The Curve

Wade Harmon died Saturday, driving his John Deere eastward on the back forty. The tractor idled until it ran out of fuel, and when he didn't come in for lunch, Mavis walked outside and saw it, green and yellow standing out against the long, brown prairie furrows.
She ran to him, but there was no diesel left in the tank with which to carry him home.
My Betty went to their house the next morning with egg-and-bacon casserole and fresh biscuits.  They'd laid Wade out in the parlor on a cooling board, the old timey way, in a suit and white shirt, shined shoes and tie.
The next afternoon, people gathered at the graveside to speak of all the ways that Wade had touched their lives. Back in the '60s, Wade had rounded up all the family farmers and started  Kansas' first  co-op. In those days, we all believed that the communal way of sharing would keep us safe from the long reach of Con-Agra and Archer Daniels Midland, those agribusiness giants spreading across the heartland like a cancer, squeezing the little guy out.
Later, folks gathered back at Harmon's farm, some to eat, others to stand by the tractor shed with flasks and tell more stories.   Trevor, Wade's eldest, walked me down the rows of spring wheat -- freshly green and hopeful -- to the spot where Wade had died.
Grief has a steep curve, and each of us  -- sons, wives, best friends -- has to climb that curve somehow and make it down the other side. 
We talked until the light was gone, talked about who would harvest the crop, about Mavis' future, about tractors and ethanol and prices of corn, two men on a patch of ground, navigating the curve of grief the best we could while whipoorwills sang their dirge and the stars leaned down a little closer.

You Only Get One Question

I met her husband in a greasy coffee shop on the run-down side of town -- his choice.  I suppose he thought the locale fit my role. I had been sleeping with his wife, after all. That made me trash.

          He was a middle-aged tugboat carrying 400 pounds on swollen ankles. He'd come with a bad attitude. The husbands always do. They never consider why their wives go looking elsewhere for pleasure. Or maybe they do consider, but the only answer they can sit with is: Some bad influence (me) is to blame for their darling Dottie or sweet Sally-Jo going astray.

          “Jesus, how old are you anyway?” he asked.

          “That's a boring question,” I said. “Of all the things you could ask at a time like this, you want a number?”

          He dumped five sugar packets into some oily-looking coffee while I marvelled at his eyes: they were kidney beans wrapped in dough.

          “I mean, if you want to talk numbers, how much do you weigh?” I asked him back. “That could figure into this, you know.”

          “Listen, you,” he snarled. “Who the fuck do you think you are?

          “Sorry pal,” I said, “you only get one question here at the Exit Interview Corral. The answer is 22.  And now, if you'll excuse me, there's a circuit court clerk waiting for me at the Marriott Courtyard. She bought herself some sexy new underwear online, and it would be rude to keep her waiting. Rude is what cost her husband his bed privileges.”

          It was true, I thought, steering my Camaro onto the bypass. Marriage has a fatal flaw. I wouldn't go so far as to say familiarity breeds contempt. But that kind of rude indifference, of taking the wife for granted, can feel like contempt. After years go by with no touching, the little gal feels bad about herself. Then, I come along, tell her she's desirable, tell her things I'm going to do to her, feed her need until all she can think about is me. Before she knows it, she's renting motel rooms for us to sneak away. She feels so alive that she's practically vibrating, like a high-school girl right before a date with the town bad boy.         Her fat fuck of a husband who left her untouched for four years while he watched televised football with Sara Lee in his lap has no call blaming me. 

          I was playing World of Warcraft (Rise of the Zandalari) the first time my phone rang for an exit interview. Some shitbird of a lawyer found my number behind the visor of his old lady's Lexus and got curious. He demanded a meet-up: Saturday morning, Eastdale Country Club, he'd give up his second nine holes just to see me. Ooooo, lucky me!

