Extract from Love And Houses...

We love the kitchen with its perfect New England backyard so much that we never bothered to do anything much with the living room, which mostly just functions as a kind of theatre for the television.  It has a working fireplace, however, and because I was feeling extremely depressed and weepy I took my package of Hostess cupcakes with me into the living room and sat in front of the fireplace remembering, remembering exactly, how the first winter after we'd moved into the apartment five years ago was spent collecting logs and twigs for the fireplace, which we lit and made love beside the way that all new couples do.  Every night we did this, and some afternoons as well, until one day I woke up and realized that kicking around the backyard looking for kindling had become foreplay and we never made love anywhere else.

''It's all become too contrived,'' I told Andy.  ''I go to kiss you and you're already feeling in your pocket for matches.  I'm thinking 'Are the logs dry? Where are my rubber boots?'  It has got to stop.''

That was true.  It was also true that on one occasion we'd positioned ourselves too close to the fire and halfway through what would have been our finest lovemaking session on record, we were forced to turn our attention to a peculiar smell, which we discovered was my hair, which was on fire.  Also that both our back had developed bruises the size of silver dollars and that we had a brand new king-sized bed upstairs that we'd hardly ever been in since getting married.

''Okay, I'll tell you the truth,'' Andy had confessed then. ''I don't like our bed. I don't like it because your mother gave it to us and so whenever I look at it I think about her and how you are her daughter and I am sleeping with you.''

''But you are married to me.  When you're married you aren't sleeping with the person, you're married to the person.''

''But still,'' he said. ''your mother.''

''She bought the bed.  She sanctions the whole thing!  She gives it her blessing.''

Andy nodded. ''Right,'' he said. ''But I think she's, like, in the bed.  Don't start talking about Freud now.  I'm not going to talk to you if you mention Freud.''

''No,'' I said. ''This is a fake-out.  I'm not saying you don't have some fleeting thought of my mother but she is not the problem here. I know this because if she were you'd never have been able to get it up all those times we stayed over at her farm. There's something else going on.  Something you aren't telling me.''

''Okay,'' he said and gave me a huge sigh.  He took out the pen he always, but always, keeps in the breast pocket of his shirt.  It's one of those pens that you can flick in and out of its casing by pressing a toggle at one end.  When Andy is nervous about something, when he's on the phone to somebody at work or can't quite crunch his numbers correctly, he flicks the pen, and he was flicking furiously now.  ''Okay, I'll tell you.  Eloise and I had the exact same brand, with nearly an identical headboard.  When I look at the bed, I think it is cursed.  Also, that Eloise is in it. Eloise and your mother, and me and you.''

Eloise is Andy's ex-wife.  She is a tall bosomy blonde - that is Andy's word, bosomy - I can't imagine describing anyone as bosomy in this day and age - with glued-on plastic fingernails and a collection of glass figurines of unicorns and kittens.  She had a  (real) toy poodle she kept under her arm because it made her feel 'society' and she thought that being glamorous meant wearing rhinestones and a tight black dress.  She used to leave little messages of the most stupid and trite variety all over the house for Andy to find.  Love conquers all - why don't you conquer me tonight? when she wanted him to seduce her.  Or, The world is our oyster, let's take off somewhere when she wanted to go to Ocean City, Maryland, which is where she is from.  She cooked using recipes she found on the backs of Fritos bas and could not tell fake jewelry from real ('Look at this beautiful pearl necklace,'' she once said to Andy. ''It was only sixteen dollars!  Can you believe it!  And all those women out there spending hundreds!).  They went to the same crummy beach hotel every year and she would insist they go to the beach and just lie there, every morning, every afternoon, while she soaked up the rays and drank diet Dr. Pepper.  She wore white zinc on her lips, and eye patches so that no sunglasses lines would appear on her temples.  At night when they got back to the hotel room she would slather her body in aftertan lotion, and stand naked in front of a mirror evaluating the deepening color of her skin.

The hotel was a wreck of a place, with a lock on the television so nobody could steal it.  You could get doughnuts in the front office in the morning but otherwise the only food was from vending machines in the hall, and those were often dysfunctional because the kids tried to rob them. Andy hated the beach, though he is exactly the sort of person who bronzes beautifully within the space of a day.  And he couldn't sleep in the hotel because he can't sleep anywhere and, besides, Eloise kept putting quarters in the Magic Fingers box and he woke up thinking there was an earthquake. 

One week and then home again.  Eloise told all their friends about the romantic time they had, but really it was just a tanning project.

''Do I look like one of those models in Sports Illustrated?'' she would ask him on the plane ride back.

Her skin had gone from creamy peach to practically black, with rich glassy lipstick and newly glued eyelashes that fluttered all the way up to her eyebrows, Andy told me. New freckles, new burgundy-colored neck skin, new blonder, frizzier hair.  She wore skirts the size of postage stamps and white sandals with three-inch heels. She didn't look like Sports Illustrated, he told me, she looked like a transvestite.

''Wow, and you were married to her,'' was my frequent refrain, when he spoke of Eloise.  I was never jealous of her - how could I be jealous of a woman who painted not only her own toenails, but those of her toy poodle, Bebe?

He'd married her when he was nineteen, a simple mistake of youth, a simple mistake that five other men have made since.  It was easy enough to see the reason behind divorcing Eloise - she bought Hallmark cards with photographs of actual couples embracing in hazy soft focus, with crude embarrassing limericks inside. She gave them to Andy signed in her loopy scrawl with the 'i' in her name punctuated with a tiny heart.  When she wrote her little messages ''Love conquers all...'' et cetera, she had to look up 'conquer' in the dictionary.  It was easy to understand why he left her, but why marry her in the first place?

I might have thought to ask that before I married Andy.  Instead, dumbshit that I am, I waited until half year into the thing when it suddenly occurred to me that we never made love in our bed - and it was then revealed that Andy could not make love in our bed - and he could not because of Eloise.  Eloise was the reason why we always made love in front of the fireplace.  Eloise was the reason why what ought to have been a nice period feature became the only place of our intimacy...