You're Married to Her? (9 page)

Did I want to smoke a joint? Kharma asked. Why not? Would I roll it while she went to the bathroom? No problem. And upon returning to the bedroom naked except for a black lace bra, Didn't I always really want to do this? I suppose I had.

Throughout the course of my much younger life I have had occasion to observe that whenever I had
not
been looking for sex, had no particular desire, no attraction, no place to do it or time to do it in, the opportunity often arose unbidden. Like the very next night back in Boston at the restaurant where I worked, when a waitress with whom I'd been carrying on a mild flirtation abruptly announced she had lost her apartment and was moving west. Could she buy me a farewell drink? Of course. Could I put her up at my place? Why not? The sex was entirely forgettable, a fumbling late night attempt to create closure to a connection that was a fantasy to begin with. It led to nothing. In fact I divulged everything upon Marge's return. I don't think we had left the baggage carousel at Logan airport before I begged forgiveness. I swore fidelity forever. End of story.

Except that a few days later, while on the Cape, I began to feel caustic electric shocks, burning flashes of liquid fire, whenever I tried to urinate. Marge insisted that I see a doctor immediately—IMMEDIATELY!—the quality of health care on Cod Cape at the time notwithstanding. (Marge had twisted her ankle jogging the year before and was diagnosed with gout.) My infidelity
precluded putting it off, however.
Nolo contendere.
I was guilty.

The admissions clerk at the local clinic seemed to pick up on this—although at first I thought it was because I wasn't a local, in itself suspect—and greeted me with a cold silent stare.

“Hello.” I smiled, but she wasn't having any of it. Everything about me looked like trouble. “I'm here to see a doctor. I have a kind of burning pain—”

“Speak up, please.”

This was a delicate situation, one that begged privacy. Yet the closer in I moved the farther she backed away. “Well, I'm experiencing a burning—when I go to the bathroom.”

“And where would that be?”

“On the second floor of the house.”

“The burn wound,” she said, deciding she was in dialog with an idiot. “Has it begun to blister?”

“I didn't say I have a burn wound, exactly, I said I have a burn
ing
.”

“Then where is the burn
ing
, exactly?”

There was no easy way to say this to a stranger, a woman, in a crowded reception room. I therefore tried to mouth the words.

“Speak up, please.”

“You know, in my. . . .” I dropped my eyes to my groin.

“Sir, I can't hear you.”

“IN MY PENIS. I HAVE A BURNING PAIN IN MY PENIS.”

Every head in the room shot up. “You'd better come with me.”

I was directed down a long yellow corridor where a nurse in square white shoes, white stockings, and a starched Florence Nightingale cap looked me up and down with her fists firmly anchored to her hips. Without a word she led me to an egg-shaped man wearing a stethoscope and perched on a creaky wooden chair with wheels.

“Well let me see it, let me see it.” He waved at my trousers while pawing through a cluttered desk drawer. As I lowered my zipper the nurse glanced uneasily at the exit sign, unsure what exactly I was going to reveal, a bomb, a gun, a chancre-covered sack of pus. The doctor wheeled forward while untwisting a paperclip that he meticulously straightened to its full length, preparing to begin the examination.

“Open the
meatus
,” he growled, barely parting his lips to speak. Mē-ā′təs. I had never heard the word. “The
meatus
, the
meatus
,” he repeated, indicating the tip of my penis. I froze upon hearing the snap of the nurse's rubber gloves. Confused, and therefore paralyzed, I didn't know what they wanted, until the nurse pinched it open like the mouth of a baby bird. With the first jab of the paper clip I staggered into the doctor, whose chair rolled over the nurse's foot. Enough! The nurse tore off her gloves. I would have to seek help elsewhere.

“But where?” This was the only clinic within forty-five miles. “Where?” I followed her to the door.

“Elsewhere, elsewhere,” she shouted, as if giving a deaf beggar directions to hell.

