Sputterpub's Blog

I sent the letter. I still had almost an hour before Julia would get home. I could use it to sand the deck or walk Fletcher. Either way I’d be thinking.

I parked the mouse in the middle of its pad and stood. My desk looked neat – clutter is like chatter to my eyes, and it makes me edgy – but I straightened the framed photograph of Lily and Vera from last summer. Their eyes looked so clear, their cheeks child-smooth.

The odd thing about reuniting with a lost love is the physical aging. You get all the mirror shock of seeing yourself: this person you remember as a kid is in front of you, definitely familiar, but lined and saggy, maybe even with a tremor, but then sometimes like when you squint a certain way or during sex she looks again (except for hair color) exactly like you remember and you get a little surge of mixed youth and sadness. It’s compelling. Disturbing. Rousing. A drag. Ultimately a drag…

Julia hums. It doesn’t seem deliberate or even conscious but most of the time, if Julia isn’t talking or sleeping, she seems to emit a low hum.

At first I thought it was an indication of happiness, like a cat’s purr, but soon it came to be more annoying than gratifying, and lately it’s grown obnoxious. I now hear it as a symptom that her brain isn’t quite right.

But the bottom line is she’s just not committed enough to our marriage. If she were, she’d understand that sometimes a person just has to let out some of the pressures that have been building. It’s not pretty or fair, but if the person is determined not to use his size to destroy things or to hit people, then he has to rage to release. Sometimes it just has to happen. And a loving mate will accept that.

The young Julia would have. Oh I can see her now, petite and sweet and always looking up to me. A compliant Catholic girl. Now she’s pliant, thanks to all the time in the gym, but I can’t describe my wife as compliant. She insists on her own e-mail, her own car, even her own bank account. She read about how she should have all those things, in some book. She’s always reading a psychobabble book. I tell Julia she thinks too much but really? I think she thinks too little.

For Julia it has to be written down. She even uses book language to argue for marriage counseling. As if someone who isn’t here, 24/7, would have a shot at understanding the complexities of our dysfunction! As if…

She says a marriage counselor will make us see the tacit arrangements of our relationship. Some crap about every relationship having its unwritten rules, its invisible book, and how the counselor is supposed to help us get the book up on the table where we can read it and see if we still like what’s in it.

But see: that’s too many words already. Like the problem of the Bible. The sweet clear truth is that the few real rules are so sweet and clear that they need never be written down. God isn’t that wordy. It’s the priests who are so dimwitted they need all the hoopla.

True love doesn’t need analysis either. I remember the vision about Julia 45 years ago. I recall my excitement about the possibility of securing that vision, just two years past. But the fact is, Julia mostly repulses me now. At first I was bothered when she left my bed, but all of her attempts at words about us have swamped the beauty I used to see. The hum that was musical has grown irksome. The shaved pubes that were girlish are now a geriatric joke. I’d rather be alone.

Something like that is what I’ll write to Lily. Something like that is what I’ll tell my wife.

I had to reproduce to have a soul mate. I’ve been ill-married four times now, but at least we made two people while we (all) were taking one another apart. Lily and Vera have been loosed upon the universe.

I love them both, unequally and infinitely, but Lily is my correspondent. She’s the female I would have been. I’m the prototype for the guy she’d be.

Vera has a strong side, but we’re fundamentally different. Lily acts like she carries a high testosterone level. I used to know life was all chromosomes but now I’ve learned. Now I have respect for the endocrine system. Hormones are powerful.

So Lily ranges and I sit tight. I’m like the fixed point of Donne’s compass; the farther she travels the more I lean toward her. I traveled enough when I was young: never less than United Premier level in my prime. Then it was my wife who formed the stationary compass point; now I stay home, rather retired, with the cerebral, verbal, needy, incompatible love of my life.

