C Hribal - The Company Car

I managed to put the car in park at the curb. Dorie opened her door. “You coming?”

“In a while. I just want to sit here a spell.”

“Em, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. Are you okay?”

“Well,” I managed to say, “at least now I know.”

“I feel awful, Em. I didn’t mean to make you feel devastated. I thought you knew.”

“I’ll be in in a little while,” I said.

Sometime later a police officer tapped on my window. I rolled it down. “Hey, buddy. I’ve cruised this neighborhood three times the last two hours and you’ve been here the whole time. What’s your problem?”

“My wife’s not in love with me anymore.”

“She in love with somebody else?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“She messing with somebody else?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Then what you have, my friend, is not a problem. It’s a marriage. Look, if you’re trying to kill yourself, you’re doing it wrong. You gotta be in an enclosed space for that to work.” I just looked at him. He shook his head. “I’m kidding, okay? You kill yourself and I’ll have to arrest you. And the paperwork for that is a pain in the ass.”

He gestured with his chin over the roof of our car. “That your house?”

I nodded.

“Get in it. Chances are your wife is in bed waiting for you.”

She was, but I slept in the guest room that night, and things between us have gone downhill from there.

There are many family tales I could tell, tales of wonder and woe, the everyday tragedies that made us who we are, each in his or her own life—the beaten martyr, the social worker, the bookstore owner, the Indian cook, the pissed-off cripple, the drunk accountant, the tentative human resource manager. I’ve given only a fraction of them here. And I know I have done a disservice to my siblings by not telling their stories here, or by not allowing them to tell their own stories, or at least their versions of the stories I have told. No doubt their versions would be different from mine. That is perhaps a task or an enjoyment for another time—after all, there will be funerals to attend to soon enough, and we will be gathering again, in grief rather than in celebration, and in those drunken nights of attempted reconciliation and consolation there will be time enough for those stories.

Who knows, by then we may all be married to different people. But once again I am speaking for myself.

Besides, this is our parents’ story, not ours, though no doubt the reason I’ve told it is ultimately selfish. I have tried to save my own life with the truest story I could tell, even if I had to imagine or make up most of it. So be it. There is so little we can ever know of someone else’s life. Even if they are your parents. Even if she is your wife.

For now there’s merely the collective us and the collective them, and the mystery for us is this: how did they manage for so long to remain a couple? And can Dorie and I manage it, too?

Dorie’s beautiful blond head peeks around the side window. “You want company?”

“It’s a free country.”

“Not the welcome I was expecting.”

I scoot over for her. “This is like old times,” she says, “climbing roofs, sitting on a tailgate. In high school I used to climb the water tower for rendezvous up there. Or somebody always had a van or a pickup and we’d find some deserted road. Not too hard back then.”

“That wouldn’t have been with me.”

“You never asked.”

“You wouldn’t have even if I had asked.”

She fishes a beer for herself and one for me from the cooler, which I’d brought down from the roof with me. “Coulda, shoulda, woulda, Ace. Why didn’t you ask me now?”

“I thought you were sleeping.”

“You didn’t check, though, did you? How long have you been out here?”

“Coupla hours.”

She feels my hands. “Brr, they’re like ice. See if I let you touch me with those things.”

“I’m sure you could find somebody else. If you haven’t already.”

“What is with you, Ace? Do you want to talk or just throw accusations around? Because I don’t need this.”

“You don’t seem to need much of anything.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re never around. It means that even when you are around, you’re someplace else. I don’t know about you, but when your partner’s distracted and disengaged while you’re making love to her, it sort of makes you wonder where her interest and engagement are.”

Dorie laughs. “Isn’t distracted sex better than no sex?”

“I don’t know, is it?”

Dorie sighs. “You’re right, Em. I have been focusing on other things.”

“Look,” I say. “I know all these trips and the workouts and whatnot have to do with your being happy and at home inside your body, especially after the kids, but I’m wondering if someone else isn’t being at home and happy inside your body as well.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“All I know is you’ve been putting a lot of distance between us. I just figured there was someone else. Isn’t that what it usually means—a moving away is a moving towards?”

“I was moving towards myself, Em.” Dorie inhales and sighs. “You know what your problem is, Ace? You have a hard time imagining me wanting to do things completely on my own. Okay, I got involved in myself. I’m sorry if I got distracted and overcompensated—”

“Overcompensated? Overcompensated? Oh, that’s rich. That’s lovely—”

“But that does not mean I’m screwing somebody else! What is with you?” Dorie exhales hard. “Christ, I wish I still smoked. How did we get on this subject anyway? I just came out here to make nice. Look, honey, will it make you feel any better if I tell you I’m not seeing anyone? If that’s what you’re worried about, don’t be.”

She says this so calmly, so reasonably that I want to be calm and reasonable myself. But I can’t do it. I open up my mouth to speak, and it comes pouring out of me—the rage, the fear, the jealousy, the despair. “Not seeing anyone? Not seeing anyone! You kick me in the balls, and then you think you’ll make me feel better by telling me you’re not seeing anyone?”

“When did I kick you in the balls?”

“ ‘I’m not in love with you anymore, Em. I love you, but I’m not in love with you.’ What’s that? A postcard from the house of happiness?”

“So that’s what’s making you so angry? Look, I said I was sorry I ever said that. I’m sorry I burst your bubble. If I’d known you were going to feel destroyed by that, I never would have said anything. Lots of people in marriages aren’t in love with their partners anymore. That doesn’t mean they don’t have good marriages.”

“Is that why you told me you weren’t in love with me? To demonstrate the strength of our marriage?”

“Look, Ace, do you want to call it quits? Is that what you want?”

“Not so loud. You’ll wake up our parents.”

“Like they haven’t been in conversations just like this.”

“That doesn’t mean they have to hear ours.”

“Fine. You have the keys? Put this thing in drive and let’s go.”

We do. The Nomad has a floor shift, and it’s rather delightful working a clutch again. In a few minutes we’re shooting over hills, driving out to where the land flattens by the river north of St. Genevieve’s. It’s marshy here, a mix of scrub trees and waterlogged fields. Half-mile gaps between houses—it’ll be a while before they get around to putting in subdivisions here. Finally, on a long stretch of empty road, I pull over. There’s a house tucked into a clump of woods on the other side of the river and an abandoned bridge that no longer connects this road to the access road on the other side. We haven’t said anything for a while. The sky is absolutely clear above us. I drop my hands to my lap. “What’s happening to us, Dorie? What in God’s name is happening?”