Sputterpub's Blog

They’re so different. Keith says he’s the kind of guy who notices what’s right in a situation, while Marnie sees what can be improved and likes to think about how to accomplish the makeover. That was true when they were young; now Keith rarely sees anything right in a situation. Now Marnie is more inclined to accept things, because she knows that she has to allocate her energy. She doesn’t tilt at windmills or argue with pronouns any more. But the gulf between their attitudes has not gotten any narrower as they’ve matured.

Keith loves toys. He goes to warehouse stores. He buys appliances and electronic devices. Now that he’s pretty much stopped drinking and having imaginative sex, the only way he gets happy is when he has a new gadget to hook up or load or debug or play.

Marnie on the other hand is made nervous by things. Clutter agitates her. She says it’s like visual chatter. As far as she’s concerned every appliance and system has idiosyncrasies, and she’d like to limit her obligation to understand their quirks. The remote control unit that governs the bedroom TV, for example, has a fussy power switch. About a third of the time that it’s pressed, it turns the TV on or off, as commanded, but only for two seconds; then the machine reverts to its former, off or on, mode. Marnie and Keith have learned not to trust that button. Or their dishwasher: it has intermittent problems releasing the detergent from its little time vault, so Marnie has to pay attention for the click that indicates dispensation. Keith’s response to those issues is to look for improved governing gadgets. Marnie tries to understand and have a relationship with each of the systems, so she wants to reduce (or at least not increase) the number of systems. Their friends get each side of the argument, but just about everyone thinks Marnie is overreacting. “Just let him shop at Costco,” they all say. But they don’t understand that all the stuff makes Marnie feel a little ill in her own house – a little edgy everywhere – and she shouldn’t have to take Prozac for that.

Lately they’ve each gotten more extreme about their preferences. In the past half year Keith has gone shopping more, returning to their garage with large boxes and bags of dry goods, while Marnie has increased the time she spends in her small study. He constructs utilitarian shelf units for the basement and fills them with batteries, lightbulbs, extension cords and paper products, while she rocks in her old chair and rereads Jane Austen, or browses through Elle. She’d like to live in a smaller house. One large room with the kitchen in a corner and adjoining bath and laundry . . . that would suit her fine. Keith would go crazy in such a small space. He doesn’t imagine it or any alternative to the house they have.

(continued tomorrow)

“Of course it makes a difference. Every little bit adds up.” Keith spoke even as he changed lanes again without signaling.

“Yeah sure,” Marnie uttered with sarcasm. “Like five minutes in a two hour trip. Really. There was a study done on a drive from San Diego to Los Angeles. Two identical cars going at the prevailing speed, but one driver had to stay as much as possible in the same lane and the other was supposed to be aggressive to try to make time. The lane changer arrived in Los Angeles four minutes and thirty-six seconds before the calm driver.”

I watched it all from the back seat, and I wondered.

“Well I don’t know who did the study, but I would have made a lot more than five minutes on that trip. Anyway,” he said with a tone a bit exasperated and a look in his rearview mirror, “there’s no way I’m happily sitting in this stew.” He swivelled his head to the right and darted one lane over.

“It makes me nervous is the problem. I’m always tense when you drive like this. Maybe you should take passenger comfort into account.”

“Maybe we should commute separately.”

“Yeah.”

Then Marnie looked out her side window for awhile, and Keith paid attention to the traffic. But they both knew commuting together was practical. Keith had free parking at his office building, and they could drive faster and toll-less in the diamond lane. It would have been more expensive and perhaps a bit silly to commute separately.

Driving in the 21^st century is a high-stress exercise in every metropolitan area. Across America people strap into bucket seats in high-powered vehicles and launch themselves into an environment which of course stimulates their glands to flood their confined bodies with adrenaline, to spur their heart rates and respiration and passions, to fill them with a lust to burst the bounds of those seat belts and diagonal straps and whomp the asshole who just cut them off.

Keith and Marnie are practical; they commute together. They are also 50 years old and feeling it in their individual ways. He gets heartburn easily. He tends to carry antacids. He also suffers from occasional hemorrhoid pain and seasonal allergies, each condition worsening with age. Marnie has some bone problems. She exercises a lot, and she feels some heel and knee pain daily. A few times a year her neck seizes up or her lower back springs out of whack.

But they’re not unattractive. She’s a little overweight but fit from all of her exercise. She takes care of her hair and she smiles a lot. Keith should shave his head; he never had good hair and it’s thinning unevenly. He would look better without the middle-aged paunch. But he has nice features and good shoulders and attractive teeth and hands. He could look worse.

