David Wallace - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

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.

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[,]

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.