Love Me (29 page)

On Memorial Day, I drove north with Iris, her father, and Uncle Gene and Uncle Lee to put in the dock at the cabin. The water was freezing cold and I being the youngest male was delegated to wade out up to my testicles and a few inches beyond, carrying one end of the dock and setting it on the iron posts sunk into the lake bed, my legs numb, my nuts, too, and fasten the bolts onto the posts. “Atta boy!” her father cried. My ceremonial welcome back into the family fold after the years of wandering in New York. He looked around at the beach, the dock, the old white frame cabin, and recited:

“There’s no running water yet,” Lee told me, “in case you were wondering.” This reminded him of the joke about the Norwegian bachelor who had no running water, and the lady asked him, “But how do you bathe?” He said, “I just take a bar of soap and go out in the crick and wash up.” She said, “But what about in the winter?” He said, “Well, the winter isn’t that long.”

There was some feast day at the cathedral when we came back to St. Paul, the Knights of Columbus standing around by the side door in their plumed hats and their sashes and red satin knee pants and the shoes with silver buckles and the swords. “Let’s make love,” I said. So we did. Our fourth time since my return. I was marking the notches on my scabbard.

 

 

 

O Anxious, this is no dumber than the human predicament itself. I have taken so many wrong turns and been so careless with precious things and managed to lose, or break, or leave out in the rain so much that I loved. And now I would rather walk barefoot across broken glass than be married to anyone other than my old lady. Call Mr. Roxanne and tell him you neglected to give him his bonus jumbo box of buttered popcorn and ask if you may deliver that now. He’ll say yes. Buy the box of popcorn and take it to his house. Ring the bell. Smile when he opens the door. There is so much in a smile. Put something in yours.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Faithful, When you entertain jealousy, my dear, you are taking a 300-pound dog for a walk and there’s no telling where it may lead you, especially when you’re on an island. Go swimming naked in the cold, cold sea and that’ll get this off your mind. Many men have gone to clubs where young women are paid to dress up as rabbits. Your husband is a principled man who believes in the rabbithood of men, too. Let it be. Put the pictures back. Send a beam across the wave.

We went to the Guntzel family cabin for a week in July and Aunt Marjorie and Uncle Gene were there, and Lee and Florence, and Reverend and the Missus, Iris’s folks. We took off the sheet of plywood nailed over the front door and I walked in and got tears in my eyes to see it after all these years. The old wooden rocking chairs on the screened porch. The blue linoleum with Egyptian temple border. The woodstove and dish towels with cross-stitched flowers and the saying 2 GOOD 2 BE 4 GOTTEN, the ancient cooking pans, the totally mismatched collection of knives and forks and spoons. The faint aroma of fish and motor oil. The plaque on the wall: “The more you complain, the longer God makes you live.” Grandma’s white wicker chair, the porch swing where Iris and I used to drink gin and tonics in our youth. Gene had grown a mustache. A major news item.
CERAMIC TILE SALESMAN SPORTS FACIAL GROWTH: DETAILS AT TEN.
A simple gray mustache. “Forget to shave?” asked Lee, the family comedian. The Rev popped open a beer, for himself—another news item—and offered me one. I shook my head. We sat on the porch. Gene passed around pictures of their trip to Rome, the Piazza del Popolo and the Forum and the piazza in front of St. Peter‘s, each with Marjorie standing to the side, like a guide, which reminded Lee of the big bathtub in their hotel room in Naples (Florida) and he and Florence climbed in and he accidentally hit a switch plate with his elbow and the water foamed up, frothing and churning, and he leaped up in a panic and knocked over a bottle of bubble bath and the foam filled the room and spilled over the balcony. “It just got so we couldn’t take the winters anymore,” Florence explained to me. She complained about her grandchildren, who all carry pagers, and the family has twelve different phone numbers between the five of them and there’s a daily schedule on the fridge as long as your arm and the parents bring home bags of work every night. Florence sighed and shook her head. Lee looked at me and said, “Nice to have you back. Guess you got New York out of your system, huh?” He paused one beat and said, “You know what they say: getting married for sex is like flying to London for the free peanuts and pretzels.” I enjoyed their company: men who knew how to set the timing on a Ford V-8, who knew what Anzio was like, and how to rid your tomatoes of bugs, and how the big grain elevators were built without interior or exterior bracing. There was no slander in their conversation, not much gossip, a general reticence about themselves, but if you inquired about how to lay concrete, they might give you a whole seminar. Optimists. “My father, Hilmer, bought a brand-new Buick for himself when he was 94, and he got the extended warranty,” said the Rev.
“
So you two going to get hitched again?
”
he said.
“
I wasn’t aware we got divorced,
”
said Iris. Marjorie said that the New Year’s Eve before she and Gene got married, he fell asleep on the couch and snored so loud it scared the tar out of her. “I never heard anything like that except at the picture show,” she said.
“
I didn’t know if I could sleep next to that for the rest of my life or not!” A tremendous thunderstorm rolled in, black clouds boiling up like mountains to the west, and buckets of rain and volleys of thunder and lightning, every tree in the woods lit up clearly, the line of little white cottages. “Wettest June in history,” said the Rev. “It was in the paper.” Over breakfast, he read the Scripture verse for the day from the
Our Daily Bread
calendar—“Consider the lilies of the field: they toil not and they spin not and yet I say unto you that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. If God shall so clothe the flowers, how much more shall he clothe you, O ye of little faith. Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of myself”—which nobody there believed for one minute, but it sounded nice, like something a person ought to consider someday.

