Where I Am You Can't Follow

(originally published in Potpourri)

My wife had a look in her eye that told me she was about to get into something I wasn't going to like.  Come to think of it, she'd had that look pretty much ever since we moved out of New York.  Well, maybe that's not the absolute truth--for the first couple of months I'd say she was happy.  Oh yes, I'd say definitely she was happy those first couple of months after we'd moved to Boston.  It was like we'd landed on top of a mountain.  She kept talking about the light.  "What light there is up here," she kept saying, "this New England light."  Strolling around our new neighborhood, we imagined the places we would take the baby when it came.  We had never wanted a baby before.  That kind of wanting, it's like an addiction.  Once you start, you can't stop. 

"Jesus, Janet, what are you up to?"

She was standing in the kitchen like a doe stunned by a pair of headlights.  It made me edgy.  I had the same feeling I get when I'm driving through a snowstorm and can't see a foot ahead.  I like to know which direction something is going to fly at me from, to know which way to turn the wheel.  I like things somewhat predictable.  Not dull, but just so you can count on something.

Janet finally noticed me, all dressed up in my dark blue suit.  "Well," she began sheepishly, "if you really must know, it's that I feel like Chinese tonight."

I slapped my head.  "Chinese!" I cried.  "Chinese?"  It was getting to be an obsession! 

*

When we moved to Cambridge it was autumn, and the colonial houses were roiling with color.  Leaves were falling as she went on about the light.  Janet spent her free time decorating our new apartment.  We had never owned anything before; it only had two and a half bedrooms but to us it felt enormous.  She had some fantasy about it, like a little girl with a dollhouse.  Everything had to be chintz and linen.  There was a sweet little room adjoining ours, more the size of a closet than a bedroom, and we argued about what color to paint it.  Janet was superstitious, she wanted to wait for the baby.  But I said come on, let's paint it already. 

"Besides," she said, "we don't know if it will be a girl or a boy."

"We could paint it yellow," I suggested.  "Pale yellow."  But Janet made a face like I'd told her to paint the walls with dog-do.

"Yellow, yellow?"

So we never painted that room and then Janet got pregnant.  For two weeks I never saw so much activity.  Out of nowhere a changing table appeared, its shelves lined with perfumed paper.  There were cloth diapers on it and a white plastic bottle of talcum powder.  Janet vacuumed the apartment to within an inch of its life.  I built shelves and assembled a mobile.  It circled lazily over a brown stuffed monkey in the crib, like a fan in Bourbon Street

*

The first snow came and it was beautiful.  I was looking out the window watching the flakes settle on the roof of our '87 Toyota Tercel when Janet marched in and looked at me like she'd just found out I'd cheated on her.  Then she locks herself in the bathroom.  I could hear her moaning, but she wouldn't let me in.  In the morning we go to the hospital, but it's over, a done deal.  She didn't speak a word to me that day.  So there was no baby then and a year later there was still no baby. 

Janet is no spring chicken, she's nearly forty.  Sometimes, she says, her face feels hot.  You're too young for hot flashes, I tell her, but she doesn't believe me.  She says she knows her own body.  She thinks it's all over on the baby front.

So now it was winter again and Janet hadn't moved the talcum powder and she wasn't vacuuming that room anymore.  In fact, we both sort of avoided that room altogether.  One day I said to her straight out, "Hey Janet, you're not alone here, you know." 

"Yes I am," she retorted.

"You're not."  I tried to put my arms around her but she shrugged me off. 

"Don't try to sympathize," she said, "it's not the same for you men."

"I'm not a man, I'm your husband."

Suddenly she caught my eye¾and laughed and laughed.  I laughed, too; I never minded being the butt of a good joke.  I never minded that Janet was smarter than me.  Than I.  Once, she had loved my easy nature.

My wife began to speak nostalgically about the decade we had spent in New York.  We were young then, with no thoughts for a family.  We weren't looking ahead.  It was all just a soft silk pillow up in front of us.  She began to speak about the things we used to do there, just the two of us. 

"Do you remember when the old Chinaman came to the door with the brown-stapled bag?  The grease soaked through and you would run to get the plates?  And we took it out onto the terrace and looked at the stars?"

"Sure I remember," I said mildly.

"And sometimes, sometimes," she was getting breathless, "we brought it upstairswhen it was very cold outand we climb the spiral stairs and spread out a garbage bag on the bed and put everything on it and watched The Honeymooners?"

"Yeah, that too."

"It was just about us, then, wasn't it.  It wasn't about anything else."

