by Jay Begler
Over time, Goodwin’s penchant for humor and Sheila’s lack of it began to erode their relationship and their marriage began to deteriorate, the result of comedic incompatibility. To his continuing disappointment, all those jokes, wisecracks or even puns, which he conjured up spontaneously or created with great care, no longer impacted Sheila in the intended way. She treated his humorous efforts as pure statements of fact and would often respond to them with a curious look as if he were crazy. With a tone implying that Goodwin was loony, she would say, “I don’t understand.” If she did sense he was joking, Sheila would admonish sternly, “Philip, for the thousandth time, please do not joke. I mean, what part of that request don’t you understand?”
“It’s as if I have a damn gag order in my own house,” Goodwin once complained to one of his friends. Then, thinking about his use of “gag order,” followed up with “no pun intended.”
To underscore her antipathy for his humorous attempts, Sheila began to wear a little lapel pin which said “Thank You For Not Joking” and placed pillows artfully embroidered with the same request at discrete places in their house. At one point she put up signs around the house that said: “This is a no joking zone,” but he made her take them down after they had a furious fight. Sheila soon found HH support groups and began attending HH sessions where people sat in small groups and told of their HH related troubles but, of course, never joked. Whenever Sheila brought home a fellow HH person she befriended Goodwin found that person insufferably dull. When the group met at their house, he could sense that they viewed him as a pariah.
While Sheila said she actually didn’t care about being HH, deep down and hidden from all to see and what Goodwin didn’t know was that it was one of the biggest disappointments of her life. Sheila longed to have a sense of humor and, more than that, of being very funny. Her greatest wish, however, one born from a mix of anger, jealousy, and resentment, was to become substantially funnier than Goodwin and, in a public and humiliating way, show him up in the humor department. When her wish actually came true, it played out on national television to one of the widest audiences in television history.
Because Goodwin was entertaining and very glib, he often held court for friends where banter would be the sport of the moment. Though not intending to achieve it, over time he became the star of the twosome, the one sought out by their friends. Although Goodwin never encouraged favoritism, Sheila blamed him for the obvious disparity of their respective positions in the club. Her resentment, never overtly expressed, festered and erupted occasionally through what Goodwin perceived was an irrational outburst.
Over time, their comedic incompatibility acted as a wedge that not only pushed them further apart from each other, but also acted as a stimulus for mutual antagonism. Sheila would frequently be furious if Goodwin joked too much at the club or at a dinner party and Goodwin would be resentful of her objections. In his favor, Goodwin took special care to never tell jokes at Sheila’s expense and would take to task in a severe manner anyone who attempted to do so. While everyone at the club was aware of Sheila’s condition, they politely ignored it, just as they ignored a member’s alcoholism, bi-polar disorder, or indictment. In all other respects, Sheila was normal and sought out by her friends for advice and companionship.
The final blow for Sheila came on Goodwin’s birthday, the day after the PPR site was launched. She had expected and hoped for a rating equal to or above Goodwin’s rating. But when she looked, Sheila found that she was not included in Pragat’s rating system. In a panic, Sheila attempted to call the company. A recorded message stated that all “advisors” were busy, but if she would hold on someone would be with her in the near future. “In the meantime,” the electronic voice suggested, “you may find answers to your questions in the frequently asked questions section of our site.”
After holding onto the receiver and having to endure periodic “all advisors are presently with customers, but your call is important to us, so please stay on the line,” she spoke to an advisor who claimed to be “John,” who she was certain was not a John, but a Patel and most likely located in Mumbai or New Delhi. John advised her that anyone who had a zero in any category, hers being humor, did not qualify for inclusion in Pragat’s survey. “This rule,” John said, “is immutable.” The rule was later changed so that Pragat could keep Goodwin in the Survey, since he was a big draw to the site, even though he ultimately had all zeros.
