An unemployment check came for a month and stopped. The cutoff was preceded by the arrival of a renewal form. It required documenting the efforts I’d been making to secure a new job. I would then have to take the form to some bureau and stand in line and get approved for the next three months of payment. I decided the whole thing was too tedious, especially since anything I wrote about making an effort would be a lie. I let the form sit on the coffee table. Things spilled on it and made it brown and curl.
Marie-Anne seethed at my dereliction of the chore. She took the form and put it on the fridge. Then it moved to the mirror in the bathroom. Then it got to the TV. When even that failed to inspire me, it ended up on the toilet, hanging in the hole, arms and feet outstretched, taped to the seat. A pen on a string hung off the flush.
“Hostage audience!” I cracked open the door and yelled, and set about filling out the form. Once it was finished, however, there was still the matter of getting out of the house and going downtown. It took a few more weeks for that to occur. Once Marie-Anne was assured that the money was coming in, she stopped chasing me around.
In this period the image that best defined our intimacy was a scrunched-up face. Ours was becoming a domesticity of the darkest doldrums. Marie-Anne was unwilling to give me the satisfaction of her surrender, while I, not the janissary type, was incapable of infiltrating her defenses. When she came home it was as if she was hanging herself by the collar in the back of a closet while I sat on the sofa like a column of iodine or some other inert gas. She slept there; I slept here. The change occurred without discussion, without remonstration by either party.
Since Marie-Anne kept the door to the bedroom closed, I wasn’t aware of what she did with her libido. Was it finger? Was it machine? Was it nothing? I couldn’t tell. There were times that I wanted to rush into the bedroom, find her sopping wet, and enter her. But this was only a far-fetched fantasy. Not only because I wasn’t capable of such aggression; but because Marie-Anne feared getting pregnant more than death and didn’t want to take any risks associated with intercourse. The last couple of pregnancy scares, her cortisol levels had shot through the roof.
Marie-Anne had not always been afraid of getting pregnant. Babies were how we had bonded. While we had been dating in Atlanta, until we graduated and met her parents, we always played games coming up with the names we would give our children, what they might look like, what their characteristics would be. We would have three. Two boys and a girl. The boys would be musicians. They would form a boy band out of Florida. One of them would then turn out to be gay and go off to Europe. The other, after a bout with alcoholism, would revive his career on Broadway. The girl would be an astrophysicist and marry a Latino musician who reminded her of her brothers. But eventually we had to stop playing these games. The turning point had been the dinner at the steakhouse in Buckhead when I met Dr. Quinn and Mrs. Quinn for the first time. After the initial pleasantries had been offered and the steaks had been consumed and the wineglasses were on their third refill, Marie-Anne had announced that she’d brought us all together to get blessings for our engagement. It hadn’t gone well. While her parents had done their best to feign politeness, the next few months revealed that they didn’t think Marie-Anne and I would make a good pairing. The stated reason hadn’t been, as we’d feared, anything related to race or nationality. Dr. and Mrs. Quinn were elites in the New South. They didn’t subscribe to the old prejudices regarding coloration and ancestry. They had signed numerous petitions trying to take down the Confederate flag at the state capital. They even had a dog named Malcolm. Their objections to me had been far more ephemeral and, in a way, far more personal.
We thought our only daughter would marry a quarterback from Clemson, Mrs. Quinn had put it in an e-mail I wasn’t supposed to read. Even a black construction worker that could handle you like a husband is supposed to. What is this pretty little boy going to do if you fall down the stairs? He’d probably start crying.
Marie-Anne had tried to reason with them, telling them that we didn’t live in the ancient societies where women were shrinking violets and men were their strong-armed defenders. The world belongs equally to women, she had assured. And I know how to make my way in it. The purpose of marriage today is companionship, emotional connection. He understands me in a way no quarterback or construction worker could. We connect in the mind.
Dr. Quinn, who had a political bent and enjoyed talking foreign policy with me, accepted his daughter’s choice. It became a regular thing between us to forward interesting political commentary to each other’s inbox. He had forsaken his ancestral Catholicism and gotten involved with a Unitarian Universalist congregation and was eager to find places in the world where the message of his church might best resonate. He didn’t really ask me for my input so much as he told me what his pastor had decided to do. I always suspected — and he made no effort to conceal — that he was far more dovish around me than he was otherwise. In this mutually indulged deception we formed an odd but comfortable connection.
Marie-Anne’s mother, however, aside from the perfunctory appearance at the wedding, hadn’t changed her mind toward me. Perhaps it was her own scientific background as a geneticist. Perhaps it was a traditionalist aesthetic dissonance about how men and women were supposed to look together. She had become more distant, more intractable. If Marie-Anne ever called her, rather than asking how I was doing, Mrs. Quinn instead tried to talk up some of Marie-Anne’s old boyfriends. She went so far as to make a social media page inviting Marie-Anne to a get-together at their Charleston home where all the other attendees were big and tall twenty-something men from South Carolina and Georgia. For four years Marie-Anne dealt with her mother with patient perseverance. She took me down to Charleston three times a year — Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Easter — hoping that her mother would be won over. Nothing changed.
At last Marie-Anne gave up. She allowed herself to be excommunicated from the religion of family. She told her father that she wouldn’t ever come back to Charleston. And she refused to break when her mother, in the guise of informing her about some tragedy in the extended family, wrote her long self-flagellating missives. It was an act of tremendous strength on Marie-Anne’s part to resist her family for my sake. No one else in this life had ever felt inclined to stand up for me like this.
That was why I couldn’t hate her for bringing pestilence upon us. The pull that our predecessors exerted upon us was a powerful thing. It was a force so strong that the only adequate release we had devised in response was to produce successors. But because of me, Marie-Anne had pincered the relationship with her predecessors into nothingness. Perhaps that was why she no longer wanted to look forward in time.
If things had stayed the way they were, we probably would’ve come around to getting a handle on the mess our family life had become. Maybe I would have been able to convince her that the solution to an imperfect family was not to kill the idea of family but to make another try, to keep pushing the aspiration of a perfect family life into the next generation. Something like that might have gotten us back to the baby talk. But instead the weight gain had struck. Marie-Anne’s body image took a nosedive, and sexing up her mind was the only kind of intimacy she would accept. Bottom line: there was no room for making children when the only communion was verbal and manual.