Punctures

My ex-husband was defined by his loose pile of ambitions. They were madnesses dressed in functional clothing. He vaguely served society. Common good like a bright shade of lipstick, black heels in the sink.

Look.

My ex-husband went on these talking binges. By himself, monologues. He would start and not stop. He ranted about everything: romance, cheap cologne, foreign stock markets, teeth whiteness, wrists, vanilla chapstick, and so on.

During one of these episodes, he jammed a screwdriver through his palm. He kept talking.

Later, in the ER, I asked him why he did it. He grinned handsomely, said nothing.

He had a son with his next wife. The son is now a young playwright, a prodigy, 20 or so. I went to see his first production. We both live in Chicago, and I go to plays often. Just to be clear—it could’ve been simple chance.

In the play, I saw a diluted version of his father’s madness. The actors would often slow, silence. An awareness of the stage would creep in. These quiet moments were lucidly stained.

I visited my ex-husband at his work just once. I was downtown anyway. You could see the lake from his windows. I arrived unannounced.

When I entered his office, he was on his desk yelling, “2.5 million people! 2.5 million people!” over and over into the phone. It was the population of Chicago at the time. He would sometimes stop, listen to what the other person was saying, then resume yelling. His belligerence included brief gaps of attention.

After a half-hour of this, I left.

The plot of his son’s play:

A man entered carrying a woman. The actress’s body was plank-like, rigid. The man muttered, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board,” like a curse. When he set her down, her body articulated. They narrated the story of their relationship. They amenably took turns.

The man and woman spoke in similar patterns. They spoke globs of floral speech. I don’t know how intentional the similarity was. His father only had one voice. It’s reasonable to expect the same of the son.

Other characters entered. Exes, parents, irresponsible siblings. Scenes formed and dispersed without warning. In short, the man and woman were well meaning people who couldn’t make it work. The audience was torn. My ex’s son halved their sympathy.

With fifteen minutes left, the couple broke up. They then shared custody of the stage, left when the other entered.

They got back together in the final scene. It took place far in the future. The lighting gained a hollow, spectral quality, the light of inexpensive bulbs. At the time, I believed the last scene to be the fantasy of one or both of the characters.

I saw the son in the lobby when I left. He was mobbed by admirers. The face of an optimist was plastered on him. Years having passed, I believe I assessed the final scene wrong. It wasn’t the fantasy of the man or the woman, but rather the son. He couldn’t figure out a way to reunite his characters, so he scraped together some cheap, shitty dream. It was strange to see an ideal so blatantly staged.

My ex-husband’s hand?

The human body is generous. The hole healed over. In our remaining months, he referred to it as a puncture.

I disagreed with him. I said that a puncture only goes in one side. A hole is all the way through.

This led to some vigorous anatomical debate. He pointed at the entry and exit points of his body and asked, “Puncture or hole?” He out-argued me through stamina, not rhetoric.

In the end, I gave up.

The last time I saw him, he had flattened. What I’d previously regarded as separate behaviors (his ambition, his mania, his violence) had become one pillar of being. I’m sorry; I don’t have a word for it. I saw him all at once.

I took his hand, kissed the scar on the inside of his palm. I whispered, “Okay, puncture,” into it and then got the hell out.