In counseling today I only wanted to talk about Paul Pierce in the wheelchair, Game One of the ’08 NBA Finals. Everyone got pissed so the session ended early. They asked what I wanted to discuss and that’s what I said. I don’t know what else I was supposed to do besides lie, which wasn’t an option, because that’s why we were there in the first place.
The Truth, #34, in the wheelchair and then on the stationary bike and then on the court and then draining a three then that big hobble that probably wasn’t even a hobble as he retreated to go play D on Kobe Bryant and completely lock him down. My wife was incredulous. The therapist and therapist-lite both just looked at me. My wife said something, but not with words. With the muscles in her face. All of them. Twitching and flexing. The therapist and therapist-lite, they looked at each other and then moved a little in their chairs. Neither of them said anything.
I looked up at the clock and thought this moment is literally costing us more money than it’s worth, every second nothing getting said putting us further and further into the red. Red. My wife’s face drained of it, her muscles having squeezed most of the blood out. She wanted to hold this moment forever. The therapist and therapist-lite kept watching it play out. Neither of them looked at the clock. Of all of us in the room these past few months, I’m the only one who ever does.
When we left, the therapist and therapist-lite, they smiled. I don’t know why or what they were smiling about. I don’t think they were relieved to see us go, but I don’t think they wanted us to stay, either. The therapist used a word earlier today that I’m going to use in my daily conversations with everyone I know. He said “Rage-aholic,” and he said it without smiling. He was talking about my wife, who probably won’t be my wife very much longer if the statistics on this stuff have anything to say about it.
Her and me, though, we’re gonna beat the odds.
The whole therapy thing was my idea. I take ownership for my being there. I don’t enjoy it but I don’t think I’m supposed to. I don’t think I’m supposed to hate it, though, either. I think I’m supposed to find it gradually and progressively helpful. So far it’s hard to tell if it’s any help at all.
My wife and I always wait until the elevator folds shut to start fighting. Not word fighting. Real fighting. The only thing she says before she takes her first swing at me is this: “Pierce in the goddamn wheelchair? What are you, retarded?” That’s my go-word, by the way. Retarded. Anyone calls me that and it’s fucking on like Donkey Kong.
My wife is short and has T-Rex arms, so she misses with her first punch. But I have poor peripheral vision and she knows it, so when I dodge the first swing, I lean square into her second. My wife is ambidextrous, so it doesn’t matter which hand she throws with. Her family is from southern Germany and this blitzkrieg punching thing she does is both natural and learned. She hits me just under my shoulder blades, flush in the kidneys. I’ve had kidney stones for a long time and she knows this because she took me to the ER a few times when they hooked me up with a Demerol drip and I felt the warmth and happiness of being numb. I’m not numb now, though, so this punch, it really hurts. I have the cysteine kind of stones in my kidneys, the kind you get just from being born. At the worst of it, I had 20 separate stones in my urinary tract, most of them clustered right at the base of my left kidney. My wife knows this, so that’s precisely where she punches me; she took anatomy and physiology, after all. Twice. Because she’s ambidextrous. The first time, she took all her tests left-handed. The second time, all right-handed. She scored exactly the same grades on everything both times.
I don’t know why, but it never seems like my wife thinks I will hit her back. I don’t know why she thinks this, if she even does think this. I will kick her, too, as hard as I can. This time I kick because I can’t throw a punch because I’m left-handed and my left hand is smashed up against the wall of the elevator along with my left arm, left elbow, left bicep, left tricep, left deltoid, left shoulder. I can’t do shit with my right hand, not even hold a fork to cut my steak with a knife, so I kick real fuckin hard at her with my right foot but I miss and that’s when I fall on the floor and that’s when everything goes black.
• • •
When I wake up I’m back in the office with my wife, the therapist and therapist-lite, and they ask me if I’d like to try our session again. They all use the word “mulligan” for some reason. So I say yes. I definitely say yes. Because there’s still a shit-ton of unresolved feelings I have about the ’86 Masters. Because my dad looks a little bit like Tom Kite, which means I only sorta look like Tom Kite. I don’t wear glasses, which is probably good, because if I did they wouldn’t have survived the thing in the elevator with my wife. But I do wear contact lenses. I started wearing them before I met my wife, which was probably a big factor in her marrying me. Meaning if I wore glasses, she wouldn’t have done it. Or I don’t think she would have. Dad told me when I married her to make sure I kept her happy. Her own dad told me exactly the same thing. Her dad looks kind of like Jack Nicklaus, back in the ’60s, back when he was rounder than he was in ’86. My wife, on the other hand, looks just like Nicklaus did back then, so much so that Dad even calls her The Golden Bear and everything, and we had to stop visiting over the holidays because of it. My mom doesn’t ever say anything or look like anybody, so no one ever talks to or about her. When I got married, Mom just smiled. I’m pretty sure she was the one who came up with calling my wife The Golden Bear, by the way. She’s sneaky like that sometimes.
When the session starts for the second time the therapist and therapist-lite ask my wife to go first, and to talk about what she thought it was in particular that upset her so much during the first time. She is really good at falling into long, dramatic pauses, my wife is. The first thing she does is make a wet little popping sound, that same sound you make when you hold the tip of your tongue right behind the top row of your teeth and pull it back really quick, that sound you make after you’ve intentionally made someone wait to hear you say something, sort of like the sound of a stylus on a turntable when it first sets itself down on the record, that long little gap of silence before any recorded sound starts playing.
