Outtakes from a Marriage (6 page)

“To play your messages, press one.”

1.

“Joe, it’s Catherine. I’ve got flight info for you and Julia. Call me.”

“Hey, buddy, it’s me. There’s no basketball on Thursday. Couldn’t get court time. We’re gonna try for the following Tuesday. I’ll let you know.”

“Joe, it’s Simon. I’m sending that script I was telling you about. It’s an offer. It’s a great part. I think you should do this one. I know it’s going to be tight with your schedule, but I think it’s a really great part for you. It’s favored nations, so the money’s not great, but that’s not what it’s all about with a project like this. I think it’s a once-in-a-lifetime part, man. It’s like it was written for you. Call me.”

“Hey, Joe. Frank. I saw Leo the other night with that chick and I was thinking about that thing you told me. Fuckin’ funny, man. Let’s go have a drink sometime. I wanna talk to you about this project I’m thinking of doing.”

“Hi, babe. Guess what? I have to work tonight. Damn! I’m sorry, baby. I’ll make it up to you, I promise. Call me. I’m really sorry, baby. I love you. Bye.”

“Bah.” That ridiculous sheep had bleated
bah,
not bye, because of her damned cracker accent. Who? Who was she?

“To delete this message, press seven. To save this message, press nine. To repeat this message, press eleven.”

11.

“Hi, babe. Guess what? I have to work tonight…”

Bah.
I wished I were better at recognizing dialects. The furthest south I had ever lived was Maryland, and we had moved not long after my mom was killed, to Wellfleet on Cape Cod. My dad ran a charter fishing business there until he was forced to retire when he got sick, but I worked for him all through high school and I used to try to guess where people were from based on their accents. I worked on the dock, barefoot, in cut-off shorts and a bikini top all summer long, taking reservations and running credit cards, my skin brown and peeling, or sometimes gleaming with Bain de Soleil, my hair sun-streaked and blond, the front cut into “wings” like Farrah Fawcett-Majors. I remember that people from the South were exceptionally friendly, calling me “sweetie pie” or “angel” while I shyly passed receipts and insurance waivers to them. The boys who worked for my dad would often roll their eyes or make obscene gestures behind the customers’ backs, and I would try hard to keep a straight face. I developed crushes on many of these boys, these amiable “wharf rats,” as my dad called them, these Tommys, Bobbys, and Steves. If Dad liked a kid but didn’t like his name, he’d change it—I fell for a “Skillet” Riley one year and a “Skank” Hanover the next. Sometimes I’d run into these men when I visited the Cape, paunchy family men now, and it was hard to remember them tanned and ripped, flirting with me, kissing me on the beach at night….

I pushed 11 again.

“Hi, babe. Guess what? I have to work…”

The kids began scrambling out into the hallway just then, and the parents filed into the school. I shakily swung my phone cover shut, climbed to the top of the steps, and no sooner had I entered the school than Sammy ran into my open arms. I tried to pick him up but he squirmed out of my grip and chased a young friend down the steps and out onto the sidewalk.

Judy was standing beside me, laughing good-naturedly. “Somebody’s glad to be going home!”

“Oh,” I said, “there you are. I just spoke to Joe. What’s the date of the auction again?”

“February eleventh!”

“He’ll do it!” I announced, and Judy screamed with delight.

“I can’t wait to tell Elaine!” she shrilled.

“Okay, well, just let me know the details when you have them.”

“Thank you, Julia! And thank Joe for us!”

“Oh, I will.”

Sammy and I walked home in our regular fashion—Sammy racing to the end of the block and then waiting on the corner for me to catch up. “Stay there, Sammy! Wait!” I called to him at the corner.

“I know!” he called back impatiently.

He knew not to cross the street without me, but I still reminded him every time. Boys are so impulsive. So distractible. What if he saw something across the street…

“Sammy!” I called, trotting to catch up.

“I know!” he hollered back.

At home, when I slid my key into our lock, the door swung open and Joe was standing there in a pair of sweats and a T-shirt, welcoming us with open arms and a big grin.

“Hi, babe, guess what? I have to work…”
Was he relieved when he heard her words? He looked so happy to be home.

“Daddy!” cried Sammy, leaping into his arms.