"All right, Janet," I said.  "That's enough.  Go to sleep now."

*

I used to think being a man was a good thing.  I felt strong, like I could take care of Janet.  I could love her.  She used to greet me at the door when I came home from work.  I looked fine.  I didn't have little love handles or thinning hairnot that I'm bald yetand I'd be all dressed up in a suit and a good pair of shoes from Brooks Brothers and a nice Italian silk tie.  I was a dresser.  She liked me like that.  Sometimes she seemed almost disappointed when I took my clothes off.   Men just look better dressed, she always told me. 

Did I say I was in marketing?  Did I say Janet was a teacher?  She teaches in a private high school out in Dedham.  Smart, like I said.  Sometimes I come so close to asking her if maybe there's a job there for me.  I think I'd like to work with kids.  Teach them photography, something like that.  I could take them on outings, cameras knocking against our hips, lenses glinting in the sun.  Maybe I could show them things they hadn't noticed before, like the way steel cables can look delicate as harp strings. 

I put most of my suits in mothballs; my good wing tips are drying out.  Janet says I should oil them once in a while.  I looked for another job at first but recently, I have to admit, my heart hasn't been in it.  I look into the future and can't see another job in marketing at all.  Just thinking about it gives me a headache.  I think ahead and all I see is a harsh silver glint, like sun on steel. 

Janet doesn't know I've stopped looking.  I go to the post office and pretend I'm mailing things out, but I'm mailing nothing.  I buy stamps so I can leave the receipts around, then I throw the stamps away.  I go to Walgreens and read the magazines, and buy a soda, have a chat with Cathy, the pharmacist.  Once I even asked Cathy if she would leave a message on my answering machine, pretending to be an interested employer.  She refused, of course.  But I have gone that far. 

*

I'm not a sleeper.  Little things can keep me up.  My mind starts going and I can just kiss sleep good-bye.  Sometimes in my mind I see a silver fog; the fog clears and I see the strangest thing:  I am sitting on the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge when suddenly it opens in the middle.  I assume there's water down there but I'm not sure.  I'm sliding down and very soon I'll know, I'll knowbut what if there's no water down there?  What if it's just a mirage, flat, cold, deceiving? 

We used to take walks across the Brooklyn Bridge.  From a distance, its thick cables looked delicate as harp strings.  They say the triangle is what bridges are made of.  Sometimes in my mind I think about triangles.  I imagine them:  an anthill.  A pyramid.  It's impossible to imagine toppling them.  Crushed, maybe. 

"Do you remember when we brought a blanket out onto the terrace and slept outside?" she asked me once.  "We had a bottle of champagne and thought we saw a shooting star?  It was your twenty-sixth birthday, I think."

"Yeah," I said, "and at two in the morning you said you were afraid someone would come and slit our throats while we slept.  You made us go in."

"I don't remember that," she said testily.  "I don't remember that at all." 

Everything comes flooding back to her, every detail.  She remembers the taste of things, the smells.  Sometimes, after we turn out the light, we just stare up at the triangle of light that comes in and lands on the ceiling.  I'm drowsy as a fly in beer and then she'll go and say something like, "I feel like part of my life has come to a close."  Then Janet would fall dead asleep but I'd be up for hours, listening to the wind hiss through the old storm windows. 

I don't deny things were good back in New York.  I also don't deny that out where we live it's hard to get good Chinese takeout.  And sometimes I too get a yen for Chinese, but one lives with the changes.  But to Janet Chinese was more than just Chinese, anyone could tell you that. 

"We've got so much here," I added more softly.  Don't you think we should use the food we have?"

"I suppose."

She reached dispiritedly for a few cans of tomato sauce and I caught a glimpse of her face.  She used to have this beautiful pale skin and it's still pale but it has gotten thinned out.  It's that translucent puppy-belly skin that ladies of a certain age start to get.  I suddenly felt sorry for her. 

"What are you looking at?"

"You're looking pretty," I lied. 

That got a smile from her. 

"Yeah, sure." 

She looked away.  I didn't know anymore how Janet felt about me.  Just me, eternally, with no legacy to carry forward and not much to look up to.  I think my wife has lost respect for me.  What I've got, it's no longer enough.  Well, you tell me¾how do I get more?

Janet used to be thin and pretty sexy.  In New York she ran around Central Park every day, and her thighs used to have these gorgeous curves.  Now she complains they rub together at the top.  I'm not complaining about her figure.  I'm not the sort of man who cares particularly about that.  But I notice these things, of course. 

