We Are Water. Wally Lamb
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I would have thought you were crazy … Agnello: that was that judge’s name. Mr. Agnello … Had there been signs all along that she might be bisexual? Cues that I’d missed right from the beginning? …
Annie’s Hygienic show caught the interest of a Connecticut magazine features writer who drove out to our house and interviewed Annie about her work. She’d brought along a photographer, so there was a photo shoot, too. I was happy for Annie. One door kept opening onto another door, and she deserved that. And I guess this was crass of me, but the fact that people had actually begun paying her for her work somehow, in my mind, legitimized her efforts. This was a career, not an emotional disorder. I should stop playing psych detective and just relax. Celebrate her accomplishments instead of stewing about her creative process. She worked so hard and with such dedication down there in our basement, to the soundtrack of the furnace’s drone and the washing machine’s agitation. Good for her!
But until that Connecticut magazine article came out, I hadn’t realized the extent to which agitation fueled Annie’s art. Eventually it dawned on me that her “no trespassing” rule had been my escape hatch, too. I’d been allowed the luxury of assuming that The Dancing Scissors, The Cowgirls’ Revolt, and Buckingham Palace Confidential were playful. Satirical. Proof that my intense and sometimes morose wife had a lighter side, too. But in “Annie Oh’s Angry Art,” the writer said that my wife’s compositions emerged from “the blast furnace of her pent-up rage.” That they were “howls of protest against a suffocating middle-class domesticity” and the many ways in which society “tethers women to the mundane.” The mundane? Had Annie been referring to Rice-A-Roni or me? Was Diana’s rejection of Charles in favor of Magic Johnson metaphorical? The UPS driver who made deliveries to our house was a good-looking young black guy. Reggie, his name was. Someone she knew from way back, she said. Twice I’d gotten home from work a little early and found the two of them chatting at the front door. I couldn’t quite imagine that she’d cheat on me, but was I being naïve? The scientist in me advised objectivity, but the husband in me had just been put on alert.
“Good article, don’t you think?” I said, when I looked up from Connecticut magazine to her. I was hoping she’d say she’d been misquoted. Misunderstood. Instead, she said, “Pretty good. It’s weird to see yourself in a magazine, though. I feel … exposed, I guess.”
“Well, isn’t that what artists want? Exposure?”
She shrugged.
“Good picture of you.”
She made a face. “I wish my hair didn’t look so flat,” she said. “I can’t believe that, on the one day I was having my picture taken for a magazine, our hair dryer died.”
“Yeah, well … It’s interesting what it says about your work.”
No response.
“I mean, who knew you were so angry?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Orion. Maybe someone who was bothering to pay attention.” She walked out of the room.
I tossed the magazine onto the coffee table, got up, and followed her down the stairs to the basement. For a minute or more, I watched her yank towels out of the washing machine and slam them into the dryer. “You know something?” I said. “I don’t exactly appreciate you projecting your own marital shortcomings onto me.”
She turned and faced me, furious. “Do me a favor,” she said. “Speak English, not psychology.”
“Okay. Sure. Somebody in this marriage hasn’t been paying much attention to the other person, but it sure as hell isn’t me.”
“Oh, right. You’re just the perfect husband, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m the imperfect husband. But I think you’ve got it ass-backward as far as who’s been ignoring who.”
“Oh, really? Gee, Dr. Oh, I’m so sorry for ‘projecting,’ as you put it. And for having a career of my own.”
It was April. I had just done our taxes. “Yeah, speaking of careers, you know how much I contributed to our income this past year? Sixty-two grand. And you know how much you made? A whopping seven hundred dollars. So I think you’d better thank your lucky stars instead of bitching about my career.”
“Oh, you’re right as usual, Dr. Oh. Thanks so much for throwing that in my face and helping me see the light.” And with that, she lifted the lid of our top-loading washing machine and slammed it down. Lifted it again and slammed it. Lifted, slammed. Thanks in part to “Annie Oh’s Angry Art,” we had just entered the thrust-and-parry phase of our marriage.
Over the next several days, each of us accused the other of myriad slights and failures, large and small. The fighting exhausted us both, and our lives were already pretty exhausting. She began giving me the single-syllable treatment. “Good day today?” “Yup.” “Want to get a sitter this weekend? Go see a movie or something?” “Nah.” In the midst of that uneasy near-silence, I reread that Connecticut magazine article and came upon a couple of paragraphs I’d missed the first time. She’d told the reporter that, once upon a time, another artist had lived on the grounds of the house where we lived—a black laborer who’d taken up painting—and that she’d discovered one of his “compositions” that had been left behind. I knew the one she was talking about: a crazy-looking circus scene we’d found when we were cleaning out the attic. To my mind, it was strictly amateur, not to mention a little freaky-looking, and I’d wanted to throw it out along with the other junk up there. But Annie had said not to. It had “spoken to her,” she told that reporter, which was news to me, and when she set up her studio in the basement, she’d brought it down there for inspiration. (Oh, she’d set up that work space? So much for the work I’d done for her down there.) In the article, she said she might even have “seen” this would-be artist, who was long dead by the time we moved in. Had seen him twice, in fact. Once out back in the yard—a big, muscular guy in overalls looking up at her as she stood at one of the upstairs windows—and another time down in her studio. Both times, she said, he’d looked right at her, nodded, and then faded away. It hadn’t scared her to see him, she said; it had reassured her. Oh great, I remember thinking. Now she was seeing ghosts? Then how come I’d never heard about this? No, I figured, she wasn’t seeing people that weren’t there, except maybe in a dream she’d had. More likely, she had told the writer that because, hey, who doesn’t love a good ghost story? It wasn’t like Annie to fabricate stuff like that, but since she’d become an artist, she’d exhibited all kinds of new behaviors. And so I didn’t challenge her on it. “Annie Oh’s Angry Art” had already caused problems for us. I let it drop.
I finally got us a referral to a marriage counselor, despite Annie’s suspicion that the deck would be stacked in my favor because she’d be the only person in the room who wasn’t a therapist. I hired us a sitter for Tuesday evenings. (Katie had been my student coordinator for Date Rape Awareness Week.) And so for the next several weeks, Annie and I drove to Glastonbury to see Suzanne in her office full of philodendrons and ferns and hand-thrown clay pots that she had made, glazed, and fired in her wood-stoked kiln. She gave us one of those pots at the end of our first session—an imperfect one. A piece had broken off and been glued back on. “My point is this,” Suzanne said, passing her finger over the crack. “This is where the pot is strongest now: at the place where it had been broken.”
“How was tango class tonight?” Katie would ask when we returned home from our marriage counseling sessions. I’d invented our tango lessons so that I didn’t have to tell her we were trying to fix our marriage.
“Great. How were the kids?”
“Super good! They’re such cuties. And you know, I think it’s super cool that you guys are learning the tango. I wish my parents weren’t such fuddy-duddies about stuff like that. Get out of their comfort zone? Forget it. They’d rather just sit there watching TV.”
Whether or not we were doing the tango up there in Glastonbury, we were definitely out of our comfort zone. But it