“To begin with”—she crossed her legs and drew the robe tightly around them—“I love you and I don’t propose to lose you.”
The stereo system inside was providing waltz music, soft and quiet waltz music. “Rosemarie,” I said tentatively, “there is no one else.”
Not my fault, maybe, especially after last night.
“There goddamn well better not be.” She smiled ruefully. “I know there’s not, Chucky, no thanks to me.”
We’d been married seven years and she was still a fascinating and unpredictable puzzle.
“Then you’re not going to lose me.”
“We are going to establish some new rules.” She waved away my comment as utterly beside the point—and probably dumb too. “First of all, I’m your agent again, check?”
“I didn’t know you weren’t.”
“When was the last time I arranged a shoot or signed a contract?”
“I didn’t fire you.” The cool breeze off the lake was not helping my body temperature. I felt sweat begin to ooze into my brown poplin suit. Wash-and-wear for traveling.
“I know that.” She dismissed my point as irrelevant with a brisk wave of her hand. “I fired myself. I’m rehiring myself? Okay?”
“Sure.” I took off my coat, folded it neatly, and placed it on the deck beside my chair.
“Secondly”—she ticked the number off on her finger—“in my capacity as your rehired agent, I arrange our schedule so that I accompany you on half your trips and work at least two days in the darkroom, okay?”
“Do I have a choice?”
I knew I had no more a choice than I did when it was decided that I should marry her. The difference this time was that I no longer pretended to myself that I wanted a choice.
“Sure you have a choice.” The wind went out of her sails. “I mean these are just strongly worded suggestions. You can say no.”
“I haven’t yet. Thirdly?”
“Huh? Oh, thirdly”—the sails filled with wind again—“lemme see… well, thirdly you stay here for the next month, enjoy the scenery”—she waved at the lake and the beach and the sky—“and get to know your wife and children again. The Michigan dunes are one of the most beautiful places in the world and you’ve never really bothered to appreciate them.”
“There was a winter night years ago—”
“That does not count.” She actually blushed. “Besides we still do provide those entertainments if you want.”
“I see.”
“Well?”
“There’s the problem of the study I’ve promised for our autumn exhibition.”
“Oh, that.” She waved her hand airily. “Do something up here.”
“Like what?” I would be inside her very soon, no doubt about that. She knows too, I can tell the way her eyes are darting.
“Like”—she paused and then leaned forward eagerly—“I’ve GOT it. Do another one of those foggy things with the kids. Up here. Call it… “Angels in Summertime”!
“You know”—I reached for my jacket and removed from the inner pocket my ever present notebook for recording ideas—“that’s actually an excellent idea.”
She smiled tolerantly at my compulsive note taking. “Am I not worth the cost as an agent?”
“Among other things.” I carefully replaced my notebook in its proper place.
“The kids are over at Mom’s.” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “Sean is asleep.”
“Fourthly?”
“Fourthly…” I had distracted her. She counted on her fingers again. “Oh… well, I think five kids are enough, don’t you?”
“Five!” it was my turn to count on my fingers. “We have four, don’t we? April Rosemary, Kevin, Jimmy Mike, and the little punk? You’re not—”
“Certainly not.” She dismissed this possibility as so absurd as not to be discussed. “I’m speaking of an upper limit. I mean I can do five like we agreed at our pre-Cana, I think, and keep my sanity. But at the present rate, it could be fifteen.”
“Easily.”
“So I’ll have another one sometime, but that’s enough. I love them all. I wish there had been a little more time, but that’s neither here nor there, right?”
“Right.”
“So five is enough?”
“If you say so.”
“I want more agreement than that.”
“I agree. I mean four would be enough too.”
“Five.”
“Okay.”
“So that means birth control.”
I knew we’d come to that.
“But we’re Catholics!”
“What does the Pope know about marriage?” She began to move the swing back and forth, fixing for an attack on the Pope.
“Not much.”
“You know what happens when we try rhythm?” She was adopting her Maxwell Street merchant persona, making me want her all the more powerfully.
“We either don’t make love or you get pregnant.”
“Right. And what about times like this when we both know that the best thing possible for our marriage would be for you to ravish me from now till supper?”
“Or you ravish me.”
“Regardless.” She waved my cavil away.
“We’d either look at the calender or give up the idea because we’d be afraid to ask.”
“Can we live that way?”
“Dear God, Rosemarie.” I shut my eyes and saw through my camera eye the failures of the past five years. “I don’t think so.”
“So?”
“We stop receiving the sacraments, I suppose.”
“I won’t do that!” Her lips tightened. “I won’t let a pope or a priest tell me that saving my marriage is a sin”.
I had never quite thought of it in those terms before.
“I’ll take care of it,” she went on. “You don’t have to worry your conscience about it.”
“That wouldn’t be fair,” I protested.
“Well then talk to some priest who will tell you that saving the marriage is more important. That’s what John Raven is saying.”
“You talked to John?”
“No, I made up my own conscience, like an adult should. But I know John is telling people that too. Michael says the same thing.”
“My brother?”
The robe had fallen away from her knees. I found myself slipping deeper into a luxurious swamp of desire. My manliness had recovered from its disgrace last night.
“It’s probably not fair to cite him because I told him to say that.”
“You told him?” I loosened my tie. Yes, she would have to ravish my body this time, having done in my mind and my conscience as foreplay.
Michael had been ordained in early May, a proud day for my parents: nine grandchildren and now a priest in the family, a serious, devout, and dedicated young priest. Mom and Dad were, need I say it, late for the ordination ceremony. Some things never change.
