Hell yeah, it hurts, I’m wrapped up like ol’ King Tut here, can you imagine what’s going on underneath? Thirty stitches in my forehead, I think. I got the little ones so you don’t get so much of a scar, but, you know, you’re still gonna get one.
So, that soup can my kid threw at me, what was in it? I hate mushroom. Guess I should be grateful it wasn’t one of those big cans, I’d be dead for sure. Ow, laughing makes my head hurt worse. I’m sorry, I know this is serious, says it right there, “Serious Condition.” Can I tell you, I actually feel a bit proud, didn’t even know he had an arm on him. He’s into that Dungeons and Dragons crap, never wanted to play baseball, not even catch in the yard. Damn basement looks like Camelot.
God no, please no charges, it’s not like my son was trying to kill me. Was he?
Twelve. My kid’s twelve. Her? Eighteen. Yeah, you heard me. No, I hadn’t really thought about it, they seem a lot farther apart somehow. Women are always about ten years more mature than men, so call her twenty-eight. And they’re older every year, nobody’s eighteen when they’re eighteen anymore.
Don’t start with me on that Lolita shit, I teach Nabokov, I know the difference. Know how everybody says they wish they could be eighteen again and know all the things they know? That’s how it feels.
It had been going on for a few months. Wasn’t even that I wanted to be with her for good, that’s not why I told Jane I wanted a divorce. It was the prospect of being wanted again. Been a long time since I felt anything like … desire. Daisy wanted me, so why keep enduring … that?
Ever been married twenty years? Try it and get back to me, tell me how it is for you. Love changes. Passion fades. You have a kid and that white-hot spotlight goes dark. But you still feel shiny and bright about her, except there’s nowhere for your love to go, she’s too tired, the baby kept her up all night, she feels fat today, every excuse you can think of except the truth, that all her love is for the kid and there’s nothing for you now, so it’s rub one out with the Playmate of the Month in the basement bathroom every night or so, maybe go have an affair, it’s the swinging seventies, right? Hef says it’s okay.
Blame the alcohol if you want, everybody does. I’ve been having pub meetups with my students for years, if they end up raising the drinking age, fine, I won’t do it anymore, but there wasn’t anything illegal about it or even immoral as far as I’m concerned. Hey, you can call an affair immoral but it’s far more immoral to live a lie.
You might not believe this, but everything started with us just talking. Conversation. Good conversation. I can’t talk about literature with Jane. Now music was what got us together back when we were eighteen, listening to the folkies at the rathskeller and sneaking off to the Village Lantern on Friday nights sharing a big pizza slice that needs two paper plates and just walking up and down Bleecker until we could get the early train back up here. We kinda knew Dylan. I mean, as much as anybody could. I can’t remember the last time we saw someone play. I put on records sometimes, but it’s not the same.
For a long time, I thought I was content. Had the wife, the house, the kid, the professorship. “The Book.” If I remember after all this, I’ll sign one for you. What a dream to teach where I was taught, to be accepted as a peer by my professors. I’ve always felt young there. Maybe that’s why I relate so well to my students. Guess if I related better to my kid, maybe he wouldn’t have beaned me with the soup.
They can keep me overnight, that’s fine by me. Can’t go home again.
***
That jerk didn’t even take his coat off, just walked into the kitchen and came up behind me at the sink while I was trying to finish making dinner and said, “I want a divorce,” like he was making a goddamn withdrawal at the bank. You bet your ass I’m angry. Who wouldn’t be? We hadn’t even discussed anything like that. I know we both have issues with our marriage, but straight to divorce? And right in front of Ricky like that? For all he knew, everything was fine and had been fine all his life. It wasn’t fair for Richard to just yank the curtain away like that.
Are you going to let Ricky go? When can I see him? I need to see my son. No, I absolutely do not need to see my husband.
Writers are such goddamn narcissists. You’d think they’d love themselves plenty enough, but no, they need every bit of your love and attention to balance out that self-doubt demon riding on their backs. What did he expect? We’re not eighteen anymore. Well, I guess she is. We’re not even forty anymore, and he wasn’t coming home every night to the Playboy Mansion. I know he has a subscription, I mean, it comes right to the house, I read it too. Don’t look at me like that.
He always blamed it all on Ricky, but look, attraction levels fluctuate over time. There are statistics, it’s part of what I teach, so it wasn’t unexpected, not to me anyway, and it didn’t just happen, this has been coming for a lot of years. The seven-year itch isn’t just a funny movie, it’s a real thing. Oh, there it is, I can’t believe I didn’t see it, we’re right at the cusp of a cycle. The first seven was easy, all lovey-lovey and career-building. The second seven was hard. I gained a lot of weight when I had Ricky and I couldn’t lose all of it. I know he didn’t look at me the same after that, and most of you men are so visually oriented in your stimulation. So yeah, it got hard for me to fake it. He didn’t want me, so I didn’t want him either. But I did want us. I thought we were on the same page about that. I wanted our family.