Marge, no stranger to casual sex, was angry and understandably wounded, but nonetheless making an effort to forgive me. In my absence, however, she, too, had begun to experience a burning sensation. We left immediately for Boston where she had scheduled an appointment with her gynecologist who referred me to a urologist, post-haste.

A well-fed, bull-necked fellow with an avuncular laugh and long silver-tipped cavalry mustaches, he dismissed the Cape doctor as a back-country moron and referred to himself as “the old army doc,” as in “The old army doc has served the troops on four continents,” and “There's nothing the old army doc hasn't seen.” Indeed the examination room was decorated with color photographs of anal genital herpes and pubic lice. Cheerfully describing the various shades and textures of discharge—milky, cottage cheesy, green—he began his examination. “So you had a sexual encounter outside marriage?”

“Well, my partner and I aren't married.”

“The old one-night stand.” His chuckle held a hint of nostalgia.

“Two,” I corrected him. “One-night stands.”

“Besides the partner?” His eyebrows peaked. With a waiting room full of swollen prostates, his morning was suddenly getting interesting. “Not allergic to penicillin are you?”

“Will that cure it?”

“If you have syphilis it will.”

“I might have syphilis?”

“Any lesions or chancres?”

“No.”

“Any pustulating sores? Gumma on your anus? Your face?”

“Gumma?”

“Round tumorous masses. I treated an old man in Korea whose face looked like a sack of golf balls. No coloration on your shorts?”

“I haven't noticed any.”

“Oh, you'd notice. Bunch of my boys in Pusan, half the damn platoon, came down with the clap. Their shorts were the color of eggs over easy.” He handed me a glass slide and instructed me to hold it in front of my penis while he opened a fresh tube of surgical jelly. “Hold tight to the table now.”

“But I haven't had any discharge.”

“Not to worry, the old army doc can get blood from a stone. Ready?” he asked, and pressed my prostate like a doorbell until one tiny droplet dribbled onto the slide. Later that evening he telephoned with the results. “Chlamydia!” he proclaimed with the enthusiasm of a proud grandpa announcing the name of a newborn.

Many men would have to admit that the sole reason they have even half a chance with a woman who is in all
measurable ways more intelligent and financially independent, socially astute and imbued with a firm sense of life purpose, is that they are some kind of improvement over the previous guy; a WIFP, as the expression goes, a Work in F**king Progress. I was not as a rule unfaithful. Yes, there had been Wendy. But Marge was married and living with another man at the time. And yes again, the one anomalous weekend. But I was not some kind of man ho. I did not hit on Marge's friends. Or try to impress these friends of Marge's with four-star restaurant meals billed to the family credit card. I did not install my girlfriends in the guest room or sing lugubrious Appalachian folk songs on the auto harp when one of them dumped me. Yes, I had given Marge an STD. But I was not her ex-husband.

Marge was a reformed roué, a woman of admitted sexual experience and curiosity. I didn't expect her to pump her fists and shout, Hey, I might have pelvic inflammatory disease but it beats living with a man who doesn't want to share my bed. I didn't expect her to choke down 500 mg of erythromycin four times a day and shrug, Who cares about nausea, stomach pain, and vomiting, Woody's got my back. But the fact is, I did. I wasn't jealous of the attention she received. I was more than happy to take up the slack at home when she was on the road and honored to be asked to read the early drafts of her fiction and offer feedback. All of which the ex considered to be a drag.

I was ashamed of myself. I was ready, begging by now,
to commit to monogamy. Her husband had never been. Even when I knew she was angry and feeling vulnerable, wondering if she would ever be able to trust me again, our strengths and weaknesses were oddly counterbalanced. Marge was good at making money but never able to save it. I was my father's son, cheap. She didn't have a retirement plan. I'd studied the market but had never had a dime to invest.

Some days before Thanksgiving, Marge received a cryptic summons from her mother in Florida. Come down here, her mother demanded. As soon as possible, she insisted. I have something to give you. And most mysteriously: Take the car.

