Sputterpub's Blog

Doug and Charles were completely different, was El’s first idea when she considered the question. One was a hippie and the other was straight about everything but sex. One was a lefty liberal and the other voted Republican. One was born after the big war and the other had childhood memories of D-day. And yet…

They were both Protestant white males born in the noncoastal West. Doug was from Wyoming and Charles’s first home was in Montana. Each had an older sister with whom he was never close – in fact both of those siblings died of rare accidental conditions in their 40s and neither was much mourned by her brother. Doug’s and Charles’s ancestors had been in the U.S. almost as long as the U.S. Each had a quasi-professional father with middle-class aspirations and a pallid, often-silent mother. Doug’s mom was mean-minded and stingy with affection and praise. Charles’s mother doted on him but was submissive to his father’s plan for him, so she permitted her boy to be sent out of state to a military high school.

El had been a seeker of intimacy each time she married, so she got to know her husbands well. She concluded long ago that what she’d thought was silent strength in each of them was really just silence. She had come to understand that both Doug and Charles had received early parental approval for acting like brave little soldiers. Each grew up with a hole in his soul, and acted like the only patch for that was a mate.

She’d never noticed how similar they were. She started to ask herself why she chose that type but her brain slammed the realization into her that she didn’t choose Doug and Charles so much as allow each of them to choose her.

Really. Now that she thought back on events, she admitted that the marriages were their ideas. As much as El always intended to try the institution, if for no other reason because that was the only way to be recognized as an adult in her family of origin, she’d been surprised when Doug had left the waterbed that spring morning to fetch a ring he had hidden in his bureau and to formally propose. She’d been startled by the speed with which Charles turned their affair into an engagement. Both of her husbands had made it excitingly clear that their happiness rested on her consent. They were like thoroughbred stallions who would only let her ride them. Yeah.

El asked herself what sort of man she would have chosen instead. She reviewed old crushes, from high school to the recent past. She was attracted to creative men. She liked a guy who was selfish enough to have his own agenda and not back away from it. She thought nothing was sexier than a well-developed sense of humor. And she knew that neither Doug nor Charles shone in those aspects.

She took five deep breaths as she finished her exercise. She still needed to figure out what to wear. It was time to move toward the office. She and Patrick were going out for lunch at her favorite restaurant; that made the commute worth her time. She started to frame her epiphany for presentation to her brother as she flipped on the shower.

I just googled PGIO. I assumed the Internet would say it stood for Penetrating Glimpse Into the Obvious, but no. I first heard the acronym in 1978 and I’m sure it wasn’t original – Joe was entertaining but not original. I immediately adopted it, in place of the word Ellen and I agreed to call a “no duh” insight: profunditty.

She had married for the first time a year after college. Doug had been her closest friend, and five years of their ten were good. They tried grad school, started their first real jobs, bought their house, birthed their three kids. Then they started going stale. Doug stopped wanting adventures and started nursing allergies and hemorrhoids and pessimism. He turned into a complete drag, which made El complain about him to her best friend first and later to himself, which made Doug grumpier, and less secure, and then he started to tiptoe around El and try to second guess what would make her happy, and by the time she got to know her client Charles she was ripe for picking.

And Charles was ripe for dallying. Neither of them knew then that he was experiencing a classic mid-life ego crisis. El was thirty-two and Charles was ten years older. He already drove a red roadster, and he was possessed of a fine home, a successful career, and a willowy blonde wife. They made trips to Europe, held season symphony tickets, and adored their only child, a well-behaved ten year old son. They were both bored almost to tears. His wife engaged in retail therapy and decided she needed another baby. Charles began an outline for the novel he always intended to write, and began having business lunches with El. His book was to be based on his Viet Nam experiences, which contained his only extra-marital affair, and it was probably his memories about that Asian nurse that fired his lust as much as the long lunch conversations. He told El he didn’t make friends often but he treasured his acquaintance with her. He wanted to deepen it. He suggested a regular Friday lunch date.

El thought the invitation peculiar but interesting. She found his personal questions odd but provocative. What new friend asks how you behave when you’re angry? How many other dining companions share war stories and, when you reply with penetrating questions, marvel about how funny it is that his wife never asked?

She agreed to lunch with Charles every other week. Those dates soon became the centerpoint of existence for each of them. Within two months they were fully infatuated and they took the next step. Six weeks after their first sexual tryst they confessed to their spouses and began living together.