I told Julia this morning that I’m finished. I more or less challenged her to move out, abandon me again, head back to San Francisco and all her cerebral, verbal, needy friends. I meant it at the moment but I didn’t think she’d do it. She’s still into trying to make changes so we work. She wants me to change too, but I’m waiting to see some effective modification in her before I figure out how to alter me. As I’ve told her a dozen times, I spent months on my own issues after Barbara left, and I’m now fairly satisfied with myself.

After all, what am I asking of her? To put the spices away so we can find them again. To stack the pots so the non-stick finish isn’t scratched. Am I really supposed to see my care of tools and equipment as some quirk in me that requires repair or accommodation?

“If you don’t have the time to do it right at first, where will you find the time to fix it?” That’s true about life too. I’m older than Julia and I’ve considered the question more, and I do know the recipe for happily-ever-after from here.

I already live in one of the perfect parts of the world, and I own a tidy house with a garden. There’s time and the places for golf when the weather is good – excellent for exercise and meditation – and it’s easy to go for the thrill and warmth of skiing in the winter.

All I needed was a companion in my Eden. My Julia from when life began. Finding her again after 45 years, talking her into leaving that stale career, that boring marriage, her static weeks, those were like miracle beads accumulating on a cord of silk. All Julia had to do was come here and move into my paradise already prepared.

But I didn’t write any of that to Lily. If she were here I’m sure I’d be talking to her about Julia (except, I hope, for the physical comments), but by e-mail I didn’t want to discuss the fray. I stuck to the Bible, especially because she seems to be headed for Jerusalem. “The thing that ultimately struck me most about the Old Testament,” I wrote in response to her news that she and Jay planned to interview rabbinical students, “was that there’s never a commandment or even a suggestion that we write it down.”

Of course I couldn’t stop there: “See, the good thing about writing is it locks the words in without change. The bad thing about writing is it locks the words in without change.”

“You’re the only person I know who’s actually read the book,” my daughter wrote. “Is this guy right?”

She included a link to an article by some Russian man, about the Bible really being a terrorist manifesto. A few years back I read the whole book – New Testament, too, to answer the question I’d gotten most often. I learned a few things, like that most folks don’t read it all no matter what classes they attend, or they’d be talking about the slapstick in I Samuel.

I read it to call my own bluff. I’d made enough harsh statements about the Bible and organized religion that I thought it was time to learn whereof I speak. “Lord no,” I wrote back intentionally. “When you take the big view the OT is mostly a breeding manual, for the healthy husbandry of people. It’s about food and water use and exercise and neighbor relations (rendering aid or judgments for the close and destruction unto the far) – all of which are most likely to produce and prosper viable offspring.”

I hit SEND and wondered when I’d see her.

She’s taking her time and traveling the planet. She stops when she must to work. Babysitting in Belgium, teaching English in Spain, telemarketing in Australia. She has plenty of time, everyone tells her, even though that’s untrue. In fact, life whips by and she’d better strike while her brain is still amazing. But I think she knows that; I haven’t kept it a secret.

Lies parents tell … to their kids (you can be whatever you want badly enough) and to themselves (what matters is quality time, not quantity). It’s not so much that they believe them; they just never think to question them.

Ach, how weird my fellows be:

I’ve never understood all the compartmentalization. Work/home, friends/family, residence/travel. There’s no natural separation to any of these. But almost everyone I know works at work and doesn’t take it home. Abandons home all weekday and travels some distance to an office that is not used at night. Sits in a trench 5/7 of their days, waiting for 2 weeks of vacation.

They should try to work at home and do personal tasks at work. Eliminate the commute, or at least walk or use public transit and read or write while riding. They won’t have to travel if they walk or ride transit around a city, watching, hearing, interacting with citizens. It’s consistently stimulating and almost always attractive.

