Donna Has Left the Building Read online

  Was this Joey?

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, no! I don’t want to be a girl!” he cried. “Christ, Donna. I just, I just—” He plopped down heavily on one of the barstools.

  Hugging myself, I started to shiver violently. My teeth were like castanets. All of it, all of it, was so surreal and outlandish, so utterly wrong. “That girl. Do you love her? Do you not love me anymore?”

  “What? Yes—no! Yes, of course. Of course I still love you. No, I don’t love Mistress Tanya! Please. This has nothing to do with you, Donna.”

  I swallowed. “Oh,” I said bitterly, my eyes welling. “Oh, I think it does, Joey. This has everything to do with me. You’re fucking another woman. And you let her into our house—”

  He put his hands up. “I’m not fucking her! We’re not having sex! I told you. I swear. That’s not what this is about.”

  “Really?” I said. “Because I gotta tell you, that’s certainly what it looks like to me.” I yanked a gingham dish towel from beneath the sink, blew my nose in it. “Some sort of perverted, fucking affair right under—”

  My husband did something then I hadn’t anticipated. Crumpling, he began to weep. He wept the way our children did when they were very small, with abandon, his bulky, hairy shoulders heaving, making bwuhuhu sounds, his whole body given over to sobs. In all the twenty-six years we’d been together, Joey had almost never cried—in fact, I could list the number of times he had (births of our kids; gallstone; Tigers losing the World Series).

  His wailing continued relentlessly, abject in its pain and rawness. When he cried aloud to the ceiling, “God, what’s wrong with me? I’m sorry, Donna, I’m so, so sorry—” I walked into the powder room and grabbed the box of tissues. Returning to the stool next to him, I thrust it at him and motioned toward his nose. I didn’t know what to think anymore. I just sat there.

  Joey snuffled and blew.

  There was a pause. “I never meant for you to find out. I wanted to protect you,” he said hoarsely.

  His makeup was all streaked now, a spray-painty wreck. “It’s just, I have these urges, Donna. I just—sometimes—” He blinked up at the ceiling, fighting back the tears again. “Sometimes I just need to dress up, and be feminine, and have somebody tell me what to do. I just want to be a slave for a little while.”

  He must have seen the repugnance flash across my face, because he added quickly: “Not for real. Just role-playing. Just make-believe.” He massaged his cheeks forlornly. “Sometimes, I just need to be Zsa-Zsa, the Sissy Maid. French. A perfectionist. If Zsa-Zsa doesn’t scrub the toilets or the oven correctly, she gets punished. Humiliated. It’s like, it’s a game is all.” When he saw my face was not changing, he shook his head. He stared down at the linoleum tiles. His face grew palsied. He pressed his fists to his smudgy eyes. “It’s a compulsion, Donna. It’s like something I just have to do. It’s—I can’t—I can’t help it. Can’t you, of all people, maybe understand this a little?”

  I looked at him. “Oh, don’t you dare,” I said viciously.

  “Okay, okay…But, I just—I figured, if I hired a professional dom, it would be like, I don’t know—therapy?”

  “So you pay her just to act out these scenarios?” I said slowly. “No sex?” My mind began to pinwheel with questions: How long? Where? What did she charge? How did they meet? I wanted to know, and yet, I didn’t want to know anything.

  “Actually, I don’t pay her at all.” A tinge of satisfaction crept into Joey’s voice. “We worked out a trade. Service-in-kind. In return for each session, I give her free dental work.” He blew his nose again. “Her semiannual cleanings. A root canal.” He added proudly, “You know, she’s even thinking about getting veneers?”

  Chapter 2

  What makes us love whom we love; what makes us choose to do what we do?

