Love is the world's infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit
up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose
smelling faintly of blood.
[ Tony Kushner, THE ILLUSION ]
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When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to
begin with. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of the head I saw,
and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard
corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a
finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily.
I'd know her head anywhere.
And what's inside it. I think of that, too: her mind. Her brain, all those
coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic
centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and
sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts. What are you
thinking, Amy? The question I've asked most often during our marriage, if not
out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I suppose these questions
stormcloud over every marriage: What are you thinking? How are you
feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?
My eyes flipped open at exactly six a.m. This was no avian fluttering of the
lashes, no gentle blink toward consciousness. The awakening was
mechanical. A spooky ventriloquist-dummy click of the lids: The world is
black and then, showtime! 6-0-0 the clock said – in my face, first thing I saw.
6-0-0. It felt different. I rarely woke at such a rounded time. I was a man of
jagged risings: 8:43, 11:51, 9:26. My life was alarmless.
At that exact moment, 6-0-0, the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks,
revealing its full summer angry-God self. Its reflection flared across the river
toward our house, a long, blaring finger aimed at me through our frail
bedroom curtains. Accusing: You have been seen. You will be seen.
I wallowed in bed, which was our New York bed in our new house, which
we still called the new house, even though we'd been back here for two years.
It's a rented house right along the Mississippi River, a house that screams
Suburban Nouveau Riche, the kind of place I aspired to as a kid from my
split-level, shag-carpet side of town. The kind of house that is immediately
familiar: a generically grand, unchallenging, new, new, new house that my
wife would – and did – detest.
'Should I remove my soul before I come inside?' Her first line upon
arrival. It had been a compromise: Amy demanded we rent, not buy, in my little Missouri hometown, in her firm hope that we wouldn't be stuck here
long. But the only houses for rent were clustered in this failed development: a
miniature ghost town of bank-owned, recession-busted, price-reduced
mansions, a neighborhood that closed before it ever opened. It was a
compromise, but Amy didn't see it that way, not in the least. To Amy, it was a
punishing whim on my part, a nasty, selfish twist of the knife. I would drag
her, caveman-style, to a town she had aggressively avoided, and make her live
in the kind of house she used to mock. I suppose it's not a compromise if only
one of you considers it such, but that was what our compromises tended to
look like. One of us was always angry. Amy, usually.
Do not blame me for this particular grievance, Amy. The Missouri
Grievance. Blame the economy, blame bad luck, blame my parents, blame
your parents, blame the Internet, blame people who use the Internet. I used to
be a writer. I was a writer who wrote about TV and movies and books. Back
when people read things on paper, back when anyone cared about what I
thought. I'd arrived in New York in the late '90s, the last gasp of the glory
days, although no one knew it then. New York was packed with writers, real
writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This
was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the
publishing world – throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash,
oh quite cute, it definitely won't kill us in the night. Think about it: a time
when newly graduated college kids could come to New York and get paid to
write. We had no clue that we were embarking on careers that would vanish
within a decade.
I had a job for eleven years and then I didn't, it was that fast. All around
the country, magazines began shuttering, succumbing to a sudden infection
brought on by the busted economy. Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring
novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don't work quick enough
to blog or link or tweet, basically old, stubborn blowhards) were through. We
were like women's hat makers or buggy-whip manufacturers: Our time was
done. Three weeks after I got cut loose, Amy lost her job, such as it was.
(Now I can feel Amy looking over my shoulder, smirking at the time I've
spent discussing my career, my misfortune, and dismissing her experience in
one sentence. That, she would tell you, is typical. Just like Nick, she would
say. It was a refrain of hers: Just like Nick to … and whatever followed,
whatever was just like me, was bad.) Two jobless grown-ups, we spent weeks
wandering around our Brooklyn brownstone in socks and pajamas, ignoring
the future, strewing unopened mail across tables and sofas, eating ice cream at
ten a.m. and taking thick afternoon naps.
Then one day the phone rang. My twin sister was on the other end. Margo
had moved back home after her own New York layoff a year before – the girl
is one step ahead of me in everything, even shitty luck. Margo, calling from
good ole North Carthage, Missouri, from the house where we grew up, and as
I listened to her voice, I saw her at age ten, with a dark cap of hair and overall
shorts, sitting on our grandparents' back dock, her body slouched over like an
old pillow, her skinny legs dangling in the water, watching the river flow over
fish-white feet, so intently, utterly self-possessed even as a child.
