Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

PART ONE. THE EVER-CHANGING STATUS OF THE YEN

For the first three years, the young wife worried that their lovemaking together was somehow hard on his thingie. The rawness and tenderness and spanked pink of the head of his thingie. The slight wince when he’d first enter her down there. The vague hot-penny taste of rawness when she took his thingie in her mouth — she seldom took him in her mouth, however; there was something about it that she felt he did not quite like.

For the first three to three-and-a-half years of their marriage together, this wife, being young (and full of herself (she realized only later)), believed it was something about her. The problem. She worried that there was something wrong with her. With her technique in making love. Or maybe that some unusual roughness or thickness or hitch down there was hard on his thingie, and hurt it. She was aware that she liked to press her pubic bone and the base of her button against him and grind when they made love together, sometimes. She ground against him as gently as she could force herself to remember to, but she was aware that she often did it as she was moving towards having her sexual climax and sometimes forgot herself, and afterwards she was often worried that she had selfishly forgotten about his thingie and might have been too hard on it.

They were a young couple and had no children, though sometimes they talked about having children, and about all the irrevocable changes and responsibilities that this would commit them to.

The wife’s method of contraception was a diaphragm until she began to worry that something about the design of its rim or the way she inserted or wore it might be wrong and hurt him, might add to whatever it was about their lovemaking together that seemed hard on him. She searched his face when he entered her; she remembered to keep her eyes open and watched for the slight wince that may or may not (she realized only later, when she had some mature perspective) have actually been pleasure, may have been the same kind of revelational pleasure of coming together as close as two married bodies could come and feeling the warmth and closeness that made it so hard to keep her eyes open and senses alert to whatever she might be doing wrong.

In those early years, the wife felt that she was totally happy with the reality of their sexlife together. The husband was a great lover, and his attentiveness and sweetness and skill drove her almost mad with pleasure, the wife felt. The only negative part was her irrational worry that something was wrong with her or that she was doing something wrong that kept him from enjoying their sexlife together as much as she did. She worried that the husband was too considerate and unselfish to risk hurting her feelings by talking about whatever was wrong. He had never complained about being sore or raw, or of slightly wincing when he first entered her, or said anything other than that he loved her and totally loved her down there more than he could even say. He said that she was indescribably soft and warm and sweet down there and that entering her was indescribably great. He said she drove him half insane with passion and love when she ground against him as she was getting ready to have her sexual climax. He said nothing but generous and reassuring things about their sexlife together. He always whispered compliments to her after they had made love, and held her, and considerately regathered the bedcovers around her legs as the wife’s sexual heartrate slowed and she began to feel chilly. She loved to feel her legs still tremble slightly under the cocoon of bedcovers he gently regathered around her. They also developed the intimacy of him always getting her Virginia Slims and lighting one for her after they had made love together.

The young wife felt that the husband was a simply wonderful lovemaking partner, considerate and attentive and unselfish and virile and sweet, far better than she probably deserved; and as he slept, or if he arose in the middle of the night to check on foreign markets and turned on the light in the master bathroom adjoining their bedroom and inadvertently woke her (she slept lightly in those early years, she realized later), the wife’s worries as she lay awake in their bed were all about herself. Sometimes she touched herself down there while she lay awake, but it wasn’t in a pleasurable way. The husband slept on his right side, facing away. He had a hard time sleeping due to career stress, and could only fall asleep in one position. Sometimes she watched him sleep. Their master bedroom had a nightlight down near the baseboard. When he arose in the night she believed it was to check the status of the yen. Insomnia could cause him to drive all the way downtown to the firm in the middle of the night. There were the rupiah and the won and the baht to be monitored and checked, also. He was also in charge of the weekly chore of grocery shopping, which he habitually also performed late at night. Amazingly (she realized only later, after she had had an epiphany and rapidly matured), it had never occurred to her to check on anything.