In poems and novels, Marge's mother emerged as an impoverished and embittered working class housewife from inner city Detroit, and more, an insidious manipulator. She was a psychic, according to Marge, able to perceive the innermost secrets of strangers and read the palms of neighbor women who lined up outside her kitchen door for the privilege. She was resentful of having had to quit high school in the tenth grade to work as a chambermaid and, jealous of her daughter's opportunities, she had tried to prevent Marge from taking a scholarship to one of the best universities in the country so she might remain living at home and pay rent. She was prone to fits of childish petulance. In one family story, upset with her husband's late arrival for dinner, she dumped a stew she'd been cooking for hours into the garbage can. Powerless, however, in the face of her husband's
violent temper—he once slammed the car door on Marge's hand because she was slow to climb into the back seat—Marge's mother attempted to wield absolute control over her daughter, sniffing her underpants for evidence of sexual activity, finding and reading her hidden diaries, subjecting her boyfriends, and later in life Marge's husband, to unyielding ridicule. In fact her ex-husband flat out refused to visit his in-laws ever again.

“What exactly does your mother want to give you?” I asked.

Marge couldn't even guess.

“Why the hurry?”

“She said it had to be before Christmas.”

“But your mother is Jewish.”

Many things about her mother were a complete mystery to Marge.

“Why do you have to drive twelve-hundred miles?”

“I assume it's too big to take back on the plane.”

“What is?”

“She wouldn't say.”

What I was about to experience upon meeting her mother was inexplicable and is to this day, bizarre, as close as I have ever come to encountering the supernatural. I had no way of knowing any of this at the time, only that Marge and I were partners and friends as much as we were lovers, however long we might remain together. I knew that visits with her mother were emotionally wrenching for Marge. I gathered, too, that this visit might be the last and I wasn't about to ask her to face it alone.

I had seen photographs of Marge's mother and I was expecting an intimidating matriarch with Marge's dark penetrating eyes and loose black hair, but it was a white-haired lady, slender and frail, who opened the door of their small retirement home in Tequesta. She was perhaps four-and-a-half feet tall with a coquettish gleam in her eyes and a soft hopeful smile. She led us to the kitchen table and an old aluminum pot full of something lumpy and thick with a brown gelatinous gravy reminiscent of motor oil. “It's lamb stew,” she whispered. “But I have to say it's beef or
he
won't eat it.”

He
? I looked around. “I'm not really hungry,” I said.

She nodded with quiet understanding, “You still worry about your weight.”

How did she know that? “I'm not worried about my weight.”

“People make life miserable for overweight children.”

I turned silently to Marge. Obesity was the shame of my childhood. You told her that?

Marge slowly shook her head, of course not.

Then how did she...?

Marge shrugged, She just
knows
.

Her mother patted the chair next to hers at the kitchen table. “Have some,” she said. It was not a question.

He
, who I realized was always Marge's father, was enveloped in an enormous Naugahyde recliner watching TV. No longer the sadistic despot who once gave his
wife a gift-wrapped mop for her birthday, he was a pallid old man with smudged eye-glasses, a half-zipped fly and the bewildered expression of someone stranded on an island between two lanes of traffic. He was happy enough to have visitors but confused as this was Tuesday and the visiting nurse came on Wednesdays. Nonetheless he rolled up his sleeve to have his blood pressure checked and chuckled, “Heh, heh, heh,” the only sounds I heard from him as long as the visit lasted.

Marge's mother entered the living room with a thick folder of newspaper clippings. She took a seat next to me on the couch and placed them one after another on my lap. Some were yellow and crumbling, decades old.

“Mother likes to talk about current events,” Marge said by way of explanation.

“I don't know,” I responded politely after giving each one a glance. “I really haven't put much thought into President Carter's dealings with Anwar Sadat.”

“He's no use at conversation.” Her mother sniffed at her husband. “How about this?” She handed me an article about the introduction of a mechanical heart called the Jarvic-7.

“Don't know much about medicine, I'm afraid.”

“You were in the slow reader group in grade school, weren't you?”