Girls (6 page)

“We have to get rid of it now,” you said but you looked at me.

So I sighed and I said, “OK but you get to clean up that sauce — I’m glad this wasn’t one of the good rugs,” and I found the box you had labeled LEGS and got out a table leg and pushed some boxes around until the mouse made a break for the skirting board. But when he got to the wall it was in the middle and there was no hole and so he had to run the length of the dim empty room hugging the wall closely, his tiny claws skittering on the bare wood floor and I intercepted him in the corner, cut him off at the pass, and smashed his head in with one blow of the table leg. I was so accurate his body was completely intact, it was only his head that had become a matted clump of fur and red and one bulging black eye.

You didn’t even want to look at it so when we were done eating I picked him up with my chopsticks and put him in the box of chicken where what was left of the dark, almost-black sauce swallowed him up like a tar pit and I closed the box up and threw it away with the rest of the trash. We ended up throwing the rug away too, the stain wouldn’t come out.

Do you remember any of that?

“‘ . . . this was no lie when you spoke of my madness. I was mad, I myself will not deny it. Worth many fighters is that man whom Zeus in his heart loves, as now he has honoured this man and beaten down the Achaian people. But since I was mad, in the persuasion of my heart’s evil, I am willing to make all good, and give back gifts in abundance . . . seven unfired tripods; ten talents’ weight of gold . . . twelve horses, strong, race-competitors . . . [and] seven women of Lesbos. . . . I will give him these, and with them shall go the one I took from him, the daughter of Briseus. And to all this I will swear a great oath that I never entered into her bed and never lay with her as is natural for human people . . . ’” — Agamemnon,
Iliad
9:115

You never discuss your business with them, never talk about the thing that occupies most of your thoughts and time, not just because they won’t understand, not just because they will find it boring, not just because, in their naiveté, they will criticize you for your practices, for winning, for generating the wealth they are enjoying at that very moment, but because it will pollute them, make them dirty, just as it did with that first one, that one you kept around the longest, that one you mistook for love.

The porn movie industry grosses more annually worldwide than the legitimate movie industry.

And still porn stars say they “make their real money” on tour — all cash.

Also all cash are the strip clubs and most hookers.

All told, in the United States, the sex industry grosses more than the domestic revenue of the tobacco and alcohol industries put together. All told, the American male spends more money annually per capita on the sex industry than on taking his wife to the movies and buying video games for his children. All told, the American male is clearly not getting what he wants at home.

She gives you a ring or a bracelet that says “Peace,” or, “Dream more.” And you wear it. You wear it even though your friends see it and say, “What the hell is that?” and, embarrassed, because you know exactly how ridiculous it is, you say, “She gave it to me,” and then they say, “Oh,” and leave it at that because now it makes sense. Yes, you wear it all the time. But you know it will not work. That is what she is for.

“‘Agamemnon offers you worthy recompense if you change from your anger.’” — Odysseus to Achilles,
Iliad
9:260

A mother catches you looking at her daughter. She scowls, she knows what you are thinking because she knows what her husband is thinking when he looks at his daughter’s friends. Yet she scowls more when she sees her daughter returning the gaze.

Apollo and Daphne. Merlin and Nimue. Othello and Desdemona. JFK and Marilyn. At what point did enchantment become sin?

I don’t remember when exactly but it must have been soon after we’d met, you taught me that if you fold a dollar bill lengthwise and then flatten it out again, a vending machine will almost always accept it.

Goddamn you for that. There are so many people I have forgotten, people I liked much more than you, people that I never even knew I knew until someone else mentions them and I wonder what happened to them because I liked them. But not you. You I must now remember in every airport, in every gymnasium, in every stairwell. Thanks to your little trick, I can never forget you. Goddamn you for that.