She loved it when he gave oral sex but worried that he didn’t like it as much when she reciprocated and took him in her mouth. He almost always stopped her after a short time, saying that it made him want to be inside her down there instead of in her mouth. She felt that there must be something wrong with her oral sex technique that made him not like it as much as she did, or hurt him. He had gone all the way to his sexual climax in her mouth only twice in their marriage together, and both the times had taken practically forever. Both the times took so long that her neck was stiff the next day, and she worried that he hadn’t liked it even though he had said he couldn’t even describe in words how much he liked it. She once gathered her nerve together and drove out to Adult World and bought a Dildo, but only to practice her oral sex technique on. She was inexperienced in this, she knew. The slight tension or distraction she thought she felt in him when she moved down the bed and took the husband’s thingie in her mouth could have been nothing but her own selfish imagination; the whole problem could be just in her head, she worried. She had been tense and uncomfortable at Adult World. Except for the cashier, she had been the only female in the store, and the cashier had given her a look that she didn’t think was very appropriate or professionally courteous at all, and the young wife had taken the dark plastic bag with the Dildo to her car and driven out of the crowded parking lot so fast that later she was afraid her tires might have squealed.

The husband never slept in the nude — he wore clean briefs and a T-shirt.

She sometimes had bad dreams in which they were driving someplace together and every single other vehicle on the road was an ambulance.

The husband never said anything about oral sex together except that he loved her and that she drove him mad with passion when she took him in her mouth. But when she took him in her mouth and flattened her tongue to suppress the well-known Gag Reflex and moved her head up and down as far as her ability allowed, making a ring of her thumb and first finger to stimulate the part of his shaft she could not fit in her mouth, giving him oral sex, the wife always sensed a tension in him; she always thought she could detect a slight rigidity in the muscles of his abdomen and legs and worried that he was tense or distracted. His thingie often tasted raw and/or sore, and she was concerned that her teeth or saliva might be stinging him and subtracting from his pleasure. She worried about her technique at it, and practiced in secret. Sometimes, during oral sex in their lovemaking together, she thought it felt as if he was trying to have his sexual climax quickly so as to have the oral sex be over A.S.A.P. and that that was why he couldn’t for so long, usually. She tried making pleased, excited sounds with her mouth full of his thingie; then, lying awake later, she sometimes worried that the sounds she had made had perhaps sounded strangled or distressing and had only added to his tension.

This immature, inexperienced, emotionally labile young wife lay alone in their bed very late on the night of their third wedding anniversary. The husband, whose career was high-stress and caused insomnia and frequent awakenings, had arisen and gone into the master bathroom and then downstairs to his study, then later she had heard the sound of his car. The Dildo, which she kept hidden at the bottom of her sachet drawer, was so inhuman and impersonal and tasted so horrid that she had to all but force herself to practice with it. Sometimes he drove to his office in the middle of the night to check the overseas markets in more depth — trade never ceased somewhere in the world’s many currencies. More and more often she lay awake in bed and worried. She had become woozy at their special anniversary dinner and had nearly spoiled their evening together. Sometimes, when she had him in her mouth, she became almost overwhelmed with fear that the husband wasn’t enjoying it, and would have an over-whelming desire to bring him to his sexual climax A.S.A.P. in order to have some kind of selfish ‘proof’ that he enjoyed being in her mouth, and would sometimes forget herself and the techniques she had practiced and begin bobbing her head almost frantically and moving her fist frantically up and down his thingie, sometimes actually sucking at his thingie’s little hole, exerting actual suction, and she worried that she chafed or bent or hurt him when she did this. She worried that the husband could unconsciously sense her anxiety about whether he enjoyed having his thingie in her mouth and that it actually was this that prevented him from enjoying oral sex together as much as she enjoyed it. Sometimes she berated herself for her insecurities — the husband was under enough stress already, due to his career. She felt that her fear was selfish, and worried that the husband could sense her fear and selfishness and that this drove a wedge into their intimacy together. There was also the riyal to be checked at night, the dirham, the Burmese kyat. Australia used the dollar but it was a different dollar and had to be monitored. Taiwan, Singapore, Zimbabwe, Liberia, New Zealand: all deployed dollars of fluctuant value. The determinants of the ever-changing status of the yen were very complex. The husband’s promotion had resulted in the new career title Stochastic Currency Analyst; his business cards and stationery all included the title. There were complex equations. The husband’s mastery of the computer’s financial programs and currency software were already legendary at the firm, a colleague had told her during a party while the husband was using the bathroom again.

