Vintage Attraction (11 page)

“That's not exactly—I just . . . I can't . . .”

There was nothing going on between my legs. It was as though I didn't have a dick. I imagined myself a longhaired paraplegic Ron Kovic, railing against my malfunctioning equipment before a frightened hooker in
Born on the Fourth of July
. Emotion had never gotten in the way of erection before. I was astonished, and not astonished, that this had happened to me, on my wedding night, of all nights. For the last twenty years, save the occasional performance anxiety that one-night stands and recreational drug use used to sometimes engender, I could always count on one invariable: I could fuck whenever, wherever: grimy food court unisex bathrooms, the backseats of compact cars, cabana showers. For twenty years, my cock had stood at perpetual attention, stoic, compliant, dimly guileless, smiling dumbly, yet capable, in theory, of wreaking great havoc, like an armed and overweight bank branch rent-a-cop. I had always been, even in the face of adversity, virile.

She wrenched herself away and rolled onto her side. Her rigid back walled me off.

My eyes, I realized then, were still closed.

Her breathing evened out to an involuntary degree and the tautness in her muscles went slack. Izzy was asleep. I wriggled myself out from beneath the covers. I tiptoed down the hall and sprung Ishiguro from his gratuitous exile.

u

My first morning of marriage to Izzy began when Scott Lahey got on his treadmill at five thirty in the morning—on a Saturday, no less—and powerwashed our apartment with a relentless hip-hop bass line. After one particularly impolite stretch of ceiling shaking, Ishiguro stood up in bed. He stretched himself out, announcing, in his typical pug fashion, that he was ready to go outside. Even though the sun hadn't completed its rising, I stepped into my jeans and socks, pulled a green argyle sweater over the Connells T-shirt I'd slept in, and followed Ishiguro to the door. I looked back at Izzy before we left the room. She remained in the position in which she'd slept, with a pillow covering her face, but I could tell, like the rest of us, she was now awake.

By the time we returned, she had relocated to the couch. Though Scott's marathon “training” run had extinguished itself after only fifteen minutes, Izzy lay with her eyes open, head propped up, legs stretched out on the couch. My old Ithaca blanket buried her form below her neck. A hand bearing a remote control extended out from underneath. The television screen hopscotched from one barely distinguishable morning news show to another. She acknowledged the pug and me with a halfhearted nod. This wasn't like Izzy. Something beyond the unscheduled wake-up call was evidently bothering her. Did she harbor hard feelings about my missile's failure to launch? Not screwing in the nuptial twilight, according to the tenets of the Oxygen network, was an unfathomable sin. It was a nightmare scenario, much the same as failing to distribute copies of the syllabus on the first day of class.

“Do you want coffee?” I asked.

“Yes, please.”

I poured Ishiguro's kibble and managed to pull myself from the intersection of pug and food critical seconds prior to certain collision. While the kettle heated, I sat down at the breakfast bar and logged onto Facebook. I sifted my inbox. The messages were mostly junk from groups I regretted joining. And there was one from Talia. I nearly deleted it along with the others. After reading the note, I wished I had.

I'm coming to Chicago. Can I see you?

I replied via text message from my cell phone:
I can't see you.

Why not?
she returned, seconds later.

Because I got married.

WTF when?

Yesterday.

Whoa.

Talia, Talia, Talia. I'd suspected she could read my mind from the beginning. I'd never mentioned in our recent brief and forgettable exchanges about writing exercises that I was even dating someone, but she must have intuited where I was headed. Possibly she'd sensed I'd already replaced her the last night we saw each other at Marché. Izzy or no, Talia was completely wrong for me. She was too young, she thought she was smarter, she was crazy. She had no idea of what she wanted. All of that had been true long before I had a wife who was the complete opposite. Izzy was someone successful, someone stable, wine's glinting, award-winning TV face. She was a deeded co-owner of property,
an adult
. As far as I could tell then, she'd remain so forever. Why did Talia even want to see me now? If a nostalgia-fueled tryst with an old flicker was what she sought, she was too late. With the vows I took yesterday, there wasn't to be any future of even a second's duration for Talia and me.

