“William?” It is Rosemary, standing at the threshold. “Richard Reinhardt from Brevature is holding for you.”
* * *
—
“We went out for dinner on Saturday with the Kleins,” Mark says. “One of those standard two-couple snoozefests, but primates are wired to socialize, right? Why fight it?”
It’s Monday, and, as it happens, I had dinner last night at Mark and Libby’s, as I do most Sundays: I played basketball in the driveway with my nephews, who are ten and thirteen, and, after the meal, I was praised by Libby for loading the dishwasher, which Mark never does. But in the presence of his wife and children, Mark jokes around a lot and reveals little.
As we make a left from Big Bend onto Forsyth, I ask, “Where’d you guys eat?”
He says Parigi, a new, expensive place that serves French-Italian fusion. “The four of us split a few bottles of wine.” This detail catches my attention, but I say nothing, and Mark continues: “We got home, I checked on the kids, and, miracle of miracles, they were both asleep. I told Libby she looked nice. I start to kiss her, and she says, ‘Just so you know, there’s a zero percent chance we’re having sex tonight.’ ” He laughs mirthlessly. “Zero percent! She claimed she’d eaten too much, but I think she was pissed because I’d said at dinner that Sandra Bullock is annoying.”
I roll my eyes. “Sandra Bullock is America’s sweetheart.”
“You sound like Libby.” He shrugs. “I have opinions. Sue me.”
“Maybe Libby had eaten too much.”
“You know when I realized she’d given up on me? When she started preferring doggy-style. That used to be, like, a present, for special occasions, but she wanted missionary as our go-to—gazing into each other’s eyes and all that crap. Now she’s fine with me getting her off with my hand, then before I can even ask, she’s on her knees with her ass in the air. And don’t get me wrong, for sure it’s efficient, but it’s like, who’s she picturing while I’m behind her?”
“If you get her off with your hand, isn’t it likelier that that’s when she’s picturing someone else?”
After a pause, with a degree of fondness, Mark says, “Sometimes you’re a real prick.”
When I turned forty, which was sixteen months ago, I expected that the pressure to marry—the pressure exerted by others—would intensify, but to my surprise, it decreased. It turned out that simply by celebrating this particular birthday, I’d crossed some border of nonconformity, and while I still could—can—turn around, retrace my steps, and assume citizenship in the nation of wedlock, the expectation seems to be that I won’t. I now hear, in reference to myself, the word bachelor; and though it evokes an image of a fussy gay man, and though I’m not gay and choose to believe I’m not fussy, either, I don’t mind. In fact, I’m relieved. I’ve dated plenty of women—nearly all of them intelligent and attractive, some exceptionally so—and I’ve never wanted to permanently attach my life to theirs; I’ve never even come close enough to be able to pretend to want it. That I understood our alliances to be temporary while the women were more optimistic was, as I progressed through my thirties, an increasingly keen source of pain—for the women, obviously, but for me, too. In one case, at my girlfriend’s behest, I read two books about men who fear commitment. But my feelings didn’t change. My aversion to the prospect of a spouse and children was, apparently, anomalous enough that it needed an explanation, and I’m pretty sure this need was exacerbated by my appearance. I was average when younger—like Mark, I have red hair, which has faded in intensity, and skin covered in ginger freckles—but just as the passage of time changed the meaning of my being single, it changed the value of my looks; and as the years passed without my putting on weight or losing much hair, I attained some higher status of desirability, enhanced, no doubt, by making partner at Grant, Molyneux, and Molyneux. That is, I’ve remained myself while my currency has increased.
Mark, who at forty-three is just under two years older than I am, got married when he was twenty-six, the summer after he’d finished medical school. Libby had been his college girlfriend and worked in private school admissions until their first child was born, and she resumed that role when their second started kindergarten. That Mark’s a pediatric cardiologist mostly offsets—to me, if not to everyone—how he’s also kind of an asshole. Meanwhile, I consider myself morally neutral. I practice bankruptcy, restructuring, and creditors’ rights law, and, yes, I routinely represent clients widely agreed to be the bad guys, but I also do pro bono work, including teaching a quarterly “financial literacy” class at a nonprofit. So: a wash.
