Still Life with Husband (3 page)

“Sure!” I said. “Definitely I do,” and I cast the same puppy-dog look at Kevin, who, in his sleep, had maneuvered his long legs halfway across my space. But I didn’t. I had no idea. Of course I loved Kevin, and more than I’d ever loved anyone. But crazy in love? My
soul mate
? It wasn’t that, like Amy, I didn’t believe in the concept. It had never even occurred to me.

The next moments were slightly awkward, as the rhythm of our conversation had concluded. We each made a few chatty comments, an observation about the scenery, a compliment on a sweater, but neither of us picked up on them. And finally, we stopped talking entirely, only smiling when we happened to catch the other’s eye. As I mused uncomfortably on Amy and Marcus’s crazy love, the impossible depth of their connection, I thought about what Kevin would say if I told him. He would argue against her claim that such an enviable state of love could exist. And that would make me feel better. So did that mean we were soul mates after all? Soul mates who were too analytical to believe in the idea? I didn’t suppose so. But I decided it wasn’t important. Kevin muttered in his sleep, and I rested my arm against his. I hoped it didn’t matter, after all.

When I get home from my breakfast date with Meg, the apartment is empty. Kevin has scribbled a note and left it on the kitchen table: “MT B LT 2NT,” meaning, he might work late tonight. I pick up the scrap of paper and toss it in the trash, annoyed, despite myself, at his perfunctory communiqué; from someone else, I think, I would at least get a complete word, if not a “See you at eight, sweetheart,” or even a “Love you!” I feel a twinge, a prickle of something at the back of my neck, and I think, unbidden,
He takes me for granted.
And as quickly as it appeared, the thought is gone. I find my wedding ring on the bedside table where I leave it every night and I slip it back on. It feels bulky, unfamiliar, as if meeting David Keller has created a chemical reaction in the plain gold band, changing its diameter, slightly altering its smooth surface.
Crazy,
I think, rubbing it against my middle finger, twisting the ring around and around.
Overly symbolic!
I think, and twist, twist, twist it.

I have no deadlines today, nothing pressing to do, so I finish an article proposal: “Exploring the Great Indoors: The Things You Can Learn by Staying Inside.” I am an expert on the subject. I’ve accumulated years of important, detailed information, gleaned from the hundreds of daytime hours I have spent in my pajamas. For example, if you stare long enough, you can be a part-time naturalist, with your front-row view of the urban wilderness outside your window. I once watched ants on the windowsill having sex, it looked like, in what I was pretty sure was the missionary position. I witnessed an autumn love affair between two squirrels, one of whom would get despondent whenever his lover wouldn’t appear at their designated tree, and would end up chewing nervously on his own arm like it was corn on the cob. Even your appliances have a thing or two to teach you: milk in the refrigerator has a tendency to freeze if you leave it too close to the edge, whereas Fudgsicles will melt in the freezer if you don’t put them close
enough
to the edge. I don’t expect that I will get this assignment, but I seem to have reached a critical point where I have exhausted all of my seriously good ideas, my brain like a diabetic’s pancreas. I’m fresh out.

I call my sister. But it’s the middle of the day and, like most people, Heather’s not home. I check my e-mail. There’s a note from Louise Aslanian, my old college adviser. Louise is a depressive lesbian poet who publishes slim volumes of verse every five or six years with a tiny local press. She writes a lot about getting old and dying, and about her mother dying, and sometimes about how she is becoming her mother and will soon die. She taught until two years ago, when she decided, at fifty-five, to fulfill her lifelong dream of moving to Wyoming and working on a ranch. I don’t even quite know what a ranch is, but Louise and her supportive partner, a painter, sold their house and did it. Now she’s a depressive, lesbian cowgirl poet. Last week I had mentioned to her in an e-mail that I was short on inspiration, knowing that she would have words of real wisdom for me.

“Dearest Emily,” she writes, “A prolific writer I once knew had a debilitating stroke several years ago. He lost the ability to speak, so he and his longtime companion worked out a system whereby this writer would communicate by blinking. He wrote his last book in blinks. Then he died. Take heart, my friend. Fondly, Louise.”

My perky friend Sara has written to me, too. She lives in Dallas and is married to the CEO of a large software company that’s been in the news recently for refusing to hire a well-qualified dwarf. She’s written to tell me that she is pregnant with her second child. “We’re hoping for a girl this time, but we’ll take whatever we get!” Except a dwarf, I think, and turn off my computer.

