I gathered a collection of half-perused periodicals from the coffee table and ran a bath in our clawfoot tub. A few years ago I purchased a walnut bath caddy that lay midway across the mouth of the bath and an ipe bath chair that sat below the water and supported my neck and bottom so that my tailbone didn’t ache while I soaked. The bath setup always made me feel like Julie Christie in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, though my legs would never bend in such straight and appealing lines as hers did. I poured my coffee and a glass of water. I brought my drinks, along with the Paris Review, New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and the New Yorker to the bath caddy. I swapped the bag of frozen mangoes for a fresh bag of frozen peas. I urinated, and noted that John and I couldn’t have had sex last night, as there was no sting or ache. Then I slipped into the water, took a long drink of coffee, rested the peas against my face, and closed my eyes.
I slid into a doze, the feeling of blanket after blanket gently placed on top of me. When I opened my eyes the peas were mushy, the bath was cool, and there was a clatter at the sink. John stood there, teeth bared like a wolf, flossing.
“Hi,” I said.
“Oh, hi,” he said, smiling. “You were in quite the state last night.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Well, it was almost fun, though when I wouldn’t have sex with you, you threw a bit of a fit.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I enjoyed feeling valiant and refusing you in your compromised state.”
“Thank you.” I turned away. He was acting a little phony, a little arch, and I wasn’t in the mood. I remember, back when I lived in New York City, eavesdropping on a woman asking her boyfriend if he wanted to get a drink. Clearly, she wanted one. He replied in a reserved and pious tone that he wouldn’t be drinking tonight. His refusal embarrassed her, and her voice rose to a high pitch: “We Never Want the Same Things at the Same Time!”
For so long, this was how it felt with John. If he came to me lightheartedly, I would want seriousness. If he came to me gravely, I would feel irritated. If he came to me lovingly, I would react icily. If I came to him in supplication, he would mock me. If I came to him in strength, he would ignore me. We were so pitted against each other. Perhaps because we were so desperate to hang on to our own identities, our own separate I’s. We insisted on living our own lives in our own minds and could never truly merge. Perhaps we were undisciplined, or perhaps it was because we didn’t go to church, didn’t live by a moral code, didn’t believe anyone was watching. We had come into adolescence in the 1970s, of age in the 1980s—we were brought up swaddled by the most selfish and individualistic decades in the history of the United States.
Then I remembered his fat thumbs texting students. Meeting them in hotels. Acting agog at the sight of their bodies, their breasts like small, round flotation devices. Even if I didn’t care, even if I liked the space, had I been doing what Sidney had said? Had I been talking myself into a compromised existence for the sake of being tough? Why did I feel as though I was still trying to figure out how I could be a better partner for John?
“Do you think you brainwashed me?” I hoped I looked a little bit alluring from the bathtub.
“What are you talking about?”
“All the women. Was it brainwashing? The fact that I allowed it?”
“You suggested it in the first place.”
“A very long time ago.”
“We didn’t want a conventional marriage. That’s what we said. That’s what you said.”
Yes, that was what I had said. And yes, that was what I had wanted. Strangely, I hadn’t thought about the idea of a conventional or an unconventional marriage in months—since the petition. I suppose because I had been foisted into the clichéd role of the wronged wife. We had wanted to live unconventionally, in a new way, invented unto ourselves, and now I was playing the most timeworn part.
Our conviction wasn’t truly behind it, because then we would have shared our life choices with Sid. If we believed in an unconventional marriage, I wouldn’t have been the one to make all the dinners and arrange all the play dates and schedule all the lessons. We lit a couple of fires in unexpected places, but we weren’t willing to burn it all down.
“Hey.” He was feeling moved, I could tell, he swelled slightly with import. “I heard what the department asked. I’m sorry that this all has affected you. I find it truly boneheaded.”
“Where do you go at night?”
He finished flossing, rinsed his mouth, and spit a stream of blood-tinged saliva into the sink.
“Nowhere.” Then he pulled his elbows behind him to stretch his chest, farted, and left the room. As a matter of habit he flicked off the light on his way out, stranding me in the dark.
* * *
I hadn’t planned on being so mentally compromised that I couldn’t contemplate my response to the tenured faculty, but my loose brain and sweaty palms lasted well into the day. I was overwhelmed with burning humiliation for whatever had occurred between Cynthia and me, no matter how many times Sid assured me that I was fine. “She’s hot,” she said. “She is,” I said, and then pictured how ridiculous I must have looked while dancing, how sloppy I must have sounded when I spoke, and how strange it was that I would threaten her, when the whole reason she came was kindness.
At 6 p.m. a little clarity broke through my brain, bringing with it a craving for more alcohol. Once more I wrote to pertinent people and told them I wouldn’t be able to teach the next day, as my cold had worsened. I had papers due in my Gothic Novel class, and wrote them a strict email requesting the essays in my inbox at the end of class time. As a teacher, I’ve found that strictness is often an effective way of diverting from one’s own laziness. Sid mixed martinis and made us some not-half-bad French dip sandwiches with sautéed onions and the leftover steak （my resolve for a liquid/vegetable diet failed around three, when I became ravenous）。 I preserved a modicum of sense and limited my drinking to one reasonable martini and a large glass of cheap red. We ate the rest of the cake and watched Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, which Sid had never seen.
“Disturbing,” she said at the end, after the credits rolled on Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon playing cards together. I wondered if The Apartment was the first film that ended by depicting love as a kind of jovial camaraderie rather than passion. MacLaine and Lemmon didn’t even kiss at the end of the film. It seemed as though all films now, unless they had titles like Desire written in red letters against black backgrounds, portrayed true love as the coming together of two fun friends. No wonder that I perceived, mostly from their short stories, that my students found nothing more romantic than lusting after a platonic member of their social group.
Sid, though, wasn’t interested in that inquiry. What was disturbing to her was that there was such a delineation of women presented and that the movie had no qualms about that. Shirley MacLaine was deserving of love and a better situation because she was sensible, funny, beautiful, and well-spoken. The other women who had affairs with the executives of the corporation were presented as fools and sluts. They were curvy and spoke with regional accents and were less beautiful and thus deserved our ridicule, while Shirley MacLaine’s gamine, refined character deserved our sympathy and support.