John Kenney - Talk to Me

Claire tried counting to ten but had only made it to four when the line came out.

“We’ve done pretty much all of it,” Claire said.

It was her tone that stopped Ted. Flat. Honest. Not intentionally cruel, but still. He thought he’d hit a winner over the net and she’d rocketed it right back over, straight down the line.

Ted turned and walked across the kitchen, to the window by the back door. Bismarck thought it was time for a walk and scampered to Ted’s side. Ted looked down, patted her. She seemed disappointed and walked back to her spot. Ted had disappointed all of the women in the family.

He looked out the window at the rain. Patches of frozen snow, hardened and dirt-covered, dotted the yards, the rain washing it away. Ted felt very tired suddenly, the fight seeming to go out of him.

“Does Franny know?” he asked, still looking out the window.

Claire had told Franny about a month ago, at a lunch they’d had in the city, Franny asking what had taken her so long, which precipitated an argument that ruined the meal.

“Yes.”

This wounded him, too. In another life, another universe, one where Ted was a good father and caring husband, this never happened. Or, if it does, his daughter calls him. In that world Ted and Franny are thick as thieves, best friends. Lunch once a week. Calls just to check in, for advice, to share a joke. Franny would have called. “Dad, we have to stop this affair. We have to keep the family together.” And Ted, magnanimous, would have planned a family getaway. The Sag Harbor house, maybe, before the season. Paris. The French Alps. A skiing holiday. Time together. Where have I gone wrong, Claire? Let’s never break up our little family or we will be lost.

Ted hadn’t realized that he had been staring at a spot on the floor, a knot in the wood of the wide-planked oak floors. He was also scratching his head with both hands. He had been doing this for some time now. He looked at his wife and saw it on her face; she was over him. And this stunned him. Here he’d thought—and he wasn’t sure why—but he’d thought that the talk that evening would be just another fight, one of thousands, followed by their respective retreats, where Ted would heat up an artisanal burrito from Whole Foods, drink three glasses of Sancerre, and watch half of a Jason Bourne movie while Claire would order sushi, call her sister, and draw a bath. He thought she would admit to the affair but say it was over and that she really wanted Ted back. Hell, why choose happiness when you can choose thirty more years of fighting and being ignored?

Ted wondered how he might report a story like this.

TED:Our correspondent, Phil Barnes, is live on the scene in the Grayson kitchen. Phil, any sense of why this Ted Grayson fellow was so delusional?

PHIL:It’s an enigma, Ted. Though he was a huge disappointment to both his wife and his daughter, withdrawing into his own world and caring little for others. Neighbors say he kept to himself. Colleagues had little to say about him except that he was a friendless, egotistical prick. His daughter, Franny, a journalist in her own right, said only that her father had, and here I quote, ruined her life. His wife, Claire, an extremely good-looking woman, has said that Grayson changed over the years. She also said he was a shockingly bad lover.

TED:A pathetic man. Thank you, Phil. Phil Barnes, reporting live.

Ted was thirsty. His throat hurt and he needed a glass of water.

“What else?” he managed.

“Do you really want to know, Ted? Or are you just being an asshole?”

The way we talk to each other, in a marriage, a ruined marriage. A way we would never talk to another human being.

“I want to know.”

“We talk,” Claire said, voice a bit quieter, less defiant.

Ted was looking at the sink and Claire saw him nodding slowly.

“What about?”

“That’s none of your business.”

She didn’t mean it to come out this way but it was reflexive, years of practice. She regretted the tone instantly, squeezing her eyes shut and clenching her jaw.

Breathe, Claire.

Ted went to the sink, turned on the tap, and put his mouth up to the end of the spigot. Then he stood and wiped his mouth on a dish towel. A ball of anger built in Claire’s stomach. A $500,000 kitchen renovation, open shelves, Simon Pearce glasses an arm’s reach away, and he has to drink like a pig at a trough?

“Everything,” Claire said. “We talk about everything.”

“Really?” Ted said, once again finding his thirteen-year-old-boy voice. “You talk about LeBron James and race relations in America and the concern over the renminbi?”

And again, Claire wasn’t having it. Her voice remained calm.

“We do, actually. He loves sports, cares deeply about social justice, and has clients in China.”

Water dripped down Ted’s chin. He felt it would be unmanly to wipe it, though he wasn’t sure why he felt this. Once, a long time ago, Claire would have reached over and dabbed it, rolling her eyes at what a boy he was, finding it charming. Now the water on his chin repulsed her.

“Is this really a surprise, Ted?” Claire asked.

It was, but Ted said nothing.

“We don’t talk. We don’t do anything. You don’t love me. And we stopped being husband and wife a long time ago.”

His body tightened. He knew she was talking about sex. He’d assumed it wasn’t important to her anymore. The notion of her as a sexual being, with someone else, thrilled by someone else, made him weak.

He was filled with embarrassment and rage. He was also surprised to find that he wanted to say Claire, please, I love you and I miss you but I’m lost inside and I don’t know how I got here and I desperately need your help. But that’s not what came out.

“Well,” Ted began, unsure of where to go after that. “I hope you two are happy talking.”

Claire stared at him. This petulance. How long had she put up with him? He drove her to these feelings, these awful, toxic feelings.

“We’re happy doing a lot of things,” she said.

Ted felt that he had long ago reached a point where he couldn’t be surprised. He had seen so much of life, so much pain and ugliness. But this shocked Ted to the point where he opened his mouth to say something but nothing came out.

How best to respond?

She’d be expecting a blowup. Show class, Ted. Show some grace. Let her go. Surely after all this time together he wished her happiness. It didn’t take.

He was staring at the pristine Carrara marble counter, the tulips in the glass vase, Claire’s phone next to them.

Ted nodded slowly and, with a nimble quickness that recalled his days as a high school quarterback, scooped up Claire’s cell phone and sidearmed it through the kitchen window, a sharp, urgent cracking sound from the Marvin window ($3,500 per window and there were twenty-seven in the house) breaking but not shattering, the phone exploding in two, like a space shuttle separating after liftoff, the disparate pieces coming to rest in a pile of dirty, mud-caked snow by the back door.

Claire looked from Ted to the window and then back to Ted, yet seemed not at all surprised. She stared at him for a time and then held up her phone.

“That was your phone, Ted.”

High above Ninth Avenue, just north of Fourteenth Street, across from Google’s New York offices, in the former mixing and baking rooms of the National Biscuit Company, sit the impossibly hip offices of scheisse.com. Once, decades ago, in this same space, underpaid men and women with heavy accents, from Russia and Ireland and Italy and Poland, takers of long subway rides from the outer boroughs, lugged sacks of flour and baked saltines and Uneeda Biscuits twenty-four hours a day, food to show for their labors. Now, within the exposed brick walls hundreds of nearly identical-looking people in their twenties and thirties, from fine universities, posted their own kind of sustenance to the masses, an endless feed of insipid online drivel, a kind of visual and verbal vomit, under the guise of journalism.