Go's voice was warm and crinkly even as she gave this cold news: Our
indomitable mother was dying. Our dad was nearly gone – his (nasty) mind,
his (miserable) heart, both murky as he meandered toward the great gray
beyond. But it looked like our mother would beat him there. About six
months, maybe a year, she had. I could tell that Go had gone to meet with the
doctor by herself, taken her studious notes in her slovenly handwriting, and
she was teary as she tried to decipher what she'd written. Dates and doses.
'Well, fuck, I have no idea what this says, is it a nine? Does that even
make sense?' she said, and I interrupted. Here was a task, a purpose, held out
on my sister's palm like a plum. I almost cried with relief.
'I'll come back, Go. We'll move back home. You shouldn't have to do this
all by yourself.'
She didn't believe me. I could hear her breathing on the other end.
'I'm serious, Go. Why not? There's nothing here.'
A long exhale. 'What about Amy?'
That is what I didn't take long enough to consider. I simply assumed I
would bundle up my New York wife with her New York interests, her New
York pride, and remove her from her New York parents – leave the frantic,
thrilling futureland of Manhattan behind – and transplant her to a little town
on the river in Missouri, and all would be fine.
I did not yet understand how foolish, how optimistic, how, yes, just like
Nick I was for thinking this. The misery it would lead to.
'Amy will be fine. Amy …' Here was where I should have said, 'Amy
loves Mom.' But I couldn't tell Go that Amy loved our mother, because after
all that time, Amy still barely knew our mother. Their few meetings had left
them both baffled. Amy would dissect the conversations for days after – 'And
what did she mean by …,' – as if my mother were some ancient peasant
tribeswoman arriving from the tundra with an armful of raw yak meat and some buttons for bartering, trying to get something from Amy that wasn't on
offer.
Amy didn't care to know my family, didn't want to know my birthplace,
and yet for some reason, I thought moving home would be a good idea.
My morning breath warmed the pillow, and I changed the subject in my mind.
Today was not a day for second-guessing or regret, it was a day for doing.
Downstairs, I could hear the return of a long-lost sound: Amy making
breakfast. Banging wooden cupboards (rump-thump!), rattling containers of
tin and glass (ding-ring!), shuffling and sorting a collection of metal pots and
iron pans (ruzz-shuzz!). A culinary orchestra tuning up, clattering vigorously
toward the finale, a cake pan drumrolling along the floor, hitting the wall with
a cymballic crash. Something impressive was being created, probably a crepe,
because crepes are special, and today Amy would want to cook something
special.
It was our five-year anniversary.
I walked barefoot to the edge of the steps and stood listening, working my
toes into the plush wall-to-wall carpet Amy detested on principle, as I tried to
decide whether I was ready to join my wife. Amy was in the kitchen,
oblivious to my hesitation. She was humming something melancholy and
familiar. I strained to make it out – a folk song? a lullabye? – and then
realized it was the theme to M.A.S.H. Suicide is painless. I went downstairs.
I hovered in the doorway, watching my wife. Her yellow-butter hair was
pulled up, the hank of ponytail swinging cheerful as a jumprope, and she was
sucking distractedly on a burnt fingertip, humming around it. She hummed to
herself because she was an unrivaled botcher of lyrics. When we were first
dating, a Genesis song came on the radio: 'She seems to have an invisible
touch, yeah.' And Amy crooned instead, 'She takes my hat and puts it on the
top shelf.' When I asked her why she'd ever think her lyrics were remotely,
possibly, vaguely right, she told me she always thought the woman in the
song truly loved the man because she put his hat on the top shelf. I knew I
liked her then, really liked her, this girl with an explanation for everything.
There's something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling
utterly cold.
Amy peered at the crepe sizzling in the pan and licked something off her
wrist. She looked triumphant, wifely. If I took her in my arms, she would
smell like berries and powdered sugar.
When she spied me lurking there in grubby boxers, my hair in full Heat Miser spike, she leaned against the kitchen counter and said, 'Well, hello, handsome.'
Bile and dread inched up my throat. I thought to myself: Okay, go.
