Alice had suffered such a string of disappointments that when she said she wanted to start taking steroids for powerlifting, I encouraged her. As her husband, I worried about what the drugs would do to her face, her voice. But I worried more about the way life, that bully and jailor, had locked her inside herself, as it had me too, the two of us like prisoners tapping in feeble communication. The words dianabol and oxandrin in Alice’s mouth sounded like fantastic keys that might set us free to each other once more.

What I have fictionalized: my wife’s name (which is not Alice), the steroids, and the attraction I express below for physically powerful women.

After being defeated at the state meet by competitors who were clearly dosing, she did speculate about what she might have accomplished on equal footing. But my wife is so frugal—and, in truth, so used to defeat—that she would never give herself such an extravagant gift.

If she did, it might go like this:

Are you really going to jab yourself with a needle? I said. 

Alice and I were standing at the kitchen counter, looking down at a zip-case of syringes laid glintingly open.

I was hoping, she said, that you would do it.

Oh. Would I have to, like, find a vein?

No. Here’s your target.

She turned and whacked her big ass. She was wearing black gym shorts full of curves and the knee socks she uses for dead lifting. My dick nudged awake.

Then let’s pull those down, I said, and see what happens.

Or:

Alice and I go to my wife’s gym to buy the steroids from Tazzy. There’s a name you can’t make up. Tazzy is—well, she’s the endpoint of the experiment involving pharmacology, megaprotein, and spray tanning known as bodybuilding. She has remade herself so thoroughly that she is beyond the touch of fiction, able to be believed only in life, where circumstance places her grunting in front of me every Saturday. At sixty, she looks like a comic-book character who has thrown herself through too many walls.

Alice and I coded in through the security door. Tazzy strode up and took my hand in her hot mitt with a Hey, babe. 

Act natural, I told myself, trying not to think of our greeting as preamble to an illicit transaction, trying to unknow that behind her public self—behind the ones and zeros of an internet paywall—Tazzy hosted private sessions for male clients who wanted to be dominated and demeaned. I was considering the terrible completeness of her arms and imagining my penis sunk in her heavy hand when she cuffed my shoulder and said, We’ll be right back.

I covered my erection with the copy of Tin House I had brought and slunk off to a corner to read. Setting: a gym in a former brewery, rafters tying high brick together, windows tall with light. Character: me sitting in the well of one of those windows, looking like someone lost in the innocent pleasure of reading fiction rather than someone for whom the pleasure of fiction has been poisoned by his attempts to make it, who cannot prevent his anxiety about writing from infiltrating even a story that admits its fictionality and ruining his enjoyment of a sunny window. I closed the Tin House and supplied language to the clinks and thuds of man vs. self, to the efforts of a woman made lovely by the tilt of her head in suffering on a StairMaster. Alice came out of the locker room with a brown lunch bag and handed it to me so she could re-tie a pink Chuck Taylor.

I could not decide, as we bid farewell to Tazzy, whether I wanted her to see me as unambiguously masculine in my ball cap and flannel shirt, beyond the need of her services, or as one of the more ambiguous men she tossed around and insulted. I have a powerful need to give people what they want.

Negative capability is no longer possible is the kind of thing I say when I mean that I am no longer capable of negative capability. I wanted to be published in the Missouri Review and was laboring to conceive a story that would satisfy MR’s aesthetic: a thoughtful (though not necessarily thinking) main character; a reality composed of recognizable objects that made the appropriate sounds when you tapped them; a prose domesticated by observation of other fictional prose. I had met Speer Morgan at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and told him, as we drank on a lawn, that being published in the Missouri Review was a dream of mine, a statement that became true as I said it, and I invested Morgan’s kindly encouragement, which he no doubt offers all writers, with exaggerated significance—in fact allowed myself to hear it as a solicitation. We leaned together over the MR website on his iPad as if we were already collaborating on my piece. 

After the conference I began submitting stories which were plainly unsuited to the journal, though Morgan’s kindly worded rejections only strengthened my desire to see my name in MR’s big, rich pages and huge font, the kind of material luxury accorded only to writing that confirms readers’ highest familiar hopes about humanity. The problem was that I experienced hopefulness about humanity only as a second-order phenomenon, as an aesthetic quantity, and so to produce a piece of fiction that could stand alongside other Missouri Review fiction, which I generally did not like, I would have to summon and inhabit a second self—a fictional self—who believed what I had believed twenty years ago about people and stories. After a careful perusal of three back issues and a procrastinating laser-toy session with my cats and a deep centering breath, I sent my hands to the keyboard and typed, With the ferry halfway across the Sound, Catherine raised her eyes to the green shore where she had met her husband and, ten years ago, under this same summer sun, buried him. 

