SECTION V
33. I lied to you. Do you know that?
What? You?
34. Right now, I’m lying. I have been seeing other people. I am in the hands of 34,000 men. I am in the hands of women, too. And the truth is I love the attention. The only way I can be good to you is to be with other people. You make me so mad, because I love you and you don’t have love to give. I want you, but in order to come back to you and not feel like an insignificant floozy, I need to cheat on you every second of the day. It makes me feel guilty, which makes me want to be tender to you even when you’re being such a self-obsessed asshole. It’s crazy, I know, but it works. I feel so bad about it that I have to be good to you. It was an experiment, a test to see if I could find a way to be better to you. Can we work through this?
Well, this comes as a bit of a surprise. I mean, here I am, leaving behind my love for my art. Then, you come along and demand all my time. I give it to you, but can’t give you the love you need. So, what do I get, just for being honest? I get someone who’s off getting drooled on and fondled by the entire township. I just wanted something to do, someone to be with for a little, not anything big. I’m sorry what I wanted isn’t exactly what you wanted. I just can’t believe you’d hurt me like this. Lie to me. Discard me. Just split like this. I can’t believe you’d go off and do whatever it is you do. Go off and screw other people, too.
35. Do you deserve that?
HOW YOU WISH
Birthday Cake Candles
Your first significant encounter with the rules of wishing came with the birthday cake and its requisite lit candles, the number of which denotes age plus a single extra luck or wish candle. This is typical. The scenery of the wish-situation has been fairly standard from your initiation onward through the years. Yellow teardrop flames atop stocky candles of primary colors, or atop stalky candles of primary colors. The low rumbling chorus of traditional song containing your name. The little warmth on the tip of your nose and your cheeks. Dark red faces closing in all around. Red-orange closed eyelids.
A rudimentary and erroneous rundown of proper wish behavior accompanied your earliest cake-candle wishes. The rules are—you might remember—Close Eyes, Formulate Wish, Open Eyes, Extinguish Candles with Solitary Lungful, Do Not Tell Anyone the Wish.
But what a bizarre (not to mention incorrect) set of rules! Didn’t you always want to share the wish? But you were informed that if you told, the wish could not come true. Hooey! Nonsense! While you sat at the kitchen table of your childhood home, surrounded by all the loving persons of your young life, the burden of secrecy begot a confusing sadness of having to make a wish alone. Shouldn’t the friends and family have wanted to share in and support your wish, especially on your day of days? This erroneous mandate of secrecy fostered a perverse and sad strain of wishes in your early wishing-life. The proper rules state: In order for your wish to come true, you must share it with another person, ideally a best friend (family members can count as best friends). The sharing-with-one rule of the cake candle wish ensures that—should it come true—the wish will not be something you would feel ashamed to indulge in once made public. Otherwise, you could get pretty weird with your solitary and secret cake-candle wishes.
So many of your candle wishes were made before you had met Melanie, before you had really met anyone in this way. Were those wishes wasted—and, if so, for how many years? You don’t remember the wishes you made when you were, what—three, four years of age? Though you do know that you followed those early rules, with eyes closed, picturing little selfish dreams becoming little selfish realities. What did you want? Sports victories. Vanquished bullies. You were a kid. You didn’t know Melanie then, nothing of this kind of floating of the heart.
Fortunately, tradition persists forever through the years. Today, as an adult, you have the chance to wish on your birthday—a chance that doesn’t come every year, because in order for the wish-scenario to conjure and establish its powers, the cake and its candles must be prepared for and presented to you in secret.
