The Soul Thief_ A Novel - Charles Baxter [46]
My wife stood, swept a strand of hair aside from her forehead, and with a laugh said, “Well, it seems we have a gay son.” With the back of her hand, she wiped her cheek, a gesture I have always found endearing.
“Could be. But I doubt it.”
“Me, too. Well, we’re completely unsatisfactory parents for him anyway. In this household, if you came out of the closet to your parents, all you’d get is a bored yawn.”
I nodded. “That’s it. No closets here. With us, everybody says everything.” As she cleared the table, I settled in to add up some receipts, part of our months-long preparations for our income taxes.
Once, about a year ago, in the car as we drove along the back roads to one of Jeremy’s swim meets in the next town over, I said to Laura that she and I were like a couple of oxen hitched together, yoked, and that when we had first come out of the stable, no one had known how much work we were good for. As it had turned out, we had accomplished plenty; we were a good team. (We had met when I was still working for Amalgamated Gas and Electric, and she and I had endured periods of tight budgets and some of the terrible economies that can break a marriage.) She was of course offended by my remarks. Oxen? Yoked together? Not a kind analogy. Not very romantic. Her womanly honor was offended.
I’m not stupid. I know that no wife wants to be compared to an ox.
Laura, by the way, is now a collector and dealer in contemporary and classic quilts. I hadn’t known about quilting and the system of sales and trading in women’s quilts until I met her, but she knows all the networks, African American and white, and she knows all the collectors and the great artists of quilting. She has spent a lifetime learning this trade and learning this art. She loves the work and as an agent takes very little for herself.
In any case, I don’t see what is particularly romantic about a married couple raising their children and getting from day to day, and I said so in the car that afternoon. I made my case. The ordinary business of diapers and fevers and broken bones and drafty rooms and lost socks and schedules on the refrigerator door takes the shine off everything for a while. Women understand this better than men do. Why should any marriage with kids be starry-eyed? Romantic heat may start the process off, but dutifulness and pure stubbornness keep it going. Romance—this is my personal view—is a destructive myth after the age of nineteen. Most people give it up, and they should. Percy Bysshe Shelley may have been a great poet, but he had an aversion to raising the children he sired, and he avoided them, and they suffered; you can look it up.
Girls swoon over Jeremy. They can see that he’s a practical boy and will be a pragmatic man. Once he’s married, he’ll be steady. He’s a great prospect. Reliability is sexy. Of course, having good looks like his sweetens the whole deal. They attend the swim meets to see him in his Speedo, these girls, avid. They smile to themselves. Their eyes are wide and glistening.
But on that day, Laura was angered by what I had said. She went into a sulk, and even though Jeremy won his event with a personal-best time, she wouldn’t speak to me on the trip back home. It was the ox simile, I’m sure.
On the particular evening when Michael had enrolled himself into the Queer Nation, and my wife and I were having one of our ordinary after-dinner clean-ups—me doing the taxes, and Laura, my wife of almost two decades, rinsing the dishes in our suburban home in New