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For the anthology Homewrecker, in which A had a story years before becoming an Adulteress herself, the editor, Daphne Gottlieb, wrote: “I am a few years older now and I know this: There are tastes of mouths I could not have lived without; there are times I’ve pretended it was just about the sex because I couldn’t stand the way my heart was about to burst with happiness and awe and I couldn’t be that vulnerable . . . That waiting to have someone’s stolen seconds can burn you alive. That the shittiest thing you can do in the world is lie to someone you love; also that there are certain times you have no other choice—not honoring this fascination, this car crash of desire, is also a lie. That there is power in having someone risk everything for you. That there is nothing more frightening than being willing to take this freefall. That it is not as simple as we were always promised. Love—at least the pair-bonded, prescribed love—does not conquer all.”
“Art cannot save anybody from anything,” wrote Gilbert Sorrentino in perhaps the first sentence from a book that I ever underlined, ever committed to memory, suspecting it would somehow both belie and also exemplify the many truths of me. Who was that girl, barely nineteen, who knew so little of both herself and the transient, tumultuous world that unmakes and reforges us? Who am I, now, on the other side of so much wreckage, still loving, still typing, still here?
If I believe that art can, in fact, save us, over and over again, then does it follow that I risk the audacity of believing that you might be the very one who needs my words to save your life?
“And it seemed to them that they were within an inch of arriving at a decision, and that then a new, beautiful life would begin,” Chekhov concluded his seminal 1899 adultery story “The Lady with the Dog,” which Nabokov considered one of the greatest pieces ever written. “And they both realized that the end was still far, far away, and that the hardest, the most complicated part was only just beginning.”
So it was for me, some one hundred and fifteen years later. And there, I begin.
At one time, my father would drive my mother to New York on dates just so they could get a slice of authentic cheesecake—even in my teens he was known to hunt for the best apple pie all over the state of Michigan, just because. He knew which bakery in Chicago made the freshest doughnuts and drove across the city for a particularly fine custard cake. “If I ever get like that,” he would say of my tiny, elderly nana with her dowager’s hump, chowing on prewrapped brownies and freezer-burned, neon-colored popsicles, “just shoot me.”
Now a big day out for my father is a trip a mile away to the Entenmann’s warehouse, where he can stock up on enough processed coffee cakes and doughnuts covered in waxy chocolate that an avalanche falls out of his freezer when we open it. He buys whichever ice cream is on sale. When my husband and I go shopping for him and buy an ice cream he deems too expensive, he pitches a fit.
“Just shoot me,” he would tell us.
But it’s never that simple. You can’t just snap your fingers and disappear like a magician’s trick. Sometimes you live to turn into your mother-in-law. You remain trapped inside your body, unable to walk, unable to hear, taste buds faded, increasingly incontinent, napping during the day and awake all night, in chronic pain. Waiting.
What I have not told anyone about my reliance on the white-noise machine is that I need it not only for my husband’s snoring, but for the sound of his breathing—a thing that never bothered me until the past few years. Even the sound of his mild sleep breath is enough to make me feel like clawing the paint from the walls, trapped in the dark insularity of our bed.
aaaahhh
Except, of course, that this male friend confessed to me a year ago, while I was in Kenya with my family, that I was the part of his day he looked forward to the most. I’ve realized that I’m a little in love with you, he emailed. I hope that can be ok. Why can’t people sometimes be a little in love, without it meaning they’re going to have an affair or run off to Cuba? His confession shocked me, even though I had nursed a more benign crush on him for several years. According to the universal laws governing the friendships of people who are both married and not to each other, I knew I was now supposed to slowly back away, to distance myself to prevent things from getting out of control.
My husband and I still have sex. We still go on dates. We still take family vacations. Nobody could call us “estranged.” It’s just that for the past four or five years, significantly predating my emotional affair, we seem to speak different languages, that old feeling of connection refusing to click into place, constantly getting stuck in the wrong groove. Maybe this is just what a long-term marriage looks like. Does my husband even think anything is wrong? He swings between chilliness and volatility lately, and I find myself acting overly polite toward him, like he is a customs official or a cop, knowing things will go more smoothly if I am “nice.” I used to be so intense that I exhausted him with my attempts at engagement. When I look at the early years of our relationship (when I loved him madly), the woman in those memories strikes me as a needy little dog perpetually trying to jump up on a too-tall couch, yapping the whole while. I don’t know what to make of the fact that my happiest marital years now also make me ashamed of myself. When we were first living together, he complained that I was too intense, too much, and three times made noise about breaking up, but then committed, became acclimated to my perpetual pursuit. If he’s noticed I’m no longer chasing, he hasn’t said so.
At last, Death is starting to listen. Almost nightly now, my father dreams of his dead brothers. My mother and I rarely figure in his subconscious. In the dreams, his brothers are still young: Emilio playing the sax; Joe a mildly powerful bookie; Frank on the front porch smiling and waving with his grandkids. In one dream, my father is forcibly taken away on a wagon across a barren white landscape.
“I never took my father out to dinner,” he tells my mother, his voice thick with regret. “He worked himself to the bone for us and I never bought him a meal.”
“You were a young man,” my mother assuages. My paternal grandfather died before I was born. “You had your own life. You didn’t know he would die soon. You thought you had time.”
Mr. Tortorici is dead by now, too, of course.
Since Kathy’s diagnosis, though—or maybe it dates back before then and I merely found a catalyst on which to pin the label of previously unnamable feelings—I feel myself unspooling, a hypomanic restless energy mounting. I change radio stations mid-song; I’m eating and sleeping less, something under my skin clawing to get out. Am I the lion in the house, after all this time, waiting to pounce? I run soups and pastas down the stairs for my parents’ dinner, go back to collect greasy Tupperware. I listen to Kathy crying on the phone, sit next to her while the nurses put on hazmat suits to administer her chemo. Emily tells me she is getting a divorce. If I am unhappy and my husband is unhappy but neither one of us speaks up, does anyone hear the tree of our marriage falling?
The white-noise machine dulls the roar of Sabina’s siren call.
My mother and I have suggested throwing a party for his ninetieth, where all the many people who love him could gather, but he won’t hear of it. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” he says. The trappings of socializing—having to maneuver around with his walker, possibly falling down as he often does or not making it to the bathroom in time—have been added to the long list of things that make him anxious. His world shrinks, month by month, day by day. Although he can still read, he can no longer recite the alphabet or remember the order of the letters. Only Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, on the pages of his morning Star, remain as some reminder of wider terrain.
He is on a journey across the white barren land, inside himself. We stand on the periphery and watch him ride away.