All That and Then Some

ALICE - It Takes Two

ONE OF THE MOST attractive qualities in a man, I have always thought, is an inclination to clean up my messes after me. Vic doesn't cook, but he reliably surveys the (disastrous) state of the kitchen after I've cooked, makes an old-matron-style 'tut'ing noise and sets to attacking the mess with a scouring sponge. There's nothing sexier than a man with a neat fetish.

I think back to a time before Vic (B.V.), a hazy, long-ago period that could rightfully be called the 'Crustaceous' Period based on the state of my kitchen and the general lassitude my roommate Vivian and I shared when it came to messes. We would easily let a dinner party's dishes sit in the sink (even on the table, where they lay) until the next day. Or the day after, depending on how hung-over we were, which was often 'very' during the Crustaceous Period because we had a large circle of under-employed, hyper-cool, artist and actor friends who were always looking for a meal and a place to pre-drink before spending their dwindling parental allowances at the clubs.

Well, looking back, they were Vivi's friends more than mine, but I'd been her best friend since grade school, which gave me special status among her, I thought, glamorous art and theatre school friends. They hardly ever mocked my junior-level job in an ad agency where I made more money each month than most of them would net in the following five years. And, if they mocked me, they did it kindly, knowing that at least half of them would end up with a desk job themselves one day, eventually seeing the benefit of a nice apartment that didn't have bugs and enough money to buy full-price alcohol in the clubs rather than showing up steaming drunk on boxed wine and throwing up in the public toilets later.

Did I mind hosting dinner parties and letting them lounge all over our PotteryBarn rug that I loved so much, spilling wine and occasionally dropping cigarette ash because they were gesturing so dramatically in fits of laughter? Not a bit. Their glamour, although tarnished by poverty, rubbed off on me. I fell more and more in love with their loud presence, their worn-out secondhand Doc Martens and vintage store style.

I bought myself some Doc Martens and spent an afternoon scuffing them with a kitchen scouring pad (finally, a use for it!) until they didn't look so nerdily new.

As much fun as the Crustaceous Period was, there was a less glamorous side. The fact is that near-constant entertaining leads to a near-constant need to do dishes and wash glasses — an activity neither Vivi nor I took to naturally. We let things pile up to the point that one of us finally bought disposable paper cups from the dollar store so that we wouldn't have to wash the teetering stack of glassware that had built up like filthy stalactites across the counters. Plus, we could chuck the cups, floating cigarette butts and all, straight into the trash.

Even less glamorous than single-use, butt-filled drinkware was the time Vivi lifted the dirty roasting pan that had been serving as a sink-within-the-sink since its original use, which, as far as we could remember, must have been in the early 90s, to search for a lost earring and discovered a writhing colony of maggots that were feasting on the rich biodome of filth that we'd allowed to build up.

She screamed, dropping the pan onto the floor, where more maggots now squirmed. I also screamed, having a desperate fear and loathing for bugs of all kinds, although maggots were a previously unconsidered enemy since I'd never actually encountered them in my pre-Crustaceous Period life.

A week after that, I lifted an instant ramen package from the cupboard and found that carpenter ants had infiltrated our pantry. Big, black, nefarious-looking things.

I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that these two bug-related events left me primed and open to Victor MacKenzie's particular brand of button-down, neat-freakery when we met not long after that.

I took one look at his well-kept nails, non-vintage store Club Monaco shirt, his Doc-Marten-less feet and the way he subtly inspected his glass for lipstick or fingerprints marks at a restaurant, and I thought "this man could restore order to my life."

That doesn't sound very romantic, and maybe it isn't, but (I found out later that same night) he also kissed like a romance novel hero and (I found out later that week) had some very unbuttoned-down attitudes about the bedroom. Which I liked.

And still like, when we get the privacy to explore them.

Anyway, this is what I'm thinking about as I sit at the kitchen table watching my husband attack the lasagna pans with a single-minded determination to restore order to our family home, now that our parents have left it.

As he works on the dishes, I've been speaking to his back in light, non-directive tones about how someone should probably have a talk with our son. The talk. By someone, of course, I mean him, but I know from experience that it's better to seed ideas in Vic's mind and let them blossom until they spring, fully-formed like they were his in the first place.

However, in this instance, he either can't hear me because of the rushing tap water, or he does hear me but doesn't want to engage in this line of conversation.

"So, I guess, what I'm saying," I say, "Is that sex is probably something a boy should hear about from his father."

Silent scrubbing.

"I mean," I press ahead, "I could talk to him. There's no reason a mother shouldn't be the one to talk about, um, penises and things. Sure, she doesn't have one herself, but certainly, given that she's a mother, I suppose it can be assumed that she has some level of familiarity with, er, the mechanisms involved and could offer her secondhand knowledge to her male child who shouldn't find it awkward at all to discuss, ah, sex and things related to, um, sex, well, with any member of his family really. It would be nice to think that we're all sort of open and healthily supportive about things like this. So, I could. Talk to him? If you think it's better?"

"Sure," he says, aggravatingly.

Argh.