U2’s 1991 album Achtung Baby was one of the last major band releases by a major music company to come out at the same time on cassette, CD, and vinyl. I don’t remember which one of the band members said it, but it was probably Bono, so let’s just go with it here and say that Bono said that U2 wanted Achtung Baby’s first track, “Zoo Station,” to sound so unlike anything they had ever recorded before that upon hearing the first notes the listener would wonder immediately if their hi-fi system was broken. I bring that up right now because in the moment between the wet pop and the first audible sounds, well, that moment seems to last a lifetime. Especially when it’s your wife about to make all the noise. Even more so when she’s making it in a therapist’s office.
My wife tells the therapist and therapist-lite that she is upset by how I’m not taking any of this seriously, but they cut her off before she can finish her thought to ask her to be careful with her words, because what she said implies that she is certain about something that may not be at all true, that she needs to use softer phrasing like speech and/or actions make[s] me feel as if, i.e., My husband’s speech and/or actions make me feel as if he isn’t taking any of this seriously. And when they cut her off like that I already know believe I think I know what’s going to happen so I just keep my mouth shut and hold still in the big leather chair they told me to sit in and let it happen. And what happens is she clamps her round mouth with all her round teeth in it real tight, pivots her round torso 180 degrees towards me, and launches her round fist into my nose. A square and remarkable shot, really. The Golden Bear never hit me so hard or so elegantly. If Mom were here, she might be impressed and actually say something to someone besides Dad.
When I heard “Zoo Station” for the very first time, I didn’t think my hi-fi was broken. Achtung Baby didn’t surprise me. Likewise, when my wife hit me in front of the therapist and therapist-lite, right there in their office, when she hit me hard and square enough with her flabby and round punch, it didn’t surprise me. And when I balled up my own fist and returned fire, that didn’t surprise me either. But my wife was surprised. But my wife’s speech and/or actions made me feel as if she was surprised, that speech bubbling out of her round throat, wrapped in her big wet sobs, the actions that truncated the sobs when she threw six more punches with her round fists, leftright leftright leftright. Everything black again.
For the record, my wife hates acts as if she doesn’t prefer the music of U2. Okay, hate doesn’t prefer is probably a little strong. But yeah, she totally fucking hates them. Me, I was into them when I was in college and for a lot longer after college. I’m not sure why she hates would act as if she doesn’t prefer them. Maybe it’s because the guys in U2 are all Irish and her family is German and because she looks like you’d think a middle-aged woman two generations removed from southern Germany would look, with her thick, amber monobrow and everything that could possibly be round on a human body in fact being round. Eyelashes and toenails, even the monobrow. All round. Which is fine by me. I’m into round.
When I wake up this time, I’m in my own bed with my wife climbing on top of me with all of her naked round parts dragging across my torso and, well, us making up.
• • •
I would tell you how this story ends but I don’t know. My wife and I are still married and still going to therapy twice a week and still making up four or five times a week. We’re calling what we’re doing Trying. So I’ll just tell you how I want it to end.
What I want is for the story to end the way all those James Bond movies begin, with him on skis or in a helicopter or in outer space or not in outer space, with a big panning crane shot that you just know it took forever to set up, and forever I mean like the better part of a month or maybe a year, all in pre-production for getting that one shot when the camera just rolls and they get it all in one take and burn like an entire mag of film getting it, all one long take with no edits and it all makes it somehow into the final print. That’s what I want.
Only I don’t want an establishing shot. I want a close-up, tight and centered on my wife’s pale, freckle-free button nose, her chipmunk cheeks and pumpkin chin and amber bangs filling the frame, bags under her eyes, her unplucked monobrow, her blotched skin peeking through orange makeup, soft spots like ice patches on the otherwise perfect snow that is her face.
I want this. And I want no pause. No edits.
And I don’t want any music of any kind playing anywhere, not in the background, not in the foreground, not in the anywhere ground. I don’t want this scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Or by Danny Elfman. Not even Jenna Elfman. And I don’t want it silent. What I want is something else.
And the something should be this: the way the air sounds when her breathing patterns change; the way her skin sounds as it curls and swells; the way her teeth scratch each other as they try to pass inside her but totally and miserably fail; the way the light doesn’t scream or stop anything because light is ultimately just light and can’t ever make anything stop even if it wanted to or tried wanting to.
The thing about Paul Pierce and Jack Nicklaus and Tom Kite and Bono and maybe even Jenna Elfman, is that they are all really good at the post-game interview. Win or lose, they are all really good at saying stuff when something is over or close to being over. Me, I’m not good at that at all. Probably because I never am sure when something is over or is close to being over or is simply needing to be.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Trevor Dodge’s most recent work appears on The Butter, Green Mountains Review, CHEAP POP, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, Gargoyle, Metazen, Juked and Nailed. His latest book is The Laws of Average, a collection of 60 flash fictions recently published by Chiasmus Press. He is managing editor of Clackamas Literary Review, and lives in Oregon City OR,
LF #075 © 2015 Trevor Dodge. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, February 2015.
