The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories (20 page)

“‘Sad,' he said.

“Then he turned around, flung open the refrigerator, and wrenched a beer open with his hands. He drank back on it and then slid it over to me. I
looked at it. He said, ‘You want one of your own?' He went back to the fridge, pulled out another beer, palmed the bottle, and almost started to open it for me, but then he stopped and stood stock still.

“I said, ‘What?'

“He whispered, ‘Listen.'

“I said, ‘I hear the house fan.'

“‘I hear her breathing,' he said.

“I said, ‘
O.K
.'

“‘I hear her breath,' he said.

“Then I heard something too. I heard footfalls on the staircase. It was quiet at first, then his daughters pattered into the kitchen. It became suddenly very noisy. We flung on a light. There were his girls, beaming. They looked at me and talked to him. They were so happy he was home. They were so happy that they could have breakfast in the dark. They asked him why we smelled like smoke.”

9.

“I got into his car. I asked him how he got hooked up with this therapy group, and he told me he'd decided to do it all on his own. He said he just drove
past the prison one day shortly after he and his wife ended their marriage and thought, You know, there are probably a lot of single guys in there feeling just like me. He told me he just went up to the front gate, asked to see the warden, and when the warden appeared asked if he thought anyone inside might be interested in getting together to talk informally about love and its absences.

“The warden laughed, apparently. My friend told me that the warden laughed and said that he doubted it, but that my friend could get a day pass and sit down in the field during a thirty-minute outdoor lunch to see if anyone came over. Then my friend said, ‘And guess who now joins my little group of forty-five inmates every week?'

“‘The warden,' I answered.

“‘That fucker,' my friend said. He looked wistful. ‘I love that fat fucker.'

“We were sitting in his car, staring at our houses. He'd stopped talking. I had nothing more to say. It was interesting to just sit and look at the houses, actually. I took a deep breath.

“‘You like the new owners?' he asked me.

“‘They're fine,' I said.

“‘They'll disappoint you,' he said. ‘That's the way it is with neighbors.'

“We had very little in common, generally speaking, aside from our property lines. We drove in silence and when we arrived I learned that the penitentiary parking lot is a vast—just absolutely sweeping—dirt desert that goes out beyond view for miles. From any particular spot in this desert, you have to walk about a quarter mile before getting to the prison's tiny entryway, which is shrouded by barbed-wire fencing. When they let you in, you pass through a maze of hallways of windowless cinder block, and you're patted down and scanned at every steel-barred gate, of which there are more than five between the entry and the open field where selected inmates can take a thirty-minute outdoor lunch. My friend and I went every step of the way through this in silence.

“Out on the lawn, many of the guys had already gathered, waiting for my friend. They were sitting folded-leg style in the grass. They eyed me as we approached. I sat down. My friend went to the front of them and stood. He lifted his hands and, when they'd quieted down completely, he thanked them
for coming and for their willingness to
see the world beyond love
.

“The men were nodding. He continued. He spoke for some time on
the intrinsic colossal disaster of seeing love that isn't actually there
, and he used an example of two blind dogs he'd come to love when he was interning at a veterinarian clinic in North Carolina. The dogs had, apparently, died. He'd discovered them dead one morning. ‘Just gone,' he said, his voice beginning to tremble. He snapped his fingers. He cleared his throat. He said he was devastated. He said he had never known devastation like this; no devastation since has ever compared, he said. He said he imagined we knew what he was talking about.

“The sun was exceptionally warm. I looked around again. One thing was clear from the expressions on faces of the men in that group: it wasn't a good idea to talk about dead dogs. They didn't like that. Some of the men began getting up. This agitated one of those still sitting. My friend kept talking as though the exchanges occurring among these men were trivial, subdued. Dead dogs, he said, were only a metaphor. But they were not. One man
stood up, shoved another one from behind, called him a slur. The warden shifted and rolled up to his feet. I was trying to stand when three or four other men pushed me back down and jumped the warden, and the guy who hadn't, at first, gotten up to leave. They kicked him in the head. I saw the man's head moving in horrible angles. Three or four men kicking a head is a gruesome thing. Then the shots came and the yard was filled with weapons and shouting. I was on my stomach, pinned. I could see others pinned to the ground too.”

10.

I look up at my wife. She's still sound asleep. We have a baby coming in the next few weeks, and she is sleeping so hard, for such short periods of time, in such odd physical contortions to fit her strange dimensions, I am amazed to see the way serenity can sometimes play across her face. We have been married six years. We have planned everything very carefully, very strategically, my anomalous heart attack and double bypass last year notwithstanding. We were ready, I had been thinking until this spate
of divorces, to have this baby. I was uneasy that everyone was getting divorced. I tell her this. “It's crazy,” I say. “What are divorces, anyway?”

11.

Eventually my friend turned on a few more of the house lights and seemed to loosen up. He told silly stories to his girls, and I drank a second beer. The television was turned on. His daughters described their favorite late-night television show to me. They said Jimmy Kimmel was
kank
, but he was also a little bit
smunt
. They could not have been six. My friend looked at me and shrugged.

Then I noticed my friend's wife had materialized in the kitchen, in a blue robe, holding a beer. She stood at the edge of the kitchen, just where the kitchen met the living room, and she asked what time we'd gotten home. My friend didn't answer, so I told her. I told her it was nice to see her again.

