Amie Barrodale - You Are Having a Good Time

My wife is very particular about being clean. When I first met her parents, and she left the room, her father leaned in and said, “Let me warn you, my daughter is a bit obsessive about hygiene. I once caught her washing the sugar.”

“Really,” I said.

“That is not a joke.”

Later I asked my wife if she washed the sugar, and she said, “That’s ridiculous. How could I wash sugar.”

In bed, I thought about how a few nights before, my wife had gone to eat ice cream. She was on the other side of the apartment a long time. Her phone must have been hidden over there, on the other side of the apartment, so she could write in secret about the color of berries, and things like that, to other men — men from her office, the man who had come to repair the sink. I thought of the places where the phone might have been stowed, and the things they could get up to with just two smartphones. Then I thought of her in her office, and all the possibilities there, and I wondered about setting her phone to “find my phone” so that I could remotely follow her, but I could never do that. Then I planned what I would do the next morning after she left the apartment, how I would go into her email and search for things. But then, I realized, she would have a secret account. When my wife got into bed, she said, “I think I am pregnant.”

“I’m sleeping.”

“What?” She shook my arm. “Tom?”

“Just let me be weird awhile.”

She said again she was pregnant — she had missed two periods. My ex-wife is often telling me that my wife and I should not have a child. She says that her psychologist advised it. I lay there angry about that — how dare my ex-wife get involved in such a way. Really, it was outrageous. She was addicted to Adderall, an attorney who was literally paid in wasps’ nests.

“Don’t you have anything to say?” my wife said.

“Just ignore me,” I said. I was picturing my ex-wife in her psychologist’s office. It made me very angry.

“If you want to be ignored, then say, ‘I’m getting tired, I’m going to sleep.’ Don’t get up and storm out. I said I think I’m pregnant. What the hell is your problem? Snap out of it. Stop feeling so sorry for yourself. I’m pregnant. You need to talk to me.”

She realized how mad she was as she spoke. She started to curse, to list my character flaws. When she talks like that, I can’t quite hear it. My adrenaline must shoot up too high. So I can’t remember what she said. She cursed and threw my glasses. They didn’t break. My wife was funny that way. She threw things, but they would never break.

I got out of bed and went to the other side of the apartment. I could not bear to say that I was jealous, that I was all alone, that I spent my life engrossed in imaginary conspiracies and humiliations, that we were haunted.

The next afternoon, while my wife was away, the phone rang.

“It’s Gwen from the Stokes Institute returning your call.”

“The Stokes what?”

“You called me. You’re having some difficulties in your marriage.”

“Oh yes, that was just crazy.”

She laughed. She said she could do a remote reading at no charge.

“Do you have some kind of electronic device?”

“Just my tarot cards.”

“I don’t believe in tarot cards. Think about how that sounds to me. You can help me with my marriage over the phone with your cards? Think about it. I didn’t realize you were like this.”

“The cards help me. I have fixed ideas. The cards help me see it differently, with an open mind.”

“I don’t believe in nonsense.”

“It’s free.”

“Look, I don’t give a damn how you think about it. One day I looked at my hands and they were smeared with shit.”

“A common sign of psychological disturbance.”

“But the shit wasn’t mine.”

“The mind manifests that, honey. It can manifest anything. Flash openness, and I’m going to lay out the cards. Just be quiet.”

I said, “My wife is pregnant.”

“Yeah, this is just your reading. The little being, she’s … if she was human it was a long time ago. She’s not malevolent, but she’s very negative.”

I laughed, “So this is like a devil? My baby?”

“I didn’t do a reading for your wife or for your unborn child. I’m talking about this being that is obsessed with you. There is a ghost on you.”

I felt a cold fear. I also felt similar to how I had felt in school, the time I had lice. I knew she was right, and that I should ask her how to proceed. But another part of me overrode those feelings. The woman was a crazy con artist, or a flake.

Still, I said, “Hypothetically, if one spouse were cheating on the other, could your cards see it?”

“Your wife isn’t cheating.”

“Did you lay out the cards?”

For the short term, she advised me to bathe a lot. She said it was important to get a cleaning. She said she would do it for me. I said to go ahead, and she explained it had to be done in person, as soon as possible. “How much?” I asked. She quoted a price in four figures. She wasn’t available to come to our apartment. She said, “You can come to the center. You’ll have to stay a couple nights.”

* * *

A sign in front of Gwen’s house said THE STOKES INSTITUTE.

“It looks like it was the show house for the development,” my wife said. “I’m surprised they let her put that sign up.”

“If you’re going to be like this, we may as well turn around.”

“What? What did I say?”

“I’ve been very honest with you…”

Gwen came to the door in a purple sweatshirt and sweatpants bunched up to her knees. She was about sixty-five years old, with pin-straight blond hair that reached her shoulders, and perfectly cut bangs. She had a smooth brow and round, gentle eyes. She was very thin and walked with her hips tilted forward. I started to introduce myself and she cut me off. “I know.” She introduced herself to my wife and offered us tea. She took us on a tour, starting with the sewing room, and then each of the four bedrooms. She showed us the bathroom and pointed out the small tub. She went back to her enormous kitchen with skylights showing the fog and glass patio doors to more fog rolling outside. Then she said, “Let me show you my work space.” On the walls were photographs of Gwen in her twenties. She had been remarkably beautiful.

“That looks like a Helmut Newton,” my wife said.

“It is,” Gwen said. “I used to be somewhat attractive.”

“Somewhat,” I joked. She ignored me. I could tell that Gwen’s past changed my wife’s impression of her.

We went into a garden room that was made almost entirely of glass and had a shining wooden floor. There was a kind of shrine, like a series of stacking tables, each in a different kind of natural stone. They had crystals jutting from their sides so they looked like slices of rock from a rock-and-gem show. On each surface were golden bowls full of water, or flowers, or cake. One held a mirror and a painting of a lady.

“Each stone has its own power,” Gwen started to explain. “That first layer is pure amethyst. After that is agate—”

My wife said she needed to use the restroom. She asked me to come in with her. She closed the bathroom door, sat on the toilet. She rested her head in her hands. “We have to drive home through all this fog.”

“No, don’t worry. Gwen said we can stay a couple of nights — actually, we need to for the purification.”

She moaned. She said, “How did this happen? How did I wind up in this position?”

She got a Valium out of her purse.

“Can I have one?” I said.

She took it out of her mouth, split it, and gave me half. In moments like this I saw my wife correctly. She said, “What are we going to eat?”