She worried that whatever the problem with her was, it felt impossible to sort out rationally in her mind to any true degree. There was no way to talk about it with him — there was no way the wife could think of to even start such a conversation. She would sometimes clear her throat in the special way that meant she had something on her mind, but then her mind froze. If she asked him whether there was anything wrong with her, he would believe she was asking for reassurance and instantly would reassure her — she knew him. His professional specialty was the yen, but other currencies impacted the yen and had to be continually analyzed. Hong Kong’s dollar was also different and impacted the status of the yen. Sometimes at night she worried she might be crazy. She had ruined a previous intimate relationship with irrational feelings and fears, she knew. Almost in spite of herself, she later returned to the same Adult World store and bought an X-rated videotape, storing it in its retail box in the same hiding place as the Dildo, determined to study and compare the sex techniques of the women in the video. Sometimes, when he was asleep on his side at night, the wife would arise and walk around to the other side of the bed and kneel on the floor and watch the husband in the dim glow of their nightlight, study his sleeping face, as if hoping to discover there some unspoken thing that would help her stop worrying and feel more sure that their sexlife together pleased him as much as it pleased her. The X-rated videotape had explicit color photos of women giving their partners oral sex right there on the box. Stochastic meant random or conjectural or containing numerous variables that all had to be monitored closely; the husband joked sometimes that it really meant getting paid to drive yourself crazy.

Adult World, which had one side of marital aids and three sides of X-rated features, as well as a small dark hall leading to something else in the rear and a monitor playing an explicit X-rated scene right there above the cash register, smelled horrid in a way that reminded the wife of absolutely nothing else in her life experience. She later wrapped the Dildo in several plastic bags and put it out in the trash on the night before Trash Day. The only significant thing she felt she learned from studying the videotape was that the men often seemed to like to look down at the women when the women had them in their mouth and see their thingie going in and out of the woman’s mouth. She believed that this might very well explain the husband’s abdominal muscles tensing when she took him in her mouth — it could be him straining to raise up slightly to see it — and she began to debate with herself whether her hair might be too long to allow him to see his thingie go in and out of her mouth during oral sex, and began to debate whether or not to get her hair cut short. She was relieved that she had no worries about being less attractive or sexual than the actresses in the X-rated videotape: these women had gross measurements and obvious implants (as well as their own share of slight asymmetries, she noted), as well as dyed, bleached, and badly damaged hair that didn’t look touchable or strokable at all. Most notably, the women’s eyes were empty and hard — you could just tell they weren’t experiencing any intimacy or pleasure and didn’t care if their partners were pleased.

Sometimes the husband would arise at night and use the master bathroom and then go out to his workshop off the garage and try to unwind for an hour or two with his hobby of furniture refinishing.

Adult World was all the way out on the other side of town, in a tacky district of fast food and auto dealerships off the expressway; neither time she had hurried out of the parking lot did the young wife see any cars she ever recognized. The husband had explained before their wedding that he had slept in clean briefs and a T-shirt ever since he was a child — he was simply not comfortable sleeping in the nude. She had recurring bad dreams, and he would hold her and speak reassuringly until she was able to get back to sleep. The stakes of the Foreign Currency Game were high, and his study downstairs remained locked when not in use. She began to consider psychotherapy.

Insomnia actually referred not to difficulty falling asleep but to early and irrevocable awakening, he had explained.

Not once in the first three-and-a-half years of their marriage together did she ask the husband why his thingie was hurt or sore, or what she might do differently, or what the cause was. It simply felt impossible to do this. (The memory of this paralyzed feeling would astound her later in life, when she was a very different person.) Asleep, her husband sometimes looked to her like a child on its side sleeping, curled all tightly into itself, a fist to its face, the face flushed and its expression so concentrated it looked almost angry. She would kneel next to the bed at a slight angle to the husband so that the weak light of the baseboard’s nightlight fell onto his face and watch his face and worry about why, irrationally, it felt impossible to simply ask him. She had no idea why he put up with her or what he saw in her. She loved him very much.

