Living Out Loud (11 page)

I
watched
Gone With the Wind
on television recently. It’s my favorite movie. It’s hokey, it’s predictable, the color’s lurid, I throw balled-up tissues at Olivia de Haviland when she’s on screen. I love it. Each time I see it I notice something new.

This time, I noticed that in some ways it perfectly illustrates one of the great truths about men. Most men fall into one of two categories for the purpose of relationships: Husband or Boyfriend. These are not literal classifications based on marital status, just the best I can do. (I once classified them as the Good Guy and the Louse, which was an oversimplification made when I was depressed, menwise, and before I had admitted that I found the Lice much more interesting than their nobler brothers.)

Ashley Wilkes is a classic Husband: upright, dependable, prone neither to wild partying nor to gross flirtation. He will show up for dinner on
time and be the kind of father a kid can depend on for lots of meaty talks about life and honor.

Rhett Butler is, of course, vintage Boyfriend: entertaining, unprincipled, with a roving eye and a wickedly expressive brow above it. I’ve watched Scarlett turn around and see him for the first time at the bottom of the staircase at Twelve Oaks plantation at least a hundred times. “He looks as if—as if he knows what I look like without my shimmy,” she says, one of the few insightful things she says in the first half of the film, before she eats the radish and swears that she’ll never be hungry again. And still my heart stops and I have trouble breathing. Give a damn? You bet I do.

This is because, unlike the obtuse Scarlett, I have never had any difficulty deciding between the Boyfriend and the Husband. Perhaps it is the way I was raised. My mother told me I should marry someone who could dance and who would make me laugh. She also said I should find somebody who wouldn’t bore me. She never said a word about a good provider. It was good advice, as far as it went, but since my mother had married a Boyfriend, it only went so far.

Of course, I married a Boyfriend, too, fell for him like a ton of bricks the first time I saw him wearing a sport coat with blue jeans and a wicked grin. I can’t say I’ve never regretted it, because there have been times when I’ve wanted to turn him in for Ward Cleaver. But the truth is that if I had it to do over again, I would do it exactly the same way.

It’s sometimes hard to accept this, although God knows why. Boyfriends rarely pretend to be Husbands. But lots of women fall for someone who is the life of the party, a dancing fool who has a weak spot for women, and then become enraged when they find themselves married to someone who is the life of the party, a dancing fool who has a weak spot for women. They expect matrimony to turn Jack Nicholson into Alan Alda. Yet they know that if they woke up in bed one morning with
Alan Alda, they’d soon yearn with all their hearts for just a little
Sturm und Drang
, a little rock ’n’ roll.

I don’t mean to sound so down on Husbands. I think these are good times for them, with women marrying later in life and actively seeking stability and maturity in a man. Teenage girls have no interest in anything but Boyfriends, and women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number. But women who have been around a bit are, I think, more likely to see the virtues in a Husband.

A Husband provides a shoulder to lean on; when you lean on a Boyfriend’s shoulder he may very well say, “You’re wrinkling my jacket.” You know what you are getting with a Husband, and at a time in your life when you’ve had too many unpleasant surprises—a man who demanded a commitment and then moved to L.A. the minute he got one, another who insisted he wanted to get married and then married his ex-girlfriend the day after you split—knowledge is power. You think you know what you are getting with a Boyfriend, but they’re a little like kaleidoscopes: infinite permutations, many of them garish.

Men can work their own alchemy on the mix, too. The most obvious manifestation of the much ballyhooed midlife crisis is that the longtime Husband turns into a Boyfriend, starts driving a red car, wearing leather pants, and talking knowledgeably about the kinds of bands that generally hit the Top 10 with songs with only three words in them (“Yeah,” “Love,” and “Baby”). There are also a few documented cases of Boyfriends turning into Husbands, although not many. These can usually be linked to career changes, promotions, and fatherhood. (Even Rhett started to act pretty straight after Bonnie was born.)

My husband, a bred-in-the-bone Boyfriend, was terrified of this aspect of having children, convinced that on the morning
after our first son was born he would awaken with a drawerful of pajamas and cardigan sweaters and the urge to say things like, “Now, son, I think we should have a little talk about that.” Not a chance. His most recent foray into fatherhood was to teach both his children the words to “You Give Love a Bad Name.” The eldest can also play air guitar along with the song. On the one hand, I hate “You Give Love a Bad Name,” although my children sing it rather well. On the other hand, my husband would not think twice about scandalizing a Confederate ball by bidding $150 in gold to dance with me. And, like Scarlett, when someone said, “She will not consider it, sir,” I know what I would say without a moment’s hesitation: “Oh, yes, I will.”

