Crestfallen

You, like most humans in the permanent agricultural and industrial age of democratic corporate technocracy, live in a gilded cage formed of your job, mortgage, marriage, and retirement fund. You stay aloft on the currents of money, and usury rules your life because free stuff for anyone means the costs get passed down to the rest, so you need lots of money to keep your head above water. You aspire to the "good life" of having stability, living in a neighborhood free of methed-out rednecks and blockheaded diversity, and having enough free time -- about ten hours a week -- to get to know yourself before you are too old to enjoy anything.

Long ago you realized that you do not like most people. They are weak in the spirit, therefore make decisions based on convenience and self-image, which makes them pathological about unimportant stuff and apathetic about the big things. Like your friend, call him Billy, back in middle school who decided that your habit of studying before school was lame and started walking past and flipping your book into your face. No matter what you said, he would not back off, even though this was an unimportant issue. But to him, it was the world; your studying made him look bad, and so finally he took a swing at you, which knocked you off the bench on which you were reading, and for once a teacher was there and nabbed him, which caused Them to put him into the care of a psychiatrist who gradually drove him insane. Billy now drives a truck, has a criminal record, and beats his Mexican girlfriend every other night.

And so you might say that the "good life" involves avoiding pitfalls. Stay away from drugs, gangs, premarital offspring, and career-enders like joining the Klan or sexually harassing the cute young intern. Do not get nabbed for a DWI like so many of your buddies, do not buy a house with foundation problems, and avoid doing anything that makes you unsociable like voting Republican or becoming a Hare Krishna. Life in fact has become a series of do-nots, because in a social group, the assumption is that everyone is good, which makes them look for non-conformists. You want to go along to get along. You want to fit in and go with the flow. You want to be invisible so the secretive hand of authority or public opinion does not smite you like the rodent you are.

This Saturday evening you and the wife are having a pleasant dinner with a friend, let us call him Carlos, and his wife, who we will call Wendy. You met him through work, decided to do some drinks or tapas one evening, and it turned out that Wendy and your wife hit it off, so now it is a regular thing. Tonight you served braised salmon with a lemon-cream vinaigrette full of basil and chives, next to young potatoes in balsamic reduction and mustard-bacon roasted brussel sprouts. You and the wife are proud of this dish, but even more proud of how well you work together in the middling-grade kitchen of your two thousand square foot suburban home.

Carlos is wandering into your above-average back yard now, carrying two beers. He will be here shortly, but you are still caught in the balance between reminiscence and analysis, a state like intoxication or dreaming where enough of the personality shuts up for you to see what is beneath. Carlos wants to talk about your wife, a "very beautiful woman" he has been texting (not emailing; email is for nerds) during the week. That same wife is watching the twilit backyard from a yellow-lit picture window while Wendy sips wine in the background, swaying gently to the not-quite-unhip-yet music playing from your laptop speakers.

We should describe your wife: she was not your first and you were not hers. You met at college, since everyone who can breathe and string together two words into a sentence goes to college these days, when you struck up a conversation at a faculty mixer, friend-group beer bash, or volunteer activity. The days of kegs and frats are over; those died with Anglo-Saxon rule back in the 1960s. It took over thirty years for their death to take hold, which is the case for most things. The cracks appear early but widen much later, and by that time everyone has forgotten what cracked in the first place. Back then you were young and idealistic, and by "idealistic" we mean not yet fatalistic. You thought that life was like school: do most things right and avoid major mistakes, and then you get rewarded with the good life.

She struck you at first as pleasant-looking. Men have practical rather than low standards: if a woman is reasonably attractive, reasonably kind, and reasonably competent, they think it reasonable to explore her further, including by getting her naked and probing deeply. In your case, it took three dates to get to that stage. That too was reasonable. You never asked about her past and she never asked about yours; you noticed that she avoided the chemistry building and smiled nervously at a certain guy in your modern literature class, but otherwise, she was a black box. If you were honest, she was your second real girlfriend and your third sexual partner, since the girl you really wanted in high school was amenable to having sex with you (once) but not being tied down. So it goes.

