Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

The next morning, water boiled.Hormone-free, ranch-raised chicken embryos scrambled over a medium flame.

Lorraine greeted him with a mouth slightly open, eyes calm and small.

She started to say…

He interrupted and faded….

There was regret. Embarrassment. Silences and false starts. Each party tried to put his/her best face on the event, advocated certain truths of whose veracity he/she was unsure. A sacrifice on their part developed as the company line; each telling him/herself that it made the other's life easier, logistically, if Lincoln slept alone in the other room. It was temporary. Just during the rush at work. When he came home so late. Successive nights. Then successive weeks. Temperatures climbed into the nineties, and then triple digits. The turn into that spare bedroom became progressively easier for Lincoln. Without so much as an attempt to address whether either of them actually wanted to be sleeping apart, the distance and regret between them multiplied. And Lincoln understood that Lorraine's remoteness was caused by some sort of insecurity, some type of deep inner unhappiness; he felt it was his job to get through that remoteness, heal that pain. Even when Lorraine started losing her shit, unloading on him for piddling garbage — running out of coffee filters and the like — even then Lincoln weathered her storms, adjusted to her whims. He flowered her with calm, showered her with exotic baked goods; with reservations at restaurants whose kitchens had been re-vamped by celebrity chefs; with a diamond tennis bracelet; with matching earrings. Lincoln busted his ass to please Lorraine and his efforts suffered as all things do under the law of diminishing returns: polite smiles, the platonic squeezing of hands, Lorraine retreating deeper into silence, erecting more barriers, becoming more distant, more withdrawn, gradually turning rigid as calculus. It wasn't funny anymore, it wasn't a game; almost as if she were making a statement, as if it were important for Lorraine to convey that her will to not be pleased was superior to Lincoln's will to make her happy. Incrementally and in stages and all at once, the possibility hit Lincoln that his wife had hardened her heart, that inside Lorraine was a kernel of unhappiness too profound, too ingrained for him to be able to affect. Generally, Lincoln possessed an athlete's confidence, but he started questioning how he acted around his wife, second-guessing his decisions. He felt himself becoming overly sensitive to her slightest act, hypercritical to the most basic of exchanges. Like how she never thanked him for anything, but rather appreciated him doing it. Or when she said, You know what? Actually, your advice worked out real well. Well, maybe he was being a little extreme with that one. Maybe he was hearing different things from what Lorraine was saying in some individual cases. But he sure as shit wasn't imagining how she always sat at a distance from him, went cold at his simplest attempts at physical articulation. Wasn't being overly sensitive to all those excuses she made— “We'll wake the boy,” “I have to be up early,” “I just did my nails.” And then, on two occasions when the stars actually had been aligned and the moon was in its proper orbit and, at the suggestion of sex, lo and behold, Lorraine did not freeze up like a cheap computer, even then, forget about it ending up in her mouth, about the only time she'd moved was to yawn, or wipe her eyes.

And so finally, one morning — like a week or so ago — they'd been in the kitchen and the kid had been getting ready to go to wherever the hell she was shuttling him off to that day, and Lincoln was putting the finishing bites to one of them burnt pieces of toast, and when he rose from their dinner table, he happened to check out Lorraine's backside. She was wearing these ballooney palazzo pants, they were unflattering and made with chintzy fabric. And all of a sudden Lincoln had the tactile sensation of not wanting to be there. He literally regretted every major personal decision he had ever made.

It was a passing emotion, one he was ashamed of, acted against, in opposition to. No matter how goddamn miserable Lorraine's unhappiness made him or what an awful burden her unhappiness was, no matter how many times he lashed out and shoved his foot in his mouth (asking her to please, please, please stop being such a cunt), the simple heart of things was that his wife remained the sun around which his universe orbited. The first person he thought of when he heard good news or juicy gossip. The wall he bounced ideas off and the ear upon which his worries fell; literally, the bottom to his line. She had introduced the son of a ranch hand to sushi, helped transform a minor league ballplayer into a corporate executive. Lorraine had shown him there were fine things in life, made him understand he was entitled to enjoy them — to say nothing of the importance of looking as if he were entitled to finer things. Lincoln's opinion on the war varied day to day, hour to hour, depending less on news from the front than on whether he wanted to piss her off or not; his relationship to immediate history was based on each particular event's relationship to their marriage. Even when black rage took him, when he thought of chucking it all — taking their meager savings and boarding a plane and starting over somewhere — what Lincoln imagined was not his new life on some faraway shore, but Lorraine's reaction; more specifically, he imagined the reaction he would have liked to see: her torn up, heartbroken, loving him with the same intensity as he did her.

Thirteen years ago, when she had insisted on keeping her last name, he had not been able to complain. And thirteen years later, the simple sight of Lorraine wandering through the bedroom naked with that little Tampax string dangling from between her legs, this never failed to send an unspeakable, almost giddy affection through him.

He leaned forward now, his arms coming to rest on his thighs, which were partially covered by the rumpled sheets. His head hung a bit and he looked out horizontally, at some unknowable point beyond the confines of the darkening bedroom. Lincoln rubbed his forehead with his palms, as if trying to will a thought into being. When he finally spoke, it was soberly, with a sad gravity, one that was not directed at Lorraine, nor at himself, but at the concept of what was true, as if he were trying to do justice to the notion of truth itself. Marriages have peaks, he said. They also have valleys. Sometimes you… sometimes we get caught in a valley. He took Lorraine's hand and his fingers, still callused after all these years away from the batting cages, entwined with hers, so delicate, manicured, perfect. He said if something was wrong with the kid, they'd deal with it. They would do whatever had to be done. Lincoln said he was tired of the spare bedroom. He'd spent six hours with clients today. Six hours on a Saturday. We get out without the kid, what, once a month, if that? Lincoln wasn't saying sex, not so much. Maybe sex in the way that the warmth of a body is sexual, the way that being here with you is nice. Was this so bad? A nice night with his wife? “We could go to Commander's Palace. Or the new place over at the Venetian. We'll pay too much for a tepid Beaujolais. Does this really sound so bad?” And now Lincoln Ewing faced his wife, intent on saying the right thing for once, this one time getting it right; fighting for what mattered most.