The sentence was so against my nature that it sickened me to write it, but I trusted that the story would now enact itself from these opening cues without unduly taxing me. First the physical details of the place as “Catherine” disembarked, the trees and dock and smell of the air. A conversation with the innkeeper where she took a room, a figure stolid and forbidding (but later unexpectedly kind) or bumbling and prolix (but later unexpectedly wise), either way an autochthonic spirit of the place. A supper alone, the red of the wine a madeleine to her memory, in whose drifts we witness the husband cut short by illness or accident. And so on until we arrive at the shaded cemetery where Catherine is informed by the groundskeeper that the fresh flowers on her husband’s grave were left by the dead man’s daughter, a person of whose existence Catherine had known nothing, herself unable to conceive children; the meeting of the two women amidst the clamor of the daycare the daughter owns; and a final scene in which Catherine walks the downtown street where she had met her husband and encounters a village parade, its progress interleaved with remembered details from her husband’s boat-building workshop, where many years earlier he had looked up from a gunwale he was planing and answered her request for directions with You aren’t lost at all.

The terrible genius of those first and last sentences was the way they foreclosed possibility and assured readers they could pay this story the same inattentive attention they had paid a thousand other stories because there would be no danger to their sensibilities in what lay between. The story would undertake, on behalf of its readers, a heroic ignorance: of Big Data, Big Pharma, Big Agra. Of the despoliation of nature happening everywhere all the time. Of Katy Perry’s spirit immanent in the clouds of the omniverse. Of everything the Hubble Space Telescope has seen, of quarks and God particles, of really anything smaller than dust (which my story would know only as atmospheric decoration and a symbol of death, in other words as literary device). The story would refuse to know about, would be ruined by the smallest direct notice of, white privilege or the South Korean plastic surgery industry or mass incarceration, and most of all it could not afford to recognize that the world no longer told stories in this way, just as Civil War reenactors cannot let themselves look beyond the tip of their swords to see the drone buzzing overhead. . . .

It was not impossible, I admitted as I shut down the computer, unable to proceed further that day, that what I wanted was to unwrite rather than write, to make writing that unmade itself. That my nature, like a critic’s or termite’s, was to dismantle rather than build.

My wife’s bench and squat numbers leapt upward. Her beaten compliance at work was replaced by a confidence that commanded her boss’s respect. (In real life, the opposite.) She read more, ate less junk food. The hard meat of her biceps won my fingers over, the plate of her abdomen cradled my head. At fifty, I have the same body I had at twenty-five, more evidence of my detestable consistency; Alice’s body kept exploding the spreadsheets and redrawing possibility. 

Then there was a sex scene.

Alice carpooled to the USAPL meet with Lucy, a figure model from the gym. During the drive, Lucy revealed that her girlfriend had broken up with her, ending a relationship she had thought would lead to marriage. Alice, unsentimental like my wife, was embarrassed by these weeping intimacies from the passenger seat, but out of politeness offered to buy Lucy a drink at the hotel bar when they arrived in Lafayette.

Their booth was dark. An electric candle threw shadows. After two drinks, Lucy was laughing again, grateful for the patient ear of a woman twice her age. Upstairs in their room, Alice looked away as Lucy took off her T-shirt and bra and pulled on a tank top, changed her jeans for a pair of terrycloth shorts, pink or baby blue, that rode the high contour of her thighs. Alice went into the bathroom to change into the shapeless XXL T-shirt and sweatpants my wife sleeps in. When she came out, Lucy hugged her and thanked her. Perhaps Alice knew what she was inviting when she held the hug until their warmth met through their clothes. I want to eat your pussy, Lucy whispered and slid a hand inside Alice’s sweatpants to grasp the round of her ass. Lucy backed her to the bed and sat her down. She tugged off Alice’s sweatpants and underwear, exposing her big white legs and puff of blonde hair. Alice loosed a shuddered sigh, one I remembered well, when Lucy eased her legs apart and pressed her tongue in. Lucy has long black hair and olive skin; my wife is a shocking pale white. I followed Lucy’s dark arms as they clasped Alice’s hips, as a hand climbed to close over a breast. Alice threw her arms up to the pillow and raised herself to Lucy. I got a tissue ready. My wife was watching local news in the next room, playing Two Dots on her phone. Lucy looked up along the soft curves of Alice’s body, all that gorgeous fullness laid out above her. When Alice squeezed her thighs to Lucy’s head and came, I gave my final blessing to their moment and dropped the tissue beside the bed. 

