The Love Wife (20 page)

BLONDIE / 
For years and years before that, we had had Larry, a gentle guy with bad teeth who never complained about anything. But after he died, his son Billy took over. We paid him more than we had paid his dad. Yet he was less satisfied, perhaps because he’d gone to college for a couple of years—had lived in the city, and gotten ideas. We made him mad. If we asked him to open up the cabins for the season, but then never came, for example—that made him mad. Even if we paid him extra for opening up, and extra for closing back down, he got mad.

CARNEGIE / 
Said we wasted his time. Said that even if a man had nothing better to do, he didn’t like having his time wasted. Said working for us was the very definition of shitwork.

BLONDIE / 
He didn’t like being in charge of the beach. As it became more of a challenge, we offered him extra; but that made him mad too.

CARNEGIE / 
Said he was a caretaker, not a guard. Said he felt like a whore, being paid more than other caretakers. Not that there were so many on our lake, but there were on other lakes. Said people treated him like a whore too. Asked him things like why did he work for a family that had to pay that much, if he wasn’t being bought.

BLONDIE / 
We thought perhaps people were jealous. And perhaps they were. When he quit, in any case, he said no one in town would take our job, and no one did. Had working for us somehow come to seem like working for the devil? Or did Billy’s job remain, somehow, Billy’s job—a job other people were afraid to take without his say-so? We never knew.

And how had our beach become, by then, the town beach? We never knew that either. Would it’ve happened in any case? Or did Billy let it happen? Billy was an intimidating guy—big, and tattooed. We had not wanted to hire him, but as Larry was dying he had begged us to take Billy on.

— It’s a dog’s life, he had said, but it’s a living.

And so upset had we been by that comment that we had promised not only to hire Billy, but to send him to school if he wanted to go. As we did. Billy was a smart guy, active in campus politics. We encouraged him to finish, and to move somewhere with more jobs. But he moved back—said he couldn’t be paid to leave the land of his father, and that if we thought we owned everything, we were wrong.

CARNEGIE / 
We posted
NO TRESPASSING
signs. We put up a gate at the end of the causeway, a joke.

BLONDIE / 
Carnegie’s alarm had at least provided several months’ peace of mind about the main cabin.

Now, though, someone was tripping it. Apparently without breaking in, the police said, though who knew. Possibly the locals were just having fun.

CARNEGIE / 
— An alarm does reflect a territorial mind-set, Blondie said. An us-and-them mind-set.

— If I were them, she said, I’d be offended too.

— I’m not saying it was a bad decision, she said. I’m only saying that I can see their point of view.

You help them you think they are going to say thank you?

I was tempted to point out how her sibs still availed themselves of the place, from time to time, when they felt like it. How they left their stuff there, and how everyone had a key, though the maintenance fell entirely to me. But she was nursing so beautifully; I watched Bailey drift straight from the most avid sucking to the most profound sleep. His cap had lifted from his head, but kept the shape of his skull.

— Someone has to go up there, said Blondie.

— I don’t know if you realize, I said. There’s a bug in the server. I need to be in touch with Ruth, Hsiao, the client, the product manager. Hold some hands, you know. It is not going to look good for me to be off someplace with no cell service, even. If the house phone were on, that’d be a different story. But as it isn’t, I can’t go.

So I argued.

Blondie rocked in response. There was a new thick carpet on the floor, sea green; Blondie hadn’t wanted to start the gender thing from day one. Also there was a beach scene complete with sand chairs and crabs and seashells on the lower part of the walls; on the upper walls and ceiling, there was blue sky. Clouds. Bailey’s crib was like a ship, a-bob in all this. His changing table was like a dinghy.

— Please, she said.

Rocking rocking, as if on the waves. There in their private sea. How little he was, a bit of flotsam. I waded in to give him a kiss, reseating his warm hat on his small head.

Still as I left it was lifting and settling again, lifting and settling. Flashing like a lighthouse: blond, blond, blond.

Day off! Day off!

