Love Me by Garrison Keillor

Fine, I said. Call me. She walked out the front door, naked, clutching her clothes and stood on the walk and sang something that sounded like Rodgers and Hammerstein in German, and staggered to her car, bright in the street lamp. She turned and faced my house and held out her arms, dropping her clothes, and shouted, “Mon ami! Mon amour!” And climbed in. And her car wouldn’t start. A naked woman came to the house while you were away, dear — she said her car wouldn’t start — so I had to start it for her. It needed the gas pedal pumped. And then it started. She honked twice and waved and drove away. I found a heating pad and fell into bed. I wondered why I was behaving so badly but before I could think about it, I was asleep.

6
    Gone
    When Iris came home, she found out about the whole thing from the neighbors and suggested that I leave.
    They said they saw this naked woman leaning out of our bedroom window. The one who you say stopped because her car wouldn’t start.
    Oh?
    She was smoking a cigarette, they said.
    Well, I was home the whole time. I don’t know how they could have seen that.
    You didn’t have guests while I was gone?
    I don’t know where they got that.
    Three people said they saw it.
    And then she held up the underpants. They were pale blue, and the embroidery said “Tuesday.”
    “Not mine,” she said. “Did you win them at the coin toss or what?”
    “I don’t know whose those are.”
    “Well, I do. Whatever woman you had over here while I was gone left her undies. What kinda deal is this, Larry? I mean, to have your girlfriend over to the house while I’m out of town? You’ve got the brains of a boxful of hammers to pull a trick like that.”
    “It’s not what you think. We were drunk, it was a silly thing, we got undressed, we kissed and stuff, nothing happened—”
    “Don’t lie to me. What about the nurse from the fertility clinic?”
    A right hook to the jaw. I’m on the canvas looking up at the sky. Bells ringing. Knockout.
    “I don’t go for you messing around with other women,” she said. “I’m not naive but I’m not going to sit back quietly and watch it happen either. I donno. A deal is a deal. Keep your end of the bargain. Simple as that. Either you do or you don’t. And you didn’t. And that’s the last word on the subject.”
    I promised that nothing of this sort would ever happen again.
    “That’s no good.”
    I started to say something and she held up her hand. Don’t. Don’t even start.
    I spent a restless remorseful night in the guest room. And the next morning I took off on the next leg of my book tour. She’d left the house early and written a note.
    I think we have a good life together but you feel otherwise.
You’ve gone off the deep end. I just don’t get what you’re up to
and I suppose you can’t tell me. So maybe you better go to New
York and get it out of your system and if you want to come back
and be married again, then we’ll see. I hope you know I love you.
    —xoxo Iris
    I went to church that Sunday, and the minister, whose voice sounded like a coffee grinder, preached on the subject of honesty. “Then have done with falsehood and speak the truth to each other, for we belong to one another as parts of one body. If you are angry, do not be led into sin; do not let sunset find you nursing your anger; and give no foothold to the devil” (Ephesians 4:25-27). So I spoke the truth to myself: I’m going to New York because I want to go, and let her do as she pleases. I love her and my home is here and when it’s time to die, I’ll come back. I’ll lie in a green-tiled room with tubes in my arm and wires in my chest, catheterized and sedated, tended by plump nurses from Granite Falls, and I will get up out of my body and find a choir and slip into the bass section like a walleye released into Lake Winnibigosh and we shall sing the perfect St. Matthew Passion at last, but meanwhile I am going to New York.
    “Well, I can’t stop