Summerlong (5 page)

Marriage is a small container.

—Jane Smiley,
The Age of Grief

Three times in the course of a long, mostly happy, but occasionally uncertain marriage, Don and Claire had considered, at least elliptically, the possibility of a divorce. The first time this happened was only six months into the marriage; they were twenty-three and they’d been up late arguing after drinking late into the evening with friends in the Village. This was the only year of their married life in which they had lived somewhere other than Iowa. New York, where they had gone simply because Claire had missed it and had cried on their wedding night because she missed it and all her New York friends so much, seemed like a long part of their shared history, but really, it was now just a sliver of it.

The argument itself had started during sex—Don could not remember exactly what had been said, but it involved the accusation of boredom or dissatisfaction or sleepiness—and he remembered, at some point in what became a long night of endless, edgy bickering, just before dawn, Claire, sitting at the edge of the bed, staring out at the dimmed building across the alley, had said, “Maybe we were too young to get married.”

“I think so,” Don said, though he didn’t think that at all.

“Do you think people will laugh about it? If we get divorced?” Claire said. “I think a lot of people—even my own mother—thought this was a big mistake.”

Don had not known this, though he suspected it. By twenty-three, in rural Iowa, you were plenty old enough to be married,
and none of his family or childhood friends would have batted a proverbial eye; but Claire, having been raised in Manhattan among a crowd of academics and artists and activists, understood marriage in an entirely different way. It was what you did when everything else on your life list had been accomplished or was at least under way. What united them in their view of marriage was this: their parents, both sets of them, had been miserable with each other and had ultimately divorced, and so there was not exactly a good road map for them to follow.

This had made the idea of marrying young a little, well, thrillingly rebellious; Don remembered how sometimes Claire’s voice would rise with a kind of glee when she would tell her New York friends—
Well, I’m getting married. Yes, to a guy from Iowa!

But they’d been fighting a lot, already, less than a year into the marriage, and Don knew this was probably normal, but then again so was divorce.

“Would we care if people thought this was a big mistake?” Don said. “I mean, do you care what people think?”

“I suppose not,” she said.

“I never do. I never care what anyone thinks.”

“How can that be true?” she said, her voice rising almost violently. “Everyone cares what people think. Even people who say, ‘I don’t care what people think,’ want other people to know they don’t care. So in a sense, they are caring what other people think just by saying that they don’t care what people think.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Fuck off.”

“I never understand you,” he said.

“Because I married a fucking idiot.”

He remembered she went to sleep on the armchair then—it was a small studio apartment and so he could still see her from the bed—and in the morning, he woke up with a terrible headache and she was next to him, spooned against his back, her hand on his hip. The apartment was alight with morning, though those
windows never got quite enough light to be impressive, but right around nine
A
.
M
. they sparkled with it.

He stirred but did not turn toward her.

“Do you want me to call a lawyer?” she whispered, her eyes still closed.

“It’s Sunday. Let’s talk to a waiter who’s serving brunch instead.”

They finished the unfinished sex of the previous night then, and never did call a lawyer. Sex had solved many of their fights in the past, and Don supposed this was not uncommon for couples, though it was the kind of thing you could never really be sure about, the sex lives of others. You could wonder about it, as he often did. Claire was the only woman he’d ever slept with and he wondered how it might be different with other women just a few months into their marriage. This too may be normal, but no one would admit it.

Then, that Monday, she received a letter accepting her into graduate school.

“It looks like we’re going back to Iowa,” she said. She was crying tears of joy and despair all at once.

Iowa! Who knew the pull it would have on them, for better or for worse?

The second time the possibility of a divorce shadowed their marriage was shortly after Bryan was born. Perpetually sleep deprived, sexless, unshowered, and, yes, back in Iowa, they fought an epic fight that began like this: Don had lit a match after using the bathroom in their small apartment, hoping to mask the smell of shit, and he’d left the match on the edge of the sink where he’d already left a week’s worth of post-shit matches. Claire had gone into the bathroom after him and called him a horrible wreck of a slob and begun weeping. “I feel so lonely” was one of the only things he could understand through the sobbing.

There is nothing harder to hear in a marriage than one partner saying to the other, “I’m lonely here.”

