So when Eliza calls on my cell 6:15 AM, waking me up the first morning of my new life in my new room, $80 a week, white walls, single bed, one old bureau with empty drawers hanging out like dog tongues, jagged crack running down one wall, mixed smells of mildew, plaster, salt sea air, camphor flakes and clean sheets I brought with me, knowing I’d need my own – I think back to when we were broke and remember everything a wife did.

              “You canceled your phone?” she says. “You didn’t cancel, you skipped on the bill. And your rent, and there you are in that tawdry slum vacation town you grew up in, a PhD – selling junkfood to high school girls? When are you going to grow up? And accept your responsibilities as a father, if nothing else?”

              “I’m sending your five hundred,” I say quietly, “Don’t yell, I’m doing what I can.” I’m remembering it wasn’t so long ago, 1998, we went home from the restaurant and had sex, good sex, though it wasn’t a sex night.

              “I don’t want five hundred,” she whispers. I say I know, I promise to try, I promise to see, I promise to think, I promise again to make up for not doing everything I promised before. “This time I mean it, I promise,” I say.

              “I want back the man I married!” she yells hanging up. Boop-be-boop! Four more soldiers dead in Iraq. I turn off the radio. I tried writing the book and couldn’t, and went on teaching English, then pretended to write, then said, “I’m stuck.” Eliza said, “You’re working yourself too hard. Take a month off. Relax.” I took three months off and met the Dean of Studies and switched from English to French. And it was alright, it was possible. My scrub jobs helped, and Eliza was making so much that money wasn’t the problem. The problem was once Eliza and I weren’t broke any more, we were poor.

12

  

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