American Wife

  And then we were bidding everyone goodbye—another couple left at the same time we did—and as we walked around Memorial Union to where Charlie had parked on Gilman Street, he took my hand. As if our fingers were acting independently of us, down there far below the conversation, we adjusted them so they were interlocked. “Your friends are nice,” I said.

  We reached Charlie’s car, a gray Chevy Nova hatchback, and I said, “How about if I drive?” I had carefully nursed one glass of beer.

  Charlie passed me the keys, and as I was turning on the ignition, he said, “Look over here.” When I did, he leaned forward and kissed me. Then he said, “I’ve been wanting to do that all night.” I turned the ignition back off, tilting my head toward his, and we kissed some more, we wrapped our arms around each other, and I was happy that we were alone, just us, holding each other tight. It wasn’t that I hadn’t enjoyed being on the Terrace—I had—but suddenly, it was as if all the talk had been the part we had to get through in order to arrive at this reward.

  Charlie pulled back an inch. “So I haven’t forgotten about what I owe you. Let’s go to my place.”

  Confused, I said, “You don’t owe me anything.” And then I understood—he was grinning—and I said, “Oh, that.”

  “I’m not taking no for an answer. You’ve got to claim what’s rightfully yours.”

  And even though, as I drove, I felt stirrings of nervous anticipation, I also wanted to just stay forever in this limbo; I’d have been content to drive all the way to Canada, knowing that something wonderful would happen when we got there.

  It was the first time I’d been to Charlie’s apartment, and what I noticed immediately was that he’d left nearly all his lights on. His place was both smaller and less furnished than mine, and the living room seemed mostly like a repository for sports equipment: a brown leather bag of golf clubs leaning against one wall and, in a messy pile, a baseball bat, gloves, tennis racquets, a soccer ball, and the first lacrosse stick I’d ever seen. There was a large television set, a sizable stereo, a black bean bag, and a French baroque sofa complete with cabriole legs and covered in burgundy mohair. (I would learn that he’d acquired the sofa by raiding his parents’ basement in Milwaukee, which was where his paternal grandmother’s belongings had been stored untouched since her death seventeen years before.) Nothing hung on the walls, and a five-ledge bookshelf had two empty ledges. Of the remaining three, one contained books, one contained gewgaws, and one contained photos in frames: his father in a tuxedo and his mother in a sparkly red gown, looking into each other’s eyes; Charlie and three men I assumed to be his brothers, standing in a row in blazers; him and another guy in plaid jackets, crouched over the body of a dead buck with blood trickling from its mouth, Charlie grinning as the other man bent his head to kiss the buck’s antlers; Charlie at twenty or twenty-one clutching a BLACKWELL FOR PRESIDENT sign. On the next ledge, the one holding books, were a dictionary, a biography of Willie Mays, best-sellers such as Peter Benchley’s The Deep and, yes, Fear of Flying, and a smattering of the sort of titles one reads in undergraduate literature courses: Paradise Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Goethe’s Faust. Resting on the final shelf were a signed baseball, a beer stein, several shot glasses, a paperweight of a black-and-orange enamel shield, and a chartreuse rubber snake.

  I noticed all of this, I took it in quickly, and I didn’t really care. So he was a bachelor—of course he was, otherwise he wouldn’t be dating me. The space actually was clean, not dusty or cluttered. The bedroom was empty except for a mattress on top of box springs with no frame. The sheets were blue-and-white striped, pulled tidily up to the pillows, and a ceiling fan was already running. In the doorway of the bedroom, Charlie kissed me again, and then he walked me backward, maneuvering me onto the bed. When I was lying on my back, he stood above me grinning. “That’s much better.”

  I was wearing my denim skirt and a maroon tunic with orange and pink flowers. He leaned over and used both hands to lift the tunic from around my waist and push it above my bra and over my shoulders. Being undressed like this made me feel, in a strangely nice way, like a child: watched over and taken care of. My bra was next to go, and when he’d tossed it somewhere behind my head, he gazed down at me, lying in the light of his bedroom—attached to the ceiling fan, sticking out from its center, was a bare bulb—and he said, “I can’t believe how beautiful you are.” He leaned forward and kissed one nipple and then the other, slowly and methodically, first with his lips closed, then opening his mouth to suck in a manner that seemed respectful, almost reverent.

