“Annie, ANNIE!”

That’s how I learned the difference between laughing with you and at you. I stood up and ripped off the wig. I tore it apart and stomped on the pieces. Gina looked up from her trick-or-treat bag, mouth full of chocolate and eyes full of wonder.

“I like your costume, Andy,” she said. “It’s better than mine.”

She dumped her candy on the floor and stacked all the peanut butter cups, our favorites, in neat-for her-towers of orange and brown wrapping. I knew she would eat all hers first, the opposite of me, who saved the best for last, after the popcorn balls and hard candies and plain milk chocolate.

“Here,” she said, pushing the peanut butter cups toward me. “You can have them.”

The next morning she would crawl into her daddy’s lap and he’d ask if she had a good Halloween. She’d say it was okay, but she didn’t get any peanut butter cups, knowing he’d drive to the Piggly Wiggly and buy her an entire box.

“Is it broken?” she asked, looking at the pieces of wig on the floor.

“I think so.”

“Mama’s going to be mad.”

“No, she’s not.”

“Yes, she will. She yelled at me for ruining my stupid costume.”

It was the first time I understood the mother Gina knew was different from my mama just as her daddy wasn’t my old man.

“Do you wanna play Clue?” she asked.

“Okay.”

“You can be Miss Scarlet,” she said as she pulled out the box. “I promise I won’t tell.”

Let’s Pretend We’re Married

Hot damn! What’s the chance the station scanner would find this oldie but goodie pulsating down at the left of the dial? It’s radio, of course, with the lyrics scrubbed squeaky clean, no forbidden words permitted, but not even the FCC can ruin this little seven-minute masterpiece. I intend to sing along to every syllable, even if means sitting in a parked car with the engine running while my counselor twiddles his thumbs, assuming some barely sublimated hostility is the only possible explanation for my chronic tardiness.

“You’re in an awfully good mood for someone who’s been sitting on a plane the last six hours,” Matt remarks when I finally stroll into his office, still humming Prince’s brilliant chorus.

“I heard a great song on the car radio tonight.”

“What?”

“You probably wouldn’t know it.”

“Of course not. The only music I listen to is Gregorian chant.”

“Are you serious?”

“No. Are you?”

Apparently my counselor has been following the career of the Artist Formerly Known As since catching an early gig at First Avenue in Minneapolis. Well, la-di-da. This goddamn priest always knows how to put me in my place.

“So which song was it?” he asks.

“Let’s Pretend We’re Married.”

Why did I bring this up? The arched eyebrow and skeptical smile can only mean the simple act of enjoying a song is about to be infused with portentous analysis and provide him with a perfect segue to an inquisition into personal responsibility. Yes, I insist, I was always safe during my little extracurricular activities. Of course I didn’t use condoms with Alice. Was he crazy? I might as well have branded Unfaithful on my forehead.

“Did you ever worry about passing along a disease?”

“I told you I was always safe.”

“That’s not the question I asked.”

“Of course I worried about it.”

“Did you ever think she suspected?”

And so on and so forth for the next fifty minutes.

Jesus Christ. I don’t know how I’m going to survive missing a week of browbeating and emotional intimidation. Next Friday is the day after Thanksgiving and I have a reprieve.

“Have a great holiday,” he says as I hand him the check.

Fuck you, I mutter as I walk out the door. What makes him such an expert on marriage?

Alice sighed and crawled into bed, a glass of chardonnay in hand to fortify herself for the challenge of plowing through the latest trade paperback selected by her book club to educate and edify. Fifty pages before lights out or else! I rolled on my stomach and grunted, too restless to sleep. I used to nod off at the drop of a hat. My wife would accuse me of narcolepsy and threaten to inject me with caffeine. That was another lifetime, before falling asleep meant having to wake up and crawl out of bed, shave and brush my teeth, put on my game face, convince the King of Unpainted Furniture I was obsessed with lumber prices and consumed with mortgage rates, higher rates equating a drop in residential home sales meaning fewer empty rooms begging to be filled with the affordable products of Tar Heel Heritage Furniture.

How the hell had I ended up a salesman? Worse yet, a successful salesman! The best goddamn salesman in the history of Tar Heel Heritage, better even than the King himself. Who would have believed I’d be a two-time runner-up for the national sales award by the American Home Furnishings Society? Who could have predicted I’d be recruited for a seat on the board of the North Carolina Furniture Association and chair its Government Affairs subcommittee, lobbying for protective tariffs on insidious foreign imports and testifying in support of legislation to decimate the right to collectively bargain?

It’s all Alice’s fault I’ve ended up tossing and turning in a bedroom in a suburban cul-de-sac, I thought, irritated by the dry, chafing sound of thumb against paper as she turned the pages of her novel. We should have parted ways when I started graduate school. She shouldn’t have followed me to Durham and taken that job at the Montessori School, teaching music appreciation to the precocious offspring of Duke’s junior faculty, being paid less than even my measly stipend from the Department of Comparative Literature. At least once a day, I would accuse her of resenting our shabby circumstances. She’d just laugh and say, “Not as much as you do.”

“It’s completely up to you,” she said while I pondered her father’s job offer. Always a pragmatist, he’d decided if Alice was going to be so goddamn stubborn, if she was going to insist he accept me, then at least he would co-opt me. I was floundering anyway, insecure among the pretensions of more impressively pedigreed academics, and highly susceptible to the power of suggestion. Curtis never missed an opportunity to make it obvious he questioned how a man could call teaching four hours a week “work.” Alice assumed I had a choice. The King knew better. All he needed to do was impugn my masculinity and it was good-bye Duke and hello Sales. He made only one condition. No more living in sin. We slipped off to City Hall before he could initiate the tactical maneuvers that would climax with the Big Church Wedding.

Well, at least the job wasn’t heating and air-conditioning. And the money wasn’t bad. It certainly impressed the old man, who’d been exasperated by every decision I’d ever made, except for marrying Alice. He’d refused to contribute a single dime for me to lounge around at Duke and read paperback novels, but he insisted on fronting the down payment on the town house, not wanting to be outdone by that blowhard, the uncrowned King, J. Curtis McDermott.

I knew my wife would have been content living in a drafty old rental on the fringes of the campus of whatever liberal-arts college might offer me a tenure-track position. I was the one who’d made the very expensive, solid cherry sleigh bed we were lying in (literally and figuratively speaking, and definitely not a Tar Heel Heritage product). And Alice? She seemed happy enough to be married to the Senior Vice President for Sales and her career introducing the young scholars of the Greensboro Friends School to the glories of Wolfgang Amadeus. She hadn’t changed much since college and still thought of me as a better-groomed edition of the obnoxious, smelly boy she’d married, with his torn flannel shirts and shaggy hair, his stupid record collection and dog-eared volumes of the literature of the South. She didn’t even seem to resent that passion and spontaneity had been replaced with a purpose-driven protocol for procreation. We copulated on a strict schedule tethered to the time of the month and body temperature. Medical science was encouraging: Millions of couples have conceived with a lower sperm count than yours, Mr. Nocera.