You never formally started being exclusive, but the little signs were there. The borrowed drawer in your dresser for clothing, the new toiletries in the little bag she kept behind your desk in the dorm room, and the assumption that on Friday and Saturday night, you would "do something" together, which as students meant a movie, some fast food, a walk down by the river, and then sex in the dorms before a long sleep and a late breakfast together where all of your friends saw you together and made the obvious inference. It was exciting, but also a relief, because the ambiguity of not having "your person" is stressful. After two and a half years of this, you got a job in a distant city, and she moved with you and then did the same.

Your life followed a somewhat ideal course. You got past the first wave of natural selection firings of the lazy, incompetent, drunk, and insane; your ensuing promotion meant that you could put down a down payment on a house, with a little help from your parents and a little more help from hers, which was good timing because she came downstairs the next morning with the little plastic stick showing two lines. Your gilded cage was already formed: health insurance took a huge bite of your salary, the mortgage most of the rest, and then you were busy with home improvements that ate up a lot of the rest. Kids crammed it further, so you doubled down at work, and your next promotion meant you could finally rest easy a little bit. By your third decade, you were starting to feel stable.

However, this simply upped the odds. You now had to defend your job against others who wanted to take it. You had to remain amenable and professional around insane coworkers and deranged clients (undiagnosed mental health problems are the hallmark of dying civilizations like yours). Therefore, you placed all of your actual self deep within and become an obedient, conformist, and pacifistic worker on the surface. You have a lot to lose now; if the job goes away, the dominoes fall: first the mortgage, then the health insurance, then the car note. When your friend Maxwell lost his job, it took a month before his wife and kids took a spontaneous vacation to her mother's house and never returned.

As such, you are oriented toward the negative. You cannot tell the deranged client that his ideas are insane; you have to walk him through the options, over and over again, until he sees what you see, which is that he is choosing an unwise path. This way, you both avoid having someone complain, and make the account a success. You have to work with people who are in your eyes retarded -- a combination of extreme stupidity and arbitrary insanity -- but who are to your bosses perfect workers because they show up six days a week, stay late, and get excited when there is a pizza party. You are living in a world where mass opinion matters, and since the masses are dunces, you are ruled by dunces. You try to avoid law enforcement, lawsuits, and any contact with government or medicine past the absolutely necessary. These people are like the cops who hand out tickets at the entrance to your HOA subdivision simply parasites, looking for an excuse to use their power to take your money and time. Your negative orientation means that you mostly figure out what to duck and ignore. Nature is dangerous, but the human world is a hostile place.

Speaking of parasites, Carlos has brought you a beer and one for himself. You thank him and you both turn toward the picture window to look at your wives. You say nothing but Carlos is riding the crest of a wave of inertia, and he cannot stop himself. They never can, you realize. People fall into pathologies instead of thinking about their choices, and they must then like mad Captain Ahab act out those pathologies, since they can never back down, change their thinking, and make another choice because that would reflect badly on their self-image. Tom Wolfe calls it the "fiction-absolute," the narrative that we each tell ourselves that explains our life choices as having led to the "good life," well except for that one thing that you need.

The one thing Carlos needs is your wife. Judging from the flushes on her cheek, her ready laughter at his jokes, and the chain of text messages you found on the pay-as-you-go phone tucked into the gap in the sheetrock above the dryer vent in the garage, she is not averse to his suggestion. In fact, she is flattered by it, and her concerns for your emotional well-being are secondary to that. You were not even looking for the phone; you saw a square of light on an outside wall blink out and be replaced one too many times, and wondered who was in the garage, at which point the pinpoints of her eyes indicated a panic, so you snooped around. The messages on the phone are fairly innocent, but the subterfuge and dishonesty are the exact opposite.

"She really is quite beautiful," Carlos is saying. "And you hid her out here in the suburbs! No one would expect that."

"Not like Wendy," he adds. Wendy has long dark hair, doe eyes, and perfect small C-cup breasts. She is fiercely intelligent, judging by her test scores and degrees, but also completely disinterested in life or in thinking. To her, intelligence exists to have jobs and make money. She and Carlos have one child, a twisted little boy named William who still wet the bed in third grade. You know this because a friend of a friend, who works at the florist in the neighborhood where Wendy and Carlos live, picked up the gossip from a junior teacher at his school. He is also chronically constipated and likes to set insects on fire. The Women's Book Club in their neighborhood is taking bets on whether or not he is a budding serial killer.

