Domestic Violets, page 6
“Really?”
I make her give me a high five, and then she runs away with the dog.
Anna’s in the kitchen boiling pasta and reading the mail. She’s dressed in her running shorts and a gray tank top. An oval of sweat marks the spot between her breasts, and I feel fat and lumbering by comparison.
“Your mother called a few minutes ago.” she says. “She sounded weird.”
“Well, she’s a weird lady,” I say.
“Oh, and we also got a delightful call from your stepmother.”
“Oh Jesus.” This is inevitable, but still not good. “What did she want?”
She nods to the answering machine. “Listen for yourself. It’s quite a performance. Allie, cover your ears again, honey.”
Allie, who’s hanging her picture on the fridge with fruit magnets, covers her ears without comment as I push the little button. There’s a throat clearing, and then it’s Ashley in all her glory. “I know he’s there,” she says, her voice boozy and sharp. “Hell, you’re probably all there, listening to me right now, you fucking chickens. Why are you hiding from me, Curtis? You can’t just keep hiding. I love you . . . well, I loved you. Doesn’t that even fucking count for anything? Why are you so awful to me? I don’t deserve it. And you don’t deserve me. I hate you now. Hate, hate, hate you. So fuck you, I’m going to New York. Come get your shit before I burn it all in the street.” As she hangs up, I can hear the venom betrayed by a sniffle, like a high school girl in tears.
“Well, she seems to be doing well,” I say.
“She sounded drunk.”
“That’s probably a safe bet.”
Anna sips from an orange-colored vitamin water. “What do you think the odds are of her killing us all in our sleep?” she asks.
“Nah, even if she tried, she’d never make it past our liquor cabinet.”
I take in Anna’s body as she stirs pasta. Tight, lean little muscles seem to be appearing daily in new places, like above her knees and the backs of her arms. I guess those are called triceps. I touch one of them with my index finger, poking it with mild fascination.
“Have you been smoking?” she asks.
“Sorry,” I say. “Doug wanted to talk after work. Doom and gloom stuff.”
“Really? What’d he say?”
“Smoking kills, Daddy,” says Allie. “It makes your lungs all black and yucky, like two big sponges all covered in oil.”
“I know, honey. That’s crooked. A little higher on the right.”
Technically, I’ve just lied to my wife. I’ve used Doug as a diversion to distract Anna from the fact that I’ve smoked, and now I’m not sure what to say. I decide to spare her the tsunami metaphor, at least for the time being.
“Is this better, Daddy?”
“Perfect,” I say. “He’s just worried, that’s all. That’s what Doug does—he worries. He’s got like eleven kids.”
“Is it about the . . . economy?”
Anna is as helpless as I am when it comes to exactly what it is that’s put the world in its current state. At least one of us really should have majored in something legitimate. Our daughter is standing in front of the fridge like Vanna White, presenting her work. “Do you like it, Mommy?”
Anna tells Allie that it’s a beautiful picture, but her eyes don’t leave mine.
“We’re gonna be fine,” I say. “I’ve survived three rounds of layoffs this year alone. I’m untouchable, like Eliot Ness.” I flex my biceps, but no one seems impressed. Recently I’ve begun imagining that other people in my life write formal complaints about me and submit them to imaginary HR departments.
Dear HR:
My husband, Tom Violet, thinks it’s fun to mask his anxiety over our potential financial ruin with a series of lame jokes. It’s clearly a façade to make me think that everything is going to be OK, but, in reality, I know that we are profoundly screwed. Attached is a long list of the many men I now regret not marrying before I met this smiling fool.
“Grandpa said he’s taking me for a ride in the Porsche. He said he’ll go super fast, too—way over the speed limit because the cops can’t catch him because they all have sucky, American-made engines.”
I tell my daughter how fun this sounds, and then I take two beers from the fridge. If this were a different era, the sixties maybe, I’d pour a couple of giant glasses of scotch. But I guess light domestic beers will suffice for now. “So he’s still here, huh?” I ask Anna.
