was wrong, why was he toying with me? And if something wasn’t wrong, the question was the same—why was he toying with me?
“Don’t do this,” I said. We looked at each other for several seconds, and I did not smile a coddling smile, I did not smile at all. I was willing to coddle Charlie when he thought everyone else was plotting against him, but I wouldn’t do so when he acted as if I were plotting, too.
At last, in a surprisingly casual voice, he said, “The company’s royally fucked.” He turned and walked past the living room and into the back den, and I followed him. (Really, I was not so stern at all—I
follow, I
coddle, in exchange for the smallest amount of respect and sometimes in exchange for less than respect, for mere neutrality. Had anyone been watching, I probably would have seemed like a doormat, but I believed in picking my battles, and there was rarely anything I wanted more than I didn’t want to keep fighting.)
The TV was on, set to the game he apparently hadn’t gone to, and on the table in front of the TV were an open bag of Fritos, a half-empty bottle of whiskey, and an old-fashioned glass with an inch of amber liquid in it. Charlie took a seat in the center of the couch, in a spread-out posture that did not invite joining him. I sat in one of the two heavy armchairs on either side of the couch.
Gesturing at the Fritos, I said, “Did you see there’s chicken marsala?”
“I had a steak.”
He grabbed a throw pillow from beside him, a pillow covered in dark brown corduroy, and clutched it in a way that was so childish it might have been funny or sweet were he not seething. He was looking at the television screen as he said, “Eleven people in Indianapolis puked their guts out after a high school sports banquet Monday night, and what do you suppose was the banquet’s entree? If you guessed chili made with Blackwell ground beef, then ding, ding, ding, you win first prize! Now the USDA has gotten involved, John has decided to do a recall—we’re talking, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of pounds of chuck, maybe millions, in at least five states—and you want to know the best part? I bet you dollars to doughnuts it’s not our fault. For all we know, the dipshits in Indiana bought expired meat, but hey, if the big corporation up in Milwaukee can take the fall for it, why not?”
“Charlie, I’m sorry.”
He lifted his head. “You and me both. I spent an hour talking to some jackass from the
tonight when I don’t give a shit about any of this. I’ll grill meat, I’ll eat meat, end of story. I’m sick of pretending I care about the integrity of sausage—I didn’t go to business school to oversee quality control.”
“How are Arthur and John doing?”
“Arthur and John can go fuck themselves.”
As he spoke, a player for the Brewers struck out, ending the inning, and Charlie hurled the pillow he’d been holding at the TV. Then he leaned forward, setting his head in his hands, and I stood and went to sit by him. I placed my palm on his back, rubbing it over his white oxford shirt, saying nothing.
With his head still in his hands, he said, “I’m tired of this bullshit.”
“I know.” I kept rubbing his back. “I know you are.”
“I’m this close to quitting. I’ve had my fill.”
“It’s fine if you quit,” I said, “although I’m sure you’ll want to do it as diplomatically as possible.” Relatively early in our marriage, I’d had the strange realization that Charlie’s income didn’t affect our standard of living. It turned out that at the age of twenty-five, Charlie had inherited a trust of seven hundred thousand dollars, and though he’d spent twenty-seven thousand dollars of his own money on his congressional campaign in ’78 and a hundred and sixty-three thousand when we bought our house, he’d hardly touched it besides that, and he earned a good salary. With the exception of the precipitous stock-market drop in October 1987, our investments had done well, and there was now in various accounts over a million dollars. I still thought it was important that Charlie hold a job—important for his sense of himself, his ability to give an answer when people asked what he did, and I also couldn’t imagine anything more disastrous for our marriage than if we were both in the house all day—but it didn’t matter to me what his job was, and I agreed with him that he could probably find something he found more engaging than the meat industry.
Having quit my own job eight months after our wedding, I had contributed a negligible amount to the family pot, and I never lost sight of the fact that
money was not exactly ours; I was, however, the one who wrote the checks for all our bills, and I also kept files for the accounts. I sometimes thought back to that check I’d seen for twenty thousand dollars one of the first times I visited Charlie’s apartment, how bewildered I’d been by it. Certain things, I now knew, required checks with many zeroes: painting the outside of our house, making a respectable contribution to the annual giving fund at Biddle Academy, acquiring my Volvo station wagon outright, monthly payments being a phenomenon with which Charlie appeared to have little experience.
I suppose it was because the taxes we paid each April on dividends from our investments were greater, even accounting for inflation, than my salary as a teacher had ever been, that I felt it was all right to quietly, and without mentioning it to Charlie, make occasional donations to charities that I suspected would have appealed less to him than they did to me. The donations were in the amount of two or three or, at most, five hundred dollars: I’d read in the paper about an inner-city food pantry, a literacy program, an after-school drop-in center for teens that was in danger of closing, and I’d feel a swelling uneasiness—familiar to me by this point—as I sat in the den or kitchen of our five-bedroom house on Maronee Drive. I’d write a check, send it off, and the uneasiness would subside for a while, until the next time. Although Charlie looked over our finances only once a year, when taxes were due, I did not include my donations in the list of deductions I gave our accountant. Of course, after you make a donation, it seems you remain on an organization’s mailing list in perpetuity, and Charlie did once, when rifling through the mail, hold up an envelope from the food pantry and say, “Have you noticed that we get something from them every fucking month?”
In the den, Charlie sat up, and I took the opportunity to lean in and kiss his cheek. He turned his face and
