Copyright © 2007 by Gerald C. Matics
Wayne and Beth are a married couple hoping for a nice evening out — but can they stand the company?
I live with a woman whose hate for me is a solid mass, a noxious, palpable malignancy. Her looks at me are awash in vitriol, so caustic they eat me alive. And, in a lucid moment, I am forced to admit my feelings approach hers, in tone if not intensity. Beth and I share nothing at all, nothing save a last name. It isn't any way to live, yet somehow, at least for now, we do.
Fights are entertainment for her, are passionate sport, are meticulously wrought masterpieces. They have a pedigree all their own. For all their seeming spontaneity, they are carefully crafted, brick upon brick of malevolence. Time and again I run myself into the wall that results, and we are both ever the worse for wear.
Saturday typifies.
"Why did you take this road?" she asks. We are driving, heading for a restaurant we've been to scores of times in eleven years of marriage. We've both had long, hard workdays, but I'm behind the wheel of her Lexus because she's just . . . too . . . exhausted . . . to drive.
"No reason," I say, more airily than I feel, my mind already mapping out where this is going. "Don't worry, this'll get us there."
Brief pause. Storm clouds mass; generals assemble their forces.
"Yeah, but you usually turn back there," she says, pointing.
"It doesn't really matter, does it? This takes us to the same place."
"You just don't want to admit you made a mistake, Wade. It's cause you're not paying attention."
I am slow to defend. As usual, I fight a rear-guard action, stepping clumsily through a minefield of words, each an opportunity to escalate the conflict.
"I am paying attention, Beth," I say. "I missed the turn, okay, but I knew this road parallels that one, so we're fine."
She's silent for a few moments, and I glance sidelong at her. She stares straight ahead, her brow clouded, her mouth set in a hard line. There is no denying her attractiveness; in her mid-thirties, she still turns heads. She has remained slim, a lingering byproduct of her college lacrosse days. Tonight she's wearing tight faded jeans that keep to her curves like a train following its tracks, and a gray sweatshirt over a plain pink top. The sweatshirt is unzipped halfway, and the swell of one breast is framed by the sagging V of material. I find myself picturing her as another man might, stealing a passing glimpse on a sidewalk or subway or mall promenade, turning surreptitiously to stare at her from behind in lust-leavened appreciation, and I am momentarily aroused — until I find her face again, see the flinty aspect and remember her loathing for me.
We pass houses in varying stages of dilapidation, tiny hooligans gadding about in the street, mothers slumped against beat-up cars at curbside. A woman shouts at her child, something about staying out of the road when cars are flying by — ours, presumably, though my gauge tells me I'm doing twenty in a twenty-five.
"Amen," Beth says, and I bristle. Impugn my choice of routes, fine, but a line must be drawn.
"You think I'm speeding?" I say.
"You're always speeding, Wade. Especially in this car. You're always more aggressive when you drive my car."
"Am not." I've turned into my daughter; at six and a half, she has found frank denial to be a potent weapon. Becca possesses her mother's beauty; she is in truth a tiny effigy of Beth, with lovely, flowing blonde hair, cool blue eyes made for swimming in, royally high cheekbones and satiny smooth skin. Her persona, however, is all her own; where her mother has sharp corners, she has gradual curves. She is all go-with-the-flow — or was, until a recent stubborn season set in.
Becca was not so much an accident as an afterthought. She was born four years into an already rickety marriage, probably in an unconscious attempt to salvage it. For a time we put all our hopes of salvation on her, clinging to her like flotsam off a sinking ship. But such hopes are illusory, and are almost invariably crushed. Becca has always striven to please, and her intractability of late might well be her reaction to the pressure we put on her to be our buffer. Beth and I stay together now for her far more than for ourselves, but I worry in the night that she will nevertheless become a sad coda to our failure.
Becca isn't with us tonight but with my sister and her husband, who have been begging for weeks for an overnight. The absence of her, our buffer, our safety valve, sets us all the more on edge. It changes the calculus between Beth and me slightly; she's freer to thrust, I'm freer to parry.
"Slow down, goddamnit!" she shouts.
I rarely seek these arguments, but like a Watership Down rabbit caught tharn in headlights, I don't run from them either. No — it is a conscious choice. Probably I could avoid this clash, and a good many others, through silent submission, like a beta wolf rolling on its back and offering its throat to the alpha. Even now I may be only two choked-out words away from something like rapprochement. But I sense the price of such appeasement would be my very manhood, and it is not a price I'm willing to pay. . . .