Sheila regarded her exclusion as a personal disaster. More than most, she fully understood the importance that the Pragat rating system would ultimately hold for society and was acutely aware of the social consequences of her exclusion. Men and women to whom she had always felt superior now possessed something she would never have, a PPR. An instant before the PPR survey went public these people had looked up to, admired and in a number of cases envied Sheila. Now, as if by some type of social fiat, she would be regarded by these people as inferior. For all intents and purposes, many of her peers would now view her as a nobody, a non-entity, the “Unrated of Grace Harbor.” While the term had not been coined yet, she would soon fall into a group called “No Lifes.”
Sheila was in tears. When Goodwin sought to comfort her just before leaving for his birthday luncheon and offered to forego his luncheon, she swiped away the sympathetic hand he had placed on her shoulder and said gruffly as if touched by a leper, “Don’t touch me!” Then, possibly to make Goodwin feel guilty and in tone underscoring that she didn’t really mean it, she said, “Have fun.”
“In many ways,” Maxine opined at the end of their first session, one populated by articulations of frustration on both sides, “you are similar. You come from similar middle class backgrounds, have solid middle class values, grew up in similar environments, and appear to have many similar interests and philosophies. You are both college graduates, hold post-graduate degrees, (Goodwin’s from Harvard’s Business School; Sheila’s from the London School of Economics.) It’s the humorless condition of Sheila that I see as the central problem.”
“I know,” Goodwin said feeling a bit of vindication.
“No, no. That’s the wrong attitude. HH is not a bad thing. It’s simply an inherent part of Sheila’s persona. I could have just as easily said that it’s your highly developed sense of humor that’s the problem. Your pathology Philip, for lack of a better word, is that you are afflicted, again for lack of a better word, with a case of irrepressible humor.” He was about to quip, “I guess having a case of irrepressible humor, is no laughing matter,” when he fully understood what Maxine meant by the term irrepressible humor.
“The quandary you both face is that HH is incurable just as having a sense of humor is, in a manner of speaking, incurable. It’s essentially an element of your being. Unlike some of the couples I see, where one or both adjust by making changes, neither of you can change these aspects of your personality.”
“What is important here is that humor is vital to any relationship. It’s essential to coping with life. It helps smooth some of a couple’s rough patches and, let’s face it, considering the spate of all of the bad news, it’s almost critical for survival. That you don’t have a sense of humor, Sheila, makes life very hard for you.” She shook her head in agreement and wiped away a slight rivulet of tears.
“And Philip, the fact that you are virtually prohibited from spontaneously joking or laughing in the presence of Sheila, has to be incredibly frustrating, perhaps impossible.” Goodwin shook his head in agreement. “But if you are both willing to try I’d be happy to help. While conventional counseling involves working with you as a couple, in your situation I think it best that we go one on one at this point.”
Despite his anger, when Goodwin recalled Maxine’s exact words, “one on one” he began to laugh in a bitter way. He muttered to himself, “One on one. I guess I should have realized that Maxine intended the term “one on one” to relate to his physical relationship with Sheila.” Nor was Goodwin suspicious when Maxine said to him, “I’m making gre
at progress on Sheila.” “On” was not interpreted in the sense of juxtaposed bodies.
Relating the story later to friends, Goodwin observed, “Dumb fool that I am, no red flags were raised for me when Sheila returned from one of her one on one sessions and said that Maxine recommended that she take a ‘sexual furlough’ from me. This struck me as ironic since she had been sexually AWOL for quite some time. Not surprisingly, our relationship, rather than improve, deteriorated, though Sheila did not seem to mind.”
Two weeks after Sheila’s departure, as Goodwin was walking to his office and for no particular reason, he stopped, and without really thinking about it, pressed the speed dial on his cell phone to get Sheila.
She picked up on the first ring, “This is Sheila.”
He didn’t announce himself. Rather, he said, “You know Sheila, I have lots to say to you, but for now, I have one question. Sydney Maxine, why of all people, him? I’m smarter, richer, taller, more athletic, more popular, and better looking. So what’s the attraction? For Christ’s sake! I’m a God damn 28.”
Her answer made absolute sense. She said, “He has no sense of humor, Philip. He’s HH just like me.”
