Dirty Love (15 page)

In bed, they made love in the dark, and Marla held him tightly. After, curled up together and beginning to doze, Marla felt little of what she had earlier; Dennis was a good man and she was lucky to have him. She reminded herself that living together wasn’t supposed to be easy, and she fell asleep with her cheek on his warm, hairy arm.

T
WO WEEKS BEFORE
L
ABOR
D
AY,
Nancy left party invitations on Marla’s, Lisa’s, and Cheryl’s keyboards while they were in the vault getting their cashboxes. Nancy took pride in her invitations, usually scrolling the borders with a pattern from one of Carl’s computer programs—blooming flowers on a vine, tiny party hats and martini glasses. In the past Marla’s invitations had been addressed just to her, but this time, engraved in gold was:
Marla and Dennis
. This phrase lingered for her throughout the day; it reminded her of all the other phrases she’d always heard but never really listened to quite in this way: Nancy and Carl, Cheryl and Danny, Lisa and, lately, Richard. Even her own parents: Helen and Larry. And now Marla and Dennis; by choosing to be with one she had somehow been invited into a whole society of others.

At the party two weeks later, Marla spent the first half hour introducing Dennis to everyone she knew, standing close enough to him that they would know right away he wasn’t just a friend. And Dennis was much better with people than she’d ever been: he called them by their first names he didn’t forget; he smiled and laughed a lot, a Michelob Light in his big hand. Marla noticed the glances of many of the women she’d seen at these parties for years, quick appraising looks at both of them. Most appeared happy for her, relieved even. One woman, Anna Harrison, her old friend’s mother-in-law, kept her eyes on Dennis’s belly for a while, looking at Marla again before turning back to conversation. She seemed to be writing them off as the two fat people who’d found each other, and Marla felt bruised by this but only for a moment or two; Dennis was really hitting it off with Carl and some of his friends from the company, talking software and search engine capability. Nancy and Carl had set up a volleyball net in the backyard beyond the pool, croquet too, but by noon it began to rain, and the guests sat in Nancy’s plush furniture around the house eating barbecued chicken and potato salad off plates in their laps. After lunch, most of the men descended to the boys’ playroom in the basement and began a dart-throwing championship while Carl and Dennis played a video game on the wide-screen.

Soon it was just the women. They sat in Nancy’s deep sofa and chairs in the living room. Outside the French doors, rain fell on the pool, empty lawn, and the trees and lake beyond. The room smelled like leftover barbecue sauce, five or six kinds of perfume and skin cream, fresh coffee. On her glass coffee table, Nancy had set out plates and forks and cheesecake right from the bakery box. Some of the women started talking about takeout food and how they hardly ever really cooked or baked anymore.

“Who’s got time?” Nancy said, slicing wedges of cheesecake onto plates.

“Exactly,” said another.

“Frank does more cooking than I ever do.” It was Anna Harrison, the woman whose eyes had lingered on Dennis’s belly earlier. Lisa offered that Richard cooked better than she did, and she believed men were really better at it than women anyway. “Look at all the chefs. How many are women?”

“Right,” Cheryl said. “But who do you think cooks at home?”

“Good point.” Lisa grabbed her cigarette pack and excused herself to go smoke. Marla could hear the rain falling against the windows, the occasional joyful roar of the men downstairs. Nancy offered her a plate of cheesecake, but Marla said no thank you, and not because she didn’t want to draw attention to herself or her eating, but because she really felt full, satisfied. Her boyfriend was downstairs with Carl somewhere and she was sitting in this room as it fell into three or four conversations now, and even though she wasn’t talking, she didn’t feel left out of any of them. She looked past Cheryl and her incandescent blond hair as she leaned forward to give a woman named Bonnie tips on cross training. Marla could see Lisa on the other side of the French doors standing on the deck beneath the eaves out of the rain, her arms crossed, a thin stream of smoke shooting out in front of her: Marla wondered if she would quit for Richard, and even though he was probably right to make her do it, Marla was glad she had someone like Dennis, who, except for the thing about cleaning up, was content to leave her just the way she was.

A while later he and Carl came upstairs for more beer. They both looked happy and flushed. Nancy asked her husband who won and Carl jerked his thumb at Dennis: “I can’t even get
close
to this guy.”

