Pleading Guilty (26 page)

I had called her doctor, who'd prescribed a salve, and I went to the john to give myself another treatment. In my sensuous thrall, I soon found myself otherwise engaged. Unspeakable activities. I sweated in my bathroom, imagining wild amours with a woman who'd been naked in my arms a few hours before, and wondered about my life.

I had just reholstered when I noticed the catarrh of an engine idling outside. I was stabbed at once by the kind of probing guilt my mother would have cheered, chilled by the thought that Lyle and his pals might have seen my filmy shape through the wobbled glass blocks of the bathroom window. I would have made quite a sight, backlit, bending and swaying as I squeezed the sound from my own sax. I heard the front door bang and gave some thought to remaining locked up there. But that was not my approach with Lyle. In any circumstance, I felt committed to staring him down.

I encountered him as he galloped up the stairs. In his various rangy parts, he looked a little more organized than usual; I suspected he was with a girl. His spume of hair was combed and he had on a Kindle County Unified Police Force leather jacket, not mine but one he'd purchased from the cop supply house on Murphy Street and which he wore in unspoken comment on the time when I had what he judged a more authentic life. He stomped past me, muttering something I did not catch at first. "Mom's downstairs," he repeated.

"Mom?"

"Remember her? Nora? It's boys' night out." I wondered if it meant anything positive that he was treating his parents' foibles with humor rather than undiluted contempt. We were in the dim interior hallway between the upstairs bedrooms, and after a few steps he turned back to me with a smirk. "Hey, man, what the hell were you doing just now? In the john? We were like taking bets."

"You and your mother?" I asked. I summoned all my courtroom dignity and told him I was blowing my nose. Frankly, he could not have cared less, but when he walked off down the dark corridor, I felt so hollowed by shame I thought I might stumble. Often humiliated and seldom saved. Is it just a Catholic thought that sex will always get you in trouble? God, I thought. God. What a moment that must have been. A boy and his mother laying odds on whether the old goat's actually up there having a wank. I headed down in an appropriate mood to see my former wife.

Nora was standing in the bright lights of the front entry
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framed by the white molding and the storm door, holding on to her purse and not venturing any farther inside. I kissed her cheek, a gesture she received stoically.

"How are you?" she asked.

"Jolly," I said. "You?"

"Jolly."

Serve and volley. Here we were, a total standoff after twenty-one years. After flips and swirls and curly dos, Nora had let her hair go straight, so that it hung lank and fine and almost black, looking as it does on those Japanese gals who seem to have surrounded their faces with a lacquer frame. She had given up makeup too. I saw Nora infrequently enough that she was starting to look different to me. The work of time was no longer undetectable for being observed day by day. Her chin was getting full and her eyes were sinking into shadow. She looked okay, though, except for her manifest agitation at being here. Nora had a different life now, one that she thought of as better and truer than the decades she'd spent with me. New friends. New interests. A big-city life. Female circles principally, no doubt, with meetings, lectures, parties. I'm sure that days went by before she woke to any recollection of me--or Lyle. One foot inside this house and something fearsome gripped her, I suspected, not nostalgia, but the terror that she would be confined again, imprisoned, held hostage once more from her real self. "You can sit." I swung a hand beyond the black slate of the foyer to the worn meal-colored carpet of the living room. "It's just a minute. He wanted to stop for money. He's going to take me out."

"Money?" With that, I heard footsteps overhead. He was in my room, rooting for cash. Nora heard the same thing, and gave me the wrinkle of some happy, suburbanized expression she'd seen on TV.

"He's no better," I told her. "Not a bit."

The plainness of this observation seemed to catch us both; somehow a sense of tragedy reared up between us so large that

I thought we'd both go down like bowling pins. You could never get around the future with Lyle, the way he was now and the suspicion that it foretold something grim, that he was worse than an unhappy kid, but was one of those people--everybody knows several--who turns out to be lame, crippled, not even up to the dismal functions, like holding a job or hanging in with someone else, which allow us our meager share of daily satisfactions. In the moment of recognition nobody--not Nora, not me--could run from the unhappy evidence that our lives were once one thing, not merely a failure of spirit but an institution of cause and effect of which neither law nor will could annul the unfortunate consequences. Those would roll on through another generation or two.

"And whose fault is that, Mack?" she asked. The answer, if we were going to be honest--which we weren't--was probably elaborate. We could start with Grandma and Grandpa and go on from there. But I knew Nora. We were starting a game of Matrimonial Geography, in which Nora would point out how all roads on the map of blame led only to me.

"Desist," I said, "cease. Let's fight about something less predictable. A new subject. Just skip Lyle, money, or me." "Look at your life, Mack. You're Mr. Entropy. What can you expect from him?" Her observations through the bathroom window seemed to have emboldened her, though ordinarily she did not need much excuse.

Mr. Entropy, I thought. There were entire universes saved from self-reproach by that remark. Jesus, this was one person who didn't take long to get under my skin.

"He's thirty years younger than me and doesn't have the same well-worn excuses." I smiled tightly and she made various faces, implying it was all right, she could take being stiff-armed. We confronted one another in simmering silence until Lyle returned and blew past me, taking his mother in tow.

In the aftermath, I settled by the TV in the living room. The Hands were playing UW-Milwaukee the usual tough first half

--both their bench and self-confidence would give out in the last twenty minutes, when they would resume their role as this decade's Mid-Ten doormat. Within, I continued prolonged fomenting. Nora fucking Goggins. Entropy! How long had she been storing up that one? There was always a hundred megaton warhead in her silo.

When I stopped drinking, Nora used to tell me I was really no fun anymore, a line that served the great principle of relationship transitivity by which she could both put me down and make excuses for herself. If I was no fun, she should have fun on her own. We reached a seven-week period where she went off for weekend conventions three times and then finally a midweek night when my bride of nineteen years simply did not come home.

