ISSN 1758-6488
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Men in Love Fiction |
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HIS WIFE.
He takes me to his wife. I don’t like her. She hates me. Arrogant like all European women, too much of too little makeup, face all bare skin, red lipsticky lips, mascara’d black eyelashes, eyebrows plucked in half-circles one hair wide. She looks like Marlene Dietrich in a thirties movie colorized for modern audiences.
“My name is (unintelligible),” she says, not looking at me, staring at empty sky. She tells me later in bed. “I think you are one more workaholic, bumaholic, sexaholic in this terrible America of the habits nobody can want to break. Then you defend America!” She turns up on her elbow to say it happily. “You say you will say things bad about America, not me. Because country is like a wife. The husband lets nobody beat her but him.”
“Never happened,” I say. “I don’t beat wives.”
“Don’t say never happened. It makes me think of you. I never feeled this way about my countries. Who cares who beats the dead? You are why it is not the terrible America to me any more. You said it made me love you.”
“I remember,” I say. “We were standing next to each other in the booth.” She nods, she nuzzles back down. I couldn’t possibly have said it. I hate Americans who say they love America. This is the single worst thing about the whole story. She loves me for being what I’m not, what I hate.
This is the real beginning of the story. I should tell it better, I taught Creative Non-Fiction once in a Senior Center. But that’s no help. All our textbook said was Forget the Uncreative Truth, which seniors already had. But this isn’t a story, it’s memories, a series of blinks, like the scam’s blue neon. I start creatively writing about her, I remember his cowboy hat, the guns, the scam, nights, airconditioning, bedsmells, underarms, unwashed shirts, her body beside me. Our Father Who Art on Vacation, Wildwood-by-the-Sea-God, have mercy on us who have mercy for nobody, not even ourselves. Let’s do this right.
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