  The night I met Joey, I was playing a gig at the Blind Pig on South First Street. He and two of his fraternity brothers came in selling raffle tickets to benefit a children’s literacy program in Flint. My set was bad—disastrous, really—my band, Toxic Shock Syndrome, wasn’t the type of music the Blind Pig had originally booked for that night. The place had a regular Bluegrass Tuesday. They’d called us in last-minute after someone’s truck broke down. It was a shit-show, really. Drunks in flannel wanting to two-step, howling at the stage: your basic ritual humiliation. Afterward, my asshole bandmates abandoned me in the parking lot. Joey volunteered to drive me back to my place. I was tearstained, I was upset, I was calling the bass player a “tone-deaf motherfucker.” This was back in the days when I tried to do everything like Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth—or at least how I imagined she’d do things—of course, I’d never met her—it was all adolescent posturing and conjecture. Still, I’d spent my last $7 doing tequila shots and tearing around the place: Absolutely not at my best. But Joey dutifully escorted me back to the grim student apartment I shared with my friend Brenda, even carrying my amp up the stairs for me. He was dressed in a golf shirt and khaki shorts that hung like bells around his knees. His hair was so closely shorn, I could see the moon of his skull through the fuzz of it. He had that goofy, scrubbed look that mothers always seem to find attractive. Generally, I was not impressed.

  When he spied my CD collection and milk crates full of Love and Rockets comics, though, he fell to his knees. “Hey, check you out,” he said, thumbing excitedly through the plastic sleeves. He was so clearly enthralled, it touched me. I had a psychology paper due the next day, but we ended up sitting on my bed drinking warm Kahlúa and milk in Styrofoam cups, listening over and over to the Pogues. Joey had never heard them before. After certain songs, he’d stop and scootch down the bed toward my stereo: “Wait. Can we listen to that one again? Do you mind?” When he talked, a gentle intensity accumulated behind his eyes that I liked. At his urging, I took out my Taylor acoustic and played a couple of songs I’d written. This was not something I normally did. He told me with pride about the cars he’d remodeled back home. About his survivalist father living in a shack up in Marquette with wife number three. Both of us, it turned out, had lost our mothers—mine to cancer when I was fifteen, his to a car accident when he was six—which I believed was far worse. At least with mine, I’d gotten to say good-bye.

  Close to daybreak, Joey stretched extravagantly. “Yahhyahh,” he yawned, cracking his back. He patted me on the knee. “Yep. Well. Great hanging with you.”

  Zipping up his sweatshirt, he lumbered toward the door.

  I was surprised by how insulted I felt. “Wait,” I heard myself say. “Just like that?”

  He turned on the threshold. “Huh? Oh.” Reaching over in almost a brotherly fashion, he took my chin in his hands.

  He gave me one kiss. It was soft, but obliterating.

  My previous boyfriends had been: hot, crazy Zack, who slept on the railroad tracks…preening bass players, “spoken word” poets with “sexuality issues”…a philosophy major who sold his Kierkegaard paperbacks to the used-book store for drug money…Joey, by contrast, was a bricklayer. An oak tree. A human levee. He drank milk with his meals and painted his face half blue, half yellow (excuse me, half maize) on game days, then drove through Ann Arbor in his pickup with a grill in the back, inviting along anyone who wanted to tailgate with him. His fraternity brothers nicknamed him “Koz” and treated him like the mayor. He was so clearly not-my-type, I told Brenda: I was merely trying him on like a costume.

  But oddly, I found I liked him. I liked his easy, muscular decency, his burliness and stability, his uncomplicated happiness. I’d needed it. I’d sought it out.

  Joseph Vincent Koczynski.

  Nobody ever tells you, nobody ever prepares you for marriage really. Nobody ever shows you yourself after the wedding: matted with sweat, cursing, howling like an animal in a hospital gown, strangling your husband’s hand, snorting and sucking air, girding yourself, bucking, until finally, hours into raw, bestial misery, it feels like a membrane inside you is ripping, and this husband of yours, ghoulishly p
ale in minty-green scrubs, is summoned to crouch between what are now your disembodied thighs, where he sees blood and mucus, and—yep—a little bit of shit—squeezing out of your gash (good God)—as you finally push your tiny, perfect 7-pound, 9-ounce daughter into the world—and he catches her in his disbelieving, latexed hands—after which you both pretend that you were never splayed out like that, that he never saw what he saw. It is only miracles and joy and beauty now. That is what you will photograph, what you will enshrine and report.

