Love Me (8 page)

It violates Iris’s principles to tell a lie. So she slips off me and disappears into the bathroom, and Mr. Penis is all done for today.

We met as two kids in choir, locked in the majesty of the
St. Matthew Passion,
and I fell in love with her slender neck and sang the low note in the chord and she turned and smiled and that launched a marriage. If she hadn’t smiled, we’d be nothing. It was a case of sympathetic vibration. Like two birds, we mated by ear, we asked no questions. We got married with less discussion than most people devote to choosing a restaurant. We married in the blink of an eye and walked down the primrose path and into the deep woods like everybody else.

 

 

 

One day I was a guy typing in an upstairs bedroom and the next day I was interviewed on
The CBS Evening News
(“What do you say to those who claim that the novel has become irrelevant to the fast-paced life that most of us lead today, Mr. Wyler?”) and I came home in a daze and walked into the kitchen and Iris says, “I’m going over to Target if you want to come with. They’ve got cloth napkins marked down fifty percent. And wine glasses for ninety-five cents apiece.”

“Did you see me on TV?” I say.

She shakes her head.

I slosh some Scotch in a glass with ice cubes.

“Your husband just spoke to twenty million on TV, and I come home and you ask me if I want to go to Target?”

“Well, if you don’t want to go, just say so. Don’t get your undies in a bunch over it.”

And she goes off to Target and buys napkins on sale. My novel is bursting in the sky like fireworks, the gates are swinging open. The apartment at the Bel Noir awaits.

I am not going to live in a stucco house on the flats, on Sturgis Avenue behind the Burger King, and wait for the cloth napkins to go on sale. I want to go to New York and find the most expensive linens in town and buy those.

I went to the liquor store and when I came home Iris was in the backyard chopping weeds out of the flowerbeds. I had a bottle of Dom Pérignon. She crinkled up her face. “Sheesh. What’s the big deal?”

“Our ship has come in, Iris. Time to start living the good life.”

“I have a good life, thank you very much.”

“I’m trying to tell you something. Work with me on this. Our ship came in. Our prayers were answered. We won the lottery, Iris. The Lord has blessed us. Mightily. Rained down blessings. Don’t turn your back on a gift. Don’t leave the harvest sitting on the dock. Why live like this if we don’t have to?”

“I
like
this house. What’s wrong with it?”

“Plenty.”

“Then let’s work together and make it what we want it to be.”

“I did. I worked and wrote a book—”

“If you’re thinking about moving up there—” she cocked her head at Ramsey Hill and Summit Avenue—“forget it. I am not going to spend
my
life putting on dinner parties and sucking up to a bunch of people from hoity-toi schools and their Junior League wingdings, no thank you. I am not a clotheshorse. I want no part of that. You want that, go marry somebody who looks good in black.”

My wife. A good woman. Some women if they were held hostage in a dank dungeon for three months and fed swill in buckets and you rescued them and brought them to the Ritz and a lovely lunch awaited and new clothes from Saks, they would say,
“This
coffee isn’t Starbucks! And I
despise
scallops. And whatever made you think I would wear
that shade of gray?”
Iris is a believer in Good Enough. I respect that. I happen to want something better.

She said, “I spent the past eight years trying to make this a neighborhood that anybody can be proud to live in and why would I want to walk out on it now?”

“Think of us as Ma and Pa Joad, heading for the orange groves. Think children of Israel in bondage in Egypt.”

“I don’t know where you get your ideas. You’ve got money? Fine. Put it in the bank. Don’t throw it away on stuff we don’t need. That kind of stuff will come back to bite you in the ass real quick.” And she went back to cleaning out rocks and glass shards so she could put in flowers.

I opened the garage door. Full of grocery carts she was storing for crazy people locked up in nursing homes. Crazy people have the same right as anyone else to own worthless junk, so Iris offers free parking. Thirty-seven of them with garbage bags full of little treasures moldering away. She knew each one by name: Harry, John, Wally, Evelyn, Maxine, Luverne, Don, Agnes, Sheila, like a herd of dairy cows. I offered her sunny afternoons on the terrace and she preferred to be the custodian of lost minds. I was proud of her. And at the same time I wanted to shake her. I have never wanted to shake somebody so much as right then.

She said, “I’m going to clean that garage out. It’s on my list of things to do.”

“I’ll call a garbage hauler to come clean it for you. Let’s go out to dinner.”

“I’ve got supper already started. Bob and Sandy are coming over. I made my bean dish.”

Iris is not a gourmet person. I knew this when I married her. Any recipe with the words
marinate
or
tie up spices in cheesecloth
—forget it. Fry up some bacon, brown the ground meat and the onions, pour in some ketchup and Worcestershire, add brown sugar and mustard and vinegar, dump in a few cans of beans—kidney, lima, butter, navy, brown beans—and bake for forty minutes and you’ve got your dinner. Iris’s Not So Bad Beans. After all these years, I know my beans. Maybe my problem is an allergic reaction to legumes.

I tried putting it to her directly. “I am a successful author, babes. I have a number one best-selling book and a quarter million in hand, and I wish to celebrate. Is this wrong? Why can’t you call Sandy and Bob and tell them it’s off tonight? You knew I was coming home tonight. Let’s go out to dinner. You and me. I thought you’d be glad to see me.”

“I am,” she said. “I just don’t see why I’m supposed to put on a big whoop-de-doo just because you come home.”

I explained that I need rewards. I suggested that we keep the house and buy a New York apartment and live in both places. She shook her head.

