You're Married to Her? (6 page)

The more lurid my fantasies, the more I craved sex
with her. The more she knew I wanted her, the more men she brought home when I wasn't around. After River's day care teacher there was the van driver, the cook, the director of the school, and then as far as I could tell, any guy who was remotely nice to her son. I couldn't very well ask her to stop unless I stopped seeing Marge. Nor could I berate her for acting out the very behavior that had attracted me in the first place. Sex was easy for Wendy. She knew how to use it to get what she needed. I was living proof. But sometimes I'd burst out, “Why are you such a slut, Wendy? To get back at me?”

“Why am I a slut? Because I have sex with other men? Is Marge a slut?”

“I knew Marge before I knew you.”

“Well, I knew Chad.”

“What about Teddy? Or James? Or Carlos, the guy I saw you making out with in the laundromat?”

“Carlos was sweet,” she said. “River was cranky so Carlos bought him a package of peanut butter crackers from the vending machine.”

“He bought your son a package of crackers so you started tongue kissing the guy? I can't even imagine what's in store for the kid's pediatrician.”

Now, if I was reading this instead of writing it, a satyricon, a sex farce featuring a moronic self-absorbed satyr, the anguished rant of some fool complaining about an impossible situation that he had created for himself, I would say, Idiot, you have no right to be
jealous. I would ask, Why did you get involved with Wendy in the first place? You were dating a beautiful older woman who loved you, who loved sleeping with you, who believed in your work. What did you imagine would happen? What made you think that a lonesome destitute single mother who fucked you two hours after being introduced would remain faithful while you were with another woman? Why would you go on torturing yourself?

Because I was writing. Because sitting alone in a room for four hours a day and attempting to make up a story is much less interesting than imagining your woman with a stranger's penis in her mouth. Yes, it is painful. Of course, it is counterproductive. But on any scale of interest or measurement of emotional involvement jealousy is to writing what five-alarm habañero chile is to cream of wheat. Writing is cream of wheat.

It gets better. But not until it gets worse.

After some months I had finished a few hundred pages of a not very good first draft, but I had wild sex every day, some days twice, with two different partners. Wendy and I had reached a kind of shaky equilibrium, based on the fact that Marge and I spent only one night a week together when she was up from the Cape and their paths never crossed. There were the occasional complications that involved the application of
Nix Creme Rinse for Pubic Lice, but by and large, we co-existed.

Until one hot summer night, while at my apartment with Marge, I received a telephone call from Wendy who was choking on mucus and tears. “I'm homeless,” Wendy said. “She's throwing us out.”

“Who's throwing you out? Why?”

“Patricia, the bitch. For no reason.”

Patricia's side of the story painted her in a somewhat more understanding light. Apparently she had arrived home unexpectedly to find Wendy and Jackson asleep on the couch. “We weren't doing anything,” Wendy protested. But, according to Patricia, nor were they wearing very much.

Marge, always sympathetic to the plight of a homeless single mother, worked diligently to find a new place for Wendy, who eventually located what may have been the last available rent-controlled apartment in the city. It was unfortunate that it was two blocks from mine, and so started her habit of showing up for a surprise lunchtime date on the very afternoons Marge was scheduled to arrive. My sudden lack of sexual energy on those afternoons caused Marge to give me an ultimatum: draw limits with Wendy or she would give up on the relationship with me. Marge was seriously evaluating an offer to teach at a prestigious writing program where a former lover of hers was also teaching. It is certainly possible that Wendy's spontaneous lunchtime blowjobs could have been the factor that
ended my relationship with Marge and changed the course of my life. But it wasn't; it was the fire. The electrical fire that burned down Wendy's building and left her without a home or an article of clothing to her name and brought her to my door one night with her son in her arms.

It had taken me exactly eighteen months to go from a promising young writer with his own quaint apartment and a sophisticated older mistress to a putz with two angry girlfriends who hated each other, a child not his own and, in lieu of a goat, a donkey, and a cow, an eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the bedroom.

