Valley of Ashes (12 page)

“Jesus,” I said, typing faster to catch up when she paused for breath.

“The cabinetry will have to be ripped out,” she continued, “and those bookshelves. Even if they’re not damaged, there’s no way to get the smell out, or the chemical residue. And the smoke leaves stencils around everything. Inside closets and cupboards, you’ll see outlines of what was on the shelves—toilet paper, shoes. You can’t get those marks out, either. All their clothing will have to go to a dry cleaner, but they’ll still have to throw most of it out afterward because of the
smell. Same thing with bedding, towels, mattresses… all Dumpster fodder. And that’s not getting into Sheetrock, flooring, subfloor, structural damage.”

“And how long before they can move back in?”

“Hard to say. With good insurance, you get two years of ALE—additional living expenses. That’s a whole other story, pretty corrupt sometimes. And then there are the contractors who pack everything up and move it out of the house. A thousand and one details.”

“Endless nightmare?”

“Yeah,” she said. “All around. Most houses, you might as well torch them again and finish the job, start over from scratch.”

I thought about that, quiet for a moment.

“But they’re alive, Madeline. Five people in that family,” said Mimi. “That’s the only thing that matters, in the end. You can always buy more scrapbooks, take new pictures to fill them with. When I can go through a scene without the medical examiner, I count all of us damn lucky.”

“Amen.”

N
obody will care,” said my husband when I asked him whether I should dress up a little for the Sunday-afternoon barbecue to which we’d invited a couple of his pals from work.

He’d been home for several days now. Hadn’t mentioned my birthday again, or the fabulously great present he’d promised me on the phone from New Orleans.

“I’m a total hag,” I said. “And also my hair is stupid.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, his back to me as he rooted through his sock drawer.

I felt about as sexy as Queen Elizabeth trudging through gorse in the Scottish rain: imaginary corgi under each arm, body thick with tweed under my Barbour coat, damp Hermès scarf tied over my lacquered blue-white hair.

Yeah, me and Liz Windsor: sex on wheels.

“You look perfectly all right,” said Dean, still with his back to me.

“The endearment every woman longs to hear.”

That got me a put-upon sigh. “You know what I mean, Bunny.”

I stepped up behind him and twined my arms around his waist, standing on tiptoe to press my cheek between his shoulder blades.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just feel like a Betty Friedan cypher-eunuch, plummeting disenfranchised into the black bourgeois abyss of toddler muck and Disney vids.”

Dean grunted, shoulders tensing.

“I started whistling in the grocery store the other day,” I said, “and realized five bars in that I was musically regurgitating the goddamn theme song from
The Lion King
. What next, Andrew Lloyd fucking Webber?”

“I can’t believe I don’t have a single pair of goddamn socks that match,” said Dean, slamming the drawer shut. “What the hell do you
do
with them?”

He pushed free of my arms.

“Airlift them to Romania,” I said, repulsed by my actual reflection in the mirror over our bureau, now that he wasn’t blocking my view. “UN volunteers stitch them into fluffy monkeys for all those poor little orphans to play with.”

Dean sat down on the edge of the bed and yanked on two socks that looked pretty damn similar, if you asked me.

He stood up. “Let’s get the goddamn grocery run over with. I need at least a couple of hours for a decent bike ride.”

“Sure,” I said. “And hey, here’s a thought… you can buy me a birthday present. A cantaloupe or a lemon zester or something. King Soopers has pretty much everything.”

He sank down to the bed again, eyes downcast.

I crossed my arms. “Because I guess you left that super-fabulous gift you bought me in New Orleans on the plane or something, right?”

“It was a T-shirt,” he said quietly. “Turquoise, with L
ADIES
S
EWING
C
IRCLE AND
T
ERRORIST
S
OCIETY
printed across the chest in white script. I thought it would make you laugh. And I left it either on the plane or in my hotel room.”

“Huh.”

“
I
thought it was funny,” he said.

“We first met in what, March 1986?” I asked.

“David Goldsmith’s birthday party. Central Park West.”

His tone of voice was way more “as you perfectly well know” than “aw, honey, remember how romantic?”

Dick.

“It’s now March 1995, Dean. Which means we’ve been together how long?”

He cleared his throat. “Nine years.”

“And in that period of time, have you
ever
seen me wear a single item of turquoise clothing?”

He looked at the floor.

I kicked one of his shoes at him, making it skitter across the hardwood into his ankle. “Buy yourself some fucking socks for my birthday. I’d
cherish
the gift of not having to hear you whine about how they’ve all gone missing every time you open that stupid goddamn drawer.”

By the time Dean walked back into the house that afternoon, sweaty and red-cheeked with his bike helmet tucked under one arm, I’d finished making three salads (orzo-feta-kalamata, buckwheat tabouleh, and hominy with diced Granny Smith apples and roasted sweet potatoes—in a lemon-thyme vinaigrette), a platter of marinated hamburger patties plumped for the grill, another of romaine lettuce with sliced onions and tomatoes, and a flourless chocolate-whiskey torte with a bowl of fresh mint–spiked whipped cream on the side.

