CHAPTER 3
MY WIFE TYPES HER life, key-by-key
site-by-site, primarily at night,
on the home PC where I try to find
work while she’s drowsing, instead
find the history of her browsing,
surfing her lost past for evidence
that she wasn’t always this sad-
Still, I’d convinced myself, at least until last night, that Lisa’s new online hobby, social networking, was a healthier compulsion than the brief, eBay shopping spree she went on last year (our garage lined with unsold remnants, nine boxes of commemorative plates, plush toys and china figurines). At one time, Lisa managed this online life at work, but the optometrist’s office where she rots as a receptionist for thirty hours a week without benefits put an end to personal computer use, so every night now Lisa spends two hours on our home computer, managing her Facebook page and her Linked-In page and her MySpace page, responding to ass-sniffing inquiries from old friends on Classmates.com and Google-imaging people she used to know. I don’t say a word about any of it-this was our couples-counselor’s advice-but I worry that what she’s really looking for is not the people she once knew, but the
Of course, it’s unwise to diagnose the mental condition of one’s spouse. But if I had to trace Lisa’s current malaise (and if I didn’t trace it to the moment she accepted my marriage proposal) I would say that it began when her confidence was battered by leaving her career to birth those two boys eleven years ago. Before that, Lisa was a world-beating, self-assured businesswoman, in charge of marketing a doctors’ group that specialized in sports medicine, and she ventured out every day in curvy business suits that made me want to coax her into elevators for inappropriate workplace contact. But then I spermed her up and she left that good job, and since I was earning decent money and making indecent profits on some canny investments, we felt safe and maybe even wise-perhaps even morally good-having Lisa quit her job while she nursed, nested and nurtured those thankless little shit-heels. Then, a decade on, with the boys safely ensconced in papist school, we figured she’d just go get another job like her old one, but she ventured back into the job world two years ago with none of the hot confidence she’d had before we procreated. I try to put myself in her position-one day you come home from work a vital twenty-nine- year-old
of resumes, referrals and rejections took their toll and Lisa accepted the first job she was offered-receptionist for a dull optometrist who calls the women in his office
I hated seeing the woman I loved lose her confidence that way. And yet, in the deepest reaches of my psyche, I wonder if there wasn’t a part of me that was glad she didn’t go back to the gym-toned guys at the sports medicine clinic. Our marriage was typical, I think; we deluded ourselves that it was made of rock-solid stuff, but there were trace elements of regret, seams of I-told-you-so, cracks of martyrdom. In the last few months-with things around here deteriorating-I’ve even asked myself if I didn’t take some pleasure
More self-pity. It’s ugly. Counterproductive. I constantly warn my sons about the dangers of self-pity when they’re moping about being the only kids in the world without a Nintendo Wii. And honestly, with Lisa and me, it hasn’t been that bad. Beneath our current troubles, I think we still like each other, and as flatly unromantic as that might sound, it’s amazing how many of our couple friends genuinely
last winter and spring, when our finances fell apart, but even then Lisa and I didn’t argue so much as
When the hole started opening two years ago, Lisa and I congratulated ourselves because at least we weren’t in one of those La Brea Tar Pit adjustable-rate home loans. We had a normal thirty-year, with a normal fixed rate, and even though we’d unwisely cashed in equity for a couple of costly remodels, we were still okay. We had some normal debt: normal credit cards, normal furniture layaways, normal car payments, some uncovered medical bills, Teddy’s normal braces and Franklin’s normal speech therapy
top of our payments, and we jumped at that lifeline, but then I lost my job and maybe we were distracted by that and by my father’s collapse (we dragged him into the hole with us) because while we fretted and waffled and stalled, the stock market went out for milk, got stoned and lost forty percent of its value, depleting my 401(k), which, due to my stubborn love for financial and media stocks, had already begun to look more like a 4(k). That’s about the time I stopped showing Lisa the grim letters about the house, with their phony warm salutations (“Dear Homeowner…”).
This is how a person wakes up one morning to find that he’s six days from losing his house.
The advice you get when your mortgage is in danger is to “contact the lender.” The last time I contacted my lender, some twenty-five-year-old kid answered the phone and talked me into forbearance, this six-month amnesty of procrastination. I should have known it was a bad move when I contacted my lender the next time and found out the kid had been laid off, that our mortgage had been bundled and sold with a stack of similarly red paper to a second company, and that the second company had been absorbed by a third company. Now I have no idea how to “contact my lender.” I seem to spend hours in automated phone dungeons (“For English, press one”) desperately looking for a single human voice to gently tell me I’m dead.
Clock ticks. Planet turns. Six revolutions from now whatever bank owns my mortgage will start foreclosure proceedings unless I can either beg more time or come up with the balloon forbearance payment of $31,200. Meanwhile, I try to figure out how to tell Lisa about this looming deadline-keeping in mind that (a) she adores this house, (b) she was raised to connect financial security to love and (c) I’m quite possibly losing her anyway. So I go it alone.
