The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories (18 page)

I took the e-mail addresses from the women who responded to the paper-plate tags I posted in the grocery store. Seventeen females and three males responded. I created another electronic invitation, this one with a clip-art image of a girl dancing in a shower of ticker tape, and invited them for interviews at the Madison simulacrum. They each arrived on time, and they each interviewed for twenty minutes. I took down information with pen and paper. I told them everything about the evening. I told them what the expectations were, and what they were not. I told them that they should only think about this as a chance to meet some new guys, pretending to have known them
without really stressing that knowledge. “It's been, in some cases, fifteen years,” I pointed out, “so you can basically just keep saying, ‘I have no idea,' and go from there.”

Not one of them flinched. I felt a cinder block in my stomach and imagined my knuckles coursing against a sidewalk throughout these interviews, but not one of my candidates flinched at the prospect of openly lying to deceive the wife of a complete stranger. It all seemed entirely appropriate to them. It all seemed like something they'd done before, something they would likely have to do again. And in the end, the woman I chose was the woman who said to me, “Look, I've been married for eight years, and I'm just looking to bring a few options back onto the table for myself.”

“You understand thirty-six men will be in the room for the specific purpose of talking at you.”

“I understand that, yes.”

“Do you want to know why we're doing this?”

She laughed. “Your brain is worth eight thousand dollars cash, and mine isn't.”

The night before the men were to arrive, Kimberly tried on dresses. It was nearing ten o'clock. She was
spinning and turning, looking at herself in the full-length mirror. She had lost the weight she'd gained from the pregnancy, and more, actually, though she didn't think so. She kept pressing on her stomach. She was saying she hoped this was a good idea, but I watched her and openly doubted that she was seriously questioning her event.

“Hormones hatch some crazy shit.”

“I could cancel this thing in an instant.” I snapped my fingers.

Kimberly just turned from side to side and looked over her shoulder in the mirror. She didn't say anything. And I didn't continue asking. Our child sucked on her bra straps on the floor.

The men were varied, mostly dark haired. They struck me as older than I'd expected. They appeared to have aged much, much worse than I had. When they approached me at the airport (I had a sign I was holding outside of Security), I asked the more attractive and assertive ones how they were doing. I couldn't help myself. I had been told not to speak with them at all. But I felt it would have been irresponsible to have followed this advice. Part of me thought my wife, deep down,
would have wanted me to do this against her expressed will.

I asked James, a tall man in sandals, from Des Moines, if he was looking forward to the weekend. James said he wasn't sure. He said he found the whole thing
surreal
. “It kind of blows my mind,” he said. When he received the invitation his first thought was, apparently, “Yes, absolutely,” and it was only after he'd accepted the invitation that he realized how odd it was. “She's probably married and divorced,” James said. “I hate divorced women.”

“Seems like you have a lot you want to share,” I said.

James slapped me on the back.

I piled him into the limousine with about a third of the other men. I told them to have a few drinks, compliments of the lady, and that they could freshen up at the hotel before they were taken to the house.

I thought my wife looked younger, standing there in the stunning disaster that had been her plans. The caterers were whispering. I'd called her several times over the course of several hours to let her know that no one had come through the security
checkpoints. I had by then dropped off most of the men at their hotel and driven back to our home. The musicians were rehearsing and then sitting silently, looking at their strings. A handyman we'd hired quietly fiddled with the hanging lanterns. Kimberly just stared off. She had read the e-mails I sent to the men. “But how could no one have seen your sign?” she wanted to know. “Is it really possible they would all simply take advantage of the free airfare and ignore the signs?”

“They'll call.”

She looked at me. I knew she knew something was amiss. I didn't care. I told her I would go back to the airport. She seemed to know something was wrong, but she seemed grateful to at least hope that she knew nothing. I did not understand. I could not understand. So I left under the ruse of the airport and followed the sabotage.

I remember that at first I felt I needed someone who
looked
like my wife to pull this off. My wife has a sort of fair-haired Swiss Miss Danish princess look, and I found it excruciating to approach women with an eye toward their physical similarities to my wife. The woman I ultimately chose
was
blonde, but she did not look at all like my wife, not really, not now and not in the years she would have known quite a few of these men. I remember hoping the men had forgotten what she looked like. I really bit my nails about this. But I don't know what I was thinking. I could have brought in a Hungarian farmer from the eighteenth century.

Twenty-nine men fill a room in an unpleasant way, I discovered on that Friday evening, and the remaining seven men, who trickled in later, made it even worse. The idea that I should leave my wife alone among this hot throng struck me as impossibly naïve. Most of the men seemed uneasy but eager. The woman I'd hired to be my wife seemed not at all affected. She was speaking with a small group and laughing, and touching their shoulders, touching her hair. She was introducing them to one another. She was talking about what they'd done together, when, where, and the extent to which it pleased or horrified her. She was somehow very natural at this, and it occurred to me that what I'd asked her to do was not really that different from courtship, where most of what you communicate are heavily sutured falsehoods.