“I thought you had to work late,” I said, avoiding his eyes.

“No. We ended up wrapping early.”

“What about that difficult stunt?” I asked, but Joe had already turned away from me and was chasing Sammy into the kitchen, with Sammy squealing excitedly and Joe roaring, “I’m gonna get you!”

I’m gonna get you,
I thought.

[
six
]

R
hesus monkeys,
thirsty
rhesus monkeys, would rather watch a videotape of their tribe’s dominant monkey than drink their favorite sweetened juice beverage.

Ruby presented me with this interesting kernel of information that night when she wandered into the kitchen and discovered me watching a story about Matt Damon on
Entertainment Tonight.

It was a distraction.

On weekday evenings, after I put Sammy to bed, it had become my habit to watch TV in the kitchen while Ruby did her homework in her room and Joe studied his next day’s lines in ours. When Ruby was little, I never watched TV in the evening because I was trying to write a children’s book.
Annie Acorn,
it was called. It was about a little acorn that wanted to be a flower but grew up to be a tree. It rhymed. There were pictures. I never really finished it. Also never finished the screenplay about the three college friends that I started and abandoned a few years back. Or the article about the politics of breast-feeding that Beth had encouraged me to write. Most recently, I had never finished an application I had requested and received from an adult literacy program. I had decided I would volunteer to teach people to read now that I had such a large part of the day with no kids around. I had started to fill out the application but had gotten hung up in the section that asked how many hours I would be able to dedicate to the program. I had meant to talk to Joe and Catalina about it—how much did they each need me? But I just hadn’t had the chance.

Anyway, we had a large flat-screen television for our living room, but I always watched television in our kitchen, where we had a tiny set that sat on the counter under the microwave. “Why don’t you watch that on the big TV?” Joe would sometimes ask when he came into the kitchen for a snack, and I’d usually say, “Oh, I’m not really watching it. I just turned it on so that I’d have something in the background while I get some things done in here.” Then Joe would look around the kitchen, immaculate from Catalina’s after-dinner cleanup, and he’d look at me sitting there with a glass of wine in my hand and he’d say, “Oh.” This always prompted me to sputter something like, “I’m just having a quick wine break,” and it had become a little bit of a running joke. “Don’t bother Mom,” Joe would sometimes call to Ruby when she approached the kitchen, “she’s working!” and I would leap to my feet and start sorting through drawers and we’d all have a good chuckle. But that night, I’d had no warning and I was caught watching
Entertainment Tonight,
which made me a little ashamed.

“Monkeys watch videos?” I asked Ruby, fumbling with the remote.

“Yep. Given the choice, and two clearly defined levers, the parched monkeys will always choose to watch the activities of their star monkey.” Ruby paused behind my chair and watched as the show segued to a piece about Jessica Simpson.

“And the male monkeys, even if they’re starving, would rather watch a video of a female monkey’s ass than eat food,” she said.

“I was only watching because there’s supposed to be a segment about Daddy’s show,” I said, finally finding the power button and switching the TV off. “It looks like they ran out of time. Maybe it’ll be on tomorrow.”

“On the other hand,” said Ruby, who had moved to the fridge to pour herself a glass of iced Kombucha tea, “the monkeys have to be bribed,
with extra juice,
to watch the ordinary monkeys on TV.”

I sat for a moment after Ruby left the kitchen and then, feeling a sudden, indignant rage, called after her, “Your father is no ordinary monkey!” to which she replied, “Mom! What are you talking about?” Then she muttered, “Psycho!” and stomped off to her room.

I tried to shrug off Ruby’s diagnosis, but the image of those monkeys stayed with me for the rest of the evening. I decided I would do something constructive in the kitchen and began searching the refrigerator for food that had passed its sell-by date, but all the while I thought of the monkeys’ hollowed eyes, glazed and vacant from hours of television viewing, their parched, swollen tongues pressing against their yellowing teeth, their fur falling out in clumps as they pulled the lever over and over again. Just to watch that celebrity monkey. And watch him doing what? Preening? Racing about on toes and knuckles? Self-grooming?

And then I wondered about the famous monkey’s mate. Did she choose him when he was just an ordinary chimp, before he became famous, when nobody wanted to watch him, much less mate with him? Did she desire him just because she loved his smell or his gait or the way he gazed at her, or did she throw herself at him later, after he was already better than juice—just to bask in his reflected glow?