(more on Wednesday)

These walls do not a prison make. These bars inhibit not. I bide in my room which is not a cell, so full of warmth now that I radiate. I could be a space heater, a hot brick against your back. The fibrous core of me is now transformed, soft-sweetened, ready to join with you. Waiting for you, but not much longer… soon …

Hank to Polly seemed substantial, solid. He had a large-featured face, long arms, big hands. His hair was thick and silvery; his smooth-shaven chin was prominent. She herself was 5’9″ and often 180. She had a strange light gait, almost mincing, which seemed peculiar on such a big woman, but Hank found her adorable. Across that room their pheromones performed a dance, or maybe it was the jasmine and musk, or more than those a stir of memories and expectations, but Hank and Polly saw, liked, and approached each other.

They tried to talk but it was loud among all the people. They had to stand with their faces close to one another, intensely aware of proximity. Each marveled about how strange it seemed to speak with one’s face that near, how intimate, how powerful, how long it had been. Polly wanted to look in Hank’s eyes but found herself fascinated with the movement of his mouth as he talked. Hank couldn’t stop gazing at the spot where Polly’s neck met her left shoulder; she hunched a little there, and he wanted to nuzzle the space apart. Rather quickly they cross-rationalized their escapes from the fundraiser.

They headed to Polly’s place.

I’m no longer the creature of an hour ago. I leave this chamber filled and about to fulfill. I brim now with hot energy, and loose a little essence to the air. I send out a bit of my scent. I will open myself to the golden raiment. I’ll wear flecked white like drifts of creamy snow.

She turned her key and pushed the front door. Within were the lamps, the heat, and the smell from her new oven. She looked back at Hank with a smile and offered to share. She said there was only one and it wasn’t terribly large, but she conjectured that it might be perfect. She told him as she led the short way through her small place that her oven had stopped working months ago, but she hadn’t gotten the new one until the day before. And she’d just realized how long she had wanted a baked potato, and had therefore set about to gratify her desire. She had forked it and racked it as she left for the fundraiser, and they could tell by the scent of hot earth that it was ready.

Ah: open, open.
Open to release.
Oh the exquisite ease of pressure,
the balm of liquid gold:
cool
soothe.
White cream mounds my edges,
like ermine singed with onyx
and shot with steaming pearls.

Her neighbor Olga begged her to come. It was a wine-and-cheese gathering to collect money to feed the homeless; normally Polly would donate and avoid. But this was abnormal Sunday. And she gave herself a way out. She set up her home for comfort when she returned, the heat and lamps just so, and she put food in the oven she’d need to tend in an hour.

So she walked half a block to the party, which was overcrowded and seemed inhospitable to her except for the few minutes she spent talking to Olga. It was hot and she was trying to figure a graceful way out when someone had the sense to open the door for air, and Polly smelled jasmine mingled with an undercurrent of musk and then, just as he swung his large-featured face her way, she noticed Hank.

I had no idea it could be like this. Each moment is identical to the last and yet a transformation has occurred… at once I feel more excited and more mellow. Dense and light. My siblings and I conjectured, in our little grooves and pockets, but never this, this smoothness. I find myself dreaming of fat, of slipperiness and lubricity, conditions I found repulsive to imagine, when I was young…

Hank was discombobulated in a different way than Polly. He didn’t work quite as hard at his job, but he was four months divorced after a 33-year marriage, and although he was the one who left, he wasn’t happy. His ex-wife was pressing him for money, his grown children distressed him with their disapproval, and he was lonely. He also felt confused and a little rebellious. Just that morning he’d smoked a joint for the first time in almost 20 years. He got the stuff from a work colleague, remembering how much he’d enjoyed it when he was younger, and that morning he rolled a joint, took a deep toke, and sat back into his cheap new couch. It only took about three drags before he was flying into memories of Anna, the one woman with whom he’d had an affair while married, who always smoked pot and who held his head when they made love.

Hank had to come to the fundraiser because he promised he would when Pete sold him the weed. He’d rather have just written a check to the cause and been done with it, but Pete insisted. Hank was there but only half-present until someone opened the door, and he never knew whether there was a skunk outside or some people smoking dope, but either way he got a whiff of his favorite scent along with something floral and at the same time he spotted Polly, who with her auburn hair and deep chest and glasses could have been Anna’s twin sister, across the crowded room.

Love at first sight takes 75 minutes. It could happen faster if we allowed it in the young, but we think they don’t understand love. Their province is infatuation. Adults require 75 minutes.

The pheromones don’t take that long. They waft at an average speed of seven inches a second; they crossed the span in a minute and a half. The middle-aged people named Polly and Hank saw each other at the speed of light and sensed each other just a little later, but they didn’t follow their impulses for nearly an hour.

