I Think You're Totally Wrong (26 page)

CALEB:
Sorry to interject, but I can see my marriage in this. It's an unavoidable dynamic.

DAVID:
How so?

CALEB:
Being involved in my own stuff, I don't need an outside source to share it with, especially if there's only superficial interest, and thus I can't share a lot with Terry. I wish she'd have her own passion so she could occupy herself. And maybe your marriage might be better if Laurie had more of that.

DAVID:
I know I have major, major deficits as a spouse. I'm so wrapped up in my own head. Sometimes I suppose I wished she had an equally focused interest, but on the other hand she's great to me, in many ways. She has incredible “emotional intelligence,” she helps me figure stuff out, she makes our house really nice. She's what used to be called—I hate this term—a “writer's wife.” Maybe she was wearying of that. There's a way in which I was an old fifty-three and she was a young fifty-three. She's limber. She does yoga, Pilates—

CALEB:
She certainly looks younger than she is.

DAVID:
She's starting to let her hair grow in gray, and she's wearing glasses more; to me, she looks like an austere French intellectual (which I find incredibly sexy—her slight remove). She's in really great shape, but with my back woes I can't go on elaborate hiking trips, etc. We could have gone in a few directions. We could have, you know, just gone our separate ways. “We had a pretty good marriage, we raised Natalie, but we're too different.” I'm not sure how much of this I articulated to her. Some of it was in my own mind. Then, there's another marriage where we keep on going as is and it's okay, but we agree to look the other way. The third option, the most interesting, is the one we're trying to do now: Okay, now let's try to be married for real. We were married for less than three years before Natalie was born.

CALEB:
I still can't believe that you were together four years and never discussed kids. Another overworked chess metaphor, but before you move the “marriage chess piece,” resolve the kid question.

DAVID:
And I'd say again, “Life isn't a chess game, my friend.”

CALEB:
My parents celebrated their fifty-fourth anniversary earlier this year. Every year my mom says, “Dave and I have enjoyed—however many—years of blisssss … ters.”

DAVID:
Oof. I hate puns like that.

CALEB:
And every time, my dad gets red in the face. My mom says, “Bliss …” She pauses and lets my dad react. He says, “Trice. Don't say it!” Then she drops the “… ssssters.” I'll do this with my wife now and then, just to freak her out.

DAVID:
Sometimes it does baffle me that Laurie and I married each other. She's very, very smart, but she's not intellectual—probably somewhat like Terry.

CALEB:
I always say that she's smarter, and I'm stronger.

DAVID:
Yep—me, too. With my bad back I can lift grand pianos.

CALEB:
She earns the money. I move heavy objects. She loves family time. All weekend it's “Let's do this, let's do that.” And we spend the whole weekend doing this and that: going to the zoo, parks, movies. She just loves “being a family.”

DAVID:
You wish she'd take the kids more often.

CALEB:
No. Yes. No. Well, yes. She works all week, she deserves to call the shots on the weekend, but I wouldn't mind having more time to myself.

DAVID:
She doesn't put a huge priority on your writing.

CALEB:
My writing doesn't bring anything into the family. I'm not as good a father and a husband if I'm doing something that doesn't bring in income, so I carve out writing moments early in the morning or late at night, and now two of the kids are in elementary school, so I have more time.

DAVID:
I'm still not someone who makes huge amounts of money, but I get these lecture gigs now: I go somewhere for a day or two or three and get paid two, three, five thousand dollars.

CALEB:
People pay money to listen to you gab?

DAVID:
I go to a college, critique manuscripts, give a lecture, a reading, do a Q&A, visit classes.

CALEB:
Hey, this is cool: on the map they have paved roads, groomed dirt roads, and trails.

DAVID:
Why do we need a map—to make sure we don't fall?… Anyway, the point is it took forever, and I finally make enough money writing and teaching and talking about writing that—

CALEB:
You can move to a better house.

DAVID:
What's the matter with my house?

CALEB:
I was joking!

DAVID:
So was I!

