Marl Pit Mercy

I married Glen when I was thirty, after two years of dating him, and in three years of marriage I had learned exactly one thing about his band: they thought of me as the nanny. Not even their nanny. Just a nanny, some generic woman who showed up with snack bags and asked if everybody had water. I was thirty-three years old, I had been minding other people's children since I was twenty-five, and I was good at it, but I was also a woman who owned heels and knew how to do eyeliner, and I was tired of exactly none of them remembering that.

And then there was the suit thing. That is the part I have to get to early, because everything that happened in the marl pit that day grows out of it. About a year ago I caught Glen, my husband, staring at an old film still of a woman in a man's suit, and he went so red I thought he was going to pass out. It took him two weeks and half a bottle of cheap red wine to admit what it was. He liked seeing a woman in men's tailoring. Sharp shoulders, a vest, a tie knotted properly. It did something to him he couldn't explain and had been embarrassed about since his twenties. I told him it was the least weird secret a man had ever confessed to me, and then I quietly started noticing which of his suits fit me over the shoulders.

The tape machine jammed on recording day. That is the other thing you need. Glen's band had hauled several thousand dollars of equipment down into a disused marl pit outside Zinder, because Jameson, their lead singer, thirty-one years old and full of ideas nobody asked for, had read an article about caves and reverb and would not shut up about it. The pit was cool and smelled of mineral, all chalky white walls going up steep on every side, work lamps on stands, mixing boards glowing blue at the bottom like a little spaceship had crashed there. Tami, their sound engineer, who had worked with them for three years and who I genuinely liked, was crouched at the tape machine with a screwdriver and the expression of a woman performing surgery on a relative.

I was supposed to be upstairs. That was the arrangement. I was supposed to sit at the top of the ramp with the cooler and the sandwiches and the sunscreen, being useful, being the nanny, while the men and Tami made art. I lasted about forty minutes.

So I put on the suit.

It was Glen's gray three-piece, the one tailored in a shop that charged more per stitch than I make in an hour, and it fit me the way it fits him, that is to say like it was poured on. I cinched the vest, knotted the tie, rolled the cuffs once because I have watched enough music videos to know rolled cuffs mean business. I stole a swipe of his stage makeup, the dark stuff he smears on under his eyes for shows, and did something smoky and unfair with it. Then the heels, the red ones, because subtlety was never the plan. I checked myself in the van's mirror and said out loud, to nobody, "Well. Look at you."

Then I started down the ramp.

You should understand that the ramp into a marl pit is not a gentle thing. It is a switchbacking dirt track cut into the wall, and I took it in three-inch heels like someone who had already decided the fall would be worth it. My heels clicked on the packed chalk of the floor and the sound went up and up and came back down off the walls, so that I announced myself four or five times before I even arrived. I want to tell you I planned that. I did not plan that. The pit planned it for me, and I will be grateful to that pit for the rest of my life.

The first thing I saw was the crisis. Jameson standing with his arms crossed, glaring at the tape machine like it had insulted his mother. Tami on her knees in front of the machine, flashlight in her teeth. Two of the others hovering with the useless hovering energy of men at a cookout. And the second thing I saw was Glen turning around because the pit had already told everyone I was coming, and his jaw just dropped. Actually dropped. His mouth hung open, and for a man of thirty-five that is worse, because he had no excuse.

"Cherise?" he said, and his voice cracked on the second syllable.

"Gentlemen," I said. "Tami." I nodded at each of them. I kept walking, slow, heels ticking, letting the suit do its work. Jameson made a sound like a kettle. One of the guitarists physically stepped backward. Tami looked up from the tape machine, took in the whole picture, and grinned at me with real warmth, which I noted for later, because Tami was the only one of them I was interested in impressing twice.

"What are you wearing," Glen managed.

"Clothes," I said. "Yours, technically."