By the time Kevin comes home, not late, as it turns out, but earlier than usual, I’ve spent the entire day fuming and have officially worked myself up into a foul humor. I hear his key jiggling in the lock. He bounds cheerfully into the apartment like a big puppy dog.

“Emily!” he calls from the hallway. “Flopsy!” Flopsy, along with Mopsy and sometimes Cottontail, are his nicknames for me. I hate them. I’m slumped on the sofa, where he finds me and climbs on top of me, practically licking my face. “Surprise for you!” he announces.

“Mmmhmmm,” I say, pushing his head away from me. He climbs off my lap and sits next to me, pulls my feet into his lap.

“We’re going to Lake Geneva this weekend.” Lake Geneva is a resort town about an hour from Milwaukee. My interest is piqued, but I’m too cranky to let on. “Hasting’s holding a conference for their tech writers,” he says happily. Kevin works for Hasting Electric, writing instructional manuals for their small- and medium-sized electronics and appliances. He’s amazing at his job; his manuals are always receiving company-wide acclaim and being circulated in-house as examples of superior work. Kevin experiences actual inspiration as a technical writer. Where others slog away over “insert tab A into slot B,” Kevin finds elegance, economy, even humor. He can wax lyrical on the difference between “click closed” and “snap shut”; he’s responsible for rewriting the gauche “hold on to the appliance’s plastic base before taking the coffee grounds out and disposing of them” to the graceful “grasp handle before removing filter.” His finest hour is the warning tag he crafted, now prominently displayed on all Hasting hairdryers:
WARN CHILDREN OF THE RISK OF ELECTRIC SHOCK
! I had that one framed for him for his last birthday. Kevin, God help him, was born to be a technical writer. “They’re updating their entire line of small appliances!” he says gleefully, rubbing my toes. “Dermott asked the guys from engineering and some of the folks in legal and all of us tech writers to attend. I figured, a fancy hotel, free meals…You know,” he adds quietly, “maybe this weekend, maybe this would be a good chance for us to talk more calmly about things. We could talk some more about buying a house,” he says, deftly dodging one issue and pressing down on the bruise of another one. Kevin has recently decided that, in addition to starting a family, we’re ready to buy a house. In the suburbs.
More bang for your buck in the ’burbs,
he likes to inform me. He’s done his research. “We could think about a timeline, and about where we might want to move.”

“Where
you
might want to move,” I say.

“Yeah, well, Emily, then we don’t have to talk about it.” He presses his lips together and releases a puff of air from his nose, the first indication that my surliness is getting to him. “But I told him we’d definitely be there.”

“Did you ever think that I might have plans this weekend?” I ask.

“I’m trying here, Em.”

I pause, glance over Kevin’s shoulder at the news on TV for a few seconds. “Fine.”

“Good, then. We’ll go!”

ONCE WE’RE ON THE ROAD TO LAKE GENEVA, HURTLING AT TOP
speed away from our lives, I have the sense that I can breathe again, although I hadn’t realized I had been deprived of oxygen before. I think Meg was right; I think we
do
need a vacation. Maybe this trip will be Paris, without the interesting architecture, great art, or fabulous food.

We cruise through rural Wisconsin, a landscape of autumnal rusts and oranges. Kevin has brought all of my favorite CDs, and has gallantly consented to listening to bluegrass—my pickin’ and grinnin’ music, he usually calls it—for the past forty-five minutes. He’s probably done this to appease me, and it’s working. When we arrive in Lake Geneva, we drive past our hotel’s wooded entrance, take a quick spin through the town for a look at Main Street’s several Ye Olde Fudge Shoppes and all manner of Aren’t We Cute Boutiques, then U-turn back down the road and into the sprawling compound, littered with golf courses, that comprises the resort. I resolve to come back later for fudge, one of my favorite foods. Kevin says that he plans on skipping as much as possible of the actual conference in favor of the whirlpool and the free cable. He raises his eyebrows at me lasciviously. “I know how we can keep busy this weekend.”

“HBO?” I say.

One hand on the steering wheel, he reaches across the seat and gropes my chest. “Not quite.”

I know that he means it, that at this moment he sincerely plans on a weekend of fun and debauchery, but I also know that as soon as he sees the registration desk he’ll start salivating, and his wild, reckless sense of responsibility and duty will take over.