CALEB:
You can travel more, indulge.

DAVID:
A little. I have three more years of Natalie's tuition and that's $57K a year. I also want to make enough money that Laurie can maybe open a café. She's a great cook.

CALEB:
That'd be so—

DAVID:
She'd love it.

CALEB:
Many restaurants aren't literally losing money. The owners just can't survive on what they make. Sometimes they make less than the dishwasher. They have a $2,000 mortgage, a couple kids, car payments, business loans, and they can't get by on what amounts to a $20,000 salary.

DAVID:
It's hard to make a profit, definitely. Before, I wasn't very supportive of her idea to quit Fred Hutch, and now I'm just, “Go for it.” I really want my marriage to work, and if it collapsed I'd be devastated, so I've made a really concerted gesture to meet her halfway.

CALEB:
You da man.

DAVID:
I don't know about your marriage—whether you've ever hit a wall and said, “Here we are; do we want to be married?”

CALEB:
We've hit different walls. Three kids is a lot.

DAVID:
You're almost too busy.

CALEB:
The physical life suffers.

DAVID:
So I've heard.

CALEB:
It shouldn't be a surprise that when you have kids you lose that spontaneity.

DAVID:
Do you guys ever go off, alone, to a hotel for a weekend?

CALEB:
Every now and then we get a date weekend.

CALEB:
Funny coincidence: when I painted Gayle Anne's house, she said you're one of her store's best customers.

DAVID:
I'll send her an email, and the next day her husband will drop the book off on my front porch. She out-Amazons Amazon.

CALEB:
She and her husband went to Bermuda for ten days and gave me keys to their house. What's that Raymond Carver story where the guy house-sits, ends up wearing his neighbor's lingerie, moves stuff around, and then locks himself out? I'm not that guy, but it's tough not to look.

DAVID:
You get a sense of their life?

CALEB:
Wall-to-wall books. He's got a room full of guitars, not many family photos, but they have a picture of a baby,
and by the coloration it's at least thirty years old. That's it. One picture.

DAVID:
I always get the feeling they don't have kids, but perhaps they did.

CALEB:
The question: did the baby die?

DAVID:
“For Sale: Baby Shoes, never worn.”

CALEB:
Some people want to talk about tragedy, some don't, and I'm certainly not close enough to Gayle Ann to ask her. Maybe I'm just way off.… Hold on. Maybe we should turn around.

DAVID:
They should have a sign saying “Four-Wheel Drive Only.”

CALEB:
My wheels might not survive.

DAVID:
I wonder how close we are. I might be kidding myself. Is the danger a punctured tire?

CALEB:
That's a danger. I almost hope it happens. You'll change it.

DAVID:
Ha ha. Let's see. This is much farther than I realized. I wonder when it'll get dark—seven or so? It's now four.

CALEB:
I'm going to be a wimp and pull over. We can continue on foot.

CALEB:
This summer my mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I wanted a portrait of my daughters. She ended up painting three black-and-white doodles. I said, “This? It took you fifteen minutes.” My father said, “No,
Caleb, it took your mother her entire life.” He's right. The caricatures are adorable, the kids like them, and they're the best my mother could do.

DAVID:
Is she senile?

CALEB:
Happy-senile. Whether she dies in a year or ten, it's over. She's a borderline diabetic: cholesterol and glucose off the charts; her doctors have warned her about sugar, but she's an addict. A while ago we had popsicles in the fridge, and she wanted one. The agreed-upon rule for her is one treat a day. She'd already had a cinnamon roll for breakfast. We gave the girls popsicles, and a couple minutes later Ava comes running into the kitchen, crying. “Grandma took my popsicle.” We go into the living room and it's true. My mom's slurping on Ava's popsicle.

DAVID:
What can you do but throw up your hands and laugh?

CALEB:
Mentally, my father is fine, but he has aneurysms and pre-leukemia, a pacemaker. He's had fainting spells.

DAVID:
This is incredibly embarrassing, but I want to live longer than my father, who died four months short of his ninety-ninth birthday.