E
very family has its divisions. There are the people who like white meat and the people who like dark meat, the people who like the country and the people who like the city, the people who like showers and the people who like baths, the people who like electric blankets and the people who know deep down that some night some quirk of wiring is going to stun them like a bug flying into one of those purple bug lights.

Each summer my thoughts turn to still another division between family members, the one between people who like air-conditioning and people who don’t. Such a division exists right here within my own family, in this very house, which is, as I write this, about 7 billion degrees Fahrenheit. Hotter than the sun’s surface. Hotter than the planet Mars. Hotter than Michael Jackson was a scant few years ago.

I am the person in this family who thinks that air-conditioning is one of the more wonderful
modern inventions, right up there with hot rollers and Cuisinarts. I think air-conditioning feels good in the summer, just as heat (not, I repeat not, electric-blanket heat) feels good in the winter.

The other adult in this family is opposed to air-conditioning. The other adult is six feet tall and wears a tie. Most important, he is a lawyer, so he can make almost anything sound at once logical and abstruse. So far, he has won. The children nap in their tiny saunas, the A-B-C wallpaper peeling and blistering. There is perspiration on my computer screen.

This has put a strain on the family. In the car, which has air-conditioning only because it was bought off the lot, options included, the children are startled from their first comfortable sleep of the season by my voice, screaming, as we pass a hardware store:

“BUY AN AIR-CONDITIONER!”

No reply. We speed down the highway.

The other adult will insist that he has already bought an air-conditioner. It cools one floor of a four-story row house. He says he is not opposed to air-conditioning qua air-conditioning, just air-conditioning in rooms where people sleep: if I start to doze off in the living room it becomes out-of-bounds.

In an apartment across the street one of our neighbors got laryngitis sleeping in an air-conditioned room. “If you have the slightest iota of humanity,” I told her, “you will not say anything to him.” She nodded. She couldn’t speak anyhow. Inevitably, the other adult in our family ran into her and tried to engage her in conversation. When he came inside the house (as hot as a mirror lying on the ground at the equator) he was smiling. “Told you,” he said warmly. I appealed to my mother-in-law. The other adult said that if no air-conditioning had been good enough for her sons when they were little, no air-conditioning was good enough for ours.

“This is a lie,” my mother-in-law said coolly, sitting in the living room of a condominium that has central air-conditioning. “In the beginning we had one air-conditioner downstairs. On hot nights the boys would come down and sleep on the floor. Later we got air-conditioners for the entire house.”

“Later they bought a fake Christmas tree, too,” my husband said hotly, when confronted with this.

You may be saying to yourself, Hey, why doesn’t she go out and buy an air-conditioner herself? She just sent $197 to Benetton for fall fashions that are too young-looking for her. She has money. Don’t tell me she’s waiting for (chortle, snicker, frown) MALE APPROVAL?

Well, she doesn’t go out and buy one because she can’t get the thing into the house, O.K.? It weighs a ton. I practiced on the one we already have. I can’t lift even one end of it. And I am up to forty pounds on the Nautilus biceps-triceps sequence. Otherwise I would buy one, stick it in the window, and sweat out the other adult’s remarks for the next twenty, twenty-five-years.

I thought of appealing to other men for help, but here are my options: my brothers (read my husband’s brothers-in-law), my brothers-in-law (my husband’s brothers), his friends (right), my friends (who are also his friends). I know what would happen. They come in, they stand around hitting one another’s upper arms and shuffling their feet and making male bonding moves and perspiring profusely, and finally some brave soul says: “Yo. We don’t think he’d like it, you know?” Then they drink my beer and leave.

So here I am surrounded by fans, their big dull blades pushing warm air from one end of the house to another. It occurs to me that I missed my big chance. Twice I’ve been pregnant in this kind of weather, a water balloon with feet, and I did not take the opportunity to complain enough. Now I have no
leverage. The children are good-tempered and they like to watch the fans go round and round. The older one thinks sweat is fun because it tastes like salt.

I think back to the days when I was renovating this old house and the plumber was putting in the new furnace. “Baseboard heat?” I remember him saying. “You could put in central air.” I looked around at my moldings and said “Nah.” Now every time I see his truck go by I want to leap out of the window of this house (as hot as those chilies lying in wait in Szechuan food) and yell “COME BACK.”

The other adult in the family drinks a beer and watches the ball game. “There are only three or four days of the year when you really need air-conditioning,” he says evenly. I fan myself with a copy of
Vogue
and wonder if climate control is grounds for divorce in this state. He also likes electric blankets.