Abbott Awaits (8 page)

“Historically speaking,” Abbott begins before a rapt imaginary audience at the imaginary Royal Institute of Harbinger, Omen, and Portent in Helsinki, “we occupy the epoch after Juvenal and before Armageddon.” He pauses for robust laughter, as his notes instruct. His imaginary paper is called “On the Feasibility of American Burlesque.” Its real thesis is that it's increasingly unfeasible. The ornate, high-ceilinged lecture hall is stiflingly hot or quite drafty and cold. The atmosphere is electric, charged, and crackling. His artful Power Point presentation culminates with a photograph of the four deceased dolphins that recently washed up in San Diego. “A necropsy confirmed that they had been shot,” Abbott says. “With a gun.” The applause lasts one minute and thirty-five seconds. Flash photographers flout the strict prohibition against flash photography. Abbott's handkerchief is soaked. He looks up from the lectern, sees members of the audience scanning the conference program for his short and humble bio. It hasn't been easy to be away from his real wife and daughter for these six imaginary days, but the benefit to his career is inestimable.
His absence makes him miss and appreciate his family even more. This trip in all likelihood has strengthened the domestic bonds. Also, he has never been to Sweden, and he has enjoyed discovering a new place on his own. Finland, he means. He has never been to Finland, and he has enjoyed discovering a new place on his own.

The bananas in the kitchen are overripe, and Abbott's wife wants to make banana bread. So far the premise is simple and so is the motivation. But there is a complication. Abbott's wife is tired and busy, and she is having trouble finding the time to make the bread. Right now she has to leave the house to get some milk and swimming diapers. After Abbott puts his daughter to bed for her nap, he walks into the kitchen and sees on the counter the perfectly overripe bananas, the large mixing bowl, and the recipe. What happens next is that he begins to make the banana bread, despite the fact that he has never baked anything. One can't presume to know another's thoughts, but Abbott feels certain that his wife did not leave the bananas, bowl, and recipe on the counter so that he might make the bread. He knows it would never occur to her that he would make the bread. Abbott is not even considering this possibility—it's just that when he sees these items on the counter he feels no twinge of guilt or responsibility, no subtle marital pressure, no implicit request or demand. He knows—to the extent this knowledge is possible—that his wife began to make the bread, but then ran out of time or energy. He knows she is not
now at the Big Y wondering if her husband fell into the trap she set in the kitchen. He has already begun assembling ingredients when he notices that his wife has made notes on the recipe card, adjusting the amounts of ingredients to make a two-banana loaf rather than a three-banana loaf. He thinks with fondness of his wife, who keeps these adjusted recipe cards somewhere in their home. He doesn't really think; he just feels fondness. Fondness and a kind of jolt. He follows the adjusted recipe. His motivations for baking are unclear, even to himself. He's just baking, and at some point in the process he realizes he is enjoying himself, a realization that leads to an overawareness of baking and the enjoyment of baking, which threatens to spoil the experience but does not. He puts the loaf in the oven and waits. As the kitchen begins to smell good, he becomes eager for his wife's return. He is anxious to witness her surprise. He is anxious, he supposes, to be regarded as a surprising husband. Abbott is beginning to understand that he baked only because he believed his wife had absolutely no expectation that he would bake. Consequently, in making banana bread he could also make himself, at least temporarily, into a remarkable spouse. He may have thought he was helping his life partner, but he was not. Not in an authentic way. He was never baking
for her
. Now he has gone and spoiled the experience, and when she comes home he is gloomy with the certainty that he has never been and will never be genuinely
nice
, a quality he admires. He wishes he had not baked the bread. That would have been the nice thing to do. He walks out into the rain to help bring in the groceries, but not in a nice way. “What's wrong with you?” she asks, to which he just shakes his head. When she enters the house and smells the bread baking, she seems legitimately confused. It's as if—Abbott is just guessing here—it's as if she can't remember whether or not she made this bread. She can't remember making it, and yet the bread is obviously baking, so she searches her mind for other possibilities, finally arriving at her husband. “Did you make the banana bread?” she asks. “Yes,” he says, unpacking groceries. “Are you serious?” she says. She opens the oven door and peeks in at the loaf, which is rising beautifully. Then, concerned, she says, “Did you follow the recipe for two bananas?” “Yes,” he says. “Did you find the baking soda?” “Yes,” he blurts, as if offended. She clearly cannot believe he found the baking soda. He
himself had been stunned to find it earlier in the door of the refrigerator. “Well,” Abbott's wife says, “thank you. That was nice.” Together they put away the groceries in silence. Eventually he says, “I thought you might be surprised.” “I
am
,” she says. “I am surprised. And I'm grateful. I honestly can't believe you found the baking soda.” This is not going well; the quality and quantity of her surprise are wrong. The afternoon has arrived at a shameful crisis: Even though Abbott knows that baking bread in order to exhibit his limitless depth is solipsistic and spiritually deficient—the very opposite of generous, in fact, and the cause of his current despondency—yes, even though he knows it,
he still wants his wife to notice his limitless depth
. “I was just trying to help you out,” he says, casting a wide net across the True/False Continuum. “Listen,” Abbott's wife says, squeezing the back of Abbott's neck, “the bread is a surprise, but you are not.” And so it is that Abbott is surprised.