For three or four days, they didn’t speak to each other unless it was to communicate something about the baby (
I changed his diaper, he just ate
)
.
Don worked during the day—he’d drive to Grinnell and work construction for an uncle there—and then he’d come home just after five, they’d eat a rushed supper together, and Claire would leave with a large travel mug of cheap coffee and work on campus until one or two in the morning. On one of those nights, after waking with a crying baby, Don Lowry made the decision that he had made a mistake.

Claire walked in, looking exhausted, smelling of beer and cigarettes, and found Don sitting in the armchair, staring out the window at the dark softball diamonds behind their apartment.

“You didn’t work?” Don said, after Claire had come up behind him and given him a kiss.

“I stopped off for a drink on the way home.”

“With whom?”

“What do you mean ‘with whom’? With some folks from the workshop. We were all working late.”

“Bryan’s been up three times.”

“I’ll go feed him.”

“In your condition?”

“Don, Jesus. I had one beer and one puff of a cigarette.”

“Whose cigarette?” Don said.

“This is so dumb,” Claire said, and went into the bedroom.

She came out a few minutes later, undressed, wrapped in Don’s flannel robe.

“I don’t want to wake him,” she said. “I’ll feed him when he wakes up. I need to pump though. Why don’t you get some rest? You look tired.”

“Whose cigarette, Claire?”

“A guy named Trent. He’s the visiting writer this week. We were talking shop.”

“I live in a goddamn Bruce Springsteen song,” Don said, and
walked out of the apartment a few minutes later. It had taken him a long time to find his wallet and his keys and Claire was sitting on the yellow love seat, slumped and half asleep, her legs spread out, her breasts being suctioned by a small electric pump. “Jesus, Claire,” he said. “The blinds are open. Put on some fucking clothes.”

He did not stay out long. Only went out for his own one beer and half a cigarette, awkwardly leaning on a bar rail lined with undergrads in black and gold. There was a basketball game that evening and they were celebrating some hard-fought win or mourning some unexpected loss. He could not figure out the mood in the bar. After that, for a while, Don would lie awake in the long, cry-rattled nights, thinking through the logistics of the divorce, but by the weekend, the skies had cleared. Calm waters returned. Don said, “I’m sorry that I am insane,” and Claire said, “It’s understandable, baby.”

“Do you think you are also insane?” Don asked. “About those matches?”

“Yes,” Claire said, and that was that, though he never left a match on the sink again. He would wet them and drop them in the trash bin, and he’d always say to himself as he did so, “That’s one tidy motherfucker, that Don Lowry.”

The third time the word
divorce
comes up is right now, when Claire, standing in the kitchen, calmly, eerily calm, actually, says, “Do we need to have a conversation about divorce?”

It’s a Saturday, one week from the morning when the sheriff found them out wandering in the weak light of early dawn, their kids home alone, a mortgage nine months in arrears.

“Not really,” Don says, “we can’t afford a divorce.”

He smiles, trying to push the conversation into the realm of shrugged-off humor, but Claire remains stoic.

“I mean, if we’re going to have to pack up the house anyway, we
should have a sense of what’s next,” Claire says. “I don’t know if we have to stay together as husband and wife.”

Don moves around the kitchen. He opens and closes some cabinets.

“Sure we do.”

“It’s just, you’ve never answered my question,” she says, “and given the circumstances, I think it’s an important one.”

“‘Why are we still married?’” Don says. “That question?”

“Yes. We never have answered it.”

“What is happening?” he asks.

“You smother me,” she says. “Your sadness, your worry—I mean, the other night, I had a taste of something kind of like freedom from you. In town, when you work, you’re Mr. Happy, the joke-teller, the flirt, the good-time guy. You know everyone in this goddamn town. How many people do I know?”

“None of this is true.”

“I’ve lived here over ten years, Don. And how many friends do I have who live in Iowa?”

“You want to separate?” Don says. “Because you have no friends? That’s my fault, that you hate everybody? That you still resent me for living in Iowa?”

“
Separate
is a good word,” Claire says. “Efficient, workaday: separate the eggs from the yoke, the sticker from its backing, the wheat from the chaff. Separate the Don from the Claire.”

“Jesus,” Don says.

“Yes,” she says. “I want to separate.”

A load of boxes and packing tape and tape guns had arrived via UPS the day before, and they are on the dining room table now.

“I don’t think it’s as hurtful a topic as you seem to consider it,” Claire says. “We’ve been miserable with each other for weeks, months, years.”

“We have kids, Claire.”

“I’ve been lonely.”

“You said you felt so free the other night?” Don says.

“I did? Yes, I did say that, I guess.”