She stirs the bubbling pot still. “He’s upstairs. I think he’s writing.”
I open the door and find my dad sitting at my computer desk staring at his laptop and casually smoking a joint. The window is open and he’s turned on the ceiling fan, but the entire upstairs smells like the inside of a VW van, and I have to actually wave a plume of smoke out of my face.
“Nice, Dad. Just make yourself right at home.”
He coughs and snaps his computer shut with a loud thwack. From the sleepy, stoned look on his face, I can’t tell if he’s been writing or napping.
“You know, there is a child in the house, right?”
He holds the wiry little bud out, offering me some.
I look out into the hallway for signs of Allie or Anna and then close the door. “All right, but I’m doing it under formal protest.”
“I’ll make sure it’s noted in the official ledger,” he says.
I take a quick toke, hold, and then exhale. I read somewhere that smoking pot is way worse for your lungs than cigarettes, but it certainly doesn’t feel like it. The inside of my skull loosens a notch, and I hand it back to him. “You shaved,” I say. “Looks good.”
He rubs his chin as if reminding himself. “Allie demanded it. She told me I looked old.” He’s wearing the same pants as last night and his tweed jacket over a T-shirt. Although he looks better than before, he’s still pale, slumping in my IKEA chair.
I hand him one of the beers I’ve brought with me. He takes a sip with his nonjoint hand and smiles at me. Beer bottles are excellent props for men who don’t talk as often as they probably should.
“Your wife called earlier.” I say. “She left quite a message.”
“I heard it. Ashley’s a passionate girl. She swears a lot when she’s feeling vulnerable. It’s a classic defense mechanism. Her parents are horrible, horrible people . . . or so I’m told.”
“Well, I’ll be sure to feel sorry for her when she shows up to boil the dog on the stove.”
Curtis giggles. He’s artfully stoned in a practiced, fully functioning sort of way. He’s one of those aged pot smokers who kept at it while everyone else gave it up and got jobs and started quietly voting Republican.
“How’s the writing going? You getting some work done?”
“A little. The men upstairs are getting restless. They want this book to be over and done with. It’s been a tough road though. Tougher than it’s supposed to be.”
When I was a kid, I took this literally, and would sometimes sneak into his office when he was gone and look for the “men upstairs.” I’d search his closet and under his bed, convinced that they were hiding from me.
“I read about you on the Web today. Even in the middle of a full-blown financial clusterfuck, you’re still getting press.”
He takes another sip and then the last hit of the joint. “It makes this next book that much more important. I can’t follow the Pulitzer with a dog. They’d never forgive me for it. Either way, at least it’ll get Zuckerman off my back. Nicholas’s been holding the Pulitzer over my head for years, the arrogant bastard. I should take out an ad in the New York Times and congratulate him on being one of the finalists. Do you think that’d be too snide?”
“Publicly showing up a literary icon in a major American newspaper? Seems gentlemanly enough.”
“You’re right. He’d take it too seriously anyway. That’s the thing about Zuckerman, he’s a talented son of a bitch, I’ll give him that, but he has no sense of humor. He still hasn’t forgiven me for calling him the most boring writer in America three years ago. Clearly I was only joking.”
It’s been a while since I smoked pot, and things in the room seem misshapen all of the sudden. The pictures on the wall are crooked, and the pattern in the throw pillows is beginning to vibrate. “Jesus, where did you get this stuff?”
“Good, isn’t it? It’s a special blend from Colombia. Or maybe Peru. I can’t remember. Somewhere like that.”
I rise to leave, warm and a little giggly. One hit off a joint and I feel like putting on my pajamas, eating an entire bag of Doritos, and watching a Will Ferrell movie. “All right, Cheech. Dinner’s in ten minutes. If you’re not down there, I’m giving your spaghetti to Hank.”
“Yes, sir,” he says.
Before I leave to go find some Visine and change out of my work clothes, I stop. “So, who is she, anyway? You’re not screwing around with Veronica Stewart again are you? I don’t think that’d be a very good idea.”