Most of the men were more than pleased to help her where she made mistakes in their histories. Most of the men seemed to know immediately this woman was not Kimberly, my wife. But if they did know, they didn't care, or they were willing to overlook it. They drank heavily, and they ate everything they could eat. They swam in the rented pool. They began making phone calls. They played with my son's fingers and they surprised him with peek-a-boo. They shook hands with my coworkers, and they chased after other women and men I'd invited from the office.

I tried to see my wife in this context. I tried to see her touching her hair and touching the shoulders of these men. I tried to ask my son if he liked seeing Mommy having so much fun like this, and he cried.

I approached my proxy wife and interrupted her conversation with Link and Jess and David M. She looked at me suspiciously. She looked worried. She tried to take the hands of my son, who was pinned to my chest in the Björn, but I turned to my side. I said, “Hi.”

She smiled and tried to turn back to the guys who were, in odd manners of masculinity, reaching
to shake my hand and introduce themselves to me. I kept my eyes on her, however. I thanked her. “This,” I said. “This was a really special idea.”

She nodded.

The guys around us agreed, though they looked at one another then, with some strangeness. I apologized for interrupting them, and I asked what they'd been discussing. They seemed not to know. So I said, “What's it like seeing all your boyfriends again?”

“It's better than planned,” she answered.

“I remember,” I said, “when I first started dating you.”

She just looked at me, shifting back on her hip and taking a sip of her drink. She seemed to concede that she had not known who I was or what I would be capable of.

I put my hand on her shoulder. I looked her squarely in the eyes. She had delightful, lively eyes. She looked, in a way, frantic. In another way, she looked exhausted. “I feel,” I said, “like I don't know you. I feel like, standing here looking at you, maybe I've never known you.”

Some of my coworkers were looking at me. They'd met my wife. They tried to conceal their
fascination. They thought, surely, that no one could remain what they'd always been. People change, they surely thought. Surely they thought, How bizarre, monogamy. And as though I somehow stood at the foot of all things reliable in their lives, surely they thought, What the hell comes next?

“Well,” she said, “we were never as close as you thought we were.”

The men liked this. They whistled and rallied behind her. I laughed. She was a good sport. I said that her trampishness was so complete I doubted very much if there was a man in the room who could say he didn't feel as though she knew him better than he knew her.

She nodded. “Last time I checked,” she said, “that's the way men prefer it.”

“Are you married?” I asked her.

She shrugged.

The men cheered. I noticed Steven T. was growing anxious. He had something he wanted to say.

“Listen,” I said to her. “Let's go. Let's get out of here. Let's leave this B-squad here to give one another handjobs, and let's just stop pretending.”

She looked confused. She considered it. I felt it then, and I feel it now. She really gave it some sincere thought. I don't know what she would have done with me had she left. But Steven T. didn't like it. He had heard enough, and he came between us, and he looked in my face. “Take that fucking baby out of here,” he said.

I laughed. My son had fallen asleep. I went in to give my strange employ a kiss, and Steven T. pushed me away from her. The room bristled. My coworkers started moving in toward me and Steven T. There was some pushing. I stood my ground. “Kimberly,” I said. “Come on. Come with me. These guys are not for you.”

She nodded, and she looked right in my eyes. My fake wife gave us long, deep consideration. She made a big show of her teeth. She turned, and I walked home to my real wife with my son's head lolling in slumber before me.

In her view of the event, I imagine, my Kimberly stood before these men and made them at ease, the way she had done when they had been younger and
together
in various ways. She was an easy person with whom to talk and be. She was not overly proud
of her intelligence, and her intelligence was not so impressive that she suffered from self-awareness. She listened relatively well, and she was very funny. She was incredibly, strangely sharp at games, board games and social/interactive games that involved guesswork and feeding people suggestions toward a specific answer. In her mind, I imagine, she wanted to experience the rush that is putting people at ease, of making them comfortable enough to be reasonable. She had lost this, she felt, and she desperately wanted it restored. She could do a
job
. She could run a marathon. She could keep a budget and make more or less anything she needed to make with her bare hands. She could nurse a child. She could be married. She could make a clown good at sex. But she could not be who she had been, and that upset her, and she told me someday I would understand. But I did not understand. I do not understand so much, and I did feel sorry for myself when she contacted a few of the men directly in the months that followed, and the pieces of the sabotage fell into obvious place. It looked as clunky to her then as it looks to me now, and it feels as childish to me now as it did to her then.

I tried to speak to her directly about all of it, but when I looked into her eyes, I found myself looking into a mirror with about thirty-six strange faces looking back at me. She studied me as one studies a fraction, and she asked me to please accept her need to end our marriage. We split our son down the middle. She wanted half, and she wanted me to have the other half. I look at him now, at the half that I have chosen, and I want to give it back to the rest of him, still having no understanding of how a person is built.

CABINS

1.

P
resuming he was still well married, I told one of my friends I could not imagine living near my wife in divorce. I've always imagined experiencing my divorce alone in the wilderness, I continued. I have a cabin. I have a boat. I can see my little cabin from where I sit in the boat. The water is slapping the boat. I'm on an elevated chair whipping lures that race across the surface of the water as I reel them back in. My wife is not nearby. In my cabin, as in my entire life in divorce, she's not anywhere to be found or heard or smelled.