In the telephonic background, in St. Paul, he faintly heard the squeal of a one-year-old. It wasn’t Connie’s kid, but it was close enough to make him nervous. He’d seen her only once since August, in Charlottesville, over the long Thanksgiving weekend. Christmastime (another sore subject) he’d spent moving from Charlottesville to Alexandria and making appearances in Georgetown with his family. He’d told Connie that he was working hard on his government contract, but in fact he’d killed whole stretches of days watching football, listening to Jenna on the phone, and generally feeling doomed. Connie might have convinced him to let her fly out anyway if she hadn’t been knocked flat by the flu. It had troubled him to hear her feeble voice and know she was his wife and not rush to her side, but he’d needed to go to Poland instead. What he’d discovered in Lodz and Warsaw, during three frustrating days with an American expat “interpreter” whose Polish turned out to be excellent for ordering in restaurants but heavily dependent on an electronic translation device when dealing with hardened Slavic businessmen, had so dismayed and frightened him that, in the weeks since his return, he’d been unable to focus his mind on business for more than five minutes at a time. Everything depended on Paraguay now. And it was much more pleasant to imagine the bed that he was going to share with Jenna than to think about Paraguay.
“Are you wearing your wedding ring?” Connie asked him.
“Um—no,” he said before thinking better of it. “It’s in my pocket.”
“Hm.”
“I’m putting it on right now,” he said, moving toward the coin dish on his nightstand where he’d left the ring. His nightstand was a cardboard box. “It slips right on, it’s great.”
“I’ve got mine on,” Connie said. “I love having it on. I try to remember to put it on my right hand when I’m not in my room, but sometimes I forget.”
“Don’t be forgetting. That’s not good.”
“It’s OK, baby. Carol doesn’t notice stuff like that. She doesn’t even like to look at me. We’re unpleasing to each other’s sight.”
“We really need to be careful, though, OK?”
“I don’t know.”
“Just a little while longer,” he said. “Just until I tell my parents. Then you can wear it all you want. I mean, we’ll both be wearing them all the time then. That’s what I meant.”
It was hard to compare silences, but the one she deployed now felt especially grievous, especially sad. He knew it was killing her to keep their marriage secret, and he kept hoping that the prospect of telling his parents would become less scary to him, but as the months went by the prospect only got scarier. He tried to put his wedding ring on his finger, but it stuck on the last knuckle. He’d bought it in a hurry, in August, in New York, and it was slightly too small. He put it in his mouth instead, probing its compass with his tongue as if it were an orifice of Connie’s, and this turned him on a little. Connected him with her, took him back to August and the craziness of what they’d done. He slipped the ring, drool-slick, onto his finger.
“Tell me what you’re wearing,” he said.
“Just clothes.”
“Like what, though?”
“Nothing. Clothes.”
“Connie, I swear I’ll tell them as soon as I get paid. I just have to compartmentalize a little now. This fucking contract is freaking me out, and I can’t face anything else at the moment. So just tell me what you’re wearing, OK? I want to picture you.”
“Clothes.”
“Please?”
But she’d begun to cry. He heard the faintest whimper, the microgram of misery she let herself make audible. “Joey,” she whispered. “Baby. I’m so, so sorry. I don’t think I can do this anymore.”
“Just a little while longer,” he said. “Just at least wait till I’m back from my trip.”
“I don’t know if I can. I need some tiny thing right now. Some tiny . . .
“She’ll tell the neighbors. You know she’s a blabber.”
“No, I’ll make her swear.”
“And then somebody’s going to be late with their Christmas cards,” he said wildly, aggrieved not with Connie but with the way the world conspired against him, “and they’ll mention it to my parents. And then—And then—!”
“So what can I have if I can’t have that? What’s some little thing that I can have?”
