Domestic Affairs (35 page)

We met in February, nine years ago. I quit my job a month later. In early April we rented a U-Haul truck, filled it with his paintings, my two white couches, his power tools, my designer suits, and moved to the old farmhouse in New Hampshire where we are living still. We had no money and few clear prospects for earning any. We hadn’t met each other’s families, didn’t know the most basic facts of how the other spent the days. We instantly set about planning the wedding. (When Steve called his parents in Ohio to let them know, they were very happy. Then asked to speak to Karen, the girlfriend he’d been seeing the last time they’d heard from him.)

We were married early that summer, in a little church down the road from our house. Afterward we gave an outdoor party for a couple hundred friends, back at our house. (In keeping with our approach to life back then, we had made no provisions for rain. None fell.) We left the dishes piled high in our kitchen that night and took off for the Breezy Point Motel, six miles down the road. Came back the next morning to wash the dishes. Our daughter Audrey was born the following winter—a year and two days from the afternoon we first got together.

The seas we have been navigating in the years since then have been rough indeed—full of choppy waters, boulders, sudden drops—and we’ve sustained more than a few injuries along our course. We’ve laid some demons to rest. (I am less quick to argue. I’ve come to understand that days are finite. Time is precious. So is peace.) I no longer shed tears over my birthday present (I seldom get flowers, but I don’t expect them). Some problems we’ve resolved. (He gets the car inspected. I do the cooking.) Some we no longer expect to resolve. We’re more realistic, maybe. We’ve seen a lot of marriages break apart over the years we’ve held together. And what I feel when I hear the stories of those marriages, is never the lofty superiority of one who has it all sewn up herself. Only the recognition, felt, I think, by anybody who’s been married a while, of how hard it is for two people to build a life together and how much more than love is required to make it endure.

Our friend Ursula’s son A.J. blew into town the other day, and this morning he paid us a visit. We’ve known A.J. close to ten years now, though never well. Like his father, Andy, who died a few years back, A.J. is a large man with not a lot of small talk in him. Trained as a geologist, he has been working these many years as a carpenter instead. He was married around 1970 to a pretty red-haired woman named Julia with whom he lived in a little cabin out of town, without benefit of electricity or running water. A.J. grew a beard. Julia wore long dresses and long hair. Their first baby, Cassie, was born right there in the cabin, and the second one, Sara, came a year and a half later. They drove a beat-up truck and A.J. picked up odd jobs; Julia baked bread.

I didn’t know them well back then, but they seemed like one of those couples—perhaps there were more of them, in those days—who lived by the creed “We ain’t got much, but we sure have love.” Sometimes I would run into A.J. and Julia in summertime, taking a dip down the road, at Gleason Falls, in the middle of the day—A.J. with a beautiful blond-haired baby in each arm. Around the time I met Steve, A.J. and Julia moved out West. A.J. had been offered a full-time construction job in San Diego. Sometimes, when I’d stop by to visit Ursula, she’d take out pictures from A.J. and Julia’s travels cross country in the truck. They camped out in Baja California for most of that summer and part of the fall: more pictures of beautiful blond children (three of them now; there was a boy, Jesse), with golden tans, wearing bandanas on their heads.

After they moved West we mostly lost touch with A.J. and his family, except for reports from Ursula. They seemed to be doing well, though. First they had an apartment, then a house. Then a better job, in Colorado. A.J. had shaved his beard. Julia (always after A.J. to push a little harder in his construction business, be a better provider) was talking about getting a job herself. She was going on a diet. The children were growing fast—still blond and beautiful.

Every summer or two they’d come back to New Hampshire for a visit, and when they did we always had the children over to our house. I always liked those children: They were kind to each other, and kind to Audrey too. Sometimes, months after a visit, we’d get a note from Sara, asking after pets, babies, news. Her family was moving again. (Texas this time.) They were buying a bigger house. She would take riding lessons. She was getting her own horse.

