Vintage Attraction (21 page)

“Anything good on?”

“Of course not.”

“Want to go to bed?”

“What did you have to tell me before?”

“Before?”

“At the sushi place. You said there was something we had to discuss.”

I unfastened Ishiguro's lead. I lost my grip on the dog and he took off before I was able to free him from his mesh. I sat on the edge of the couch. Izzy looked up at me. She was braiding a section of her hair.

“It's not a big deal.”

“Well, tell me the small deal.”

“I don't know how to say this.”

“Just say it.”

“I got fired, too.”

“What? What happened?”

I hadn't thought to prepare an explanation. I should have expected she'd want details. It couldn't possibly be enough to say, “I got fired” and have her not need to know how and why. But sharing the truth was out of the question.

“Nothing happened.”

“Something must have happened. Look at me.”

I raised my head. By doing so, I telescoped the distance between our eyes.

“Don't lie to me. You only look like that when you're lying.”

When had she suspected me of lying? This was the first time she'd articulated an accusation, such as it was. “Listen,” I said carefully. I didn't want to let my diction betray frustration. It was too easy a sign of equivocation to detect. “I was downsized. Enrollment's been dwindling for semesters. There are just so many sections of these shitty classes. There wasn't enough left for the adjuncts.”

“For a semester. Right? Things could change? Right?” she asked with exponentially compounding franticness.

I shrugged. “I guess. In theory. But there's also the issue that—”

“Peter, I know how you feel about working there. I know how you scorn Shelley Schultz, how you're pissed off the department never took you on full-time.”

I resented her reduction. Is that how she saw me? “I don't think that's exactly accurate. I've never applied for a full-time position.”

“Never?” Her exaggerated suspicion felt mocking.

“A long time ago. But what does it matter?”

Izzy's BlackBerry buzzed. She turned to conceal her reading. She issued a subsequent reply in a blaze of thumb strokes.

I heard myself ask, in the voice of a sitcom father, “Who is that at this hour?”

“Pacer. He found out about what happened at the bistro and wanted to make sure I was okay.”

“How considerate.”

She blotted the corners of her eyes. “Hapworth . . .” She began unwinding her solitary braid.

“But you're married to me,” I said.

She sniffled. “I just don't know what to do.”

It had once been my role in our marriage to attend to the day's
earliest imperatives. I got up first. I walked and fed the pug. I allocated ibuprofen tablets for Izzy. I brewed coffee and poured nonfat organic milk over bowls of Kashi Go-Lean! Crunch. I periodically checked on my wife to make sure she didn't oversleep. It had been a glorious but fleeting era of familial responsibility. I'd always completed my tasks expeditiously. There was only so much time before I'd have to leave for school. Now that I no longer had anything to do by a certain hour, nor a need to pretend I did, I'd been finding it increasingly difficult to rise. This morning I remained in bed and watched Izzy. She was an unwound vacuum cleaner cord, one long, twisted, gray shape lying opposite me. Even Ishiguro appeared to have lost his sense of weekday urgency. He snored between us. When he finally got up, well after eleven, he was anxious to go outside. I threw on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt.

We wandered into a block where retail and residential commingled. It was a part of the neighborhood I knew the pug preferred for the variety of scent textures that his fellow canine denizens left for him. The sidewalk ephemera the humans flung as they moved along the street was additionally fascinating and occasionally edible. It was over here among the bodegas and narrow, boarded walk-up apartment houses where the laborers who'd been reared in the neighborhood still outnumbered the benevolent public-radio-listening, text-messaging hipsters with advanced degrees over on our side by the Starbucks. The true locals carted laundry, shambled into and out of bars and taco emporiums, carried on conversations in Spanish, bought churros, apples, and iced
café con leche
from sidewalk stands. Our chorizo came from Whole Foods. When I taught, a time I now called “my previous life,” I was always in a rush. In an effort to make it to class or office hours or meetings, I passed this section with little notice to the surroundings. It was only now that we could ramble like pugs that I'd really had the chance to stop and take a look at the twenty-four-hour Laundromat, the donut shop next door, and the alderman's ward office with faded committeeman election posters in its windows. Ishiguro, too, seemed quietly appreciative of the opportunity to take his walk at an unhurried pace that allowed for so much experiencing. I kept an eye at all times on the pavement a few feet ahead. I didn't want the dog experiencing any of the green and white glass shards or unextinguished cigarette butts.

We found Izzy in the kitchen upon returning.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Making coffee,” she said. It didn't appear as though she'd made much progress beyond boiling water.

“Let me.”

She smiled and put down the bean grinder cord. “I was hoping you'd say that.”

