Playing House (19 page)

The sounds of sex draw me close to my husband, when he allows himself to have them—what he says, what he does not say. But I have learned, the hard way, that while the sounds of sex are private, they are not in fact the
most
private sounds a human being is capable of uttering. I have heard sounds, from my husband, that have taken me an octave below sex, straight into annihilation, and these are sounds, like the beating of my brother, that I cannot forget, and that haunt me, and that have showed me that more private than the spasm of sex is the spasm of death. And once you have heard another human being make death sounds, you have gone too deeply down and will forever feel haunted in this person’s presence.

I would prefer not to linger very long in this space of fire. It happened a long time ago, a decade ago perhaps, and late at night, midnight, I remember in fact, for the church bells had just gone off, striking twelve resonant peals that echoed in the spring air. I’ve told this story before, but as I retell it now, it’s somehow changed.

We had married. I was finished with my affair, committed to the course ahead. My husband, who has always had a long-standing interest in chemistry, was downstairs in the basement, in a room we had built just for him, a study of sorts, lined with bookshelves upon which there were no books but bottles, and bottles, and bottles, mostly glass, some tin, all full of chemical concoctions tightly corked. His desk held Bunsen burners and glass pipettes, and a huge exhaust fan overhung the whole show, sucking out the toxic air.

And I was upstairs in the kitchen washing pots, and he was downstairs finishing some experiment—I knew not what—when all of a sudden I heard, from deep in the bowels of our house, this, this . . .
sound
, this ugly, twisted, inhumanely human, stripped, screaming sound I had never heard before but recognized immediately as pure primal terror, the sound a man makes and has made for the millions of years he’s been on this planet, his body trapped in the jaws of a giant beast that is shredding him to bits.
The Sound
. I remember thinking that someone had climbed through the basement window and was murdering my husband—what else could account for that sound, as we lived no longer on the Pleistocene plains and our beasts were mostly men now.

I remember running, running as fast, so fast, as fast as I could, which was not fast enough, down the interminably long (twelve) steps to our basement floor and running across the miles of concrete (ten feet?) between the landing and the closed door to his study, behind which the screams were coming, and coming, and coming, each one rawer than the next, only “screams” in the plural is not right, because this was one solid, unrelenting scream that comes from a place deep, deep down in a person and that we usually only make in dreams we can’t recall, or at the final threshold, so far gone into the darkness or light that no person can hear us, and our echo is gathered by angels or nothing.

And here I now stood, at the door that separated me from the scream. I flung it open and saw him, saw what had happened to him, my man, my lover, my husband: he had caught on fire. A spontaneous chemical combustion. His long, lovely red hair had turned to a pure rivulet of flame, and he stood there engulfed and simply screaming. I saw his hair turn to writhing snakes of fire, and then I saw the fire clasp his entire perimeter, so he stood in the center, his margins fringed with angry flames, his mouth untouched and open and the singular solid deeply private scream a man makes when faced with eternity—coming and coming and coming.

And I thought:
Five seconds ago I was a woman who had a certain story about falling in love with a red-haired man, sidestepping into a stupid, embarrassing brief affair that freed me to marry the man I loved, and now the man I love is burning up in a fire right in front of my eyes. And forever and ever this will be my story. I will be, forever and ever, a woman who watched her lover burn to death in a fire
.

This is not an essay about how my husband caught on fire. No, this is a story about sex. And sound. And stones. And snap. Don’t look for the links between each position, because there may not be any, because sex is real; it is not art. It is shape-shifting and discontinuous. It has no beginning or end. Orgasms have beginnings and ends; affairs have beginnings and ends; marriages have beginnings and ends. But sex goes on and on and on for as long as this turquoise planet spins in its spot, in its particular, magical, miraculous, perfect distance from this sustaining star: our sun.

Sex is private, and the little lady in me, with her teacup on a shelf, suggests it may not be in good taste to write too, too much about it. Nevertheless, because I also have stones in the pockets of my pants, I have kicked through the lady’s Do Not Enter sign and entered this essay here, only to find that though sex is indeed private, more private still is death, and that if you think you’ve seen your lover naked, if you think you’ve heard him sing his deepest self, you haven’t unless, god forbid, you have witnessed what he looks like in the maw of a beast so much bigger than he. And once you have seen that, once you have heard his sounds, once you know the body of your lover as it burns away, your sex will forever be infused with fear, and rage, and smell, and echo, and you will want to push that away while, at the same time, you will want to cling all the more tightly to this friable, tender, vulnerable body of his, and yours, and yours, and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours and yours. And you will come to realize that there are so many
yours
es, so many bodies, and that they are all on fire or about to be, and so sometimes it seems that the entire world is his singular scream and the terrible dangle between the stuck lever and the ejaculated mist of white.

The result of which is this: me, sitting here, pockets full of silent stones. I am a woman in love, but I am not in love with sex. I am in love with the opposite of the sound of the scream. I am in love with glass and sand and skin. I am in love with my children, my animals, my bodies, my banquet. I am in love with making but not the reverse, making (minus the
with
) love. Someday, I hope to build not only a hearth, but a house. And inside this house I want to have with me my family—my children and my animals and my husband, whom I love so imperfectly, with so many gaps and hesitations. I hope he does not leave me for a woman who likes to make love, as opposed to a woman who loves to make . . . what? What is it I love to make? Oh, I’ve told you that already, and besides, the list is always changing. Here I sit, pocketful of stones. Remember a long time ago, those mornings in the room in the rooming house of the boy with all his
F
’s? Remember “Ripple”? I am in love with grateful, but I am not in love with dead. The music washes over us. The orgasm is over. I remember this.