"She seems perfectly lovely," you say, then change the subject. After all, you get clients by referrals, and you want to avoid anything outside accepted normal behavior, which means non-threatening behavior. People will answer surveys saying that they are tolerant of drug use, swinging, homosexuality, multiculturalism, organized religion, and gun ownership, but the reality is that if you demonstrate too much of any of that shit, they will cut you out of your lives because you are now a threat to their public image. Who wants to be known as the friend of a cocaine-addled gun-toting bicurious swinger? They will "tolerate" it in the lives of others and in society at large, but NIMBY: not in their backyard, their friend group, their employee list, and so on. You tell Carlos about new opportunities for investment in rare earth materials and low-orbit geosynchronous satellites, but he is hearing none of it.

"So charming how she moves," he says. "You are a lucky man." You both look up now. Wendy and your wife are standing in front of the window. It seems that the time has arrived for... something... and so you bow to inertia and allow yourself to be swept into the house by Carlos' too-eager arm. You sense a trap, but the gilded cage enwraps you. Only in stories on the internet do you get away with impeding the "free will" (impulses, desires, pathologies, habits) of another.

"Honey, I am so glad you are here," your wife says. "Wendy was just telling me that she and Carlos have an 'open relationship.'" She does not give you her "rescue me" look, where the face smiles pleasantly but the eyes dart like trapped tadpoles, however. This tells you how your life has now changed forever.

Ah. And there it is. Out in the open, glistening like wet pubic hair, for all to see. "Oh, how interesting," you say. "That would never work for me, and would be bad for us, since if anyone at work found out -- "

"No one will find out," says Carlos cleanly. "It is just us here, in this lovely house, far from the road, with no one watching. The choice is ours." He draws the curtain.

"Honey, I -- " the wife says. She pauses, not certain how to carry on. Finally she opts for the neutral: "-- think it sounds very interesting."

Very interesting! The catchphrase from the Caucasian suburbs that, like "bless your heart" in the South, means everything and anything. Double-your-money investments are very interesting, but so is the story from your neighbor about finding a badger in the public toilets at Yellowstone. In this case, because you know your wife, it means that you are not allowed to drop the subject.

"I am very glad it works out for others," you say, your voice thin and far away to your ears, "but it would not work for me. We should talk about this -- later -- and for now, enjoy the night."

But her eyes are on you, burning bright with intensity of desire, and it is not for you. Wendy watches with a bemused but disinterested smile. She would enjoy having sex with you, you realize, but would not lift a finger to make it happen. She would be just as happy to read some arty book about pre-Colombian Aztec clay figurines, or have coffee with a friend who just came back from a trip to southern France. She will not be bothered if it happens, does not happen, or something else happens, because she is entirely self-contained. She needs nothing from anyone or anything and is content with her own company.

Your wife is a contrast. She is not content, and she wants the company of another. She wants you to approve so that her own gilded cage is not shattered. Her eyes are bright and her face is flushed. She does not look directly at you, but stares at your corner of the room. You look up to see three sets of eyes targeted at that corner. It is also the closest to the door. They know that you are at a disadvantage: a gilded cage person can say no, but he cannot forbid it. After all, she is free and equal too. All he can do is offer consequences, but not too firmly, because no one wants to be known as the guy who bullied his wife in front of guests.

"You might like it if you try it," Wendy says, pigeon-toed so that under her dress you can see the shapes of her thighs, which are open and facing toward you. She is not unattractive but she gives you the creeps, like the faint scent of decay wafting out of a restaurant kitchen.

"That does not matter to me," you say. "I designed this life for my wife and I, and now our children, to be stable and nurturing. This is a happy home, or at least, as close as it gets on Planet Earth. I would not trade a night of passion for what we have built here, and I would hope my wife feels the same way."

But you can see, just from looking at her nervous hands fluttering behind her back and then flitting over the folds of her dress, that she does not feel the same way.

"Honey, would you just do this... for me?" she asks.

And there it is. You have not convinced her of her free will to turn it down, and now she has asked for it.

"No," you say. "Looks like our evening is winding down, so maybe you -- "

"Wait, my good man," Carlos says smoothly. "You want what your wife wants, right? Happy wife, happy life?"

"She wants this," says Wendy, but her face is already slipping back into boredom after engaging in the façade of her role. It hits you then that she is, like all things, acting in her own self-interest, and this is how she buys off her husband so she can do, well, whatever secret thing it is that Wendy hides behind that impassive and placid face.

