My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

Don’t Bring Me Flowers

Some years ago, a well-known perfume company invented a concept called “the Aviance night.” In the ads, a housewife was shown primping for a night on the town, sashaying around the bedroom and flipping her hair from one side to the other as she puts on her earrings. As she douses herself with Aviance perfume, an unseen chorus conjectures excitedly that “she’s gonna have an Aviance night!”

I never had an Aviance night. I don’t, as a general rule, sashay. But I cannot completely silence that part of me that longs, every now and again, to be heading off confidently and aromatically into a night of candlelit romance. My longing tends to coalesce and rise to the surface, like chicken fat, every February.

A word about Valentine’s Day. This was originally a holiday for a god who protected shepherds’ flocks from the wolves outside Rome. I don’t know how we got from livestock surveillance to romantic love, but if I had to tender a guess I’d say it had something to do with the Hallmark company. We really have to watch these guys, because soon we’re going to find ourselves sending cards for Plumbers and Steamfitters Day (“You bring a special kind of caring to our water-serviced area…”).

It’s not that my husband and I don’t go out. Every Valentine’s Day, Ed will dutifully reserve a table at a romantic restaurant. I look forward to it until about five o’clock on the actual date. Somehow the mood never seems to fit. I put on perfume and wait for the unseen chorus to kick in, but hear instead the dulcet tones of my sweatpants calling out to me. Suddenly I don’t feel like going to an unfamiliar, overpriced restaurant. I want to go somewhere comfortable and known, a place where the wine doesn’t cost more than my shoes and the waiter won’t look down upon me for making “daikon” rhyme with “bacon.”

But this is Valentine’s Day, and we must persevere. For tomorrow, the Aviance Day After, friends and coworkers will grill us as to the activities of the night before. “The living room” is not an acceptable answer to “Where did Ed take you for Valentine’s?”

This year is no different. Poor Ed. He’s trying very hard. As we dress to leave, he takes my hands in his and leans in close. He cocks his head to one side, as if seeing me anew, in the fresh dawn of reawakened love. “Are you wearing an odor?”

Ed is romantic, but not in the traditional manner. I once suggested that we bring the dining room candles into the bedroom. Ed brought them in and set them down on the floor near the door, at the farthest point from the bedspread and other combustibles, completely out of our view. “They still provide some nice ambient illumination,” he said. It was like getting into bed with Norm Abram.

I once asked him to pick up some massage oil, and he came home with an unscented variety. I didn’t know such a thing existed. Another time he tried to surprise me with a romantic bubble bath, not realizing that sometime during the day, something had gone wrong with the hot water heater, and the bath water was stone cold. No doubt we’d forgotten to send flowers on Plumbers and Steamfitters Day and the Local 486 had sabotaged our tank.

The Valentine’s Day dinner itself is always a bit of a trial. From the moment you’re seated, the gazing and hand-holding must begin. Everyone else is doing it, and so you must too. No matter what kind of day you’ve had or how long you’ve been married, the two of you must appear to be utterly, helplessly captivated by each other, unable to think about anything else. This does not work, for one simple, incontrovertible reason. A man at a restaurant table is thinking about food. He cannot help himself. He knows this isn’t allowed and will try very, very hard to appear to be thinking thoughts of love. The effort typically fails, and he achieves a look somewhere between hypnosis and acid reflux.

I say Valentine’s Day should have term limits. I say if you’re old enough to have trouble reading a menu by candlelight, you’re old enough that you shouldn’t have to bother. Kiss each other across a plate of spaghetti, while an unseen chorus admits that the Aviance night was always a little overrated.