Izzy, Ishiguro, and I lay together for the rest of the morning, piled up like a triple-decker sandwich on the couch. I got up to get Izzy water when she asked for it. We watched TV. The general state of pleasant inactivity in which Ishiguro's humans found themselves was apparently contagious. The pug took long naps. In between, he occupied himself on the floor with a blue plastic duck and a length of multicolored rope.

That afternoon, Izzy, still in her pajamas, baked peanut butter cookies. She served them to us with two small glasses of tawny port. We watched more TV. The emotionally overwrought complainants sought what they imagined to be justice in the parodic courtroom sets of Judge Mills Lane, Judge Mathis, and Judge Judy. The low-budget commercials for debt consolidation hucksters and attorneys in search of clients for bankruptcy and mesothelioma class action suits between the acts got us laughing.

“I feel better,” she said.

“Me, too.”

“It's nice spending time with you like this.”

“I agree.”

And, as she'd done for a significant portion of the week, she even ignored her BlackBerry for most of the day.

But in the evening, after she'd exchanged coffee and water for vodka and wine, she became restless. This domestic reverie no longer appeased her. She checked her messages, all at once capitulating to what—or, more precisely, whom—I knew she'd been working intently on staving off.

“Pacer Rosengrant?” I asked.

“I have to go get a drink with him. He has a job prospect for me.”

“Where?”

“He wants me to meet the people who are financing Atom Bomb.”

I groaned. “You really want to go from being a sommelier in a fine-dining restaurant to . . . I don't even know what you'd be doing in a nightclub. And plus, how is he even involved?”

“He's doing mixology consulting for them. They'll serve wine, too, you know. They need somebody to buy it.”

“They don't need someone of your caliber.”

She snorted. “Please. I lost my ‘caliber' almost four days ago. I don't have any ‘caliber' left. Someone has to make money.”

It was a conversation I once would have done anything to get out of having. Now, somehow, I could stand up to it.

“Look,” I said, almost pleading. “I don't want you to leave. You have to get a hold of yourself. Okay, you're not screwing around. But you just can't run when he calls.”

“You still don't believe me that nothing's going on, do you?”

“Can you honestly say you don't feel anything for him? That he's not feeling something for you when he calls to help you plan out your future in the nightclub wine-buying business with him?”

She turned her head.

“Just stay with me.” I took her arm.

And she remained right there, for a moment. A long moment. Long enough to make me think she was willing to go along with me. But then, as though a contrary spirit blew into her, she wrenched her arm away and stood up.

“What if it's my only chance?”

“It's not.”

“I'm scared, Hapworth. Goddamn you. You don't understand. I can't even count on you now, now that you're not bringing in any money.”

She sighed and took the seat farthest from me on the couch. Ishiguro had become alarmed and now went over to her. He jumped in her lap and revolved himself several turns before condensing. Izzy smoothed out one of his velvet ears. He was too adorable to resist even in the most emotionally freighted of moments. I moved closer to them. She didn't accept the hand I offered her to hold. She jerked her knee when I attempted to touch it. I retreated without hesitation.

“Things would be different if you had a job,” she said.

“I'll work again.” Doing what, I had no idea.

“I don't know if I can shoulder the burden of supporting this entire family,” she continued.

“We can make some changes. Take out the cable. Buy inorganic. There are things we can do to save money.”

Without obvious impetus, Ishiguro dismounted the couch. He took off for a distant corner of the living room with the speed of the chased. I gathered he'd been following the conversation and didn't want to end up a budget-tightening casualty.

“This just sucks,” she said.

“It may,” I said, “but that doesn't mean you need his help.”

“I need someone's help.”

“You have mine.”

She smiled weakly. “For what it's worth.”

I chuckled. “For what it's worth.”

Even this late in the season, winter still had a stranglehold on Chicago. Hard snow; slick, muddy ice; and abrasive wind hadn't yet surrendered the city to the felicities of spring. Izzy refused my offer to drive her to the Atom Bomb space. She bundled up and left for the bus to meet Pacer Rosengrant. I let her go without much protest, but followed behind, in my Mustang.

Instead of ending up at an under-construction bar in Bucktown, Izzy's destination turned out to be an apartment building in Lakeview. In front of my disbelieving eyes as she went toward it was the penultimate installment of the e-mails Izzy and I had exchanged over the better part of an afternoon just five months ago. I'd always said that series of messages had effectively launched us. One could argue, given what was unfolding here on Kenmore Avenue, that really it had
in
effectively launched us. The concluding line in my mind as she got closer to the building and farther from me was
This invitation is all based on the assumption that you are not a psycho killer stalker with unmarked graves in your backyard.
And ever since then I'd been careful. I'd measured my steps. No matter how close we got, I'd kept my distance, to an extent. And I'd done it out of fear. I didn't want to come on too strong in the beginning. I never wanted to crowd her. Once things had taken a turn for the bleak after we eloped, I was especially reluctant to. I'd followed her lead because I didn't want to lose her, then or now.

