Nine Inches by Tom Perrotta Page B

eighteen-wheeler as a young man and considered himself an honorary Southerner) and Gus usually hated. But for some reason, he didn’t mind it so much in Lonny’s garage, all those songs about hard luck and heartbreak, how everybody got their share.
    A couple of times, though, late at night, they got to talking, man-to-man, about more serious subjects — the deaths of their parents, their worries about their kids, the everyday indignities of walking around in an aging body, what their lives added up to more than halfway down the road.
    And they talked about their marriages, too, something they had never done before. Lonny complained bitterly about Peggy — how she’d let herself go and lost her sense of fun, how critical she’d become of everyone they knew, as if she’d somehow been promoted to a higher station of life. On top of everything else, their sex life had gone down the tubes. She practically made him beg for it; he was lucky if they had relations once a week.
    “I don’t know what happened,” he confessed. “She used to love it, used to put these little notes in my lunch box.”
    Th e notes weren’t dirty, Lonny explained. I can’t wait for bedtime, she’d write, or You are entitled to a free gi ft . Details at eleven. Just cute little things like that. But man, they sure got him going.
    “Now I’m lucky if I get a sandwich,” he said, grimly scrutinizing his cigar. Gus must have been thrown o ff by Lonny’s candor; he must have felt obligated to con fi de a secret of his own. Or maybe he just needed to unburden himself. Whatever the reason, once he got started on the subject of Martha, it all came tumbling out. Her frustration with him, with the fact that, intelligent as he was, he was never going to amount to anything more than shipping supervisor at Precision Bearings. For years she’d been bugging him about going to night school, taking some courses in computers or accounting, but he always had some excuse. And now — it was as if both of them had woken up on the same gray morning and realized the same thing — it was too late. Th ey’d turned a corner. Th eir lives were their lives. Nothing was going to change.
    “It wasn’t so bad when she was working,” Gus explained. “But now that she’s home all day, she broods about it.”
    A ft er years of stoical silence, Martha had turned into a fountain of complaints. She wanted to travel, drive a nice car, to own a vacation house on the water, to look forward to a fun and prosperous retirement, but it wasn’t gonna happen. Because of him — his passivity, his cowardice, his willingness to settle for second best. He could see the disappointment in her face every time she looked at him, and it had done something to his head. Well, not just his head.
    “Between the sheets,” he told Lonny. “You know. It’s not working like it’s supposed to.”
    “Ouch.” Lonny gave a sympathetic wince. “ Th at’s a tough break.”
    And of course Martha held that against him, too. He didn’t get it. She claimed to have lost respect for him as a man, but somehow still expected him to perform like one.
    “At least she’s still interested,” Lonny pointed out.
    “Lotta good it does me,” muttered Gus.
    All these years later, Gus wasn’t quite clear why he and Lonny had stopped spending their nights together in the garage. All he remembered for sure was that Martha had gone back to work the following September — she found a secretarial position at Merck, a job she’d keep until retirement — and their marriage slowly returned to an even keel. She stopped complaining, lost interest in making him accept responsibility for her unhappiness. His “problem” had continued, but a ft er they moved to separate bedrooms, it no longer seemed to upset her so much.
    GUS HAD the compressor warming up and the de fl ated pool spread out on the cement fl oor when he suddenly became aware of a hitch in his plan, such an obvious one that he was embarrassed