Leaving the city, I did think that. Being the first to admit I had a complex, the man who mistook a personal day for a crime. But mostly I thought, Bailey. Blondie. The girls. Did I have a map? Did I need one? Also I thought about our broken radio/cassette deck, its repair obviously insufficiently prioritized.

The traffic its own circle of hell. If only Dante could do an update from the grave, surely this was material: the wavy air, the exhaust, the construction dust, the heat. The stop and go, stop and go, stop and go. Brake job coming up, I thought. And the noise! Finally I put on the AC. Why did I even delay? Some misguided masochistic concern for the ozone. But anyway, I did turn it on, as much to shut out the noise as to cool the car down. Also to claim some silical remove from those concrete barriers lining every lane; and beyond them, the strip malls. Could the Founding Fathers have foreseen this? That the pursuit of wealth would take the form of restaurants for eight hundred, with bulls big as the Trojan horse out front, grinning?

How far I was from home already—from the world of breast pumps and nursing bras and bag balm. For all her sisal and oatmeal, Blondie’s left nipple had still cracked; leave it to Gabriela to meet this eventuality with the very ointment that vets used on cow udders. Which came in a green tin from whose side beamed an udderly (okay, okay) happy cow ringed by red roses. Who knew if it was safe for humans. In the meantime the milk ran bloody; not that Bailey seemed to mind, but Blondie had to do breathing exercises as if still in labor. In, out. Knotting her toes, watching the clock. Of course there were going to be psycho consequences, a good-breast/bad-breast split. But the bonding, and how he was gaining. La Leche said they’d never seen a baby so perfectly able to latch on from day one. Even before Blondie had milk yet, even when she was engorged, two bowling balls, he latched, he latched. My son, the best nurser in the nursery! How proud I was already, how convinced this would prove a stable personality trait that would serve him in his later years. It did not say so in any of the baby books, but even as I sat in traffic, I knew it was true. This was a predictor of great things. Call it my own great-man theory.

Brake jobs these days could run six hundred dollars; honestly, you had to wonder.

Of course the girls were jealous. How could they not be? Blondie trying to help them work through their whatever, while I managed to react with,
Well, life isn’t fair.
Infuriating Blondie.
You forget you forget,
she said,
how you drive her into the arms of that horny Derek.
Whom we did discover entangled with Lizzy one night, in a state of engrossing undress. A nice boy otherwise, but still: was it time to buy a shotgun?

Though hadn’t I had my own days as a horny beast, what about that Esther What’s-Her-Name? The first girl to vulvate against my manhood on the dance floor. Whatever Lizzy was doing, I hoped she did not vulvate.
In this family, we let sleeping logs lie.

A shotgun, a shotgun.

And when was Blondie returning to duty?

Ah—but now, finally, two whole lanes to choose from. You could drive in one and consider the other and feel free.

What a shame Mama Wong had no idea about Bailey. I had tried to tell her:

—Your grandson, Mom. Your grandson.

— We call him Bailey, but he’s a Wong, you know. Until the day he dies, a Wong.

— The Wong heir, even if with the wong hair.

But all she did was grind her teeth.

Of course, what she would have said, if she did understand:
What’s the matter with his hair? What’s the matter with his eyes? That child is mutt.

The office. While still in cell-phone range, I called the office. What? The bug already found, and on its way to heaven?

— 
Good! Great!
Yes yes, do tell Marketing.

So it was okay to leave town after all; Blondie was right.

I’m so glad, sweetie. Does this mean you’re surviving your day off?

Trees.

Rest stop.

Should I have married Blondie?

Trees.

And what to say to Mitchell’s brother Nick? Wanting to go into business together, wanting to do up some—what? Content-management software, large-scale web-server database-type stuff. Bring some sweet access to the reams upon reams that, say, courts or Congress churned out; it’d be easy as pie, and then let the sunshine laws shine on us, right? He’d do marketing, I’d do development, Nick knew a funder. The key being your outside-the-box story, you had to learn a thing or two from these kids who had no idea how to tell a hope and a prayer from a business. For look how it paid off! All that fresh-faced ignorance, those baggy-panted skateboarders pitching VCs with their underwear showing. Think anyone’d give them a dime if they wore real pants?