  Next he unbuttoned my denim skirt, unzipped the zipper, and I arched my back to help him slide it off; this, too, he tossed aside. I was wearing pink cotton underpants, and he stuck his thumb inside the elastic waistband, snapping it lightly against my hipbone and grinning. “Hi, pink,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said back, and as we looked at each other, I felt what I’d felt the times I’d laid beneath him at my apartment: sprawling, enormous happiness. What I most wanted was exactly the same as what was about to happen. Which forces had conspired to make me so unreasonably lucky?

  He ran his forefinger from my navel straight down over the front of my underwear, slowing above my pubic bone, and when he got to the cleft, the cotton fabric beneath his finger was damp, and he said, “Looks like someone’s enjoying herself.”

  I reached up; he had so little fat on his stomach that I could slip my hand into his boxer shorts without unfastening his pants. His erection was hot and stiff, and when I brushed my fingers over the tip, he inhaled, but then he drew back, shaking his head. “This is about you. We’ll get to me later.”

  “It can be about both of us.” I was touching him from outside his pants now, and he shook his head and nudged my hand away.

  This was when he pulled down my underwear—they got caught for a second around my ankles before I kicked them off—and then I was naked on his blue-and-white-striped sheets and he was crouching over me, tanned and masculine in a yellow oxford shirt, his flared nostrils, his slight hint of stubble, his light brown hair, and his smile, his perfect smile, and I felt a total, unfettered attraction to him. He bent his head to kiss my sternum, my navel and belly, my pubic bone, the tops of my thighs, and then he dropped to his knees on the floor and used his elbows to spread my legs, to open me up, and he brought his face in and was licking me, he was licking me firmly and repeatedly, and it seemed both difficult to believe (Charlie Blackwell’s face burrowed between my legs?) and also entirely inevitable: beyond logic and language and decorum. Possibly, I thought, I had lived my life up to now in order to be licked by this man. I could hear myself cooing—I was leaning on my elbows with my feet near the floor, and he was kneeling, with his arms beneath my thighs—and he began to flick his tongue rapidly, almost thrashing it, in a focused spot. His cheeks between my thighs, his bobbing head, and his earnest assiduous lapping—very quickly, it was too much to bear, and I gasped and cried out. It was like tremors, and I felt my thighs clenching around his head, and when he came up a few seconds later and kissed my forehead, I said, “I hope I didn’t suffocate you,” and he said, “I can’t think of a better way to go.” Then he whispered, his mouth against my ear, “I really want to be inside you right now,” and as soon as he’d rolled on the condom, I encircled him with my legs, and he slid into me. He didn’t make much noise when he came, his breathing just thickened and slowed a little, and we both were still. Lying there, I felt a peaceful kind of sleepiness come over me. I could have gone to bed right then, without brushing my teeth or washing my face, without changing positions. Not that I would; instead, I’d leave within the hour and return alone to my own apartment. To have sex with a man was one thing, but to spend the night with him was another—even if my personal sense of etiquette had become outdated, I had difficulty disregarding it.

  Against my neck, Charlie said, “We should do this every day for the rest of our lives.” Then he said, “I can feel you smiling.”

 
ALL AT ONCE we were spending vast amounts of time together. In my apartment, I moved the papier-mâché characters into the living room so he and I could lie on my bed, and though I didn’t let him stay over, he ended up leaving at a later hour each night—one or two, sometimes three. Because we often fell asleep after making love, I started setting my alarm clock for two, and when it beeped, Charlie would groan and say, “For the love of God, woman, make that thing stop,” and then we’d curl in to each other and fall back asleep, and after twenty or thirty minutes, I’d wake with a start and push at his torso, saying, “You really have to go now,” and he’d pretend to cower, covering his head and groaning, “I’m being exiled! The queen is banishing me from the castle!”

