Vladimir(42)

With relief I recalled I’d canceled my classes—planning in advance for this day of mental squalor. Well, yes, and so I deserved it. I started the coffee, and while I was waiting downstairs I pressed a bag of cut-up frozen mangoes to my face. Water, I needed to drink water. All the water in the world. Later I might ask Sid to go buy me a green juice from the little health food store off Main Street. And a kombucha, I liked those. I began a mental list of what I would eat and drink that day. (Most people think it’s best to compensate for a hangover by eating, and while that works for young people like Sid, I have found in my dotage that starving and dousing a hangover with excessive hydration is a much more effective tool for recovery.) I would let nothing pass my lips other than water, coffee, and the green juice until one in the afternoon. After that I would allow myself to eat high-water-content fruits and vegetables (watermelon, cucumbers, cantaloupe, celery, lettuce, tomatoes) until 5 p.m., at which time I would make a chicken soup (no noodles or rice) with a healthy amount of spice to burn and scour my insides. I would do an old aerobics DVD that forced me to sweat.

I gathered a collection of half-perused periodicals from the coffee table and ran a bath in our clawfoot tub. A few years ago I purchased a walnut bath caddy that lay midway across the mouth of the bath and an ipe bath chair that sat below the water and supported my neck and bottom so that my tailbone didn’t ache while I soaked. The bath setup always made me feel like Julie Christie in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, though my legs would never bend in such straight and appealing lines as hers did. I poured my coffee and a glass of water. I brought my drinks, along with the Paris Review, New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and the New Yorker to the bath caddy. I swapped the bag of frozen mangoes for a fresh bag of frozen peas. I urinated, and noted that John and I couldn’t have had sex last night, as there was no sting or ache. Then I slipped into the water, took a long drink of coffee, rested the peas against my face, and closed my eyes.

I slid into a doze, the feeling of blanket after blanket gently placed on top of me. When I opened my eyes the peas were mushy, the bath was cool, and there was a clatter at the sink. John stood there, teeth bared like a wolf, flossing.

“Hi,” I said.

“Oh, hi,” he said, smiling. “You were in quite the state last night.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, it was almost fun, though when I wouldn’t have sex with you, you threw a bit of a fit.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I enjoyed feeling valiant and refusing you in your compromised state.”

“Thank you.” I turned away. He was acting a little phony, a little arch, and I wasn’t in the mood. I remember, back when I lived in New York City, eavesdropping on a woman asking her boyfriend if he wanted to get a drink. Clearly, she wanted one. He replied in a reserved and pious tone that he wouldn’t be drinking tonight. His refusal embarrassed her, and her voice rose to a high pitch: “We Never Want the Same Things at the Same Time!”

For so long, this was how it felt with John. If he came to me lightheartedly, I would want seriousness. If he came to me gravely, I would feel irritated. If he came to me lovingly, I would react icily. If I came to him in supplication, he would mock me. If I came to him in strength, he would ignore me. We were so pitted against each other. Perhaps because we were so desperate to hang on to our own identities, our own separate I’s. We insisted on living our own lives in our own minds and could never truly merge. Perhaps we were undisciplined, or perhaps it was because we didn’t go to church, didn’t live by a moral code, didn’t believe anyone was watching. We had come into adolescence in the 1970s, of age in the 1980s—we were brought up swaddled by the most selfish and individualistic decades in the history of the United States.

Then I remembered his fat thumbs texting students. Meeting them in hotels. Acting agog at the sight of their bodies, their breasts like small, round flotation devices. Even if I didn’t care, even if I liked the space, had I been doing what Sidney had said? Had I been talking myself into a compromised existence for the sake of being tough? Why did I feel as though I was still trying to figure out how I could be a better partner for John?

“Do you think you brainwashed me?” I hoped I looked a little bit alluring from the bathtub.

“What are you talking about?”

“All the women. Was it brainwashing? The fact that I allowed it?”

“You suggested it in the first place.”

“A very long time ago.”

“We didn’t want a conventional marriage. That’s what we said. That’s what you said.”

Yes, that was what I had said. And yes, that was what I had wanted. Strangely, I hadn’t thought about the idea of a conventional or an unconventional marriage in months—since the petition. I suppose because I had been foisted into the clichéd role of the wronged wife. We had wanted to live unconventionally, in a new way, invented unto ourselves, and now I was playing the most timeworn part.

Our conviction wasn’t truly behind it, because then we would have shared our life choices with Sid. If we believed in an unconventional marriage, I wouldn’t have been the one to make all the dinners and arrange all the play dates and schedule all the lessons. We lit a couple of fires in unexpected places, but we weren’t willing to burn it all down.

“Hey.” He was feeling moved, I could tell, he swelled slightly with import. “I heard what the department asked. I’m sorry that this all has affected you. I find it truly boneheaded.”