But don’t listen to me. No one does. Seems like all my life I’ve been watching naked leaders as they stride by, their wide bare feet slapping the pavement, their asscheeks bobbling, their portliness swaying above their sex. They turn their heads from side to side like beauty queens on parade floats, and their faces take on such expressions of serious importance that all around me my fellows only see them from the neck up. “But he’s nude!” I say, or “Look: she has toilet paper stuck to the bottom of her foot!” and I might as well be a substitute teacher, for all I’m heard. No, I’m worse off than that, because the sub knows he’s being ignored; I’m often in the presence of someone who nods in apparent agreement, even comments “uh huh” or “no duh,” and doesn’t have the self-esteem to confess: “Say again? I’m sorry; I wasn’t paying attention.”

Beau attempted to do something with his classics degree at first. He subbed and then taught as a regular faculty member in a private K-8 school. He tried to start ten- and eleven-year olds on Latin. He beguiled kids with myths. He made next to no money and after Annika become pregnant in 1975 Beau took a job at Andreini & Company. With his personality he actually outsold Steve. They both did well.

Beau was practically a stand-up comic by then. He performed jokes more than told them, constructed shaggy dog tales (don’t cry over milled spilk), and did some wicked impersonations. His practical jokes were seldom executed but ever well-conceived, and almost always played on Steve. Who actually didn’t mind them. Steve was so consistently into philandering that he needed some tactical support from Beau – he was nothing if he wasn’t grateful for that – and anyway, the big jokes always turned out to Steve’s advantage.

There was the time Beau put rocks in both back hubcaps of Steve’s T-bird. Maybe it wasn’t the most original joke but it worked. It scared the pants off Steve, who loved the car and panicked at the sound those rocks made when he started to drive away from work that March day. And it’s true that the rocks actually damaged the insides of the hubcaps, but Steve had extras at home. The thing was that the noise made Steve stop the car just outside the fenced parking lot. Just in time to miss being hit by an escaping slab of concrete that was being hoisted up to the building which was under construction next door. The freak accident never would have happened except that the crew was under pressure to complete the job. They were too tired to be trying that maneuver; the slab slipped and fell forty feet to smash on the asphalt below. If Steve hadn’t stopped, the concrete would have nailed him.

It was several years before Beau pulled another one, but his next idea was original and brilliant. Both of them wore eyeglasses then, but Steve was acting obnoxiously cocky about the fact that he didn’t yet need bifocals. He was also tiresome in the way he appreciated the design of his new Dior frames. He was accustomed to looking good, and he took care as he aged to use what the designers and cosmeticians offered. It was his practice to set his expensive glasses on his desk most of the time; Andreini & Co. employed several sweethearts and Steve always tried to look his best for them. One day when he left his glasses behind Beau borrowed them. Working carefully with some transparent tape and an Exacto blade, he applied thin strips of tape to the lenses in such a way that the wearer would immediately assume both lenses had shattered. He replaced the altered glasses on Steve’s desk and then loitered around to witness the reaction.

Steve had never outgrown an impulsive temper. As soon as he put his glasses on his face he saw the crack-like lines; snatching them off he hurled them to the floor in exasperation. Which action did break them. Beau roared his laughing delight. Steve glared, paused, grunted, paused, giggled, paused, and guffawed. “I deserve it,” he concluded. “I really do it to myself, don’t I?”

The joke had two interesting effects. It made Steve focus on his old temper problem and begin to deal with it. He’d had such a generally successful life that his temper hadn’t often hurt him, but it took a toll on his marriage. Elena went with him for counseling and the process did help their relationship. Of more interest to him, it improved his golf game. He and Beau hit the links before Steve’s replacement glasses arrived, so he couldn’t see well to putt, and under that disadvantage he began to understand the focusing advice that Beau had been giving him all those years. Without his eyeglasses Steve had the best putting of his life. He made jokes about “using the force.” He thanked Beau.

A year ago Beau came up with what may have been his best one. He and Steve never used caddies. Their memories of golfer-mocking were too vivid for them to put themselves in that role. They didn’t use carts either. They wanted the exercise of walking the course and carrying their own clubs.

