"I'll come back, Go. We'll move back home. You shouldn'd have to do this all by yourself."
She didn'd believe me. I could hear her breathing on the other end.
"I'm serious, Go. Why not? There's nothing here."
A long exhale. "What about Amy?"
That is what I didn'd take long enough to consider. I simply assumed I
would bundle up my New York wife with her New York interests, her New
York pride, and remove her from her New York parents – leave the
frantic, thrilling futureland of Manhattan behind – and transplant her
to a little town on the river in Missouri, and all would be fine.
I did not yet understand how foolish, how optimistic, how, yes, just
like Nick I was for thinking this. The misery it would lead to.
"Amy will be fine. Amy …" Here was where I should have said, "Amy loves
Mom." But I couldn'd tell Go that Amy loved our mother, because after
all that time, Amy still barely knew our mother. Their few meetings had
left them both baffled. Amy would dissect the conversations for days
after – "And what did she mean by …," – as if my mother were some
ancient peasant tribeswoman arriving from the tundra with an armful of
raw yak meat and some buttons for bartering, trying to get something
from Amy that wasn'd on offer.
Amy didn'd care to know my family, didn'd want to know my birthplace,
and yet for some reason, I thought moving home would be a good idea.
My morning breath warmed the pillow, and I changed the subject in my
mind. Today was not a day for second-guessing or regret, it was a day
for doing. Downstairs, I could hear the return of a long-lost sound: Amy
making breakfast. Banging wooden cupboards (rump-thump!), rattling
containers of tin and glass (ding-ring!), shuffling and sorting a
collection of metal pots and iron pans (ruzz-shuzz!). A culinary
orchestra tuning up, clattering vigorously toward the finale, a cake pan
drumrolling along the floor, hitting the wall with a cymballic crash.
Something impressive was being created, probably a crepe, because crepes
are special, and today Amy would want to cook something special.
It was our five-year anniversary.
I walked barefoot to the edge of the steps and stood listening, working
my toes into the plush wall-to-wall carpet Amy detested on principle, as
I tried to decide whether I was ready to join my wife. Amy was in the
kitchen, oblivious to my hesitation. She was humming something
melancholy and familiar. I strained to make it out – a folk song? a
lullabye? – and then realized it was the theme to M.A.S.H. Suicide is
painless. I went downstairs.
I hovered in the doorway, watching my wife. Her yellow-butter hair was
pulled up, the hank of ponytail swinging cheerful as a jumprope, and she
was sucking distractedly on a burnt fingertip, humming around it. She
hummed to herself because she was an unrivaled botcher of lyrics. When
we were first dating, a Genesis song came on the radio: "She seems to
have an invisible touch, yeah." And Amy crooned instead, "She takes my
hat and puts it on the top shelf." When I asked her why she'd ever think
her lyrics were remotely, possibly, vaguely right, she told me she
always thought the woman in the song truly loved the man because she put
his hat on the top shelf. I knew I liked her then, really liked her,
this girl with an explanation for everything.
There's something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.
Amy peered at the crepe sizzling in the pan and licked something off her
wrist. She looked triumphant, wifely. If I took her in my arms, she
would smell like berries and powdered sugar.
When she spied me lurking there in grubby boxers, my hair in full Heat
Miser spike, she leaned against the kitchen counter and said, "Well,
hello, handsome."
Bile and dread inched up my throat. I thought to myself: Okay, go.
I was very late getting to work. My sister and I had done a foolish
thing when we both moved back home. We had done what we always talked
about doing. We opened a bar. We borrowed money from Amy to do this,
eighty thousand dollars, which was once nothing to Amy but by then was
almost everything. I swore I would pay her back, with interest. I would
not be a man who borrowed from his wife – I could feel my dad twisting
his lips at the very idea. Well, there are all kinds of men, his most
damning phrase, the second half left unsaid, and you are the wrong kind.
But truly, it was a practical decision, a smart business move. Amy and I
both needed new careers; this would be mine. She would pick one
someday, or not, but in the meantime, here was an income, made possible
by the last of Amy's trust fund. Like the McMansion I rented, the bar
featured symbolically in my childhood memories – a place where only
grown-ups go, and do whatever grown-ups do. Maybe that's why I was so
insistent on buying it after being stripped of my livelihood. It's a
reminder that I am, after all, an adult, a grown man, a useful human
being, even though I lost the career that made me all these things. I
won'd make that mistake again: The once plentiful herds of magazine
writers would continue to be culled – by the Internet, by the recession,
by the American public, who would rather watch TV or play video games
or electronically inform friends that, like, rain sucks! But there's no
app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will
always want a drink.
