Now they tell me…
What if the problem with finding a house is ME?? It probably is. Can’t get away with nothin’ around here any more.
Driving into town to look at a house for rent. Why does she even want to look at that one? I rejected it yesterday without ever having seen it. That went over well: she ranted and raved, stomped her foot, and let me have it. When you get girls from Iowa stamping their feet, you’re in big trouble. I couldn’t say a thing (and didn’t try) for 20 minutes, which is fortunate. Besides, she was right.
What a paranoid sumbitch I am, scared someone’s going to say I can’t go outside and play. Everything’s a threat to my precious independence, like my wife, denying us a chance to live in a dump forever. Oh, a loveable dump, to be sure, the perfect bachelor pad, best place I’ve ever lived. Driving into town to look at a house for rent. God, the sky is beautiful! Dark blue over Taos Mountain with lightning bolts, brilliant sun and white clouds overhead. Eighty degrees and I’m cool in my long sleeves. Makes it hard to be an idiot.
We didn’t rent the place — too awkward, no wood heat, etc. — but we prowled around the neighborhood. My wife is pulled there. (This is big medicine, bastards beware.) The woman is a creature of wild unleashed passion and joy hemmed in by negativity and big smelly men. I for one spent years of my life holding her down out of madness. It didn’t work, and she’s still with me. I’m not just lucky, I’m obscene.
Driving back to Llano Quemado after latte and chai in Taos Plaza. My partner is blazing sane, friendly, and tuned in. (How do they DO that?!?) Despite this, I’m still eating broken glass from last night’s dressing down. I’ve been forgiven (in effect), she’s miles ahead, but I’m a bastard without an excuse, averaging two syllables per mile. When we get home, she goes off to practice the piano, and I take a nap, otherwise known as all I can manage without being tasered.
Cocktail hour under the elms. I look at the mountain and drink my tequila. She walks back from her studio all smiles from playing Bach, goes into the house to change her clothes, and comes back out with a glass of wine. I pour myself some more tequila, and we clink glasses. Usually one or the other of us makes a toast, but I’m not talking. Still touching her glass to mine, she leans in close, pulls her sunglasses down just far enough to drill me in the eye, and says, “You take a long time, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do,” I reply, turning away and downing my shot.
Later I will put on loud Cajun music from the 1930s and microwave burritos from Antonito while she makes a salad. I am lots less crazy but the weight of me has slowed us down. After dinner we have three chances to catch Callie the studio cat and blow each one.
It’s 2:00 a.m. now. Time to zap the last half-cup of coffee and answer email, order hard drives. Moths are beating against the window glass, welcome to America.
Comment by Schro
1 July 2, 2008, 4:55 pm o'clock |
Nicely written. I can just picture the both of you.
But I’m still not sure if I should be insulted over the Lumpy post.
Comment by John H. Farr
2 July 2, 2008, 6:56 pm o'clock |
Your comment surprised me, so I went back at looked at that BAD piece of writing! Try it again.
Comment by K.J. Webb
3 July 2, 2008, 7:13 pm o'clock |
Here’s the sovereign remedy for what ails us males in the married state: We gotta learn to C-O-M-P-R-O-M-I-S-E or else it’s D-I-V-O-R-C-E. That first song wasn’t a Tammy Wynette hit, but it might get some of us through the night with a mate still in our bed at the end of it. –Hell, who knows anything about how to live with a woman? Psychologists and marriage counselors are mostly working on their 3rd and 4th goes at it. “All Happy Families are the same,” said Leo Tolstoy, who made his own utterly miserable. In his last days he deserted his spouse of 50 years so that he could live free at last of her corrupted femaleness. Leo, my boy, you needed to learn to C-O-M-P-R-O-M-I-S-E. Tequila cocktails in the cool of the evening might have made all the difference.
Comment by Gregory LeFever
4 July 3, 2008, 12:18 pm o'clock |
Tolstoy never said, “All happy families are the same, and mine is one of them.” He knew the score.
Comment by Carmel
5 July 3, 2008, 9:47 pm o'clock |
Well, as she’s still with you, John, you must be doing something right. Personally, I don’t like ‘compromise’. The one who compromises always feels they’ve lost. I like to find a third way that’s better than the other two.
