after a while I noticed how much I looked forward to her coming home at night. After dinner, the two of us would sometimes walk down the street for ice cream. She had hazel eyes, thin, wavy brown hair, and olive skin. The hair resting thinly on a delicate skull held an introspective, self-doubting, reasonable, forceful, somewhat dignified mind. She wanted to get out of kids’ programming and work in hard news, wanted to see the world. Digger had friends who could help. In the fall of that year, two Sudanese guys had blown a hole in the USS Cole as it refueled in Yemen. The new trend in terrorism, Robin said, was asymmetrical, like a bottle of botulism in a New York City reservoir. She wanted intensity and danger. She was so pretty that guys would stare at us as we walked down the block. Sometimes I worried that one of them would try to kill me.
Eileen and I split, and I thought for sure it would change things. I remember standing in the bathroom when no one else was home, examining Robin’s tongue scraper, and found myself pondering the wall that separated our bedrooms, wondering if I could tunnel through it to find her there asleep. There were moments where I’d given up, moments where I got obsessed, moments where I was repelled, moments where I’d grown too emotionally attached. I felt feverish and sick whenever Digger spent the night, trying not to listen while brushing my teeth, long sick sleepless nights until he left for some war zone in East Timor, until he moved back to Prague for good. In the mornings Robin and I had those nattering exchanges old couples have, bickering in front of our housemates or alone, about the missing butter or how long to boil an egg. If her insomnia plagued her, she’d shoot me a look—and I can remember now, the rush of blood in my face. I felt somewhat powerless, and assumed it would pass.
She’d ask my opinion on her clothing before work in the morning, she’d notice my haircut or suggest I stop chewing ice before I cracked a tooth. I wanted her to love me. There was this basis forming beneath us. Sometimes we walked together to the nearby community center for our morning laps. I’d spy on her from underwater, her thin arms balletic and almost lazy in their strokes, a weird, improper technique, her legs kicking furiously, frothing the water around her.
Julie took a job in Atlanta. Nedd moved out. The housemate thing collapsed. Rishi and I found a place in Fells Point. Robin moved into an apartment alone, two rooms with a refrigerator under the counter and the smallest kitchen sink you ever saw. It was fall. One night I brought her flowers and beer and got a home-cooked meal. She was my friend, she took pity on me, I was a pitiful tortured person who could make her laugh. A wall of books greeted me when I walked into the apartment, film theory, life on the Serengeti, prehistoric pottery of the Colorado Plateau, whatever she was interested in.
She didn’t want me, maybe didn’t trust me, saw something missing, wanted less, a lighter commitment, or was holding out for someone who could take care of things down the line. I couldn’t cope with her withholding, couldn’t talk to her about us. I played the part of the ironic, submissive romantic, and she played the partially compliant friend of the opposite sex, sexually complicated, rigid, obsessive, a tease. I was protective and patient but losing hope. She was emotionally damaged by the death of her brother and her parents’ divorce.
On a weekday morning in December, some lady blew through an intersection and T-boned Robin’s Jetta. Thus began the period of her concussion. It lasted through the spring with a sort of merciless momentum. The nausea alone almost killed her. She wore sunglasses at work, had trouble looking at a screen, couldn’t tolerate light or music or ambient noise. Went to neurologists, did brain-rehabilitation exercises, memorized colored playing cards. I came and went, brought groceries, made phone calls to her auto-body place and health insurance. I still recall the soft shush of a beanbag she tossed from one hand to the other, crossing the midline.
Indoors at night she wore shades under a floppy wide-brimmed hat, looking like a Russian double agent, one I called Farvela Du Harvelfarv. By cooking for her in the stuffy apartment, I earned the right to sit quietly while she talked to her mother, rubbing a certain spot on her temple while she cried, wondering whether she’d ever recover. She became softer, less guarded, quietly resting beside me, resigned to a constant migraine-type vertigo. But because it wouldn’t end, it seemed to get worse. She couldn’t exercise. Went to bed at eight. Was sad and strange to herself.
Overcome by a wave of anguish, she slept with me. In that way, we began sleeping together. I think it was, even for her, a consolation. And yet, I couldn’t help feeling, as I learned to take on her bottomless fears of permanent damage, that the inordinate conditions under which she lived had forced her to surrender. I remember pulling her onto my lap, kissing her head in different places. She was so vulnerable and open. I wished we could always live that way.
What I knew about Robin at twenty-six has since been overwritten by our twelve years together, by the fuzzing of boundaries that separate us, by events we faced beyond our abilities, by the sound of a four-note wooden xylophone our son liked to beat the shit out of at five A.M., and by the immutable cycles of birth and sleep. It’s not an excuse, for anything really, but there were nights Beanie woke up screaming every fifteen minutes. I could count on one hand the times in his life he slept more than two hours straight. It became a secret among us, like domestic beatings, what went on in our house after dark.
Sometimes I blamed our daughter, who fell between the mattress and the wall, or had bears in her dreams, or the rain upset her and drove her out of bed. Sometimes I blamed my wife, who never did figure out how to sleep, who needed protection from the chaos, and wore earplugs and a satin eye mask, and had a bag of prescription drugs she kept hidden in her underwear drawer, and in an emergency had to be shaken awake, and couldn’t go back to bed or take naps during the day, and in sleep debt quickly spiraled into anxiety and short-term mania.
But I woke up smoothly and easily when he screamed, and took him from the crib at the foot of our bed and carried him away and fed him or sang him a song, and he went back down for a while. Then I wandered from the bedroom to the couch to the futon in the basement, helpless and itinerant, waiting for his cry, so that the silence became loud, and the quiet throbbed and roared through the stillness like a marching band. If I lay there long enough, I split the worry into so many pieces it started to glitter, and I got dizzy and hopeful and felt grateful for the sounds of cars, birds, dawn.
I did the nights. In the morning I rested on the couch half-dead while Robin got them dressed. Sometimes as I lay there, my daughter came close and made a little ponytail on the top of my head. There were mornings when I wished I could escape or be put out of my misery, but the accumulation of good behavior, the years placed end to end, had also made me strong, although sometimes it occurred to me that it was all too fucking weird, as I struggled to stay the course, all this goodness and responsibility; it seeded an impulse toward endless badness and rebellion.
Sometimes as I lay there Robin bent down to see how I was, touching my hand with a look of eagerness or tenderness in her eyes, almost like hunger or lust, a look I didn’t see much in any other context, asking gently for a recap of how bad it had been. Sometimes she brought me toast. I think my pain meant something to her. I think she enjoyed my suffering almost as much as I did. Like lovers using clamps and whips, it somehow brought us closer.
She gave them life, gave them milk from her breasts, nursed them through sickness and colds, made a throaty sound when she hadn’t seen them all day, moaning, kissing them all over. She did the days. I handed over my paychecks, any option money or royalties that hadn’t dried up; she pooled it with her money, paying the bills, taking them to kid parties, doctors, setting up playdates, hanging with other mothers, deciding on Kaya’s preschool, wondering if I could take a more active role in decisions. Sitting in a little chair by the door of Kaya’s classroom last fall for three straight weeks, her back breaking, trying to get Kaya to calm down and hang in there. She was strong, strong-willed, and shouldn’t have been surprised that her daughter was,