Even as I resist the idea that my singleness requires more explanation than Mark’s seventeen-year marriage, there was an explanation I offered to my girlfriends and happen to believe, disappointing as it is in both its succinctness and its banality. My parents had a bad divorce; the almost two additional years that Mark spent experiencing their marriage before it soured were, it seems, crucial in allowing him to later suspend disbelief about the institution. Or you could just chalk it up to our being different people.
It’s slightly less clear to me that I never wanted children than it is that I never wanted to marry, but I mostly didn’t, and in any case, Finn and Noah charm me on Sunday evenings without leaving me regretful when I depart from their house.
Mark and I are passing the baseball fields of Washington University when I say, “Seriously, though—I’m sure Libby hasn’t given up on you.” Mark says nothing, and I ask, “So was Parigi any good?”
“It was okay.” When I glance at him, Mark smirks. “The food was a little rich.”
* * *
—
I like how slow and powerful this piece is, I write. It amazes me how much emotion Chopin could fit into something that’s only four and a half minutes. (You probably already know people called this “Sadness.”) Is it weird that Chopin and the Pixies remind me of each other? It’s how they both move so quickly and effectively from loud to quiet.
The link I attach is to Étude op. 10, no. 3.
* * *
—
I text Bonnie at six, while I’m still at the office: Feel like company tonight?
Her response arrives less than a minute later: Sorry I have Sophia
Bonnie and I met seven months ago, through a dating app, though dating is of course a euphemism. She lives twenty-five minutes south of me, is the manager of a housewares store—it’s part of a national chain, and hers is at a mall—and is divorced, with a nine-year-old daughter I’ve never met. We see each other every ten days or so, and though we went out for drinks a few times in the beginning, our encounters now occur exclusively inside my apartment or her condo and start at around 8:30 P.M., with a glass of wine and a discussion of current events; we share few other frames of reference. After sex, she stays over, which I don’t mind, but I never stay at her condo. I usually fall asleep, then wake at midnight or one and drive home.
Bonnie is pretty enough—she’s thirty-eight, with obviously dyed long black hair—and the curviest woman I’ve been involved with. She must outweigh me by thirty pounds, and I’m reminded, when she’s straddling me, of the middle school girls who entered puberty before the boys did. The truth is that I consider her a kind of preventive medicine. If I could make my libido disappear, I would, and as I age, this might well happen; certainly it’s decreased already. But it hasn’t yet gone away, and I’ve found in the past that I can go without sex for three or four months, and then one day I wake up in despair. Presumably, there are biological explanations, and my abrupt desperation has as much to do with touch as sex, meaning maybe I could stave it off with massages, of the more or less sordid varieties. I’m considering trying this after Bonnie tires of me, which I imagine will happen when she decides she wants a real relationship, a stepfather for her daughter. I will lament such a development and do nothing to stop it. No worries, I text back.
/>
At six forty-five, I leave the office, drive to Clayton, park outside my apartment building, and walk to a restaurant where, once or twice a week, I have dinner at the bar. The bartender, who is French and whose name is Thérèse, is the woman I currently am most attracted to; if she and Bonnie were standing side by side, Bonnie might not appear pretty enough after all. And if I were younger and knew less about myself, I’d pursue Thérèse. Even now, though I’m fifteen years older than she is, I have a feeling she’d accept if I asked her out. She’s unfailingly warm and has remarked more than once on how unusual it is that I pronounce her name correctly. Despite the two accent marks that appear on her name tag, apparently most St. Louisans pronounce it not only with a long second e, but also with a nonexistent a on the end.
