weekend. In total, preliminary estimates seemed to point toward a weekend costing just under one hundred thousand dollars. I slid these figures across the table to Kimberly, who studied them and said, “But when you consider how much we're getting, though.”

Someone at my office had suggested I might put in for a better-paying position that had just opened up. I hadn't really considered needing more money until that time. The sabotage would double the cost of the arrangements, and I wondered how people who didn't have money managed to hold together a marriage with children. I wondered what someone
like, I didn't know, a teacher did with marriage. Being married was expensive. It perplexed me for a while, before I fell asleep, how the rest of the world could afford to stay married.

The sabotage of course required a destination, a simulacrum of ours, and I found a nice five-bedroom rental outside Madison without too much difficulty. My coworkers loved the idea of a party so much they willingly and eagerly dolled it all up, helped pull the catering, drinks, and music together. When it comes to parties, young singles don't ask many questions. Not many single people worry about the logistics of planned social events. The men from my office would blend in with my wife's lovers. My specific roots are northern Midwest, settlers near Green Bay, and while we know our way around the labyrinth of deception, because we are half the time misleading ourselves, we are not actually well prepared genetically for the confined chambers of overt and sustained lying. We don't have the energy for it. Yet, this all came together so seamlessly, so naturally, it took the breath away.

Ten days out, I took on some troubleshooting from work:

Kit could purchase sandals in a store not far from the house, yes.

Matthew could be driven to see his great aunt in a relatively nearby city, yes.

Patrick and Steven T. would not find the humidity terribly high at night.

Link could not
expect
to have oral sex again while high on cocaine, no, but Kimberly really missed those days too, and only in the stark contrast of her present life can she take pleasure in what was, for her, a very difficult emotional time.

David had to realize that he was not the only man being invited to the event, and could not therefore expect to take one of his “special drives” again.

Benjamin had a great memory, and he was welcome to bring photographs, of course, but Kimberly did not actually remember the time they had fallen asleep in the hotel sauna in Gainesville, was he sure it was
her
?

It did not seem likely that Kimberly would be able to have a private dinner with Ken, Rick, or Steven L.

Christopher should be grateful he had a wife and family, and there was no need to denigrate
them in writing (or in speech), and he should keep his personal shit private or else he would find himself disinvited.

No, Dick, Kimberly did not hang on to that sweatshirt of his, she doesn't think, but she could buy him another one on eBay if he wants. She is sorry about that.

Some of the basic ground rules permitted that I could answer in the affirmative if I were asked if I was her husband and the child's father—she said she could not bear the thought of me having to lie about this—but I was not permitted to bring the matter up with any of the guests. And, generally speaking, I was discouraged from being around at all. I was to remain in the bedrooms upstairs throughout the scheduled events. I was not to feel that I
had
to remain upstairs—she said she could not bear the thought of me feeling as though the child and I were being imprisoned in our own home, locked in some attic like mental invalids from literature—but Kimberly had been clear that I should feel as though it would be best for her if I were to minimize my interaction with the events. If I did come downstairs, with or without the child, I
would be encouraged, she said, to not overdo the
protective husband
thing. Don't say things like, “We've been happily married for, et cetera, et cetera.” That's annoying. “Don't spoil this for me.” And I was not to let them gaze at the child. “Keep the child out of sight as much as possible,” she said. She had typed up and printed many of these considerations, and number fifteen was phrased, “Do not go out of your way to stress my relationship to either of you.”