[
seven
]

H
i, Julia! It’s Alison! I feel like we haven’t spoken in ages. Jules, where the hell have you been? Why do I get the feeling you’re there and just not picking up? Hmm…Okay, well, just wanted to check in and see how you’re doing. Not much going on here. Call me when you get this—don’t worry about the time difference, I wake up early. Julia? Oh, I thought I heard somebody pick up. Okay. Just checking in. Let’s catch up. Call me! Bye!”

Beth had told Alison.

I feel like we haven’t spoken in ages
. Right. I talk to Alison on the phone every other day. She was feeling left out.

Beth had told, that lying bitch. I knew she was going to tell. I knew it because I probably would have done the same thing—in fact, I have, many times. The friendship that had existed among the three of us since we shared an apartment in college was basically a twisted triangle of deceit. When Beth told me about Walt’s gender ID issues, for example, I promised—swore—not to tell Alison. Less than an hour later, I was talking to Alison about something completely unrelated when she said, “Something’s wrong with Beth. I sense it.”

Blown away by Alison’s almost mystical intuitive powers, I allowed as to how Beth might be going through a difficult time.

“Is it Walt?” she pressed.

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

“Walt’s a child,” Alison said, and I concurred, and before I knew it, I had spilled the beans about the panties and the shoes and everything. If it had been something else—a health issue or something—I’m sure I could have kept it to myself, but Alison and I always secretly felt that Beth’s decision to marry Walt was a serious betrayal. She knew we weren’t fond of him—couldn’t stand him, honestly—and it seemed selfish of Beth to go ahead and marry him anyway. I knew that Alison and Beth both felt the same way about my marrying Joe, and for that matter, Beth and I had always wondered why Alison had tied herself down with creepy Richard—we didn’t care how much he made in his mysterious real-estate ventures. Our standards for one another seemed to be higher than our standards for ourselves, and we each thought that the others had settled for illegitimate, undeserving mates, which is why we felt entitled to speak disparagingly about them with one another.

I had no intention of calling Alison back that morning. I had just sent Ruby and Sammy off to school and Joe was in the shower. I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table with the telephone. I dialed Joe’s phone number, tapped in his code, and waited.

The first two messages were show related: an urgent plea from the wardrobe manager to return a belt and the second AD calling to announce a delayed call time.
Too bad Joe didn’t listen to his messages before he took his shower,
I thought smugly.

The next message was from his assistant, Catherine. He had a photo shoot lined up with
GQ.
A fashion shoot for television’s best dressed. And that was it.

“End of messages!”
declared the automated recording.

Was it my imagination or was the Nextel voice getting increasingly chirpy? Almost teasingly pert. It was getting on my nerves. I had expected a message from the slutty girlfriend and now I felt let down. Extremely let down. Like some weird lifeline between Joe and me had been severed.

Joe walked into the kitchen, freshly showered and dressed for work, and I closed the phone.

“Coffee?” I asked.

“Yup,” he replied, and I got up to pour him a cup. “Thanks, hon,” he said, and he gave me a kiss on my forehead. Then he took a sip from his mug, flipped open his phone, and punched in his code. My heart raced. I don’t know why I found it so thrilling to know his messages before he did, but I had to steady myself against the counter while he listened. Then he slammed his phone shut. “My call time’s not till noon now. I’m going back to bed.”

“Oh,” I said, but what I thought was,
I know.

The kids were in school. Catalina was out. Not long ago Joe would have lured me back into bed with him, or I might have beat him back there myself. Because, you know, who doesn’t love morning sex? There’s something so leisurely and satisfying about that time of day in an empty apartment. The kids off learning. The bed still warm. But now, now that I had to look at all aspects of our marriage with a critical eye, I could see that our sex life had started to deteriorate during the years we tried to have Sammy, and it had never fully recovered. The drudgery of ovulation calendars and fertility drugs and the cruel monthly arrival of my period had slightly soured us to each other. “It’ll get better,” said my friend Jennifer, who had been through it. “Sign up for IVF and then go back to having normal sex.” Jennifer’s son, Nathaniel, was conceived in a petri dish. We think Sammy was conceived on a block of ice, in an ice hotel. We’re not sure, but that’s what we tell people, because it’s possible, and it’s a good story. In fact, it occurred on a trip that had become part of our family lore. The trip to the Ice Hotel! It was one chapter of an oral anthology that Ruby and Joe and I had compiled over the years, which also contained tales of botched birthday surprises, a kleptomaniac house cleaner, and other amusing anecdotes of our family history that we revisited often, returning like a parched flock to a familiar watering hole.