I take a seat on a stool and Thérèse smiles and says, “William.” Ironically, she mispronounces my name—she says Weel-yum—and I find it very endearing.
I ask for a whiskey and soda, which Thérèse deposits in front of me with two skinny black straws and a curl of lemon rind. For dinner, I order green salad with wild salmon, and she says, in a teasing voice, “Always so healthy.”
“Not always,” I say, though I do avoid bread and sugar. It’s when I’m eating with others, most frequently with Mark’s family, that I relent, more as a matter of politeness than indulgence.
“But you are not the only one,” Thérèse says in her beguiling accent. “I now train for a triathlon.” She holds up both her arms—despite the chilly temperature outside, she is wearing a tight sleeveless black top—and flexes her biceps.
“Impressive,” I say. “When is it?”
“April. You run, yes?”
“I do run. With my brother.”
“Maybe someday you and I run together.” She raises both eyebrows, in the playful manner of a woman aware of how attractive she is.
When it becomes clear that she’s waiting for a response, I say—I make sure to say it pleasantly—“Maybe so.”
She then turns to attend to a couple on another of the bar’s three sides—there are only twelve seats around the bar, most empty on this Tuesday night—but instead of admiring her small, toned ass and graceful stance, as I usually would, I feel a dismal sorrow. She ruined it. It happened so quickly, but now it’s finished. Though she asked me out with a casual deftness that allows us both to pretend she didn’t, she did. And I’m certain that the intermittent rhythm of interacting with Thérèse while she’s on the clock is far more enjoyable than her unbroken attention on a date would be.
It’s also true that if she were less fluent in English, I’d probably have asked her out, weeks ago, in spite of everything; we could coast longer on each other’s mystery. But the language barrier is negligible. If I did ask her out, I don’t doubt that after the initial exuberance, I’d be quietly bored, politely restless, possibly subjected to reading yet another book about men who fear commitment. And Thérèse is young and lovely. She deserves better.
It is, I assume, due to her confidence that she doesn’t comprehend until after I’ve signed the check and am standing that I’m not going to follow up on her overture; I won’t try to confirm a day or time for us to run together, even tentatively. First, she’s expectant, and then, as I say, “Have a good night,” there is some shifting of her facial features, some new resentment and understanding.
Back in my apartment, in bed beneath the covers, I imagine her naked on her knees. Her long hair is loose and swaying as her head bobs. But afterward, as I roll away from the wet spot to go to sleep, I know I won’t return to her restaurant.
* * *
—
My favorite moment in all of Strauss’s writing is the finale from “Der Rosenkavalier,” she writes. His lush late Romanticism mixed with dissonance makes it so evocative and thrilling, to the point that even though I’ve listened many times, it still almost brings me to tears (okay, maybe not almost). This version is a trio, all sung by women. Amazing, no?
* * *
—
“Do you remember Alicia Thompson?” Mark asks. “My year in high school, tennis player, smoking hot body.”
“Wasn’t she prom queen?”
“That’s the one. So I ran into her yesterday in the elevator at the hospital. She was bringing her dad in for an echo. Let’s just say when it comes to looks, she peaked early.”
“Has she been in St. Louis all this time?”
“She’s married to a dude from Nashville, and I think they were there for a few years. Or Memphis? Anyway—back when she and I were seniors, she used to date Joe Streizman. Right after we graduate, they break up, and at a party at Tina Hoffer’s house, Alicia and I end up alone in the basement. We’ve both been drinking, and she’s full-on plastered and very touchy-feely. We’re sitting really close together on this couch while she tells me about the breakup, all weepy and shit, then she leans in and whispers right in my ear—well, this is the eternal mystery—she whispers either ‘Hug me’ or ‘Fuck me.’ No kidding, it sounded like ‘Fug me.’ Maybe she didn’t know what she was asking for. Obviously, I should have just said ‘What?’ But here I am, seventeen years old, with a rock-hard boner, and my logic is, if I hug her and she said, ‘Fuck me,’ I’ll get another chance. But if she said ‘Hug me’ and I fuck her, I’m a rapist.”