  Your husband: running behind this very same daughter, his belly jiggling, fingertips barely touching the back fender of her new tangerine-colored two-wheeler as he cheers, “That’s it! That’s it! Keep pedaling!” and watching him, you feel a bolt of love, but also a secret bit of jealousy because he’s always the Fun One, the Hero—and she harbors a special, sparkling adoration for him alone. Your husband, keeled over on the toilet, his pants around his ankles, weeping from the pain of what will turn out to be a gallstone. Your husband, pressing you to him on the deck, stroking your hair, murmuring, “Hey, you just woke up on the wrong side of the bed is all,” after you’ve just lost it with your kids—in a tsunami of PMS and insomnia, you grabbed Ashley by the wrist and swatted her for pushing Austin’s stroller into the parking lot outside Kroger’s. You and your husband, lying in bed together, realizing that time is eroding your bodies, your responsiveness. Appendages are sagging; the two of you are becoming limp, landed fish. It is dispiriting and ominous. A vapor of shame thickens between you until, finally, you say to the ceiling: Well, this sucks. And he snorts: Not that that would even help at this point, and then, improbably, you both start to giggle. No one ever lets you know that one day, your husband is going to come home from a dentistry conference, talking a mile a minute about some boorish colleague he had to sit next to, and you’re going to have to interrupt him, and make him come sit beside you on the couch, and put both your hands around his and gently say, “Joey, honey. Your brother just died.” No one tells you how murderously bored you’ll feel—could he please stop picking his damn cuticles?—or how stupidly tickled your husband will be that you were once in an indie-punk band, bringing up your demo CD from the basement to play for people at your first Christmas party in Lakeshore Manors, saying, “Can you believe she once had pink and purple hair?” unwittingly humiliating you and making all the other guests stare uneasily down into their cups of eggnog. No one tells you how the investment properties you bought will go into foreclosure—and you’ll sit up nights together trying to figure out the Rubik’s Cube of your finances. Or that one afternoon, your husband will hold your hair back as you vomit in the ladies’ room, handing you his handkerchief afterward, then gently ushering you back into the mall area where you are doing a Sunday brunch demonstration, all the while making jokes and apologies to the customers (“Too much cooking wine, folks! This is why our ‘The Drunken Chef’ TV-show idea never took off!”), until one day—one day it becomes too much—after which, he will stand before you solemnly in the family room and say: I love you, but this has got to stop. I’ve made an appointment. And that for the next five years, he will refuse to even keep beer in the cooler in the garage for his buddies. No one will tell you how, when you sleep, even when you are no longer touching, even when you are feeling sick or irritated or indifferent, you will turn over in unison like dancers.

  No one will tell you that after more than two decades of marriage, this same husband will begin to secretly dress up like a giant baby doll and think nothing of letting another woman into your own home to humiliate him—and you—in exchange for free dental work. That you will suddenly face this man across the counter of your own kitchen on a sunny Wednesday morning at the end of September—surrounded by all the cheery trappings of your life together—and have absolutely no idea who the hell he is.

  “Cancel the rest of your appointments. Have Arjul cover for you,” I told him. I’d be damned if I’d let my husband retreat into his office or a hotel somewhere, leaving me to face the wreckage alone.

  Arjul Banerjee, DDS, was Joey’s partner. He was an excellent dentist, if a little too gung ho. He’d crafted a social media presence for himself, Dr. BanerTeeth, through which he tweeted out oral hygiene advice to some 2,749 followers. Other times he Instagrammed pictures of gum diseases or the molars he’d just pulled. He claimed it helped attract new patients.

  “Of course. Of course.” Joey nodded weakly. In his frilly bloomers and absurd brassiere, he looked utterly defeated, a chubby Miss Havisham. He picked up his cell phone, punched a button, murmured something to his receptionist about food poisoning. Then he stood before me like a penitent, staring at the floor. “Um, I guess— Should we talk?”

  “Jesus Christ, Joey. Take that stuff off first.”

  He fled up the stairs, his Mary Janes clumping on the runner. In the empty, salad-smelling kitchen, photographs from our vacations to Disney World slid and dissolved across the screen on the family computer in the desk nook. A coffee mug reading WORLD’S #1 DAD sat beside it, jammed full of assorted pens. Magnets on our refrigerator held grocery receipts and pizza coupons. All of it so banal, so normal.

  You never expect your own life to become something tawdry, so lifted-from-the-pages-of-a-supermarket-tabloid, so laughably awful. This was so far off the spectrum of anything I could wrap my head around. I was dying for a drink. Perhaps, I thought desperately, if neither Joey nor I said anything more, if we did not address what happened out loud, perhaps all of it would just dissolve somehow and prove a mirage.