Tonight, you are staring down a 25-candle lumen. Still a young man, but no kid anymore. It’s time to get serious, time to take things seriously, you think. Tonight, this wish will not be a throwaway. Here, in your small but clean studio apartment in the city, the first place that really is yours and yours alone, you will not rush through the wish-formulation to satisfy the cake-presenters, your mom and dad, your sister, and friends as they demand of you, “Make a wish! Make a wish!” No. This time you take it slow. Thoughtful. This time the wish is for this girl, Melanie. You want her. More than that. You want something with her. You met Melanie only a week ago, but already it feels different. You didn’t play it cool, not with her, because this wasn’t a hookup situation. This wasn’t an arranged date, no friends trying to set you up. This was random chance, a fate thing, maybe. She has lodged in new places in your chest and your head. You sat down next to a pretty girl at your local haunt, just a Monday evening after work. You didn’t expect anything but a beer and to read more of your book. She was reading, too, and you couldn’t make out the title. You hadn’t seen her before. A vexing tattoo on her right forearm caught your eye. Nothing figurative. You wanted to ask what it was, what it meant, because you were curious, not looking for an excuse to chat her up. But if you did ask that, you’d appear to be asking for an excuse to chat her up. Damn society, ruining everything for you. Then your natural-self leapt out through all the self-consciousness, through all the society-consciousness, surprising you, as if you were being controlled by another dimension’s wish for you to chat her up: “I was just sitting here, wondering what that tattoo was, but I played through all the reasons I shouldn’t ask, and now I just want to ask what it is. What is your tattoo, if you don’t mind?” She smiled! And then—poof—it was hours later, and you were still talking and smoking cigarettes and walking through town, and a voice in your head said, Oh, this is my person, and you were surprised by that but also immediately distracted by her again. You parted ways, and you got to the end of the block before spinning around and catching yourself and yelling, “I didn’t get your number.” Jesus. Think of it. How precarious these things are. You could have rounded that corner. Poof.
Since it is your own birthday, the wish must pertain directly to you. The birthday cake candle wish is not a time for selflessness. Altruism is lost on the birthday cake candles. In fact, the wish should be downright selfish. You are allowed this selfishness. Go ahead. It’s perfectly proper.
You notice your wish feels real this time, because it could come true, because you sense an unknowable force in the world that you have somehow tapped into. Whatever it is, it feels like it is favoring you and Melanie. Tonight, you are wishing for this one to be the real thing. But you know it is. It’s got to be. Stare down the candles’ flames. Blow out the arranged fire.
The demigods of wish-granting get to work. But they are strict and they are vigilant. They are known to watch us for the slightest slip-up, the momentary carelessness with the rules, with the rituals. No matter how desperate your situation may become, you are no exception to the rules. Though, at times, they may seem to be, the demigods are not kind. Though, ultimately, you may curse them, they are not cruel.
Wishing Well or Fountain
Countryside wishing wells and their city-dwelling sisters—wishing fountains—are communal. Most of life’s wishsituations are solitary. Although public, the birthday cake candle wish is made by a single person, not by many at a fixed location. This affects the wish rules.
The fountain wish may be selfish or selfless, but it must feel whimsical. While the birthday cake candle wish is mandatory and—so—often unimaginative, considering the wisher’s limited time allotment for wish formation and stage fright at performing in front of flamelit faces in a dark and makeshift theater, and while the shooting star wish is inspirational and inspired (rules forthcoming), the wishing well/wishing fountain wish is a bit hokey. It’s a folksy thing, regardless of rural or u
rban backdrop. “Oh, a wishing fountain!” you might hear lilting from a nearby and delighted child. It’s a cute thing. There is no obligation to wish when stumbling upon these wells/fountains, but there is a chance that you might miss out on an actually-functioning, water-based, wish-granting device. So, the pull to wish is always strong. It’s important to take a contemplative moment and admire the sparkling pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and foreign coins sprinkled across the tiny sky-blue tiles that line the bottom of the fountain. Listen for and indulge in the calming plunge of water rushing into more water. Since these wishes must commingle (for eternity, you imagine, though only until the annual scrubbing by the municipal janitorial services) they must have common tone, must play in the same key. Whimsy. Imagine the bubbling dissonance in the fountain when a dime, carrying the wish, Please … let the surgeon’s hand be true when cutting out Robert’s brain tumor, is covered by a quarter, carrying the wish, Please … let the Bruins take home the cup, baby! Any demigod overseeing that particular collection of wishes is likely to shake its head in frustrated confusion and grant nothing. Keep the wishes in the communal fountain whimsical. Maintain tonal harmony among the chorus of coins.