“Remember the time we drove to Canada, Mom?” Ruby would say suddenly as the four of us sat in traffic on a hot summer day.

“You were visiting me on the set of
Appalachia
in Montreal,” Joe would reply. “What was that, 2000?”

“No, it was 2002! It was the winter after 9/11—that’s why we drove,” I’d reply. That first winter after 9/11, I was still of the mind-set that I’d never fly again, so Ruby and I drove to Montreal during her spring break. We spent a few days hanging around the set, being shuffled behind monitors and standing, breathless, in hushed anticipation of a scene out of context. We watched some of the dailies and met the crew.

“That was the last halfway decent thing Wyman ever made,” Joe always said when somebody mentioned the film.

Bill Wyman, the film’s director, had his wife and daughter visiting from California, and since Abby was only a year younger than Ruby, they swam in the hotel pool together each morning. The production had a long weekend coming up and Joe and I decided we should take Ruby to visit Quebec City. “Check out the Ice Hotel,” said Kate Wyman when I told her. “It’s just outside Quebec. We’re thinking of visiting there at some point ourselves.”

“The Ice Hotel!” Ruby had declared with delight. “I’ve always wanted to go to the Ice Hotel!”

Ruby had seen an article about the Ice Hotel in a scholastic magazine the year before and had been fascinated by it ever since. At one point she actually had photos of the Ice Hotel posted on her bulletin board, and it was easy to see why the place was so intriguing to her. The photos revealed what appeared to be a minimalist-inspired hotel interior—except that all the walls, floors, ceilings, and furnishings were made of ice. The beds were blocks of ice with animal pelts for bedding. The artwork was carved into the ice walls, and all of the rooms had an eerily beautiful incandescence that can only be found in a space where light bathes ice everywhere. Everything—the chapel, the lobby, the lounge—was an ethereal blue. It was a pristine winter palace, and in the mind of our daughter, to visit such a place would make us part of its magic. To not visit would be to surrender our lives to an eternity of the carpeted, upholstered, heated damnation that was our only existence.

The hotel was in a park that had other amusements such as skiing, snowmobiling, and dogsledding, and we decided to make a day of it. We would visit the Ice Hotel and also, in honor of Ruby’s favorite book,
The Call of the Wild,
we would go dogsledding.

That morning—a bracing, crystal-clear Canadian morning, fourteen degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of March—we drove out to the park. We decided to dogsled first and had been told to arrive at the kennels no later than ten o’clock. Apparently there were some instructions they needed to go over with us.

I was looking forward to the dogsledding. I imagined Joe, Ruby, and me all tucked into a cozy sled together with a Yukon Cornelius character standing behind us on the sled’s runners, mushing the dogs and telling us of his adventures on the old Iditarod Trail. I envisioned noble, courageous sled dogs running us across the frozen landscape, their tongues lolling happily out of their mouths, and of how it would be one of those experiences that Ruby would cherish for the rest of her life.

We arrived to find half a dozen empty dogsleds parked outside a large but dilapidated barn. The sleds were placed in a line, obviously waiting to be hitched up to the dogs, whose shrill voices rose in a cacophonous series of barks, yips, and howls from inside. As we approached the barn door, it suddenly swung open, and the three of us instantly covered our mouths and noses with our hands. The sickening stench of a barnload of dog crap blasted out into the cold morning in an almost visible gust. Then through the door lurched a pair of barking huskies dragging a burly handler along with them. The dogs were strapped into nylon harnesses and their handler was between them, a rough, calloused hand firmly gripping each harness. The dogs were so excited and pulled so hard that their front feet didn’t touch the ground, but instead pawed frantically at the air while their hind feet propelled them forward in short hopping steps. The first pair of huskies was followed by a second pair being somewhat restrained by a lanky teenaged boy, and then a third pair and another teenager. All of the dogs grinned maniacally between barks, and their upright two-by-two procession looked like the deployment of a senseless but ferocious army. “Go on inside,” said one of the handlers to us. “They’re giving the driving instructions.” I looked doubtfully toward the massive, listing barn. The cries of the dogs within sounded primitive and foreboding to me, like the lusty song of caged wolves, pent-up, frustrated, boasting of blood and danger. “Go on in,” the man said again. Ruby pranced enthusiastically toward the door and we followed her.