“Have two homes? Why would we do that? Some people don’t even have one.” She looked at her watch. “They’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”

The sirens were calling from the shore. The Prodigal Son was dreaming of the Far Country. Iris was in San Francisco, at a conference on aging. I dropped by Macalester College for Katherine’s poetry reading. Five of us sat in a room for sixty. Painful. We all felt miserable for her, especially when she said, “It’s okay. It’s two more than Emily Dickinson had.” Katherine is no Emily. Afterward, she kissed me lightly on the cheek as if I were cracked porcelain and said, “I’ve been worried about you. You’re so busy. I hear your novel is doing well, though.”

In fact,
Spacious Skies
had gotten a nice review in the
Times
(“a dark and witty midwestern homage to Flannery O‘Connor by way of Raymond Chandler”) and was selling with gay abandon, but it’s bad luck to discuss success, especially with another writer.

“It’s doing okay,” I said. “Your new book looks terrific.” The cover art was one of those lush tropical leaves meant to look vaginal, spattered with dew. “Is that semen on the leaf?” I said.

She laughed. “It’s been ages since I’ve seen you,” she said. “Why don’t we get together?”

She opened her book—“I wrote this one with you in mind”—

A lady whose hair smelled of Lysol stepped in to talk to Katherine and Frank Frisbie cornered me and asked how my book was doing (“Fine”) and referred to it as The Big Sky and said he’d heard good things about it. I escaped and headed down Grand Avenue toward my car and there was Katherine in the doorway of a bookstore, smoking, her foot up on the windowsill.

“Waiting for somebody?” I said.

“Yes. For you.”

“What’s up?”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” she said. “For one thing, you’ve always felt sorry for me, Larry, and you’ve got no business doing that, so stop it.”

She took a tremendous hard drag and said, “I’m not a charity case. I’m a writer. You should never be sorry for another writer. Today, you’re up and I’m not, tomorrow it could be the other way around.”

She touched my arm. “If you can’t recognize a fellow human being, Larry, then you’re in the wrong line of work.”

She moved over close to me. “It all goes by so fast, doesn’t it. I think of Corinne every day. I keep wanting her to come back, and then I realize that what I really want is to step outside of my own boundaries and live my life as she must have wanted to live hers. Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying—Kiss me.” She put her skinny arms around my neck and I kissed her and she held on.

“It’s so simple. We’re writers. Writers open themselves up to experience. We’re not here to win awards for good citizenship. Why should we give a shit what people think?”

She took a deep breath.

“I wish I were in bed with you right now,” she said. “I just feel bad that you and I never were lovers.”

I took her hand and felt a sharp twinge in my left glute, like an ice pick. Too many hours sitting on planes. I groaned and she said, “Kiss me again.” So I did.

She said that the thought of being naked with me was making her wet.

It occurred to me that Iris was gone and that our house, a mile away, was empty. It also occurred to me that this was a dumb thing to do. I felt guilty for not being attracted to her. She wanted to sleep with me. An old friend ... an old friend who’s been darned lucky himself and could afford to be kind. I heard myself say, “What are we waiting for?” It was my voice.

There was a swelling in the shorts that accompanied this, and she noticed. “I’ll bet you’re good in bed,” she said.

“Nobody’s complained yet,” I said.

It was remarkable to come into the old familiar kitchen with my old classmate who had spent evenings there with Iris and me and even brought a boyfriend once, and now I was the boyfriend. We kissed in the dark and I felt her hand in my pants.
Why am I doing this?
Because it is an experience.
Jumping off a cliff is also an experience.
This is not the same thing. It’ll be okay. Settle down. She needs to seduce you, it’s her way of showing she’s your equal.

We went upstairs and undressed and she lit the candles on the dresser—I stuffed a stack of Iris’s underwear into a drawer—and she put a James Taylor CD on. She had lovely breasts, small, with button nipples, and a rose tattoo just above her pubic hair, and she clenched me to her and whispered, “I’m going to make love with you until the sun comes up.” This struck me as bad luck, to make a prediction like that. It also struck me that I wasn’t hard anymore.

We lay on the bed and did some stuff and rolled around and she was breathing hard and I was trying to do the right thing, as if it were a project and I was going for the merit badge in adultery, and then she reached down for my member and found it in a diminished state.

She gave me a brave smile. Woman, the Bringer of Hardness. And she got to work on it and meanwhile the candles are blazing and James Taylor is crooning. And my back hurts. Stabbing pains when I roll over.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

She interprets this as a moan of delight and goes to work even harder, her curls shaking, panting, grunting, Woman at Work, and I twist the wrong way and feel a knife in my back. “Oh, Jesus!”

“I’m dying for a cigarette,” she says.

She sticks her head and shoulders out the window and lights a cigarette. She asks if I have any wine. “I do, but I can’t move. My back went out.” She tells me to relax. She disappears and comes back with a bottle of rose from the fridge and two cups. My member is now the size of a salted peanut.

It is so clear to me why adultery should always take place at a hotel: easier to make an exit if things don’t work out. Never commit adultery in your own home. This is a rule never to be broken.

She reads me a poem:

I wanted her to vanish. “Could I give you a massage?” she said. I shook my head. “There is so much I want to tell you,” she cried. She pulled out another poem.

“I wrote this on a camping trip,” she said. “To the Boundary Waters.”

“What do you think?” she said.

I said, “I like the way that under the surface of the poems so much is happening.” I say I feel that her poetry is in transition, trying to find its own course, like a river—

“Someone told me that I eroticize everything in my poems. That everything, especially the animals, is sexual.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said.

The phone rang. I didn’t pick it up. It was Iris, unable to sleep in San Francisco, wanting to tell about her exciting day—something about schizophrenia, she had done some good deed for schizophrenics and she was happy and she missed me and she couldn’t sleep, she was sorry it was so late, she wanted me to know how much she loved me—we listened to her voice and Katherine said, “She sounds tired.”