Outtakes from a Marriage (2 page)

7829.

My thumb knew exactly where the numbers were. I didn’t have to look.

“I’m horny as a motherfucker…. I just thought you should know that, baby.”

That lilting, sultry voice. Southern, that’s for sure. And the mouth on her.

Then, the crisp, automated female voice. My familiar Nextel friend:
“To repeat this message, press eleven.”

11.

“Hi, babe, thanks for the message. I can’t believe you had to ask if I’m happy, baby, you know I am….”

“Julia,” Joe called from the bedroom, “are you coming to bed or what?”

“Shhh! Joe! You’ll wake the kids! I’ll be there in a minute.”

“To repeat this message, press eleven.”
11.

“Hi, babe, thanks for the message. I can’t believe you had to ask if I’m happy, baby, you know I am….”

It was 1:33. The digits on the microwave clock emitted a miniature aura—a pale emerald haze that seemed to hang in the air in the dark. The refrigerator hummed lazily and every few seconds the freezer tumbled ice. From the street below came the sound of two raised voices, one singing in a hollow, drunken tone, the other inexplicably yelling, “Hey!…Hey!”

“I’m horny as a motherfucker….”
said the voice in my ear.

“Hey!” cried the voice from the street. “HEY!”

The Golden Globe nominations had been announced live, on national television, two weeks before our dinner with the Metzgers. The announcement was scheduled for eight-thirty, during the morning news shows, which was the same time that our son, Sammy, was supposed to be at preschool. It was the last day of school before the holidays, and at first I had considered sending Sammy to school with Catalina. Then I decided to take him myself—I wanted to be distracted from the excruciating suspense of it all. This wasn’t the first time there was a lot of hype surrounding Joe and his show. The year before, I woke up early and waited three hours for the announcements. All the critics had insisted that Joe deserved it, that he was guaranteed a nomination. Although Joe went off to the gym, so as not to “jinx” himself, I had watched the morning news with a sense of impending glory, the phone on my lap, ready to dial Joe the second his name was called out. I watched the new 007 guy and America’s Sweetheart read off the list of nominees, and when they skipped Joe altogether, I honestly thought they had made a mistake. I sat there and watched for several minutes before the network switched back to the regular broadcast and then I made the unhappy call to Joe, but he already knew. He had been running in front of the TV. I imagined his shoulders sagging with disappointment and his feet slowing down on the rushing treadmill when they announced the other nominees, and I wondered if he was carried backward, just for a moment, before he was able to regain his stride. A week later, on Christmas morning, Ruby presented Joe with a Golden Globe award she had made out of papiermâché, carefully replicating the trophy from a photo she found on Wikipedia. She had painted a bronze-colored plaque on the Styrofoam base and etched in the words “Best Performer in the Role of Father.” Joe had displayed it proudly on a bookshelf, where it remained for several months, but at some point it ended up in a toy box (four-year-old Sammy sometimes used it as a sword), and that was the last I saw of it.

This year I had opted for a different tack. Joe wanted to watch the announcements live, and I decided I’d rather be told the news, so we planned to meet for breakfast afterward. I was looking at my menu when he arrived at our favorite neighborhood spot. I wasn’t really reading it, just using it as a diverting focal point, and when I glanced up, there he was, a Yankees cap pulled down low over his eyes, moving between tables, ducking around waitresses and waiters.

Christmastime…is here,
chimed the child-chorus from the recording of
A Charlie Brown Christmas
that the diner had been playing every day for the past week.

A man seated at a nearby table called out, “Hey, Joey Ferraro! How’s it goin’?” and Joe nodded at him. “It’s going great, man, thanks.”

Then he sat down beside me and glanced up from under the brim of his cap, grinning.

“Oh…my…God,” I said slowly, reacting to his grin with my own. I bit my lip, searching his eyes cautiously, but I knew.

“I got it.”

“I knew you would!” I cried, and Joe grabbed the seat of my chair and pulled it right up next to his. He kissed me, and when he let me go, I was blinking back tears and laughing.

“I wish I saw them announce it,” I said. “I should have had Catalina take Sammy to school. Who else was nominated?”

“I need a coffee. Where’s the waitress? I’m starving,” said Joe, as if it were just another day, but then he placed his palms down on the table and pushed his shoulders back, causing his chair to tilt up onto its hind legs, and he grinned at the ceiling for a moment. He rocked forward a few seconds later, letting the chair slam back onto all fours, and he beat the table like a bongo drum. “I’m fucking starving.”

We ordered our breakfast from Zara, the waitress who had been serving us breakfast for years, and Joe told me about turning on the
Today
show just seconds before his nomination was announced.