He’s smiling at me, this old cad in yesterday’s clothes. “What are you talking about?”
“The new girl, Dad? Who are you in love with now?”
Talk of women has brought some color back to his face, and he sits up. “Once again, son, you’ve managed to expose my tragic flaw.”
“Really, there’s just one?”
He grins. “Don’t you get it by now, Tommy? I’m a writer. I’m always in love.”
Chapter 9
And here I am again, looking at myself in the bathroom mirror.
They’re like loaded guns, these pills, and my eyes are red and everything in the room that’s supposed to be white is now bluish. These are both normal side effects, according to the box, so I shouldn’t worry. An abnormal side effect, one that I hope to avoid tonight, is a four-hour boner.
I check my hair and mess it up a little. Then I spray some cologne in the air and quickly walk through it. This is what teenage girls do before the big dance, but I don’t want to smell like I’ve been in the bathroom blasting myself with cologne.
Shirtless, I examine my chest and biceps before dropping to the floor for fifteen quick push-ups. The last five are harder than I imagined they’d be.
The blood, moving through my body now, has added some definition where definition should go, at least a little, and I feel suddenly awake and tingly with sensation.
“You look good,” I tell my reflection. “Hot?” But this last part comes out with a question mark at the end. I’ve never been good at sales.
My heart feels strange in my chest, like it’s beating through mud, but these are the risks a man takes sometimes in the name of sexual competence. It’d be an embarrassing way to die, though, felled by a heart attack with an absurd hard-on standing at attention from my own dead body like an Italian baguette.
In our bedroom, the Victoria’s Secret outfit is tucked safely into its dresser drawer and there are no candles or music. Anna is lying beneath the covers with her eyes closed and a copy of Runner’s World magazine open across her chest. I fall onto the bed, landing on my side like some doofus being cute in a movie, but Anna doesn’t stir, and for a moment I watch her sleep. Her moisturizer has left a little streak on one of her cheeks and her mouth is just barely open. I used to fuck this woman, when we were younger. It’s an ugly word in marriage, “fuck,” but that’s what we did. We didn’t make love or fool around, we fucked like people who didn’t know any better or didn’t care to do anything else. It wasn’t scheduled or worried about or something done when they’re wasn’t anything good on TV. It was an effortless thing, like breathing, something so natural and fantastic. I don’t remember when it became something that I had to think about so much or gear up for in the bathroom.
I nudge her shoulder. “You awake?”
She opens her eyes and says hello, and I rub a streak of moisturizer into her cheek. Just this simple contact, the warmth of her skin, starts things moving in my body—blood flowing and gathering—and I feel kind of dizzy, but not in a bad way. I cross the neutral zone between us and kiss her cheek, finding an earlobe and biting there lightly. I don’t know if it’s the pill or the fact that I know I’ve taken the pill, but I feel urgent and affectionate, and these goddamn things really work.
“Did you put on cologne?” she asks.
“What? No, this is what sexy smells like.” I slide one hand beneath the covers and find her belly and run my fingertips across the ripples of her rib cage. Her lips are soft and warm against mine, and I feel myself getting harder. The pulse in my head is beating and I move to her neck where things are warmer and softer still.
That’s when I realize that I seem to be doing this alone. Anna is completely still. “Are you OK?” I ask.
She looks at me, totally void of anything even resembling desire, and the whites of her eyes, big in the glow of her reading lamp, look blue. I recognize this face. It’s the face of an Anna who’s been thinking. Thinking too much.
“So, you hate your job, right?” she says.
I look at her for a moment and then I look around the room, wondering if perhaps I missed something while I was in the bathroom doing my push-ups. “Of course. It’s killing me slowly, like asbestos.”
This is the answer she was prepared to hear, and she sits up against the headboard. “Then, I think you should do something about it. You’ve been there for years, and you’re always talking about how screwed they’d be without you. If that’s really true, then they should promote you to something better, or at least give you a raise. And if they won’t do that, then you should let them know that you’re not afraid to look for something else.”