I get up every morning at four and feed the cats. On the way to the kitchen, I stop in the bathroom and pee as furry cheeks bump my shins. I open a tin of food, aim two plates at the meowing, pour iced coffee, and sit down to write.

I considered putting the Lucy/Alice scene to paper. Then, I considered a scene where Alice catches me trying on a pair of her stockings and violates me with a strap-on. I wrote neither but instead sat wondering whether all my fiction is powered by the on/off switch of my dick.

I was reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and feeling ashamed of my familiar fictional practices, all the silly ways I had written about sex and love. I opened the book: That’s what we both hate about fiction—it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, rendering you less able to see out, to get out. My most successful stories have female main characters. My male characters are always forced to navigate the false choices of some clumsy moral trap. But I had to admit, as a cat jumped into my lap, that my stories about women merely replaced moral dilemmas with will-she-or-won’t-she—that is, find somebody to fuck—and that I believed those stories touched mystery only because I was mystified by sex. And that my mystification about sex was shorthand for the mystery of my wife, about whose inner life I know less than I did twenty years ago. And so, I thought, setting aside my clipboard, the only way I can write about my wife is by imagining her into a different person. Thus doing her violence and learning nothing about her at all. My wife snoozed her alarm in the next room and skipped the gym, and I sat quietly drinking coffee. 

My wife and I were middle-class kids who believed violin lessons and good grades would lift us beyond the nothing of our suburbs. Maybe our teachers told us that. They should have told us that unless we were geniuses or willing to devote our total energies to self-fashioning, the stink of Peoria, Illinois, and Fenton, Missouri, would forever be on us, in our language and clothes, in how we ate and watched TV and spent money. My job teaching high school English provides a daily lesson in the exact truth of my potential. I find the lesson invigorating, but something in my wife—something I both admire and pity—continues to believe she is made for something better than her mid-management job at a university, with the result that reality wounds her anew each day with its emails and evaluations and office politics.

On this night, when my wife and I were an hour into other people’s pathos on TLC, Alice grabbed the remote and killed the TV. She laced up her cross-trainers and said, Let’s go.

We cockpitted ourselves into something lower and leaner than my Versa or my wife’s Vue, a conveyance with dash lights burning blue. Under a scythe of moon, we growled into a neighborhood where the houses looked like piles of money. Tamed lawns spoke their worldview to the night. We slipped on black burglar masks and held hands down the sidewalk.

Every house is taller than every tree, Alice said, her blonde bangs cute above the mask.

The resources it must take, I said, to maintain these signifiers.

We found the house and pissed in its landscaping, our water soaking blooms and darkening the rocks beneath. The front door’s gold knob disintegrated to powder under Alice’s squeeze.

It’s just like I imagined it, she said inside. We looked into a sitting room, which is to say a room where no one ever sat that served as a consecrated set-aside to consumption. A chandelier affirmed the room’s dark pinks. A long rug led us down a central hallway, family portraits watching us to a lighted room at the rear of the house ashout with television. My wife’s boss’s husband was watching a football game.

I’ve been waiting for you, he said from his recliner, demonstrating his object permanence as a character and confirming the rightness of what we had come to do. He pointed: She’s upstairs.

He was handsome, with the kind of face described in lazy fiction as rugged and a mustache so commanding it seemed almost perverted. His wife had married him for that mustache and for his law degree, though he no longer practiced and now smiled his way through life with a dissipated idleness that fueled his wife’s workplace manias of competence and control. 

Perhaps my inclusion in the scene, he called behind us, will open the possibility of empathy for my wife?

Not today, champ, I said. 

Wow, I said, climbing the stairs behind Alice, your ass in that body suit.

Focus, she said.

We found my wife’s boss in a former bedroom. Purple drapes pooled into the dust of that forgotten idea, and the king bed was lost under binders, post-its, scrawled legal sheets, highlighted emails, and several editions of Who’s Who in Louisiana. The cunt herself was at a corner desk tapping a laptop with one hand and a phone with the other.

Why are you dressed for work at 11 p.m.? I said.

