American Spirit: A Novel (4 page)

Matthew shifts to a mantra to calm himself:
Fuck jogging.
This simple Zen koan is repeated in his head a few times but then there are good college tries at attitude adjustment shoehorned in:
That’s not the attitude, is it?
And also:
That’s not how we improve ourselves, is it?
Focus on the positive. Focus on the stupid free song that the former employer shoved onto your computer. Two become one. He tries to start reverse engineering some kind of jogging mantra or message from the benign lyrics. Two really do become one, he tells himself… yes, imagine a vision of a healthier, not depressed, brand new you who is finally living a real and authentic life. And now imagine the old you. And now imagine that the versions of you are kissing and becoming one. Excellent. Now just focus on getting around the perimeter of this parking lot at least once and then back to where the car is parked. Throat feels like steel wool. Why are the daytime McMansion housewife jerk-off grocery shoppers staring? Ah, right, still holding the second beer bottle. Bad form, they’re right. But still, fucking back off with the judging, you apes. This is the beauty part of never knowing your neighbors. Do you think Matthew cares what any of these people think? He does, sadly, but still, it’s not like they know him or know Kristin. Matthew stares ahead, stares back at them, stares at the asphalt below him and thinks:
What are you dirty bats going to do? Tell my wife that instead of being at work I was jogging around the parking lot at Stan’s with a beer in my
hand with my face all twisted up and red, here atop my weird, sweaty steel wool constricting neck? Go ahead and tell her. I’ll just say that I called in sick. I look sick right now, so it fits.

Plus, these women staring at him, they don’t even know Matthew’s wife. At this point in her life she’s tired of playing nice and having faith that time is on her side. Kristin is a woman who understands that faith without the fucking teeth and fight to take what you want is dead. If these house bots introduce themselves with the idea of ratting Matthew out, she’ll shrug to hear the information and eventually screw their husbands if these judgmental monsters give any indication that there’s a husband in their house with even a modicum of personality not fraught with struggle or frustrated ambition. Or even just a husband with more money than Matthew has—and they all have that at the moment—so keep your distance if you like your marriage, ladies.

W
is for Whale. Now coming up on the
V
section of the parking lot.
V
is for Vegetables,
V
is for the leftover Vicodin one eats in front of the TV when the knees split and their ligaments snap free, after the shins have splintered and made their way through the skin. Goddamn, jogging isn’t getting any easier. The eyes start to bulge and water, the face is full of vibration, mostly tonal, because Matthew is now making sounds not unlike the whale on that sign in the last parking section; deep and involuntary primitive bronchial groans. This sound is maybe what the trophy wives are looking at as they saunter from their cars and toward the store without even making the effort to jog. At least find the heart to make
an effort at jogging before you pass judgment on how someone is going about it.

Matthew’s form is all over the place, hunched and weaving, staggered and wheezing. In a last-ditch effort to right the body’s course and form, he throws the beer bottle toward the plants that border the parking lot, but the bottle breaks on the curb, stopping a bit short after achieving—strangely enough—the same off-kilter swerve Matthew is trying to correct in his stride. Now even more of them look and judge and shame, but Matthew finds a resolve in himself that seems to say:
Oh, I see how it is; now I’m the crazy one? I’m the crazy guy wearing makeshift running shorts (boxers that are almost passable and, frankly, probably cost more than most pairs of exercise shorts) and huge headphones, running around the grocery store parking lot drinking and throwing bottles spastically into the concrete?

Okay, new plan; with the chest tightening a little too fast, it’s time to stop this jog short, time to cut across the lot and back to the car for what athletes refer to as the cool-down period. This was far enough for the first one.

Matthew hangs a hard right to cut through the middle section, and the back of a car is suddenly angled right up against him. When it happens, it happens so quickly that one can’t figure out why a car would be so close to the hip and waist. It tags him hard, it sends him onto his ass like a cartoon, like slapstick, like grainy blue-and-gray footage from a security camera that has to be slowed down to see what even happened because it happened so fast. The vision blurs for a
second and his point of view is instantly that of a man lying on the asphalt looking up at the sky.