Beau began adding weight to Steve’s bag. He was subtle about it. They always played at least two days a week, and Beau added a rock only every other time. Within a couple of weeks Steve was commenting. Observing that he must be out of shape. Resolving to work out more. By the end of two months Beau gave the joke a rest but Steve joined a gym. He hired a personal trainer and met with him three times a week. He found the place to be a treasure trove of females and their presence inspired him to exertion.

Steve never caught on to the joke but Beau told him about it four months later. By then Beau had seen the improvement in Steve’s shape and attitude and joined him at the gym. Both of them benefitted, of course. But when Steve had his heart attack last month the doctors got their first close look at his system. They said the training saved his life. No one had any idea until then about the extent of his heart disease.

Steve’s going to be fine. As fine as anyone fifty and growing older. He sailed through the quadruple bypass. But he and Beau both know that if it hadn’t been for that sneak weight-training and consequent gym work, Steve wouldn’t be alive now to record this.

Beau developed his personality. He was naturally inclined to talk back and wisecrack, and he grew into telling and playing jokes. Especially in his association with Steve, it worked with the girls. Beau had his high school’s largest collections of knock-knock, grape and elephant jokes. In the years to come he would readily absorb other genera, like lightbulb jokes, and lawyer jokes, and dumb blonde jokes.

As for physical comedy, he started with items from the Anthony’s catalogues: whoopie cushions, cigarette loads, plastic puke. He matured into acts like soaking a sleeping friend’s hand in warm water to make him wet his bed, short-sheeting Steve’s bed, stealing underwear from girls at a slumber party and freezing it. For a time when they were in college Beau got into cooperative ventures. He organized big projects like taking three horses up into the dean’s office, or disassembling/reassembling a VW bug so it formed the centerpiece of an upstairs co-op dining room. But before and after that, for most of his jokester life, Beau has worked alone.

Steve and Beau caddied all the way through high school, and in that period their attitudes did change about golf. Steve accepted the fact that he wasn’t going to win any big awards at the game. Beau realized that he had developed a kind of unwilling commitment; he still couldn’t say he liked golf, but he was accustomed to playing it, and that custom had become something of a ritual for him. The young men went together to college and continued to play a couple of times a week.

Perhaps Steve liked the way it felt to, as he said, “face the facts about golf and drop the fantasy,” but he became increasingly more practical and pragmatic as he passed into adulthood. He majored in economics in college and then went straight into his father’s very successful brokerage business. He married Elena Boudy, the girl from his neighborhood his parents most wanted as a daughter-in-law. That’s not to say he didn’t love Elena in his own way, but it was very convenient and useful to marry her. Especially after their son came, the union provided the impetus for her father to merge his business into Andreini & Company, and anyway, Elena’s mother and Steve’s mother were best friends.

Beau went the other way. It was ironic for him to be so impractical, given the fact that he had no family money behind him, but he couldn’t resist majoring in classics. He was never good-looking, always too thin for his height, with features unoffensive but too bland to attract, but he went with a number of young ladies in college. He may have driven a few of them away with pranks like the Vaseline lump on the toilet seat for that squishy surprise when she uses the john in the middle of the night, but mostly his sense of humor drew them to him. In fact, his last and best girlfriend, his future wife Annika, laughed when she sat in the glop. Came after him without even cleaning her thigh, pounding him with her pillow and wrestling with him until of course they fucked. She made him agree to stop pranking her when they got married. Actually, the day after they got married. On their wedding night, after consummation but before sleep, Beau stretched some Saran Wrap tightly over the toilet bowl, set the seat down, and unscrewed the lightbulb. He figured Annika would use the toilet during the night and if she tried the light he wanted her to think the bulb was blown. He snickered as he imagined her urine stream bouncing off the drum-tight plastic.

As it happened the joke worked. That time, Annika wouldn’t have found it funny. She was a very good sport but just a little sentimental about it being their wedding night. She would have been genuinely angry at Beau except for the fact that a huge sewer rat had managed to swim up their plumbing and into the toilet bowl. But for the Saran Wrap, the rat might have had a piece of Annika.