Your relationship—your actual three-year romance—can, at times, make you feel whimsical. Melanie has morphed you into the kind of fellow who holds doors for and smiles at strangers on the morning commute. You can admit it. This relationship has transformed you into the guy who takes strolls on lunch breaks to watch the wind chase the high-up maple leaves, or regard the architecture of your fine city’s stone churches and glass towers, or pause for public art, the sculptures in marble and metal, the graffiti murals in purple and yellow. You can find and love Love in so many of its forms now. You have softened to the idea of whimsy. Your cynical and single days would never have allowed a toss of a wish-coin, unless it was to wish away the stupidity of wishing fountains, how naive all those wishers seemed back then, when you had it all figured out, but really before you had it all figured out. Now, here you are, on the way to the grocery store, right smack in the middle of a relationship that has made you a true believer, thinking about how you have plans to get red wine and tacos at seven tonight and then head back to watch a flick at your new apartment you have with Mel—just drinks, dinner, and a glowing laptop screen in the dark of your bedroom. Ahh. The sweet realization that majesty lies curled up on the couch, hidden in plain sight among life’s simple stuff! This new understanding that the oldie’s radio station love songs are not, in fact, sugary nonsense from a lost, irretrievable, innocent era.
You know what’s so true about this relationship? It’s that you have fallen into the person you are, not the person you should be or the person someone wants you to be. Mel and you, you actually nudge your real selves into existence, encourage these forms out of shadowy recesses. The world is a brutal place, and up until meeting Mel, you did what you could to grab scraps of confidence, of usefulness: defense mechanisms that got you safely if sadly through social interactions and career obligations; worldviews borrowed from books and magazine articles that competed with something at your core but that you espoused with fake conviction. But now, now! You are becoming yourself. And you get it. When you are with Mel, you are not simply with another person; you are with a complex, mysterious, and evolving life force known as a human being. As she changes, and as you change, you are in love with the spirit, the core, some immutable essence that exists for eternity while masking itself in slightly different human shapes and looks year after year, as you both age and grow. Jesus, listen to you!
With a chuckle, you lose the last morsel of your old cynicism. This is the whimsy required. It’s a great trade, you notice, cynicism for romanticism. Toss a coin. Wish for Melanie to say, Yes.
Coin value does not affect chance.
Shooting Star
The shooting star wish is perhaps the purest of all wishes. The blowing out of candles atop cake would be bizarre except for its long tradition; the expense of tossing metal money into small pools for fountain-wishing has been coopted by less and less magical fountains across the cities of our country (arbitrarily selected watery tubs, really). But when a meteor streaks across the black sky, burning white hot at a million degrees, come a trillion light years through the multiverse, wish-making feels innate, involuntary. The moment is all-consuming, the cosmic spectacle colliding with the sudden acknowledgment of your own tininess in space and history since the Big Bang. The sight of the shooting star conjures a wish, without any real need of thinking one up. Romantic wishes are most appropriate, though no wish is truly off-limits with the shooting star. Wishes for financial gain or anything similarly impure is frowned upon.
It seems important. It feels like something meaningful. You are by yourself. Here on a beach, in late summer, having escaped on this hasty retreat to a Cape resort town in its early offseason because you needed to fetch perspective on your marriage. You couldn’t concentrate at work. Really, you couldn’t face your coworkers who know Melanie. You lied and said you were taking an impromptu romantic vacation when requesting the days off, giving only a day’s notice, to just get the hell away for a minute. Jesus. Nothing functions as it should—even your voice, it feels faked, your mannerisms, they aren’t your own all of a sudden, playacted—when things are fucked up with Mel. The word divorce was used. It was actually stated as a real possibility, in the middle of the series of terrible fights last week. Divorce. If it happens, at least there are no children. God, what a freezing comfort. You used to brag about Melanie, about how perfectly fit you two were. How you both lucked out! You were once proud, without vanity, of how this relationship had navigated real problems with maturity, respect, and essential love. Friends and coworkers once sought you out for advice, about how it was that you and Mel had built such a good thing. How embarrassing to feel adrift while the folks who once needed your counsel now appear so much wiser.