On the evening of their third wedding anniversary, the young wife had fainted in the special restaurant he had taken her to to celebrate. One minute she was trying to swallow her sorbet and looking at the husband over the candle and the next she was looking up at him as he knelt above her asking what was wrong, his face smooshy and distorted like the reflection of a face in a spoon. She was frightened and embarrassed. The bad dreams at night were brief and upsetting and seemed always to concern either the husband or his car in ways she could not pin down. Never once had she checked a Discover statement. It had never even occurred to her to inquire why the husband insisted on doing all the grocery shopping alone at night; she had only felt shame at the way his generosity highlighted her own irrational selfishness. When, later (long after the galvanic dream, the call, the discreet meeting, the question, the tears, and her epiphany at the window), she reflected on the towering self-absorption of her naiveté in those years, the wife always felt a mixture of contempt and compassion for the utter child she had been. She had never been what one would call a stupid person. Both times at Adult World, she had paid with cash. The credit cards were in the husband’s name.

The way she finally concluded that something was wrong with her was: either something was really wrong with her, or something was wrong with her for irrationally worrying about whether something was wrong with her. The logic of this seemed airtight. She lay at night and held the conclusion in her mind and turned it this way and that and watched it make reflections of itself inside itself like a fine diamond.

The young wife had had only one other lover before meeting her husband. She was inexperienced and knew it. She suspected that her brief strange bad dreams might be her inexperienced Ego trying to shift the anxiety onto the husband, to protect itself from the knowledge that something was wrong with her and made her sexually hurtful or unpleasing. Things had ended badly with her first lover, she was well aware. The padlock on the door of his workshop off the garage was not unreasonable: power tools and refinished antiques were valuable assets. In one of the bad dreams, she and the husband lay together after lovemaking, snuggling contentedly, and the husband lit a Virginia Slims and then refused to give it to her, holding it away from her while it burned itself all the way down. In another, they again lay contentedly after making love together, and he asked her if it had been as good for him as it had for her. The door to his study was the only other door that stayed locked — the study contained a lot of sophisticated computer and telecommunications equipment, giving the husband up-to-the-minute information on foreign currency market activity.

In another of the bad dreams, the husband sneezed and then kept sneezing, over and over and over again, and nothing she did could help or make it stop. In another, she herself was the husband and was entering the wife sexually, ranging above the wife in the Missionary Position, thrusting, and he (that is, the wife, dreaming) felt the wife grind her pubis uncontrollably against him and start to have her sexual climax, and so then he began thrusting faster in a calculated way and making pleased male sounds in a calculating way and then feigned having his own sexual climax, calculatingly making the sounds and facial expressions of having his climax but withholding it, the climax, then afterwards going into the master bathroom and making horrid faces at himself while he climaxed into the toilet. The status of some currencies could fluctuate violently over the course of a single night, the husband had explained. Whenever she woke from a bad dream, he always woke up too, and held her and asked what was the matter, and lit a cigarette for her or stroked her side very attentively and reassured her that everything was all right. Then he would arise from bed, since he was now awake, and go downstairs to check the status of the yen. The wife liked to sleep in the nude after lovemaking together, but the husband almost always put his clean briefs back on before using the bathroom or turning away onto his side to sleep. The wife would lie awake and try not to spoil something so wonderful by driving herself crazy with worry. She worried that her tongue was rough and pulpy from smoking and might abrade his thingie, or that unbeknownst to her her teeth were scraping his thingie when she took the husband in her mouth for oral sex. She worried that her new haircut was too short and made her face look chubby. She worried about her breasts. She worried about the way her husband’s face sometimes seemed to look when they made love together.