The music volume was knocked and jammed all the way on high and the ears are splitting to the sound of a benign melody that speaks of his heart growing strong, of two becoming one. Interrupting his vast and inspirational view of the sky is a hysterical woman, suburban-pretty, stunned, and squawking, in her forties and standing over him looking down and moving her lips without making a sound. Matthew loves the feeling of lying on his back with a woman caring about how he’s doing. He remembers this feeling. There’s a moment in jogging that the Fuel Feet clerk told him about, it’s called “hitting the wall” and it comes with symptomatically irrational thinking and then increased performance levels. He wonders if that’s what he’s hit. Matthew manages to essentially paw at the large headphones that have been knocked ajar, until they are the rest of the way off of his head.

Staring up, he manages to say something. “I’ve been… I don’t usually drink. Fitness is important to me.”

What seemed like a fairly polite icebreaker earns him being quickly hushed up and covered with a blanket from a car trunk, thrown onto him by another onlooker who has also rushed over.

“Let’s get him covered up. He’s talking nonsense, he’s going into shock.”

And then this man—this half-assed lump of spiritual effect with a 1995 expiration date, whose hair—both receding and long—and Mexican poncho suggest a dicey decision to
embrace hippy culture fifty years after it has gone to seed; he continues speaking.

“Okay, let’s all just relax for a minute. Let’s not panic. Everyone’s okay; everyone’s right where they need to be at this moment for whatever reason.”

There are thanks doled out for this! Thanks are showered on the lumpling instantly! “Thank you for being so calm in the middle of this,” the woman says; thank you for keeping us from panicking. Matthew doesn’t thank this man. Matthew doesn’t want to talk anymore today. He makes his way up and onto his feet to everyone’s chagrin, happy to have it in him to shake off the injury like an athlete. But he also wonders if one can, in fact, shake off internal bleeding if it turns out that’s what is happening. The two onlookers fuss and follow him and Matthew manages to mumble, “This is probably exactly the kind of shit that makes people quit jogging forever.”

Wake Up and Get to Sleep

M
ATTHEW SHAKES IT OFF
by walking a couple of cooldown laps around his car, happy to be upright and conscious, but then he looks at his watch. He is certain Kristin has materialized in the house; fading up like a song; growing taller like a shadow trying to block the sun. At 1282 Druxbury, now well past noon, she is with the man she loves. The man vaporizes from the steam of the shower, first a barely darker section in the white, then clearly more than a notion, and then a body in the clear. He seems to dry instantly, or not worry much about being wet, gets back into bed, and kisses her. He appears fine with the luxury of a lazy morning—daily, as far as Matthew can tell. There is no real idea of who this man is, but the eyes picture him wholly in a handful of torturous little scenarios the gray has
come up with. Matthew has sensed him for a long while now.

A year ago, or two, or however many, Kristin did little to dissuade Matthew from indulging the worst suspicions he could come up with. He was forthright, he told her that the details in his head were insane, burnished on the brain; he had never been a jealous man, he said, but now the hunches seemed so real that it was hard not to humor them. He said he even knew what they had for breakfast together, that it was like a hotel breakfast, strong coffee in those little silver pots with heavy cream, those little glass yogurts with the foil lid like Matthew and Kristin had from room service in Paris back when the two of them still seemed like a good idea, if only to the two of them. One might argue that Matthew was in need of some kind of comforting from Kristin, in need of some reassurance maybe. That sort of thing isn’t unheard of in marriages on occasion. There was a host of things she could have said. She could have said,
Matthew, our love is stronger than these neurotic fits of yours and you need to realize that.
Or even, lovingly, but firmly,
I think you’re being a little paranoid, don’t you?
These are both just suggestions for things people on earth might consider saying in exchanges like this, and anything along these lines would have done just fine. But the only thing she said was, “Do you know how much fat is in heavy cream?” A long pause hung and answered every terrible question Matthew didn’t have the guts to ask. And she broke the silence to seek clarification by asking two questions.

“Did you mean skim milk, maybe?” and “Do you think I’m fat?”

Matthew comes home to this house, this same house, this ghost town, nine or ten hours after leaving it to “go to work” and about seven and a half hours after being hit by a car. The man is gone, but Kristin pops up around every corner about twice an hour and then a little less the later it gets. She’s impossible to avoid, even in almost three thousand lonely square feet, well, especially in three thousand lonely square feet. She is upstairs on the phone again, barely heard above a whisper, talking in code to friends or family or worse. She is reflected in the kitchen floor, framed on the walls, embedded like smoke in the drapes, all over the place, just out of sight and range.