“I take it you hugged her.”
Cheerfully, Mark says, “Biggest mistake of my life.”
“When you guys were in the elevator yesterday, did you ask her which she’d said?”
“Sure, in front of her dad. Why not?” As we head south on Big Bend, he adds, “I want to be like the Clintons. I don’t want to be like the Gores. I want to ball other women but stay married.”
“Anyone in particular?”
“There’s this girl butcher at Whole Foods with a bunch of crazy tattoos. What’s that rule for how young is too young—it’s half your age plus seven, right? So if she’s, what, twenty-eight, we’re good to go.” He pauses, then says slowly, “I don’t think she’s twenty-eight.”
That ostensible rule means Thérèse needs to be twenty-seven, which she also isn’t. But Mark knows about neither Thérèse nor Bonnie, and in any case, I don’t anticipate crossing paths with Thérèse again.
I say, “Aren’t open marriages just a stopgap until divorce?”
“Oh, I don’t want an open marriage.” Mark looks at me with distaste. “Where’s the fun in that?”
“You don’t want Libby to be involved with other men?”
“Of course not,” he says. “But even more than that, I don’t want another domestic agreement, another fucking chore chart. I don’t want to have a respectful dialogue about how we can both get our needs met.”
Mark has been complaining about his marriage for a couple years, during which time, as far as I know, he and Libby haven’t gone to counseling, he hasn’t cheated on her, and he’s expressed his dissatisfaction to her barely, if at all. What he wants, it seems, is simply to vent, which is to say that perhaps he has been in counseling, with an unaccredited therapist, who happens to be me.
“Don’t cheat on her,” I say.
* * *
—
From me: Do you know the story behind “Symphonie fantastique”? Berlioz said it’s about a man going insane because of how in love he is with a woman. Which is so awesomely dark and dreary! The real/autobiographical version is that Berlioz fell in love with an actress and wrote the piece to attract her. She eventually heard it, she married him, and they were miserable together. So if it’s symphony as love letter, maybe that letter would have been better off left unanswered?
* * *
—
After waiting three days, I text Bonnie again: You free?
She usually responds right away, but this time, unprecedentedly, she doesn’t respond at all. It is possible, of course, that she’s traveling, or that she lost
her phone, or that she’s simply preoccupied.
Just to be sure, I wait another day and text once more: Hope all is well.
Again, there is silence. And it’s not that I didn’t know this eventuality was possible, not that I don’t understand. It’s not even that I care much that she’s ghosted me; I just wouldn’t have guessed it to be her method of choice.
* * *
—
My favorite Berlioz is “Harold in Italy”—the viola concerto he wrote for Paganini, but Paganini rejected it because the viola part was too easy and not flashy enough. Then after hearing it, Paganini changed his mind. In addition to telling a story, it has weird phrase lengths. (Maybe related to Berlioz being a big user of drugs?) My favorite part is the 2nd movement, “Marche des pèlerins” (March of the Pilgrims). The viola starts to play ponticello arpeggios over the walking bass and it’s a series of chord changes with this special trance-like sound. The first time I went to Paris, I heard it in my head as I wandered around.
* * *
—
Mark is standing in the driveway when I arrive, his legs spread, his torso tilted right, his left arm extended over his head. “You’re not gonna fuckin’ believe it,” he says. “Libby’s preggers. Guess the old sperm have got some juice yet.”
No! I think. But this is a visceral reaction, and selfish; it’s not that I don’t want another child for Mark and Libby or, for that matter, a niece or another nephew. “Amazing,” I say aloud.
“Fourteen-year age gap between our oldest and youngest kids.” Mark holds his hand up for me to high-five and says, “No joke, this is gonna be the baby that launches a thousand vasectomies.”