I moan as though mostly asleep, yet here I am in knots beside him (his flesh still chilled from the rainstorm that caught him between the subway and home), crippled by jealousy: if only I were as courageous as that young woman who kissed my husband on the subway.
The Wife Solution
What we needed, we realized, was a wife. You for sexual purposes, me for housekeeping purposes. So, because it was finally legal, we arranged a three-way marriage with this woman Anna. The palindrome seemed somehow appropriate.
Anna! What a wife she was.
On the wedding day she was all smiles, as though she couldn’t have been happier. There’s a picture of the three of us in front of City Hall, Anna and I holding our small bouquets of Gerber daisies, we newlyweds grinning at the dandyness of it all.
Anna, precious Anna. On the wedding night we stroked her. We wondered if our old double bed was too small, if we ought to get a queen, but Anna didn’t mind. She said she enjoyed being squeezed in between us. She said she enjoyed having my tits on one side and your cock on the other.
That was the thing about Anna, she could talk so dirty but still seem so sweet.
You couldn’t find a more generous wife than Anna. More than anything, she seemed so happy, as though spending the whole day cleaning the house and cooking dinner was some kind of divine meditation. There was this one line of organic cleaning products she totally loved, and even though the products were quite pricey we encouraged her to buy them, because we wanted Anna to have whatever she wanted, absolutely whatever she wanted; lavender was her favorite fragrance. She’d travel long distances on the subway to farmers’ markets to purchase strange, dazzling local vegetables; she’d roast these vegetables in bizarre but brilliant combinations of spices. By the time we returned home from work, the candles would be lit and the table laid with the yellow napkins she’d bought to give our tired gray placemats new life (in addition to everything else, Anna had excellent visual taste). Scooping steaming vegetables from the pan, she’d ask in her dear way about our days, our failures and frustrations, encouraging us to see the minor successes amid our general sense of professional inadequacy. When we tried to reciprocate, asking about her day, she gently evaded the question, simply replying that it had been a good day, like every day.
All of which is not to mention what happened at night, in bed, where Anna was just as tidy, precise, fragrant, and eager to please as she was the rest of the time. Her breath smelled like cinnamon and her body was reminiscent of a seal’s, sleek and shiny, with the perfect proportion of fat and muscle. Her face so symmetrical it would have made us feel bad about our own uneven faces if she hadn’t been running her fingers so tenderly down our cheeks. Yes, she could stroke both of us at once, and indeed was always on the verge of orgasm herself.
Oh Anna. Our Lady of the Grocery List, Our Lady of the Linen Closet, Our Lady of Sorting Through the Junk Mail, Be Sure to Plug in Your Cell Phone, Don’t Forget Your Umbrella, Here’s the Lunch I Packed for You, Where Do You Want to Be Licked?
Our drawers were always filled with clean laundry, even our underwear folded. We, the people who used to shove our socks into the sock drawer without matching them up! Every corner of our home contained exactly what one needed at the instant one needed it: scissors, tape, last year’s tax documentation. Whenever we misplaced something (The hat with the red pom-pom?), we simply had to ask Anna (Second box from the left at the top of the coat closet). Her mind was a library catalogue for our home. What a genius she was. How we adored her.
Yet it was hard to adore Anna. For instance, it was hard to think of a good gift for her. What did she love? She loved flowers, but she always bought them herself, at the farmers’ markets, clutches of zinnias she put in the blue jug my cousin had given us for our wedding, arrangements that elevated our moods the moment we stepped in the door, and, on second thought, who knows whether Anna really loves flowers herself or if she just knew how we loved them? Yes, she loved organic cleaning products, but that’s not something anyone can love love, plus it’s not gift material. It upset her to think of us wasting our paychecks on clothing for her, on a fancy dinner for her, when she was so happy anyway, yet when her birthday came around we did give her a shiny blue dress and took her out, but she just sat there looking radiant and uncomfortable, moving her elbows on and off the black linen tablecloth of the fine, edgy restaurant we’d selected. She didn’t drink and she didn’t smoke and she got nervous riding the subway late at night. As soon as we returned home, she pulled out a lavender-scented SurfaceWipe and started to polish the bathroom floor, still wearing her new dress, and when we peeked in on her crouching there she looked up at us and smiled for the first time that night.
“Anna, Anna,” we cried out, “Anna! Please, tell us, what can we do for you?”
But she just smiled in that quiet way of hers and squeezed out of the blue dress as she walked across the bedroom toward us, taking our breath away.
When we gave her a slender silver necklace, she thanked us profusely and wore it that evening but then we never saw it again. We could only speculate, during our brief time alone together each day, that she’d flushed it down the toilet or thrown it into a gutter. Of course far more likely was that it had somehow fallen off, that the clasp had broken and she, in her fathomless politeness, didn’t want to mention it to us. Yet we were suspicious.
We encouraged her to rest on the weekends, to take a nap or come to the park with us or go see the mermaid parade. But she would only nap if we were napping too, and if it was one of those naked late afternoon “naps.” We encouraged her to read books, we had lots of books plus we’d buy her any book she requested, we’d subscribe to any magazine, and we urged her to listen to music, to download the songs she liked, we could pay, we were happy to pay, and also she could be the boss of our Netflix queue. “Maybe a vegetarian cookbook would be nice,” she said softly (we were both vegetarians). She was too busy, she often said, to do anything except keep house, and though she obediently tended to the Netflix queue, she was attentive only to our viewing history and the recommendations generated on the basis of our past favorites.
“Anna … what’s your favorite movie, Anna?” we once asked her, desperately.
“Oh,” she said with that infinite smile, “I don’t have favorites.”
Anna didn’t make us feel guilty about the dishwasher we never had to unload or the toilet paper that never ran out. Yet that only increased our feeling of guilt. In the months before the divorce, we began to long for Anna to flare up, to scream at us that we were selfish and lazy and never lifted a finger, because it seemed inconceivable that we could receive all these blessings for free. We wanted to pay, pay, pay.
The Sniper Solution
There came a time in my life when I could not speak to another person without imagining that person’s skull getting shot by a bullet on the left-hand side of his/her head, as though there was a sniper in the upper corner of every room I was ever in, a sniper crouched atop each building I passed.
The person (my husband or whoever else) would just be talking to me, innocently, and there I’d be, watching the explosion of bone and blood and brain and hair spraying out across the room or the bus or the street, speckling the person’s clothing with red and other disturbing colors.