“What business?” he said, taking off his shoes and socks.
“About watching My Super Sweet 16.” Mindy turned off her light. “Sometimes I really do not get you. At all.”
James didn’t feel tired, so he left the room and went into his office. He sat at his desk, his feet bare, looking out the small window that framed the tiny courtyard. How many hours had he spent at this desk, looking out this window, and laboring on his book one word at a time? And for what? A lifetime of seconds wasted in front of his computer, endeavoring to re-create life when life was all around him.
Something’s got to change, he thought, remembering Lola.
He got into bed and lay stiffly next to his wife. “Mindy?” he said.
“Mmmm?” she asked sleepily.
“I do need sex,” he said. “By the way.”
“Fine, James,” she said into her pillow. “But you’re not getting it from me. Not tonight.”
Mindy fell asleep. James lay awake. Several pernicious sleepless seconds ticked by, then minutes and probably hours. James got up and went into Mindy’s bathroom. He rarely ventured there; if Mindy caught him in her bathroom, she would demand to know what he was “doing in there.” He’d better not be relieving himself, she would warn.
This time he did relieve himself, urinating carefully into the bowl without lifting the toilet seat. Searching for aspirin, he opened Mindy’s medicine cabinet. Like everything else in their lives, it hadn’t been cleaned out in years. There were three nearly empty tubes of toothpaste, a greasy bottle of baby oil, makeup in smudged containers, and a dozen bottles of prescription pills, including three bottles of the antibiotic Cipro dated October 2001—which Mindy had obviously hoarded for the family in case of an attack after 9/11—along with a bottle of malaria pills and antihistamines (for bites and rashes, the label read), and a container of sleeping pills, on which DANGER OF OVERDOSE was typed. Here was Mindy, he thought, prepared for any emergency, including the necessity of death. But not sex. He shook his head, then took one of the pills.
Back in his bed, James immediately fell into a brilliant Technicolor dream-filled sleep. He flew over the earth. He visited strange lands where everyone lived on boats. He swam across a warm salty sea. Then he had sex with a movie star. Just as he was about to come, he woke up.
“James?” Mindy said. She was already up, folding laundry before she went to the office. “Are you all right?”
“Sure,” James said.
“You were talking in your sleep. Moaning.”
“Ah,” James said. For a moment, he wished he could go back to his dream. Back to flying and swimming and having sex. But he was seeing Lola, he reminded himself, and got out of bed.
“What are you doing today?” Mindy demanded.
“Don’t know. Stuff,” he said.
“We need paper towels and Windex and garbage bags. And aluminum foil. And dog food for Skippy. The Eukanuba mini-chunks. Mini. It’s very important. He won’t eat the big chunks.”
“Can you make a list?” James asked.
“No, I cannot make a list,” Mindy said. “I’m done with doing everything and being everyone’s mama all the time. If you need a list, make it yourself.”
“But I’m the one doing the shopping,” James protested.
“Yes, and I appreciate it. But you need to do the whole job, not half of it.”
“Huh?” James said, thinking that this was yet another great beginning to a typical day in the life of James Gooch.
“I’ve given it a lot of thought,” Mindy said. “As you know, writing my blog has made me examine things I haven’t wanted to confront.”
Perhaps it had, James thought, but it didn’t
appear to have made Mindy any more sensitive. She just went on and on, running people over.
“And I’ve come to the conclusion,” she continued, “that it’s crucial to be married to another adult.” Before he could respond, Mindy rushed out of the room. “Aha!” he heard her exclaim, indicating that she’d had a burst of inspiration about her blog.
“One of the joys of not having it all is not doing it all,” Mindy wrote. “This morning I had a Network epiphany. ‘I’m not going to take it anymore!’ The constant doing: the laundry, the shopping, the folding, the lists. The endless lists. We all know what that’s like. You make a list for your husband, and then you have to spend as much time making sure he follows the list as it would have taken you to do the job yourself. Well, those days are over. Not in my household! No more.”
Satisfied, she went back into the bedroom for another round of hounding James. “One more thing,” she said. “I know your book comes out in six weeks, but you need to start writing another one. Right away. If the book is a success, they’re going to want a new one. And if it’s a failure, you need to be working on another project.”
James looked up from his underwear drawer. “I thought you didn’t want to play mama anymore.”