Ask me what I’ve always wanted and I’ll describe this. My roots are absolutely normal: salt-of-the-earth American, raised in the country among my own kind. But I’ve arrived now. This is my hour. After a lifetime in the dark, at last I sense heat.

The fact is, people are rather gross. Their palates aren’t as subtle as chefs behave, and their minds are not that susceptible to subliminal messages. In the grand scheme of human perceptions, pheromones and subtleties don’t matter much, compared to basic ego. That Polly exuded a molecule shaped like a receptor in Hank’s forehead didn’t promote their union any more than the ambient temperature in the room where they met.

The facts are, Polly and Hank were each present and ready.

She was 53 and he had just observed, grumpily, his 60^th birthday. She hadn’t been in a relationship for a decade. Neither had had sex for a year. Both were burned out by their careers, having risen to consulting positions in their respective industries, where they were so capable that all they ever worked on were the nastiest and most thankless problems. His environmental business had him flying so often that he suffered from a chronic respiratory infection, while her management consulting operation meant she drove an average of 700 miles a week, in all the traffic. They were both overweight and medicated for hypertension.

The warmth continues into me, and of course I soften. From starch I sweetly melt. I was raised with my siblings dreaming of sunlight and now, finally, I feel this. My skin eases. Yearning quiets.

Polly smelled jasmine as she saw him, and the scent probably made her more receptive. Someone opened the door to the back garden, tumbling the fragrance like low smoke through the stuffy room. Her brain zipped to memories of summer evenings from childhood, when the night-blooming jasmine drifted its incense through the screened open windows in the back of her aunt’s big house at the end of dinnertime, just as she and her brothers were about to burst out of doors for hide-and-seek in the late dusk.

She had decided that morning to take a day off. She tended to work every day for at least several hours, and it had been over three months since she had a free Sunday. But that morning she resolved otherwise. She did nothing customary. She didn’t exercise immediately; in fact, she never got around to it all day. She drank less coffee. She even agreed to stop by the little fundraiser.

And so it was. We had a wake for Mr. Fartham, and then we played Bingo for mementos. The wake was not about drinking out of pewter or any hope of Mr. Fartham rising again. Rather, we reminisced around him while we all got used to the idea of him dead. For although he’d had a cluster of small strokes a few years back and had become progressively more forgetful, frail and fearing, no one had expected the massive heart attack that grabbed him while he slept. His wife awoke to discover herself a widow while Valerie, who had lumbered downstairs and started the Sunday pancakes, had her father’s sudden death announced to her with hysterical shrieks.

The wake lasted that day and most of the next. We didn’t have the body but we had the time till the burial. Mrs. Fartham tried to stay in her room; she might have resisted the effect but for her older daughter. For Valerie got into it. She sat by her father’s stuff weeping at first but she was susceptible to the recollections of most of us around her, and gradually she became more composed than I’d ever seen her, and her face lost the grief-engorgement, and I saw for the first time that she was actually attractive within all the fat. Valerie O. performed little services for her, bringing her hot tea or warm slippers, rubbing her rounded strap-dented shoulders and the wide nape of her neck below her lifted lobes, and when she rose they went upstairs together, apparently to see Mrs. Fartham, who was better for their visits, but also (we learned later) to seek time alone together, for mutual consolation. The Valeries became a couple.

Elizabeth was not so lucky. My phony old friend tried to have everyone and lost us all. She flirted with Jimmy, teased Valerie O., even tried to vamp my brother John. She batted her eyelashes at her fathers’ old colleagues, and attempted to pad her dad’s obituary with references to herself (she elbowed me out of the way to tell the local reporter that her father’s pet peeve, as well as her own, was rudeness!). She made bulldyke disparagements about Valerie O. and then tried to gulp them back when her sister came out. She flirted so aggressively with Jimmy that I saw him blush; I overheard her promise him that he wouldn’t have to do anything – he could just lay back and enjoy.

She saw me overhear. She blushed redder than a redhead and retreated after that. And I’ll admit I got a thrill. It was a cheap thrill, yes, but powerful enough.

The burial was a brief ceremony between the wake before and the games after. We caravanned there in the traditional dark, slow-moving sedans, placards in the windows and headlights on, but we’d all said so much at the wake that the speeches were short at the graveside. Then we returned to the Fartham abode and more food, and Jimmy as promised ran Bingo games for the miscellany.

I took the classic Playboys when I won, and some of my old friends looked a little askance. But me behaving oddly wasn’t that strange to them. They knew me for weird. They did agree with me though: we did it right; we honored Mr. Fartham; we had fun.