When I marched through the door the next evening, the house was clean, I could smell a hot meal, a relative rarity, and I immediately made out the plan: life as normal. The idea was that I should ask nothing. Neither of us had enough fingers and toes to count the occasions when I'd pulled more or less the same stunt in those nineteen years, nights when I was so drunk that I sometimes felt I had to hang on to the grass to keep from falling off the earth, though usually the barkeep knew enough to give her a call. Nonetheless, about 9:30 I finally glued together my courage.

`I was with Jill,' she answered. Jill Horwich, her erstwhile manager and bartime buddy.

`I know you started out with Jill. I want to know who else you were with.'

`Nobody else.'

`Nora, don't bullshit me.'

`I'm not bullshitting.' When I fixed her with one of those looks she might have given me, she said, 'I don't believe this is happening.' She was on her feet, twisting the wedding ring around on her finger, posed in a corner of the living room where a lovely brass vase with gladioli was arranged. I was, I admitted, struck

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at that moment by the enduring phenomenon of beauty. 'Mack, leave it be. I know I don't have the right to ask that. But I am.' 'Motion denied,' I said. 'Let's go. The sticky truth.'

'You don't want to know.'

'You're right, I don't. But I'm asking anyway.'

'Why?' She looked at me bleakly.

`I suppose I sort of think it's important.'

Silence.

`So who's the guy?'

`There is no guy, Mack.'

`Nora, who were you with?'

`I told you, Mack, I was with Jill.'

Press your buzzer when you have the correct answer. It was the next afternoon before I got it, sitting in my office, being, as usual, no use to anyone, talking as I recall to Hans Ottobee, an interior decorator hired to do something about my furnishings. Nineteen years, you think you've seen everything from a person and then some guy mentions a modular
. W
all unit and somehow you see something else. I always loved cubism. What a wonderful illusion that you can see all sides at once.

At home that night, I didn't wait long. She'd cooked again. I took my plate of pot roast from the oven and started right in. `So how long have you been like this?'

`What do you mean "like this"?'

'Spare me. When did you start?' I finally got the heart to look at her straight on, which was more or less the end of the game. 'Always.' She blinked. 'As far as I know.'

"Always"?'

`Do you remember Sue Ellen Tomkins?'

`From the sorority?'

She just nodded.

'I don't think women are like men,' she said. 'I don't expect you to understand.'

'Jesus,' I said.

'Mack, this is taking incredible courage for me.'

She apparently did not consider that it wasn't particularly easy for me. People who stay married, who hold on for the long pull, put up with a lot from each other: personal oddities, bad habits, ill health. For some it's tolerance, others commitment, many, like me, fear the unknown. For a while I tested myself with the notion that I should put up with this too. People stay married without sex. I'd known plenty. After all, I grew up a Catholic. And who even said it had to be like that? But it just sort of cut to the heart of things. I never saw this issue in normative terms. I wasn't worried that it was a perversion, or something that would have made my sainted ma faint, and I gave Nora no points just because it was the latest in style. It just seemed like an awful lot not to know. For her not to tell. For me not to recognize. So what was it like for her, those many years with drunken old Mack, whose sails on rare occasion would blow full of lust and fall upon her, riding her waves, mast in her harbor? What did she think? How much was she faking? Inquiring minds want to know. I sat there tonight with the wretched dark broken by the flickering of the sporting event and the announcer's occasionally hysterical pitch, trying to fathom it all, and found myself, for me, admirably charitable. I doubt she knew what to think. She must have felt uncertain, not really herself. Not resentful. Not engaged. How could she not know? you ask. The law governs acts, not evil intent alone, and we seem to take that lesson to heart. In this life--Catholic theology notwithstanding--we are what we do. She must have thought about her college friend from time to time and been surprised to find herself stimulated by the memory. She must have put it off to voyaging youth, the same untamed daring that let her give fellas blow jobs on the second date, and dismissed her continuing reflections as part of the universe of unruly and unsavory things rattling around in the average human mind. At times she must have confronted herself starkly with the question--Am I?--and at other instants comforted herself with the facts: husband, boys in the past, he
r r
oots in the present, her child. It must have taken her by surprise to have been so pleased the first time Jill Horwich laid a hand on her shoulder and then, feigning inadvertence, brushed against her breasts. That's what I think. I didn't know, whatever the disbelief with which that state of knowledge--or grace--is greeted. We see a person, hear a voice, are drawn most intimately to them, and yet so much remains unknown. No matter how earnestly we search, the mysteries abide. As Nora would tell you, we do not even know for certain when we look in the mirror.

Practicing man's original sin, I have found my own unruly mind passing over the image of the two of them, with Jill's face buried up to the brows in Nora's female region and my wife lolled back in an ecstasy she only aspired to with me. I see this, I admit, with an unseemly exactness of detail, imagining it from Nora's eyes, another of those figures I can't manage to paint. Afterwards, I am morose, immobilized by grief. But often in the instant of sensation and heat, in that image of Nora finally free, relishing her own sensations like the finest music, I have a certain flight myself, as if something similar were even possible for me. So that's what I thought, staring frozenly at the TV, suddenly recollecting how much I loved to drink and hating my surroundings. I swear, aren't the Irish the tackiest decorators in the world, dark and cheap, with so many fucking little knickknacks collared in dust that I never can find an inch of space on a tabletop to put down a glass, and too much lace and all the required family pictures? My ma's place looked just like this too, kind of a savage irony, since Nora hated Bess, both her tightfisted, pursed-lipped, judgmental ways and her flipside moods where she was worshipfully reverent of her men. More's the marvel, since as time passes and I close my eyes, it feels as if they both filled the same space inside.