Tom Perrotta - Nine Inches

“I don’t know what happened,” he confessed. “She used to love it, used to put these little notes in my lunch box.”

The notes weren’t dirty, Lonny explained. I can’t wait for bedtime, she’d write, or You are entitled to a free gift. Details at eleven. Just cute little things like that. But man, they sure got him going.

“Now I’m lucky if I get a sandwich,” he said, grimly scrutinizing his cigar. Gus must have been thrown off by Lonny’s candor; he must have felt obligated to confide a secret of his own. Or maybe he just needed to unburden himself. Whatever the reason, once he got started on the subject of Martha, it all came tumbling out. Her frustration with him, with the fact that, intelligent as he was, he was never going to amount to anything more than shipping supervisor at Precision Bearings. For years she’d been bugging him about going to night school, taking some courses in computers or accounting, but he always had some excuse. And now — it was as if both of them had woken up on the same gray morning and realized the same thing — it was too late. They’d turned a corner. Their lives were their lives. Nothing was going to change.

“It wasn’t so bad when she was working,” Gus explained. “But now that she’s home all day, she broods about it.”

After years of stoical silence, Martha had turned into a fountain of complaints. She wanted to travel, drive a nice car, to own a vacation house on the water, to look forward to a fun and prosperous retirement, but it wasn’t gonna happen. Because of him — his passivity, his cowardice, his willingness to settle for second best. He could see the disappointment in her face every time she looked at him, and it had done something to his head. Well, not just his head.

“Between the sheets,” he told Lonny. “You know. It’s not working like it’s supposed to.”

“Ouch.” Lonny gave a sympathetic wince. “That’s a tough break.”

And of course Martha held that against him, too. He didn’t get it. She claimed to have lost respect for him as a man, but somehow still expected him to perform like one.

“At least she’s still interested,” Lonny pointed out.

“Lotta good it does me,” muttered Gus.

All these years later, Gus wasn’t quite clear why he and Lonny had stopped spending their nights together in the garage. All he remembered for sure was that Martha had gone back to work the following September — she found a secretarial position at Merck, a job she’d keep until retirement — and their marriage slowly returned to an even keel. She stopped complaining, lost interest in making him accept responsibility for her unhappiness. His “problem” had continued, but after they moved to separate bedrooms, it no longer seemed to upset her so much.

GUS HAD the compressor warming up and the deflated pool spread out on the cement floor when he suddenly became aware of a hitch in his plan, such an obvious one that he was embarrassed not to have considered it until now: if he inflated the pool in here, he’d never be able to get it out. Lonny’s garage was equipped with a roll-up door wide and high enough to admit a car, but Gus hadn’t seen it in its raised position for years, not since the day the pool table had been delivered. Lonny had apparently decided to treat the big door as if it were a wall, blocking it up from the inside with an impressive collection of junk. It would have taken a half hour of hard labor just to clear a path to the handle, and Gus would have to put everything back when he was finished.

No, the only practical way in and out of the garage was the regular door, maybe seven feet high by three feet across; the kiddie pool had a nine-foot diameter. After a moment’s thought, he arrived at what seemed like a reasonable solution. All he needed to do was drag the pool liner directly outside the door, with the air valve facing in; that way he’d be able to inflate it from the doorway without exposing himself to the rain — it had gotten quite a bit heavier in the past few minutes — and without removing the compressor from the garage.

The plan would have worked perfectly except that the electrical cord on the compressor turned out to be too short. Gus checked all the obvious places — the drawers on the worktable, the tool chest, the storage shelves — before his gaze finally landed on a fat orange extension cord, neatly coiled, resting on the card table where Lonny kept his record player, a clunky wood-veneer Kenwood that had to be at least thirty years old. At Folsom Prison was on the turntable, and Gus couldn’t help smiling. That was Lonny’s favorite record, and it seemed like a blessing that it should have been the last music he had ever heard.

A handful of familiar, timeworn albums were stacked on the table, a rogues’ gallery of men in cowboy hats. Gus flipped through the collection — Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Tom T. Hall — the essential sameness of the portraits making it that much more jarring when he reached the bottom of the pile and found himself looking at a hazy, romantic photo of a woman with an elaborate fifties hairdo sniffing a spray of flowers.

Bouquet, the cover said. The Percy Faith Strings in Stereo.

A startled laugh escaped from Gus’s mouth, followed by an odd feeling of relief, the sense of a small mystery being solved long after he’d stopped wondering about it.

SHORTLY AFTER he’d retired from Precision, Gus returned from his annual physical with a free sample of Viagra that had been urged on him by his doctor. When he sheepishly mentioned this to Martha, she surprised him with a willingness to give it a try.

“I’ve missed all that,” she told him.

“Me, too,” he said.

They tried not to make too big a deal about it, taking the plunge on Saturday night after a pleasant dinner at Applebee’s and a game of Scrabble. They went upstairs and undressed in the dark, shy as newlyweds, before slipping under the covers. For a few seconds, as they pressed against each other in a tentative, slightly anxious embrace, Gus imagined that things would be better between them from now on, that they’d found a cure for what ailed them, the real problem lurking at the bottom of everything else.

This feeling of optimism lasted only long enough for his vision to adjust to the darkness, at which point his wife’s face came slowly into focus. Her eyes were wide-open, and she was staring up at him with an expression of such profound sadness that Gus felt all the air go out of him.

“Martha,” he said. “Honey?”

She started at the sound of his voice, as if she’d forgotten he was there.

“Is this okay?”

“Yeah,” she muttered in an unconvincing voice. “It’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s fine,” she repeated, in the clipped, slightly annoyed tone she would have used if a waitress had spilled a drink in her lap. “Don’t worry about it.”

Confused, but trying to make the best of it, Gus pressed on to the finish. Martha kissed him on the cheek — he was grateful for the kindness — then immediately turned onto her side, facing away from him. He wanted to say something, to get some reassurance about what had just happened, but he didn’t know where to start, and she wasn’t helping him. He lay beside her for a long time, until her breathing turned soft and regular, then got up and shuffled across the hall to his son Mark’s old room, where he’d been sleeping for the past several years. He felt pretty downhearted at first, but upon reflection, he decided that they’d taken a real step forward. It was foolish to imagine that they could fix their marriage in one night. They’d probably have to work at it for a while. But at least the pill had done its job, and they were officially unstuck from their rut.