My wife is right about the light here.  It's a special light.  We live next to a golf course and sometimes when the sun sets and the golfers go home I push through a piece of cut fence and walk on the green.  I just walk to the top of the hill and look out over Boston, not thinking anything, just looking at the light.  It feels like the end of the world, like I could just reach out and fall right over.  

I went in to undress from my "interview," and when I came back out Janet was staring at the kitchen counter as if she didn't know where she was.  As if this wasn't even her home.

"What are we having for dinner?" I asked her, but she just kept looking at the counter. 

"Hey," I called, "que pasa?"

That's when she reached for her wallet and whipped out her American Express card.  Then she went out of the room and returned with the Boston Yellow Pages cradled under one arm.

"What are you doing?" I said to her.  "Now is not the time for a phone call.  I'm hungry.  It's dinner time."

"Shhh," she said, cradling the receiver under her chin.  "Be quiet."

I stood up, shocked at her tone, then sat back down.  On the other end of the line I could tell someone had picked up.

"Don't order takeout," I said.  "I'm sick of pizza.  It's getting expensive."

"You go ahead and eat what you want," she told me.  "I'm taking out.  Hello?  Yes, I'd like one order of sesame noodles, one wanton soup, one Chicken with garlic sauce, and an order of spring rolls.  No, that's all."

"Janet, what are you doing?"

Then she gave me this strange look and turned her back on me.

"I have a right," she said.  "I have my own money."

"Well," I said bitterly, " you've gone and done something spontaneousdoes it feel good?"

"Yes, actually," she smiled.

"Like hell.  Like hell it does."  I was beside myself.  "How much is it going to be, all the way from Boston?"

"Forty two dollars," said my wife without looking at me.  "And thirty nine cents."

"Forty dollars!" I shouted, incredulous.  "That's a lot of money to blow on a self-indulgent little whim." 

"That's my business."

"How come my money was always your business, but now your money is not my business?  How come it only works one way?  Is that some sort of feminism?"

But my wife didn't answer me.  She went into the bedroom to change her clothes.  I stayed in the kitchen, stunned.  Janet didn't look like she was about to come back and I was hungry so I scraped together some spaghetti for myself and ate alone, extra noisily, at the table.  When she reappeared I said, "I bet it'll be cold when it gets here."

But she just ignored me.  It was like everything we once had had fallen into a vast, frozen river.  Not just furniture and objects but everything between us, tooeven our memorieswas sticking out rigidly from its glassy surface. 

A heartless winter sun declined over the golf course, its light glinting against the glass doors and turning Janet into a shadow.  I did the dishes, like I always do.  Soon, it was nearly ten o'clock.  No sign of anyone.  I began to wonder why I'd gotten all worked up.  This guy wasn't about to show.  I went into the bedroom and turned on the TV.  Janet was sitting out on the terrace, in the dark.  Smoke came out of her mouth, cold smoke.  But it was like she didn't feel it at all.  And then, all of a sudden, the sound of the doorbell made her jump. 

"Go ahead," I said nastily, "go ahead and get your forty-dollar plate of noodles."

She bolted down the stairs.  I crept after her and peered around the bend: standing at the door was an elderly Asian man, his slick black hairline soaked with perspiration.  He looked up at my wife with tired, jaundiced eyes.  Then he saw me, crouched behind my wife. 

"That should cover it," said Janet, handing him a tip.  She thanked him but he didn't go away.  He just stood there in the harsh porch light, small and withered, like a bad omen.

"May I get a drink of water?" he asked suddenly, startling me with his gift of speech.

"Oh gosh," Janet apologized.  "Of course. Do you mind waiting herethe house is a mess." 

The man nodded; my wife brushed past me as if I were a ghost.  I retreated a few steps, taking glances at the old man.  And thenI don't know what came over mejust before Janet returned I slipped him a ten dollar bill.  He took the money and put it in his breast pocket.  It didn't seem to make him any happier.  It was like one more penny down a wishing well.

"You think," I hissed the moment she had shut the door on the old man, "you think this is going to bring anything back?"

But Janet just ignored me.  She carried the brown bagroughly the size of Perseus's headtoward the terrace and the bright stars.  It's the one thing I can't take, when she ignores me.  It makes me crazy.  I dogged her into the living room. 

"What's it, like sex?  Like some kind of sexual gratification?"

But still Janet said nothing.

I went on.  "You think being fat is the same?  Who're you trying to fool?" 

That finally got her.  She turned and I moved toward her, expecting to see eyes filled with hurt, expecting to embrace her and make everything all right.  It's all right to be sad, I would then tell her.  It's all right to feel something. 

