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CHAPTER 1
Caught Up
The vision started coming when I was nine. It was always the same: I was alone, standing on the brick patio in front of our house, watching thick clouds above the mountains turn shades of red and purple, then draw themselves together and spiral. Whirlpool, hurricane, galaxy. The wind picked up, my hair whipped my face, and I felt — knew — that the world was on the cusp of a cataclysm. Then came a tugging in my middle, as if I were a kite about to be yanked up by a string attached just below my navel. Takeoff was imminent; all I had to do was surrender — close my eyes, relax my limbs — and I would be catapulted, belly-first, into the vortex.
The vision ended there. I never left the patio.
When I told my mother, she said, God speaks to his children in dreams. She said we should always be ready for the Lord's return: lead a clean life and stay busy with our work, keeping an eye skyward. I pictured my mother up on our roof, sitting in a folding chair, snapping beans.
I don't remember when the vision stopped coming. Somewhere along the way I forgot about it. I grew up and married a good man who cries at baptisms and makes our children carry spiders outside instead of smashing them; who never goes to sleep without kissing some part of my body. He says he wants to know, on his deathbed, that his lips have touched every square inch. In grad school, when I told him I was attracted to one of his friends who'd made a pass at me, he said, "Show me what you would do with him, if you could."
Three years ago — seventeen years into this marriage — I fell in love with a man who lives nine hundred miles away. Ten months of talking daily with this man, until finally he bought train tickets and arranged a meeting date. We'll just — pick a car, he said on the phone. Any car, so long as it's empty.
The day he suggested this, I called my mother and told her about the affair. I told her I wanted the infidelity to stop, but planned to keep the man as a friend. I said I loved my husband and wanted to protect my marriage. What I didn't say was that I only knew I was supposed to want to protect it; thought that if I did the right thing, eventually my heart would follow.
My mother was quiet.
Please tell me you won't keep him, she said. In any way.
Are the children all right? she said. Can you put one of them on?
After we hung up, I went for a long run, then walked the last block up our street's steep incline. A cloud covered the sun so the entire length of pavement was in shade, and then the cloud pulled back, all at once; the light sped down the street toward me, and in those few seconds it looked like the road itself was moving, a conveyor belt that would scoop me up from underneath. The old vision returned. The upward tug in my belly. I recognized the feeling — what I felt every time the other man, the faraway man, told me what he would do if he had me in person, my wrists pinned over my head.
It would be devotional, he'd said. I would lay myself on your tongue like a Communion wafer.
This time, in the vision, the other man was with me. I would like to say he was standing beside me — that we were equals — but he was the size of a toddler. I was holding him. He was limp and barely breathing, his skin gray, the color of my two-year-old son's face the night we rushed him to the ER for croup, and I knew the reason I was about to be caught up was because I was supposed to carry the man to God and lay him in His lap so that God could ... what? I didn't know.
Bullshit, the man said when I told him about the vision. I'm already there.
My turn, he said. You, me, walking in the woods. It's winter. We've just had two feet of snow. We're playing together like kids. I'm chasing you, and when I catch you, I push you into a drift and lie on top of you. Above us the sky rips open and God is there, smiling down, and what he is saying, over and over, is Yes.
I wish I knew God your way, I said.
You will, he said. All you have to do is show up. Grand Central, February thirteenth, nine A.M.
Tell me you'll be there, he said.
Two years later, when I called my mother to tell her how much I missed the man, how on the one hand I wished I had gone through with our planned meeting yet at the same time regretted even the phone sex, because if we hadn't done that we might have been able to save the friendship; when I told her that something inside me was weeping all the time, and that I hoped there would be a literal Second Coming and Consummated Kingdom because then the man and I could spend eternity just talking, she said, Wait — phone sex? And I said, I thought I told you, and she said, You told me you had an affair, and I said, No I didn't, we didn't, not in that way, and she said, I must have assumed, and I said, I can't believe all this time you've been thinking I went through with it.
You might as well have, she said. It's all the same in God's eyes.
CHAPTER 2
Decomposition: A Primer for Promiscuous Housewives
I: Algor Mortis: early postmortem stage in which the body gradually loses heat to the ambient environment.
Two weeks before Christmas your husband says, Let's take a walk through Rock City, and you say, Sure, let's, though at this point neither of you cares about seeing the Enchanted Trail with its twenty thousand glittering lights. You park at the coffee shop across the street and go in for a cup of Yogi Calm, choosing this flavor not because you're about to kill the man you've been having an affair with (you don't know this yet), but because you think calm sounds nice this time of year, and they're out of the chinaberry/jasmine, and it's too late in the day for caffeine.
