The Existential Burlesque: 1
Mitch sat at the kitchen table eating ziti while his wife Susan watched television in the next room.
It must be Tuesday, he thought. She’s watching the show about the sassy young professionals in New York.
He shoveled another forkful of pasta into his mouth.
No, wait, that means it’s Wednesday. Tuesday is the show about the sassy young professionals in San Francisco.
He stood up to appraise his reflection in the kitchen window, marveling at the orbicular belly protruding from his shirt like an enormous, prehistoric egg. Lifting his shirt he patted the paunch and sent waves rippling through the doughy flesh.
Great, now I’m rippling.
He shook his head and sat down.
Fucking rippling.
The fact that he was thirty-two had finally become undeniable. Somehow he had always managed to convince himself that thirty-two wouldn’t happen to him–not the way it happens to other people, anyway–but now he was rippling and there was no more denying it.
Thirty-two goddamn years old. Supervisor at a failing coffee shop. Holder of a profoundly expensive anthropology degree that had advanced him exactly nowhere. Husband stuck in a marriage that he could most euphemistically describe as “less than fulfilling”. No kids yet, but Susan would want kids soon. Her clock would start ticking or whatever the hell they call it.
Maybe we should have kids. It would be a nice distraction from each other.
Susan walked into the kitchen and started preparing her nightly carrot sticks.
Mitch glowered and impaled ziti with his fork. He had always suspected that she ate healthily solely to piss him off, just to point out that that she ate fresh vegetables while he inhaled vast quantities of complex carbohydrates.
Every impact of her knife against the cutting board reverberated through his nerves like a jackhammer. She was behind him, but he felt certain she was smiling maliciously as she worked.
“I’m going to bed after this show is over,” she said.
Mitch nearly succeeded at restraining a snarky comment, but in the end succumbed. “That’s surprising.”
The carrot chopping ceased. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Mitch shrugged. “You always go to bed after your shows are over. Every. Single. Night.”
“Is something wrong with that?”
“Only if there’s something wrong with spending half your life watching idiotic television shows, I guess. Other than that, no, nothing’s wrong.”
“So watching internet porn all night makes you better than me?”
Silence. Mitch jockeyed mentally for a clever rejoinder, but found nothing. In the end he resorts to the old standby. “Am I under investigation now, officer?”
“Do you even realize that today is my birthday?”
He had been readying an indignant arraignment of her matriarchal tyranny, but the birthday statement brought him up short. He turned in his chair to apologize and saw the chef’s knife still in her hand, its blade looking grotesquely huge in her petite fingers. He eyed it warily.
“I’m sorry.”
With a long sigh, Susan closed her eyes. It sounded like five years’ worth of air was being expelled from her lungs. She opened her eyes again.
“I turned thirty-two today, and I swore to myself that I wouldn’t spend one more day living with all this bickering and silence. We need to talk this out. Once and for all.”
Mitch knew that she was right, but something about the words once and for all filled him with panic. It was like a balloon had suddenly expanded in his throat, cutting off the oxygen. Brain grasping for air, he muttered, “Why? So you can lay another guilt trip on me?”
Susan sent the knife clattering into the sink and threw her arms up in exasperation. For a moment it seemed she might cry, but she didn’t.
“What the hell do you want from me? I try to get you to go out, you complain that I’m imposing on you. I give you your space, you just throw your angry little quips at me. We haven’t had a real conversation in weeks. We don’t even have sex anymore.”
Looking into his wife’s eyes, Mitch felt a contempt more vicious than anything he ever thought he could feel towards any woman. In answer to her question only one memory came to mind, blurred and smudged like an impressionist painting.
In the memory they are twenty-two years old and have just finished college. His plan is for them to go to Europe, where they will hitchhike through the countryside, take photographs, and write poetry. They will work in Parisian cafés, sleep on the streets of London, argue Nietzsche in Austrian bars. But these things are not to be, for in this memory Susan tells him she is going to grad school. They argue. Because he loves her, Mitch agrees to work while she attends grad school. After grad school they will go on the trip, they say, but of course that will not come, either.
In the end, grad school led to work, which led to nothing — which led to now.
“You have the nerve to attack me?” Mitch sneered. “You know what? You’re right. I can’t even blame you.” He sang in a note of high accusation, “You’re just a boring, timid person. I knew that when I married you. I have only myself to blame.”
Anger flashed in Susan’s brown eyes like light skipping off the surface of turgid waters. She’s a small woman, five foot one with a face like the librarian that she is, but in this moment she looks flat out frightening. Mouth clamped tight in rage, she said, “You have no idea who I really am.”
For a moment they stare at each other, and then she said, “I turned thirty two today.”
Mitch thought she was going to say something more, but she didn’t. She just walked past him and up the stairs.
When Mitch finally made it up to the bedroom, he was expecting to find her crying in bed. When he got there, however, she was fast asleep.
Something about the peacefulness of her rest unsettled him.
Continue to Part 2