“I thought I missed it, but I turned it on and the category they were announcing was for Best Actor, TV Drama. I was the first name they read. Joseph Ferraro.
The Squad.
”

“When do we go to L.A.?” I asked.

“I think the show is on January 22. It’s a Sunday. We’ll probably go out Friday.”

“The twenty-second is Dad’s birthday,” I said. “You know I like to take the kids up to see Dad on his birthday.”

“So go see him the weekend after,” Joe said. “He won’t know the difference.”

“Yeah,” I said. And it really wouldn’t make any difference to Dad. He thought Gerald Ford was the president and that I was married to an astronaut. He told me that the last time I visited, told me how proud he was. I had asked one of the nurses if I should try to correct him when he was confused like that, and she just shrugged and said, “Nah, what’s the point? It’s easier on everyone if you just go along. Act as if.”

By the time Zara brought our eggs, Joe had shut off the ringer on his phone, but it continued to vibrate nonstop, and he would look at the caller ID each time and tell me who was calling without answering. “That’s Scott.” “It’s somebody from the UK.” “It must be Frank.” “Mom.” He smiled each time he checked. “By the way,” he said, popping his last crust of toast into his mouth, “Brian Metzger called right after the nominations. He just wrapped that sci-fi movie. They want to have dinner.”

“After Christmas,” I said, and then I said, “I’m really proud of you, baby.”

He nodded, grinning broadly, drumming the table with his palms like a teenager.

[
two
]

J
oe was asleep by the time I finally put the phone down that night. He lay naked on his side with one of his hands, strangely palsied and twisted-looking, curled up under his chin. His dark brown hair fell over his eyes, his mouth hung slightly open, and I realized for the first time that Joe looks quite simian when he sleeps. The lower half of his body had stretched out onto my half of the bed and the wrath inspired by his trespassing genitals and limbs took me by surprise.
Get your disgusting ape legs off my side of the bed,
I thought. I sat down and drove my thumb into Joe’s hamstring, and when he mumbled in protest, I said, softly, “Move over, Joe. There’s no room.”

Somehow I slept. I had closed my eyes and thought,
I’ll never get to sleep tonight, never,
and then it was six o’clock the next morning and I discovered that Sammy had crawled into bed beside me sometime during the night. Joe was gone—he’d had a five o’clock call—and now Sammy lay sprawled out, belly up, in his place. Sammy’s blond hair formed a feathery halo around his head, and his arms were thrown out to either side as if he had landed there after a long backward free fall. I wrapped my body around my son—a classic Sam (Dad never met one who couldn’t look you in the eye)—and the smell of his sweet, damp hair and his freshly laundered pajamas filled me with an aching sense of longing and regret. My youngest, my last child, was no longer a baby. I would never again hold my own sleeping newborn against my shoulder or feel the weighty, sensual anticipation of milk-heavy breasts. My children were getting older—someday they would leave. I was forty, my life was half over, and my husband had found somebody new.

“He’s gonna grow up to be a serial killer, you know.”

Ruby, our fourteen-year-old, was standing in the doorway in an oversized T-shirt, frowning at the sight of Sammy lying asleep in my bed.

“Good morning, Ruby.” I sighed.

“Mom, you have to stop letting him come into your bed every night or he’ll develop a narcissistic personality disorder and end up going on a killing spree when he’s older.”

“Really?” I whispered, carefully climbing out of bed. “Well, you slept in our bed almost every night until you were at least Sammy’s age, and you don’t seem to be too terribly deranged.”

“Um…Mom? Could you please stop telling me that? It’s really damaging for me to have to visualize myself in the same bed with you and Dad.”

“I’ll damage you!” I said, and I aimed a fake karate kick at her. I was forcing a laugh now, trying to be fun, but Ruby just scooted out of the way, exhaling a weighty grunt of disapproval.

“Mom! You almost kicked Sammy!”

Ruby considers Sammy as much her child as Joe’s and mine, and she spends a great deal of time worrying about, and second-guessing, our behavior toward him. She seems to view herself as some sort of buffer, a human firewall that will, ideally, protect Sammy from the reckless parenting that she feels she has had to endure all these years. She goes to a progressive school that offers a course in psychology to eighth graders, and ever since she started taking the class, she has been telling us how just about everything we do is “damaging” or “undermining” or “demoralizing” to her or to Sammy.

