Later I emerged from the basement, having wrecked myself with the illusion of work, and got into our bed, sad and alone, and listened to Beanie snore. I was hoping for a cry, maybe praying for a way to give myself over to anything, anyone who would need me, who I could soothe and hold, as a way to put our family back together.
On our block, you could see which families got along, which ones couldn’t be apart, clutching, clinging, which ones couldn’t be in the same room together. Across the street lived a heavily pregnant litigator named Shao, married to a jittery math professor named Phil, expecting their second child. Next to them were an old, bent, scowling, poodle-walking hermit—a retired electrician—and his wife, in the final stages and bedridden. Next to them was a house with three boys, hockey sticks, soccer balls, skateboards all over the lawn. They were lawyers in the telecom industry who wrote regulations and then crammed them down the government’s throat. Lisa served disgusting slabs of bloody meat for dinner that everybody over there loved. We had a block party every Labor Day with a bouncy castle and an egg toss.
We lived in a Maryland suburb known for its aging hippies, free mulch, and hundred-year-old Victorians, just inside the Beltway, a five-minute walk to the subway, a twenty-minute ride to downtown D.C. We’d been here for six years. Before that, we lived in Baltimore.
You could see how other people’s marriages worked, and you could take a wild guess, just by looking at them, who still did it. The ones who didn’t do it didn’t like you, but they knew they’d get you soon enough. The ones who did, who still seemed to hunger for each other, with their arthritis and their floppy appendages, made you wince at the thought of them naked.
Next to Lisa and Brett lived Amanda and Robert. He was special assistant to the deputy something at the State Department; she wrote talking points for some evil intelligence agency. She had small boobs and lacy bras and it really worked. Some nights before dinner she’d come up the sidewalk with her two little kids and we’d joke around and stand in our yard and she’d keep checking her blouse to make sure the top button didn’t come open, and I couldn’t help feeling noticed for noticing her.
On the other side of us lived a guy named Steve who cleaned carpets for a living. His wife looked too young, like he’d married his daughter. His daughter looked exactly like the wife, and could sometimes be seen from my upstairs bathroom late at night taking breaks from the glare of her monitor to kneel and rummage through her clothes half-naked. Elements of aging and ugliness now played a role in the corners of our privacy and the marriages around me. More people fatter and in worse shape, but still on some sort of eternal honeymoon. Other people who couldn’t get along, and caved and got divorced, destroying everything. Their kids fell apart. People who stayed single were children themselves and their genes were weeded out by natural selection.
Everyone not getting fucked enough, men not fucking anyone, women no one was fucking. What was the point of having a body? Intellectual life was not so satisfying that we could afford to relinquish the physical. The simple act of, or, I should say, when two people who, for whatever reason…or maybe it was more about the ability to give pleasure, if that’s what married people are up to, or maybe it’s just the raw power of sex, to cleanse and heal the body and mind, to simplify, soften, maybe clarify a complicated, heavy relationship, to make strong what is often rough or broken, while putting a fine and graceful point on the coarse and bumbling flesh, while gently nourishing the other, while somehow loosening oneself from the hunger—hey, around here we didn’t get enough of that. But just to hold the other and be held in return until the boundaries melt and our bodies hover, float, become weightless in that zero time of unclocked moments—we didn’t do a lot of that, either.
So when Beanie finally woke up with a shriek, I figured it was from the waves of unhappiness pouring off me, wafting across the floor. And maybe he wasn’t hungry so much as receptive to my distress; maybe I fed his hunger not for some nutritional reason but in order to fill my own emptiness. Maybe Robin was right and I shouldn’t have been giving him bottles in the middle of the night at ten months, rewarding him, training him to wake up. I couldn’t stop this vicious cycle. She pleaded with me, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t sleep, didn’t want him to sleep either, didn’t want to be alone. It was one thing in our lives that I could control.
When he finished his bottle he made a good burp, and what more could you ask for? Then he made a different sort of burp, his eyes rolled up into his brain, I could hear it coming up the pipe, it hit me in the chin first, then in the chest, like a garden hose had been attached to the back of his head. It was warm and smelled, at least at first, like apples. I staggered to my feet and carried him to the tub, to rinse the puke off him, rinse it from my hair, the plumbing whistling right through the wall, to wake whoever slept on the other side, and after I put him back down Robin and I met in the upstairs hall.
Quietly at first, we exchanged strongly held parental philosophies. She sighed, softly breathing sly accusations. I handled her inauthentic parroting of facile ideas, barf on the lapels of my pajamas, hoping to enlighten her. She deftly batted away my objections, invading my space, so I held her back, so she kicked me and tried to scratch my face off. I begged her to stop, or maybe I urged her on, like, “That the best you got?” I used my hand to keep her away, but not a flat hand, more a sort of curved grip, noting the sensation of the thin, soft, frail neck of my wife in my hand, like, “How did that get there?” A voice in my head, a tiny stage director, said, “Careful, careful,” until I let go.
That was followed by the abandoning of her post, the dragging of blankets past me, the knocking of stuff off low tables, the destruction of personal property as Robin went downstairs to sleep. I followed her to the living room, where she made up the couch, draping windows with towels for curtains as I stood, arms folded, sadder than I’d ever been, admitting everything, asking forgiveness, wishing her a good night’s sleep. After our fights I felt tender and protective.
“Go on, keep talking,” she said. “I’m calling the police.”
—
When I met Robin, she was a cute kid who could do impressions of the wackos who worked in televised puppetry: Lois, head puppet wrangler, who built each of the characters by hand; Brenda, who talked to them as though they were alive; and Kyle, who played Anselma. Sometimes her impressions overtook her: grabbing an oven mitt, pretending to be Skunk, saying, “I love you, Chippy, DIS MUCH,” her cheeks flushed as she got tongue-tied and disoriented, wiping away tears.