“You just said it. What night?”

“When I was without you. The night I wasn’t here and neither were you.”

“Where had you been that night? I was gonna ask you just as Halverson pulled up in the squad car.”

“Where had you been?” Claire says back.

“I told you. I’d been smoking pot with this person, this woman I met totally randomly.”

Don doesn’t tell her that he’s gone to see ABC four times in the last week, to drink beer, and smoke pot, and fall asleep on the wide, swaying hammock.

Don takes some scissors and cuts the plastic band from around each stack of boxes—book boxes, small boxes, medium boxes, large.

“Umph,” Don says. “And that’s all we did.” He tries to say something else. “Umph,” he says again. “You haven’t told me anything!”

“I don’t think it’s your goddamn business.”

There is a sharp edge to the statement. The abrupt force of it is terrifying.

“It’s not?”

“We need to talk about the larger issue, whether it is painful or not. Question: why are we still married?”

Don often agreed with Claire’s assertion when she would say, “We need to talk.” She was usually right. He wanted to help her make the process smoother. But what would he tell her now—that last week, as he was driving to work, he felt an almost unimaginable pull to keep driving, to veer onto West Street and down Highway 146 and continue on a trajectory south until he reached the Gulf of Mexico? Why more people hadn’t done this, in fact, is something Don Lowry considered one of the great mysteries of the Midwest. How, in fucking February, for example, did people manage to stay put, to show up for work, to tough out the slog year after year?

“I’m going to sleep down in the basement guest room for a while,” Claire says. “Anyway, I need a shower. Before I go out.”

“You gonna do your ‘nice little Saturday’? Good for you.”

What he wants is to veer Claire back on the tracks of routine, of their life, of the rhythms and predictability and, yes, love, that guided their days, which were simple, even if now they were stressful.

“Then I’ll take the kids over to the pool, if you want to come.”

“Why?” Don says. “You hate the pool.”

“Because,” she says, her voice coming at him from the staircase she’s descending. “I promised. Why else do I do anything?”

Charlie Gulliver greets the mornings in a strange house that is, in fact, his house. It’s the house in which he spent his first eighteen years, and it’s still owned by his parents, and it’s his own mother who’s asked him to return to the house in order to clean out his father’s study, but when he awakens each morning on the air mattress in his parents’ old room, it does not feel like it is his house, or like it ever was his house. For starters, almost everything is gone. His mother sold off most of her possessions after the divorce, and the swift subsequent decline of his father while the divorce was becoming finalized allowed her to get rid of many of his things too. What she has left behind, the things she actually wants, she’s told Charlie, are in a storage locker at the edge of a hog farm near Montezuma; all of his father’s things are out in the guesthouse, the study where his father worked for three decades. There is almost no room to walk in that study, piled high with boxes, papers, books, knickknacks, file cabinets, and furniture.

But the house itself is empty—there’s none of that familiarity he’d fantasized about: not the couches he’d once napped on, or the paintings in the hallway he’d once stared at while imagining the stories behind them—horses in a pasture, houses on a hill, a man falling into the sand under a sliver of silver moon. What is here: on the counter, a coffeemaker, and on the white fridge, a calendar bearing the smiling face and contact information of Don Lowry, his mother’s realtor.

It’s your home, but it’s my business!

Also on the kitchen counter: a note from his mother, who is still in Colorado with her new friend Lyle Canon.

It is a simple message:
Charlie, will you call me when you arrive and get settled in? Let me know how your father is doing. Do you think you can make any sense of his study? Do you need money? Also, are you drinking too much? Please be careful. Also, Lyle and I are experiencing a kind of wonder I once thought impossible. Be happy for me.
LOVE MOM.

The last two sentences of this note, sans commas, sound more like a command than a closing. Maybe he should be happy that in her fifties his mother has suddenly grown a spine and a sense of her own needs and desires. But it is still fucked up: his mother camping with a man a decade her junior while his father lingers, half-senile, in the Mayflower assisted living complex.

He has not yet called his mother, nor has he gone to visit his father. One of the strange dynamics of the Gulliver family, a dynamic Charlie is only now beginning to realize, is that the three of them—father, mother, and son—seemed to exist in a way in which they feel absolutely no sense of obligation to one another. Charlie, though he never felt completely alone or unloved as a child, spent much of his life feeling somewhat unnecessary. It’s different from feeling neglected or unloved, this condition. But he always felt, as he still feels, that he was somewhat expendable. That his parents liked him, even loved him, but didn’t depend on him for happiness the way he imagined many parents did. A long time ago, he thought this meant his parents were cool. Now, he isn’t so sure what it had meant.