You skip the lights and walk up Fleetwood, which curves around behind Rock City. It's a clear night, cold enough to see your breath. Your husband is silent. You pass the churning pump shed and the owner's house, a yellow Cape Cod with four dormers — three identical, the fourth oddly elongated with an arched transom — thinking, as you always do when you pass this house, that the incongruity must make sense from the inside.
At the back of the albino deer enclosure you and your husband pause to look over the stucco wall. None of the deer are out. You take a sip of tea and it's so hot the skin peels from the roof of your mouth, and it's this sensation you'll come to associate with the moment, after months of lying, you finally decide to answer your husband's question truthfully.
You're in love with him, aren't you.
Yes, you say, probing a delicate strip of scalded tissue with the tip of your tongue.
When you get home your four children are sprawled in front of the new flatscreen. They're watching a SpongeBob episode in which Patrick runs halfway up a mountain, falls off, then repeats the action, each time hoping he'll make it to the top.
Upstairs, your husband says to them, then goes into the bedroom and closes the door, so it's up to you to pay the babysitter, manage the teeth-brushing, book-reading, bedtime-praying, hall light–adjusting.
Tell Daddy to come up, your six-year-old daughter says. I want a kiss from Daddy.
Your husband is curled into the fetal position on his side of the king-sized bed. Beside him, lying faceup, is the man with whom you've been having the distance affair. You're not surprised to see the other man in this particular spot — in your mind he's been interjecting himself along this length of bed for the past ten months. Your husband's shoulders are quivering and you know you should say or do something to comfort him but you're shocked to discover that your only concern is for the man in the center of the mattress.
You lie down on your side of the bed, gently touch the man's forehead to wake him up and tell him that the time has come to say goodbye. The skin is cooler than it should be.
You sit up. Feel the man's cheeks, chest, arms. He's cold everywhere. You straddle the body, thinking ABC (remembering, only fleetingly, how often you'd imagined yourself in exactly this position) but he must have taken his last breath while you were out walking, because a) the airway is clear but b) he is not breathing and c) you cannot induce circulation even after twenty minutes of CPR.
You collapse beside the man, wrap your warm hand around one of his, the fingers already so stiff you have to push them down.
You knew your confession would do this.
You thought it would happen gradually.
What does he do for you that I can't, your husband says.
The following day is marked by a strange but not unwelcome sense of peace. Chicken broth, lit candles, hot baths. Enya's Winter album. There is a sweetness, a rightness, a bigger-than-yourselfness to the day. Under different circumstances you would call it a holiness. The death is as it should be, you know this intellectually; in fact, the overall intellectual quality of your mood is striking, the absence of raw feeling; though you've read about grief, and know that shock is the earliest stage, so you wonder if you truly feel nothing or if you feel so much it is beyond the capacity of a human body to process it, the nervous system therefore — immediately, mercifully — converting every rising emotion into a sensation of nothingness.
The sun is out. Dark branches splay themselves against an ecstatic blue. You decide to take a long drive, alone, on the one-lane highway that leads out the back of Lookout Mountain. Fresh snow bends limbs on the Georgia pines, narrowing the road, making it intimate.
You tell God you're grateful he has taken the burden of sin from you. You know it's the right thing to say.
In the front yard you pick clusters of holly and magnolia to arrange on the pillow around the man's head, thinking the least you can do is create a little beauty around the edges of death. But when you enter the bedroom you notice the man's skin has turned the color of wet newspaper. You smell menthol and burnt plastic and something like rotten Nilla wafers. You hold your breath and close your eyes while the word inaccessible lights up against the backs of your eyelids — the thing you wanted there in front of you but also as far away as the bottom of the ocean — and you remember how your husband said, when you were pregnant with your first child, inches from us but she might as well be on another planet, and it is perhaps this realization — you are shut out — that makes you drop the leaves onto the wood floor, grab the bedpost and hold on and say, to your husband, still curled up on his side of the bed: But I wanted him.
I checked the body out, your husband says. It's fucking wax.
He sits up.
You didn't think it was real, did you?
You and your husband meet with your pastor, who comes over after you've put the children to bed. He brings his wife. The two of them somehow manage to look both grave and jovial (infidelity is serious; all is forgiven). You sit in the living room. You've dimmed the lights. Before anyone speaks you hand the pastor your confession, which you've typed because a) you will cry if forced to speak and b) you want to spare your husband hearing the details one more time and c) you feel the confession is authentic and moving, that it has literary merit, and perhaps the pastor could use it to help others in similar situations, or even reference it in a sermon, and in this way the anguish you've created might acquire meaning.
We're standing on holy ground, the pastor begins.
You weep.