“Sure, they put the poor kid in a parish after locking him away for seven years and expect him to work intelligently with men and women who are older than he is and more experienced and better educated. So”—she shrugged, the Maxwell Street merchant—“he needs someone to ask about women and marriage and stuff like that.”
Rosemarie as confidante to the clergy. Wow!
“Do you object?”
“Me? Hardly. I was merely admiring his good taste.”
She blushed again and stayed crimson. “You’ll talk to John. He says, I’m told, that if the Pope doesn’t change the rule, the priests and people will change it for him. Married people can’t and shouldn’t live the way they told us we had to live. God understands that, even if the Church doesn’t.”
I thought about it. “I’ll ask John what he thinks the next time I see him. But it’s obvious that you’re right, as always. The trouble with our marriage, like most, I suppose, is not that we have too much sex, but that we don’t have nearly enough.”
She sighed, her robe now open from top to bottom. “I couldn’t agree more.”
Thus did we change our attitude on family limitation, a few years before most Catholics and most priests. As I write these words, the Pope and some of the bishops, more than forty years later, are still kidding themselves into thinking that if they are clear enough about the Church’s teachings, we lay folk will put our marriages in jeopardy at their say-so.
You don’t have to be married very long to know that the frictions and the tensions of the common life in which a man and a woman occupy the same house and the same bed are only tolerable when the pain can be healed and the love renewed in physical pleasure. From inside a marriage that fact is so evident, so “natural,” so undeniable, that you wonder how anyone can doubt it.
Even if your wife is a splendid woman such as my Rosemarie, maybe especially if she is a Rosemarie, you simply have to love her physically or you go out of your mind with tension, conflict, avoidance, and frustration.
If the Pope doesn’t like that, he should take it up with the God who made us that way.
“Fifthly?”
“Fifthly, I love you, Charles C.”
“Then take off your robe, it’s too hot out here anyway.”
“You’re the one who is too hot.” But she obeyed my command.
Bikinis in those days, as I have said, were considerably more substantial than they are now. But there was still a lot of Rosemarie, nicely emphasized by white fabric and long black hair. It was such a comfortable swamp. Why not stay here all summer?
“Thank you, Rosemarie.” I would wait a little while longer before joining her on the swing; a little more anticipation seemed appropriate.
“For taking off my robe?”
“That too. But mostly for lowering the boom. I would never have had the nerve, not in a million years. I’m glad my wife did.”
“I was scared”—her voice caught—“you’d be mad.”
It was a perfect time and occasion, was it not, for talking about the remaining problems on our marriageproblem agenda: her drinking habits and the mystery (in my head anyway) of her mother’s death?
I thought about it, wondered how to raise the issue, and then, not nearly as brave as my wife, I postponed talk about her occasional drinking bouts to another occasion. It was a loss of nerve that would cost us both dearly.
“Are you really going to stay with us all summer?” she asked.
“Looking at you this moment, young woman”—I rose, walked to the swing, and sat beside her—“I think I’ll find it very hard even to drive into New Buffalo to buy the paper.”
“It’s delivered during the summer.” Her voice was soft now with desire. “Let me take off your shirt.”
The screens around our deck provided sufficient privacy to protect us from any voyeurs who might be off-shore in cruisers watching us with binoculars.
“I knew, deep down, you wouldn’t be angry.” Her lips roamed lightly over my body, rewarding me for my co-operation.
“I’ll never be angry when you say truths I need to hear.” I unhooked the back of her bikini top. “I can’t promise that you won’t have to do it again.”
“It’ll be easier next time. … The little slob left some nourishment in there if you want it.”
I turned her head and looked deep into her eyes. It was a fantasy that, I would learn later, many, if not most, husbands and wives have, but which few are able to discuss: nursing your own husband/son and being nursed by your own wife/mother.
“You’re sure?”
“Please,” she begged me, her back arching in anticipation. “I really want you to.”
My lips circled her salty nipple and gently drew on them, sweet warm fluid slipped into my mouth. Rosemarie moaned softly. I felt like I was floating on a sweet-smelling, snow white cloud. I could stay here forever.
She held my head against her breasts. There was no milk left but I did not want to leave. Not ever. Our renewed love was sealed. We would always be together.
Rosemarie’s fingers began to fumble with my belt buckle.
The renewal of married love that glorious summer was profound and powerful. Unfortunately, it was not strong enough to resist the storms that would assault it later on in the year.
In our bedroom—to which we had eventually repaired—lying peacefully and happily in my arms, Rosemarie continued her litany.
“Sixthly—”
“I thought we were finished.”
“No, but you seemed too preoccupied with other matters to listen.”
“All right.” With my fingertips I skimmed her lips, back and forth, several times.
“I can’t talk if you keep doing that.”
“Sixthly … ?”
“Sixthly”—she drew a deep breath—“we’re flying to Germany at the end of August. You have a contract to do an update of The Conquered. A big, big advance. They’ll print your old pictures with the new ones and you can write a long text too. It’ll be a major work, right? You can put in all that stuff from your dissertation about the Marshall Plan—which by the way we’re going to finish real soon, are we not?”
“Yes, ma’am. Before Christmas.”
“Labor Day. And then they’ve planned an important exhibition of all your work. So we have to go, don’t we? I mean we’ve never traveled on the continent together …”
“Where”—my heart was sinking toward the bottom of Lake Michigan because I already knew the answer—“is the show?”
“In that cute little city where they make the Benzes, you know, Stuttgart.”