Their relationship lasted seven years and their marriage lasted six. It turned out that Charles would rather be bored and comfortable than stimulated and edgy; after he was done with El he contracted a relationship with the old college girlfriend he’d rejected thirty years earlier. El discovered she’d rather be lonely than frustrated; she has remained single ever after.

She interrupted her meditations to pay attention to the abdominal crunches. She tried to keep her belly level, like she was balancing a full bowl of water in the area between her hips and above her pubic bone, while she concentrated on protecting her lower back. There were eighty reps in the sequence. She was happy to get to her feet after that, and kick her heels back one at a time as she worked her butt.

El was thinking about her brother’s love life while she exercised. She should have been focusing on the warm-up portion of the program that was playing in front of her. If she was thinking at all, it should have been about what she’d wear to the office after she finished working out and showering. But the four young women on the show, stretching in front of her in matching lycra-infused outfits, reminded her that both Cindy and Terry had their cars broken into recently. Each had found gems of tempered glass arrayed on the back seats where their gym bags used to be, and Patrick reported that they were not as upset about losing their iPods as they were about their shoes.

“You women,” he’d said to El across his desk, “you care more about shoes than anything else.”

“Not fair!” she contested. “You’re generalizing about women from two individuals. C’mon,” she continued: “Am I that attached to shoes? Is Mom?”

Patrick backed off immediately, but that didn’t mean he gave up his conclusion. El and Patrick worked together, so she heard him repeat himself as often as if they were married. He thought his shoe comment was witty, and he usually retained his witticisms and practiced them when he could.

El kept thinking about Cindy and Terry while she squatted and lunged. On the surface, Patrick’s estranged wife and married girlfriend were dissimilar. Cindy was five feet tall and still bore the remnants of all the weight she had shed since she moved out. Terry was a foot taller and had never been fat. Neither was known for smarts or particularly well-educated, but Cindy was five years older than Patrick and Terry was sixteen years younger; the decades between the two women’s birthdates resulted in different favorite music and movies.

And yet…

Both had been raised by hardworking parents who aspired to join the middle class. Neither had finished college or had babies. Each nursed a chronic health condition and enlisted Patrick in her care. “There’s a reason he chose them,” El thought as she assumed push-up position, “or maybe it’s really that they chose him.” Patrick was a big guy, gentle and helpful and always motivated to make those around him happy. It was easy to obtain his love, and once he offered it, he seldom took it back. He was eight years younger than El and she’d paid more attention to his toddlerhood than to that of her own kids; she remembered how much his antics had cheered their sad mother, and she understood his tendency to dance as fast as he could.

El caught herself judging her brother again. “Shit,” she self-lectured. “Stop it.” She tried her latest strategy; she turned the glass on herself. “What about my husbands? Was there a significant difference between them?” She rose to her hands and knees and flexed her lower back. She had taped the exercise shows twenty years ago, and now she did spine stretches instead of fast-forwarding through the vintage UHF ads. She counted deep breaths while in the universal play position. She resumed her catalog when the boxing sequence started.

Tracy enters the office after James ends the call from Gus. She closes the door and leans against it. Her skirts aren’t as short as they were before the event, but she still shows a shapely leg, knee-down.

“The Giannis are vibrating,” she reports. But she needn’t have closed the door to tell him that, so James knows there will be more. “Three calls from Gino, two from Sal, only one from Tony. Sal wants to sic the health department on the deli. I know, I know…it will cost Sal as much as anyone else.

“Listen,” she says with decision. She walks toward James’s desk but then veers and starts to pace before it. “It’s not my place but I can’t help saying something. I can tell that you’re not happy right now. I’m not sure why, but I suspect you may understand yourself. What I want to say is: oh, a few months ago, something happened to me. Some things. I had a man die on me. I actually cared for Rich. But when anyone dies close to you, it makes you look at life a little differently, you know?” James nods, but Tracy isn’t watching. “I got possessive about my life. I got angry about the fact that I had been letting Rich do things I didn’t want. I decided I’m not taking it any more. I’m going to learn to speak up. Softly I hope.