At least that was what I'd spend the next weeks of my life trying to convince myself.

I went back into the kitchen. The dog's bowl was empty, cleaned with scientific precision, as though it had never once contained anything. I French pressed coffee, and brought a mug, doctored with a Splenda and splash of nonfat milk, to the living room. Izzy accepted the coffee appreciatively, bent her knees, and withdrew her legs a measure in order that I could sit down at the end of the sofa.

“Sorry about last night,” I said.

“It's okay,” she said. She blew on her coffee.

“We said we weren't going to make a big deal about eloping.”

“It's not that. It's not you. I was just kind of preoccupied yesterday.”

“Why?”

She sighed an inordinately lugubrious sigh. “Chef Dominique wants to go to Carbondale to shoot a segment.”

I couldn't decide if I should feel perturbed she'd kept something important from me. The reappearance of Carbondale in her dialogue was also unsettling. She hadn't referenced it in months. I asked, “Why didn't you say something?”

“I was getting married.”

I flashed back to all the smiling. How delighted it made me to see her so unencumbered, so unguarded. The feeling of triumph that the future I'd offhandedly imagined for the two of us following our first date had actually, by virtue of who knew what, come true.

“Of all the places, why Carbondale? What enologically news-breaking topic could he possibly want to cover in Southern Illinois? A White Zinfandel revival?”

She muted the television and dropped the remote control onto her blanketed lap. “There are actually close to five hundred boutique wineries in the state,” she said. “Next week is Frontenac Festival and—why do I have to explain this to you?”

I rubbed my eyes and tried to bring my campus schedule to mind. It followed no pattern I could commit to memory. It was a haphazard, illogical arrangement that one could safely assume had been generated either by a slot machine or by an incompetent adjunct coordinator. “I think . . . I can get someone to cover class for me, but that—”

“With the camera guy and the equipment and everything, there's not going to be enough room in the Range Rover for another person.”

“I could drive you separately.”

“In the 'Stang? We'd be lucky to make it to I-57.”

“I have it on good authority that there are cars manufactured postbellum to be rented.”

“Just stop it, okay? We don't have to go everywhere together.”

“We used to go to festivals together.”

“Well, we're married now.”

“I'll drive up by myself, after I'm done teaching.”

“I don't want you to.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I started out there alone,” she said, “and I want to finish there alone.” She switched the television back on. “Did I ever tell you about Ernie?” she asked. “My stepfather?”

“Foster father.”

She threw the remote in my direction. I ducked, instinctively. It landed on the floor before it had a chance to reach my head. “Foster father, stepfather, you know what I mean.” She stared down at her hands, as though a FedEx delivery of new information had arrived at her brain, priority, guaranteed before ten thirty, and she'd excused herself to sign for it. Her hands fell to her sides. “He ran a liquor store. I used to work there, on weekends, in high school. You know, I never really thought about it before, but that was kind of my first job in the wine business.”

“Are you sure this is a good idea? You haven't been back to Carbondale since you moved away.”

“At least it's quiet there.”

“We have the rest of the weekend together, though, right? When are you leaving? Monday?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Great,” I mumbled.

This honeymoon was getting better and better. I felt like I should fight her decision, make her see why I, her new husband, should come. Clearly, the prospect of returning to the site of her impoverished youth was harrowing Izzy—all the more reason to have her so-called stalwart accompany her. She was supposed to now be able to lean closer to me, and not have to turn deeper into herself. At the same time, I really didn't
want
to go to Carbondale, especially not for a celebration of a hybrid grape variety of which I'd never heard, alongside a film-school crew and a chef masquerading as the director. Letting a childish emotional whim like that govern me, I realized, was not the sort of thing to which I, an adult, a man, was supposed to succumb, but what else was there for me to do? All of this hurt.