Comment by John H. Farr
6 July 3, 2008, 10:20 pm o'clock |
I like to find a third way that’s better than the other two.
Yes, that THIRD way. Brilliant! That’s exactly how it works.That’s the thing that gets me all excited.
And K.J., it’s like you’re reading me through a straw. Loosen up, dude. Get transcendental. It’s the new sex.
Comment by K.J. Webb
7 July 4, 2008, 4:03 am o'clock |
Tossing back Tequila kinda leads to the old transcendance, but I’ll take my transcendance anywhere I can find it, little as I ever do find it.
The trouble with formulas like the third way and stayin’ loose is that they deceive us into thinking these big structural issues between men and women can be easily dealt with. Greg is right about Tolstoy. That old boy had the real lowdown on what happens inside families - everything from the enchantments of courtship to the first strained accommodations of married life, the heartaches children bring, the ecstasy and unsatisfactoriness of adultery, the sheer misery of a married lovelessness that led his most famous heroine to throw herself under the wheels of a train. In his own life Tolstoy, after making his wife pregant a dozen or so times, tortured her with visionary dreams of a perfect world without sex or family relations. She was ready to throw HIM under a train…. Most women who live with men get that way eventually, though the Tequila helps ease the situation.
Comment by Carmel
8 July 5, 2008, 8:34 pm o'clock |
The ‘third way’ is not a formula, and it’s not easy. It requires looking outside the box, leaving your comfort zone, giving up the idea that there are only 2 ways or variations thereof. There are a million ways. ‘Compromise’ is lazy thinking and usually results in a lose-lose situation.
Oh, and by the way, in 36 years of marriage I’ve never once wanted to throw myself of my husband under a train. Don’t drink tequila either, though I do drink single-malt whisky … but NEVER when I’m unhappy.
Comment by Carmel
9 July 5, 2008, 8:37 pm o'clock |
Oops … should read ‘throw myself OR my husband’.
I should add that I do sometimes ‘compromise’, as does my husband, but I always wish we hadn’t. In little things it doesn’t really matter, but in big things … very very unwise.
Comment by K.J. Webb
10 July 6, 2008, 5:31 am o'clock |
“Compromise” and “third way” are just words. As you describe the latter, Carmel, it seems pretty much what I mean by the former. My favoured word doesn’t get much respect because of its connotations of corruption and giving up on achieving the ideal. But living with a mate necessarily means giving up things - and not necessarily idealistic things. More likely, selfish things and even rather trivial things.
My two best friends are lifelong bachelors. Charming and good-hearted guys, both of them love being with women, have women friends, have briefly lived with women, etc. The reason they can’t close the deal is pretty simple - they’re fussbudgets about every darn thing in life. Neither has found a woman willing to put up with being dictated to about the pattern of the wallpaper or lights-out time, never mind the big stuff. Both have given up on finding a mate - another kind of giving up on the ideal, you might say.
I like your description of third way solutions. My friends could use some of that. In the end the reality that lies behind that phrase (and my blunter word) is that in marrieage you don’t get to have things just the way you want them. You’ve stopped being a sole proprietor and become a partnership (or, with the arrival of children, a joint stock company!). You’re hostage to others, you’re no longer the only one at the wheel, you’re fully exposed to the heartbreak and frustration of having your happiness depend on another’s will. You either like the mate who comes with that condition well enough to put up with the condition’s constraints - or you don’t and you won’t. The Man in Black had it right: “I walk the line.” (Years ago, I remember reading a critique of that song in the “Village Voice” - the critic called it something like “an anthem to Fascism”. If so, all us married men are living under the heel of a dictator.)
But my friends will tell you that their choice - to be solitary, free and, with apologies to Carmel, uncompromised - isn’t without its own constraints. As has often been said (by males, I admit, in exasperation): “Women! You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them!” –Of course it depends on the woman. Compromising with the wrong woman about the wrong things, walking the line for her, struggling to find the third way out of each daily hole: all that with the wrong woman ain’t the ticket to nothing but a long friendship with the bottle.
–Do women say such things about men, Carmel?