"No," you say again, and go to the kitchen for another beer. You sigh, facing the refrigerator. Alea jacta est. The die is cast; does it mean "cast" as in thrown, or "cast" as in the pouring of lead into its holes to make it equally weighted, something that never happens perfectly, meaning that all dice have inherent bias? The bigotry of dice and the fascism of fate smash down on your heart. Your eyes become dark holes. Even by asking, she has broken the past from the future. Your lives are now discontiguous.

As William S. Burroughs once wrote, thermodynamics has won at a crawl. She is Captain Ahab now, fixated on the white whale for the ruin of all. Three children barely in their teens, a comfortable house, a decent income, medical care, two cars, organic food, and family vacations in cheap but sunny places be damned! She wants what she wants, and all else must burn. She is the balistic arc of a rocket in a Thomas Pynchon story, or the femme fatale in a Raymond Chandler story setting down her drink and deciding that yes, indeed, she is going to kill him. Or maybe she is Juliet, so impassioned with passion itself that she throws all sanity to the wind, or maybe Ulysses, so furious at the world for not recognizing his cleverness that he offends an ancient nature deity. The ego has outweighed the brain; desire was merely the form it took.

You pop the top on the beer and go back into the living room. The light is yellow, the walls are pus-colored, and the green sofa has turned into a swamp of decay. Your spit tastes like ash but you have not been smoking. Carlos and your wife are seated on the sofa. Wendy is at the mantelpiece, leafing through one of your books on Greco-Roman architecture.

"I think it is time for this party to call it a night," you say gently.

"Carlos can't drive, he's had too many beers," Wendy says quickly.

"Surely you can drive, or we can call him an Uber," you rejoin after a second.

Your wife looks at you, directly looks at you, without seeing you. There is now anger in her eyes, replacing the fire of desire. The anger is not hot like desire, but cold like destruction or the final moments of life. You feel the cold invading the world you have built. You wanted one thing, and one thing only, which was to have a good life. And now, for a few minutes of pleasure, it will be destroyed. Muss es sein? Es muss sein.

"Honey, we should consider this," she says.

"Yes, tomorrow," you say evenly. "Come on, folks, nothing good is going to come of forcing the issue."

"Carpe diem, I always say," rebuts Carlos quickly. "The mood is right, the time is right..."

"Then the time will be right tomorrow, too, or the day after," you say. But you are watching her eyes. Your wife stopped looking at you the moment Carlos started talking, and is now looking at him. He takes up her whole gaze. Wendy smiles slyly at the mantelpiece, and closes the book.

"Okay, let's talk it over," you say, trying to be reasonable and pacifistic, like you would at work, or at church, or even on the golf course when two guys have gotten heated about the lie of a ball.

"Let's go into town," your wife says suddenly. "We can go dancing, or have some drinks at a club."

Carlos takes her hand and they mimic a two-step, right there in your living room where better memories were formed. "What is wrong with her?" you find yourself asking. She just stepped out of reality into a dream, and she will hold on to that dream tight-fisted until the ship falls apart around her. You know her well enough to be certain of this; you are glad the kids are at the grandparents and none of your friends are there to see.

But you know also that this is a false binary solution set, meaning that both decisions lead to the same result. You say no, she sees Carlos and herself as victims and goes off and does it anyway. The cell phone in the garage is the tell there. You say yes, she does it, and then you have to tolerate a spouse who scorns you. She will scorn you in either case, whether you are Satan telling her "no" or Jesus on the cross finally giving up and saying "my spouse, why hast thou forsaken me?" She has made her choice.

Night has fallen. The neighborhood, cloaked in black, has gone to a state of rest because this is a place for people who do things, whether jobs or home-making. Faint warm spots mark distant porch lights and two bright dots shine at the fence line. It is the neighbor's cat, a rusty tom named Buchanan, who for some reason likes to watch your house. Behind you Carlos and your wife are in conversation, and Wendy has moved on to fiddling with her phone. Even money says any wife swapping results in her slipping out the back door and going to do Wendy-things somewhere else.