Another bad dream, which recurred more than once, involved the downtown street the husband’s firm was on, a view of the empty street late at night, in a light rain, and the husband’s car with its special license plate she’d surprised him with at Christmas driving very slowly up the street towards the firm and then passing the firm without stopping and proceeding off down the wet street to some other destination. The wife worried about the fact that this dream upset her so much — there was nothing in the scene of the dream to explain the crawly feeling it gave her — and about the way she could not seem to bring herself to talk openly to him about any of the dreams. She feared that she would feel somehow as if she were accusing him. She could not explain this feeling, and it gnawed at her. Nor could she think of any way to ask the husband about exploring the idea of psychotherapy — she knew he would agree at once, but he would be concerned, and the wife dreaded the feeling of being unable to explain in any rational way to ease his concern. She felt alone and trapped in her worry; she was lonely in it.

During their lovemaking together, the husband’s face sometimes wore what sometimes seemed to her less an expression of pleasure than of intense concentration, as if he were about to sneeze and trying not to.

Early in the fourth year of their marriage, the wife felt herself becoming obsessed with the irrational suspicion that her husband was sexually climaxing into the master bathroom’s toilet. She examined the toilet’s rim and the bathroom trash basket closely almost every day, pretending to clean, feeling increasingly out of control. The old trouble with swallowing sometimes returned. She felt herself becoming obsessed with the suspicion that her husband maybe took no genuine pleasure in their lovemaking together but was concentrated only on making her feel pleasure, forcing her to feel pleasure and passion; lying awake at night, she feared that he took some kind of twisted pleasure in imposing pleasure on her. And yet, just experienced enough to be full of doubts (and of herself) at this innocent time, the young wife also believed that these irrational suspicions and obsessions could be merely her own youthful, self-centered Ego displacing its inadequacies and fears of true intimacy onto the innocent husband; and she was desperate not to spoil their relationship with insane displaced suspicions, like the way she had failed and wrecked the relationship with her previous lover because of irrational worries.

And so the wife fought with all her strength against her callow, inexperienced mind (she then believed), convinced that any real problem lay in her own selfish imagination and/or her inadequate sexual persona. She fought against the worry she felt about the way, nearly always, when she had moved down his body in the bed and taken him in her mouth, the husband would nearly always (it seemed then), after waiting with tense and rigid abdominal muscles for what felt somehow like the exact minimum considerate amount of time with his thingie in her mouth, would always reach gently down and pull her gently but firmly back up his body to kiss her passionately and enter her from below, gazing into her eyes with a very concentrated expression as she sat astride him, she sitting always slightly hunched out of embarrassment at the slight asymmetry of her breasts. The way he would exhale sharply in either passion or displeasure and reach down and pull the wife up and slide his thingie inside her in one smooth motion, the gasp sharp as if involuntary, as if trying to convince her that merely having his thingie in her mouth drove him mad with desire to be all the way up inside her down there, he said, and to have her, he said, ‘right up close’ against him instead of ‘so far away’ down his body. This nearly always made her feel somehow uneasy as she sat astride him, hunched and bobbing and with his hands on her hips and sometimes forgetting herself and grinding down with her pubic bone against his pubis, fearful that the grinding plus her weight on him could cause injury but often forgetting herself and involuntarily bearing down at a slight angle and grinding against him with less and less caution, sometimes even arching her back and thrusting out her breasts to be touched, until the moment he nearly always — nine times out of ten, on average — gave another gasp of either passion or impatience and rotated slightly onto his side with his hands on her hips, rolling her gently but firmly over with him until she was all the way beneath him and he ranged over her and either still had his thingie deep in her or else reentered her smoothly from above; he was very smooth and graceful in the movements and never hurt her when changing positions and rarely had to reenter, but it always caused the wife some worry, afterwards, that he almost never came to his sexual climax (if indeed he ever really did come to his climax) from beneath her, that as he felt his climax building inside himself he seemed to feel an obsessive need to rotate and be inside her from above, from the familiar Missionary Position of male dominance, which although it made his thingie feel even more deeply inside her down there, which the wife enjoyed very much, she worried that the husband’s need to have her beneath him at the sexual climax indicated that something she did when sitting astride him and moving either hurt him or denied him the sort of intense pleasure that would lead to his sexual climax; and so the wife to her distress sometimes found herself preoccupied with worry even as they finished and she began to have another small after-shock of climax while grinding gently against him from below and searching his face for evidence of a truly genuine climax there and sometimes crying out in pleasure beneath him in a voice that sounded, she sometimes thought, less and less like her own.

