But until the day people stopped wishing they could cram their spouse into a dumpster, my story was relevant, too. Until we stopped accepting the destructive force of monogamy, until we stopped constructing other selves in secret, I had the edge: my story had yet to be told. And given the intensity of these past days, I held reserves of emotional capability no one could match.
Maybe you had a crush on a co-worker, or came to find some erotic charge in the dimpled smile or soothing voice of a neighbor or friend. You began to tamper with your repressions, the prison of your own making; you craved the slightest attention and the physiological boost that came from easy conversation with some sympathetic, similar-minded soul. Was this nourishing emotional connection a violation of trust? Your life felt rehearsed, performed; your most significant gestures only mimicked real emotion. Routine insincerity had inadvertently hollowed out your entire existence. What passed for candor became an act of nostalgia, loyalty, compulsion. Your drives and urges got sublimated into oblivion, for the good of something better, renovated master bath, shorter commute, authoritative parenting, the load-bearing walls of your house cracking and settling all around you. You became ashamed of senile arguments about how to sauté broccoli, you tuned out bleating babies and bug-eyed children, so that they had to scream to reach you. You peeked through the bars of your cage. Your heart jumped from a five-second exchange with a fair-skinned, ginger-haired stranger in the supermarket’s frozen-food aisle. Married life was too strict, isolating, cruel. You could still recognize a certain look in the eyes of a friend when she laughed at your jokes, touching your elbow, sitting beside you at dinner, and said good night with a damp kiss and a flicker of pain, a reflection of your better self, possible lives, better days. Was there someone out there who wanted to enter an immersive illustrated fictional experience on this provocative matter? I shuddered at the thought of the mind-boggling complexities involved. Years of intense labor lay ahead.
I read through my sketchbook and found notes and drawings that fed ideas and strategies. Another world revealed itself to me, with lyrical imperatives. I made a few thumbnails. I imagined a web of unpleasant characters, trafficking in artistic misery, free markets, abstruse financial loopholes. I saw several moves ahead, my hand tracing lines only I could see, hovering somewhere between work and play, between necessity and escape. And yet, even as I worked, I knew it would cost me. Robin would withhold her body forever, or kill me in my sleep. I’d never live it down. Still, the sketches gave me pleasure.
On a clean sheet of paper I drew our little bungalow from the street, wooden porch, burnt lawn, the building planted squarely on the land. In the next panel I drew a tired man, characteristic receding hairline, long birdlike nose, him, me, kneeling in the glare of the television, folding laundry. In the third panel a woman sits on the rug beside him, in leggings and a yoga bra, stretching, her legs in a split. He’s watching South Park, one where Kenny is dead and the boys build a ladder to heaven to try to get ahold of his winning lottery ticket. In the fourth panel I drew Kenny. In a box beneath Kenny I wrote:
Fuckless weeks, excused by parenting, had turned weirdly okay. Marriage had changed, become solid, had become newly grim as they learned, together, what it was to not be young.
“Let’s hope they sleep,” the woman says. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”
Clean, folded laundry fills the basket. They stand, hugging. She presses her face into his shoulder. He sniffs her hair. “It’s late,” she says, her way of saying no. He hugs her but keeps his frontal parts back from this deeper embrace, creating a shaft of space between them as he stands impassively.
“What if,” she says, “we just keep being nice to each other for a few more days?”
This is what stands for hope, when two people run up against the limitations of aging and married love. Then I roughed out a scene at the wealthy woman’s house in Connecticut, the hot couple going from room to room, past the egg-shaped tub, then rolling around on the floor in her closet.
When I looked up, two hours later, it was as if no time had passed. I had eight pages of tight pencils, and four dense pages of notes. I stood and stretched. In a hidden cabinet in the bathroom I discovered a stash of clean sheets and towels, made the bed, gathered dirty dishes from around the apartment.
The teacup sat on the kitchen table. It was cracked, the cracks stained, the handle gone. It had roses painted along the rim. I lifted the cup, and the earrings rattled. I dumped the earrings into my palm and held one up to the light. Easy enough to overlook while packing and leaving. Easy enough to miss if you’re crying. Easy enough to understand why the owner might avert her gaze at the sight of a gift given as a reward for tolerating spousal abuse. The stones were bluish white and packed with rainbows. A gift she didn’t want, for an act of punishment she hadn’t deserved, meant to signify obedience, humiliation, surrender, disgrace.
I should’ve handed them to her while she was packing her clothes, but in the haze of emotion I’d forgotten, although I could’ve handed them to her before that, but maybe I didn’t want her thinking I was tracking her valuables. In her dorm room she’d asked me to remove them. I’d done nothing wrong. Of course I’d stolen them. Instead of feeling worse, I found mitigating thoughts distracting me. What if she’d left them here on purpose? What if this was how she’d decided to help me? Was she messing with my mind?
I walked through the rain, clutching the earrings as if any jostling might cause their disintegration, and entered the computer room of Crabston Hall, where, in a darkened hush of still bodies clicking mice and keyboards, I began to construct a quick, witty note, to let her know I’d found her baubles. They were bigger than a pencil eraser, smaller than a raspberry. I searched the Web for tips on how to tell the difference between a real and a fake diamond, and estimated their value between $29.95 and $20,000.
I would let her know, then toss them in the mail.
I found myself opening our secret folder, rereading the very last email she’d sent, from the hospital, back in March. I’d forgotten those photos of Lily, in post-op, still sleeping, all tape and tubes. Before that, Amy had complained that her roofer had accidentally backed into her security gate, so now it wouldn’t open. A neighbor from the building in Manhattan where she and Mike owned their duplex said the Russian businessman in the $39 million penthouse had demanded board approval for new security cameras, locks, and doors, because he worried he’d be kidnapped off the roof.
She didn’t need these earrings.