Jessica Chiarella - And Again

He asked about them, of course, about what their stories were. Men always asked. But he was easy to distract in the inky darkness of his bedroom. It took him three years, finally, to get all the answers. And then in the fourth year I was wiped clean, and there was no point to the questions anymore.

I’ve never liked Chicago much. It’s a city just big enough for its residents to have an overinflated sense of their own importance, while still harboring a deep inferiority complex because they don’t live in New York or L.A. That, and the Democrats have such a stranglehold on the political system that there hasn’t been a clean election here in the past hundred years. It’s the perfect example of liberal hypocrisy; the bleeding hearts and the unions and the welfare-dependent masses have had their way for so long that they’ve created a bankrupt clot of buildings surrounded by war zones on two sides, and one side by water. It’s a microcosm of corruption and institutional failures. Everything from its school system to its police force to its public transit system is either irreparably broken or chronically useless. And everyone who lives here thinks the deep-dish pizza makes up for it.

My home is a house in upstate Wisconsin, in my district, where the people also might have a chip on their collective shoulder, but they work damn hard to make up for it. Unfortunately, somewhere in the stack of paperwork I signed before the transfer there was an edict requiring me to remain within an hour of Northwestern Memorial for the next few months, so for the time being Beth and I have rented a condo on Lake Shore Drive.

I’m sprung from the hospital on a Friday afternoon, and that’s where we go. Beth drives, because I technically don’t have a driver’s license yet. It’s something you don’t really think about when you get a new body, that you’ve never passed a driver’s test and not even the photo on your license is accurate anymore. I don’t know if I’m even capable of driving a car. After all, I just learned to walk again.

Beth waves to the parking attendant as she pulls our gray Audi into our parking space. She’s been living here alone for the past few months while I’ve been in the hospital. This is her turf. It’s an off-putting sensation, like I’m an intruder in my own house. But considering how much time I’d spend in D.C. every year, Beth is well accustomed to living alone by now. It was one of the reasons she stopped wearing her wedding ring. One of the reasons there were divorce papers waiting on my desk only a week before my diagnosis.

Beth leads me into the building and unlocks our door with a silver key, just one of many on her key ring. I can’t remember where my keys are. It turns out getting released from the hospital isn’t much like getting out of prison in the movies; they don’t hand you a plastic bag full of the clothing and possessions you had on when you went in. No, I only signed some paperwork in my shaky scrawl and was wheeled out to the curb like a helpless invalid. Hospital policy, of course.

The apartment we rented is modern and fully furnished, all chrome and glass and well-lacquered wood. It makes me homesick for the high vaulted ceilings of our remodeled farmhouse in Wisconsin, or even the antique faux-European accents of my apartment in D.C. This is yuppie artifice, as inauthentic and gaudy as a stretch limo. But Beth doesn’t seem to mind. She cares less about the soul of a place than I do; all she cares about is the price.

The apartment is so far-flung from the house I grew up in, it’s almost comical. Simply the fact that it’s two stories already makes it a step up. My family lived in a squat little ranch house on sixteen acres of farmland just outside of Athens, Wisconsin. My early life was flat and gray, speckled with mud, sweat stained. Everything was like that, the house, the land, my family. Everything smelled like hay and manure and empty air. The idea of living in an apartment like this was laughable; of being a congressman, unthinkable.

I was never the smartest guy in my high school. Or, if I was, I worked too hard on the farm to ever spend much time studying, so my grades never reflected it. But I knew how to talk to people. I learned it early, after my mother died and my father took off, leaving my grandmother to take care of me and the farm by herself. I was suddenly the one to haggle with our equipment suppliers and barter with our grain distributors and fight with the mortgage lenders. I learned fast, how to get what I wanted. It was a survival skill back then, as important as knowing how to build a fire or find water in a desert. I loved my grandmother, probably more than anyone else in the world, but had it been up to her alone, we would have lost the farm in that first year. It was my responsibility to step in, to keep everything running as it had. And no matter what I did, it wasn’t ever enough.

In the end, we had to get help from the federal government to keep from losing everything. That was the worst part of those years, the food stamps, the subsidies, the government relief for small farmers. I hated those checks, hated my free lunches at school. Those were indignities my grandmother and I should not have had to bear, not in America. It should have been enough that we worked, and worked hard.

Of course, the Wisconsin where I live with Beth and David Jr. is very different from the Wisconsin where I grew up. Beth was New York City through-and-through when we met, when I was a freshman congressman and she was a budding reporter for one of those trendy Internet news sites. I had to all but crowbar Beth out of the Big Apple when we married, and she’s never been quite at peace with Wisconsin, even though we live in a veritable estate, even though she plays tennis at our country club every weekend, even though David Jr. is attending the best private school in the whole damn state.

“How’s David Jr.?” I ask.

“Well, he got into an argument with one of the other boys at school the other day,” Beth says, as she pulls a bottle of Perrier out of the fridge with perfectly manicured hands. “I guess he saw some cartoon of you on the Internet or something.”

“An argument or a fight?”

“His teacher called it an argument. She says he’s been volatile lately, and it was only a matter of time. But don’t worry, I’ll handle it.”

“No,” I say, leaning on the counter to give my legs a break. “Tell him I’ll Skype him this weekend and we’ll talk about it. I don’t want him getting pushed around.”

“Sweetie, I’ve got it,” she says, her perfect rows of teeth showing under red lips. “It’s kid stuff. Don’t bother with it.”

Time was, I would’ve been more than happy to let Beth deal with our son’s problems. After all, how could they compare with what I had to deal with at his age? I had work on the farm and a part-time job and a grandmother who would forget to eat if I let her stare out the window for too long. It’s been a concern of mine for a while that my son has it too easy, the child of a congressman with his private school and our big house and the best of everything. How on earth will he be prepared for the world with that kind of an upbringing? It’s been easy to blame Beth for coddling him, for giving him the sort of posh lifestyle she grew up in. But now I think it’s my own failing, not being around enough to insure he’s got his feet on the ground. It’s just one of the things I intend to address now, with my second chance.

“No,” I say to Beth. “No, I’ll handle it. I’ll make it a priority.”

“All right,” she says, her mouth quirking up at the corners, as if she is afraid to smile too wide just yet, when my reform is still so new. I’m beginning to feel like everything is a test, to show her proof that I am truly changed, that she made the right decision in tearing up the divorce papers and taking care of me when I got sick. She rounds the counter to me, smoothing out the shirt I’m wearing, her hands brushing down my chest. “I’m happy you’re home, you know,” she says, sniffing a bit, batting at the corner of her eye with her fingertips.