  Several times he said, “Don’t you think it’d be nice to wake up together? And we can make some morning mischief that no one but us needs to know about?” But the fact that I felt it was improper for us to stay over at each other’s apartments was really our only point of dissent. He was very easy to be around, very comfortable, in a way that surprised me. With Simon, if we had gone to kiss each other and our mouths missed, he’d pretend it hadn’t happened; he wouldn’t acknowledge if one of our stomachs rumbled. With Charlie, everything was out in the open. Once, after dinner, when we were watching television in his living room, he stuck his hand beneath my shirt to rub my belly, and when I shook my head and said, “I have a stomachache,” he said, “Go ahead and let one rip if you need to. I’ll still think you’re the prettiest girl in all of Madison.” I didn’t do it—I couldn’t have, I’d sooner have tap-danced in Calvary Lutheran Church—but he apparently felt no such inhibition. A few days later, I walked into the kitchen after him, smelled an earthily unpleasant odor, and said, “Did you just—?”

  “I can’t remember, but probably.” He grinned. “In my family, we call that tooting your own horn.”

  He was so appealing to me, and so confident of his own appeal in a way that was boyishly endearing rather than arrogant. He always wanted to snuggle, he even used the word snuggle, which I’d never heard a man do. The night I made us halibut in aspic for dinner, he did the dishes afterward, and when he finished, he came into the living room, where I was lying on the couch reading. Wordlessly, he lifted away my book and lay flat on top of me, then said, “Aren’t you going to put your arms around your man?”

  At his apartment, we always grilled out, making either hamburgers or steaks (I had not realized the evening we’d gone to Red’s that we were having one of the two dinners Charlie most preferred). His refrigerator was largely empty but held a few items that all belonged to the same category: ketchup; mustard; relish; packs of hamburger buns that he never closed properly after their first use, causing them to go stale; and a shelf of beer. Meanwhile, his freezer was filled to capacity with multiple packages of Blackwell-brand boneless strip steaks and ground beef. His apartment was on the first floor, and he kept a three-legged black kettle charcoal grill on a patch of pavement in the backyard and usually accessed it by climbing out his kitchen window rather than walking through the front of the house and around the side. I’d perch on a stool in the kitchen while he climbed in and out, tending to the meat, and when dinner was ready, we carried our plates to the living room, sat on the couch, and watched baseball. I knew plenty of women wouldn’t have considered this a pleasant arrangement, but I liked how the game made conversation easy, how we could talk or comfortably not talk, and Charlie seemed especially sweet when he was explaining a play: “That was a great save, because when the ball’s coming directly at you, it’s harder to tell how deep it is.” Or “He bunted foul with two strikes, so that’s why it’s an out.”

  Charlie ate breakfast every morning at a diner on Atwood Avenue, and he encouraged me to meet him there, but I was afraid, should we run into anyone we knew, that it would look like we’d spent the night together. (“Then I guess we might as well,” he’d joked, but I had come of age before sexual liberation really took hold, there’d been curfews in place when I’d started college—ten on weeknights, midnight on weekends—and men weren’t allowed in our rooms in the sorority. I’d had trouble entirely shaking the propriety of that time.) Besides, I had work to do during the day: I wanted to finish the papier-mâché characters by the time back-to-school faculty meetings started in late August, and as the weeks passed, I really was beginning my lesson plans. I prided myself on being a librarian who didn’t just rehash the same material year after year, and this year I was especially excited about a new book called Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, which I planned to use with the fourth-graders as an entry point into a unit on origami.

  As for Charlie’s schedule, he described this time as the calm before the storm—he used the expression repeatedly, both with me and with other people. I was hesitant to ask him much about his impending congressional run because the topic made me skittish, and it also didn’t seem entirely real. Did he actually want to live most of the year in Washington, D.C., to sit in an office building on Capitol Hill debating policy, casting votes on the House floor? Restless, joking, athletic, spontaneous Charlie? It seemed like he’d be acting out a role in a play. And of course, if he were elected (it was unlikely, but if he were), what would happen to us?