          That's the thing, see. The husbands come to the meet all bowed up for a bush-pissing contest between two dogs.  But I show up in full androgyny theater:  black leather,  high-heeled boots, eyeliner, cubic Z earring. The guys get massively confused. Shitbird's eyes almost crossed when he saw me. I could see the word bubble over his head. Boy? Girl? He was trying to put his cookies-and-cream Mary-Lou together with me, but he couldn't figure me for the top or the bottom.
      I learned something that day: lawyers are no better than anyone else at asking the right first question. His was, “What the hell was your number doing in my wife's car?” 

          “She must have put it there.”

          And then I was gone. I look at it this way. If the guy wants information, if he wants to fix things between him and the wife, he should be asking her. Not me. And if he's asking his wife the questions, there's only one relevant question to ask. Not, “who's this guy?” Or “how long has this been going on?”

The only question that matters, the only one she wants to hear is, “How can I make you happy?”

The Late, Late Show

During the night, even your feet are hot to the touch.
You throw off the covers and turn on the ceiling fan,
which in turn flings your heat to the corners of the room.
This is my secret source of income, you see,
for while you sleep, I charge admission to strangers
who want to witness the miracle of you.

"Lay-deeez and gennel-mun," I call from our front lawn under a quarter moon, "step right up and see Inferno Man, the human electric blanket!"
They pay to file in quietly and stand around our bed,
holding their small children over you to warm their tiny feet.
After the show, I slip back under the covers, hide their dollars in my pillow and watch the gentle rise and fall of your bellows. 

The Rare Air on Planet Teeny

I was 14 when the phone call came with news of Teeny’s death.

Her Ma asked to talk to me, personally, but when she heard my voice she broke down in hard sobs, the kind that words can’t get through.
She said a drunk driver was the cause, but I could not listen to the details about Teeny on the pavement under her smashed-up bicycle.  I just handed the phone to my Ma and went looking for a suitcase because certain things would have to be rescued right away from Teeny’s room: A blood-oath pact required it.  

After retrieving Teeny’s treasures and personal letters, I turned my attention to her air collection, which had to be packed up carefully and taken away before anyone decided to throw it out.
Half-pint Ball canning jars, each labeled in earnest capital letters, took up a whole wall of Teeny’s bedroom.
Inside each jar was air she had collected from some place important to her life: Six Flags over Georgia at the top of the ferris wheel; the back seat of Delmar Robbins’ ’72 Barracuda;  a breath sample from inside Principal “Halitosis” DeLosis’ office (the label contained a warning skull and crossbones).
Teeny had collected air from the ICU when her brother overdosed; from the graveside when her granny died (she had tried to scoop a jar under the coffin lid and capture the essence of the old woman’s corpse, but the undertaker had body-blocked her at the last second),  and from the front of the stage while The Temptations sang “My Girl.”
One hundred and eight jars glinted down from their shelves, each with its own unique cocktail of oxygen, hydrogen, methane, cigarette smoke or aftershave molecules.

Ever since, when I think about Teeny, I pretend she’s visiting another world with a half-dozen mason jars clanking around in her bicycle basket. The air out there is fresh and sweet and filled with birdsong.
There’s no smell of  peeling tires on pavement, or gasoline or blood.
Teeny is revered there as a scientist, and people come from far and wide to watch her chew Bazooka gum, scoop air into containers and label every one of them “RARE.”