I finished my now-cold coffee and returned to the kitchen for a refill. I purposely avoided asking Izzy if she wanted more. I poured the last of the lukewarm, glazed-over contents of the French press into my sooty mug. After a few tortured swigs, I sat down at the breakfast bar and pulled over the MacBook so I could load up Facebook. From the message queue, Talia's profile picture thumbnail stared at me. Irony would have had no choice but to return her to me now. Was the look in her eyes, frozen in microscopic digital still frame, one offering compassionate salvation or one betraying supercilious mockery?

“Do you want to go have brunch or something?” Izzy asked. “We can go to Milk & Honey. Get those peanut butter and banana pancakes you like. It is our honeymoon, after all.”

I nodded. “Those pancakes
you
like. And I can bring you coffee with five different creamer options, just like when I didn't know any better. Whole, nonfat, vanilla soy . . . Lactaid.”

“Now you know what I like. And that's only four options.”

I shot an index finger over my head. In Chef Dominique's inarticulate put-on Franco-Prussian accent, I exclaimed, “Get me half-and-half!”

It was the first time I'd heard her laugh, really laugh, in a while.

Rustling summoned me from repose. It was five in the morning. I assessed my surroundings and found that there was only a narrow portion of the huge queen-size bed available for me. Izzy was positioned in the center. Unconsciously, she'd put her hands behind her head, as though she dreamt of lying alone in a hammock. Her arms and forearms formed forty-five-degree akimbo angles. The near elbow pointed, hovering, at my cheek. Between us lay an unraveled Ishiguro. He traced the contour of Izzy's side with his rangy body. His even, innocuous snoring resembled a toy machine gun's emptying of its magazine of plastic bullets back into itself.

Driven by what had to be an intuitive canine sense of solidarity, Ishiguro soon was awake, too. He arched his back to stretch it out, just as Talia's cat Mildred did after a lengthy spell of repose, and then vaulted over Izzy. She remained asleep, or feigning so. Ishiguro leapt out of bed. At the closed bedroom door, the pug issued a plaintive whimper.

“Izzy,” I whispered. I nudged her gently in the side. “Izzy.”

“Wha?” she half-spoke.

“I think Ishiguro needs to go out.”

Silence.

I followed the pug along a rectangular route of the north and south sides of the block. He analyzed and catalogued a number of frozen organic and inorganic objects that littered the sidewalk in myriad textures and colors and states of decomposition. Before each item he poked and sniffed, he was immobile. I tugged on the lead, asked him politely to come so we could go home, but he refused to move forward until he'd completed the inspection. His fixity seemed a pretty clear message: every smashed plastic lighter and sodden Chase ATM receipt and greasy, stomped take-away food tin was a matter deserving of his—and my—full consideration. It made me wonder if the dog was also trying to tell me something else. Perhaps I'd been moving through this new life of mine with Izzy a little too easily, too casually, too much like a blithe-breed canine or like one of my incurious undergraduates. Maybe I needed to start sniffing more than just the wines to which my sommelier continued to introduce me. The time had come for me to stop taking the things that presented themselves along the ways of our relationship for granted. I was fucking married. I owned half a condo. I was thirty-seven years old and needed to learn how to be skeptical again and scrutinize life just as I had when I was an idealistic MFA student and still believed someday I'd end up a writer.

When we returned to the apartment, the sun was coming up. The light flooded in through the windows here so strongly, much more so than it had ever entered my old sublet, with the necessarily inadequate vantages of the bachelor pad it was. Even in the city, where illumination, in one highway billboard form or office building or twenty-four-hour diner other, never ceased, the return to day from impenetrable night was provocative. The pug, too, appeared dazzled by it. Standing there, it was as though we were being embraced by a lion's room-sized golden arm. I divested Ishiguro of his harness and we made our way back to the bedroom. Izzy was still fast asleep, but had narrowed herself. The pug and I resumed our poses of repose without a sound.

