Bedtime

I’ve made mistakes with my wife, but asking “Why don’t you buy some lingerie?” is in another dimension.

My wife has an old gray long-sleeve shirt that has been relegated to a pajama top. She often dons it just after feeding our daughter to sleep. There’s a decal at the chest, two blue swirls of water like large eyes, with a rectangular waterlogged sign floating just above, and between them, in caps: HEAD OF THE CONNECTICUT REGATTA. Get the joke? Usually a pair of polka-dotted or college-aged sweatpants with the right leg torn in two up the knee rounds out the ensemble. I am dressed in a white T-shirt with underarms stained calico, a pullover with numerous holes and rips, green sweatpants from the dollar store, and expensive gifted slippers that are coming undone near the pinky toes from overuse. We are so dressed at seven o’clock each night, the time our daughter goes to bed, ready for our evening’s entertainment and probable falling asleep on the couch less than two hours and a medley of snacks and alcohol later.

No girlfriend or lover of mine had ever worn lingerie. I should tell my wife that, though it would only elevate the temperature in our kingdom. I’m sorry I ever brought it up. If a person really changed, that is, if my wife turned into a woman who had an unbridled affection for lingerie, I have great doubts her lover would want to be with her anymore.

We don’t talk about the other women in my past, just as we don’t discuss the men in hers. Yes, a statement will be made: Bess used to get so goddamn drunk. . .but we go no further, as if the whole motley are consigned to some hell where their right to be discussed has been mortgaged in lieu of still floating ghostly in our consciousness. These persons are mostly nameless and unimportant—they’ve already been inhooped to each of us via the ghastly epigram When you have sex with someone, you have sex with everyone that person has had sex with. This inspires no reclamation but gives a tangible sense of metaphysical history—our unique history, the trace we leave, the why behind haughtily pronouncing, Everyone is connected. I’d seen lingerie on another woman—my wife knew this before I put the final querying mark on the origin sentence. Why else would I bring it up? You can rarely go sexual without fiduciary forces flashing at some juncture. Peer pressure, consumerism, the hard sell. There are other energies driving my mistakes, and what they are I know not but they have debased and made my mouth move in reverse—skewering my love when I meant only to take the piss out of me, poor me, who thought to be less angry and hostile by letting bile fly.

My wife’s greatest friend, Lucia, confronted me one day—You have demeaned her, you silly ass. We were drinking, but my wife had left the room. I’d also made the lingerie comment almost a year before, and with our new baby in tow, I’d seen Lucia on at least a fifth of those days. I can’t believe she told you that, I said. Lucia writhed as if she had a muzzle on. She couldn’t speak—she had an ice cube in her mouth. She slowly crushed it in delight. Oh, she didn’t? You told me a few months ago, when I brought that whisky. What? Come on. Rick, I think you might have a drinking problem. Or a memory problem. For over an hour or so I successfully believed I’d never made the lingerie comment at all. Lucia always wanted to see us crumble. My wife had sat muted for almost all of that time, listening to Lucia’s own life challenges with a flickering sneer, while I kept imagining astonishing scarlet-hued lingerie fitting her curves. I should never drink, I finally said, though by then I was all alone, sprawled on the couch in distemper, a small hard pillow jutting my head up—a bad posture for my neck’s pinched nerve. Eleven o’clock. I thought I would muster a second wind and maybe finally finish The Magic Mountain, but I was still in the early middle, not even to the halfway point. Or write a poem, an explication of myself in blank verse—telling my wife about my fumblings so I’d feel better about being who I was. I peered at the walls and drowsed.

Nights like this are rare. We both aren’t drinkers. I can say this because I’ve been with many, more than just Alex. Bedtime is nine. When I get in beside my wife and have a pretty clear idea of her clothing, whether it be the regatta shirt and polka-dot pants, or the red tank top and billowy salmon shorts in the summer, or maybe the umber Yosemite National Park pullover and ripped sweatpants during colder days, there is serenity, like after a great vanquishing.

Just around the corner, through a doorway with no door (in a nook), lies our daughter, still in the first stages of a ten-hour sleep. We all lie in a large semicircle, with sound machines in both rooms and, next to me, a fan on low with a pillowcase draped over the top to louden it. The noise of Brooklyn is lessened. Though if I’m awake in the middle of the night, thinking of what I’d be like asleep, I can still hear the odd large truck throttling to the higher reaches of the slope. Thunder and fireworks, but no more of the big dogs on the block giving late loud barks. It is in the third setting of the Marpac Hushh white-noise sound machine, a sort of hurricane-wind sound, that our relationship has found its best feature. There—on the bed at night, we sleep. We share the space. It’s a peaceful sleep. Nothing carbolic I can detect—we’ve said all we’ve needed to say for one day, and rest will restore. There can be happiness in sleep. In seven years, I’ve never gone to the couch. We’ve always been able to come to a necessary calm. How does one know a relationship is over or on its way there? When one person doesn’t want to be around the other.

No, night is pretty peaceful. Our little rooms are peaceful. I smell the linen pressed with weeks of our oils and skin and scalp, the clothing grimed by greater amounts of unwashed time. The pressure leaves off. There is a sweet silence in our hills. This living is eternity.