What was I seeing? She looked unhappy, but she always looked unhappy. But now I was seeing it in such refined detaiclass="underline" the disappointments, the displeasures, the wear and tear, the rub, the whispers, and the dying. And around her like a halo, like a cocoon: this house, much loved, and all that we’d put in it, and taken out, and so much of it accidental, without our choosing, just following habit, bad, lazy habit, just not thinking.
“You and your damn quotations! Couldn’t we just have a normal conversation now and then? Couldn’t you just tell me how you feel for once without dragging it out of the lips of someone famous, or dead? So tell me, I’m so unoriginal, who was that said ‘what on earth,’ and ‘what are you doing,’ and ‘for heaven’s sake,’ and all that, for heaven’s sake!”
“I don’t know,” I replied into the beautiful face of my disappointed, dying wife. “It’s anonymous. All the books call it ‘source unknown.’”
“Then as far as you know, it could be original with me, right? I’ve never asked you before, have I? What you were doing with our life? I just let things go.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “God, it’s so bright in here! Where’s all this terrible light coming from?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s these new bulbs I bought,” I said, going to the lamp and shutting it off. “Don’t open your eyes yet, okay, honey? I’ve brought some really bad bulbs into the house. I wouldn’t want you to hurt your eyes! Let me just get them all shut off, and when they cool off, I’ll throw them away, smash them out in the garbage can, you know? So no one else can get their hands on these bad bulbs.”
I chattered on, making very little sense, walking from room to room and switching off those terrible bulbs, and every time I switched one off, I swear I could hear a little sigh, once the current was cut and my intentions were clear. And as I moved about that darkening house I could hear my wife weeping, not saying anything, just crying, and I wondered, just as I had seen those things in her, what, exactly, had she seen in me?
But ignorance is bliss, according to a thousand different authors, a hundred thousand fellow sufferers along the road. I kept this constant in mind as I wandered through the dark.
SLAPSTICK
That morning Terry had the familiar feeling that his face was all wrong, but even though he could feel that wrongness, he couldn’t find it in the mirror. His eyes were bright, his cheeks were rosy, his nose gleamed, his hair that color his wife called “beautiful.” He wasn’t sure beautiful was what he’d been striving for, or what was most appropriate, but no one had ever called anything about him beautiful before and he was reluctant to give it up. “Take those compliments and keep them in your pocket,” his mother used to say. Terry had large pockets, but usually nothing in them other than a pig’s bladder or a rubber chicken.
He knew he was in for a difficult day if he started it out with an unhappy thought. Wait. He leaned closer to the mirror. Of course. He’d gotten the mouth upside down. He’d painted his mouth as a big frown this morning rather than in his trademark delirious grin. Make sure they see you smiling, as his mother used to say.
He really should redo the entire look. Even though the application of the frown had probably been some random mistake it had no doubt affected the painting in of the other features, the eyes especially. But there was no time. He pulled out his kit and spread cream across the lower half of his face, much as if he were shaving. Then he wiped that half away, leaving great smears of white and red on the towel and a broad, flesh-colored hole in the middle, marred at the center by this wrinkled little pucker of lips and teeth, his naked mouth. He stopped and stared. It looked inept and pitiful, some frail insect you might expose from under a stone.
He reached for the white and spread it over the flesh-color, wanting to cover his nakedness as quickly as possible. He could hear his wife and kids arguing in the kitchen. Dwight had lately been giving them fits. He understood how, and pretty much why, his son hated everything—he had been the same way at that age. Nothing fit: clothes, shoes, skin, hair, the life that appeared to be lying in wait. But understanding didn’t make his son any easier to live with. He was always upsetting his much younger sister, but then there wasn’t much that didn’t upset Jane.
His wife’s voice sounded uncharacteristically strident, with a raw and hoarse edge. If he was very careful he wouldn’t even have to go into the kitchen—he could just give a shout that he was running late for work (which was true), and had to skip breakfast. No time for some irritable conversation. They never talked about much except the house and the kids anymore. Last weekend he’d discovered a green silk costume and makeup in one of her drawers. He’d thought that had been all settled. He’d never wanted her to go back to work—since before their marriage he’d imagined her at home, having long, pleasant days with the kids. Hours of genuine smiles and laughter.
He finished painting on his bright red—and huge—smile, then lined the inside of his fleshy lips with black. His pale pink tongue stood out in the dark hole of mouth, an exposed organ. He grinned widely in the mirror, bloody mouth stretching so far to each side he almost expected his head to fall open, something to reach out of that cavity of neck and ravage the room. He almost wished it would.
“Running late! See you tonight!” He paused briefly with his white-gloved, oversized hand on the doorknob, waiting. The argument had stopped in the kitchen, the house suddenly frozen in silence. He waited a second, let go of the doorknob, spread his arms out dramatically in supplicant posture and tilted his motley clown head back until he was staring at the ceiling, and shouted, “Good-bye, honey! Goodbye, Daddy!” He waited, one great eye cocked in the direction of the kitchen. Nothing. He pulled a crazily twisted ear horn out of one accessory pocket and jammed it into his right ear, tilting his body toward the kitchen in a gravity-defying lean.
“…’bye, Daddy…” came Jane’s little girl whisper.
Satisfied, he put the ear horn away and slung open the door, knob smashing through a previously existing hole in the plaster, rattling the walls and triggering the clock’s drunken cuckoo, the painted wooden bird dangling upside down on a spring from its door.
In order to get into his tiny yellow car Terry had to tuck his head in between his shoulders, crouch, stretch his right leg with oar-sized twenty-two shoe into the passenger’s side, then reach through the open passenger window with his Mickey Mouse hands and grab the side-mirror in order to pull the rest of him into the vehicle. His left knee typically banged the top of the door opening, and he typically uttered some G-rated curse. He then drove to work with his arms pushing out between his knees, hands spasming in pain, stiffly clutching the steering wheel.
Down the freeway under the rising sun his car joined the stream of commuters pouring from garages and tributary streets, scrambling like bugs over kitchen tile, nipping and shouldering like bumper cars, radios cranked to drown out both laughter and curses. Terry’s radio still broken, he forced his own music of mouth pops and whistles over a melodic bed of nonsensical raving.
He drove around the parking lot looking for any empty slot. For the eighty-fifth consecutive day unable to find one, he motored out of the lot, across the bright green grass, and straight into a lush bush, which concealed his little auto quite nicely. He staggered out of the branches and shook his orange wig free of insects.
Once in the expansive lobby of his office building he waited at the elevator doors. Overhead rumbled the departing troupes of the night shift. The thunder descended slowly, one floor at a time. Terry backed up, stared at his shoes as they nervously flapped the tile, beaver-like. He gazed up just before the numbers hit “1,” then backed up some more.