  For his job at Blackwell Meats, he did not, as far as I could tell, go to the company headquarters on the outskirts of Milwaukee more than twice a week. He did drive to Milwaukee regularly, but more often it was to play midday golf or tennis with one of his brothers, preceded by lunch with Hank Ucker and prospective donors to his war chest: lawyers from large firms, the CEO of an outboard motor company, men Charlie referred to as stuffed shirts. I once asked a little tentatively if he considered his job at the meat company full-time, and without hesitating, he said, “Alice, here’s an insight I’ll give you into who I am. Being a Blackwell is my full-time job.”

  In the late afternoons or on the weekends when, increasingly, I skipped my trips to Riley, Charlie and I would go swimming at BB Clarke Beach (“You should wear a bikini,” he said the first time we went, when he saw my red-and-white-striped one-piece) and then we’d go play badminton at the Hickens’ house or meet up on the Terrace with Howard and his latest young thing—he had already moved on from Petal—and Howard and Charlie would go through several pitchers of beer (Charlie would always drive there, I’d always drive back), and then Charlie and I would go home and grill. We’d never made it to the Gilded Rose, we hadn’t even discussed it again. I didn’t mind.

  The way I’d felt in Charlie’s presence, ever since leaving the Hickens’ barbecue, was as if I were suspending disbelief. Our compatibility seemed so improbable that at first dating him struck me as some combination of amusing and mildly irresponsible. Once, late on a Sunday afternoon the previous May, I had run into Maggie Stenta, one of Liess’s first-grade teachers, at the food co-op where I belonged, and we’d started chatting while Maggie’s children ran wild in the aisles. “Listen, do you want to come over?” Maggie had said. “We’re just having sloppy joes.” Though I’d drawn up a list of other errands I needed to run, I accepted the invitation, which meant following Maggie back to her house, where I proceeded to forget my milk in a bag in the backseat of my car. Inside, Maggie said, “Do you want some sangria? We had people over last night, and it’ll go bad if we don’t drink it.” We sat on chairs in the yard, Maggie’s kids were jumping on a trampoline—the older one, Jill, was my student—and Maggie’s husband was inside on the second floor, and Maggie yelled at him, “Can you fix dinner, Bob? I don’t have the energy,” and then her neighbor, a woman named Gloria, came over and said she was pretty sure she’d seen a lizard run under her living room couch—“Not a big one, maybe four inches,” she explained—and this seemed to delight Maggie, so we went over and were tipping up the couch, and then the lizard scampered out—it was olive-colored—and into a vent in the floor, and Maggie decided what we needed was a net, which neither household had, so we left the children with Maggie’s husband and walked to a hardware store that he??
?d told us would be closed and indeed was. On our return, Maggie said good-naturedly, “Have you ever seen kids more badly behaved than mine?” We went back to Gloria’s house and looked around in the basement, which was outrageously cluttered, but we saw no sign of the lizard. By then it was seven o’clock, I had prep work for my classes the next day, I was tipsy from sangria (I ended up calling a taxi two hours later), and no doubt the milk in my car had gone bad. But what I felt that afternoon and evening was what I felt around Charlie all the time: This is not my real life. There are other things I should be doing. I’m enjoying myself.

  IN MID-AUGUST, I was getting a haircut at Salon Styles—I had just settled into the chair after being shampooed—when Richard, the man who cut my hair, said, “Did you hear about Elvis?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He died. They were saying on the radio it was a heart attack, but it sounds to me like the old hound dog had a fondness for the pharmaceuticals.”

  In the large mirror I was facing, I could see my own eyes widen. “He wasn’t that old, was he?”

  “Forty-two.” Richard had parted my wet hair in the middle, and he took hold of chunks on either side, holding out the hair by the tips. “How many inches are we taking off today?”

  THAT EVENING, AS soon as I knew she’d be home from work, I dialed Dena’s number. The friendliness in her voice when she answered the phone, before she knew it was me, broke my heart a little.

  “It’s Alice,” I said. “I was thinking about you today because of—I’m sure you know Elvis died, and do you remember when your mom took us to see Jailhouse Rock the night it opened, and then she made us peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches afterward?” Dena didn’t respond immediately, and I added, “Is your mom really upset?”