Fucking Thoreau—he could, for his part,
happily do without the post-office
. Leave it to the childless to be complacent about the mail. You put a toddler in Walden and you'd get new philosophy. For
his
part, Abbott takes great comfort in the reliable work of the postal service, a representative of which comes to his neighborhood in the mid- to late afternoon six days a week, every week. The mail is an undeniably significant part of his day. It not only signals the blessed arrival of the mid- to late afternoon, it also offers the promise of surprise and wonder. Today there is nothing surprising or wonderful, and in fact there never is. But there is the promise. Today it's a bill and three more baby catalogues. Abbott and his wife used to feel irked and mildly infringed upon by the fact that these companies somehow knew they were going to have a baby. But then they started flipping through the catalogues, and they found a lot of interesting stuff. Abbott sees four neighbors from four houses on his side of the street, all walking to or from their mailboxes. The mail truck is still moving down the street, and it continues to draw more neighbors from their houses. The scene feels a bit like a nature documentary. Everyone greets one another in a
mechanical fashion, waving first to their eastern neighbors and then to their western neighbors. It's like they're all riding in a parade. Abbott does not even focus his eyes on a person or people—he just transmits vague signals of salutation to his counterparts. This is, to the best of Abbott's knowledge, a weekday. Don't his neighbors have jobs? And what could they all be expecting every day that is so important? Why this desperate rush? The awkward trip to the mailbox is enough to make Abbott want to wait a few minutes each day after delivery before checking his mail. On the other hand, he knows there are limits to what a man can ask of himself.

Abbott does not consider the broken doorknob on the seldom-used front door a high-priority repair, or even a problem. “So we can't get out,” he says to his wife. “People can't get in. It's kind of a nice feature.” “But what if there was a fire?” his wife says. She is a very skilled wife. This afternoon, during the child's nap, Abbott drives to the hardware store to purchase a doorknob. He stands in the doorknob aisle for fifteen minutes. Faced with a choice between many seemingly identical doorknobs, Abbott purchases the second most expensive one and takes it home in a bag. The installation is supposed to be easy, but it is not. The doorknob and the screwdriver become slippery in the moist air. The dropped screws clatter and vanish. Eventually, Abbott replaces the doorknob, then makes small noises and gestures of completion until his wife says, “Looks good. Nice job.” Since Abbott did not replace the deadbolt, which was not broken, he now has two different keys for a door he does not use. He puts the new key on his ring, which has become heavy and crowded. What is that blue one for? It was only seven years ago—no, six—that Abbott left Texas in a small moving truck, after completing his lease and donating
his Plymouth Reliant to an organization that teaches troubled teens to fix transmissions. At that point he had no keys. Not one. A putative adult with an empty key ring. He had forsaken the air-conditioning on his drive out of Texas. He had opened the windows and let the hot wind blow freely through the cab. The last time he told this story to his wife, she laughed and said, “Why don't you just tell me about a woman you enjoyed having sex with?” Stepping onto his porch with his screwdriver and jangling keys, he recalls the story of the empty key ring with a powerful sense of boredom. He closes the front door and tests the new doorknob and the lock. He turns and pushes, turns and pulls. He listens for the click, and he hears it.

