Rebecca Coleman - The Kingdom of Childhood

I didn’t move. I felt too surprised to react. When was the last time he had tried to have sex—had it been this year, or the previous one? Despite the conversation, I had assumed he was making a nominal attempt to come on to his wife so he could tell himself it was her fault he wasn’t getting laid, in service to his ego. Never mind his complete disinterest in the act itself.

But he didn’t seem disinterested now. He tried to roll me onto my back, but I wadded the blanket into my hands and refused to budge. In response, he nuzzled my neck and pulled up the back of my nightgown.

“ No, Russ,” I said, and elbowed him away.

“Why not?”

“Because I need sleep.”

“But we’ve got a hotel room all to ourselves.”

“Russ—we always have a whole bedroom all to ourselves.”

“Yeah, but at home I’m always wrapped up in the dissertation.” He rubbed my arm. “I’ll be quick if you want me to be. Or slow if you prefer.”

“No. Leave me alone.”

I writhed away from him, but he grabbed my elbow and pulled me back. As I tried to jerk my arm away, I wriggled onto my stomach, but he held on and moved as I did. His weight on my back, with my face against the scratchy sheet, made me feel half-suffocated. He must have heard my struggled breathing, because he rose up on one arm to make room for me to stretch my neck.

“Now, Judy,” he said, his voice placating but his fingers still tight above my elbow, “you know I’d never make you do anything.”

I took several deep breaths and swallowed.

“So I’m asking you to be nice to me. Because I work my ass off, and you’re my wife, and it would be awfully damn considerate if you’d allow me the privilege of having sex with you on the rare occasion my schedule permits.”

I relaxed a little, and in turn, he eased his grip. When I turned onto my side he curled up behind me, and after that I didn’t protest any further. I stared at the band of light around the window and tried to ignore Russ, who didn’t seem to notice, or care.

The streetlights still shone halos of yellow against the charcoal sky when we climbed into the car the next morning, groggy and unsettled, as if the previous night’s events had embarrassingly revealed just how far gone our marriage was. Perhaps it was only my own perception; Russ, loaded up on medications, could no longer be depended on to display a reaction that meant anything. This time he took the driver’s seat, and I did not complain. My exhaustion was probably as debilitating as whatever state he was in, and he could throw back his black coffee much faster than I could.

Neither of us spoke for the first thirty minutes or so, allowing National Public Radio to hold up its end of the conversation unassisted. Two Congressmen, one Democrat and one Republican, argued over the impeachment proceedings, and for once I thought Russ’s jazz CDs might be welcome. I thought back to Zach’s opinion of the whole thing—that the president had been betrayed, his private business hung out so his enemies could make an example of him, that it was frivolous and absurd. Zach’s interpretation was simplistic, but naturally I appreciated his take that privacy trumps all else. I slowly sipped my coffee and gazed out the window at the low blue hills, hazily beautiful against the yellowing grass of autumn.

“So when are you going to stage an intervention?” asked Russ.

I turned in surprise to look at him, and then, finding his small smile unreadable, stared back out at the road. “Your business is none of mine,” I said.

He chuckled. “Sure it is. I pay the bills. I stay at this damn job so our kids can get tuition remission.” He let go of the wheel long enough to hold up his left hand. “I keep the ring on.”

“How kind of you.”

For a moment he met my eye and scowled. “I’ve never known you not to have an opinion about something. I keep waiting to come home and find you and Scott and my boss and whoever else sitting around in a circle ready to haul me off to rehab.”

“Do you want me to?” I asked, cool-voiced. “Because to this point I was under the impression that Scott and your boss were the last people you would want me to tell.”

“They are. I’m just surprised you haven’t done it anyway.”

“You sell me short,” I told him. “You always have.”

His mouth pulled into a slow, thin line. “I married you,” he reminded me. “In spite of everything.”

“In spite of nothing . I rest my case.”

“Bull shit, ” he countered. “Marty didn’t fare so well. Did I hold that against you? No. And damn well I should have.”

“What happened to Marty was an accident.”

“Like hell it was. And it damn near took out the entire dormitory. People who pass out drunk don’t spill vodka over their entire bed. They also don’t light cigarettes after they’ve passed out. I gave you benefit of the doubt then, because I knew you wouldn’t stage something that evil. But I wonder now and then.”

“You wish now and then,” I corrected. “I was innocent when I had what you wanted, and twenty years later, when I’m entitled to half your retirement, I’m guilty. Drunks do things like that all the time, and Marty was one of them. It was terrible what happened to him, but I can’t say I’m sorry. He was abusive.”

“You think everyone is abusive. You think I’m abusive.”

“I beg your pardon. You strong-armed me into bed last night and nothing burned down. I wouldn’t consent to you abusing me. I’m above that.”

“Lucky me. Did you enjoy it?”

“No.”

He snickered. “I would have stuck around for you if you’d asked.”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

His expression, focused distantly on the road, was placid. “You’re probably having an affair. Even when you’re pissed as hell, it’s not like you to turn down an orgasm.”

“Maybe I’m done with both opinions and orgasms.”

He grinned. “Not you. You’re certainly hitting the wine these days, though. Maybe that has something to do with it.”

“With which part?”

“Either. I’m willing to bet it’s either chilling you out or warming you up. Our recycling bin looks like the day after a faculty party every night of the week. Maybe we both need rehab.”

“I don’t. If you do, feel free to go. I’ll hold down the fort.”

He glanced at me. “I bet. I think the difference between you and me is that you’re still in the denial stage, and I’m starting to move past it.”

“Oh, not at all,” I said. “I didn’t deny a thing.”

For a long moment he considered that in silence. Finally he said, “Judy…it could be better than this. I think they’re going to clear me to graduate in the spring. After that I’ll take the summer off, we’ll clean up, get the last kid out of the house, take a vacation. Maybe you can get some counseling, deal with how low you’ve been since Bobbie died. We’ll both get better. Put all this crap behind us and get on with the rest of our lives.”

His words sounded sincere, but I knew Russ better than this. His first loyalty was to his ambition, and if at the moment he was turning it back toward me, it was only because he didn’t yet know to whom he would need to pay obeisance in order to resume the climb. In the vacuum of authority he could let his eyes rest for a moment on his small wife, and make me feel cruel to harden myself against the gentleness I knew from experience would not last long. Regardless of his sincerity, our dreams had diverged so completely that I could not imagine how we could share a life much longer. Russ wanted to move forward into an accomplished and respected advanced adulthood, while I yearned to fall back and back, recapturing all I had lost along the way to this place. Because I have learned that all anyone ever wants is to feel at peace with the sadness and love they have cobbled together into a life, with opportunities missed and those misguidedly taken, and for Russ that peace stretched like a ribbon between two posts lodged at a point in the future. My peace, that paltry ball of tangled wool, lay abandoned on a straw bale somewhere in a past that shifted each time I reached for it; and of all I remembered from that room full of shit and salvation, nothing had lasted except a love that was almost pure.