When people first meet our family they often comment on the age discrepancy between our two children. “Decided to start all over again, huh?” they’ll ask, as if suddenly, after ten years, we decided it was time to produce another child. It’s taken for granted that Sammy is an afterthought. That we almost forgot to have a second baby. In fact, we didn’t forget. In fact, after Ruby, there were three other pregnancies and three miscarriages and then, finally, there was Sammy, whom we didn’t really trust or believe in until I held him in my arms, all slimy, breathing, squalling seven pounds of him, delivered so quickly that we almost didn’t make it to the delivery room. “What a lucky mom,” Dr. Rajaman said as he casually slid him onto my belly. “Such a short labor!”

And it’s true; we felt blessed and just dripping with luck that day at Lenox Hill Hospital. I still remember the way Joe wiped his teary eyes with the palm of his trembling hand when the nurse handed over Sammy, now all clean and swaddled, that round pink face peering seriously up at him. The nurse was giddy and distracted in Joe’s presence, and when he thanked her for her help, she giggled and sputtered, “No problem…Mr…. Ferraro!” Because Joe was famous by the time Sammy was born. It was the end of his first season starring in
The Squad,
NBC’s breakout number one show, and for the first time in his career, people called out to him wherever he went and pleaded for autographs when all he wanted to do, he loved to complain to his friends, was buy a pack of cigarettes or take Ruby to the movies.

He had been only a little bit famous when Ruby was born. He was mostly doing commercials then and was at the level of fractional fame where people would just stare at him, or sometimes waiters and cashiers would say, “Hey, you’re that guy!” But usually they wouldn’t really know which guy they were talking about. It wasn’t until Ruby was in kindergarten and he was doing more supporting roles that people started greeting him like a semiforgotten friend.

“Hey, you’re the guy who kidnapped Julia Roberts and then had your ass kicked by Nicolas Cage, man. You’re, uhh…,” a kid would shout at Joe as we walked by. Joe would smile and nod and then the kid would call out, “Hey, really, who are you, man?” This usually wiped the smile right off Joe’s face. You know what really annoyed Joe in those days? The way that many people felt entitled, because of his familiar face, to openly chastise him for his career decisions, as if he could afford back then to not take any job that came his way. Typically, we’d be sitting in a restaurant and a Wall Street–type guy would approach us, smiling apologetically. “My buddies and I know we know you, but we’re trying to figure out who you are.”

“Is that right?” Joe would mutter.

“Yeah! You’re in the movies, right?”

“Right.”

“I knew it! What movies have I seen you in?”

Early in his career, when Joe was still wildly flattered at being identified at all, he would actually participate in this type of exchange. He’d begin by listing his favorite film credit,
A Simple Mind,
in which he’d costarred with Ralph Fiennes.

“Is that the one where Ralph Fiennes played the retard?”

“Yeah, I was his teacher!”

“Nope, missed that one. What else have you been in?”

Joe would then begin to painstakingly recite his résumé until he’d finally come across something that the Wall Street guy had seen. This would, inevitably, be the most embarrassing film of Joe’s career.

“That’s it!” the guy would shout. “
Fraternity of Brothers!
I saw that one! Hey, man, no offense, but that movie was a piece of shit.”

“Thank you. Well, nice to meet you.”

“He played the psychotic white guy in that Eddie Murphy frat house movie!” the guy would shout over to his friends at the bar. “Hey,” he’d then say to Joe, “come over to the bar and meet my buddies. They’re big fans, too.”

“Actually, we’re just leaving.”

“Oh, I get it, you think you’re too important to meet a few regular guys, don’t you?”

At which point we’d pay our bill and leave, but the answer was yes. Yes he did.

“Mom?”

Ruby had pulled the sheet up over Sammy’s chubby legs and we were tiptoeing out of the room.

“Yeah?”

“Some lady called last night for Daddy.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t leave her name.”

Okay,
I told myself,
just take it easy.
Then I said, “What did she sound like? Did she have an accent? What time did she call?”

“I don’t know. I think it was someone from the show.”

“You do? Why? What’d she sound like?”

“
Mom!
What’s the big deal? The only people who call Dad on that line are usually people from the show.”

“Okay. Okay.”
Change the subject.
“What do you want for breakfast?” I chirped.

The phone. The phone.

“I’m just gonna have a muffin.”

Ruby is a vegan, which is, in my mind, just a glamorous way of saying that she hates food. Born a picky eater, she has never liked anything but juice and sweets, but it wasn’t until my friend Alison began proselytizing to us all about the poisonous mucus in cow’s milk and the antibiotics in meat that any hopes I had of someday feeding Ruby protein were dashed. Early in Ruby’s vegan career, Joe and I would have to listen to her gag dramatically at the sight of “that disgusting ground flesh” in the refrigerator. Or, just as we were about to tuck into a delicious steak, we would be treated to seven-year-old Ruby’s musings about how our colons were going to cope with “all that animal tissue.” Joe finally put his foot down and forbade Ruby to comment on anybody’s food but her own, ever, which Ruby has more or less adhered to, limiting her commentary to nonverbal grimaces and retching noises.