Ishiguro and I got up several hours later alone. Izzy was
already in the living room, primed to leave. Her suitcase and messenger bag were packed. She'd put on her stage makeup and blown out her hair. A new Burberry trench cinched her waist.

“Not even a good-bye?”

“Hapworth, you were sleeping.”

“So?”

“Let's just . . .” She looked at her baggage. “I just want to get to the part when this trip is over and I can come back. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said quietly. I thought about asking if she'd at least call me when she got to Carbondale, but I didn't know if I wanted to hear her answer.

With Izzy at the Frontenac Festival, the Biscuit Factory was somehow even more untenable. This was due, in part, to a series of absurd incidents. First, Amanda, from the garden apartment, distributed “warning” memos under each of our doors. She cautioned the residents against “suspicious activity”—enterprising kids selling ice creams and tamales from their grandparents' ramshackle carts. According to her handwritten and Xeroxed screed, this sort of unlicensed vending could only contribute to the overall decline of public health. She entreated us to abstain from patronizing. The illiterate propaganda's philosophical underpinnings thoroughly disgusted me. We lived in Pilsen. Xenophobia wasn't supposed to be an urban pioneer trait. Amanda's note also offended me grammatically. The resident comp teacher “anonymously” corrected and graded his copy. I returned it to her doorstep wadded into a ball. Yet most disconcerting was how insensible she was of the dangers on the very premises. Amanda had suggested we call the non-emergency 3-1-1 police line whenever children were being “obstinate” and couldn't be “shooed away.” Could I call 3-1-1 on Casshole? He'd taken up driving a foot-powered red and yellow plastic toy car inside the loft. The Laheys had
recently
bought the Little Tykes Cozy Coupe for him. Even though he'd abandoned hammering, for those beneath the highway, it was to be death by a thousand excruciating tiny stomps. Again and again, I planned to put Ishiguro in his crate and go to Mamacita's for the evening. There I could drown my grievances in a few hours' worth of tequila. By the time I'd return, Casshole's gas tank would have been empty. But I didn't leave the loft. Running, the Laheys were ever reminding us, only worsened matters. Plus I had no interest in going out without Izzy. I missed her. Her abrupt and bewildering departure left me listless. Were my wife and I unraveling already? How could a marriage begin and end so quickly? To compound my unhappiness and confusion, I'd let myself fall into a messages-long Facebook conversation with Talia. At the end of it, we'd agreed to have a drink one afternoon.

We met at Third Coast, a wine bar on the Near North Side. I'd gone there a lot after I moved back to the city in the mid-nineties. We sat at a table in the back where she could smoke. I inquired about Mildred, the calico cat she promised to leave in my care before she went to grad school. I asked after the stack of my beloved cellophane-wrapped Modern Library editions she'd absconded with to Iowa City. That was pretty much all I had left to say. So I let her talk, while I stared at her. She'd lost a considerable amount of weight, and, as a result, had gotten older. Her face was more angular than I'd remembered. Her baby-fat cheeks had pulled taut. I concentrated on her pale eyes, more gray here than they were blue. I could tell she hadn't washed her hair, now dyed blonde throughout, since she'd been back from Iowa, but I wanted to reach up and inhale it nevertheless. Under an unbuttoned man's flannel, she wore a tight wife-beater, which revealed a suitably provocative amount of cleavage. I wondered if Talia approved of the Prada shirt, two-hundred-dollar Diesel jeans, and black blazer from H&M I had on.