Tonight Abbott is a generality, a tendency, a convention. He is an indistinct and featureless lump beneath a thin blanket. Tonight he is Husband on Couch. The battered cushions sag beneath the weight of his unoriginality. He is complicit, he knows. Nobody can make you be Husband on Couch. Wife in Big Bed can't. You always have choices. Abbott could hop a freight train, ride the rails, build fires in trash cans. Or he could be Husband on Air Mattress, just for the principle. The fight was painfully stupid. Abbott, lying in bed, asked his wife if her novel is any good. She said, “Oh, you know.” Then he asked what her novel is about. He didn't even care; he was just making bedtime conversation. She said, “Oh, you know.” He studied the title, the cover. He tried to peek at the author photograph. He said, “I do know. It's about marriage and secrets and faith. Am I right? And the strange settling sounds an old house makes at night? And that angle of light in the winter?” Abbott's wife did not say anything. Abbott said, “Loss of youth. Estrangement. A nice meal ruined by the truth. A long walk during which it becomes shockingly evident that the natural world is violent and ruthless.” Abbott's wife said, “Are you done?” Abbott
said, “
Passion
. Memory. Forgiveness. Seething things beneath a placid surface. A tree cleft by lightning.” Abbott's wife closed her book and said, “Is there something you'd like to talk about?” Abbott realized that he was spoiling any chance of a good night's sleep for his wife, but he knew if he stopped now it would appear that he knew he was acting poorly, and that was not an admission he was prepared to make. He was operating by a strongly felt but dimly understood sense of correctness. “The smell of the cut grass, the feel of the cut grass on bare feet, the memories of walking on cut grass with bare feet in simpler times.” Abbott's wife said, “Stop yelling.” Abbott said, “I'm not.” Abbott's wife said, “If there's something you'd like to say to me, then say it.” Abbott said, “She lives in upstate New York with her husband, her two children, and her two horses.” Abbott's wife said she didn't care about the novel but he was being an ass. And of course she rolled over to face away from him. It had taken Abbott, without premeditation, something like two minutes to wreck the night. Then, apropos of nothing beyond his own insensitivity, he said, “I know about the water in the basement.” He found a tone to make it cruel. He got out of bed and stood up. Abbott's wife held her book with her index finger marking her place. She did not move and did not speak. Beside her, on her nightstand, that small porcelain dish filled with earplugs. He left the room and arrived unimaginatively on the horrible family-room couch, a stained and cat-tattered mound of soft dough. The dog came with him, but then returned to the bedroom after a few minutes. Abbott does not anticipate falling asleep anytime soon, but the next thing he knows his wife is shaking his leg. He opens his eyes to see her holding her novel and a steaming mug. The lamplight makes him squint. He rubs his eyes, pats the listless cushions for her to lie down with him. “This is my spot,” she says. Abbott extracts himself from the couch and limps down the hallway, dragging his thin blanket like a vagabond. That's way too fast, he thinks, hearing a car drive past his house.

Gone are the daydreams of academic notoriety and glistening vulvas and whatever else. All Abbott wants right now—the only thing—is to be knocked unconscious by the long wooden handle of a lawn tool.

