REAL WIFE It’s an interesting question because, during the recitation, my husband and I were talking about how people sort of “abuse” XOXO, and it made me think about something that had happened to me at Parsons.
T.S.F.N. Tell us about that.
REAL WIFE Well, I’d been there a couple of years, studying painting, and I’d been doing all this, y’know, completely derivative work—Kenneth Noland rip-offs, imitation Agnes Martins, second-rate Peter Halleys, all this shit. And then I came up with this idea, which was to use photographs of very grim, morbid sorts of things and make these kind of unfocused, blurry paintings out of them. Really cool idea, and I’d never seen anything like it. So, I’m thinking, y’know, finally, here I go. So I did this huge, unfocused, blurry painting of Joseph Goebbels’s family, based on a famous photograph of Joseph and Magda Goebbels’s dead children’s pajama-clad bodies (Helga Susanne, Hildegard, Helmut Christian, Hedwig, Holdine, and Heidrun) after they’d been put to sleep with morphine and poisoned with cyanide by their parents. And I showed the painting to one of my instructors at Parsons, and he was like, that’s amazing, that’s brilliant, that’s a completely new, unprecedented idea. And I was just totally euphoric. And then, a couple of days later, the same instructor comes up to me and says, you better go check out the new Gerhard Richter exhibit at MoMA. And I was like, why? And he said, just go. So I went to MoMA and there’s this fifteen-painting cycle of unfocused, blurry paintings that Richter had done based on photographs of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof and their deaths.…It occurred to me at the time that maybe XOXO had taken the idea from my head and given it to Gerhard Richter. It crossed my mind. I’ll be honest. And I pretty much gave up on painting after that.
T.S.F.N. What did you mean about people abusing XOXO?
REAL WIFE I think it’s too easy for people to always blame things on XOXO. Everyone’s always, like, oh, sorry for what I said last night, XOXO must have kidnapped my soul and plied it with drugged sherbet, y’know? I think sometimes people just use that as a way of avoiding responsibility for what they say — it’s like the equivalent of — oh, I was drunk or I was so tired…
T.S.F.N. Was it a huge disappointment to you that you didn’t eventually become an artist?
REAL WIFE No. Look at the so-called “art world.” Fucking David Geffen sells a de Kooning to this hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen for 137.5 million dollars. Such “art lovers”! Right? It says in The Sugar Frosted Nutsack that a time will come when all fettered monsters will break loose and the plutocrats will be dragged out of office buildings and guillotined on the street. That includes the “art lovers.”
T.S.F.N. Some people think that that whole business about Ike getting hit by a Mister Softee truck on Spring Break when he was eighteen but initially telling people he was hit by a Hasidic ambulance to foment some apocalyptic Helter Skelter — type global war is really confusing. Do you agree with that?
REAL WIFE When I went to my first recitation and I heard the bards chant that part, I thought to myself, I don’t see how a dispute between club kids and Hasids could set off any kind of apocalyptic global war.
REAL HUSBAND What about World War One? Who was that guy…the Bosnian Serb…the nationalist? Uh…oh fuck!..What was his name, sweetie?
REAL WIFE Gavrilo Princip?
REAL HUSBAND Yeah, Gavrilo Princip. Gavrilo Princip assassinates the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, right? And it sets off the whole fuckin’ First World War. I mean, that’s a pretty apocalyptic war. If the conditions are right, you never know what can set it off. Club kids and Hasids could conceivably do it.
REAL WIFE I’m not sure that’s the best analogy.
REAL HUSBAND You don’t think World War One was an apocalyptic global war?
REAL WIFE That’s not what I mean.
REAL HUSBAND You don’t think World War One was an apocalyptic fucking global war?
REAL WIFE I never said it wasn’t.
REAL HUSBAND Trench warfare. Poison gas. Fifteen million deaths.
REAL WIFE The Archduke Franz Ferdinand was heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. There was an extremely complicated situation…
REAL HUSBAND I’m just sayin’.
REAL WIFE …with all sorts of interlocking alliances.
REAL HUSBAND I’m just sayin’. If the conditions are right, you never know what can set it off. Club kids and Hasids could conceivably do it.
T.S.F.N. You seem to really identify with Ike.
REAL HUSBAND People tell me I sound like him — y’know, the raspy, whispery voice and everything. And I have the same kinds of fantasies he does about big, sweaty, uneducated, working-class women, and about being ogled by masturbating Goddesses…
T.S.F.N. Do you think your wife is a Mossad agent?
REAL HUSBAND (looking askance at his wife with mock suspicion) Hmmm…
T.S.F.N. Possible?
REAL HUSBAND (laughing) Seriously, I tend to interpret that whole “everyone’s wife is a Mossad agent” thing in a more sort of metaphorical way — that people you’re intimate with might be, like, “double agents,” y’know? It’s a weird kind of paranoia you get about people you love — that they might turn out to be completely different from who you think they are, that it’s all been some sort of diabolically patient plot against you. I think that’s a pretty normal fear you have in any serious relationship. And that’s why it’s such a popular part of the epic, because so many people can relate to that fear. But personally I don’t really worry about it too much.
T.S.F.N. Why’s that?
REAL HUSBAND Have you ever heard of Cupid’s Stigmata?
T.S.F.N. No, what is that?
REAL HUSBAND It’s a term they use in online dating. It’s when two people share some uncommon anatomical feature with each other, which usually means that they’re sort of predestined to be together. And my wife and I both have double ureters draining one of our kidneys (which is an anomaly occurring in, like, 1 in 150 people), and we both have port-wine stains in the shape of Nike swooshes on the smalls of our backs (which is, like, 1 in 10 million people), so…
T.S.F.N. Is that true? That’s amazing!
REAL HUSBAND (totally cracking up) No, I’m kidding. I’m busting your chops, man. But seriously — we’re really close. Really really close. And I think that what they say about Ike and Ruthie is sort of true about us too — that we’re utterly inscrutable figures who, paradoxically, understand each other perfectly well. And we’re both lifelong connoisseurs of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.