The sexual relationship the wife had had prior to meeting her husband had occurred when she was a very young woman — hardly more than a child, she realized later. It had been a committed, monogamous relationship with a young man whom she had felt very close to and who was a wonderful lover, passionate and giving and very skilled (she had felt) in sexual technique, who was very vocal and affectionate during lovemaking, and attentive, and had loved to be in her mouth for oral sex, and had never seemed hurt or sore or distracted when she forgot herself and ground against him, and always closed both his eyes in passionate pleasure when he began to move uncontrollably into his sexual climax, and whom she had (at that young age) felt that she loved and loved being with and could easily imagine marrying and being in a committed relationship with forever — all until she had begun, late in the first year of their relationship together, to suffer from irrational suspicions that the lover was imagining making love with other women during their lovemaking together. The fact that the lover closed both his eyes when he experienced intense pleasure with her, which at first had made her feel sexually secure and pleased, began to worry her a great deal, and the suspicion that he was imagining being inside of other women when he was inside of her became more and more of a dreadful conviction, even though she also felt that it was groundless and irrational and only in her mind and would have hurt the lover’s feelings just terribly if she had said anything to him about it, until finally it became an obsession, even though there was no tangible evidence for it and she had never said anything about it; and even though she believed the whole thing was almost surely just in her mind, the obsession became so terrible and overwhelming that she began to avoid making love with him, and began having sudden irrational bursts of emotion over trivial issues in their relationship, bursts of hysterical anger or tears that were in fact bursts of irrational worry that he was having fantasies about sexual encounters with other women. She had felt, towards the end of the relationship, as if she were totally inadequate and self-destructive and crazed, and she came away from the relationship with a terrible fear of her own mind’s ability to torment her with irrational suspicions and to poison a committed relationship, and this added to the torment she felt about the obsessive worrying that she was now experiencing in her sexual relationship with her husband, a relationship that had also, at first, seemed to be more close and intimate and fulfilling than she could rationally believe she deserved, knowing about herself all (she believed) she did.

PART TWO. YEN4U

She once, as an adolescent, in an Interstate rest-stop women’s room, on a wall, above and to the right of vending machines for tampons and feminine hygiene products, had seen, surrounded by the coarse declamations and crudely drawn genitalia and the simple and somehow plangent obscenities inscribed there in varied anonymous hands, standing out in both color and force, a single small red felt-tip block-capital rhyme, tiny and precise and seeming somehow — via something about the tiny hand’s precision against all that surrounding scrawl — less coarse or bitter than how simply sad, and had remembered it ever since, and sometimes thought of it, for no apparent reason, in the darkness of her marriage’s immature years, although, to the best of her later recollection, the only real significance she had attached to the memory was that it was funny what stuck with you.

IN DAYS OF OLD

WHEN MEN WERE BOLD

AND WOMEN WEREN’T INVENTED

THEY ALL DRILLED HOLES

IN ROADSIDE POLES

AND STOOD THERE QUITE

CONTENTED[,]

PART THREE. ADULT WORLD

Meanwhile, back in the present, the immature wife fell deeper and deeper inside herself and inside her worry and became more and more unhappy.

What changed everything and saved everything was that she had an epiphany. She had the epiphany three years and seven months into the marriage.

In secular psychodevelopmental terms, an epiphany is a sudden, life-changing realization, often one that catalyzes a person’s emotional maturation. The person, in one blinding flash, ‘grows up,’ ‘comes of age.’ ‘Put[s] away childish things.’ Releases illusions gone moist and rank from a grip of years’ duration. Becomes, for good or ill, a citizen of reality.

In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life, maturation and acquiescence to reality are gradual processes, incremental and often imperceptible, not unlike the formation of renal calculus. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the ‘magical thinking’ of children that achievement of insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash.