As we drank our glasses of Malbec, I imagined that afternoon last year, when we first succumbed to each other. There was snow on the ground, just like now, and raw coldness in the air. I'd never be able to get that ride in her red Jetta with out-of-state plates out of my head. In my brain's nose was the scent of waxy, paper-covered crayons the upholstery exuded and the Exclamation perfume on her skin (I knew what kind it was from her earlier fiction's foreshadowing). I watched us hurry into the bagel place in a strip mall near campus. We got coffee and she gave me the story. She claimed to have spent hours on it. Discussing the two double-spaced pages of disjointed exposition was our purported purpose for meeting. We only got through a sentence before the context took an unrecoverable turn for the ill-considered. I was beyond the teacherly point of caring. I just wanted to fuck her.

“How are things with Izzy?” she asked now. She'd been going on about Iowa and her workshops and her untalented undergrads while I reminisced, and seemed content with my participating in no more significant way than nodding. This question brought me back to the conversation. “You were kind of weird on the phone.”

“I'm fine. Things are fine,” I said.

“You don't sound too convinced.”

I sighed. “We're going through something right now. Domestic disturbances.”

“Meaning?”

“Our neighbors are terrible. Upstairs, downstairs. We're sandwiched between two slices of hell.” She looked at me like I was being ridiculous. “It's a strain on things.”

“A strain on you?”

“Yeah, it's a strain on me.” Then Amanda's stupid memo came to mind. I smiled. “They're obstinate. They can't be shooed away.”

“You can't shoo people away, Hapworth.”

“Yeah,” I said, my eyes to her Camel Lights packet. “I'm beginning to notice.”

“So, is that why you didn't want to see me?”

“What are you talking about? I
wanted
to see you. It's just that, you know, I didn't get your message for a while because I didn't recognize the number you were dialing from and didn't check the voice mail and then when you called—”

“When I called, you were married,” she completed.

I nodded.

“Maybe you're not allowed to see me,” she said quietly.

“Of course I am,” I said emphatically, but with a pang.
Seeing
her was just about all I was allowed to do. I was married. No matter what I'd imagine could happen between us, it was a foregone conclusion how this would have to go, where it would end up. I was now prohibited by social mores (and possibly even certain litigable formal norms) from having intentions beyond wine and conversation. More important, I couldn't bring myself to do something that would hurt Izzy. Sure, we were having problems. I hadn't gotten over the feeling that she'd
left me
when she left me. But it would have been madness to just throw it all away, for sex with my old student Talia, someone with whom I had little significant connection otherwise. We weren't soul mates. We'd hardly even been entangled. I was still single during those two months we were sleeping together, and so was she. We'd owed nothing to anyone then, but that was no longer the case for me. If anything were to happen with Talia now, even if Izzy never found out, I'd be breaking a promise I made. I had to remind myself that though sitting across from Talia helped me pretend I was someone I else, I was no longer that person. I sat here as someone she didn't know and whom I was just getting to know, someone monumentally different beyond fancy clothes, someone married. I had to be.

“So what do you want to do now?” she asked.

I glanced at the silver band on my finger that Izzy and I had picked up in Chinatown after we got engaged, the ring I forgot to bring to the City Hall ceremony when we eloped. “Say good-bye?”

“Is that really what you want?”

“It doesn't matter if I do or not,” I said. I wasn't looking at her face. I could feel my resolve slipping again, as it was wont to do in her proximity. Goddamn it. My eyes lingered around an arbitrary fixture behind the chrome and glossy cherrywood bar. I couldn't even make out what it was. It was too late to find out.

“Oh, Hapworth,” she said. “What would you do without me?”

When I got home that night, Izzy's still-packed suitcase stood on its wheels by the breakfast bar. There was an open bottle of DeKalb County Chambourcin on the counter. Beside it lay the cork, which had fractured in the middle, with the key Bea Corton gave me at the wedding still screwed through it, holding the two pieces together. My wife was back, but the luggage and the wine were the only indications. She wasn't on the couch. The TV was off. The pug was snoring in his crate.

I found Izzy in our room. She lay on her side of the bed, reading a novel. Even absent its dust jacket, I recognized the hardcover I'd bought at O'Gara's in 1992 from the doorway:
Crazy Cock
. I said hello. She closed the book without marking her page and set it on the night table beside a full glass of wine. Then she pulled back a corner of the comforter and gestured for me to get under the covers with her. She was only wearing her bra and underwear.

