After the debacle with the marsala, Jim refused to cook for New Year’s Eve and even put it in writing, handing his wife a note while she was on the phone to her mother so she could not vocalize her displeasure as he took the car keys from the glass bowl in the foyer and gave her the middle finger. Six hours later, after a few whiskeys, he would deny the incident even took place. Marjorie showed him the note, which he claimed was a forgery.
“I don’t. I don’t do my h’s like that. Nice try.”
“I’ll put on some coffee.”
“It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. Just let me go to bed.”
Further to his newfound resolve not to cook dinner anymore, Jim refused to remove the electrodes from his penis and, in case there was any question, wrote down his reasons, slipping his wife a folded piece of paper while she was talking over the fence with their neighbor Simone, who was de facto president of the Home Owners Association.
“Oh hello, Simone.”
“Hiya, Jim!”
“Dear, this letter came for you.”
“Well not now, Jim. I’m talking to Simone.”
“It’s marked urgent! Simone, I do apologize.”
“No worries, Jim.”
Marjorie read the note and inhaled sharply.
“Everything alright, Marge?” Simone asked.
“Fine, fine really. My seamstress won’t be able to see me this month. Too much on. She can’t get me in until March.”
“Oh no! How dreadful,” Jim replied. “Hey, but my wife would look good in burlap, what do you say, Simone!”
Simone laughed. “Oh, aren’t you a dear, Jim.”
Five minutes later Marjorie stormed in and demanded to know: “What electrodes! What have you done to yourself, Jim.”
“Listen, I rather think that’s my own business. I simply kept you apprised of the situation so that you wouldn’t scream at the unsightly wires or object to the leaking battery acid singeing our bedsheets. The technology isn’t quite there yet.”
Marjorie said: “If this is a conspiracy to drive me insane, I’m warning you, Jim, I have gin for the minor inconvenience of whatever the hell this turns out to be.”
Marjorie went to fix a drink, leaving Jim standing alone in the living room. He called out to her, “Don’t pretend you’re not curious about the electrodes.”
Marjorie didn’t answer.
“Oh, are you up to date on the current literature vis-à-vis male impotence? Was there an article in the latest issue of Marie Claire about electrodes?” Jim asked half-seriously. “Fine then, I must have missed it.”
Jim could hear Marjorie tinkering with her drink, tasting, shuddering, adding more gin.
“I think it’s pretty damn rude of you not to ask about it,” he said as he slumped down on the couch.
The notes subsided for a month and then there was the Great Alderman’s Banquet, which the McDowells attended yearly, where they had their own table, and where Marjorie held court in the powder room during intermission while Jim smoked pot with the busboys in the alley behind the kitchen. Marjorie was having a good time. Jim had been remarkably well-behaved, even going out of his way, crossing the width of the ballroom in fact, so he could glad-hand the Mayor and not mention what a conniving son of a bitch Jim believed him to be.
In the powder room the notes found Marjorie once more, having been entrusted by Jim to a series of concerned old ladies. Jim had explained the urgency and frequency of the notes to his messengers thusly: that Marjorie’s eldest sister, a nun in the order of Saint Helena, who had sheltered children during the war, had to have emergency surgery on a burst hernia, that the doctors had discovered a cancerous growth wedged between the liver and the pancreas and that it had turned into a delicate ‘touch and go’ operation running into its fourteenth consecutive hour, that Jim had been on the phone with a nurse who had been updating him every five minutes.
The missives, scrawled onto cocktail napkins, were typically emblematic of the man: I haven’t filed our taxes since the year 1985. / We’re not welcome at the club anymore because I vomited on the fourteenth hole intentionally. I used syrup of ipecac, the well-known emetic. / I bought a boat with the money I didn’t pay to the Federal Government, which I have no intention of ever taking out on the water. As an extravagance I am having it portaged back and forth across an isolated isthmus in the Amazonian Rain Forest on the back of Guaraní Indians. / I know I HAVE NO RIGHT TO JUDGE YOU but I feel like the only thing standing between you and turning totally and utterly feral is one more serving of gin a night, which actually I suppose isn’t inherently a judgment but an observation with only the suggestion or whisper of a normative purpose.
“Not here, not here,” Jim pleaded when Marjorie confronted him at the bar. “I mean do you really want to stay for this whole fucking thing.”
Jim and Marjorie gathered their things from the coat check and strolled along the boardwalk, smoking like teenagers.
“What is going on, Jim?”
“I’m dying, Margie.”
“No you’re not. That’s not funny.”
“I have high cholesterol.”
“So, what, you’re being an ass to me? You’re saying all the things you’ve wanted to say all these years?”
“No it’s not that. I’m not dying but anytime I go to the doctor’s for a check-up, I think a bit about my own mortality. I wanted to preserve something of myself for you, for the eventuality of my death.”
