ISSN 1758-6488
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Men in Love Fiction |
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MY WIFE. A HISTORY.
“The wife does this,” my wife Eliza says mopping the floor, balancing the checkbook, paying the bills, making the beds, earning the money, straightening the livingroom, making the bed all over again specially neat after our three times a week stolen hour and fifteen minutes of afternoon sex. “The wife knows how,” she seems to be saying with her eyes, staring up at me from my supplemental Thursday night blowjob. “The wife is a resource,” she says, baking bread, raising herbs in windowsill pots, sewing on buttons, changing baby, walking baby, reading to baby because tests have shown you can’t start too early, checking my footnotes, filling out grade sheets, cooking meals. “And cooking means cooking,” she says. “In this house we do not boil-in-the-bag.” Depending on the audience she winks or grins here conspiratorially. “Pardon my Franglais, but we do not eat Insta-Goormay Chicken Cor-Dung bloo-ew Frozen Enn-Trays. We eat food that tastes good, live lives that are good and going to get better, own books not TVs, make plans for the future not payments on a car. We’re broke, not poor. The difference is – broke is a temporary situation being dealt with. We’re struggling and hopeful and happy.”
It’s 1998, I’m finishing my thesis, she’s on her way from scut-pay paralegal to big bucks legal secretary, I have a brand new $400 black Academic Applicant suit, we’ve picked out East Coast areas we’re willing to move to. I do University Faculty Selection Committees and laugh with Eliza about how brain-dead they are, and don’t get the job. I try West Coast, Mid-West, even the South we both laughed at, and don’t get the job. Eliza says “Don’t you dare lower your sights!” But I can’t have a blank year on my resume, I need teaching creds. I try Illiterate State Normal Schools and laugh about them with Eliza.
“I walk in in my black suit. The men have white-collar rugby shirts with cute little three-button necks. The women wear bangles and earrings that dangle, and colorful shawls or else see-through puff-sleeve hand-embroidered Mexican peasant blouses.” A laugh from Eliza. “Blouses Kingsley Amis made fun of in Lucky Jim when he was a Commie and knew how to write. But they don’t read Amis, they teach. They teach in Central Ohio Junior College, and once read Bloom on Blake and Frye on genre and the Academic Dean gave them a job-slot and said, ‘It’s time we had someone in gender.’ I look at the sagging old sixtyish boobs that droop bigger and heavier on men than women and agree with the dean. They have nobody in gender.”
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