David Gates: The Wonders of the Invisible World

He has never hit me, and only once or twice in our two years has he raised his voice in anger. Even in bed Steven is gentle. To a fault. Why, then, am I wary of him? Obvious. Well, so if you’re wary of him, what are you doing here? Also obvious. For one thing, I have his baby inside me.

Ye gods, his baby. I think of it that way because he and Marilyn never had children, and what other chance is he going to get? But it’s not his baby, of course, nor mine. The baby is its own baby. I think of it as a girl, because the idea of a tiny man inside me is, is, is what? Repulsive, I was going to say, though sometimes I think, A little man, yes, squeezed out into the world to do my will. But at other times I pray, Dear God, if You’ve made it a boy, go back, in Your time-scrunching omnipotence, and re-do the instant of its conception. Not forgetting to add, If it be Thy will. You know, the kind of thing God does all the time, going back and changing what His will is.

So I’m trying to take it as it comes; even that seems wildly ambitious. Two days ago, after Steven had finished working and I’d come to a stopping place, we climbed the hill up behind Carl’s house until we reached the power line. Steven put on his skis, I put on the snowshoes he bought me. I’m not to ski anymore, until after. Another thing I’m not to do is address Carl Porter as Carl; Steven sees it as a class thing. Slipping along by my side, he praised my walking in the snowshoes. “Big deal,” I said. “You put one foot in front of the other.” “Ah, but that,” he said, raising his index finger, “is ofttimes the hardest lesson of all.” Big joke with Steven is to intone fake profundities, raising his index finger to make sure you see he’s kidding. I thought, Right, I’m learning that. Being married to you.

Oh, I know, bad. You should be reaching out to him.

Been tried, honey.

Like our first night in this house. We’d both learned — not from each other; we’ve both been around the block — that the big moments you plan never work, so we decided against the French restaurant two towns over with the forty-dollar prix fixe dinner, and went to the diner on 28. We took a booth, ordered pancakes and sausage and sat waiting for the modest magic by which the everyday becomes precious. Steven flipped page after page of jukebox selections, fingering the little metal tabs at the bottom. The country songs in green. Then he flipped back through in the other direction.

“Nothing,” he said. “Zip. Unless you want to hear fucking Randy Travis.”

By this I understood that I was not to want to hear Randy Travis.

I put a hand on his. “Something’s worrying you,” I said.

“Don’t,” he said, pulling his hand out from under. I saw tears come up and fill his eyes.

“What?” I said. “Talk to me.”

He shook his head. “You’ve heard the same shit forty-eight times,” he said. “Maybe the pills will help.”

Forty-eight was one of his numbers I hadn’t heard before. Usually they were round and overwhelming, like fifty thousand (I’ve done fifty thousand of these fucking children’s books) or ten million (Ten million fucking fax machines at fucking J&R, and I get the one that craps out). Afterward I thought about it. Forty-eight was how old he’d be in June. When his first child would be born. Oh, but Steven was such a complex man; could it possibly be that simple? One thing that might help: to get my contempt under control. Since he doesn’t seem to be doing much about his. Now that would be a mood drug I could get behind.

We moved up here for the beauty and the quiet, and so we’d each have a workroom. It’s all so postindustrial: no need anymore to be bodily on Lexington Avenue from ten to six. Up here I’d be able to take my job lightly and my work seriously — as seriously as Steven takes his. But needless to say.

Yesterday we had to go to Oneonta for groceries. It had started snowing in the morning; when we got back, it was still coming down and we couldn’t get up the driveway. He insisted on trying to shovel — after making three trips all the way up to the house with the stuff, which he wouldn’t let me help with. I told him forget it, come inside, we’ll drink tea and get snowed in. Thinking, actually, of some Rémy in the tea — what he’s taking is one of the new anything-goes antidepressants — and stretching out by the pellet stove, our feet together under the shiny maroon comforter. And so on. We’ll get Carl to plow us out in the morning, I said. He said I treated the locals like old family retainers. Which was so uncalled-for when for once I was trying to take some care of him. He was already pale and sweating, and his chest was heaving. I went into the bathroom and cried, then washed my face. When he came in, looking even worse, he found me sipping tea (with Rémy) and reading Mirabella. Or, rather, staring at the pages and feeling put-upon because now that I’d cut myself out of the loop, I would never design anything but monthly newsletters and annual reports. Bitch, I’m sure he thought, and clomped upstairs.

When it got dark, I opened a can of soup. Then I stopped bothering with the tea and drank myself pretty nearly to sleep. Just managed to get up the stairs. Then woke up, of course, at two in the morning, mouth dry, head killing me. I went to the bathroom to pee and get a drink of water and some aspirin, and heard the music still going in Steven’s workroom — his damn Louis Armstrong — and saw a line of golden light along the bottom of his door. Inside was the Kingdom of Art, from which I’d been exiled. I crept back to bed like a dirty animal.

Sneaking around a dark house at night: just like old times.

When I was twenty-two, my boyfriend and I shared a big old farmhouse in Rhode Island with his best friend and the best friend’s girlfriend, and once a week or so I would leave Dalton in bed and make my way down the creaky stairs to find Tod waiting on the sofa. He would be drunk, having got Kathleen drunk enough to put her to sleep, and not gentle with me; I would have put Dalton to sleep by fucking him as sweetly as I knew how. More sweetly than I know how anymore. But saving my orgasm for Tod. Knowing it was of no value to him, except as proof that he could make me do it when Dalton couldn’t. Though of course Dalton could. And I didn’t always save it.

It started in the summer, one morning when Tod and I were alone in the house. He asked if I wanted coffee, then ran his index finger down my bare arm (me in that blue sundress with the yellow flowers, him in blue jeans and a T-shirt I couldn’t imagine how he kept so white) and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we put the horns on Dalton?” The horns. What more did I need to know? And yet. I heard two voices in my head, talking at me as I stood there in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room: my own voice saying This is bad for you and a man’s voice saying Do what I say. I narrowed my eyes, trying to hear which was right, and I could picture myself as Tod saw me, looking intense and tempted. This is a beautiful boy, said another voice, a voice that wished me ill, who knows how to touch you.