They wait for you to turn around, expectantly. They know they can simply wear you down. You either have to say no and enforce it, or be weak and either say yes or not say no forcefully enough. Inertia, entropy, and time are on their side. At some point, you tire of being the bad guy. The heckler's veto wins in the end; you get tired of answering inane questions and saying no. She gets what she wants, and everyone else pays. At this point, the very fact of her entertaining this choice says that she has bailed out on the marriage in her heart, and wants something you cannot give her.

All prognosis is bad. If you get in a fistfight, you lose your job, might go to jail, and based on what you now know of how Carlos actually operates, will almost certainly be sued. He wields the whip hand of the rest of society finding your actions objectionable. Your wife, allied with him, is using that against you. Anger suffuses your nerves at that thought. You really should kill all three of them for this. Fantasies of chainsaws and shallow graves flit across your mind. But then, reality sets in: you have everything you have built to lose, just like you will lose it in a divorce.

The sensible math is to say yes and then, as inevitably happens, to take a lover on the side, since you will no longer want anything to do with her. In her narcissistic delirium, she does not realize that this must be the case; there is no universe in which a man like you will take her back after she stabs you in the back. You are already disgusted by her, which is the emotion that comes after disappointment when you realize that the person cannot stop themselves from behaving badly because they are broken. Something broke them, or they broke themselves, in a broken world (with a broke government $40 trillion in debt).

There is no hope. You step outside, make a brief phone call, and then come back inside. "Okay kids, the party is over," you say. "Time for everyone to go home. We will talk about all these issues tomorrow, but not now. Carlos and Wendy, thank you for covering over, it has been lovely, but now it is time for you to go." You open the front door.

Wendy stares, a brief smile wrinkling her lips, then goes back to her dispassionate and disinterested face. She respected you for a moment, and almost considered offering herself to you, but now, like the rest of the world, you are neither boring nor interesting to her. You are the paint on the walls, the wind in far-off alleys, and the droning off lobster boats offshore. This is what goes on of its own outside of Wendy-world, and she is not fascinated by it.

No one moves.

This is where they expect you to throw up your hands and say "oh okay you win" finally, or to wander off, which with this group is the same. They will start up the hue and cry to go into town soon, which means separate cars, and the car with your wife and Carlos will get mysteriously lost for an hour. Or perhaps they will just depart for a hotel or the little split-level that Carlos and Wendy inhabit in a farther-off neighborhood, despite their legendarily high IQs and supposedly high salaries.

You say nothing and step outside the front door to stand on the porch. A purple glow begins at the end of the street, a long winding suburban loop, and separates into red and blue flashing lights as it gets closer. You go to the curb to meet the police. "Good evening and I'm sorry to bother you," you say. "I spotted a prowler in the backyard over there. I couldn't see any detail, but he is wearing dark clothing." They go next door with flashlights. Finally the atmosphere inside becomes tense and, fearing his own gilded cage, Carlos murmurs to Wendy that they should leave. You are already holding her coat out to her.

They depart. Your wife remains on the sofa. You close the door, turn off the lights, and go to bed.

In the light of day neither of you think highly of the other. She thinks you are a wimp and a tyrant, and you think that the relatively innocent decent person that you married must have had a mental breakdown. You both go off to work in separate cars, muscle through the day grateful for distractions from the lurking Thing squirming underneath your immediate conscious thoughts, then hop into cars to go home. You pick up the kids in the twilight, thank the grandparents, and hustle home.

If this were the internet, you would have the big confrontation and tell her what you think of her. You would be angry and drink too much. You would tell us all how she was your perfect love, the love of your life, and you are just shattered by this betrayal. You would find Carlos in the night and kick him in the balls until he shat his prostate and died impotent. But reality is simpler, and you live in a gilded cage.

Your kids are not fooled at all for even an instant. They come home and feel the static electricity in the air. The youngest starts crying; the other two get hollow-eyed thousand yard PTSD stares. You do your best to reassure them that nothing will change, and that everything will be okay. You learn that pizza, minigolf, and the affection of one parent can substitute for a working family at least for tonight.

Do you drink more? You do not interrupt the gilded cage of corporate neoliberal democracy. Drunkenness means failure and failure means poverty. Do you want to live around methed-out rednecks or erratic diversity? You do not. So maybe you buy another case of Saint Arnold's Elissa a month, so what? You are numbing the nerves. You also take up hobbies that keep you in the garage, on the golf course, in the back yard, or at "Friendly Fire" the local cigar shop. You fear time alone with your wife, and dread time alone with your thoughts.