Inside the barn, several people stood in a semicircle around an empty dogsled. Next to the sled was a very ruddy French Canadian, who said when we entered, “Ah, here zey are! You made a reservation yesterday. You’re with ze child, yes?”

“Yup,” said Joe, who then turned to me and rolled his eyes. Later, when he told the story, he would claim that the accent was fake.

“I am Jean-Luc,” said our guide. “We will begin our safety demonstration.” His demonstration involved much jumping on and off the runners of the sled and stamping on the brake. It wasn’t until about halfway through his speech that I came to understand that we were expected to drive our own sleds.

A final pair of dogs dragged their handler past us. The dogs’ barks had built into an hysterical crescendo and Jean-Luc smiled as they passed and said, “Zey are excited.”

Excited
doesn’t even begin to describe the emotion I was experiencing. Adrenaline surged through my veins like a flash flood of panic. Even
I
could smell my fear.

“Zee brake under your foot is this metal bar,” Jean-Luc was saying. “Ees the only way to slow down the dogs. If the dogs are running, it might mean you must stand on the brake with both feet. With all your weight.
It is important not to lose control of ze dogs.
”

Although the temperature in the barn was about six degrees Fahrenheit, I was beginning to sweat.

Ruby grinned with delight. Joe was clenching his jaw. A bad habit of his. Never a good sign.

“Also, very important,” said Jean-Luc, “we will tell you the name of your lead dog. There are eight dogs in a team, but you only need to know the name of ze lead dog. He is the one you talk to. Say the dog’s name, then give a command. ‘Hup’ means forward. Your lead dog will know what you want.
It is very important to keep the dogs moving forward.
If they stop or slow down, they might become entangled in the harnesses. If that happens,
immediately
call for help from one of your guides. When a dog becomes entangled, usually the other dogs will attack it, and there will be a
big dogfight.
So be very careful. Any questions?”

“I can’t do this,” I whispered to Joe.

“Shhh! Just listen to the guy,” Joe said, but I could tell by the way he was clenching his jaw that he was having second thoughts himself.

“Okay, let’s go!” said Jean-Luc, and we all followed him out of the barn. The dogs, all hitched to their sleds now, howled and barked and snarled with excitement. Their sleds were anchored to the ground and the dogs lunged against their harnesses, snapping at the air and at one another.

Jean-Luc began assigning sleds to people. When he came to us he said to Joe, “I think I will take your daughter in my sled. Your wife will ride with you. It’s easier for you to drive with one person.”

I was relieved that Ruby was going to be riding with a professional. At least one of us would survive. And Ruby was clearly thrilled to be riding in the first sled with a real dog musher. Joe and I were directed to the last sled, and when I climbed inside, Jean-Luc threw a filthy blanket over my lap. Then Joe stepped onto the runners behind me and our team of dogs lunged forward so hard that the sled bounced and slid sideways against the strain of the anchor.

“Jesus!” said Joe.

“Whatever you do, don’t let go!” I cried. My fear was that if Joe fell off, I would be left alone in a sled with no reins and no way to reach the brakes, behind an out-of-control pack of dogs. I imagined the dogs bolting off so fast that the sled would become airborne with me clinging to it for dear life.

“The lead dog!” I said to Joe. One of the handlers was now unfastening our anchor from the ground. “We never found out the name of the lead dog!”

“Jesus Christ, the lead dog!” Joe screamed. “NOBODY TOLD US THE NAME OF THE LEAD DOG!”

“HELP!” I shrieked.

“It’s Lobo,” the handler said calmly. He pulled the anchor from where it was lodged in the ground and placed it next to me on the sled and we were off.