“And you thought that love letters were too gauche.”
Jim snorted. “Listen, you’re the one who was quote unquote underwhelmed by my veal marsala because I forgot to use creminis. I managed to find veal in this backwater, but fuck me for not remembering which varietal of fungus the dish calls for. You made us leave the Church when they started delivering Mass in English. I had to dig up and take out and remortar the flower beds so they faced east-west at a 45 degree angle. Do you remember that? The kids couldn’t have sugar. Saturday mornings were for reading ‘serious’ books, all four of us. You are a woman who insists on Chanel wall paper. You abhor televised sports and frankly you would look like a knock out in sackcloth. Margie, you’re a ruthless, diligent, clear-eyed woman who has never been a second rate silver medalist and I don’t believe for a moment you would prefer the fog of romance that love letters confer—if not impose— to the nuance of the truth.”
“And the truth is you’re a bastard,” Margie stated outright. “Our marriage was imperfect but it was love, that’s what you want me to remember twenty years from now.”
“Yes!” Jim shouted, raising his arms in triumph.
“But I knew that, Jimmy. I know about the taxes. I’ve been filing my own for quite some time now to hedge against being audited and being taken down with you and your economic pacifism, and I know about the boat. You think it is an extravagance but you want to give the Guaraní people the dignity of work and I know you are fully compensating them for their labor. You’re not a racialist so you don’t play golf at a club. I was too hard about the marsala, and I suppose too diffident about your attempts to remedy your impotence.”
“You can’t let me win, can you?”
“Well, think of this as an opportunity,” Margie said, gesturing toward Jim. He offered her another cigarette which she waved away. “No, the hip flask.” Jim sheepishly retrieved the flask from his blazer and handed it over to Margie. She took a long pull. He looked at her under the street lamp, noticing the flecks of scarlet in her hair. She reached for his hand and pulled him down next to her on the bench where she had taken a seat.
“An opportunity for what, my love?” Jim asked.
“Well to do something truly reckless. Something that will really force me to take the balance of things. It will no doubt torment me as to the very stability of our marriage, my feelings for you notwithstanding.”
“That sounds promising. I’ll think about it,” Jim said. They ventured back to the hotel where the banquet was being held to retrieve their car from valet parking. Jim pulled into a McDonald’s drive-thru on their way home, knowing Marjorie had been underwhelmed by the dinner they’d been served, some uninspired Midwestern pairing of broiled steak, a wilted green salad and stale dinner rolls. Jim decided the next morning he was going to raise turtles since turtle meat was a delicacy in China and there had been a shortage. There was disposable income to be had. Marjorie said this plan was asinine. Jim began excavating a stockade by hand in the backyard, giving up after an hour. He had bent a sprinkler head and severed a water line with the spade.
“No, no, it doesn’t need to be replaced. I can fix it.”
“Oh, fix it? Yes, Jim, you’re clearly very handy,” Marjorie said while surveying the wider swath of damage Jim had done to the backyard while she sipped the martini Jim had fixed for her.
“That tears it. That tears it, Marjoram. Goddammit.” Jim stormed off. He returned five minutes later and asked defeatedly, “Where are our papers? Why can I never find anything?” Marjorie followed him inside so she could retrieve his passport for him.
The next day Jim received his inoculations and the week after he set off for South America. He planned on traveling to the interior of the Amazon to ascertain the current whereabouts of a ship he had christened ten years ago the SS Marjorie. There were rumors of a Greenpeace blockade forming in the Gulf of Mexico that Jim wanted to join, in order to escalate things so beyond reason that his pitiless and indulgent nature could be thrown into stark relief for Marjorie’s benefit. “My chance to do something reckless like you said, beyond your powers of intuition, deduction, doppler. A chance to be my own man,” Jim told Marjorie when she dropped him off at the airport. Jim made it as far as his hotel room in Rio de Janeiro, where he spent the one hellish night there unable to fall asleep by himself. He came home on the next available flight with a bottle of duty free gin for his wife and a promise in his heart to call a contractor the next day who could repair the considerable damage he had done to the backyard irrigation.
AVEE CHAUDHURI is a frequent patron of Jake's Bar, which is located two blocks from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he teaches and is completing a PhD in English Literature.
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Avee writes very short, macabre songs about his friend's pets. Here’s one about Hudson, a five-year-old golden retriever/great pyrenees mix. The chords are included for you to work it out on your own at home.
🎶 [A] Hudson, [E] why'd you do it again? [G] You stole my car. [D] You killed that cop. [A] Hudson, [E] why'd you do it again? [G] You stole my car. [D] You ran that cop off the road.
Great piece! I particulary enjoyed the paragraph outlining the missives scrawled on the napkins. They are so broad ranging, haha. This element reminds me of Herzog by Saul Bellow, and how that character is always writing letters to people, alive or otherwise. Looking forward to reading more.