“You’re clearly not happy, James. Maybe you need to blow off this Portals thing. Or maybe it’s something more.” By now, James is smiling quietly at her. She meets his eyes for a second. He thanks her with unusual warmth. He watches her leave his office, soft dark hair shining as it moves when she walks, and involuntarily remembers her pinned helpless under Rich, his bad heart exploded within him.

Tracy is on a break when the call comes in from Jane. James and his twin sister usually don’t speak often, but they’ve lately been discussing a nursing home for their mother. They’re not particularly close to each other, or to their mom, against whom they hold their names among many other banalities. Being twins, however, they’ve been hyper-aware of other twins; after meeting Charles/Carol, and Michael/Michelle, they know it could have been worse.

“James,” he says by way of answering his phone.

“Jane,” she answers. “What are you up to?”

“Contemplating illness, and playing with a paper clip.” He reaches for his paper clip assortment, piled in a square pocket at the right front of his middle desk drawer. He starts to unbend one.

“Mom’s illness?” This is in reference to the slight stroke their mother just suffered, while having the bluing bleach rinsed out of her hair at the neighborhood salon, when the cold porcelain of the shampoo bowl finally cut off the flow in her one till-then open neck artery.

“No. Actually, I’m supposed to be contemplating the theme ‘My Favorite Illness’ for a psychobabblative meeting tonight. Shall I do our stones?”

“What’s favorite about stones?” Jane rejoins without hesitation.  James and Jane bear no resemblance to each other, except that they both have a tendency to kidney stones.  None of the boy/girl twins they’ve known look alike, except an interesting set James met recently: Jack (female), who works at the bank the firm uses; and her brother Jim. They’re interesting because they’re each gay, and because Jim is actively HIV positive, meaning he has health care resource material helpful to James and Jane with respect to their mother.

“That’s true. I guess I only mention them because I’m at a loss for a subject, and because I passed one last week. I’m getting good at it. I recognized the pain when I woke up Friday, called in sick, downed two Vicodin, and took to my bed with a gallon of cool water. I drowsed and drank and drowsed and drank. Passed the thing about 3 PM and was wiped out for a day and gut-tender for three more. But when I compare it to the first time…”

“It still hurts. You’ve just learned how best to cope with a day of hell.”

“They say it hurts more than having a baby.”

“Not. I’ve done both. I’ve done kidney stones four times, and babies twice. Babies hurt more. But you know what hurts most? A shot of novocaine behind and between the upper front teeth. Now that’s pain…”

James’s other line rings. Tracy is still away from her desk. James should just let it go to voicemail, but he has a hard time ignoring a bell. He releases Jane and picks up the other call on its fourth ring.

He shouldn’t have done it. The voice is Sal Gianni’s, and the conversation is long and unrewarding. By the time James extricates himself, he feels frustrated and rushed. His phone rings again. He almost manages to let it go, but…

“James.”

“Honey?” It’s Hannah’s voice, but she never starts a conversation that way.

“Yes?”

“I know you told me earlier, but when are you going to be home tonight?”

“Around ten thirty. What’s wrong, Hannah?  Are you okay?”

“I’ll be all right. I’m just a little ill.”

“What is it?”

“Really. I’m okay. I have a slight fever. Around 100°. No other symptoms. I came home early. I’m cozy in bed. I’ll see you later.”

James is envisioning. Bright eyes. Flushed skin. He starts to grin while looking upward unfocused. “Hannah,” he says. “I just realized I’m not going to the meeting. I’m coming home.”

Hannah hates hot feet, so she often moves barefoot around their house. And she moves quickly. Every year or so, she clips the little toe of her left foot on a table leg or other furniture. Maybe she breaks the toe or probably it’s just a sprain, but she has to elevate her foot, apply ice, and sit still for a couple of days. James loves it. Hannah doesn’t mind it, after an initial indignant rebellious twenty minutes.

But Hannah’s toe-spraining is an injury, not an illness. James is looking at the columns of illness definitions, and he can’t fit this domestic mishap into the category. He continues to ponder the subject now and then as he works on the plan to unravel a family-owned business conglomerate, consisting of an adult movie theater and an Italian delicatessen. The two businesses are about equally profitable, but that doesn’t make division any easier; James’s mission is to effect the most tax-advantageous split of two businesses among three now-hostile brothers, each of whom is spiteful enough to want to cause tax problems for the others even if it hurts himself. The Gianni brothers’ problems are about emotions rather than taxes, James knows, so he’s giving them some time to react and adjust. He told Tracy to hold all calls from them. This is why James has time to consider a favorite illness. And that’s fortunate, because the seminar meets tonight, and it’s small enough that absences or silences are noticed. The partner who pushed James to enter the Portals Program has become very active in it; Edward will hear about it if James isn’t prepared. And Edward, who’s as much of a hound as Rich Adams was, also’s as much of a rainmaker. Add the fact that he’s the only partner of African descent, and you’ve got what James knew: a shitty situation.