You know I have things to do, she snapped and then turned. Who are you?

It had been so many years since my wife’s boss had truly looked at her, and Alice’s transformation had been so comprehensive that the cunt did not recognize her even though the mask was a mere toy.

Do you have anything thematically resonant to say? I asked Alice.

Let’s let action carry the meaning.

The squalid room and drifted bed in particular exposed the dirt behind my wife’s boss’s polished public self, its rat heap a more extreme version of the clutter my wife had made of our house during ten years of working for the cunt, our living room stacked with chronicles of workplace abuse against the idea of some future reckoning.

Cunt is a word my wife and I use only for her boss, a woman who has removed herself from the human family by making herself a monster. Only monstrous language will do. 

The job had made my wife insane, but here was evidence that evil required an even greater insanity, greater personal waste. Alice snatched the tiny woman by the collar and tossed her atop the bed’s debris.

You hate me, the cunt accused as I wadded a spreadsheet to stuff in her mouth, because I’m all the girls who wouldn’t date you in high school. And you hate me, she said to Alice, because you couldn’t be me.

Our hatred is more polymorphous than that, I said. It moves beyond gender into the politics of language, into institutional and class critique. 

Fictionalized violence against women is still violence against women, the cunt cried, fighting her head from side to side.

Pssh, I said. That’s an aesthetic canard. Read your Maggie Nelson. 

It did, however, seem best to limit my role to holding her down while Alice did the kicking and punching merited by a decade of workplace cruelty. Alice returned my wife’s anger to its source, each blow to nose or belly delivering its dark payload. As in dreams, my wife’s boss’s face did not bleed or bruise but presented itself to be struck again and again in obedience to justice.  

Say what you are, Alice commanded.

You’re right, the figure on the bed cried. I admit it, I am.

Say it.

I’m a cunt.

With that, she became one. Her limbs shrank away, and her face skinned over to a blobby glisten. Instead of a business suit, she now wore a tangle of obscene hair. The meat of her lay on the bed with an exposed, defenseless twitching. A cunt, it turns out, only vaguely resembles a vagina. They share a certain pubic humidity, but the formless lump before us came from beyond nature, like a laboratory error. Deprived of the speech with which my wife’s boss violated truth and decency, the cunt had only three squiggled lines, as in a cartoon, wiggling mutely above its rancid stink.

*

I was playing Two Dots. My wife was playing Candy Crush.

Are you coming to the parade? I asked. (The obligatory Carnival reference in a New Orleans story. This one happens to be true.)

Mm, she shrugged. 

We both knew she would not go to the parade. I had asked only so that when I went, she would not hold my fun against me, which we also both knew. In truth I did not like crowds and merriment much more than she did, but after a couple drinks I could briefly see the point of it.

There was a different life for us in some parallel rendering of time, a place where we were exactly the same but better. Where we were happy in our bodies, where we didn’t let the things we knew—about the world, about people, about each other—crush our hope and will. Where speaking our thoughts didn’t terrify us. We do like each other. Perhaps that is enough, even remarkable for people who have lived together for twenty-five years. It isn’t impossible to think we might someday live inside that liking the way characters do in stories.

Have you ever hit this into this? she asked, turning the screen.

She had a multi-bomb next to a juice ball. I pipped my eyebrows and gave a nod that meant, You’re going to like this.

She slid the objects together, and Kimmie, the sugar-addicted girl who is the guiding spirit of Candy Crush, swiped onto the screen with legs dangling below her pinafore, wearing sunglasses against the nuclear blast that bloomed behind her and swept the board clean.

Hi, Kimmie, my wife said.

When I got home from the parade, my wife was in bed. I sat on the couch and wrote an ending:

Notching personal bests in all three events, Alice won the Louisiana State Powerlifting Meet. At the victory party, with our friends around us, I announced that I had accepted an offer to teach at an international school—we were leaving immediately for South Korea. My wife dreams of denouncing her boss on the last day, delivering the finality of a public thrust, but Alice simply laid her key on the desk and walked out. In Seoul we found a cafe where we met after my days of teaching and Alice’s of managing a gym. Our house in America had a TV always talking, but here we told each other about our day, spoke beginner’s Korean to our waiter, offered each other bites of food. After a bike ride through Bakhansan Park, I realized with a shiver of health that I had neither drunk alcohol nor written fiction in months. The forsythia blooms hung yellow around us and had no associations. I took off my helmet and breathed the air.