“How did it go?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

“Will you just lie down with me?”

“Right now?”

Those first couple of weeks after we'd begun dating, we did it at Izzy's place or mine (and
really
early on, both) every day. It began without preamble. We just started in, wherever we were,
in medias res
, like teenagers. But after we moved into the Biscuit Factory, our sex life tapered. There were still some nap breaks between seminars at a food and wine festival and recumbent tussles after speaking engagements here and there. Though at home, it was just too absurd and distracting to commence while the Laheys carried on. Izzy wouldn't even shut off the television and turn in for the night until the fight ended, usually after Scott drove off to go sleep in his office or they'd gone to bed at opposite ends of their loft. Rest for us was certainly out of the question prior to that, let alone fucking. In the aftermath, neither of us was much in the mood to get in the mood. I didn't think I'd lost interest. I'd just let the obstacles get in the way of this, too.

“They went to Costco. It will be quiet for a couple of hours. Come on, Hapworth, let's not waste it.”

I took my shirt and jeans off and spooned her. Pressing my thicket of chest hair against her back, the lengths of our torsos aligned, my knees filling the divots in the hollows behind hers like that, brought me to a state of rapt priapic attention. She reached around, drew down my boxers, and took it into her hand.

“Tell me what happened,” I heard myself whisper.

“You don't want to hear,” she whispered back. She clung to my dick tighter.

“I want to.”

She let go of me and began to get up, but I reeled her back and climbed on top of her. She relented. I pulled down her underwear. The bare surface above her crotch was slippery against my abdomen.

“I missed you,” she said.

“I missed you, too.”

I obviated her bra and landed my mouth over a pert nipple. I took my tongue to it and encircled. She clamped down her eyelids. I curled my fingers and pushed into her.

“Keep doing that,” she said. “Make me come.” She interspersed the words with throaty vocalizations.

I finished with my hand and was inside her now. She jammed her tongue against mine. The harder I pushed, the harder she pushed, but her push felt like a pull. As she rose, she was simultaneously falling. I was driving her down instead of resurrecting her. And she, me.

After a while, she wanted me behind her and pulled me out of bed. Trying to find my way into her vertically, I flailed around. She directed, righted my course. I could see through a gap between the venetian blind slats that the Laheys' SUV was still gone. How much longer would they stay away? I suddenly felt like I was on an orgasm deadline. I had to make Izzy come before they came home. Once the running and screaming started up, there'd be nothing to keep her from falling apart. I didn't want her to be reminded of how she'd imploded after the wedding. I didn't want either of us to have to return to that scene, even though I knew it was inevitable. She was against the wall beside the door that slid open onto our back porch, above the parking spaces. I was disappointed screwing like this—it was as though we were strangers doing it in an alley—but she was into it. Obviously I had to keep going. Her hands against the concrete balanced the tripod our fused limbs made. The only sound besides our breathing was the hum of the humidifier.

When we were done, we fell back onto the mattress. Our limbs lay like battered, cast-aside merchandise that remained after the Christmas shopping stampede. We'd been thrown from the shelves and trampled into unfamiliarity in the aisles. My ears buzzed. Eventually Izzy tore herself away from me. From under the bed, she pulled a pack of American Spirits I hadn't known was there. She lit a cigarette with a match from a box on the nightstand, heretofore used in the apartment for the sole purpose of igniting Pottery Barn cherry-and-lavender scented candles.

I let this smoking go without comment. Izzy was so placid. I couldn't imagine disturbing her with reproof. Periodically she turned to ash on Henry Miller. The building was still silent.

“I don't want you to leave again,” I said. I waited for her to tell me she wouldn't. I wanted her to tell me that if she had to go somewhere, she'd take me with her, just as she'd always done before.

But she didn't.