I’m at the end now. Not
my
end or
his
end, thank god.
The
end. The naked too-much truth, right here. My husband will not forgive me for my words when he reads them later on and hurt creases his whole face.
I’m sorry. I am so, so very sorry. I love you, you know. With my whole heart. You and only you
. But it is not enough. This will all come later. Right now, he hasn’t seen this yet. A little bit of peace? Some unusual serenity? Sun falls across my hands, hovering over the keyboard. Nothing more can come. The computer whirs and hums; it has so many memories. So do I. And the sun falls across my hands. Everything is quiet now, except the echoes: on and on and on.

We needed a new kitchen table. My husband hated the kitchen table we currently had. It was one of those islands on wheels, high off the ground, a sort of snack bar with two tall chairs that toppled easily, if you leaned the wrong way. Our daughter had leaned the wrong way a time or two, keeling to the ground like a ship filled with wind, only the landing here was hard and made of maple.

I liked our kitchen table because it had storage space. It had a drawer into which I slid my bills, usually unopened, where they remained out of sight and out of mind until the mysterious automated phone messages arrived: “This is an important call for Lauren Slater. Please return the call and cite reference number 5670890325619.” At that point I would open the table’s drawer and pull out my wayward bills, sticky from food that had slid in. I have always liked paying my bills in a state as stained as possible. I like to envision the recipient on the other end opening up the envelope and pulling out a check and an old french fry and feeling . . . what? Sorry for me? Guilty for harassing an overworked mother? All of my tax bills have always carried on them the contents of my kitchen table.

If it is possible for a table to be two-faced, ours was. It was a piece of furniture whose explicit mission was to provide a surface for dining, but whose implicit purpose was to allow an escape from the very domestic burdens it seemed to support. Phone bills, raveled ribbons, single socks, unsigned report cards, life insurance quotes: the table took it all in. A few times, when I’d become especially agitated at the chaos of my life, I’d picture opening the front door and sending the table sailing—swoosh—out over the porch and down the hill we lived on; there it goes. I can see it now. It careens crazily, bonking into cars, getting sucked up by its own speed, smaller and smaller it keeps going, a table with legs, it can run, it goes on and on, and then I’d picture the table swerving off the street and into some fairytale forest, where it would finally come to rest with a soft crash against the sapped trunk of a tree. And there it would live, on an enchanted carpet of pine needles, beneath a fairy-blue sky, in blessed silence and happily ever after.

If I sound disgruntled by domesticity, it’s because I am. I feel, as a forty-two-year-old woman in 2006, almost obligated to say that, while simultaneously knowing that such complaints are stale and smack of other eras. Nevertheless, let me recount the whats: I dislike the dishwasher; I dislike anything having to do with diapers; I dislike car rides with my kids, those cumbersome car seats, the big jammed buckles, the straps always twisted, you bending into the backseat while the winter wind snaps at your exposed legs. I dislike shopping for birthday presents, which I think should be outlawed, all those presents, all those parties, the grown-ups milling aimlessly about, the kids with plastic forks. I dislike the flowers on the birthday cakes, big beveled roses, the sugar so dense you can taste the grit in your teeth, the rickrack of frosting that fringes the cake, which is sometimes green inside. I dislike emptying the trash; I dislike the supermarket, where red wheels of beef are sealed in plastic and pale chicken flesh bleeds pink around its edges.

But there’s another side of the story to tell. I am also delighted by domesticity. For every piece of it I hate, there is a corresponding piece of it I love, and that makes up, in large part, the core of how I wish to live my life. For instance, I love sewing. I love my sewing machine, a Singer 660 with thirty-three stitch options and a translucent spool. I love mechanically winding the thread, looping it through the thises and thats, snapping the empty bobbin into place, pressing the pedal, and watching the thread swell on the spool—so fast—you can see the accumulation of color, the single strand of blue now a bundle of blue, ready to be clicked into the contraption and threaded through the needle. I love fabric. My favorite brand is Moda, which makes, in addition to unusual designs, vintage children prints, prints at once sentimental and haunting: a girl with curly golden hair offers a boy a frog, and Humpty Dumpty sits on his wall while the letter
w
sprouts wings and flies over the Land of Nod.

But it doesn’t end there. I will try to be brief, although it is difficult to cut a passion short. I also love my red enamel colander, my two very domesticated dogs, my pine and Pergo floors, my slotted spoon, my loomed pastel pot holders, and my salad bowl made of lathed and oiled wood. I love my crochet hook, my knitting needles, my Mod Podge glue, and my stencils. I love my steam cleaner and I can get very happy filling it with water, hearing it hiss as it heats up, and then, cloth in hand, firing at the floor, the loud blast of sound always accompanied by a billow of burning mist that dissolves the dirt faster than you can say
Bounty: The quicker picker-upper
.

While I was picking my child up from school recently, Rosemary, one of the other mothers, and I began talking. Many of the mothers who are there for pick-up work in corporate jobs. That day, Rosemary, the CEO of a company, was telling me of her neighbor, an old lady gifted in almost every “domestic art.” “We don’t do domestic arts in our house,” Rosemary said, “so my kids are curious about her.”

Domestic arts
. That’s the term Rosemary used. She didn’t say it condescendingly, but it is impossible for a woman to use that phrase in a neutral way while standing in a business suit. “I can’t cook,” Rosemary said. “I can’t even thread a needle,” she added, laughing, and I wondered what she would think if I said I could, and often did, in lieu of paying work. The sewing, perhaps I could tell her about the sewing, but the decoupage I knew would remain a deep, deep secret, as would the crocheting, the appliquéing, the stenciling, and the steamer.