David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

—

During our first winter in the new house, we got snowed in for a day and a half and the power went off. “Why didn’t I have them put in a fucking generator?” he said. “Christ, we can’t even flush the toilets.”

I had some life left in my laptop, so we got in bed, pulled the duvet over our shoulders and played solitaire together, taking turns. I reached under his pajama bottoms, under his briefs, and he said, “Your hand is cold.” It was the first time he’d turned me down, which I’d thought neither of us was allowed to do. True, he was in a bad mood about the power—surely this needs no commentary—and my hand was cold. But. So I went under with my head and took him in my mouth, and our marriage was saved.

After I’d made him come, he fell asleep and I took care of myself, trying to be quiet about it. He snored awhile, then started giving out these little cries— uh, uh —which must have sounded like mighty yells to him, and I shook his shoulder to wake him. “God—horrible.” He rolled his head back and forth on the pillow. “Thank you. I guess my mind wanted to have a talk with me. Do you suppose it shuts up when you die?”

“That would be the hope,” I said.

“Some hope,” he said. “We’re fucked every which way, aren’t we.”

“Why would you expect me to be the expert?” I said.

“Oh, I’m just complaining into the void,” he said. “It hits me every once in a while, that’s all. I thought you might know the feeling.”

“Are we having a moment?” I said.

“Okay, you’re not inclined,” he said. “Distasteful subject—whatever the subject was . Did we think to bring that bottle in here?”

—

We didn’t know anybody in town—the New Yorkers who had weekend places socialized with one another and the locals were, what can one say, locals—but his friends would come up from the city, marvel at the house and sometimes stay for a night or two: musicians or artists or writers or academics. These were men his age, but not all of them showed up with younger wives or girlfriends, and not all the women his age were bitches to me. One of those women, a poet who was still friendly with his ex-wife, told me he looked ten years younger. “You must be a pistol,” she said. “I wish Milt could borrow you for a week.” (This was her husband, a gray-haired sculptor who wore bib overalls under his suit jacket, apparently to hide his weight.) “I bet he’d come back a giant refreshed.” But when a married English professor brought his grad-student protégée for a weekend, she got drunk, took it into her head that I was flirting with her mentor and came after me in the kitchen. “If you want his bad breath in your face, it’s fine with me. And his three-inch cock. Just do me a favor and drive me to the train.”

The summer after we moved in, a friend of his stayed for two months in Spandau—yet another name for the basement—to work on his novel; a condo was going up across the street from his apartment in Brooklyn, and construction started at eight every morning. If he came up here, my husband told him, he wouldn’t be underfoot—that is, he would be under foot , but. The novelist kept his own hours, ate dinner with us a night or two a week; other nights he’d take us out to the sports bar or go wherever by himself. One morning, I went downstairs to do laundry and met a woman coming out of his door, wearing a bar-length skirt. Fat knees, pretty face. I thought I recognized her from the convenience store in town, but maybe not. She introduced herself as a friend of the novelist’s—she must have thought that knowing his name made it okay for her to be here—and went out the private entrance. I heard a car start up, stepped outside and watched a little sky-blue Kia—a good name for her , I thought—go down the driveway. I didn’t tell my husband, because I couldn’t decide what attitude to take. One possibility: that Kia might have sketchy friends among the locals and that he’d better change the codes on the security system. Another: that she was just some poor girl who’d wanted to get laid, and the novelist was handsome in what you’d now call the George Clooney mode. (He had a longtime girlfriend, whom I’d met, but she’d gone to Europe for a couple of months.) And still another: Why put my husband on alert, not that it really crossed my mind to sneak down there myself. Or if it ever had formed itself into a thought, well, you could just let thoughts come and go, and at this point my husband still fucked me like a man with a younger wife he wouldn’t be able to fuck forever.

—

First thing after waking up was best for him, before he’d—crude joke coming up—pissed away his opportunity. But morning light wasn’t, shall we say, his element. As much as he kept himself cardiologically fit, the skin was loose at his belly and buttocks, though his pubic hair, for some reason, was still black and the lines on his face still attractive in a daddy way. This was a man who could remember the attack on Pearl Harbor, when he’d been ten years old. Skin tags began to appear on his forehead, but I don’t suppose he ever thought of them and, in fairness, I never suggested he have them removed. I did order light-blocking shades for the bedroom, which I assumed would flatter me, too, in years to come—years that, to be honest, wouldn’t be long in coming. But in any marriage, one trains oneself not to look, and what must he have trained himself not to notice? My too-broad forehead and too-pointy chin? Maybe my feet, with the second toe longer than the big one—an ape foot. Or my areolas, the size of fifty-cent pieces, which I suppose might have looked like Mommy watching him. The things I could do something about, I did my best to remedy. Down in the basement, on the treadmill and the elliptical and the Smith machine, I could get through a movie in two days.

Of course wasn’t it the person you were supposed to be fucking? And wasn’t the expression supposed to be “making love to,” or, airy-fairier still, “making love with”? He once said, “I never thought this would happen for me again,” and I didn’t ask what this was, exactly. Maybe he just meant bedding a woman with a still reasonably firm body. Certainly mine presented fewer obstacles than his for our souls to pass through, on their X-ray flights toward spiritual union. Sorry to sound so cruel, but now that I’ve crossed over into unwantable myself, I’m afraid I don’t see much besides cruelty. Remind me what the compensations were supposed to be?

Anyhow, he wasn’t without vanity. At first I was impressed that he did his own laundry—what a male feminist. Eventually I figured out that he was privately bleaching away the yellow stains on his briefs, and this also helped explain why he slept in pajamas; I’d assumed it was a generational thing. He’d warned me he was a light sleeper, that he might get up during the night to read in another room. But I’d hear the toilet flush and found the saw palmetto pills in his sock drawer. For a while, he was able to hide the Viagra too; he’d slip the pill into his pocket an hour before he had to put up or shut up. So when I’m called to account, as I surely will be, for my own deceptions and evasions, let’s remember that I wasn’t the only one harboring little secrets. The bad version is that we spent years hiding from each other in that beautiful house. A happier way to look at it is that this is what marriage is —mutual accommodation, tolerance and forgiveness. Or is there a distinction?

—

A computer infested with miscarried books—they never made it to stillborn—a husband whose body was beginning to bother me and whose mind was running out of fascinations—and more to the point, I suppose, a body and a mind of my own that I was beginning to despise. Now what would you expect me to do? Yes, thank you: find yet another man to fasten on to. The George Clooney in the basement was long gone, back to his apartment and his girlfriend; when his book came out, it had an acknowledgment to us for giving him “refuge in my hour of darkness” and got a mostly good review in the Sunday Times . (Poor Kia, pseudonymized again, had unwittingly sat, or rather bent over, for her portrait, though I don’t suppose she ever knew it.) But the world was full of men who liked to think they were in their hour of darkness and that a woman could grant them refuge. A woman, that is, whom they didn’t already have, preferably younger than themselves, and younger than the woman they did have. If I was no longer twenty and toothsome, weren’t there still men who’d be perfectly glad to use me and whom I’d be perfectly glad to use? You know—that perfect gladness. It was just a matter of getting out of the house and hopping a train to the city. Instead, I had enough originality to take up smoking weed again.