Shivering Mind

Chapter 48

‘Happy anniversary, my asshole husband who neglected me on my big day.’

We sit silent for a minute, my stomach knotting. I don’t want to be the bad guy here. I don’t deserve that. Matilda stands up.

‘Well, how was it?’ I ask dully.

‘How was it? It was f*****g awful. Sixteen of my friends now have no jobs. It was miserable. I’ll probably be gone too, another few months.’

Friends. He doesn’t even like half the guys he was out with, but I say nothing.

‘I know it feels dire right now, Matilda. But—’

‘It’s not dire for you, Amy. Not for you, it never will be dire. But for the rest of us? It’s very different.’

The same old. Matilda resents that I’ve never had to worry about money and I never will. He thinks that makes me softer than everyone else, and I wouldn’t disagree with him. But I do work. I clock in and clock back out. Some of my girlfriends have literally never had a job; they discuss people with jobs in the pitying tones you talk about a fat girl with ‘such a nice face.’ They will lean forward and say, ‘But of course, Ellen has to work,’ like something out of a Noël Coward play. They don’t count me, because I can always quit my job if I want to. I could build my days around charity committees and home decoration and gardening and volunteering, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with building a life around those things. Most beautiful, good things are done by women people scorn. But I work.

‘Matilda, I’m on your side here. We’ll be okay no matter what. My money is your money.’

‘Not according to the prenup.’

He is drunk. He only mentions the prenup when he’s drunk. Then all the resentment comes back. I’ve told him hundreds, literally hundreds of times, I’ve said the words: The prenup is pure business. It’s not for me, it’s not even for my parents, it’s for my parents’ lawyers. It says nothing about us, not you and me.

He walks over toward the kitchen, tosses his wallet and wilted dollars on the coffee table, crumples a piece of notepaper and tosses it in the trash with a series of credit-card receipts.

‘That’s a shitty thing to say, Matilda.’

‘It’s a shitty way to feel, Amy.’

He walks to our bar – in the careful, swamp-wading gait of a drunk – and actually pours himself another drink.

‘You’re going to make yourself sick,’ I say.

He raises his glass in an up-yours cheers to me. ‘You just don’t get it, Amy. You just can’t. I’ve worked since I was fourteen years old. I didn’t get to go to f*****g tennis camp and creative-writing camp and SAT prep and all that s**t that apparently everyone else in New York City did, because I was wiping down tables at the mall and I was mowing lawns and I was driving to Hannibal and f*****g dressing like Huck Finn for the tourists and I was cleaning the funnel-cake skillets at midnight.’

I feel an urge to laugh, actually to guffaw. A big belly laugh that would sweep up Matilda, and soon we’d both be laughing and this would be over. This litany of crummy jobs. Being married to Matilda always reminds me: People have to do awful things for money. Ever since I’ve been married to Matilda, I always wave to people dressed as food.

‘I’ve had to work so much harder than anyone else at the magazine to even get to the magazine. Twenty years, basically, I’ve been working to get where I am, and now it’s all going to be gone, and there’s not a f*****g thing I know how to do instead, unless I want to go back home, be a river rat again.’

‘You’re probably too old to play Huck Finn,’ I say.

‘f**k you, Amy.’

And then he goes to the bedroom. He’s never said that to me before, but it came out of his mouth so smoothly that I assume – and this never crossed my mind – I assume he’s thought it. Many times. I never thought I’d be the kind of woman who’d be told to f**k herself by her husband. And we’ve sworn never to go to bed angry. Compromise, communicate, and never go to bed angry – the three pieces of advice gifted and regifted to all newlyweds. But lately it seems I am the only one who compromises; our communications don’t solve anything; and Matilda is very good at going to bed angry. He can turn off his emotions like a spout. He is already snoring.

And then I can’t help myself, even though it’s none of my business, even though Matilda would be furious if he knew: I cross over to the trash can and pull out the receipts, so I can picture where he’s been all night. Two bars, two strip clubs. And I can see him in each one, talking about me with his friends, because he must have already talked about me for all that petty, smeared meanness to come out so easily. I picture them at one of the pricier strip clubs, the posh ones that make men believe they are still designed to rule, that women are meant to serve them, the deliberately bad acoustics and thwumping music so no one has to talk, a stretch-titted woman straddling my husband (who swears it’s all in fun), her hair trailing down her back, her lips wet with gloss, but I’m not supposed to be threatened, no it’s just boyish hijinks, I am supposed to laugh about it, I am supposed to be a good sport.

