You Think It, I'll Say It(19)
“In the toilet germs?” I ask.
“In the disgustingness of her humanity. Does she want me to cheat?”
It is six thirty-three on a Friday morning in February, about forty degrees, and still dark. We’re running east on Pershing toward Forest Park. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I leave my apartment at six-twenty and get to Mark’s house by six-thirty. They live in a brick colonial—stately on the outside, cluttered and dog-hair-filled when you step in—and if he’s already stretching in the driveway when I arrive, it usually means he awakened before his alarm went off and is in a bad mood. If I have to text him because he’s still inside, maybe still asleep, it means he’s equanimous. Occasionally, it even means he and Libby had sex the night before.
“I doubt the shirt has anything to do with you,” I say. “I think she’s just existing.” I add, “She doesn’t want you to cheat, Mark. Don’t cheat.”
Though my brother is next to me and I’m not looking at his face, I know his exact expression as he mutters, “Said like a man who’s never been married.”
* * *
—
It’s while I’m parking in the garage adjacent to my law firm—I live in the suburb of Clayton and work in downtown St. Louis—that I feel, in my pocket, the ping of an incoming email. When I glance at the screen of my phone, I can see the first sentence, but I postpone reading the entire message. This way, an anticipatory pleasure—if I am being honest, the purest pleasure of my life these days—imbues the otherwise mundane six minutes it takes to ride the garage elevator to the lobby, cross the lobby to the other bank of elevators, and rise to the fifth floor, where I’m deposited at the glass entrance of Grant, Molyneux, and Molyneux.
I greet Gloria at the front desk and my assistant, Rosemary, outside my office, set my briefcase on the desk, sit, and read the email on my phone; the phone’s smaller screen feels more intimate than my computer. Like almost all the others, the message is one paragraph, with neither greeting nor sign-off; rather, it ends with a YouTube link.
Even as a child, I remember being enraptured by this piece—how the long orchestra statement of the first theme builds and builds in excitement and then the violin and viola enter in octaves in a seemingly random moment. When I was younger, I thought it sounded like how flying would feel. And the second movement has to be some of Mozart’s most beautiful and sad music ever—apparently, he wrote it shortly after his mom died.
The link is to Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman playing the Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major for Violin, Viola and Orchestra, conducted by Zubin Mehta. It was recorded in 1982 with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and is twenty-five minutes long, and I am seven minutes in when I hear someone saying my name.
“William?” It is Rosemary, standing at the threshold. “Richard Reinhardt from Brevature is holding for you.”
* * *
—
“We went out for dinner on Saturday with the Kleins,” Mark says. “One of those standard two-couple snoozefests, but primates are wired to socialize, right? Why fight it?”
It’s Monday, and, as it happens, I had dinner last night at Mark and Libby’s, as I do most Sundays: I played basketball in the driveway with my nephews, who are ten and thirteen, and, after the meal, I was praised by Libby for loading the dishwasher, which Mark never does. But in the presence of his wife and children, Mark jokes around a lot and reveals little.
As we make a left from Big Bend onto Forsyth, I ask, “Where’d you guys eat?”
He says Parigi, a new, expensive place that serves French-Italian fusion. “The four of us split a few bottles of wine.” This detail catches my attention, but I say nothing, and Mark continues: “We got home, I checked on the kids, and, miracle of miracles, they were both asleep. I told Libby she looked nice. I start to kiss her, and she says, ‘Just so you know, there’s a zero percent chance we’re having sex tonight.’?” He laughs mirthlessly. “Zero percent! She claimed she’d eaten too much, but I think she was pissed because I’d said at dinner that Sandra Bullock is annoying.”
I roll my eyes. “Sandra Bullock is America’s sweetheart.”
“You sound like Libby.” He shrugs. “I have opinions. Sue me.”
“Maybe Libby had eaten too much.”
“You know when I realized she’d given up on me? When she started preferring doggy-style. That used to be, like, a present, for special occasions, but she wanted missionary as our go-to—gazing into each other’s eyes and all that crap. Now she’s fine with me getting her off with my hand, then before I can even ask, she’s on her knees with her ass in the air. And don’t get me wrong, for sure it’s efficient, but it’s like, who’s she picturing while I’m behind her?”
“If you get her off with your hand, isn’t it likelier that that’s when she’s picturing someone else?”
After a pause, with a degree of fondness, Mark says, “Sometimes you’re a real prick.”
When I turned forty, which was sixteen months ago, I expected that the pressure to marry—the pressure exerted by others—would intensify, but to my surprise, it decreased. It turned out that simply by celebrating this particular birthday, I’d crossed some border of nonconformity, and while I still could—can—turn around, retrace my steps, and assume citizenship in the nation of wedlock, the expectation seems to be that I won’t. I now hear, in reference to myself, the word bachelor; and though it evokes an image of a fussy gay man, and though I’m not gay and choose to believe I’m not fussy, either, I don’t mind. In fact, I’m relieved. I’ve dated plenty of women—nearly all of them intelligent and attractive, some exceptionally so—and I’ve never wanted to permanently attach my life to theirs; I’ve never even come close enough to be able to pretend to want it. That I understood our alliances to be temporary while the women were more optimistic was, as I progressed through my thirties, an increasingly keen source of pain—for the women, obviously, but for me, too. In one case, at my girlfriend’s behest, I read two books about men who fear commitment. But my feelings didn’t change. My aversion to the prospect of a spouse and children was, apparently, anomalous enough that it needed an explanation, and I’m pretty sure this need was exacerbated by my appearance. I was average when younger—like Mark, I have red hair, which has faded in intensity, and skin covered in ginger freckles—but just as the passage of time changed the meaning of my being single, it changed the value of my looks; and as the years passed without my putting on weight or losing much hair, I attained some higher status of desirability, enhanced, no doubt, by making partner at Grant, Molyneux, and Molyneux. That is, I’ve remained myself while my currency has increased.