What precipitated the young wife’s sudden blinding epiphany was her abandonment of mentation in favor of concrete and frantic action. ^* She abruptly (within just hours of deciding) and frantically telephoned the ex-lover whom she’d formerly been in a committed relationship with, now by all accounts a successful associate manager at a local auto dealership, and implored him to agree to meet and talk with her. Placing this call was one of the most difficult, embarrassing things the wife (whose name was Jeni) had ever done. It appeared irrational and risked seeming totally inappropriate and disloyal: she was married, this was her former lover, they had not exchanged a word in almost five years, their relationship had ended badly. But she was in crisis — she feared, as she put it to the ex-lover over the telephone, for the very soundness of her mind, and needed his help, and would, if necessary, beg for it. The former lover agreed to meet the wife for lunch at a fast food restaurant near the auto dealership the following day.

The crisis that had galvanized the wife, Jeni Roberts, into action was itself precipitated by nothing more than another of her bad dreams, albeit one that comprised a kind of compendium of many of the other bad dreams she’d suffered during the early years of her marriage. The dream was not itself the epiphany, but its effect was galvanic. The husband’s car slowly passes his downtown firm and proceeds off down the street in a light rain, its YEN4U license plate receding, followed by Jeni Roberts’ car. Then Jeni Roberts is driving on the heavy-flow expressway that circumscribes the city, trying desperately to catch up with the husband’s car. Her wipers’ beat matches that of her heart. She cannot see the car with its special personalized license plate anywhere up ahead but feels the particular special sort of anxious dream-certainty that it is there. In the dream, every other vehicle on the expressway is symbolically associated with emergency and crisis — all six lanes are filled with ambulances, police cars, paddywagons, fire engines, Highway Patrol cruisers, and emergency vehicles of every conceivable description, sirens all singing their heart-stopping arias and all their emergency lights activated and flashing in the rain so that Jeni Roberts feels as though her car is swimming in color. An ambulance directly in front of her will not let her by; it changes lanes whenever she does. The nameless anxiety of the dream is indescribably horrid — the wife, Jeni, feels she simply must (wiper) must (wiper) must catch the husband’s car in order to avert some kind of crisis so horrible it has no name. A river of what looks to be sodden Kleenex flows wind-blown along the expressway’s breakdown lane; Jeni’s mouth feels full of raw hot sores; it is night and wet and the whole road swims with emergency colors — spanked pinks and slapped reds and the blue of critical asphyxia. It is when they are wet that you realize why they call Kleenex tissue, flowing by. The wipers match her urgent heart and the ambulance still, in the dream, will not let her pass; she slaps frantically at the steering wheel in desperation. And now in the window at the rear of the ambulance, as if in answer, appears a lone splayed hand at the glass, pressing and slapping at the glass, a hand reaching up from some sort of emergency stretcher or gurney and opening spiderishly out to stroke and slap and press whitely against the rear window’s glass in full view of Jeni Roberts’ Accord’s retractable halogen headlights so that she sees the highly distinctive ring on the ring finger of the male hand splayed frantically against the emergency glass and screams (in the dream) in recognition and cuts hard left without signaling, cutting off various other emergency vehicles, to pull abreast of the ambulance and tell it to please stop because the stochastic husband she loves and must somehow catch up to is inside on a stretcher ceaselessly sneezing and slapping frantically at the window for someone he loves to catch up and help; but then (such is the dream’s motive force that the wife actually wets the bed, she discovers on waking) and but then as she pulls abreast on the left of the ambulance and lowers her passenger window with the Accord’s automatic feature in the rain and gesticulates for the ambulance driver to lower his own window so she can implore him to stop it’s (in the dream) the husband driving the ambulance, it’s his left profile at the wheel — which the wife has always somehow been able to tell he prefers to his right profile and customarily sleeps on his right side partly with this fact in mind, though they’d never spoken openly about the husband’s possible insecurities about his right profile — and but then as the husband turns his face toward Jeni Roberts through the driver’s window and lit-up rain as she gesticulates it seems to be both him and not him, her husband’s familiar and much-loved face distorted and pulsed with red light and wearing a facial expression indescribable as anything other than: Obscene.