Some of the women laughed. Marla smiled up at her big bushy-bearded engineer. She could feel the women watching her. She puckered her lips and Dennis leaned over, said hi, and kissed her quickly before he disappeared down the stairs with Carl. Marla raised her cup to her lips.

She felt watched by the whole room, but she kept her eyes only on Nancy, who was smiling with all her teeth, her eyes moist behind her glasses.

D
ENNIS AND
C
ARL
had hit it off so well that Nancy began arranging double dates for the four of them one or two Saturdays a month. They’d go to a restaurant downtown, then maybe a movie, or, once, dancing. At dinner Dennis said he’d rather go to a movie instead, but Nancy wouldn’t hear of it, and they drove over to the Marriott in Carl’s Mercedes.

The Executive Lounge was dimly lit and full of people, loud DJ rock blaring from gargantuan black speakers. Carl paid the cover charge, then led his wife between dancing couples right to the center of the crowded floor. Marla could see just the top of Nancy’s head as she began to move fast to a song Marla had heard her whole life. She’d never really danced before, but the place was so full and loud and dark nobody would really see her anyway. Why not? She pulled on Dennis’s big hand, but he wasn’t moving. He shook his head at her, then nodded at a small table a cocktail waitress was just finishing clearing. They sat down and Dennis ordered a round of what they’d all been drinking at the restaurant.

A new song began before the old one ended, The Rolling Stones this time; Marla knew most of their music from the radio. She leaned over the table to Dennis and shouted: “I want to dance!”

Dennis shook his head.
“I don’t dance.”

“Never?”

He smiled, then shook his head again, then sipped his Michelob.

Marla sat back in her chair. The dance floor was too crowded to see Nancy or Carl, all those well-dressed bodies bobbing and jerking and swaying in the dim light, the music so loud she could feel the bass beat in her wineglass and under her fingertips on the table, too loud for her and Dennis to even talk. She sipped her wine and watched the crowd. She could feel Nancy and Carl out there, and she didn’t like it; Marla and Dennis should be there too, the same fun-loving couple who’d been laughing at Nancy and Carl’s jokes all night, who’d been swapping stories from work, raising their glasses to toast the good times, Nancy and Carl smiling at them in the candlelight on the other side of the table, smiling at their fun friends: Marla and Dennis.

Marla glanced over at him now. He was watching the DJ up on the small corner stage, studying his microphone and speakers, the electronics of his sound system, it seemed. Always an engineer. It was that part of Dennis that Carl seemed to admire so much, but without Carl treating him with such respect for his engineering skill, without Nancy smiling at both of them for having found each other, Marla sat there feeling a little lonely. But why should she feel this way sitting next to Dennis? She reached over and squeezed his hand. He smiled at her behind his beard, raised his beer to her in a toast. She toasted too, though she felt like an actor backstage rehearsing for the next scene, and she couldn’t wait for the music to end and for Nancy and Carl to come back.

A
T HOME, AS ONE WEEK
pushed into another, little things about Dennis began to bother Marla: the sometimes nasal way he’d call her “Marl”; how at breakfast every morning he’d skip the newspaper headlines and do the crossword puzzle instead; how he cleaned up so often the place never looked lived in; even their lovemaking needed something—it always seemed to stop just as things began to gather all warm and rising for her, and she didn’t like how he always took a shower after. It made her feel dirty and like what they’d done was slightly wrong somehow. He stopped wanting to go anywhere except on weekends, preferred instead to watch TV or go to his computer room and play games where the viewer entered a cyberworld armed with a shotgun, machete, and hand grenades. He taught her how to play it too, but sitting in that dark room staring at the simulated colors of bad muscular men bleeding to death from just the click of the mouse on Dennis’s desk, from the electronic blast of the shotgun or the swipe of the machete blade, Marla felt the same bruised emptiness that she did after an action movie, and she’d kiss Dennis on the forehead and leave the room while he kept playing.