Thus quoth Nick, and as I headed into the state of Maine I could almost picture myself in a loft office. Mine that high-ceilinged chaos. Mine those industrial windows. Mine those temporary partitions and half-erased white boards; mine those junk-food stockpiles, and ad hoc phones, and community futons. I was young, I wore funny pants, I let my underwear show. I never worried. For I was the future! The future was mine! Creativity! Revolution! Out-of-the-box thinking! All mine!

Trees.

I headed into the state of Maine proper.

Trees.

Distance learning, Nick was doing now, English as a Second Language. Meaning that every get-together began with pics. I did this one, I did that one. Of course he went to other countries, but truly there was no country like China. He thought I would be especially interested to hear. This one in Shanghai, this one in Xiamen.

These girls, you do not know. Truly you have not lived. Are they not beautiful?

Trees.

I kid you not.

Trees.

You would be so at home.

Trees.

They will do anything.

Could I really stand to be in business with Nick?

Truly you have not lived.

My foot tiring of the pedal. My arms tiring of the wheel. My back tiring of the seat.

The sun pulling its long foot out through the passenger window, slowly.

How much farther this drive by myself. Farther than any plane ride, which you made with fellow passengers, after all, and with certain certainties. From whence you were departing, to whence heading, at how many miles per hour, hence your estimated arrival time barring weather. How long the charge on your computer battery. No lull into which unproductive realizations might seep.

For example:
My mother slaved her whole life so that she could pay her own bill at the Overlook.

Slaved her whole life.

Trees.

The first time I went to Maine with Blondie, her brothers dared me to swim across the pond—technically a great pond, i.e., practically a lake. And of course I accepted, could not but accept. For anyway, what was it, a mile. I’d swum a mile before, definitely. And so I plunged in. But halfway across, the wind picked up—a sudden Canadian event—the surface swells more and more monstrous until I could hardly see over them. Which was the opposite shore? On land it had been perfectly clear; but now—what a circle the pond. My goggles fogged up, yet I couldn’t take them off—my contacts—the swells now waves; in fact, whitecaps. When did I realize that I was not swimming straight—that I veered to the left on my crawl? What I would have done then for lane markers! Some nice nylon rope with intermittent lozenge buoys. Had I really gone, as it seemed, in a semicircle? I tried to compensate, veering right, then switched to the breaststroke, though I barely knew how to breaststroke. So as to be able to see. No, I did not know how to breaststroke, in fact was hardly a swimmer, in fact had failed the swim test in college, almost drowned; being too embarrassed to say that I had not learned as a child. Swim lessons! What an idea.
Who need to know anything, all you need are some nice basketballs. New ones.
And of course I did not exactly spend a lot of time around pools. Until college, that is, where I finally learned. Looked at some books. Tried stuff out.

But what use the breaststroke? Why wouldn’t the crawl be enough? Beware people good at the butterfly, I’d always felt. Show-offs. Now, though—here I was, heaving myself over the waves. Trying to breaststroke. Trying to stay calm. The whipped-up rhythm of the water being nothing like my rhythm; what pattern its pattern? The lake at odds, what with, was it me? How to breathe? In the sometimes air sometimes water. I battled. Resting, sometimes, on my back. Trying not to think how deep the water was.

Once upon a time my mother braved ocean and sharks, hell-bent for Hong Kong. Now her son struggled in—what?—a pond. And could I even say where I was headed, if indeed I was headed there? Gasping, wheezing, wishing I had had swim lessons. Swallowing water.

Where was the shore?

How the Baileys laughed when finally I struggled onto somebody’s dock, who knew whose. From which I had to be rescued.

— What a course! We thought you were headed to Canada! they said. Or else writing something,
J
for Janie, maybe. Or maybe drawing a heart, except that somewhere around the aorta you bagged it.

And what a funny heave-ho I gave, it seemed, coming up for air. Launching myself out of the water like an orca at Sea World. Bonus points they gave me, for entertaiment. What a guy Janie’d found! Just marvelous!