Now Ruby picked at her spelt muffin and I tried to focus on her, tried not to stare at the phone that rested on the charger on the counter behind her, recovering from last night’s exhaustive overuse. The desire to snatch it up and smuggle it into the bathroom to check Joe’s voice mail was almost unbearable.
Had he heard his filthy girlfriend’s message? Was she his girlfriend, or could she just be an irksome stalker? But how would she have his number if she was a stalker?

“Zoe and I want to go out for pizza tonight with some other kids,” Ruby was saying. I nodded.

And why did it sound like she was returning his call?

“It’s freezing out and we want to take a cab from her house, so can I borrow some money?”

Mmm-hmm,
I thought.
Who does he know from the South? She sounded like she was from Texas or Louisiana…maybe Georgia?

“Mom?”

Who the hell was it?

“MOM!”

“What?”

“Jeez, it’s no wonder I have intimacy issues.”

“Ruby. C’mon. That’s really enough. How can a fourteen-year-old have intimacy issues?”

“By having parents who don’t pay attention to her,” said Ruby.

“I’m sorry. I heard you. How much do you need?” I fumbled in my bag for my wallet.

“Well, I just realized that you owe me ten for babysitting the other night, and if you loan me another ten, that should be enough. Actually, I’ll deduct the extra ten from the money you owe me for the two weeks’ allowance you forgot to pay me last summer and that time I babysat on a Saturday and you never paid me, so you’ll only owe me forty after you give me the twenty.”

Ruby has perfected this impenetrable flimflam routine to a science. In normal commerce, when a sum is paid out to another party in the form of a loan, that party is expected to pay back the initial sum, usually with interest. The
borrower
is beholden to the
lender.
Somehow, in our family, this whole tradition has been turned on its head, and whenever I think I’m loaning money to Ruby, the amount of the “loan” ends up being just a drop in the gigantic bucket of debt that I apparently owe her, the detailed account of which she always has at her fingertips.

“Wait a minute,” I said, determined not to be made into a chump this time, “you keep talking about that Saturday and I keep paying you for it.”

“No, you just keep saying you paid me,” said Ruby. “You paid me for the time I bought lunch for Allie and me with my own money because you told us to go out to lunch since you hadn’t been to the store, but you never paid me for that Saturday babysitting, and now that I think of it, you never paid me back for the time I paid for my MetroCard with my own money.”

“Well, it seems to me that if you’re riding the bus with your own body, you should pay for it with your own money.”

I knew my error as soon as the words escaped my mouth. Ruby had both barrels loaded for this one.

“Oh, so
now
I have to pay for my own MetroCard? I only use it for transportation to and from school, and my allowance barely covers the cost of one. I’m
sorry
that the school
you chose
is on the other side of town! Nobody I know has to pay for their own MetroCard, but apparently
this
family can’t afford for me to take public transportation to school. The next thing I know, you’ll have me working as an escort to pay for my tuition!”

“All right, all right. Stop being so dramatic. Daddy and I just want you to understand the value of money, but I don’t want to get into a big thing about it this morning. How much do you need for this afternoon?”

“Just the forty.”

“Okay,” I said, handing her the money with relief.

“Thanks, Mom,” said Ruby, kissing me swiftly on my cheek. “Now you only owe me fifty. But tomorrow’s Friday, which is allowance day, so you owe me another twenty, but you can pay me later!” Ruby grabbed her backpack, and before the door had closed behind her, I had already dialed Joe’s number.

“Hello?”

It was Joe. It hadn’t occurred to me that he would now be answering his phone, and I was struck mute.

“Hello?”

I hung up. A moment later the phone rang. I let it ring twice before I answered.

“Hi, honey,” I said.

“Hey,” Joe said. “Did you just call?”

“Yeah, sorry. I had another call coming in and I thought I was putting you on hold….”

“Oh. What’s up?”

“Hmm?”

“Why did you call me?”

“Just wanted to see how your morning is going.”

“Oh. Well, it’s going good.”

“Great!”

“By the way, you gotta call Catherine about getting a dress. Get her on that right away, it’s only two weeks from now….”

“Okay. Are we still going to Susanna’s party tomorrow night?”

“Yeah, of course. Why?”

“I think I’ll buy something to wear, that’s all.”

“Okay, she told me it’s casual. Just a small birthday party. Casual. She said it more than once.”

“I know, you’ve told me more than once.”

“I gotta go.”

“Okay, bye, hon.”