Lipstick in the Kitchen

I knew that marrying Kenley would be a mistake the moment he brought me home to meet his mother who, it appeared, never left her kitchen. A passive-aggressive woman, her way of conveying anger was to bash pots and pans around like cymbals and gongs. Her means of showing disapproval was to slam cupboard doors. Her kitchen was a symphony of rage.
Kenley made the introductions, and she was pleasant enough at the start. She offered us both sweet tea, but the glass she handed to me had a definite lipstick print on the rim, a thin lower lip and a smudge of an upper. Moreover, she pronounced my name "Jita," although I had been introduced as "Gita." We sat at the breakfast table and they made family small talk while I took in the surroundings.
The stove was obviously the centerpiece of this domain. It was a gleaming stainless steel behemoth with two ovens, a plate warmer and six gas burners. In the middle of the floor squatted a sway-backed butcher block that appeared to have been chopped upon with such force as to make it cower.
"Lita? You're not drinking your tea. Does it need more sugar?"
"I'm sure it's fine, Mrs. Carmoody," I said. "I'm not thirsty right now."
And there it was. The first lie. It sat in the air between us like a cough, and she chalked up round one. She knew I wouldn't criticize the cleanliness of her glass, and she knew there would be a million more lies to come. I could see the years rolling out ahead of me: a marriage to Kenley would make a complicit, chronic liar of me. No one in Kenley's family ever expressed anger or dissatisfaction openly. I and my children would tiptoe around the knife-wielding Matriarch. She’d rope us like meek heifers into the Carmoody Corral.
"Actually," I said, looking up into her eyes, "the glass is dirty."
I held it up, like Exhibit A, and heard Kenley's quick intake of breath.
" And I'd appreciate it if you would call me Gita with a hard G. Most people over the age of five get it right on the second try."
Kenley drifted away from me after that – not abruptly, but you could tell. (It was not the Carmoody way to confront, after all.)
“That was a speeding bullet that missed you, my girl,” a friend told me later. “You would have become a headline eventually. ‘Daughter-in-law found buried in his Mum’s lettuce patch.’”
Eventually I forgot Kenley, but apparently his family never forgot me. I was “the girl with the tea glass.” This I discovered five years after the fact when I went to apply for a new job at the power company and was made to fill out a dozen forms in their personnel office. Kenley’s younger sister Marjory was sitting behind a long counter, handing out applications to a line of hopefuls. When I reached her and held out my hand she squinted hard and cocked her head.
“Why, you’re the tea glass girl, aren’t you? You’re the one who stood up to Mum! We were talking about you just the other night, wondering what became of you!”
I calculated how this development might improve or dash my chances of getting hired. I decided that silence was my friend.
“We all admired you, you know,” Marjory went on. “You have spine.” Then, leaning in close so that I could feel her breath tickling my cheek, she whispered, “Put on your application that you go to church regular and serve the poor, and I’ll be sure it gets to the Personnel Manager right away. He doesn’t care whether you can type: he only hires Christians.”
“Isn’t that illegal?” I asked.
Marjory Carmoody cocked her head again, sparrow-like, as if that thought had never occurred to her.
“But, hey, thanks for the tip,” I said, “That’s really decent of you to help me.”
She smiled then, a bright front-desk-receptionist smile and I left, arms full of paperwork.
I went home, trying to imagine myself a power company employee with a 45-minute lunch hour, paid holidays and dental insurance. I tried to imagine Mrs. Carmoody’s face when she learned that I had been sighted.
I wondered what clashing of pots and pounding of meat on the swaybacked butcher block would follow that revelation.
“Poor kitchen,” I thought. “You’re in for a loud time tonight.”

Diplomatic Relations

The truth about our marriage is not pretty. Hamilton took a lover after our second child was born. When I got my figure back, I initiated an affair with the Brazilian attaché and a year later dropped him for the second-chair violinist in our city symphony.  (He looked marvelous in tails and black tie.)
 And what quick strong fingers he had. They never tired.

Then Hamilton was transferred to Bogota and I dragged the children along behind him, but I resented every hour of our miserable three years there.

You might think the world of embassies and international relations is glamorous. Well, it’s not. It is a world of petty bickering, social climbing, secrets and second-rate wines poured from cut-glass decanters to make them sparkle like Grand Cru.
One is expected to make small talk, night after night, at dinner parties where one is seated next to flatulent perspiring foreigners who slide their hands below table to squeeze one’s thighs.

As if!

After Bogota, Ham was asked to take a small role in making friends with an Iranian business conglomerate, and so we were sent to Tehran. There, at least, one could eat well and shop with abandon. I spent many happy days in the rug bazaars in the company of an eager young translator with lovely muscled shoulders. Some afternoons, he would take me to drink tea in small cafes far from American eyes. We found a room – no more than four walls and a cot – and pleasured each other for hours under a slow-turning fan.

Then one morning, Hamilton called me to the breakfast room and asked for a divorce.

“Here? In Iran? Are you crazy?” I asked.