But Janet's eyes were not filled with anything of the kind.  They were hard, black discs, like miniature eight-balls.  Only I didn't think there was any message written behind them. 

"Just shut up, okay?" she said.  "Will you please just go away and shut up?  You can't ruin this for me."  Out she went, placing the brown bag on the table.  In a minute she came back in to get chopsticks, some napkins, a soup spoon.  Then she shut the sliding glass doors behind her.

I pressed my face to the glass; I tried to watch, but my breath made fog.  It was very dark out there and hard to see.  She'd gotten it all spread out on the table.  Noodles, spring rolls, steaming soup, two wonton cookies in their cellophane.  And thennothing.  She wasn't eating it.  Why wasn't she eating it?  She was sitting there looking kind of past it all.  She was staring at the trees on the golf course.  Her hand, poised in mid-air with the chopsticks, looked like a praying mantis.  

And then, just as I was about to turn away, she lifted a few noodles onto her chopsticks and bared her lips and her little white teeth gleamed in the moonlight.  She tilted her head up and slipped those noodles right into her mouth.  Then she picked up another two, opened her mouth wide with her head far, far back, and slipped those in.  And soon she was scarfing down the whole thing at once, chewing so hard I could see her jaw working.  Chew, chew, chew.  Chew, chew, chew.  She took a slurp of soup straight from the cardboard container, then went back for more noodles.  It was endless.

When she had eaten all she could she put down her chopsticks by the side of her plate and daintily dabbed her napkin against her lips.  Then she packed the empty cartons neatly and folded them back into the brown paper bag. 

She was about to get up when she remembered the wonton cookies.  She sat back down and carefully opened the cellophane and cracked open the wonton.  I had opened the door an inch, silently.  She read the little curl of paper, smiled to herself, and then threw the paper over the railing.

"What did it say?" I asked, popping out from hiding.  Janet turned and looked at me with dark sated eyes, as if I were a stranger.

"What?" her tongue was thick, nearly drunken.

"I want my cookie."

"Your cookie?" her speech was slurred, uncomprehending.

"Yes, mine.  Two for two people.  They always pack two."

"Oh, what a baby," she sighed.  "Here, catch."  She threw me the other wonton and brushed past me with the brown paper bag.  Opening mine, I couldn't help but ask her:

"So, how was it?"

"It was delicious," she said.

But I had already opened my wanton and uncurled the paper and for a minute I couldn't believe my eyes.  I checked to see if there wasn't another slip of papersometimes they get caughtbut there wasn't.  It was blank!

"Janet!" I called to my wife, "can you believe it?  A blank one.  Have you ever heard of such a thing?"

I wanted to tell her about the Brooklyn Bridge opening up and about my trips to the post office and Cathy.  But if my wife heard me she wasn't letting on.  She had gone off to the bedroom and I heard the familiar click of the remote control and soon I could hear a talking head reporting on the day's news.  I didn't go in right away.  I was waiting for her to call me to bed.  She always callscan't sleep without me.  But this time she never did.  I waited a long time and when I finally went in I could see she was dead out, with the TV. still flickering a malevolent green light.

I went back out to the living room.  The fire in the fireplace had long been extinguished.  I knew there'd be no sleep for me.  I paced around, restless as a cat.  I went out on to the terrace.  The moon was just a cruel gray sliver; it wasn't about to warm me.  I thought I could still smell her sesame noodles, faint whiffs of ginger and chicken broth.  A few grains of rice had fallen to the floor; I bent to pick them up, and stood up dizzy.  It felt as if I were sliding down, down into a cold darkness.  In the distance I thought I could hear the howl of a dog on the golf course.  It was a lonely sound.

The cold clung to me like an unwelcome intruder as I stepped inside.  I shut the doors behind me, then went and peered into the nursery.  In the crib, the stuffed monkey was lying on its back, arms akimbo, eyes staring lifelessly up at the ceiling.  I went back out and sat down on the sofa.  I read old magazines and the front section from last Sunday's paper.  Damn her, I said under my breath.  Damn her and her cold sesame noodles.

And then, abruptly, I stood up and went into the kitchen.  I wasn't thinking of anything.  My head was spinning.  I stepped down on the pedal of the garbage can and I stuck my hands down deep into it.  Kneeling down like a starving dog, I opened the empty cartons and stuck my tongue in, groping for the last tiny bits of sauce at the bottom.  And with my long tongue stuck out all the way, I licked and licked until everything was all clean.