THE PINTO MADE ITS rat-a-tat-tat valve noise beneath the hood, and the warm wind blew through my long hair as I drove home. The neighborhood in Pittsburgh where Annie and I lived held no beautiful houses—indeed ours was the homeliest on the street. They were solid shot-and-a-beer structures of various shades of red or yellow brick, a few wood houses, no-nonsense dwellings where lives got lived. Since Robin’s death, Annie and I fought constantly. Annie never smiled. She didn’t talk to me. She was distant.
“What did you do today?” I would say, goading her to speech.
“Nothing.”
“Well, you must have done something.”
“I went to work. Why are you grilling me?”
“I’m not grilling you, I’m trying to have a normal conversation. What happened at work?”
“Nothing. I worked.”
“What did you see from the car on your way to work?”
“Would you please just shut up?”
“‘Would you please just shut up?’”
“Don’t mock me, Buddy.”
“‘Don’t mock me, Buddy.’”
Shouting, recriminations, door-slamming, tears. This was the new life we were living. I knew I was defective, an intolerable wretch with a dead son.
I was seeing a therapist at the time who said I should communicate better. I knew this already. It’s the reason I was always trying to initiate small talk, as a place to begin at least. I vowed to try harder. Not the affair, but other stuff. I didn’t want to communicate myself right out onto the street. This therapist’s ears were covered with hair, incidentally, over the tops of his ears. His hairy ears drove me crazy. I didn’t communicate this either.
I read in Glamour magazine that sharing sexual fantasies was something women liked to do, so this was the way I decided we might communicate. I gave it a shot. I said, “I’ve got an idea. Let’s share sexual fantasies. You go first.” We were in bed, Annie was reading the newspaper. She wouldn’t do it.
“I’m not good at fantasies.”
“Oh, sure you are,” I insisted.
“Can’t I just read the newspaper?”
“It’ll be fun.”
She put down the newspaper. She told me a fantasy involving a couple of our friends she was attracted to. I was so shocked and hurt I was ready to jump off a bridge. I didn’t let her know this. I kept on with the fantasies strategy. During lovemaking I pretended we were a gorgeous couple in a porno movie. I described us as the actors, I told about the director, the camera operator, the movie set, the plot. I spoke in movie-making lingo—“Cut, that’s a take,” whatever I could come up with. Other times I pretended that we were in bed with another couple, or that friends were watching us or encouraging us. I filled up our bedroom with talk.
I became utterly focused on sex. I brought up the idea of sex in the middle of anything else Annie might be talking about. Once I interrupted her when she was talking about the death of her mother. I said, “Whaddaya say we go to one of those sex motels sometime, you know, with all the videos and sex toys.”
I won’t try to describe the glare she fixed upon me. She said, “Do you even know what you just did?”
I said, “Huh?”
“What you did just then.”
“What? I just thought it would be something fun we could do together.” A mother’s death seemed an affront to me, I couldn’t tolerate hearing about anyone’s death but my son’s.
The house that we lived in was an old, old structure, but it had been remodeled so often and so poorly for the past hundred years that nothing of its original self was discernible. Apparently it had once been a small caretaker’s house, when Pittsburgh was young, but now it was larger, and oh my God. The character and style that you normally associate with old houses was completely missing in this one. There was no Victorian symmetry, no gables or dormers or shuttered windows, no gingerbread or stained glass or tower. The color scheme seemed to have been chosen by a psychotic person. The largest portion of the exterior was covered in white shingles, another part in green shingles, and a large section containing the kitchen was aluminum siding painted red. The roof was shingled in two colors as well, green and black, and the square brick columns that held up the front porch roof were yellow brick. The porch had been added as an afterthought and with inferior materials. The porch roof, which slanted steeply, was the most visible feature of the house. It was made of metal and had rusted in large patches all over and so presented itself as a ghastly reddish brown.
THE HOUSE LAY AHEAD of me. I pulled the Pinto into the driveway, and felt its specter cast a pall over my whole life. Everything I had ever lost or feared losing rose up before me. The sordidness of my affair with Susan was shockingly apparent, maybe for the first time in its fullness. I was stricken to think of her terrible, self-destructive idealism. I wanted my son back, alive. I wanted my own life back. I wanted the freight train in my head to stop its terrible noise. I imagined Annie in the house now. I imagined her at the sink, cleaning a kitchen that could not be cleaned. I imagined her hands in a sinkful of soapy water. I imagined a yellow box of SOS pads, a bottle of Murphy’s Oil Soap, these hopeless images. I took a deep breath. I strengthened my resolve. I would go inside that house and make our lives right. I would become a different person. I already was a different person, hadn’t my axing Susan proved that already? I would become the perfect man. I would give up all lechery. I would withdraw all demands. Sex would become an earned part of respect and intimacy. I would be truthful, I would learn to communicate, I would learn to wear Birkenstocks and ratty sweaters. While my body sat behind the wheel and did not yet move, my heart, my prayerful soul, my best self, flew on ambiguous wings out of the explosive Pinto and through the Sears vinyl windows and into the house to my wife’s heart, where it rested for one golden moment in peace.
During my reverie, Annie had been inside hard at more practical work. I stepped just inside the front door and watched her as she finished up. It was work I think she enjoyed. She went about it efficiently, methodically. Not the soapy mundanity I had imagined for her, a wifely toiling at the kitchen sink, making clean the uncleanable, but a work of the heart. She was kicking me out.
It was not easy work either, it was labor that required dedication and commitment and physical strength. It required many trips up and down the stairs, top floor to basement. She was ripping to shreds every card I had ever written to her, tearing apart, breaking into pieces, cutting up with the scissors every gift I had ever given her, throwing these things and all my belongings, shoes, shirts, jeans, books, long-lost items I was interested to see she had found, into the basement, helter-skelter in a pile, where they would not pollute her line of vision, every stitch of clothing, every crossword puzzle, anything that reminded her of me, indeed all evidence of my existence. My wife had built a golden pile of shredded metaphors at the bottom of the basement steps, while I had only contemplated them as abstractions from the ivory tower of the Pinto. She made trip after trip past me. I watched my life pass in front of me, all exterior manifestations of it, anyway.
On one of her passes through, I said, “Can we talk?”
At first there was no response, but then eventually I learned a few things.
Susan, it turned out, had given Annie a call before I got home. Susan had explained everything to her. I don’t say “related” everything or “spilled the beans” or even confessed or unburdened herself or ratted on me. She just called to make things clear. Susan was a genuine idealist. In her wacky way she believed in the sanctity of love, she believed in marriage and commitment and even communication and truth-telling. She believed in my marriage. She wanted the best for me. She had called to assure Annie of these things and to assure her that though she loved me and wanted to bear my child, that I did not love her, that I loved only my wife. “Oh, sure, he said he loved me plenty of times,” she explained, “but that was only to make me feel better.” She explained the many times I had “axed” her and how these were evidence of my commitment to my marriage. She told Annie, as I pieced things together later, some nutty version of the incident in the Family Oven rest room. Which is to say, she told it pretty much as it in fact happened. She told her she hoped to have a baby someday. She told her about the baby furniture we had seen in Babyland.
Annie was almost finished with her hauling and ripping and breaking to bits. There were no hysterics, no screaming. Annie’s face was a blank slate. She seemed more rested than she had been for a long time.