  Unpacking my suitcase in the mudroom, I threw in a load of laundry, then climbed upstairs to the kids’ bathroom. Only once I was in the shower did I realize that I was still wearing my clothes. I dumped the sopping mass of fabric into the dryer back downstairs, then frantically set about righting the kitchen, sweeping up the shards of pottery, mopping up the vinegar. Joey hovered in the doorway, dressed now in his old chinos and a T-shirt.

  As I was frantically finishing up, Austin wandered in from school, clutching his skateboard, his face obscured by two lank curtains of hair. When Ashley left for London, Austin seemed to have disappeared into a foreign country of his own. Overnight, it seemed, my sweet, solemn, contemplative boy had taken up residence in Glowerstown. Surlyville. The Walled City, Joey and I called it sometimes. He’d barricade himself in his room—or return home from school hours after it let out—petulant and closemouthed, sometimes with stains on his clothes, scrapes on his hands, smelling of chemicals I couldn’t quite place—turpentine? Adhesive? I was worried, of course: Drugs? Was he huffing? Or, worse still, was he one of those kids who was secretly building an arsenal in his best friend’s garage? Joey and I had agreed not to keep guns in the house—but a lot of people we knew did. Was I smelling gunpowder on my kid? Crystal meth? Yet when I confronted Austin, he narrowed his eyes and looked at me with utter contempt: Jesus Christ, Mom. What kind of a psycho-moron do you think I am? Then, he boycotted me: nothing but stony-faced silence for days. He was home but not home.

  I knew it was a phase—I kept telling myself it was a phase—I kept waiting for his frontal lobe to develop more, for him to grow out of it—just as he had after what Joey and I now referred to as “The Minecraft Years.” But what if Austin never did? This is what they never tell you about parenthood: that it leaves you bereft, in a perpetual state of yearning, secretly, for your child to revert to their newborn state—to smell again of that wonderful baby-smell of fresh cream and talc—for them to be as miraculous as they were the first time you held them—to that way you loved them and they loved you right back—that pure, fierce, clobbering joy. Come back to me; let me love you again without restraint. And yet, what if your kids never leave home? Well, then you’re really screwed. Parenthood was either failure or loss, it seemed. It was no-win.

  “Oh. You’re back early,” Austin said impassively. Loping into the pantry, he emerged with a bag of Tostitos clenched between his teeth, seemingly unfazed by the fact that both Joey and I were h
ome, standing in the kitchen in the middle of the afternoon. Outside, the sun was coppery on the lake. Grabbing a Pepsi out of the fridge, Austin finally pulled out his earbuds and regarded us. “Yeah, um. For English class, we’re supposed to, like, do this project on this book called The Odyssey? So can I use the computer in your office?” He flashed a large, quick smile—sixteen-year-old boys were never so charming as when they wanted to borrow something. Joey and I nodded numbly. Normally, I’d waylay him before his retreat: Excuse me. Not so fast. Tell me about your day, please. And since when are you allergic to hugs? But for once, I was grateful for his total self-absorption and remove. “Go,” I said, waving. And then our son tromped upstairs, and the house was eerily quiet again, and I went back to the mudroom, alone, to continue doing our laundry.

  That night, Joey lingered in the doorway of our bedroom. “Should I sleep on the foldout?”

  The question hung in the air.

  After a moment, I shook my head.

  Almost formally, he walked around to his side of the bed and stood there like a footman. He waited and drew back the covers only when I did, as if on cue. For years, of course, we’d been going to bed in sort of a haphazard fashion. Joey might head up to sleep before me—I’d get caught up with some test recipe in the kitchen or folding the last load of laundry—but half the time, when I finally did climb upstairs, I’d find he was awake anyway, watching Game of Thrones on his iPad or playing Candy Crush or half asleep with the TV still on, his reading glasses sliding down his nose.

  Now, however, we lay in our bed, as stiff and alert as two virgins in an arranged marriage. I could almost hear us blinking in the darkness, the soft clicking of eyelashes. Only the red pinpoints of the television and the cable box glowed on the bureau. When a car pulled into the Brodys’ driveway next door, a broad parabola of light swung over the ceiling, carrying with it a gust of music that halted when the engine was cut. I heard the crunch of gravel, then a ruffle of wind, then silence. Just air and molecules again.