Love, lust, passion, longing, a sight for sore eyes, tempted by, weakness for, ache for, pant for, hurt for, languish for, cry for, itch for, wild for, yearning, craving, thirsting, coveting, hungry for, voracious, rapacious, unquenchable, insatiable, stuck on, gone on, need, want, set on, driven mad by, intoxicated, in your blood, besotted, befuddled, drunk, buzzed, bombed, high, stoned, hopped-up, coked-out, fucked, hooked, habit.

Somewhere, sometime, somehow you lose something or see something lost.

If you are lucky it was when you were young. If you are lucky you saw your parents divorced. If you are lucky your high school girlfriend died in a car crash. If you are lucky you saw your little sister lose the use of her legs because your family couldn’t afford the right health care.

If you are unlucky, it will happen when you are older. If you are unlucky you will see your son lose his place at the college of his choice to the child of a man richer than you, rich enough to donate some new lab equipment. If you are unlucky your wife of thirty-seven years will develop bipolar disorder and have to be hospitalized after you come home from work and find she has opened her wrists with an electric meat carver. If you are unlucky you will lose your job after twenty-two years of service and will be too old to find another.

If you are unlucky you will realize too late that the way you thought the world worked was just an illusion. If you are unlucky you will become afraid too late.

But if you are lucky you will become afraid when you are young, afraid of the unexpected changing your life for the worse and not having enough power to set things back the way you wanted them to be.

And then, if you are lucky, you will pursue power from that day forth. You will lead armies into Gaul, you will take on a colony in a new world, you will acquire money, you will only maintain relationships where you have the upper hand, only stay in jobs that can eventually lead to you being the one in charge. And you will do this because if you are lucky you will know that power means you don’t have to be afraid. Power means you can do what you want when you want to. Power means you can have what you want when you want it.

If you are lucky, you will do this because you will know it is really Power that is worth any sacrifice, that it is really Power without which you can’t live, that it is really Power without which you can only eat and breathe and sleep and shit and sometimes not even that. You will do this because if you are lucky you will know that when we say we’d die for Liberty we’re really saying we’d die for Power.

Except that in the pursuit of Power one of the things you will have to sacrifice will be the ability to enjoy the thing you lost or saw lost.

So even if you reach that point where you aren’t afraid anymore, that point where you can relax, that point where you are free, that point you never reach, even if you reach that point, you will realize you weren’t so lucky after all.

Yet, you wonder, who can say they’ve never been lucky?

Have you ever seen a domesticated dog with his first bone? He will still try to bury it in his bed or the couch or under a skirting board even after all the pushing has worn the top of his nose raw.

You are sitting outside your house in your imported British sports car. It is winter. The sky has just darkened and you have watched the lights come on inside. The trees and the bushes and the statues all around the house remind you of pictures you have seen of spacecraft during re-entry. Every surface, every edge, facing the house glows with yellow light. But beyond that, the objects disappear into darkness, become indistinct.

You had driven up to Boston for a meeting. Normally you would have taken the company jet out of JFK but the car just arrived last weekend. It was the first one on American soil and you got it. So you decided to drive up. You were feeling confident, wanted everyone to see the new car. You were going to let them sit in it if they wanted to. And you knew they’d want to. Besides, Boston was only an hour farther from you than the airport, once you added in the flight time and the trip from Logan to the office, driving almost made things quicker. Almost. And it also might snow soon, then you’d have to wait until spring to take it out again. You refer to the car as “it.” You know some men, mostly older men, refer to cars as “her” and “she.” You think that’s foolish, that it’s silly to animate the inanimate.

But then at the meeting, the meeting that was supposed to go well, out of nowhere people started using terms like “scramble” and “rapid repositioning.” At one point a COO who had originally been trained in the navy, said, “We got a real SNAFU here.” You asked him what the hell that meant anyway and he’d replied, “Situation Normal All Fucked Up.”

You had been twenty-five minutes outside of Boston before you realized you’d forgotten to show everyone the car. They didn’t even know you’d driven up.