As she treaded the gangway, heading to what I suspected and would later confirm was her old boyfriend's newest residence, I wondered if her disassociating words had really just been an instance of sublimating repression. Her hard-hearted conduct recently could very well have been an expression of Freudian
wunscherfüllung
. She had a wish I wasn't fulfilling. She'd really wanted me to trail her, to protect her, to save her, hadn't she? She was mine now, my responsibility, my love, so why the hell was I just sitting here watching her fall apart from afar?

I got out of the Mustang and shouted, “Izzy,” before she touched the intercom. “Stop.” She turned around, hands in her coat pockets. She began to come in my direction, but she wouldn't look at me. I couldn't see if it was out of fury or regret. I went on, in a lower voice, “You don't want to do this.” Then she got in the car. I drove her back to our apartment, but she said nothing, not one word to me, the entire way. After we got home, I walked Ishiguro. Twenty minutes later, she still wasn't talking to me. It wasn't until I'd gotten the dog out of his gear that Izzy finally spoke.

“How do you expect me to live like this?” she asked.

“I could ask you the same thing,” I returned. “Let's not even try to have this discussion right now.” But I couldn't help myself. “Do you think this is right? Do you think behaving like this is fair?”

“When you say ‘behaving' it makes me feel like a child. Like you're one of my fucking arrogant foster parents. Like I'm sixteen and stayed out past curfew and now you're threatening to send me ‘back,' even though there's no ‘back' willing to take me.”

Ishiguro made for his water bowl.

“I can't do this anymore,” she said. “Maybe we should just split up.”

She didn't pack the suitcase I expected her to then. And when I went to bed, instead of taking a pillow and blanket to the living room, she climbed in also. She wrapped her arms around me. The pug drilled himself between. We slept like that until the following afternoon.

Even though she had feelings for someone else, I didn't want to split up. We didn't need to. Separating wasn't going to solve anything. Whether what was going on between Izzy and Pacer Rosengrant was personal, whether it was professional, whether she'd slept with him since we'd been married, or whether she'd just hovered around the regressive temptation and had been inching closer and closer to cheating on me without yet doing the deed, I just couldn't accept that what Izzy and I had together needed to end simply because of his presence in our lives, because of him. This wasn't a soap opera. We were married. We had a thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage, for Christ's sake. In making promises to each other, we'd also made certain implicit pledges to a certain furry foot-and-a-half long pug novelist who depended on us to remain united in emotional sickness and in health. Tumult aside, I didn't hate our life. Rather, I was quite fond of it. I ate and drank well. I dressed in suits and ties for occasions that weren't funerals or job interviews. This was the only reality I'd ever know, aside from reading other people's novels. This was the only chance I'd ever have to experience something real and true, something that existed outside of myself, beyond the conceptual. Breaking up couldn't possibly be the answer. Whatever the solution was, I was sure coming to it would be the result of careful consideration. The solution would require interpretation from myriad angles. The end result would be a product of dispassionate (albeit still passionate) deconstruction. This was just like spending a semester analyzing a dense and unyielding passage of text and, at long last, unlocking its wisdom. It was just like tasting wine, when everything seemed to suddenly click.

“Greece,” I whispered, mainly to myself.

“What?”

“We should still go. On the trip. Together. I mean, we can take separate rooms or whatever, if you want. Regardless, we could use the time away.”

“You think?”

“Well, it's not like we have jobs to keep us from doing it. Besides, you did already book the tickets.”

She smiled, in spite of herself. “Go get my bag.”

“Why?”

“Just get it.”

I brought over her Timbuk2. She withdrew from the front compartment a folded set of stapled pages. “You want to hear what we're doing?”

We sat there together, in bed, discussing the plans. We Googled wineries. We looked up the indigenous grape varieties on Wikipedia. It all sounded so foreign to me. I'd never even considered a trip to this part of the world. Usually when polled about dream European vacations, predictable destinations came to mind. I'd planned to return as an adult to places I'd dimly previewed as a teenager on holidays with my parents and older sister, like Paris and Barcelona and Rome. My dreams never were set in cities called Thessaloniki, Naoussa, and Metsovo. I'd never heard of them. I knew nothing about Greece. I could only vaguely picture it on a map. Was the country part of the EU? Google confirmed it was, and that the national currency was the euro, which was an exchange rate conversion relief to me. The math involved in turning francs to dollars in 1986 was more than my verbal brain could handle.