“You’ve been unfaithful,” was all he said.

“But I could be punished for adultery with stoning or imprisonment!” I said, panic rising.

“Then go back to America and we’ll get around to it later, in a year or two when my work is done here.”

“What about the children?” I asked.

“They will stay with me and continue here in school. I want them to learn Farsi and Arabic, It’s a changing world.”

I wasn’t ready to give up without a fight. “You’ve been unfaithful too, and I can name them all, your mistresses and whores!” I shouted.

“Not for YEARS! Not since my hiatus hernia operation,” he snarled. Hamilton snarled well, I’ll give him that. It was one of his successful negotiating tricks at world trade conferences. But I was having none of that.

“Please pour me a drink,” I said, adding quickly “but not the embassy wine.”

How, I wondered,  does one end a marriage? It’s not as if there are classes one can take to prepare for exigencies like these. Ham poured me a drink – Bombay gin and limes – and we sat civilly and listened to parrots chattering in the plum trees above our terrace. 

“The buggers will have eaten all the fruit before cook gets his lazy bum out there with a basket,” Ham murmured.

I picked up a basket then, smiled at him conspiratorially, and dashed out to the garden to rescue what plums were left. Each one, pinkish-purple and soft, felt like a testicle in my hands. When I had picked a bowlful I went back inside, hoping to flirt with Ham about the resemblance to his own testicles. Instead, I found him weeping in his wing chair by the window.

“We’ve bollixed everything up, haven’t we?” he said. “It’s a bridge too far.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I sensed that he was on the cusp of reconciliation. I mean, weeping with remorse is better than open-mouthed shouting, isn’t it?

I maneuvered myself onto his lap and fed him bites of plums and made fingertip circles at the edges of his hairline (something the violinist had taught me).

“Darling,” I reminded him, “there are worse things than marriage to a slightly unfaithful spouse.”

“Like what?”

“Like being stuck with a bore. Or a wife who corrects you in public.”

“True,” he said. “True. We could be the Marchioness and Duchess of Lichtenstein who have two teeth between them and those dreadful Pomeranians.”

I could have corrected him and said Pekingese, but why spoil the moment?

We had reached détente, which is a term used in the diplomatic corps to mean both sides are fucking exhausted and ready to agree to anything just to get out of the conference room and away from their opponent.

So, as I said, our marriage isn’t pretty, but we are staying together. I have my reasons, not the least of which is that a birdie told me Hamilton’s next posting will be in Manhattan at the United Nations. It will be spectacular all around with never, ever a dull moment.

In the end, I think the secret to a good marriage in the diplomatic corps all boils down to staying busy.
I’ve already arranged for season tickets at The Met, some quality spa time at Elizabeth Arden, and fittings at Prada. I am positively sure I won’t so much as LOOK at another man, I’ll be so fulfilled.

In fact, we are embarking on a whole new chapter. Those lovely Persian rugs from the bazaar will go down in the new apartment. I fully intend to show Hamilton the delights of soft Oriental carpeting and a delicious new position I learned not long ago.
It involves a silk scarf, a leather strap and some aromatic herbs.
I wish I could remember its name in Farsi. Roughly translated it means ' reaching your hoped-for destination.' 
Appropriate, wouldn't you say?

The Day After Falling in Love

The day after falling in love,
I became unmoored from everything familiar.
This chair, that piece of curtain, all suddenly turned brilliant
And I floated off, as light as a photon.
You stayed behind to guard the perimeters of
our marriage, to summarize the situation when
onlookers stopped to gawk.
"Nothing to see here, folks. Move along," you said
in your crossing guard's voice, the one you used
whenever I was a day late or a dollar short of your estimates.
"It happens every few years. She's just that way," you said,
and the neighbors shuffled off, looking doubtful.
In my altered state, I had no need of food or a clean bathroom,
but I was beset with hiccups and filled with poetry.
Eventually, weeks later, I regained my corporeal form,
which was subject to the usual rules of gravity.
Thus I fell to earth like Icarus, aflame with passion
 and disappointment in my too-short flight.