As soon as we got back to St. Paul, I went to Dayton’s to buy some raiment and rode the escalator and it crisscrossed with the one coming down and there was Katherine riding down, she didn’t look at me, her hair was dyed red, she wore a tight black miniskirt. I guessed she was still with Brian. I was wondering when Iris and I would get back together. I hated to think that we might not. The gains in life come so slowly and the losses come on suddenly. You work for decades to get where you want to be and it can all be wiped out in one moment when you check in the rearview mirror to see if you need a haircut and you don’t see the lumber truck pull out in front of you. I got a haircut. I fixed supper for her. Bought Sri Lankan oregano and Slovenian cinnamon at the spice shop and added them to the tuna hotdish, the manna God gave to His people in the Minnesota wilderness, and we ate it, and afterward we made love, our kisses reminiscent of lands we had never seen.

I lay thinking about oregano and she murmured, “I have to go to sleep.”

“Go to sleep then.”

“Good night, Larry,” she said, sitting up. “Thanks for making love with me.” She gave me a kiss, the kind that leaves no doubt:
There’s the door, buster.

So I was dismissed.

I drove up the hill, Summit Avenue, feeling no less exalted, determined to press my case.

I will say in my own defense that Iris needs me quite a bit. Yes indeed. These liberals are in need of lightening up. Iris can sit drinking fine coffee on a sun-speckled day in June with the nectar of lilacs and cut grass in her nostrils and still brood about the unmet needs of the American people and work herself into a froth of quiet desperation. She needs a guy like me who will flirt with her, steal a kiss, coax her into bed, tell her the joke about two penguins on the ice floe, sing “Some intertwined centipedes do it/In the winter even Swedes do it/ Let’s do it, let’s fall in love”.

I took her to lunch. She brought along a book. Frank Frisbie’s
Fair Henry.
The annotated edition. “There is so much in it,” she said. “It’s like a fable. I’m absolutely astonished. Someone we know, an old classmate, and here he’s written an American classic.” My heart burned. Dammit, woman. We are a marriage, every marriage is a conspiracy. Disinclude jerks like him and adhere to your old lover here.

“Why are you so quiet?” she said.

I denied that I was quiet. I pointed out that we were having a conversation about various things including Frank Frisbie and his book that he wrote quite some time ago and that she was gaga over.

“I just wish we could be friends,” she said. “Do you still want to be married?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Do you? You don’t seem happy.” And then she told me her big news.

“I’m happy,” she said. “I quit MAMA, you know. A year ago.”

I didn’t know.

“
Too much monkey business. Talk, talk, talk. Too many unnecessary meetings. The paperwork. Every time you turn around, there’s another form to be filled out and they get longer and you look down at the bottom, it says, ‘Penalty for misrepresentation, a fine of $10,000 or six months in jail, or both,’ I love the ‘or both’ part. And of course if you actually read the whole thing line for line, you’d never get any work done. And my weekends started getting eaten up. It was time to move on. So I went into massage therapy.”

Silence.

“Didn’t I tell you all this?”

Nope.

“I thought I told you.”

I said, “This isn’t the sort of massage where there are colored flashing lights around the doorway and you wear a pink negligee—”

“How do you know about that?”

“I have friends. They tell me things.”

No, it wasn’t that. It was the sort of massage you go to school for nine months to learn and get a license and people come in for an hour, mostly ladies, and you turn down the lights and put on a Chilean flute CD and they lie on the table under the sheet and you tell them to take two deep cleansing breaths and you go around the table twanging their muscle groups and pressing the connective tissue and getting the lymph nodes pumping.

“The real benefit is just that people get to relax. It’s siesta time. People pay me to give them permission to stop working for an hour. And people need to be touched. They crave it.”

I said nothing.

She looked at me for a long moment. “Are you seeing someone else?” she said.

I am a lonesome monk in a cloister, kneeling on the cold stone floor, I said.

She talked about trust and how fragile it is.

“
You can’t eat trust for breakfast,
”
I said.
“
You need me. I love you.”

“You’ve changed so much,” she said.

“I haven’t changed one bit,” I said. And I snatched a fly out of the air and popped it in my mouth and ate it. An old trick and a good tactic for changing the subject. She rolled her eyes in disgust but we went to the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra concert the next Saturday night and they did the Bach
Magnificat
with the St. Olaf Choir and it stirred something in us, some old ardor, and I wrangled her into bed, and that was sweetness itself, and then quite amazing, two old veterans quickened by such sharp desire—mounting up—spurring each other on—intoxicated by the familiar touch and smell, and as we lay afterward, naked, at rest, she said, “That was lovely.”