Safe from the Neighbors Read Online Free Page B

married couples, though it’s hard to say because people don’t talk about this subject unless sitting across a desk from somebody getting paid one hundred seventy-five dollars an hour to listen sympathetically and nod every thirty seconds. What I can say for certain is that one afternoon when I was about twelve, I discoveredthe key to my father’s closet, where he kept most of his guns, and when I opened it, intending to mess around with a Japanese rifle he’d brought home from the war, I came across a box of Trojans. He had eight of them, all wrapped in red cellophane. The next time I saw the inside of that closet—a couple of years later, when he handed me the key and told me to bring him his shotgun because a cottonmouth in the backyard needed killing—the box was still there, its contents providing evidence that my parents hardly had a sex life.
    I laughed at the time and told myself he must be really clumsy if his wife wouldn’t let him touch her. I never stopped to wonder if maybe they weren’t both just tired—not only of each other, or of working hard for next to nothing, but of life in general.
    Were it not for her writing, I might have wondered the same thing about Jennifer. No matter how worn out she might seem when she came home from school, she’d spend an hour or two at her desk before dinner. The study is just off the kitchen, behind a set of French doors. These were always closed when she was working on a poem, but I could still see her in there when I walked by. Most of the time she was just staring at the computer screen, her elbow occasionally propped on the desk, her chin resting in her palm, her eyes closed, her lips moving silently. I assumed she was trying out a line, seeing how it sounded before writing it down.
    She wrote first thing in the morning too sometimes, and she was doing that when I got up the day after Ellis came over for dinner. Her classes started later than mine—ten o’clock most days—and she usually spent her extra time grading papers, but since the fall term had barely begun she wasn’t yet being bombarded with bad freshman essays.
    I tapped on the door. At first she didn’t react, just sat there in her bathrobe frowning at the screen. So I tapped again, harder.
    This time she looked up and frowned. “Yeah?”
    I cracked the door open. “Working on a poem?”
    “I
was
.”
    I’d love to say that the abruptness with which Jennifer responded to me when nobody else was present had its origins in her difficult artistic temperament. Unfortunately, that would be a lie. She hadn’t always been like that, but when our marriage was starting to sour I often was. I wanted to sit in my armchair every morning and read the Memphis paper, and sit there at night with big biographies of Southern demagogues like J. K. Vardaman, Theodore G. Bilbo and Pitchfork Ben Tillman. I’d react with annoyance when she interrupted me, wanting to discuss some problem one of the girls was having or to tell me about some administrator up at Delta State. Once, when I was engrossed in a Huey Long biography I’d probably already read three or four times, she pulled it out of my hands, stuck a finger in it to mark my place and held it against her breast. “Did you hear what I just asked you?” she said. I must’ve stared at her with a confused expression—I didn’t have the faintest idea. She gave the book back. “You aren’t interested,” she said, “in any life that isn’t over.”
    Now, seeing her sitting there looking pissed off, I was tempted to slam the door and break every pane of glass in the damn thing. This sudden rush of anger, if I’d taken time to consider it, should have puzzled me. Things had been like this for a long time, and I hadn’t thought of breaking anything before. “I was just wondering,” I said, doing my best to sound calm, “whether you’ve had any breakfast.”
    Winston Churchill is supposed to have once told Lady Violet Bonham Carter, “We are all