Well before Senta was born, Marguerite and I had decided to end our union.
I remember the evening our dissolution began. I was lighting a cigarette on the back porch, and Marguerite came out to ask me a question.
“Jared?” she called, opening the back door and catching me with the first cigarette that I’d smoked in twenty years.
Holly Martins, the office intern, had given it to me.
That morning Holly had said, for no particular reason that I could tell, “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.”
She was dropping off client files I had asked for. Holly didn’t know that it was my fifty-third birthday or that Marguerite and I had been arguing for the past four mornings about her quitting her management position at Rae, Wheeler, Johns, and Picket Financial Advisors. I only wanted her to work for seven more months, so we could take a trip to Rome before tightening our belts.
“I never wanted to go to Italy,” Marguerite had said that morning. “And I can’t take one more day of those sexist assholes.”
“Do you smoke?” I asked Holly later that day, a few hours after her unasked-for existentialist sound bite on the general failure of humankind.
“Yes,” she said. “Gitanes. They’re French.”
“Can I have one?”
She was wearing a flimsy, brown and pink dress that was both too short and too tight for proper office attire, but Mr. Angelo, our supervisor, was afraid to tell her that because it might be construed as sexual harassment.
She ran out of my cubicle, came back in less than a minute, and laid a nearly full pack of the French cigarettes before me. She smiled and stared into my eyes.
Holly was a pretty young woman in her twenties, rounded in ways that made me think of a comfortable sofa in a room full of hard chairs.
I had no idea that her unsolicited pronouncement, the cigarettes, and the faraway architectural vestiges of the Caesars would bring about such deep changes in me and my world.
For months after that day I thought that ideas sometimes worked like viruses, that if you heard even just one word at the right moment, dozens of lives, maybe hundreds, could be deeply impacted by a kind of mental contagion.
“What are you doing?” Marguerite asked that evening when I had just lit my first stubby little Gitane.
“Somebody . . .” I said and paused. I was thinking that if she had come out a minute before, I wouldn’t have been caught. “Somebody dared me, and I’m trying to win the bet.”
“By killing me?”
Marguerite had been treated for breast cancer six years earlier. They caught the few cells at a very early stage. That particular cancer was the least virulent variety, but it scared us both, and she, ever since then, had been on guard against carcinogens of all types. We no longer ate bacon, used aerosols, or allowed smoking anywhere nearby. Marge started meditating and exercised every morning for at least forty-five minutes. We never ate sweets, red meats, white flour, or starchy vegetables. She wouldn’t allow cell-phone use in the house and harried our congresswoman with a barrage of letters urging a ban on the use of microwaves near schools and hospitals and, for that matter, in any neighborhood that didn’t want the dangerous radiation pulsing through its inhabitants’ flesh.
“That’s why I’m doing it outside,” I said, taking a drag of the harsh smoke. Even after twenty years I felt that nicotine rush as if I had last savored it only yesterday.
“You won’t even put it out when I’m standing right here?”
“I’ll blow the smoke out the screen.”
“Don’t you understand?” she said. “One molecule of that poison could start my cancer all over. That’s why so many people who have never smoked die of lung cancer every year.”
People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.
I took another drag, and Marguerite hurried back into the house, slamming the door and throwing the bolt.
I was in my boxers and T-shirt on the screened-in porch, smoking that cigarette and loving every poisonous breath.
I rang the doorbell for an hour before breaking the living room window and climbing in that way. Marguerite ran out wild-eyed and indignant.
“What the hell are you trying to do?” she shouted.
“It was cold outside. What were you trying to do locking me out?”
“I was protecting my life,” she said as a pronouncement. “How can I trust a man who wants to fill my air with poison?”
“I’ll fix the window in the morning,” I replied. “Right now I’m going to bed.”
“Not my bed.”
“No,” I said, “mine. If you don’t want to get contact cancer from me, you can go sleep on the couch or in some motel that has smoke-free anti-allergen rooms.”
When I came downstairs in the morning, Marguerite was sitting at the dinette table drinking tea. Her eyes were both tired and troubled.
“Did you sleep?” I asked, going about the motions of making my French-press coffee.
“This is the end, you know.”
“Like existence,” I agreed, reminded of a phrase that Mrs. Anthony used in high school physics.
“What the fuck does that mean?” Marguerite had never before cursed in my presence.
“I know that it is,” I said, quoting my science teacher, “but I don’t know why.”
Marguerite stood up so violently that her cedar chair fell on its back. She held her teacup up high by its ear and, with subdued but elegant flair, let it drop. The china shattered under a spray of glittering amber liquid. She stormed out of the dinette. A few seconds later I could hear her footsteps overhead, marching into our bedroom.
When my coffee was finished, I told myself to go up there and apologize for something I didn’t quite understand. Child-rearing had taught me that understanding often comes after the apology, but even so I couldn’t make that climb.
Instead I made another cup of bitter coffee and remembered a story my father, Bill Thistle, used to tell about himself and his friend Emir Rolf.
“When we lived in Cincinnati,” Dad would say, “Rolfie worked the midnight shift at Westerly Fabrications, and I worked for a glove maker in the afternoon. I’d get home at eleven and wake him up. He’d get out of the bed, and I’d jump in.”
I loved that story. Something about the burly men and that one bed that did double duty seemed like snugly tied shoes or tucked-in sheets. Their life was balanced and trusting.
“But what if one of you got sick?” I would always ask my dad.