And now you are looking at the front door, imagining what your wife will want to talk about when you go in. It’s not that she’s not understanding, she is. As understanding as she could be at least. You know some guys whose wives are a real pain in the ass, whose wives start piling shit on them the moment they walk in the door, whose wives the moment they walk in the door say something like, “You have to talk to that edging man, he won’t listen to me.” And then, when your friends say, “Can this wait until we’ve eaten?” when they say, “Can’t this wait until I’ve had a drink? I had a difficult day,” their wives say, “Well excuse me! You don’t think what I do is hard work? You don’t think raising your children and looking after your goddamn house is difficult!?” You know some guys who are so used to this, they don’t even bother to answer, they don’t even bother to say, “I’m not saying what you do isn’t hard work. I’m not saying what you do isn’t difficult. I’m not even saying I could do what you do. I’m just saying there wouldn’t even be a goddamn house or goddamn children or a goddamn edging man without my work!” You know some guys who don’t say any of that. They don’t say anything. They just sigh and walk into the closest room with liquor and pour themselves a glass of twenty-five-year-old Highland malt. You even know some guys who would sometimes rather spend a night alone in a hotel in the city, who would sometimes rather go into work the next day in the same clothes than go home.

But your wife isn’t like that. She’s not like that at all. Your wife is wonderful. She will say “poor dear” if you bother to tell her about today. You frequently don’t even have to tell her, frequently she knows how you feel just by looking at your face. She will give you sympathy, stroke your hair, rub soft little circles on that spot on the inside of your elbow. If there are problems with the kids or with the households, she will know enough to keep them to herself until the right time, will even try again to deal with them herself.

And yet tonight when you go to bed, when you lie there awake all night long, your heart pounding like it’s going to leap out of your chest as you work and rework your strategy, when you lie there once more trying to figure out how to come out furthest ahead, when you lie there like that, by yourself, she will be sound asleep. And the kids will be sound asleep if they still live at home. And you are happy to give that to them. You really are.

But at some point, perhaps around three or four
A.M
. after you’ve gotten up to make yourself a sandwich but have been unable to because you don’t know where anything is in your own kitchen, as you return to bed, as you get back in bed and pull the covers up over yourself, you will look down at her and you will wonder what she didn’t tell you. You will wonder what other problems you will have to deal with sometime soon, which parts of the things that were supposed to make you happy, which parts of the things that were supposed to fulfill you have gone wrong now. You will wonder what else you will have to deal with on top of the problem that hasn’t let you sleep.

And it will occur to you, as you look down at your wonderful, caring, understanding wife, that if she is ever going to really talk at all, if at any point she is ever going to tell you about her life as she once did so long ago (but how long really — ten, fifteen years?), if she’s ever going to talk to you as she once talked to you about her classes or her love of sailing or her desire to join the Peace Corps, if she is ever going to talk to you like that again, she will have to talk to you about those responsibilities that she didn’t want to talk to you about when you came home tonight. Because they have become her life. Her whole life is now the responsibilities you have made for yourself outside your job. Her whole life is now the world that used to be your dream, the world you have been doing the work to create, the world that has become a burden, the world you now can’t bear to face.

And so perhaps looking down at her, something that not so long ago used to fill your face with amazement, sheer disbelief that you were lying naked next to a woman like this, perhaps looking down at her you will suddenly feel sick. Perhaps looking down at her you will suddenly understand why sometimes when you come home and she opens the door with a smile on her face you can’t stand the sight of her, why sometimes when that door opens it feels like you’ve stepped off one unpleasant ride at an amusement park and right onto another one. And perhaps, just perhaps, just for a split second, you will think about how easy it would be to strangle her in her sleep. And then you will wonder where that thought came from.

For no reason at all you run your fingers over the hand-carved wooden dash. You find yourself wondering why British sports cars are so small. Italian and German sports cars are a decent size, why do the British make everything so small, you wonder.