“Something About Perfecting A Love”

We were sitting at the cafe on our third date. The waiter brought us our drinks: a cappuccino for me, loose-leaf tea for her. Monk’s Blend, it was called; she ordered it often thereafter. We fussed with the mugs and saucers for a bit, and then I coughed and looked at her, still a bit nervous in those early conversations. So, what’s the funniest joke you’ve ever heard? I asked. She didn’t say anything, just dipped her tea bag up and down in the browning hot water. But then she laughed to herself. I sipped my foam and was about to say something else when she said: How do you get a nun pregnant? I shrugged. Prayer? I asked. She shook her head. You fuck her, she answered. She stressed the hard consonant and squeezed the wet tea bag between her fingers; she pursed her lips to blow cool air across the surface of the drink. I remember her stare over the rim of the mug. I remember her fingers, her orange bracelet. Today I like to tell people that was the moment I fell in love with my fiance. It’s so much better than a truer story.

“Something About Marriage, Pt 2”

Sometimes a person might ask, “How did you two meet?” And if you answer, “We met in Bible Study ten years ago,” the asker will think certain things. And maybe those won’t necessarily be things you want the asker to think about you, but at the same time they may be true things, true parts of a past you cherish. So when I got back to New York after a trip to Seattle and a student asked me, “Who’s wedding were you at?” and I said, “A friend from high school,” I didn’t go on and tell her that I knew the groom from Bible Study and Student Leadership conferences. Instead, I repeated a story a married actor-friend told me during the reception. The actor and I had been sitting in the back of a pick-up truck, drinking our way through a bucket of expensive Northwest stouts and smoking thick cigars the father of the bride gave us. It was windy and smelled like salt water and cigar smoke. The mountains in the distance were beautiful with orange fire behind them. Puget Sound looked like a great puddle of oil. “Let me tell you something about my wife,” the actor-friend started. “Or rather let me tell you why I love my wife,” he corrected. “Last weekend we were at the Tacoma Mall getting a gift and we started talking about our own wedding, how Jason had fallen in the pool with his tux on and how his sister was so drunk she jumped in to rescue him still wearing her bridesmaid dress. The sun was shining, birds were chirping, etcetera. We were laughing and so I was a little distracted when I went to unlock the car, but then the key wouldn’t work, and I realized I’d gone to the wrong car; there was another Ford Taurus the same color two spots away. So I look back at my wife, who knew I was trying to unlock the wrong car, and she starts shaking her head and says, ‘Wow, I’m married to a fucking retard.’ And then she smiles, you know, joking, but then she goes completely stoned face and says, ‘I don’t think I can stay married to a retard; our children might be retarded.’ So now we’re, like, in character, and instead of laughing I say, ‘Don’t you laugh at me, you fucking bitch, don’t you dare,’ but I say it a little loud, and now people are looking, right, because it’s Saturday afternoon and we’re in the middle of the Tacoma Mall parking lot. But we stay in character. So I move like I’m going to hit her, and she starts to pretend-cry and run off in the opposite direction. Then I catch up to her and grab her arm, hard, like I’m all pissed off, and I yell in my best Stanley Kowalski, ‘No! Don’t you fucking pull this shit! Don’t you even fucking try to pull this shit here!’ and so then she starts to really wail, and she yells out, ‘Somebody help me! Help!’ And suddenly there’s this old man pulling me away, and his wife is there too, or at least some old lady, and so this lady is petting my wife and saying, ‘It’ll be okay, honey, don’t you worry, it’s okay,’ and this old man’s like, ‘A man doesn’t treat a young lady like that, get your hands off of her, be a man, etcetera,’ and my wife keeps crying and overacting, saying things like ‘Oh Lord I’m so afraid! Oh Jesus help me!’ and she’s clutching onto this little old lady. So now there’s really a crowd of folks forming around us, and I’m starting to get a little nervous, you know, because I think people are getting the wrong idea, and I’m trying to figure out whether or not my wife is getting nervous too. But then everyone is talking and I hear someone ask her, ‘Is that your husband, sweetheart?’ And she says, still all in tears and choking, ‘He’s—he’s my father!’ and at that I just lose it, just start cracking up, because we’d watched Chinatown the night before and that was what she was referencing, you know, that last scene. So at that point she sees me laughing and she starts laughing too, and everyone around us just sort of is standing around like a bunch of retards wondering what the hell is going on, and that’s when my wife yells out, ‘Run, Jack!’ and so we run to the car and get in and drive away.”