“Stomach-ache is pretty bad. Which is better: sore throat or headache? A cold is usually obnoxious, always inconvenient, but not that bad…except that one isn’t ill enough not to work…unless one is Tracy…” James ruminates without success. “Adams dying on her didn’t keep her away from the office, but she misses three days whenever she has a cold.” Tracy is the secretary who best understands James’s verbal fastidiousness – she may mess with the margins but she takes care of the apostrophes – so he’s always aware of her absences. Tracy is also the person who pokes apart James’s philosophical logjam today.

She first inserts when she puts a call through from Gus. She buzzes James on the intercom to announce the call, but before he takes it, James asks, “Quick. What comes to mind when I say ‘Favorite Illness?’”

“Fever.” There is silence on the line after she says the word. She continues. “Sometimes I just get a little fever. No other symptoms. It makes me drowsy, sensual, a little delirious. I rather like it, provided I can stay home. Now,” she summarizes, “shall I put Gus through?”

Augustus Murphy is a psychologist. He spends most of his professional time evaluating alleged stress injuries for worker’s compensation insurance carriers. He is also James’s best friend. They were accidental freshman roommates, and they continued to share a home until Gus married Patty after grad school. Back in the days when they were both going for undergraduate BAs, Gus in psych and James in English, James edited Gus’s writing, and wrote his transitional paragraphs, while Gus did the social science course work for James.

When Patty entered their lives they became a companionable threesome, and then Hannah fit in too, so the friendship continued through wrong turns into teaching, and beyond that to psychological evaluations and tax law. Gus and Patty have two sons; those boys and James’s nieces are the closest James and Hannah come to parenting.

Gus and James talk on the phone every couple of days, and lunch together every Friday. This call is nothing special. Except that when James describes the Portal assignment, Gus suggests, “Diabetes. That’s your favorite illness. Talk about that.”

James knows about diabetes, because Gus has it. Gus thirstily presented with the disease twelve years ago, and it was James’s job to understand the condition. He read books, joined the national association, and helps Gus adjust his insulin doses. James is the scientist, at least when it comes to words. He’s not strong in math. If he had been, he’d probably be an engineer instead of a lawyer.

He swivels to look out the window while they talk about the elegance of the illness. It’s terrible to have, except that the treatment is the prescription for any healthy life: good food, exercise, low carbs, low stress. With understood diabetes, the doctor is not in control; the patient is making the adjustments between food, exercise, condition and insulin. The patient acts as his own pancreas. James appreciates that. He also appreciates his new telephone headpiece. He has a tendency to carry his stress in his neck, and he spends a lot of his business day on the telephone; until he bought the headpiece he kept exacerbating his pain by cocking his neck to hold the phone while he wrote. Now he can look at the view, take notes, type at his computer, peel an orange.

Gus is lower tech. He’s still using an old-fashioned headset, and he’s living with chronic neck pain. He’s also resisting the idea of an insulin pump. After twelve years on insulin, the man is experiencing a side effect or two; he’s getting less sensitive to low sugar symptoms and more likely to have trouble in bed. If James were Gus, he’d try a pump.

No. James likes knowing about diabetes. James likes being able to counsel Gus. But it isn’t his favorite illness.

James is quietly grumpy, as usual. Exquisitely critical. He’s sitting in his new office, gazing without intention at the dictionary stand near the doorway, resisting the “assignment” he’s been given to work on this week. He considers the Portals Program, with its seminar training toward self-actualization, and he diverts himself by paraphrasing the claim so familiar to his generation: “Aura flossing has been shown to be an effective, despair-preventive artifice that can be of significant value when used in a conscientiously applied program of psychic hygiene and regular professional care.”  He almost grins as he conjectures that the Crest paragraph, or the Superman prologue, or the introduction to the old Star Trek show, are our culture’s “oral tradition,” but he overpaves that smile with a straight-lipped frown at the realization that those shabby TV bits are as close as our culture can come to a glorious oral tradition. “Pathetic,” he spits within, as he swivels his chair a bit to the left. “Pathetic like Portals.”