Kristin has stuck to saying she’s thirty-nine for as long as she can get away with it, she’s never in the sun but always evenly tanned, she’s sexy but frail and too thin, she’s three labels and a watch, and she’s also had as many dreams and hurt feelings, holdouts, high hopes, and letdowns as any of us mortal and trying. She was a kid once just like everyone was; she’s someone frightened to let the heart believe in second chances, like anyone with a decent heart is. But Matthew was never the man supposed to see any of this in her, and she is not the woman meant to see the same things in him. But they met, then they did what so many people on the 30 percent of the planet not covered by water usually do: They stayed together, determined not to notice what didn’t fit, and made relatively small, silent, ostensibly secret, but
painfully irrevocable mistakes in a process that will always last longer than it should. And in that process bodies become too fat, bodies become too thin, the result of everything unconsciously becoming reward or punishment for the comfortable mess two people are in when the year on the calendar changes again.

There was a time when the truth came out, a time when both of them were a little bit drunk, drunk enough to talk about making things work. Matthew had been drinking a few alone at home wondering where she could possibly be staying so late most Friday and Saturday nights, and Kristin came home from her Saturday night at about five on Sunday morning. She lay down on the couch, across the room from Matthew, and he gave it his best shot at a better marriage.

“Where were you? And I want you to be honest with me. If we’re going to make this work, we need to be honest with each other, Kristin. That’s what being married is all about. Just tell me exactly as you would tell a friend. Because first and foremost we’re friends, right? Where were you? I was worried.”

And then out came the big guns, Matthew adds the phrase he’s convinced makes people disappear in a heartbeat: “I love you.” This chestnut has left Matthew’s lips only a handful of times since age nine, and admittedly, maybe that’s part of the problem. Saying it apparently really made Kristin jump at the chance to go back to being friends; back to being two people who weren’t locked into it, back before that moment when the plane door closes and you know this is
where you’re sitting until the very end of the flight, honoring in sickness and in health, forever and ever, amen, and all of that. Kristin warmed to this idea of talking like friends almost immediately.

“I went to Splash with Stephanie, and I met this guy that had a ton of coke, so we did drugs in his car and then somehow I ended up back at his place, sleeping with him and then actually, you know, falling asleep.”

Matthew is no longer very interested in talking like friends. Kristin raising the bar to this level of friend-like talking really threw a monkey wrench into the communication exercise.

7:45
PM
is the perfect time to come home. It says one has had a full day at the office; even hit some traffic on the way back in from Manhattan; it’s early enough to still watch television and consider a way out of the position you’re in; it’s late enough that dinner won’t warrant serious production—it can be eaten alone over the sink, no plate, just a paper towel or napkin. Pants cover the bruises and scrapes and tarmac grind on the legs, though there is the matter of the limp when moving from the kitchen to the couch in front of the television. It’s something that Matthew will try to blame on a rigorous visit to the gym, if he has to. There’s more blood in the urine, but that was happening before, and the car only aggravated it. The blood is from the pain, and the pain is why there will be an X-ray that anyone in their right mind puts off getting until the pain gets finally too scary. But there has been no X-ray so far, because walking around feeling like you’ve
been kicked in the nuts is a pain that is easy to rationalize when one considers how they’ve spent so many days in an office feeling like that’s what has metaphorically been happening during all of the submitting to superiors under the influence of a heavy mortgage. Nobody knows a thing about it; this business of the blood and pain is between Matthew and God and a sixty-something-year-old Republican doctor that puts his hand in private places on people while he talks about Karl Rove’s book being pretty darned good. The brain keeps saying that she knows everything he’s trying to hide. A shadowy dart in the corner of his eye is always her and the shadowy dart always knows. And he knows, too; knows everything he’s done wrong; everything she thinks of him; everything she did to begin with, how she’s the first to admit that maybe she started it. With any luck, sleep will bring a nightly reprieve; Matthew prays in his head to anything that might be listening. He asks that he figure out a way to have fixed what’s going wrong inside of him, even though he may not have insurance; he also asks that he never develop a tolerance to the lovely mild opiate called television.