I would occasionally answer the phone to the following:

“Hi, is Wendy there? This is Brad from her Ed Psych class. No? Tell her not to call me back, okay? Tell her I'll call
her
. You got that? Under no circumstances should she call
my
house.”

These were men from her night school courses, guys who were hoping for a little action on the side. Three nights a week Wendy was making up required credits, completing her BS in Education in hopes of getting into grad school for a Masters in Special Ed. It seemed like an impossible long shot, a single mother of thirty working part-time, studying for the GRE nine years after leaving college, but we rarely talked about
it. In fact we avoided talking about our situation entirely. Our little makeshift family lived together in my small apartment along with the invisible gorilla, a huge and unmentionable presence made apparent the very morning after the fire, when Wendy opened a dresser drawer, found Marge's stash of black fishnet stockings and garter belts and threw them in my face; a situation hopeless to discuss because, as Wendy had no money and no other alternatives, there was nothing we could do about it. Therefore River was the focus, always. Getting him to school in the morning, making sure he ate breakfast, reading to him at night, painstakingly scheduling pick-ups, drop-offs, play dates; making life seem normal, making sure he wasn't crushed by the enormity of this love blunder of ours. With every spare moment, early mornings before sunrise, evenings, breaks at her job, Wendy studied. A teaching job was the dream, the only imaginable solution, the impossible outside chance that might ensure her ability to make a living for herself and her child. I could feel her sheer impatience with me, her excitement as weekends approached, when I might visit Marge and leave her to her son, her studies, her new school friends. There was no future for Wendy and me, only her present dependence, and the unspoken but mutual determination to see this mess through to a peaceful end.

For the better part of that year Wendy had a regular study group with people prepping for the Graduate Record Exams and although I never asked, and she never
volunteered, I began to think she had met someone special. There were unaccounted-for hours in her evenings out, added care in the way she dressed for class, even surprises in our now very occasional lovemaking. One night, after never once having expressed curiosity about the position I have since identified as the reverse cowgirl, she straddled me while turned to face the opposite wall. It was lovely watching her ass cheeks quiver as she stretched forward, placing her weight on her forearms to climax, but of course I was left to wonder where she'd picked up this little trick. And then there was the night I arrived home from a weekend with Marge to find River simply bursting with news. “Well, don't you look like the happy little guy,” I said.

“Oh, yes. Know what?”

“Tell me.”

“While you were gone there was someone here.” He actually winked. “And he was very nice!”

But mostly there was a sense of strength and confidence in Wendy that grew in proportion to her distance from me. Sometimes she would actually ask, “How's Marge doing?” and expect to have a conversation.

One evening in late April, she sprang from her car and ran up the front steps. The door seemed to blow open in a rush of wind. There was a radiance surrounding her, a shimmering aura of victory and newly won power. Her eyes were wild. She was taking gulps of air and holding her hand over her heart. In her other hand she was clutching a letter from Simmons College. She
took a long slow swallow in order to speak. “I got into grad school,” Wendy said, and she began to weep. It was over. Our ridiculous makeshift family had come to an end.

That summer River went to visit his grandmother at her cottage on Lake Superior and I attempted to write again, tentatively, for an hour each morning, at the desk I hadn't used in months, in the room we had turned into River's. I was circulating the novel I had written and receiving the first spate of many rejections. Marge's agent, famous as a keen judge of talent, had attempted to be kind, but read it for exactly what it was, an episodic apprentice work seething with self pity, fantasies of revenge and imagined offenses. Wendy spent most of her free time arranging financial aid and looking for an apartment in a good school district. I took a night job as a waiter in a high-end restaurant and spent my afternoons writing something new, tentative sketches about the restaurant's spoiled and wealthy patrons, its petulant chefs, and the other waiters, artists like myself, unknown and hungry for attention. With River splashing away somewhere on the Upper Peninsula, Wendy living with her new boyfriend, who had been one of her night school teachers, and Marge on the Cape writing what was to become her novel
Vida
, I was alone, truly alone with my work for the first time in
years, no women to please, no
Rubber Ducky
; no goat, no donkey, no cow, no gorilla in the bedroom. Rabbi, I felt like a new man.