At this point in his story my actor-friend threw his now-empty bottle into the bed of the truck and opened another. He talked for a while longer, other stories that followed more or less the same arc, none of which I completely understood. But before we went back inside he said, “My God, I love that girl so much. Every day I get down on my knees and thank God for bringing the two of us together.” And that, really, I think was the point of what I was trying to tell my student in the first place.

“Something About A Nail”

When I was maybe ten or eleven years old my grandfather hammered a nail into a tree with his bare hand. My cousins will tell you it never happened, but we had called his bluff; we hadn’t believed him when he said that, as a carpenter in Tacoma after the war, he’d never used a hammer. I remember he boasted: My hands are like the Finns. My hands are stronger than Russian tanks. I remember he did it, too, right there in front of us. I remember him holding a three-inch nail against the cedar tree between thick fingers. I remember him swinging his gigantic frame. I remember when he pulled away his hand was ripped and bleeding. And I remember that nail stayed sticking out of the tree like a monument, and a piece of skin was its flag.

“Something About Marriage, Part 1”

When I think of our wedding, and the holiness of it, I think of a blonde curly-headed child dressed all in white, slowly pouring water into the ocean from a grand glass pitcher. It takes both hands, and a very long time passes before all the water has poured. The sun sets and the moon rises and the sun sets again. There is warm wind; the arcing water is the only sound. I think maybe we are the water in the pitcher, or maybe the pitcher. Maybe we are the ocean, or the moon, or all of it. I know none of this makes sense.

“Something About A Joke”

On weekend afternoons in the spring I sometimes walk to the Chelsea market to buy flowers and a cup of coffee. The way home passes a loud neighborhood park, and from over a block away I can hear little girls on squeaky swing sets, their laughs and giggles as their mothers or nannies yell for them to Hold on tight! Sometimes, walking that way reminds me of a girl I dated before I met my fiance. I remember little about the girl, save for a joke she once told me:

Why did the girl fall off the swing set?

Because she didn’t have any arms.

I sometimes wonder if one of these days I’ll be walking that way with a bunch of gladiolas—sipping my coffee, burning my tongue—and from down the street I’ll watch one little girl soar high above the leafy trees and across 10^th avenue, smiling and armless, like a yellow-haired doll some bully vandalized and tossed over a fence.

“Something About A Painter”

1

There was another girl who painted on stretched Value Village t-shirts instead of canvas. Her pictures were heavy and bold, like the fingers and brushes she used to make them. She wanted to be a costume designer on Broadway, she said, but she never designed anything but these unwearable shirts. One purpose replaces another, she told me, That’s the way with the world. She was younger than me and very beautiful. She told me her mother used to paint, and that in her mother’s paintings there was never any trash or fences or rain. Sometimes there were clouds, but they were only there to give contrast and make the sky look bluer, she said. I love your blue eyes, I would say, and touch her. She would put down the brush and sometimes she would smile.

2

This one is called Memory 1, she said. And this one is called Memory, 2. She held them up in the dark for me to see. I propped myself against her headboard, maybe I peeled a condom wrapper off my shoulder. Creative titles, I said. She smirked and held up another. It was black with an orange smear through it—I recognized its shape from earlier, when the lights were on. In the dark the red looked like a gray arrow pointing to the door. This one’s called Asshole Joseph, she said. But I could hear her smiling. I wrote a poem for you while you were sleeping, I replied. It’s called “Bitch Painter.” She laughed and maybe she leapt back into bed. A few days later we realized we brought out the worst in each other and, as I remember it, we parted under easy terms.