I was very late getting to work. My sister and I had done a foolish thing when
we both moved back home. We had done what we always talked about doing.
We opened a bar. We borrowed money from Amy to do this, eighty thousand
dollars, which was once nothing to Amy but by then was almost everything. I
swore I would pay her back, with interest. I would not be a man who
borrowed from his wife – I could feel my dad twisting his lips at the very
idea. Well, there are all kinds of men, his most damning phrase, the second
half left unsaid, and you are the wrong kind.
But truly, it was a practical decision, a smart business move. Amy and I
both needed new careers; this would be mine. She would pick one someday,
or not, but in the meantime, here was an income, made possible by the last of
Amy's trust fund. Like the McMansion I rented, the bar featured symbolically
in my childhood memories – a place where only grown-ups go, and do
whatever grown-ups do. Maybe that's why I was so insistent on buying it
after being stripped of my livelihood. It's a reminder that I am, after all, an
adult, a grown man, a useful human being, even though I lost the career that
made me all these things. I won't make that mistake again: The once plentiful
herds of magazine writers would continue to be culled – by the Internet, by
the recession, by the American public, who would rather watch TV or play
video games or electronically inform friends that, like, rain sucks! But there's
no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will
always want a drink.
Our bar is a corner bar with a haphazard, patchwork aesthetic. Its best
feature is a massive Victorian backbar, dragon heads and angel faces
emerging from the oak – an extravagant work of wood in these shitty plastic
days. The remainder of the bar is, in fact, shitty, a showcase of the shabbiest
design offerings of every decade: an Eisenhower-era linoleum floor, the edges
turned up like burnt toast; dubious wood-paneled walls straight from a '70s
home-porn video; halogen floor lamps, an accidental tribute to my 1990s
dorm room. The ultimate effect is strangely homey – it looks less like a bar
than someone's benignly neglected fixer-upper. And jovial: We share a
parking lot with the local bowling alley, and when our door swings wide, the
clatter of strikes applauds the customer's entrance.
We named the bar The Bar. 'People will think we're ironic instead of
creatively bankrupt,' my sister reasoned.
Yes, we thought we were being clever New Yorkers – that the name was a
joke no one else would really get, not get like we did. Not meta-get. We pictured the locals scrunching their noses: Why'd you name it The Bar? But
our first customer, a gray-haired woman in bifocals and a pink jogging suit,
said, 'I like the name. Like in Breakfast at Tif any's and Audrey Hepburn's cat
was named Cat.'
We felt much less superior after that, which was a good thing.
I pulled into the parking lot. I waited until a strike erupted from the
bowling alley – thank you, thank you, friends – then stepped out of the car. I
admired the surroundings, still not bored with the broken-in view: the squatty
blond-brick post office across the street (now closed on Saturdays), the
unassuming beige office building just down the way (now closed, period).
The town wasn't prosperous, not anymore, not by a long shot. Hell, it wasn't
even original, being one of two Carthage, Missouris – ours is technically
North Carthage, which makes it sound like a twin city, although it's hundreds
of miles from the other and the lesser of the two: a quaint little 1950s town
that bloated itself into a basic midsize suburb and dubbed it progress. Still, it
was where my mom grew up and where she raised me and Go, so it had some
history. Mine, at least.
As I walked toward the bar across the concrete-and-weed parking lot, I
looked straight down the road and saw the river. That's what I've always
loved about our town: We aren't built on some safe bluff overlooking the
Mississippi – we are on the Mississippi. I could walk down the road and step
right into the sucker, an easy three-foot drop, and be on my way to Tennessee.
Every building downtown bears hand-drawn lines from where the river hit
during the Flood of '61, '75, '84, '93, '07, '08, '11. And so on.
The river wasn't swollen now, but it was running urgently, in strong ropy
currents. Moving apace with the river was a long single-file line of men, eyes
aimed at their feet, shoulders tense, walking steadfastly nowhere. As I
watched them, one suddenly looked up at me, his face in shadow, an oval
blackness. I turned away.
I felt an immediate, intense need to get inside. By the time I'd gone
twenty feet, my neck bubbled with sweat. The sun was still an angry eye in
the sky. You have been seen.
My gut twisted, and I moved quicker. I needed a drink.