“Umm, not sure if you’ve been watching the news on a different channel or something, but this might not be the best time to pull ultimatums at the office.”
“Or maybe it’s the perfect time.”
I get the sense that my wife’s been through this conversation in her head already. She wrote the script this afternoon on the treadmill, and I’m really pretty defenseless here. Forethought is perhaps their greatest weapon against us.
“You’re good at your job, right? You pretend like you don’t care about it, but if you’d actually apply yourself and take it seriously, you’d be doing everyone a big favor.”
“I’m not pretending,” I say. “I’m not that good of an actor. I really don’t care about my job.”
“Then why are you worried about losing it?” She takes a breath. “I can tell you’re worried about getting fired. You can sneak upstairs and smoke up with your dad like a teenager all you want, it doesn’t matter. I know you. You’ve let yourself get into a position where you’re afraid that something you hate is going to go away. You’re like those women in Lifetime movies. You’re terrified your abusive husband’s going to leave you.”
Things had been looking up for a minute there, but now, as my wife ventures into the metaphorical, all my blood is diverting back toward the unimportant parts of my body.
“I know that you and I aren’t exactly corporate geniuses here,” I say, appealing to a sense of commonality. “But I think just about everyone’s afraid of losing their paycheck right now. This isn’t about having a fulfilling job. It’s about being able to afford groceries.”
Anna laughs. Apparently I’ve said something ridiculous. “Tom, Curtis is always trying to give us things. You think he’s going to let us starve?”
“Jesus,” I say. “He already gave us this house. Is that not at all embarrassing for you? We’re almost thirty-six years old.”
She takes my hand with both of hers. “I don’t want to sound like the type of wife who says something like this, but that’s really your fault, Tom, OK? You refuse to ask for a raise, or to make any attempt to get a promotion, or to take on any more responsibility, or, God forbid, to look for a job that doesn’t make you want to blow your brains out. You have ten years of writing experience. If you wanted to, you could be making way more, and we wouldn’t be living paycheck to paycheck and accepting houses from your dad.”
“Wow, I didn’t realize that it’s 1953 all of the sudden,” I say. “You make less than I do, Anna. A hell of a lot less. How about you go storming into your office tomorrow and start demanding things?”
She lets go of my hand, and I see Hank’s head poking up from the foot of the bed as he studies the tones of our voices. “I help poor children learn to read, Tom. What does your company do again? I always forget? Something really noble, right?”
I lie on my back and so does she, and a long silence fills the growing expanse in the bed between us. I realize that the television is on—the volume turned all the way down. Lately I’ve been surrounded by muted televisions. Over the anchor’s shoulder, there’s a graphic of a red arrow pointing down.
“I just don’t understand what’s keeping you there,” she says, looking at the ceiling. “What’s keeping you from moving forward? I’m not a Stepford Wife, Tom. I don’t want a fur coat and a BMW. I just want to be able to actually afford the baby that we’re trying to have. Or, at least the one I’m trying to have.”
Married couples really only have a few arguments. They just keep having them over and over again. “This isn’t my career. You know that. This isn’t what I want to do with my life.”
“I know that. I’m not saying you have to stop writing, or that you have to give up on your book. I just think you need to start being more realistic about the world. You’re an adult. We have a family. You’ve been working on your book for—”
“I am being realistic. The day you take on a real job with real responsibilities, that’s the day you’re done writing. You become some poser with five chapters of some shitty novel in your bottom drawer that you’re never going to be able to finish because you’ve got screaming kids downstairs and some bullshit presentation to give about some useless buzzword. You know what my dad was doing before his first novel? Stamping books at the American University library for minimum wage, and he just won the Pulitzer Prize.”
“You’re not as good as your father, Tom,” she says, her voice suddenly loud. “You’re not Curtis, OK? I mean, for Christ’s sake, wouldn’t you know by now if you were?”