With his helpmeet Abbott establishes one early-summer evening a small utopian community in a seventh-floor room of a Boston-area La Quinta. After checking into the hotel, Abbott and his wife and daughter ride the elevator to the seventh floor, stopping at the second, fifth, and sixth floors because Abbott let his daughter push the buttons. Inside the room, Abbott says, “This is OK,” and his wife says, “Yeah, it's fine.” While Abbott holds the child on the window ledge overlooking heavy highway traffic (“Truck! Bus!”), his wife spreads out a picnic dinner on the comforter of the king-sized bed. There are peanut butter and honey sandwiches, sliced carrots and cucumbers, a sandwich bag of Fig Newtons, one ripe banana, and a large bottle of a sports energy drink that they all pass around and dribble onto the comforter. After dinner, Abbott puts a rusty barrette in his daughter's hair and the family rides down the elevator, walks out of the lobby, and discovers a tiny plot of grass by the parking lot. Nearly all of this utopian grass has been killed, either by dog urine or grubs. A high chain-link fence separates the play area from the busy highway. Abbott runs wildly in small circles, and his daughter chases him, stopping
occasionally to put Styrofoam cups and blades of dead grass on a fire hydrant. Abbott's wife is too pregnant to run, but she watches and cheers and exclaims. Then they all return to the elevator and ride back up to the seventh-floor room. Abbott and his wife work together to put their daughter in pajamas, to brush her miniature teeth and wash her face. They turn out the lights, close the curtains to block the glow of the setting sun, and place the girl, along with her stuffed pony, in a playpen/crib in the corner. “Goodnight, sweetie,” they say, moving a large utopian chair in front of the playpen/crib. “Have good dreams.” But the child gets teary and is obviously not going to sleep, so Abbott moves the large chair and lies down on the floor next to the playpen/crib, the vinyl mesh siding of which allows him to speak to his daughter and to see her in the dim light. She rolls to the edge of the playpen/crib with her stuffed pony and says, “Dad's down.” She says, “Dad's on the floor. There's Dad. See Dad through the hole. Hi, Dad. Dad has two knees. Airplane far away.” Abbott says, “It's time to go to sleep.” His daughter says, “Dad through the hole. Sunblock tastes bad. Toast is food. This is Popo. Show Popo to Dad? Hi, Popo. Mama's driving. This is a different blue one. We saw lions!” She begins singing the alphabet song, veers into “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” then returns triumphantly to her version of the alphabet. “Good night,” Abbott says, rising to his knees after fifteen or twenty minutes. His daughter says, “Dad? Dad, lie down! OK? That's fine. Dad through the hole!” So Abbott lies back down on the floor and talks to his daughter through the vinyl mesh of the playpen/crib. He feels as if he is either giving or receiving confession. His daughter says, “Dad's tired. Dad's rough. OK!” Once more he tries to get up and once more he is ordered to stay. The despot behind the mesh weighs less than a bag of dog food. Seventy minutes after being placed down, Abbott's daughter falls asleep, and Abbott creeps away from her, silently replacing the large chair in front of the playpen/crib. He finds his wife sitting cross-legged on the floor in the closet-and-sink niche outside the bathroom. The light from the bathroom is just enough for her to read a celebrity and fashion magazine. Abbott sits beside her, and they share a Hershey bar and look at dresses and purses and DWI mug shots. They're both too tired to be sardonic. Later, in the king-sized bed, Abbott wants to attempt late-term utopian intercourse, but his wife does not, so
they compromise on a hand job. This is just fine with Abbott. He understands that compromise is a vital component of marriage, as is, though to a lesser extent, the hand job. In fact, as he approaches orgasm—or more likely, much later—he realizes that the hand-job-within-marriage, while no substitute for vow-renewing egalitarian coitus (from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs), nevertheless does have a legitimate place in the utopian scheme. He rubs his wife's swollen belly as she does it. Afterward, she brings him a washcloth. They kiss goodnight, then roll to distant regions of the enormous bed. The next day is a disaster. The amazing furniture clearance is not amazing. There are too many other people and too many other people's children. Abbott's wife sits on every couch and makes the same look, as if she's offended or as if the couch has lied to her. “Well, it sort of has,” she says. “You have to imagine you're not pregnant,” Abbott keeps telling her. “I wish you knew what a ridiculous thing that is to say,” she says. Abbott and his wife bicker all day and are constantly reminded of each other's most regrettable qualities. There are no good couches, but they pretend the real issue is their spouse's poor taste or unreasonable requirements. “Comfort is not an unreasonable requirement,” Abbott's wife says, causing Abbott to wonder aloud whether they are wealthy enough for comfort. Abbott's daughter behaves like a two-year-old in a furniture store. She spills apple juice in a deluxe modern showroom, narrowly missing a divan. The child's stuffed pony is lost, discovered by a virtuous sales associate, then lost again. Abbott's wife's ankles hurt. She sits on couches and does not want to stand back up. The utopian community disintegrates, almost upon sunrise. All told, it lasted roughly thirteen hours, six of which Abbott spent sleeping. Like all other utopian settlements, including Robert Owen's New Harmony Community on the banks of the Wabash River in 1825, this La Quinta venture dissolves into chaos and fails. Still, Abbott considers while hiding from his family amidst the leather sectionals, all the
non
utopian communities have dissolved into chaos and failed, too. So big deal. So try again.