Confessions of this kind tend to trickle out, he says. New bits of information can leak for months, which slows the healing process. If there's anything you haven't told your husband, now's the time.
You ask if you could please have your confession back. Read aloud the bits about the texts, the recordings of your voice you created using GarageBand, the nude photos you e-mailed. The phone sex.
Like Jacob, the pastor says when you finish, you have wrestled with God and overcome. But make no mistake: those who wrestle come away wounded.
You will walk with a limp for the rest of your life, the pastor says.
You don't know if he means you or your husband.
II: Bloat: in which gases associated with anaerobic metabolism accumulate, creating enough pressure to force liquids from the eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and anus.
Go to classroom parties. Help your four-year-old make a gingerbread house out of a milk carton and graham crackers. Admire his roof, onto which he crowds the entire Dixie-cupful of gumdrops and peppermint disks. Comfort him when the roof slides off; wipe his nose, encourage a more balanced distribution of candy.
Shower, shave legs, apply makeup. Attend your husband's departmental Christmas party. Force the eggnog and candy cane–shaped cookies. Listen to yourself say, over and over: Yes, four is a lot of work, but it's also a lot of fun.
Stuff envelopes with the annual letter in which you have the children answer a sharing question: What does Christmas mean to you? What do you want from Santa? If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?
Decorate the tree with the ornaments you've purchased for your children, one per child per year, dates written in Sharpie on ballerina feet and bunny ears, hockey sticks and electric guitars with tensile fishing-line strings.
Help the six-year-old wire the pinecone angel the two of you made to the top of the tree.
Do not forget to take pictures.
I'm going to get rid of it, you tell your husband. I'm going to roll it up in a sheet and drag it outside.
Leave it, your husband says. I need you to see that it won't decompose.
I won't look at it, you say.
Look all you want, he says.
To prove yourself, you roll the corpse over to your side of the bed. One of the arms winds up twisted beneath the torso — a horrifying, impossible bend in the wrist. You resist the urge to adjust. You slide over to your husband's side of the bed, across the midsection, which is a bit moist. You wish there were a stench, something to permanently disgust you, but there is only the menthol/plastic/cookie scent, which you actually don't find unpleasant.
You turn your back to the man's body and wrap your arms around your husband's chest from behind, clinging to his torso like it's a buoy. He doesn't move. You lift your shirt so he can feel the warmth of your breasts pressing into his back.
Your friends tell you to look at the body.
Give yourself permission to grieve, they say. Spend time with it, then bury the thing.
You assume the passage of a week will make looking at him easier — you will see the horrific side of death — but the corpse remains, to you, flawless. You notice some swelling in the joints, but the lips are full, the skin on the face smooth. The abdomen is a bit paunchy, but wasn't this one of the things you admired about the man, his refusal to become a slave to the gym when he hit middle age? The way he embraced his own imperfections, and yours?
You find a Christian therapist named Bobbie in the yellow pages. You choose her not because she's Christian, but because her office is in Hixson, as far from Lookout Mountain as you can get without leaving the city limits. Bobbie asks you to list ten positive and ten negative memories from your childhood. You tell her that's not why you came.
You tell her there's a watermelon in your stomach.
You tell her that every sentence you were in the habit of crafting for the other man — every thought and feeling you were accustomed to sharing — is now taking up residence inside your body.
You tell her you might just need to unload.
I thought you were here because you wanted to save your marriage, Bobbie says.
That too, you say.
What we find, in most cases, she says, is that the woman lacked affirmation in her childhood. We'll identify the lies from your childhood and, using various techniques such as eye movement therapies, replace them with truths.
What if the truth is I'm in love with him? you say. What if the truth is he was the one I was supposed to marry?
I assume that biblical truth is what you're most concerned with, Bobbie says.
We talked about having a baby together, you say before you walk out.
III. Active Decay: in which the greatest loss of mass occurs. Purged fluids accumulate around the body, creating a cadaver decomposition island (CDI).
Christmas comes and goes. The children seem happy with their gifts, but you're not sure. It's hard to listen when they speak. They are loud and clamorous with need. Your husband requires constant reassurance. The body is still on your bed, though you've covered it with a sheet, which sags over the midsection of the body, rising to a peak at the toes. You spray Febreze and keep the bedroom door locked.
On drives up and down the mountain you use the Slow Traffic Pull Over spaces to park the van and crawl your hands around the steering wheel, around and around, listening to yourself repeat the other man's name to hear what he used to hear, your name to remember what it was like to listen. In the shower you trail handfuls of your own hair along the wet tiles, pull clusters of it from the drain. You remember what the man on your mattress said about yanking your hair; how he knew, without your telling him, that you'd like to be handled that way.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "I Want to Show You More"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Jamie Quatro.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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