The new house was in a development called Pleasant Woods; I saw it on television, one time, when we were in Ohio visiting Steve’s parents, and Steve’s father was watching a golf match televised there. The place looked green and perfect, and it turned out A.J. and Julia’s house overlooked that very golf course. I tried to picture A.J. in a luxury housing development, not only building houses there but living in one. Hard to imagine.

Then we didn’t see them for a few summers. (“Too busy, I guess,” said Ursula, a little bitterly.) Ursula’s husband, Andy, was dead by now. Julia had put the children in day care and got a job as a secretary at the Pleasant Woods resort complex, where she’d been such a success they’d made her executive secretary to the head of the whole place. She had indeed gone on a diet; the new photographs from Texas showed her in fashionable suits and a new short hairdo. A.J.—still a good-looking man, but considerably aged—had put on weight. Sara, the second daughter, was taller than me now and could’ve been a fashion model.

A couple of years ago they came back through town, in a rented Lincoln Continental. Sara came for a sleepover with Audrey, but there was a crisis when she misplaced a ring she’d just been given by her mother for her birthday. The ring was real gold. In the end we found it, but not before some tears were shed, with Sara saying, “My mom will just kill me.”

A.J. and Julia were celebrating their anniversary that August: I think it was their fifteenth. As we stood on the lawn at Ursula’s house, where they’d been married (Julia barefoot; the minister in an embroidered Indian shirt), they fed each other cake and Julia (in a pant suit) said something like, “Once you’ve made it together this many years, you’ve gone too far to quit. I know now we’ll always be together.” A few months later they split up.

Ursula called me one day early last spring, in tears, to say that A.J. had turned up at the housing development where Julia and the children lived, on the edge of the ninth hole, and he’d gone on a rampage—yelling, breaking things. He had just been committed to a mental institution. Julia had just called Ursula to say she feared for her life. “The man’s gone nuts,” she said. “He’s crazy.”

I told Ursula it didn’t seem so crazy, to me, for a man who’d just ended a fifteen-year marriage and had been separated from his three beloved children, to flip out a little, but as for the homicidal part, I didn’t believe it. He must be under a lot of pressure, I said. As long as he’s getting good care, and he can get out when he’s ready, it might not be such a bad idea for him to have a rest.

A few weeks later he started sending us poems. It was easy to recognize the characters: The poems were all about A.J. and Julia—the old days in the little cabin, lit by kerosene; and more recent history, in the house on the edge of the golf course that the bank had announced it was about to repossess.

The poems kept coming. It was odd, getting them: Steve and I had never really known A.J. all that well, but after reading a few batches of those typewritten sheets, with the hospital return address, he started seeming like a friend. And though they were odd poems—disjointed, angry sometimes, wistful—they were not the poems of a madman either.

He checked out of the hospital after a few weeks, when the insurance money ran out. He drove across country in his old truck, with a wooden bumper that had Sara’s name carved in it. He took a carpentry job in Connecticut and kept sending us poems all summer.

A.J. came to New Hampshire from the Adirondacks a few times that summer. He’d show up on our doorstep, always unannounced. Once we were just heading out the door for our week’s vacation in Maine, with the car packed and the children already buckled into their seats. Another time, when Steve was out of town, he knocked at the door just as I was getting the children into bed. I was so startled to see him, six feet tall and then some, looming in the doorway in the pitch-dark night, that I told him it was a bad time for a visit and closed the door before I realized he’d come over on foot from Ursula’s house, where he was camping out.

His middle child, Sara, flew out to see him in the fall. She stayed with him at Ursula’s for a week, seldom letting A.J. out of her sight. I tried to imagine our children without Steve, Steve without our children. I avoided seeing A.J. for a few days after Sara left, knowing it would be a long time before he’d see her again and knowing how torn up he’d be.

He came over this morning, just to visit. I fixed him a bowl of soup I’d been making, and he sat down and told us the story of how his marriage fell apart. Amazing, I thought to myself, that I ever took this man for the quiet type. I had been making a blueberry pie when the story started. I made a second pie so I could justify staying on to listen, and when that pie was done too, I started in on some cookies. As it turned out, I forgot to put salt in the pie crust (which has a more adverse effect on the pie than you might suppose), simply because I was so wrapped up in A.J.’s tale.