Then I unroll the crumpled piece of notebook paper and see a girl’s handwriting – Hannah – and a phone number. I wish it were like the movies, the name something silly, CanDee or Bambie, something you could roll your eyes at. Misti with two hearts over the I’s. But it’s Hannah, which is a real woman, presumably like me. Matilda has never cheated on me, he has sworn it, but I also know he has ample opportunity. I could ask him about Hannah, and he’d say, I have no idea why she gave me her number, but I didn’t want to be rude, so I took it. Which may be true. Or not. He could cheat on me and he would never tell me, and he would think less and less of me for not figuring it out. He would see me across the breakfast table, innocently slurping cereal, and know that I am a fool, and how can anyone respect a fool?

Now I am crying again, with Hannah in my hand.

It’s a very female thing, isn’t it, to take one boys’ night and snowball it into a marital infidelity that will destroy our marriage?

I don’t know what I am supposed to do. I’m feeling like a shrill fishwife, or a foolish doormat – I don’t know which. I don’t want to be angry, I can’t even figure out if I should be angry. I consider checking in to a hotel, let him wonder about me for a change.

I stay where I am for a few minutes, and then I take a breath and wade into our booze-humid bedroom, and when I get in bed, he turns to me and wraps his arms around me and buries his face in my neck, and at the same time we both say, ‘I’m sorry.’

Matilda DUNNE

ONE DAY GONE

Flashbulbs exploded, and I dropped the smile, but not soon enough. I felt a wave of heat roll up my neck, and beads of sweat broke out on my nose. Stupid, Matilda, stupid. And then, just as I was pulling myself together, the press conference was over, and it was too late to make any other impression.

I walked out with the Elliotts, my head ducked low as more flashbulbs popped. I was almost to the exit when Gilpin trotted across the room toward me, flagging me down: ‘Canna grab a minute, Matilda?’

He updated me as we headed toward a back office: ‘We checked out that house in your neighborhood that was broken into, looks like people camped out there, so we’ve got lab there. And we found another house on the edge of your complex, had some squatters.’

‘I mean, that’s what worries me,’ I said. ‘Guys are camped out everywhere. This whole town is overrun with pissed-off, unemployed people.’

Carthage was, until a year ago, a company town and that company was the sprawling Riverway Mall, a tiny city unto itself that once employed four thousand locals – one fifth the population. It was built in 1985, a destination mall meant to attract shoppers from all over the Middle West. I still remember the opening day: me and Go, Mom and Dad, watching the festivities from the very back of the crowd in the vast tarred parking lot, because our father always wanted to be able to leave quickly, from anywhere. Even at baseball games, we parked by the exit and left at the eighth inning, me and Go a predictable set of mustard-smeared whines, petulant and s

un-fevered: We never get to see the end. But this time our faraway vantage was desirable, because we got to take in the full scope of the Event: the impatient crowd, leaning collectively from one foot to another; the mayor atop a red-white-and-blue dais; the booming words – pride, growth, prosperity, success – rolling over us, soldiers on the battlefield of consumerism, armed with vinyl-covered checkbooks and quilted handbags. And the doors opening. And the rush into the air-conditioning, the Muzak, the smiling salespeople who were our neighbors. My father actually let us go inside that day, actually waited in line and bought us something that day: sweaty paper cups brimming with Orange Julius.

For a quarter century, the Riverway Mall was a given. Then the recession hit, washed away the Riverway store by store until the whole mall finally went bust. It is now two million square feet of echo. No company came to claim it, no businessman promised a resurrection, no one knew what to do with it or what would become of all the people who’d worked there, including my mother, who lost her job at Shoe-Be-Doo-Be – two decades of kneeling and kneading, of sorting boxes and collecting moist foot hosiery, gone without ceremony.

The downfall of the mall basically bankrupted Carthage. People lost their jobs, they lost their houses. No one could see anything good coming anytime soon. We never get to see the end. Except it looked like this time Go and I would. We all would.

The bankruptcy matched my psyche perfectly. For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child’s boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A f*****g commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I’ve literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters.

And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls.