Today Will Be Different(24)

But as of this morning he was facedown on the breakfast table. He must be going somewhere each day without telling anyone. And at some point, he’d aimed a telescope at this exact spot…

This was ridiculous. I called Joe’s cell.

He picked up after one ring. “Hey, babe.”

“Joe.” My calm voice belied my heart, which had broken loose in my chest. “Where are you?”

“At the office. Why?”

Yow. I realized I wasn’t dreading a scene, I was itching for one. I was ready to jack this party up to eleven and start breaking some plates. The last thing I could have fathomed was that I’d be lied to with such calm, clarity, and conviction. (C-words! They’re everywhere today!) I’d like to say such a thing had never happened to me, but I knew sickeningly well it had, eight years before, at the hands of my sister, Ivy. It’s the last impression I have of her, the cool betrayal. But now Joe? If there was one thing in this world I thought I could count on, it was that Joe was no liar. But here he was, lying.

Yo-Yo pawed at my lap. I’d stopped scratching his head.

“Just thought I’d check in.” I matched Joe’s nonchalance and raised him a bored sigh.

“All’s well?” he asked.

“‘I myself am hell, nobody’s here, only skunks,’” I said. “You know how it is.”

“Do I ever,” he said.

“I had to pick up Timby at school. It’s a long story involving cheaply made clothing, Bangladeshi slaves, and an antagonist with the last name Veal.”

This was better than a scene! It was so exotic, so uncharted; it was forging a new pathway, the two of us, liars. I actually felt closer to Joe in a kinky, thrilling way. Lying! The middle-aged sex?

“I’ll fill you in tonight,” I said.

“I’m stuck at a thing,” he said. “I might be late.”


For years I’d been cataloging traits of Joe’s that annoyed me, things I’d be relieved to have out of my life should he ever decide to leave me. The Gratitude List, I called it.

1. When I get out of the shower and ask Joe to hand me a towel, he invariably hands me a damp one.

2. He has never once offered to walk Yo-Yo. He’ll walk Yo-Yo, but only after making me play the harridan.

3. When we go out to restaurants, he puts leftover dinner rolls in his socks and brings them home so they won’t go to waste.

4. Said dinner rolls get placed on his bedside table until he notices them a week later, at which point he hands me the wheat stones and asks me to “use them in something.” (Thus the frequency of bread pudding. No wonder poor Timby is a chunkster.)

5. Every time we go to a movie and it starts twenty minutes late because of the previews, Joe goes nuts, showing me his watch and informing me and everyone else in the theater what time the movie was scheduled to begin.

6. When we run a fan to cool down a room, he insists it point into the room, not out, which just seems wrong.

7. He puts sriracha on everything I make. Even waffles.


My Gratitude List was self-protection. I started composing it the morning after Joe and I first said “I love you,” at Dojo on St. Mark’s Place. Bob Marley’s Legend was playing in the background. (This was New York in the ’90s; when wasn’t Legend playing in the background?)

Joe was due at the hospital at 5:30 a.m. He’d showered and dressed quietly enough. But then he sat at the end of my bed, on my feet (!), and put on his shoes. Just so you don’t take me for a complete scorekeeping bitch (which I am, but there’s better evidence), Joe freely admits he’s “essentially selfish.” It’s the single piece of insight he received the one time he went to a shrink. (Me, on the other hand, I’ve been to nine shrinks in twenty years and I’m still like, “Wait… what?”) This selfishness, according to Joe’s miracle shrink, was a response to being one of seven children. Every time a box of Quisp or Quake was unpacked from the grocery bag, kids descended on it in a feeding frenzy. Joe shared a room with three brothers. Control of the remote, a private place to read Playboy, everything a cage match to the death. The fault, of course, lay with the Catholic Church, which encourages lower-class families to reproduce like rodents and build up the Church’s ranks, blah-blah.

Another item for the Gratitude List: no more Joe railing against religion.

In fact, that dinner at Dojo, it wasn’t Rasta Bob singing “I wanna love you, every day and every night” that inspired Joe to declare the three words that sealed our fate; it was the following discussion of the New Testament:

Joe: It’s doggerel, aggrandizing a moody egomaniac written by men who believed heaven was a hundred feet above their heads. Literally. So when Christ ascended, He didn’t go higher than a seven-story building.

Me: Who cares?

Joe: The hours I wasted listening to that contradictory claptrap! The things I could have done with that time! I could have learned another language. Or leathercraft.

Me: I was brought up Catholic too, you know. When I was seven, they were teaching us about the loaves and the fishes. I raised my hand and said, “That couldn’t really happen.” Sister Bridget, not happy, responded, “Faith requires the mind of a child.” I said, “But I am a child.” She replied, “A younger child.” I thought, What a load of malarkey, and never looked back.