He has no home and no job and no money, and he sleeps in the back of a seventeen-year-old truck. He is back again to where he started, only now he’s forty years old, with three children he loves more than anything, living two thousand miles away. I guess his is the old story: romantic, idealistic young love (the cabin in the woods), worn down by too much domestic reality. Designer jeans, horseback-riding lessons, summer camp, wall-to-wall carpeting: “We just got so busy getting ahead,” A.J. says, climbing into the cab of the same ancient red truck he and Julia rode off in on their wedding day, back when they thought all they needed was each other. The last I see of him is his hand-carved wooden bumper, with his daughter’s name carved in big capital letters (he made it the day she was born—on their bed, into his waiting hands). And then he disappears around the corner and out of sight.

Our old car needed a new muffler. That much seemed clear. And because the last one we’d purchased came with a lifetime guarantee, we were cheered to know we’d be out nothing more than the price of a new tail pipe to go with it. That, plus the sixty-mile drive to the muffler shop and back. We thought we’d combine the trip with a night at the movies: drop off the car, walk to the theater, pick up the car after the movie, drive home.

That was the plan. Steve made an appointment a week in advance for six-thirty on a Friday night. A few days before the scheduled appointment, he brought our 1966 Valiant into the shop for an advance viewing, in case the muffler installers might need to contemplate our particular tail pipe situation. We hired a babysitter. And finally the big night came: I set out the children’s dinners, sleeper suits, a plate of brownies. We made a successful exit—no tears. We were on the open road, Steve patting the steering wheel with satisfaction, saying, “It’s good to get this taken care of.”

In theory I look forward to these long drives alone with my husband. There’s been so little time to talk, lately, that sometimes I’m tempted to bring along a notebook with a list of subjects we need to cover. But the truth is, when I have him alone with me, captive in his seat belt, my tendency is always to raise large and troubling areas of discussion. Money comes up. Who has been sorting more laundry. Who last cleaned the car. I become icy. He grows silent. I may say, “Stop the car, let me out right now.” Having heard this line probably once a month in our nine years of marriage, Steve calmly turns on the radio. I say nothing for ten miles or so, and then forget for a second that I’m mad, tell him something Charlie said today. A song we like comes on the radio. By the time we’ve reached our destination we feel like actors who have just finished auditioning for a Bergman film. Who did not—thankfully—play their roles well enough to get a part.

So when we walked into the muffler shop, we were friends again. Steve presented our six-year-old warranty and our car keys, reminded the manager about our tail pipe. And then the trouble began.

“We don’t start repairs after six o’clock,” the man said. I—who always anticipate trouble when it comes to cars— braced myself for a fight. Steve stayed calm, his voice friendly. “I made this appointment a week ago. The woman I spoke to said six-thirty would be fine.”

“The girl was wrong. You know how they get mixed up.” The manager winked in my direction.

Steve didn’t have to look at me to know what I was about to say. He made the hand signal a policeman makes to indicate, “Slow down.” I held my tongue while he talked the fellow into making an exception.

“Now about the tail pipe …”

“We don’t have a tail pipe for that model in stock. You’ll have to come back some other time.”

I had begun pacing the floor a while back. Now I returned to the counter. “Leave this to me, please,” said Steve, who is still pained by the memory of the time I took action when a commuter airline lost our luggage even though we were the plane’s sole passengers. There is an entire airport we avoid these days, as a result.

Well, they had made a mistake. They had failed to order our tail pipe, and though they were equipped to make tail pipes at this place, the particular page in their instruction book giving the specifications for 1966 Valiant tail pipes was the one page missing from the book. No, they couldn’t call another dealership: No one else in the state was open Friday nights.

There was a long silence as I prepared the speech I was about to deliver, and Steve, hands in his pockets, thought hard. “Please,” he said to me. “Go outside now. Let me handle this.”

I sat down and picked up an old copy of
Car & Driver
magazine, flipping through it in about the same manner in which Jerry Fallwell might handle a double issue of
Hustler.