C Hribal - The Company Car

“I don’t know, Em. Some things you can’t explain.”

She puts her hand over mine, but I don’t grasp it. “I thought we had a good marriage. I mean, if anybody had a decent marriage, it was us, right? So how could this happen?” I’m someplace between crying and laughing. “Why did you say you weren’t in love with me?”

“Because I wasn’t, Em. It comes and goes. Haven’t there been times when you weren’t in love with me?”

Like right now? I want to say, but I remember Nomi’s words: Some things are best left private. So I say instead, “But I would never say so, and you know why? Because it would hurt you. So why did you tell me? Because you wanted to be honest? Please. It’s why I keeping thinking you had an affair. I want a reason for all this unhappiness, something I can point to and go ’j’accuse!’ or however the French do their finger-pointing. But it’s more elusive than that. You probably don’t even know yourself why you said it, but you did, you can’t unsay it, and I go around with this kicked-in-the-balls feeling of incredulity: how has this happened to us?”

Dorie looks at the sky and sighs again. “Christ, you’re even more sentimental than your father.” She lifts her beer from between her legs and sips. “Okay, truth. In the past year, year and a half, I have spent time rethinking the marriage. I have thought of getting out. No doubt that was why I said what I said. I wanted to hear what it sounded like. But haven’t you noticed, Em, that lately I’ve been trying to make nice? I don’t want to call it quits. I’ve got too much invested in this marriage. Besides, you’re a nice guy and the world is full of creeps. You’re not a creep. Who else would make love to a pregnant woman when her breasts were big and sore and she felt like a balloon?”

“I don’t know if I want to be known simply as the noncreep in your life.”

“Well, there isn’t anybody else I’m auditioning for the part. C’mon.” She squeezes my hand, gets out of the Nomad. Once I’m out, too, she hugs me from behind, kisses me behind my ear. This is the closest we’ve been in years to a “moment.” “Look, Em, you’re my husband. That isn’t going to change, okay?”

“You’re still not in love with me, are you?”

She squeezes my belly, a marital Heimlich maneuver. “Give it time, Em. I’m trying. And it’s not easy. You’ve been distant, too.” Another squeeze. “You know what I think we need, Ace? Enthusiastic marriage repair.” She snuggles up to me. “It’s too bad I was pregnant with Henry when you first brought me home to tell your folks we were getting married. Remember that? We were so desperate to find a place to make out, we were like a couple of teenagers—”

“We’re not teenagers now.”

“We weren’t then, either.”

I know what she wants to do here—buy my silence with her body—but we haven’t talked out things that have gone too long not being talked about at all. She is trying, and I’m being a petulant bastard, but I can’t stop myself. The event to which she’s referring—Dorie and I parked in front of Wally Jr.’s shed, which we thought was out of the way, and we were half-naked in the backseat when he came home from working a swing shift. He wanted to put his truck away. So he slid into the front seat of our car, announced, as we were scrambling to cover ourselves, “I didn’t see nuthin’,” moved our car ten feet, parked his truck where he wanted it, and went into his house. Never said a word about it again to either of us. And we were horny enough not to let that stop us from finishing.

Dorie shakes her head. “Christ, whatever happened to Wally Jr.?” She shakes her head again. “Your family,” she says. “It’s even more fucked up than mine was.”

“That’s a definition of family, isn’t it? I mean, look at us—two brothers in AA, one who ought to be, the whole lot of us with dispositions in that direction, we’ve got four divorces among us, not including you and me if it comes to that—”

“It’s not going to come to that, Em—”

“Things break down, Dorie. They do. You don’t mean for them to, but they do. You start off in one place and you think you’re heading towards Y and you end up in X. And you have no idea how you got there, how you ended up in this other place.” I think about how Cinderella’s marriage ended, after we caught Okie cheating on her, and it was clear, too, he was beating her up. Each of us took one of her kids; Dorie and I got Okie II, her oldest. Skinny kid, haunted eyes, always crying about something. We thought we were saving him. We thought we were saving everybody. Cinderella had broken from Okie, and it was just a matter of time before her kids were returned to her. Then Okie Jr. started stealing from us, and we said, Well, he’s going through the lurchings of adolescence. He was a sensitive kid, Okie Sr. had really whaled on him, he was bound to act out. The other kids were going through their own lurchings as well. Only this permanent smirk seemed to take up residence in Okie Jr.’s mouth and nothing we said seemed to get through to him and we ended up shipping him off to Mom and Dad. And he stole from them, too, and as soon as he could leave he left and hasn’t been back. The last I heard he was in California laying carpet alongside former dot-com moguls. Supposedly he’s got a wife and two kids now himself. And our mom, the original “you will always have a home to come home to” lady, has two—two!—great-grandkids she’s never seen, never met, never held. And she isn’t likely to, because Okie Jr. is so damn much like his father it’s not funny.

I sigh, my chest filled with disappointment. “Remember what happened with Okie Jr., Dorie? And you remember what happened when Cinderella’s Amy got pregnant and wasn’t intending to marry the father? Mom said, ‘She didn’t do anything anyone else in this family didn’t do, she just got caught at it.’ ”

“And this has what to do with us, Em? What are you saying?”

I’m somewhere else now. I’m not even trying to answer her. “I mean, think about it. Our parents together fifty years, yet more than half their kids manage to marry so badly they get divorced. And you and I—after what, a decade and a half?—we’re on the outs, too—”

“You could be in if you wanted to be, Ace.”

“—Or how about this: our parents move us out of the burbs because they aren’t safe, and you and I plunk our kids down in the middle of a city, in what’s politely known as a ‘transitional’ neighborhood. You think about it, in our family we’re either reversing trends or taking them to their logical extremes.”

“Em, are you okay?”

“You know what the problem is? All those stories that try to end themselves with a wedding. They kiss, fade out, and that’s that. They want us to believe that time itself stops right then: And they lived happily ever after. As though there was nothing more to be written, as though nothing else could happen.”

“So stuff happens, Em. What’s your point?”

I want to say something to her about how people experience a marriage at different rates, and the secret is not getting caught up in any one moment and thinking that moment is the whole. How that probably explains why my first marriage didn’t last: we couldn’t imagine the unhappy times ever ending. We were twenty, twenty-two. Time spread out before us like a galaxy. Spend all of it with one person? What on earth were we thinking? And yet that’s exactly what I want to do with Dorie. I want to tell her how it’s tearing me up inside that maybe she doesn’t. That maybe she’s bored with me, tired of the whole thing, and she’s having tryouts on the road to stave off the ennui of being with me. I try telling her that, but I end up babbling, “I can’t help it. I still feel like I’m losing you.” And there it is, the nub, the very heart of it.