There was something else too—and she hated herself for this—but it was his weight: watching him walk naked into or out of the bathroom she often looked away, not out of respect for his privacy, but because she honestly did not like to see the way his hairy chest pushed out to the side like a woman’s, how his belly hung almost to his penis, which looked somehow boyish and outmatched in the great mass of all that flesh and hair. At first she thought this reflected his size and strength, his very manliness. But that’s when she’d allowed herself to think he’d been a wrestler or weight lifter in college, maybe even a football player. Not the sedentary man she now knew him to be and to always have been. He told her that he spent his childhood in his room reading and drawing robots and guns and galactic cities floating in fiery orbits, that college was one long period of book after book and a lot of hamburgers, pizza, and fries.

She found herself judging him for this, especially at night after dinner, dessert too, when he’d bring a box of crackers and a jar of peanut butter to the living room with him, or a second helping of dessert, or a hunk of cheese and bowl of nuts. One night in late November, a couple of days after a Thanksgiving they’d spent at a restaurant, she had a cold and sat on the couch wrapped in a blanket, holding a hot cup of lemon tea. She glanced at the peanut butter crackers on his plate and said, “Are you really hungry?”

He’d just sat down. He looked over at her, his cheeks flushed. “Obviously.”

Marla didn’t know if he was angry or embarrassed, and she felt mean-spirited and small. For a long minute or two there was nothing but the sounds of the TV, the forced laughter of the studio audience, slender actors with good skin and shiny hair looking naturally appealing.

“You shouldn’t talk, you know.” Dennis bit off half a cracker and chewed.

“What?”

“You know what I mean.”

Marla’s face burned. It was as if he’d just overturned the couch and she was falling to the floor. “You’re talking about my
weight
?”

Dennis swallowed and bit into another cracker, his eyes on the television. There were crumbs in his beard, and she hated him for it, and they began to blur, and she jumped off the couch and rushed upstairs to their room.
His
room, really.
His
bed and
his
bureau and bedside table. On the walls were framed
his
degrees and another boring graphic. On the bureau were his wallet and keys. Where was her room? She curled up on the bed and cried. She could hear the jingle of a commercial downstairs, and she wondered how long he’d stay down there without coming up to address what had just happened between them.

And what did happen?

She was mean and then so was he? But it was more than just that; Marla couldn’t help but notice that part of her was relieved to see another ugly side of him.

The TV noise stopped and she heard the creak of the carpeted stairs, then the sinking of the bed, the smell of peanut butter and his perfumey cologne.

“Marl?”

“Yeah?” She sniffled, dabbed at her nose with two fingers.

“Do you think I’m too heavy?”

“Do you think
I
am?”

“No.”

“Then why’d you say what you said?”

“To get back at you, I guess.”

Marla sat up and blew her nose. He rested his hand on her thigh and she knew they were on their way to patching this up, but something had opened between them and she wasn’t sure she wanted it closed. She looked straight ahead at the dark window. “I’ve always been fat, you know.”

“Me too.”

Marla wiped her nose. “But I bet you had girlfriends.”

“Two or three. Nobody special.”

“Well, I didn’t.” Marla kept her eyes on the black glass of the window, the reflection of the lampshade in it. “You’re my first boyfriend.”

“I am?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” He nodded his head slightly. She wished she hadn’t told him but was also glad she did, as if this were some kind of test they could not avoid, though she did not know who was testing whom.

“Are you surprised?”

“No. I mean, yes, of course I am. What’s that have to do with anything?”

Marla shrugged. “I’m not the best catch in the world, Dennis.”

“Marla—”

“No, really. I’m not pretty, all I know how to do is count other people’s money, I—”

“Shh, stop that, Marla. You shouldn’t say that.” His voice was gentle but distant too, like he was already beginning to believe what she was saying and didn’t want to. He pulled his hand from her thigh and stared at the floor again. “You should never say that about yourself.”

They sat quietly for a moment, then he stood and took a long, tired breath. “Want me to bring your tea up?”

She shook her head and listened to him walk heavily out of the room and down the stairs.

L
ATER, IN THE
middle of the night, she woke up with him pushing himself inside her and he did it harder and faster than ever before. It hurt a little, but then felt good, and lasted longer too. He finally stopped and let out a moan, said into her ear, breathing hard, “I’m sorry, I was asleep.”