“Yeah,” she said, as if she was asking me a question.

Then she asked about my wife. I asked her about her lawn. I complained about the housing
market. She said she knew it was strange, but she loved crabgrass. We went on like this for a few minutes, talking small, my friend playing with his daughters by the television. She had come over to me and sat on the arm of my chair. She seemed entirely easy. She only looked in her husband's direction a few times.

“Well,” I said. I stood up to leave.

She looked surprised. “Oh,” she said. “You don't have to go anywhere.”

“No,” I said.

“Have another beer,” she said.

She got up and went to the fridge, even as I was saying I shouldn't drink any more, and she opened that beer, twisted it with her bare hands, and brought it back to me. Then she went back to the fridge, opened another, and brought it to her husband. Then she told her husband, my friend, to sit on the sofa.

And he did. He got up from the floor and threw himself onto the sofa. She sat on his lap. “What else is new?” she asked me.

I hear you're getting divorced, I wanted to say.

“Very little,” I said.

My wife is still sleeping as I tell her this. I tell her that when I looked up again, I saw the two of them—my friend and his wife—kissing on the sofa and I presumed, at first, it was a quick and conciliatory kind of thing. I looked at their girls, who were also looking at their parents.

They kept kissing. I looked again at the girls, and then back at their parents. The
TV
went to a commercial. I saw my friend's wife's tongue, and his hand slipped inside her robe. They were both still holding their beers. As soon as he dropped his beer on the carpet, I stood up. I patted the girls on their heads. They took this as a sort of signal. They didn't look at me. They turned and left the room with me, as if they were going to walk me to the door. Instead they went straight up the stairs to their bedrooms. I whispered “Good-night” to them, and they turned around.

12.

My cardiologist took particular care of me during my heart attack and subsequent surgery. He visited my room frequently. He said little, but he checked
my stats with a sort of earnest determination, flipping papers, hammering things into his computer. The night before my surgery, after everyone had left, he came to my room and closed the door. He sat on the edge of my bed. He said, “You know what you need?”

“A hug?”

He looked at his watch. “I find most heart patients,” he said, “need someone to scare the shit out of them.”

“
O.K
.,” I said.

“If you're not going to change your lifestyle . . .” he said. He looked at me. That's all he said. He produced a plastic model of the human heart from his coat pocket, and he stuck his fingers inside and started pulling it apart. He scattered the rubber pieces across my bedsheets and left.

13.

“C'mon,” the older daughter said. She summoned me up. I followed. I went upstairs with them. At the top of the stairs, we turned to the right and went into a room lit only by candles. Inside, the walls
were lined with mounted game. I stared at a zebra head. “Jesus,” I said. The older daughter told me the zebra's name was Beverly. The fox was Lenny, the pheasant Jennifer. And the wild turkey had no name at all, because they had just killed it that morning.

14.

I take my head off my wife's lap and sit up. I upset the sofa cushions a bit, bounce a little, so that she'll wake up. I touch her shoulder. She wakes up. She smiles. She wipes her face. She reaches into a stretch, and she brings her hands to her stomach, to our bursting child inside there. She tells me she feels like hell, and I say I know what she means. She rolls her eyes. “Take me upstairs,” she says. I consider this. I consider carrying her. I consider her weight. “C'mon,” she says. I put my arm under her legs. I support her back. I lift her. Her eyes close. Her mouth sags. It's chilly. The gravel path is lit only by dull moonlight. There's a breeze. The crickets are calling. I hear the waves lapping at the shore. I hear my boat rubbing the wooden pier. The
rope moorings are aching. The cabin is dark. I put my wife down on our creaking bed. I stand upright and look at her form. It's no easy journey getting her here. I wish we lived closer.

SCANDAMERICAN PASTORAL

“D
on't you fucking tease me,” she says. But I'm not teasing. I have manufactured an afternoon alone, the two of us. I am thirsty, very dry. “But why?” she pleads. “How?”

I can't remember the answer to these questions. It all seems so complicated in retrospect. It might've been just one phone call. We deliver the children by their armpits to her sister.

We're off like fugitives. We drive and spar. Then silence.

The mall strikes me as larger from the outside, smaller and more angular on the inside. I feel my hands needing occupation. I look around my feet, the tile flooring, certain I've dropped something. I pat my pockets. She demands I tell her what time it is. I am rocking from one foot to the other.

We search for things that have been needed at some point in time, but I can't determine if the listed price of an ottoman is reasonable, or if it's suddenly through the roof, the way it feels to me, sort of, I really can't remember, and she can't remember the space the ottoman was supposed to fill—do we even need an ottoman? Is it an ottoman, or was it a fish tank?

In the fish tank, fish—small carp—spawn. It's a vicious visual experience. She's gone instead for French lip balm, returns with nothing. She needs
advice
!

We lunch. Strange breadless pizza—robust, god-awful huge—is smoking in front of us.

She demands the time.

I am bored. She is tired. She naps on a leather sofa, beside an elderly man who has allowed her to place her head on the cushion next to him. The man covers her with newspapers to keep her warm, and I fix my gaze on the way in which well-waxed tile floor refracts the soles of rubber shoes an instant before the sole.