The Fun Parts

EXPRESSIVE

Folks say I have one of those faces. Not just folks, either. People say it. You have one of those faces, they say, a person can tell what you are feeling. Mostly what I’m feeling is that I’ve just farted, but I nod anyway, twitch up my eyes, my mouth, all earnest and merciful. It’s called Joy Is Here (So Don’t Be Such a Prune-Hearted Prick), or at least that’s what I call it. If you know how to work your face, you can make people think you feel anything you want, and with that power you can feel up anything you want.

Example: this chick, Roanoke, I meet at the Rover. She’s kind of dykey, the way I like them, has her own darts for the dartboard.

I buy her a beer.

“You’re kind of dykey,” I say.

“Thanks,” she says, in the tone of her generation.

Roanoke rolls the dart in her hand. I glance off, swivel back with Harmless Fool / No Strings Attached / Penis as Pure Novelty, which sounds easy but requires most of the human face’s approximately seventy-three thousand muscles.

Next thing we’re back in her efficiency and Roanoke’s moaning with her hand on her mouth. She’s worried we won’t hear the door if the girlfriend comes home. We do hear the door, but that’s not the problem. The problem is efficiency. The apartment is laid out perfectly for dykes to discover they’ve betrayed each other and their way of life. A curtain around the bed might help.

I give Roanoke one more look before I leave her to the business of ducking creamers, ramekins. I call it Remember, the World Is Not Broken, Even If Your Crockery Is.

* * *

Folks, people, like to ask what you would do in a moment of great moral confusion. Would you save that burning portrait of Hitler painted by Rembrandt? Who cares? The serious question is what are you doing right now. Do you have time for another drink?

My friend, or, rather, anti-friend, Ajay disagrees.

“You’re an idiot,” says Ajay.

“Go back to fucking Mumbai,” I tell him. “Or whatever the fuck it’s called now.”

“Mumbai,” says Ajay. “And I was born here.”

“In the Rover?”

It’s not a bad place to be born. Every third beer is a buyback.

I don’t bother pulling a face. They never work on Ajay, not even I Know My Racism Amuses You, but It’s Still Racism, so I Win, and anyway it gets tiresome manipulating my universe. It’s nice to give those millions of tiny face muscles a break. Ajay goes up to the bar, and I keep my eyes peeled for dart dykes. When he comes back, I tell him all about Roanoke.

“You really are a fucking idiot. Go home to your wife.”

* * *

I go home to my wife. She’s sitting up at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee, like she saw it in a movie about a wife sitting up for her shitty husband. She clicks her wedding ring against the side of the mug, which is my mug, a mug she gave me that reads WORLD’S SHITTIEST HUSBAND.

I tell her everything, but I can hardly hear my words because I’m focused on the nearly Dutch wonder forming on my face—Most Radiant Penitence. It’s a fairly simple purse-and-squint combo, but unless performed by an old master like myself, it risks smirk.

“Motherfucker,” my wife says, in the tone of an earlier generation. “Do you love her?”

“Not her,” I say. “Maybe the one who caught us.”

“I want to save our marriage,” says my wife. “Do you want to save our marriage?”

“Yes,” I say. “Just not right now.”

“Get out.”

* * *

I’ve got my prepacked get-out bag and I’m standing in the nursery doorway watching my sleeping son sleep. His face is smooth and milky in the moonlight, and there’s really no name for it, his face, not yet, except maybe I’m Sleeping. Some people might consider this expression beautiful, but it scares the crap out of me. You need more than I’m Sleeping to navigate all the evil in this world. Me gone, who’s going to teach my boy The Strange Thing Is It’s Nobody’s Fault, or Believe I Jammed the Printer All You Want, We’ve Still Got to Order Toner? Folks? People? My wife? I drop my get-out bag on the nursery floor, curl up next to the crib. There’s the moon through the window, that Moon Man with his masterful Moon Man look: We Are All Schmucks, but I Control the Tides. If he had a coffee mug, it would read “World’s Shittiest Moon.” But he doesn’t have a coffee mug. I get that now.