We park and haul our bags inside. Kevin sets his on a big pink lounge chair in the lobby and motions for me to do the same. Poking out of a pocket of Kevin’s suitcase, I notice, is the book he brought to read during his free time:
Sound Investments for the Careful Planner.
I feel a familiar pang of love for my steady, staid husband. He’s like a brick wall you can lean against when you’re tired—immobile, rutted with predictable grooves, always there. “Emily, can you hang out here for a minute? I guess I’ll just go register and check out the main conference room. I’ll get myself sorted out and I’ll be right back.”

Twenty minutes later, I’m lugging all of our bags up to our room. Kevin has decided to sit in on the first session (“Window and Floor Fans: A Better Blade, a Better Breeze”), but he promises that he’ll meet me in the room in a half hour. I should unpack, he says, and relax. He grabs one of the room keys and dashes down the wide hall, waving to someone in the distance.

By the time Kevin comes back, I have unpacked both of our bags and hung up our clothes, showered, watched the news, flipped through the forty-two channels three times, watched an episode of
Sabrina, the Teenage Witch,
unwrapped all of the drinking glasses, turned down our bed, pored over the room service breakfast options, called the front desk to request more shampoo, wandered up and down the hallways, and still had forty-five minutes to spare, sitting at the little desk and trying to read, but stewing, instead, about all the time I’m already spending alone. When Kevin walks in the door, guilty and on the defensive because he has left me alone for two hours, I am beyond testy.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, baby,” he says, plunking his new conference bag onto the chair. His voice is of a subtle caliber between edgy and placating; my response will determine its course. “I got caught up in the session, and then I had to mingle afterward. I couldn’t get away. Have you been having fun? What’ve you been doing?” He stands next to me and anxiously rubs his hands together, looks over my shoulder at the novel I’m reading.

“I just don’t want to be on my own for the next two days,” I say sulkily.

“I do have to attend some of the conference,” he answers evenly. “I mean, I suppose I can skip the early morning address on can openers, but I
will
probably have to spend most of the day tomorrow in the small-group small-appliance sessions…. And to night I do have to go back downstairs for the evening program. They’re unveiling their new bread maker. It’s half the size of the old one, with the same bread-making capacity!” Clearly, the man can’t help himself.

“Great. Great, I’ll just watch TV for the next forty-eight hours. Or maybe I’ll swim by myself in the hotel pool. That should be fun. Or, no, I know, I’ll go back down to the lobby and just wait for you in that big pink chair until Monday.” I’m escalating. I can’t seem to stop myself. “Why did I come with you? What am I even doing here?”

“Emily, for God’s sake,” Kevin says sternly. “You’re out of control!” I hate it when he accuses me of this, even though at the moment it happens to be true. It makes me sound like a lunatic, and him like an emotionless reptile.

“No, I’m not!” I shout. “I just wanted to go on a little weekend vacation with you, and now I’m going to be all by myself for the next two goddamn days!”

In the rhythm of our smaller-scale fights, this outburst indicates that we have just hit the zenith. Kevin wheels another desk chair around next to mine and takes both of my hands in his. “You won’t be alone,” he says. “I promise. I’ll skip out as much as I possibly can.” He rubs my knuckles with his thumb. “I promise, baby. Come here,” he whispers, moving his hands up my arms and around my back, drawing me toward him. “Come here.” He stands and pulls me up with him, presses his body to mine. He starts kissing my collarbone, my forehead, my lips. I feel him grow hard against me. He’s unbuttoning my sweater and covering my neck with kisses. His breath is hot on my skin, and I start to respond, to kiss him back. He’s murmuring in my ear now, and moving us together toward the bed. I had forgotten how excited he gets at conferences! He stops at the foot of the bed and kisses me again, slowly, his hands reaching inside my shirt. Heat begins to radiate from my center. My insides are turning into lava. I know that what we are doing is an avoidance of the issue, of my feeling abandoned, but what the hell; I don’t feel abandoned now. He guides me down onto the bed and kneels over me, unbuttoning my jeans. He slides his hands down my stomach, my hips, grazes the tops of my thighs, back up to my breasts. I’m pulling off his shirt, kissing him as he lowers himself onto me. We’re moving together, still partially clothed, with something halfway between urgency and familiarity, the particular landscape of our lovemaking. I’m letting myself be submerged in the easy waves of this, before I realize: a condom. We need a condom! Did anybody bring condoms?