You are facing a conflict too hurtful for even the two of you, however evolved, to smooth out and move past. They didn’t have sex. You keep hearing yourself say this. You replay her words: I caught myself. We didn’t. It is meaningful. She stopped it before that. The whole brief thing is a symptom. You’ve both ignored some shit. You hadn’t been having sex, at least regularly. At first, of course, sex was all the time, then once or twice a week, then it was spread out more and more, but you were both really concentrating on your jobs, and your schedules weren’t lining up, and she’d come home and you’d be asleep in front of the TV, or you would get up early and then make plans with a friend at night. You were traveling more for work, sometimes not calling before going to sleep in your hotel rooms. Sometimes, you were staying up at the hotel bar with someone and wondering. But you never. You both encouraged each other’s careers and social lives that maintained your sense of individual self; you two weren’t going to wind up codependent. That was a good thing. But for too long you left out the hard work of maintaining the romance, and now this. The cheating is a real shock, but it’s human. You want to get through this. You do not want to run. Mel, too. She wants to work.
So, here you are on a beach, alone at midnight. Tide rushing in. Moon rising up. Cold sand in between your toes. Socks and shoes in hand, swaying, a bit drunk. Behind you, on the road, the sounds of care-free revelers roaring past in the last rented convertible of the season.
Then. A shooting star.
When you have been circling your thoughts and forgotten that there is anything in the world larger than your worst problem, that white streak across the sky feels like a ping from a friendly demigod who just happens to be awake and seeing you.
A wish for the strength to work through the impossible parts of love.
11:11
You must randomly find a digital clock reading: 11:11, and never await the flip from 11:10. The accuracy of the timepiece does not influence the wish. Of course, time is of the essence with this wish-scenario, having, at most, 59 seconds to formulate and express. The appropriate wish should relate to
the particular day in which the wish is being made. Nothing long-term, nothing expansive and grand. Something concrete that could happen within the day. Of course, the ante meridiem 11:11 leaves more hours for things to happen. In the post meridiem, the wish can apply to the following day, though this diminishes chance. The 11:11 wish should be refined and reduced to its essence and whispered to yourself: “Nail the Presentation” or “My Son’s Baseball Championship” or “No Cavities This Time.”
It feels desperate and pathetic, but critical, to wish on 11:11 now. With Melanie sick like this. But you take any opportunity to wish. In fact, you have invented new moments to wish upon—2:05, her birthday, February fifth; 6:14, your anniversary; 1:13, your daughter’s birthday. You are wishing all the time now. But at eleven past eleven, you hope this precise time of day holds more value, that it conjures and establishes powers, that it means more to the demigod in charge of the temporal wishes. Mel is sick. She has battled. She has done everything they told her. You have supported her. Your kids have been stronger and more helpful than you thought teens could be with sadness and emergency. You need to know the effort and attention worked. That Mel will come out the other side. She has gone in for the latest follow-up tests. Please … let the results be negative, let it relent. A wish at 1:13 a.m., at 2:05 a.m., at 6:14 a.m., at 11:11 a.m., 1:13 p.m., 2:05 p.m., 6:14 p.m., at 11:11. A wish on a ladybug. On a shooting star, though you find yourself scanning the night sky for them. Every wishing fountain, though not in any moods that could be mistaken for whimsical. A wish on every bird that flies overhead. A wish every time you see your reflection. A wish upon seeing the bottom of every pint glass, every coffee mug. A wish every time your kids hug their mother. A wish when the phone rings. Every time you pass through open doorways. Whenever a cloud moves in front of the sun. Each time she—. Everywhere—Anything—The same wish.
The OK End of Funny Town Page 11
