*
I look up at my house and cogitate some—I don’t rightly want to say what about. The thing is, I’m a successful man in the prime of life. Started DJ-ing in college, and, OK, my voice was fine for the 3:00-to-6:00 a.m. slot at Marquette, but out in the real world there was an upper limit, I’ll admit. Never did land me a job in front of a microphone. Telemarketed instead. Then the radio itch got back into me and I started consulting. This was in the eighties, when you had your first country-rock crossovers. A lot of stations were slow to catch on. I told them who and what to play. Started out contracting for three stations and now I’ve got sixty-seven coming to me asking, “Charlie D., how do we increase our market share? Give us your crossover wisdom, Sage of the Sagebrush.” (That’s on my website. People have sort of picked it up.)
But what I’m thinking right now doesn’t make me feel so sagelike. In fact, not even a hair. I’m thinking, How did this happen to me? To be out here in the bushes?
Find the Bad Guy is a term we learned at couples counseling. Me and Johanna saw this lady therapist for about a year, name of Dr. Van der Jagt. Dutch. Had a house over by the university, with separate paths to the front and the back doors. That way, people leaving didn’t run into those showing up.
Say you’re coming out of couples therapy and your next-door neighbor’s coming in. “Hey, Charlie D.,” he says. “How’s it going?” And you say, “The missus has just been saying I’m verbally abusive, but I’m doing OK otherwise.”
Naw. You don’t want that.
Tell the truth, I wasn’t crazy about our therapist being a woman, plus European. Thought it would make her partial to Johanna’s side of things.
At our first session, Johanna and I chose opposite ends of the couch, keeping throw pillows between us.
Dr. Van der Jagt faced us, her scarf as big as a horse blanket.
She asked what brought us.
Talking, making nice, that’s the female department. I waited for Johanna to start in.
But the same cat got her tongue as mine.
Dr. Van der Jagt tried again. “Johanna, tell me how you are feeling in the marriage. Three words.”
“Frustrated. Angry. Alone.”
“Why?”
“When we met, Charlie used to take me dancing. Once we had kids, that stopped. Now we both work full-time. We don’t see each other all day long. But as soon as Charlie comes home he goes out to his fire pit—”
“You’re always welcome to join me,” I said.
“—and drinks. All night. Every night. He is married more to the fire pit than to me.”
I was there to listen, to connect with Johanna, and I tried my best. But after a while I stopped paying attention to her words and just listened to her voice, the foreign sound of it. It was like if Johanna and I were birds, her song wouldn’t be the song I’d recognize. It would be the song of a species of bird from a different continent, some species that nested in cathedral belfries or windmills, which, to my kind of bird, would be like, Well, la-di-da.
For instance, regarding the fire pit. Didn’t I try to corral everyone out there every night? Did I ever say I wanted to sit out there alone? No, sir. I’d like us to be together, as a family, under the stars, with the mesquite flaming and popping. But Johanna, Bryce, Meg, and even Lucas—they never want to. Too busy on their computers or their Instagrams.
“How do you feel about what Johanna is saying?” Dr. Van der Jagt asked me.
“Well,” I said. “When we bought the house, Johanna was excited about the fire pit.”
“I never liked the fire pit. You always think that, because you like something, I like the same thing.”
“When the real estate lady was showing us around, who was it said, ‘Hey, Charlie, look at this! You’re gonna love this’?”
“Ja, and you wanted a Wolf stove. You had to have a Wolf stove. But have you ever cooked anything on it?”
“Grilled those steaks out in the pit that time.”
Right around there, Dr. Van der Jagt held up her soft little hand.
“We need to try to get beyond these squabbles. We need to find what’s at the core of your unhappiness. These things are only on the surface.”
We went back the next week, and the week after that. Dr. Van der Jagt had us fill out a questionnaire ranking our level of marital contentment. She gave us books to read: Hold Me Tight, which was about how couples tend to miscommunicate, and The Volcano Under the Bed, which was about overcoming sexual dry spells and made for some pretty racy reading. I took off the covers of both books and put on new ones. That way, people at the station thought I was reading Tom Clancy.
Little by little, I picked up the lingo.
Find the Bad Guy means how, when you’re arguing with your spouse, both people are trying to win the argument. Who didn’t close the garage door? Who left the Bigfoot hair clump in the shower drain? The thing you have to realize, as a couple, is that there is no bad guy. You can’t win an argument when you’re married. Because if you win, your spouse loses, and resents losing, and then you lose, too, pretty much.
Due to the fact that I was a defective husband, I started spending a lot of time alone, being introspective. What I did was go to the gym and take a sauna. I’d dropper some eucalyptus into a bucket of water, toss the water on the fake rocks, let the steam build up, then turn over the miniature hourglass, and, for however long it took to run out, I’d introspect. I liked to imagine the heat burning all my excess cargo away—I could stand to lose a few, like the next guy—until all that was left was a pure residue of Charlie D. Most other guys hollered that they were cooked after ten minutes and red-assed it out of there. Not me. I just turned the hourglass over and hunkered on down some more. Now the heat was burning away my real impurities. Things I didn’t even tell anyone about. Like the time after Bryce was born and had colic for six straight months, when in order to keep from throwing him out the window what I did was drink a couple bourbons before dinner and, when no one was looking, treat Forelock as my personal punching bag. He was just a puppy then, eight or nine months. He’d always done something. A grown man, beating on my own dog, making him whimper so Johanna’d call out, “Hey! What are you doing?” and I’d shout back, “He’s just faking! He’s a big faker!” Or the times, more recent, when Johanna was flying to Chicago or Phoenix and I’d think, What if her plane goes down? Did other people feel these things, or was it just me? Was I evil? Did Damien know he was evil in The Omen and Omen II? Did he think “Ave Satani” was just a catchy soundtrack? “Hey, they’re playing my song!”