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I LIVE IN YONVILLE
 
This is going to be a story about marriage. I don’t know any others. It’s twelve years for me this October, and in that time I can’t think of much else that’s happened. In the old nineteenth-century tales, the events of the world somehow managed to creep into the domestic cottage; bankers came chasing Balzac’s bridegrooms, shouting and pulling out their hair at the fall of the Paris bank rates. But the world hasn’t affected us much. We bought a house ten years ago, when the rates were 18 percent. Still, houses were a lot cheaper then. When the rates went down, we refinanced.
 
I am a reader, so I can tell you that Flaubert knew best when he began the story of Emma Bovary with Charles’s school days. Once you know what an idiot Charles was as a boy, you understand much better how she is able to fool him, and why he puts up with her even when he ought to know better. I’m not going to tell you about infidelity here, because as far as I know there isn’t any to tell about. But our world is small and provincial like the Bovarys’, and if there were secrets here I would probably be the last to know.
 
As I write this, I am alone. It is that hour of the morning I have to myself. My wife leaves the house at 8:15. She is a medical technician at a hospital twenty miles north of here. My daughter is supposed to leave the house at the same time, but she is a dawdler. She takes her time tying her shoes. I like to have a good bowel movement after the both of them leave; it is the only time I am really fully relaxed. Then I sit at the kitchen table and drink a last cup of coffee and smoke a couple of cigarettes. Two’s my limit, usually. I am not due at the office until 9:30.
 
I mentioned Flaubert before, and that was no idle name-dropping. I barely finished college, but I have kept up. Other men my age, if they read at all, read books by people like Ken Follett and Tom Clancy, while I have been known to come home from the library with a thick copy of Middlemarch under my arm. In towns like ours, we use the library. We feel civic-minded and virtuous doing so. It’s also a way of saving money, though few besides me will admit it.
 
As for Flaubert, I am always impressed by the way he has of rooting his stories in the physical space his characters inhabit. Once I was at a party where I didn’t know too many people, and some guy came up to me and asked me where I lived. I answered, “I live in Yonville.” It was a way of testing how smart he was and also of telling the truth. He didn’t get it, but I was proud of myself nonetheless. You can learn a lot about people from just a couple of details like that. I like to know the car a man drives, and how far he has to commute to work. People become dreamy in cars if they have to drive a long way. We put up a great fight against dreaminess by means of car stereos, but I find it’s nearly always a losing battle. If I’m talking to someone who has to drive a long way to and from work, I tend to be kinder toward him. I think of this guy surrounded by mountains and fields and the long roads, and I know how you can’t help feeling about your life on those long drives. Something creeps into the car with you; it’s like the seat beside you doesn’t really want to remain empty.
 
I drive twelve miles to work and twelve back. In the morning there’s classical music and in the late afternoon a posh news show in which reporters from the BBC are forever heard shouting over gunfire in places like Baghdad and the West Bank. Last week there was an uprising in Azerbaijan and, sure enough, the BBC was there, shouting. Personally, I couldn’t care less what is going on in Azerbaijan, and I don’t know anyone who really does. But there seems to be some agreement that at five o’clock, as we all drive home in our cars, we’re going to listen to these reports with the attention we reserve for things that matter to us.
 
The fact is, our world has gotten smaller and smaller, and we’ve stopped complaining. What’s to complain about? I am involved in the local PTO. My wife sends packages of clothes to poor Native American children somewhere in the Southwest. We vote. We cast our nets in the shallows. I write grant proposals for an expensive women’s college. Our friends are doctors, tradesmen, local professionals. We are proud of our little world. Though no one would come out and say this outright, we consider ours a model for the way all towns should be. We vote Democratic and don’t object too strenuously to a rise in taxes. We think of our children as enlightened.
 
I know some people who are unmarried, but not many. That fact—along with all the preceding information—might make it sound like my life is totally homogenized, but I don’t consider it so. I find great variety in the country of marriage. Always, you have to interpret the world through the subtlest of clues. We are forced to become detectives of each other, a far more interesting proposal, to my mind, than the naked emotionalism of the unattached. Divorce drops like sudden death among us. All the clues were there, but none of us picked up on them, so we have something to discuss for weeks. Who needs to listen to the news when we have the spectacle of Roberta Hawkins, who used to stay home baking tomato cakes for her husband, hitting the bars and bringing around a new boyfriend every week? The BBC would never think of coming here, and that is why we smile—I smile—when we hear the announcer’s voice. It’s as though he’s stuck in an old version of the world. Or perhaps—who knows?—I am.
 
It’s hard to remember exactly, but it seems five or six years ago I stopped thinking beyond my immediate circle. Before then, I suppose I was ambitious. I got this job, at least, which pays me well, though I don’t see any real chance that I’ll rise. Some other person might want to tell you this story from the inside out, but not me. I look around myself and there I see my story. When I’m alone for even a night away from here, I panic. This house and the car and the job, and, of course, the marriage, are what I’ve become. I’m not complaining.
 
Maybe you’re a curious person and you want to know what I look like. Let’s just say I’m one of those people you see on the beach in summer—we go to Wellfleet, ourselves—and don’t wonder too much about. I’m small and slightly built, and my hair won’t grow. It’s always short. When it does grow, it grows unevenly no matter how it’s cut, so I don’t fight it, I just keep it short. I’ve been told I’m not bad-looking, but I don’t have what I suppose you’d call a sexual presence. I’m one of those men who might as well be women.
 
We recognize one another, I think, and make our friendships accordingly. There are certain men I just don’t know what to say to. They seem to be savages to me, different entirely. I don’t know what they want. You know the sort of men I’m talking about. Maybe you’re one of them. If so, write the story of your life please, because I’d like to know it. When I pick up a contemporary novel that promises to lay bare what the cover describes as “the macho heart,” I am generally disappointed. I am convinced there are more differences between us than the novelists allow. These “macho heart” novels are most likely written by men like me, men who are only guessing.
 
My friends are all as soft as marshmallows. We joke about one another’s bellies, but no one really cares. None of us plays competitive sports, though we swim and run. We are the ones who failed at high school athletics. We are the ones the girls never liked. We consider ourselves lucky—blessed, even—because we found a girl to like us. We’re not the ones you’re going to catch sleeping with other women. Sometimes when we’re alone in bars (it’s rare) we marvel at the fact that all around us men are cheating on their wives. We stare at one another and laugh and ask: Who? It’s the same game the virgins used to play in high school. There’s a raw world and there’s a tame one, and I believe you make the choice early as to which you’re going to live in.