What you do not do is have sex with your wife, ever again. She does not mind. You knew she would do it, but you never know when she does it, mainly because you both live in gilded cages and hers allows her lots of freedom to do whatever she wants during the day. You do not participate in the little rituals of affection that you shared. She knows they are dead and does not expect them anyway. You keep conversation light and formal, like a job interview or coffee in the church courtyard on Sundays.

You no longer believe in love. You realize that love is a deception we embrace in order to have children, and you have gotten that out of the way. You are counting down until the last one is off at college. You plan with a grim pragmatism. You take out a second mortgage to reduce the amount you have invested in the house. You buy things and sell them online late at night from your new perch on the workbench in the garage. You postpone vacations and stop direct deposit on your paychecks.

Buchanan the tomcat has found a new love, Daisy the Abyssinian. Sleek with a heart-shaped face, she is fetching. Oddly you hope they have kittens. It has been a long time since you have held a source of hope as infinite as a kitten. You see hope in your children, and do the best you can to insulate them, but they have had to grow up too quickly and too suddenly. You realize now that your youngest will never marry and the other two will be divorced eventually.

You never wanted to believe you could murder your family, but now you are choking it to death. Money for routine maintenance is no longer there. You keep up appearances, but spend time with your children and avoid your wife, and everyone can see it. However, this does not break the rules of gilded cage world, so you are safe. Your income increases with a promotion, but you tell no one. Who would you talk to, who will celebrate your achievements, anyway?

As the old saying goes, people worry about whether women are okay, but only check in with men to see if they are still useful. You are: the last of the kids bundle off to college and you change the deed on the house so that your wife owns it outright, or at least the twenty-four percent of it not owned by the bank. You take that promotion with a transfer a distant state, set up an apartment there, and tell your wife that you will be working in the field for awhile. She nods.

You change your phone number, liquidate your retirement savings, set up a corporation with fake officers and buy big chunks of businesses: a plumber, a fiber optic cable installer, an all-night emergency clinic. You rent a new apartment paid for by the corporation, which also covers your healthcare and new used car (a Toyota truck because they are damn handy when friends need to move). Speaking of friends, you meet new people who know you as a confirmed bachelor.

Your wedding ring? It disappeared somewhere, without you meaning to do so, or really noticing. Your former possessions are mostly liquidated. You give the kids your new number and ask them not to give it to your wife. No parties to this transaction are surprised. The wife never calls, but neither do the kids. You keep investing in local businesses and gradually transition from employee to contractor working for the company, earning just under the standard deduction, although the company buys your housing, food, insurance, cars, equipment, clothing, and the like.

Carlos gets off lightly. You wonder when exactly he fucked your wife for the first time, and how long it went on. He and Wendy are divorced, not surprisingly, but his career is easy to track, and you track it. You leave online reviews about anything his company does and mention him by name as intransigent and uncommunicative. Your alt email sends many communications over the years to his bosses, clients, and girlfriends. Eventually he moves to Costa Rica and disappears from the airwaves.

After a sermon about forgiveness, you leave your local church and never return. Forgiveness, too, is a lie. What you need is detachment. You need to stop caring. One day you awaken and realize that you have. Yes, you have lost two-fifths of your lifetime wealth, but you will make most of that up with your investments. Yes, the word "family" provokes a feeling of loss in you. And yes, you fail to believe that a woman could ever want you, ever again. You were broken but now you are apathetic.

Apathy proves to be healing. You no longer can remember much about your old wife. Perhaps you are still married; you simply do not care. One of your former neighbors emails your corporate account to say that Buchanan the tomcat got in a fight with Gatsby the tomcat over Daisy, and Buchanan won, but Daisy went off with Gatsby instead. Perhaps it was pity. She pitied him because she pitied herself. Apathy is freedom from pity and charity, and this is an improvement for you.

Over time, you find new ways to have joy in life. You abandon old hobbies and take up pursuits. You find yourself chained to an old-growth tree, giving the finger to the cops who arrest you along with a tall lady who has the same look of permanent shock in her eyes that you do. When you glance back at her, she sees your eyes and nods, barely. When the cops let you out, she places her fingers in yours and you walk off together alone.