L
ocated in the heart of Beacon Hill, the restaurant didn't serve food exactly, food you ate at a diner, but romantic descriptions of food, and charged by the adjective. Desert wasn't called pudding, however much it resembled it, but banana caramel mousse with Maine summer berries. An appetizer that tasted, at least to me, like a sour pickle was called a Kirby cucumber fermented in sea salt, spring water, Chardonnay vinegar, and Sri Lankan green peppercorns. At the time the concept was completely new in provincial old Boston, pioneered by a small cadre of ambitious young restaurateurs who were inspired by Julia Child's bodacious local TV show. Celebrated for our variations on traditional favorites—cod cakes sautéed in white truffle oil garnished with Usukuchi soy sauce and orange blossom honey; I had to memorize this stuff—and presentations assembled as delicately as a house of cards, we were among the first restaurants in a city known for Yankee comfort food to feature
la nouvelle cuisine.

The owner/chef was Le Cordon Bleu trained and not only considered herself an artist but liked to hang out with them and hired a wait-staff of painters, musicians, dancers, singers studying opera, and me, the would-be novelist. We knew nothing about food, much less about wine, and blundered through table service with pure youthful chutzpah. Before I got the job I didn't have any artist friends my own age but the regimen of the restaurant soon made it impossible to hang out with anyone else. We slept until noon, reported for work at four, and spent the next eight hours at an all-out sprint. Exhausted to the bone at midnight but unable to sleep, we swigged the dregs of our tables' unfinished wine bottles, counted our tips, and primped to hit the dance bars while trash talking our customers, our boss, and all the undeserving artists who were making it while we were not. I saw precious little of Marge on her one night in the city as I worked Monday through Friday and arrived back to the apartment reeking so intensely of sweat, food, alcohol, tobacco smoke, perfume, dish water, and all the congregate effluvium of fine dining, that no matter how late I entered she would be awakened from sleep, sit upright in bed and gag. Every Friday night, however, I drove to Cape Cod for the weekend, leaving whatever bar at last call, grabbing coffee and a roast beef sandwich at Buzzy's, the all-night drive-in next to Mass General, and plowed the hundred-plus miles with the windows open and the radio blasting to keep me awake. One night I left Boston so blindly drunk that I arrived
in Wellfleet with a sandwich in my lap that I had neglected to eat and could not remember buying. Much as I enjoyed the life I had to admit that waiting tables in a high-end restaurant, like working in the theater or the emergency room, the night desk at a daily newspaper or for that matter organized crime, guaranteed access to the shadow world of the nocturnal demimonde but made it impossible to conduct a relationship with anyone outside the business. I gave notice soon thereafter.

I had accumulated some savings to live on, however, and more than enough material for the novel. In a little over a year, I managed to complete and revise a draft that was competent enough to get me a good agent, which at the time I defined as anyone who had a mailing address in New York City, at least one client who had written a best seller, and took me to lunch in a restaurant with a wine list.

The book was rejected by over thirty mainstream publishers and although their comments ranged from the condescending (“Mr. Wood is a writer whose next project might be worth reading”) to the absurd (“I cannot publish this book because I hate the protagonist. He reminds me too much of myself”) I was aware of a disjointedness of opinion that I could not dismiss. Many people familiar with the novel, including some quite famous writer-friends of Marge's and audiences who heard excerpts read aloud, liked it very much. I kept being told how the book spoke to them of family situations they found painfully familiar, of what they feared went
on inside pretentious restaurant kitchens, and above all how much it made them laugh. My agent had felt that way too, at first, but wearied of making costly submissions (these being the days of bulky manuscripts delivered by messenger), taking my lugubrious phone calls, and building up the ego of someone from whom she had yet to make a dime.