The girls were bathed and dressed in their playpen, and I was just stacking whole wheat kaiser rolls and burger-ready chunks of sourdough baguette in an alternating pyramid.

“The house still looks like shit,” said my husband. “They’re going to be here in half an hour.”

“I wanted to get the food prepped first, so I can relax a little later on. It’s been forever since I talked with actual grown-ups.”

Except for Mimi, but what business is that of yours? I mean, if you’re going to be such an asshole, generally.

He yanked his sweat-soaked T-shirt up over his head and threw it on the floor, about a foot away from the laundry pile. “I’m sick of running around to shove all your crap in random closets at the last possible moment, every single time we have people over. It’s ridiculous.”

I glanced into the living room. The girls’ toys were everywhere, but
other than that there were only the two buckets of clean laundry I’d actually folded already, and a pile of dry-cleaned suits Dean had left draped across the sofa.

Well, along with a couple of coffee mugs here and there. And several sections of last Sunday’s
New York Times
spread across and around the coffee table.

“Just take your shower,” I said. “I’ll handle it.”

“I mean, I work my ass off, day after day,” he said, timbre of his voice shifting from pissy to shrill, “and I have to come
home
to this shit after a week on the road? We live like goddamn
animals
.”

I gritted my teeth.

For this I went to college. Excellent.

“What the hell is
wrong
with you, Madeline? Jesus, you’re the lightning rod for entropy in the universe, and you obviously have no respect for me whatsoever.”

I dropped my eyes to the kitchen floor, which, admittedly, could have used a little sweeping-and-mopping action.

His voice ratcheted up another key. “You expect me to entertain my professional colleagues in this pigsty?”

Fuck you…

“It’s goddamn embarrassing.”

Fuck you…

“I’m ashamed to have people know I put
up
with this. To know I allow my children to be
raised
in this
filth
.”

Drop dead, you petulant sack of rapidly balding shit. You and the glad-handing fancy-fucking-restaurants-every-night expense report you rode in on.

Arguing back just prolonged his tirades. So did crying.

“I’m sorry,” I said, eyes squeezed shut as I bit the inside of my lip, relieved my hair had fallen forward to veil my face.

I’d gotten the last lick in about the socks and
that
was now his excuse to come back at me over something else.

It was never about anything, or it was about
everything
. I couldn’t tell anymore.

The litany varied: If the house was clean, I was spending so much
money we were “doomed to end up living in some refrigerator box over a heating vent in the sidewalk.” If our expenses were in order, I was letting the girls watch videos all day instead of taking them out for “fresh air and healthy activities, like any sane woman would considering we live in such a beautiful place.”

Lately it had been like being married to a brown paper bag full of Africanized bees. The tantrums were random as summer thunderstorms—squalls of pique during which he fumed and yelled and found fault with everything I did.

And then the storm front would pass and he’d joke around like nothing had happened.

I couldn’t remember anymore whether he’d always been like this, or whether he’d morphed into a wife-berating shithead gradually, over time.

He never did it when we had an audience, and he was always unfailingly kind and patient with Parrish and India.

Maybe it was the pressure of being low-on-the-totem-pole middle management. Maybe it was unmedicated depression.

Or maybe my childhood damage had programmed me to seek out a man who’d treat me as badly as the majority of my stepfathers had—once he’d gotten me geographically isolated and financially dependent, saddled with kids.

Dean took off his socks, shorts, and boxers, tossing them all vaguely in the direction of the laundry pile. He stalked naked out of the kitchen and toward the shower, slack white-boy ass jiggling.

I scraped his clothes off the floor and shoved them into the washing machine, not bothering to turn the damn thing on.

Or, worst of all, maybe I deserve it.

I half wanted to hit him over the head with a cast-iron skillet for being such an asshole, half cowered with nauseating certainty that his rants were my fault and entirely justified. Mostly I was too tired to string together any kind of cohesive rebuttal.

Plus which, for all I knew, this shit was what
all
husbands did—by definition, if you stuck it out in any marriage long enough.

It might be just another thing the sitcoms of my childhood had glossed over, right up there with the prime-time pretense that all persons of the married persuasion slept solo and fully clothed in well-spaced twin beds.

I jogged toward the living room, willing the tears that pricked at the corners of my lashes not to fall. People were due to arrive in twenty minutes—not enough time to rub ice cubes across my eyelids, erasing the evidence of a good cry.

We’d been married seven years—two longer than my mother’s personal best in her four times at the nuptial bat.

We had health insurance. We had two gorgeous children. And life with Dean was pretty decent at least 80 percent of the time.

I hoped this was a rough patch, that maybe we just needed a couple of solid naps to restore the best aspects of our couple-hood.

This guy called Fassett (my favorite stepfather-type person when I was fifteen) had once remarked that it was pointless both spiritually and practically to spend your time in a relationship bitching about what the other person should be doing for
you
, because the only thing you ever have control over is what you’re doing for them—how much you give and forgive, how generous you are—without worrying about what you should be getting in return for the effort.