And now, although this does not feel like a homecoming at all, after a week of waking there in that house on Elm Street, spending his days drinking beer, swimming, reading random novels from the pile of books nearest the study’s front door, his old life in the wider world—the one he’d deliberately made without his parents’ help or support—seems thoroughly gone. And for once, he feels needed by his parents: clean out the study, prepare the house for
sale, go visit your father. He doesn’t feel as if he has a fresh start or a blank slate exactly, but he does feel that by simply changing his physical location to a place like central Iowa, he has erased several years of pursuing all of the wrong things—meaning, beauty, art, even, in his way, wealth—and now he has returned to the Midwest, the world of the practical, the realm of easily achieved and sensible to-do lists.

He makes such a list that morning as he waits for the coffee to brew.

        
1.
    
Clean out my father’s study.

        
2.
    
Assemble the drafts I find into a potentially publishable manuscript.

        
3.
    
Assess and curate the letters, notes, and ephemera that might make a useful archive of my father’s long career.

        
4.
    
Take that archive to the college librarian for assessment and possible storage.

        
5.
    
Await the sale of my parents’ home and the small but still meaningful percentage of the profit that my mother has promised me.

        
6.
    
Fuck Claire.

This last thing he writes to amuse himself, to give himself a jolt of energy, but yes, all week he’s thought of her, so close to him in that pool, and he wonders how he will see her again and how he can convince her—husband and kids aside—to fuck him in that pool. It’s a goal and he’s glad to have a goal. He is glad to have a challenge before him; he wonders what he’s capable of achieving. Once, in college, he played Iago. And wasn’t that Iago’s real motivation? Boredom? Not revenge for a passed-over promotion, but an interest in how far terrible things could go?

Lately, Charlie’s done nothing. No auditions, no voice-overs, not even a guest-directing gig with some obscure community theater. Writing this dark and ambitious final task,
Fuck Claire
, puts
something in his heart like lust. He never knew why he wanted what he wanted, not ever.

But he wanted.

He puts the list up on the fridge with one of Don Lowry’s business card magnets.

Out the back window, he looks at the small guesthouse where his work is, in piles and boxes and mazes of clutter, and he looks at the glimmer of the swimming pool between him and all that work.

He gets the coffee, which is terrible, and goes out to the guesthouse/study and begins to look through the stack for something new to read; maybe he’ll go to the coffee shop downtown and have a decent espresso and read. He is in no hurry to do anything—tackle the clutter of the study, see his father, or give his mother a progress report. None of his friends know where he is or why he has left Seattle: they are all actors and writers and artists, their heads stuck so far up their own self-obsessed asses they have not even noticed his dramatic and sudden exit from their world. It would be weeks before they wondered about him. A man exits a pond without a ripple, he thinks.

He writes this on a Post-it note. Maybe he should write a book, but nobody writes a book simply by thinking
maybe
and
should.
His father once said that after a long day of working on his own book. He remembers his father coming in one day at cocktail hour, and taking a gin and tonic from his wife’s hand.

They sat in the living room together, Charlie’s parents, and his mother asked, “How is the book coming?” and Charlie’s father said, “You know what gets me? When people say things like
maybe I should write a book
. Because the truth is, honey, if you’re a real writer, you have to write a book. It’s as if you don’t even want to do it. You have to do it.”

There was a long silence then and as Charlie sat playing with Legos on the rug in front of them, his mother exhaled.

“That’s insane, Gill. That makes no sense.”

Charlie’s father, wounded and indignant, took his drink back
out to the study. Charlie still remembers going to the window and watching him walk down the path. Maybe Charlie was seven, maybe eight. He turned to his mother. He said, “Is he mad?”

“In one sense of the word,” his mother had said.

Out in that same study this morning, that place of constant retreat, he does nothing but scan the spines of his father’s bookshelves. There seems to be no order to anything, and he flips through novels he’s heard of but has never read—
The Mill on the Floss
,
Vanity Fair, Pale Fire.
It is next to this last book that he finds
Everybody Wants Everything
by Claire Lowry. He turns to look at her author photo, over a decade old, and thinks of her ass now, as she shimmied out of his pool, and he thinks, yes, I want to see her again.