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.