Some people say golf is the hardest sport to master. Some say it isn’t a sport at all. It’s like cilantro that way; folks seem to have strong opinions about it. Almost from their infancies, Steve Andreini loved the game and Beau Anderson didn’t.

Golf is what brought those boys together. Golf and the alphabet. They were the same age and attended the same school so they were always being lined up or seated together. But they got to know each other when they started caddying at the country club in 1961. Steve had already been playing for six years; his prosperous father got him the caddying job so he could be even more immersed in the game. Beau on the other hand worked for money. He’d been established for several years as the local boy most able to retrieve lost golf balls; each week he sold at least a bucket back to the pro shop. The head pro noticed and promoted Beau to the regular income of summer and weekend caddying.

Working on the course didn’t change the boys’ attitudes. Steve continued to love the game, but his improvement came with practice and maturity rather than from carrying clubs and associating with the members. He agreed with Beau that most of the golfers were jerks regardless of the size of their tips.

Beau kept recovering and reselling golf balls. He liked money and disliked golf. He and Steve became acquainted while waiting at the pro shop for work or while attending a group around the course. By the time the boys returned to school they were good friends.

They arrived for their first day of junior high together. Steve’s parents drove him from their luxurious, unincorporated, golfcourse-abutting neighborhood to Beau’s small tract house in the middle of a ten-year-old subdivision a block away from the school. Steve’s mother tried to get a kiss from her seventh grader but Beau walked out of his front door at that moment and saved his friend from the sentimental demonstration. The boys greeted each other with a “hey” and an upward toss of the head. That movement would make their hair fly in a few more years when boys began to have hair, but on that September day in 1961 Steve’s dark Brylcreemed waves stayed where they were supposed to stay, and Beau’s blonde crewcut didn’t have anywhere to go. The boys stood together beside a large bird-of-paradise plant and waved to the Andreinis as they drove away. Then Beau and Steve walked the block to school.

They entered their junior high campus two twelve-year-olds, and they matriculated three terms later as new people in a new world. Beau was still taller and thinner than Steve. Steve was still handsomer than Beau, and they were still good friends, but they had body hair and baser voices, and the world had been shrunk by assassinations and transistors and expanded by new music. Steve was interested in girls, attractive, and dating. Beau was interested in girls, gawky, and not.

They still caddied. Steve’s golf game had about hit its peak but he didn’t know that yet; he continued to fantasize about a future as a famous pro. It irked him that Beau who hated the game had developed a wondrous putt; Steve had the better grip, the superior eyesight, and nearly a decade of experience, but Beau was almost always able to sink the ball if it was within fifteen feet of the cup. “It’s a brain thing,” Beau used to say (in another three or four years it would be called a “head thing”). “It’s not about my eyes and arms as much as it’s about visualizing where the ball will go. I don’t know, Steve, but I can almost do it better with my eyes shut than open…” Beau tried to describe the sideways concentration that occurred for him, but Steve couldn’t grasp it. He got irritated. He worked on his grip, his stance, and his measurements, but he didn’t putt as well as Beau.

Steve had the advantages over his friend in almost all other aspects of their lives. He was better looking, better shaped, generally more popular. He got better grades but that was largely because he didn’t argue with the texts and tests; Beau spent a lot of time talking back. Steve had more attention and money from his parents. Beau did about as well at baseball as Steve did at football, but Steve’s sport was far more glamorous. Steve had girlfriends.

At first, Beau’s experiences with girls all derived from Steve. There was always at least one with a crush on him, and she’d come around with a girlfriend or two to watch Steve play or talk to him. Beau got to know the girlfriends. That socializing led to nighttime meetings on the golf course. It was a popular spot for the area kids; they found privacy around the lagoon-like water traps and freedom on the greens. They understood the perils of the automated sprinklers that would rise from the ground in concert and circle-soak to the zzhup zzhup zzhup of their movement. Sometimes the kids would find the course already invaded by a herd of ruminants – horses from the livery stable or a group of mule deer or once even a dozen cows from a pasture three miles away.