It was this look on the face that (slowly) turned left to look at her from the ambulance — a face that in the very most enuretic and disturbing way both was and was not the face of the husband she loved — that galvanized Jeni Roberts awake and prompted her to gather every bit of her nerve together and make the frantic humiliating call to the man she had once thought seriously of marrying, an associate sales manager and probationary Rotarian whose own facial asymmetry — he had suffered a serious childhood accident that subsequently caused the left half of his face to develop differently from the right side of his face; his left nostril was unusually large, and gaped, and his left eye, which appeared to be almost all iris, was surrounded by concentric rings and bags of slack flesh that constantly twitched and throbbed as irreversibly damaged nerves randomly fired — was what, Jeni had decided after their relationship foundered, had helped fuel her uncontrollable suspicion that he had a secret, impenetrable part to his character that fantasized about lovemaking with other women even while his healthy, perfectly symmetrical, and seemingly uninjurable thingie was inside her. The ex-lover’s left eye also faced and scanned a markedly different direction than did his dextral, more normally developed eye, a feature that was somehow advantageous in his auto sales career, he tried to explain.

Galvanic crisis notwithstanding, Jeni Roberts felt awkward and very nearly mortified with embarrassment as she and the ex-lover met and selected their meal options and sat down together in a windowside booth of molded plastic and made radically incongruous small talk while she prepared to try to ask the question that would accidentally precipitate her epiphany and a whole new less innocent and self-deluded stage of her married life. She had decaf in a disposable cup and put in six prepackaged creamers as her former sexual partner sat with his entree’s styrofoam box unopened and gazed both through the window and at her. He had a ring on his pinkiefinger and his sportcoat was unbuttoned, and the white shirt beneath the coat bore the distinctive furrows of an oxfordcloth dress shirt that had only recently been removed from its retail packaging. The sunlight through the big window was noon-colored and made the crowded franchise feel like a greenhouse; it was hard to breathe. The associate sales manager watched as she started the tops of the creamers with her teeth to safeguard her nails and removed them and placed them in the foil ashtray and dumped the thimblefuls of creamer into the disposable cup and stirred them in with a complimentary square-tipped stirrer one after another, the look in his developmentally appropriate eye the puddly look of nostalgia. She was still profligate with the creamer. She had both a wedding band and a diamond engagement ring, and the rock wasn’t cheap by a long shot. The former lover’s stomach hurt and eye-flesh ticced especially bad now because of how now they were in the dreaded last three bank days of the month and Mad Mike’s Hyundai put unbelievable pressure on reps to move units in the last three days so they could go on that month’s books and inflate the books for the clowns in the regional office. The young wife cleared her throat several times in her special way that the man solely responsible for the performance of all Mad Mike’s reps remembered all too well, doing the dry nervous thing with her throat to communicate the fact that she recognized how inappropriate a question like this was going to appear now at this juncture, with them with their unhappy history and now no longer in any way even like marginally connected, and her happily married, and that she felt embarrassed but was also in some kind of she was saying genuine inner-crisis-type situation about something, and desperate — the way usually only serious credit problems made people look desperate and trapped like this — with her eyes with that drowning look in them of she was begging him not to take advantage of her desperate position in any way including judgment or ridicule at her expense. Plus and how she always drank her coffee with two hands around the cup even in a hot environs like this one here. Hyundai-U.S.’s volume, margins, and financing terms were among the countless economic conditions affected by fluctuations in the value of the yen and related Pacific currencies. The young wife had spent an hour at the mirror in order to choose the shapeless blouse and slacks she wore, actually taking her soft contacts back out in order to wear her glasses as well, and nothing on her face in the windowlight but a quick dab-and-blot of gloss. The expressway’s heavy flow glittered through the window that lit up her right side with sun; and through the glass the Mad Mike’s lot, with its plastic pennants and a man in a wheelchair with his wife or like nurse getting worked by fat Kidder in the hospital gown and arrow-through-head-prosthesis the reps all had to wear on the days Messerly was there to keep tabs, lay also within the divided purview of the booth’s former lover — who still loved her, Jeni Ann Orzolek of Marketing 204, and not his current fiancée, he realized with the sickening wince of a mortal wound reopened — and just beyond it, shimmering in the heat, the Adult World lot, with its all makes and classes of vehicle day and night, moving them through like Mad Mike Messerly could only fantasize.