James takes a deep breath and settles his chair facing forward again. He looks at the dictionary with momentary appreciation. It’s a 1903 Funk & Wagnalls, in well-thumbed but otherwise good condition. It sits open on an antique walnut stand. It doesn’t have definitions for new-fangled words like airplane or fax machine, but its pages have a lovely, parchment-like quality, and the book has the feel of history. So many hands have turned the pages, so many eyes have searched the print: how many minds have grown upon it? Then James recalls its most recent historical place, and he sours again.

He inherited the dictionary and the office three months ago. Its former inhabitant died unexpectedly in the place, at the age of 48. Rich Adams had been an asshole. James always despised him, and can’t regret his demise.

Rich, like James, was a word-junkie. Many lawyers are wordsmiths, but some are more precise than the rest. They’re the ones who gravitate to tax work. It was perfectly logical for James to assume Rich’s partnership position as well as the office. And James doesn’t disagree with the positioning of the antique dictionary. Rich put it on the stand by the door as a sign of his belief in defining terms before proceeding with argument. He used to make underlings look up words in the book before he’d allow them to present a murky position. James might have continued the tradition, except that the dictionary now signifies nastiness to most of the firm. Rich was never discreet about his womanizing. Far from being sensitive to issues of sexual harassment, Adams had been the sort of man who found a woman’s relative powerlessness arousing. He was a hound around secretaries, paralegals, even the occasional associate, but he steered clear of his peers. He’d been very driven and successful in his field, so his wife hadn’t had to work, but James was convinced that Rich wanted it that way. He and Hannah spent enough time talking with Mrs. Adams at firm functions that they knew she didn’t have to stay home to cook or care for kids, and they read in her the despair of a wasted woman.

Rumor had it that Rich used that dictionary stand as an apparatus, and rumor was confirmed three months ago. James won’t ever know whether it was true that Rich did paralegals frontally and secretaries doggie-style, but half the fourth floor will never forget the Thursday afternoon when they heard odd hysterical yells, and tracked them to Tracy, bent over the dictionary stand in Rich’s office, skirt up and pantyhose down, with dead bare-assed Rich collapsed on her back and pinning her panicked self. Tracy is so short her feet barely touched the ground. Rich was so big there was no way she could get his dead weight off her without help. The scene was so bad it was comic, but James doesn’t share that opinion with anyone except Hannah.

Tracy is still with the firm. She came through the experience surprisingly well. James first assumed he’d have to dump the dictionary and stand, which he would have regretted; they are attractive and occupy a spot in the office which won’t serve for anything else. But the consulting psychologist said no: this is almost like getting back on the proverbial horse – the furniture isn’t the issue.

James certainly isn’t going to direct employees to use that book. Nowadays, they settle their semantics by reference to the e-version of the Oxford English Dictionary, on James’s computer. He longed for the OED when it was thirteen volumes and he had neither the shelf space nor the money, back in the early 70s. Now he had both, but the set was up to twenty books; he traded the dream of fondling the actual pages for the portability of electronics.

He’s using his OED now. The only unpleasant condition to his promotion is the Portals Program. All of the senior partners agreed that James was Rich’s proper successor, but two of them expressed concern about James’s management abilities. James didn’t argue about that. He knows himself, and he’s never taken or given supervision well. His people skills could always use a bit of polishing, but James has other interests. His flaw is nothing compared to Rich’s, but the partners were being very careful, and one of the two complainers was evangelical about some program he had just completed. They made a condition and James agreed; now he’s three sessions into a ten week seminar on Understanding. This week’s homework is to consider (for sharing discussion) the theme: My Favorite Illness.

The topic first made him think about Hannah’s little toe. The woman who would be his wife, if either of them believed in the institution of marriage, his life partner (as he thought of her), his Hannah has a tendency to rush around. She doesn’t often relax. Even their vacations are planned to the minute, so they see a lot but the pressure never lets up. Sometimes there isn’t even time allotted for lunch. Hannah tends to diet so that may be deliberate on her part, but James has a fast metabolism; he needs to eat every four hours.