At that moment Goodwin realized that as hard as it was for him to live with her, it was equally as hard for her to live with him. All of his rage dissipated at that point. He felt a large sense of guilt for his email message to Sheila and if he could have taken it back he would have. So, he attempted to do the next best thing and apologize on the phone for his insane email, but Sheila had already hung up.
Part Two
Love In The Time Of Apps
The Best Revenge
The anger, shock, and stress arising from Sheila’s departure earlier in the day had exhausted him. By day’s end, Goodwin longed for sleep, but none was forthcoming. The usual tricks used to coax himself to sleep, drinking warm milk or watching a really dull television program, failed. Goodwin even attempted to count sheep, but became agitated when the sheep he envisioned all seemed to be wearing little Manolo Blahnik shoes. The answer to his temporary insomnia, he realized, would be via the ingestion of copious amounts of scotch and Ambien. The potent mix had the desired effect and he dropped off immediately. His last words before crossing the border from consciousness to the land of Nod were a pouty/whiney/slurred, “stupid girlie man.”
Sweating, with his stomach churning and heart pounding, Goodwin woke with a start. He had the sense that it was nearly morning and that he had slept at least six hours. The little red digital clock light on his cable box, however, told him otherwise. It was 11:45 pm. His sleep had lasted for less than 40 minutes and he was now very wide-awake. The rush of anger and adrenalin that absorbed Goodwin throughout the day overtook him again like a fever.
“What the hell am I going to do now?”
He paced, watched television, paced some more, stood in the middle of his living room and, as loudly as he could, cursed Sheila, then cursed Sydney Maxine, and then just cursed. His primal screams were actually cathartic in a way, and each time he repeated the exercise he felt slightly better. He was on his fourth round of cursing and midway into “mother- fu..,” when he abruptly stopped, turned, walked into his den, and turned on his computer.
Within the narrow horizontal search rectangle provided by Google, Goodwin typed “revenge,” deleted that and entered, “sweet revenge,” deleted that and settled for “best revenge.” This entry brought up over one million hits, but Goodwin found what he was looking for in a matter of minutes: “Living Well is the Best Revenge.” When he linked into the site of the same name, Goodwin was surprised to learn that the oft-quoted phrase was not of modem vintage, (many had credited it to the fashion designer, Bill Blass) but was first coined by the English clergyman and metaphysical poet named George Herbert, (The Temple: Sacred Poems – 1633)
Goodwin thought it unlikely that Mr. Herbert would have guessed that almost half a millennium later his little observation would become the buzz words for those poor unsuspecting saps like himself who, via a friend, voice mail, email, posted note, hand delivered complaint for divorce or in some rare instances via a personal face to face announcement, suddenly discovered that they had been deported from the state of matrimony by a spouse who had chosen to leave for greener pastures. Mr. Herbert’s advice, Goodwin decided, was actually quite good. It was inspirational in fact, but needed to be tweaked ever so slightly to fit his situation. “Fucking well is the best revenge” worked perfectly.
It was the first time since learning about Sheila’s departure that he smiled. Thinking that he was indeed a clever lad by conjuring this phrase, he typed the notation into the Google search engine only to find that there were already 5000 entries for it. The search result confirmed what Goodwin already knew: any ideas that he thought were original were thought of before by many other people.
The next few nights Goodwin began to scour clubs and bars in midtown Manhattan in search of someone who might be his revenge partner. He soon found, however, that he had no luck or enthusiasm for his project. While he was quick witted and charming with women at his club, women whom he had known for many years, women married to his friends, women having no amorous interest in him, safe women, within the confines of an unfamiliar and overcrowded bar where his ultimate goal was a sexual liaison, whenever he attempted to make initial small talk with women whom he did not know he was tentative and not very confident. Goodwin attributed part of this to the fact that all of the women he met were at least a decade and a half younger than he was and all, it seemed, spoke about rock groups or entertainers whose names Goodwin had never heard of before.