I did not rush past him. The whole performance was the slow walk, the eye contact, the total refusal to hurry. I made it all the way to the mixing board before I let myself look back, and every face in the pit was still pointed at me like sunflowers at the sun. Even Jameson had uncrossed his arms.

But here is the part I did not expect, and I have replayed it maybe four hundred times since. Glen crossed the floor, grabbed my wrist, and pulled me behind the stack of equipment crates, out of the lamp light, into the blue glow spilling off the mixing board. Not rough. Urgent. His hand was shaking.

"You look," he started, and stopped, and started again. "You look so hot I can't think. I have been trying to think for ten seconds and there is nothing up there. There's just you in my suit."

"Good," I said. "That was the goal."

"You came down here like that. In front of everyone."

"In front of everyone who calls me the nanny, yes."

He laughed, breathless, and pressed me back against the crates and kissed my neck, just below my ear, and I felt the whole shape of the day change. Three years of marriage and I had never once seen him like this in daylight, this undone. "You have no idea," he said into my skin, "how long I have wanted to see you in one of these. In public. Where people can see. I know that's insane."

"It's not insane," I said. "It's the least insane thing about you."

"You did this for me?"

"I did this for me, and you get to enjoy it. Tami's the only one I dressed up for on purpose, though. She's the only one who'd notice the tailoring."

"Tami noticed the tailoring?"

"Tami noticed everything, Glen. That's her job."

Behind us, from the middle of the pit, Tami's voice carried off the chalk walls the way everything did, so it reached us twice, the second time like a verdict. "Okay, I'm calling it. The tape machine's jammed and it's not getting unjammed today. Something in the transport is seized and I don't have the part, and I'm not forcing it, because this piece costs more than the van."

"There's no backup?" Jameson said.

"There's a backup in Amsterdam, Jameson."

"Well, how long?"

"However long it takes to drive a backup from Amsterdam, plus however long I say I need to not be rushed. Today is dead. The acoustics aren't going anywhere, they're a hole in the ground."

Jameson grumbled something in the key of a man being reasonable against his will, and then, to his credit, said it out loud: "Fine. Everybody take a break. Long break. Eat something. Don't touch anything." A pause. "Cherise, I take back every boring-nanny thing I have ever thought, and I have thought several."

"Several," I called back. "Noted."

Glen was still holding my wrist. Behind the crates, in the blue light, his thumb was moving over my pulse as if to confirm I was real, and I was already deciding how the rest of this break was going to go, because a dead recording day in a pit with my husband looking at me like that was not going to end with sandwiches.

So there we were, wedged behind the equipment crates, my back against cold chalk-dusted plywood, Glen breathing on my neck like someone who had just learned something about himself in real time. Which, to be fair, he had.

"You did this to be mean," he said. It wasn't a question.

"Partly." I had decided by then to give him the whole accounting, because he deserved it and because watching his face while I delivered it was going to be its own reward. "You dragged me to a country where the main cultural landmark is a hole in the ground, and your bandmates have spent three days calling me the nanny. The nanny, Glen. I have been minding other people's children since I was twenty-five, I retired from that, that was the entire point of getting married to a man in a band."

"Two guitarists called you the nanny?"

"Jameson called me the nanny by implication, which is worse." I smoothed the lapel of his gray suit, the one tailored in some shop in Lisbon that cost more than our first car, the one I had taken off its hanger that morning out of pure spite and put on my thirty-three-year-old body, and I watched his eyes track my hand like a cat at a window. "And partly, yes, I did it because I caught you looking at that photograph of the woman in the man's suit about a year ago, and you went red and changed the subject, and I have been sitting on that for twelve months like a hen on an egg."

He made a sound. Not a word, a sound, somewhere between a laugh and being punched.

"You knew," he said.

"Glen, I have known since before we were married. I dated you for two years. I know what your face does." I tipped my chin up at him. "What I didn't know was whether you'd ever say it out loud, so I decided to make saying it out loud the easier option."