Marital Problems

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Marital Problems
• Robin Romm (bio)

Victor and I crouch in the yard, trying to find where our five-year-old daughter, Lucy, has buried the bird. She made it a coffin—sweet, except that she made it out of my husband’s father’s binocular case. My husband didn’t know his father, a birder—a deadbeat birder to be more precise. So the binocular case came to him in a roundabout way a few months ago.

Junk from the kitchen remodel litters our yard—an old sink, pieces of hacked-apart tile—a hazard, a disgrace, a child’s wonder-land. As we search, Victor piles the debris in the corner.

“That fucking guy,” he says, trying to move a cast-iron sink basin.

We’ve been remodeling our kitchen for the better part of a year. That makes us sound fancier than we are. In truth, a guy’s installing Ikea cabinets and tile we got at a seconds sale. New lights, new wiring. For this budget refresher, I interviewed seven men in Carhartts, many of them hazy-pupiled, a few of them so expensive I couldn’t bear to relay the bids to Victor. I settled on Marco. [End Page 613]

Victor would like to sue Marco for leaving us without a working kitchen for months on end. Victor would like to take a cosmic flyswatter and squish him against the wall. Cork him in a bottle and sink him to the bottom of the sea.

“I think Marco’s having marital problems,” I tell him, moving a rock and peering under it, testing to see if the earth’s been disturbed.

“Whatever,” my husband says. “He can still find some guys to move this shit.” He has dirt on the top part of his shaggy sideburn. If he swipes at his brow again, he’ll wipe it into his eye. I don’t mention this to him. “His wife has nothing to do with this job.” Victor takes a piece of wood and hurls it at the corner. “Anyway, what makes you say that?”

“I can just tell,” I say.

Whenever I predict the dramas of other men, Victor frowns and squints his eyes. He doesn’t care, really, if I know such things about my female friends. He’ll often jump into the fray with that sort of gossip. He loves a good postpartum depression story, a colicky baby, an eating disorder. But when I surmise a man’s emasculating salary, his attraction to domineering women, his obvious lust for a clichéd paramour—a nanny, a personal trainer—Victor recoils. You don’t know that, he’ll say, and it becomes clear to me, the boy he was at sixteen.

“He wants to talk about it, but I never ask,” I say.

Marco’s hair curls around his forehead and his lips form surprisingly soft little pillows above a very perfect knob of a chin. He looks like Hansel all grown up, a fairy-tale boy with his tool kit and leather belt and paint-spattered ladder. Except that he isn’t happy, our Marco. He hasn’t figured out how to throw the witch in the oven. Instead, he finds himself married to her.

This is, at any rate, my theory, assembled through tattered bits of small talk. His wife, a Brazilian woman named Rosie, wants [End Page 614] kids. Marco mentioned this once while doctoring his coffee. But he doesn’t want the complication. He had a daughter from another marriage, and that child was the reason for the divorce. Marco always talks to me—no matter the subject (hardware, contracts, his wife) with a sultry little smirk.

I get the sense that Marco figures if he lingers in the kitchen long enough, I’ll finally lose my inhibition. My obvious attraction to his compact body, those muscles that look carved from soap, will overwhelm me. I’ll descend the stairs in a negligee, a look of raunchy hunger thickening my gaze. But I don’t feel like telling this to my husband. It’ll make him even more furious at the asshole hijacking our home. He’ll ratchet up the...