The inability to recognize the names of certain celebrities they mentioned was consistent with a formula Goodwin had devised in jest for his friends over 50. He called the formula the “People’s Magazine Theorem.” His formula: Percentage of Celebrities You Know in a particular People Magazine (or InStyle, Star Magazine, US Weekly, or OK Magazine) equals the number of pages in the magazine divided by your age. Given his current encounters and his meager recognition factor, he decided that the numerator in his equation should actually be his age plus 10 years.
For the first three nights of his quest he found himself not between the sheets with a young and sexy glam-puss, but on the hard plastic seat of the 11 pm Long Island Railroad. His sense of disappointment on these evenings was magnified because each night the train seemed to be filled with bubbly suburban couples that had attended the opera, Broadway shows, or some other typical New York event. It wasn’t that he really missed Sheila or mourned her loss; he didn’t. Goodwin missed the life they led as a couple, a life he knew was no longer possible. Like a number of couples he knew their marriage had evolved only to a marriage of convenience. Now, the convenience was gone.
On each of his rides home, Goodwin recognized a few of the couples on the train, but they seemed to avert their eyes when he looked at them. “Just as well,” he thought. He didn’t want to rehash Sheila’s departure either. After four days on what he called his “sexual liaison trail,” he gave up.
Goodwin’s decision was not only prompted by his inability to interact with the women he encountered. He simply couldn’t keep up with their drinking. He was amazed by the amount of alcohol many of them consumed. Goodwin would get heady after one martini. He didn’t even like martinis, but that’s what every one of these women were drinking. More often than not the drinks were exotically flavored martinis. “What?” a young woman said to him incredulously, “You’ve never had a bacotini?” which she explained was bacon favored martini. He joked that he was Kosher, but she took the remark at face value and simply replied with a muted “Oh.”
Upon reflection, Goodwin realized that he really was not truly interested in a sexual dalliance with a woman to whom he had been exposed to for no more than the length of time it took for her to consume a few martinis. What he was really looking for was a woman with whom he could talk, possibly entertain with his wit and perhaps be entertained by her wit; in short a
woman to whom he could relate. Thus, when he entered the bar section of the Gramercy Tavern restaurant in Manhattan several weeks later, his interest was social, not sexual, intercourse.
Goodwin scanned the busy and festive bar in the restaurant’s front room for a place between two people with whom he might share some easy conversation and spotted a woman whose appearance almost knocked him off his feet. She was seated upon a high, tufted, bar stool. Her long and tanned legs were crossed and exposed well above her knees. He pegged her at about 45. Had she been younger and less athletically built, she could have been a high fashion model.
As soon as he saw her, Goodwin felt a strange sensation in his loins. Goodwin knew that strange sensations in a man’s loins when he was 50 or older could relate to an incipient kidney stone, an enlarged prostate, lust, or a combination of all of the above. He reviewed these options, decided it was merely lust, and walked over to her. He later said of this meeting, “It’s hard to fully articulate how her looks drew me in. There was just a certain strong allure about her, a magnetism that immediately took hold of me in a very powerful way. Until I saw her, I never believed the cliché ‘love at first sight.’ I don’t think I was there yet, though I might have been. All I know is that when I saw her my whole psyche went ‘Wow!’ I might have even shuddered. I think I heard some music and saw a spotlight shining down on her, but looking back I really don’t know if this was simply a hallucination or romanticized a recollection.”
For an instant Goodwin’s amorous enthusiasm was tempered by his recollection of a warning from Kass, who had been married three times, fallen in love on the rebound with virtually the first woman that paid some attention to him, only to have a disastrous and failed relationship. “Look, buddy boy,” Kass advised, “take it from one who knows. When you are on the rebound, and I’ve been there enough times to know, don’t fall in the love with the first woman that flutters her eyelids at you or shows you a little thigh. It will only lead to disaster. Believe me. You’re not in love. You just have a case of rebounditis.” The problem with Kass’ sage advice was that it was incomplete. Kass forgot to warn Goodwin that those infected by rebounditis never know they have it until it’s too late. Goodwin walked up to the conveniently vacated seat next to her, “Is anyone seated here?”