I feel like I’m the only one who gave up anything for it. I didn’t go to school just to get an MRS like my girlfriends. I got a PhD. I’m not just a wife. That’s how it goes in our society, though, isn’t it? Have a baby, lose your career. I can’t even get a credit card in my own name without my husband to sign, and I’m supposed to be grateful that I get to teach two classes a semester as an adjunct now? Did he even tell you that I supported him through his master’s program? That stipend of his didn’t cover expenses like an actual job. And anyway, they didn’t see him as anything while he was in school, nobody did. Then Knopf bought “The Book.” I bet he offered to sign you one, didn’t he? So all the critics go wild and he’s our next literary superstar and suddenly the university desperately wants him to teach. Nobody in that department has won an award worth using in the marketing materials for years. He was their golden goose. Well the goose isn’t laying eggs lately, is he? Who knows what the hell he’s working on in the den every night. I think he plays the record player loud so I can’t tell he’s not typing.
Why didn’t he just talk to me? To me! Not bust in and do it in front of our son like that. Richard could’ve unburdened himself however he wanted, told me he was ashamed, or that she made him feel young again, or her ass looked great in Jordache, whatever! I’m pissed off that he blew up all of our lives in one instant! With no thought! For anyone but himself! He could’ve had it all if he’d just talked to me. Both of us, he’s not the only sexually liberated person in the house. I’ve been fucking his department head for years on Richard’s pub nights.
***
It’s NOT Satan worship! Why the hell does everybody think that? Nobody’s sitting in giant pentagrams chanting incantations, it’s just a GAME! Yeah, like baseball, sure. D&D didn’t make me try to kill my dad, okay?
He’s not dead, is he? Is he?
Where’s my mom? Get my mom. And these handcuffs really hurt, can’t you take ’em off? I’m not violent, I’m upset! I don’t know why I did it, I was just mad at him. It wasn’t the freaking D&D! It doesn’t make anybody do violent things, it lets you get it all out.
Okay, don’t take this the wrong way. I did kill him in D&D this one time.
Jeez, will you please listen? We started writing our own campaigns a few years ago, after we had played all the ones you could buy, and when it was Jesse’s turn to be DM, that’s Dungeon Master, he created this nasty-ass Orog who had been expelled from his group and went crazy inside some cave system he found on the outskirts of a walled city. He started terrorizing everyone there by flinging shit on all the buildings and writing evil crap on the outer wall. Yeah, in shit. Wall-high letters. The city’s burgermeister paid me and my band to hunt him down. I’m a Paladin. We finally get him cornered and our magic user casts a Zone of Truth around him to make him tell us if he has any extra powers or weapons and then asks him his name. Jesse does his Orog voice and says, “My name is Richard of Academia!” I just about shit myself laughing and beheaded the bastard with a Holy Avenger. It’s a powerful sword only Paladins can use, plus-3 attack and damage, 2d10 radiant damage when it strikes a fiend, and a protective aura. Do you see? That’s what D&D is all about, friends having each other’s backs.
Richard of Academia is the one always talking about Grendel, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, so you’d think he would at least understand D&D. If we didn’t play it, we’d all just be alone in our houses watching rotten TV reruns. You can only watch so much Trek and Brady Bunch. Now there’s some fantasy for you, nobody has a family that happy.
All I know is I was sitting at the table reading this article about Tolkien and Orcs in the new Dragon magazine. Mom was washing potatoes in the sink for meatloaf. Dad comes in, doesn’t even say hi to me, opens the fridge, cracks a can of Bud so hard that some suds fly out and he flicks the pop top into the sink. When Mom looks up like “What the F?” he just says, “I want a divorce.” She throws a potato at him and knocks the beer out of his hand and starts crying, then they’re just screaming at each other.
I couldn’t keep track of everything they were saying. I was kinda paralyzed, I’d never seen them fight like that. The longer it went on, it felt like they were just ripping the fabric of reality and this dark universe was rushing in and taking over.
Mom runs out of the kitchen, still crying, and it’s just me and Dad. He gets right in my face with his beer breath and says, “Well kid, that’s gonna do it for me. Stand up and give me a shake goodbye like a man.” And he pulls me up out of the chair and half shoves me against the counter, then he grabs my hand and shakes it real exaggerated like and kinda throws my hand back down and nods at me and starts walking off. He gets a few steps into the living room and turns back around and says, “Guess we’re never going to have that catch in the yard, are we?”
I reach behind me and grab one of Mom’s cans of Cream of Mushroom, you know, for the meatloaf, and whip it at him. I think I just wanted to hit him like Mom did, I wasn’t aiming for his head, but that’s where it got him and he went down like a freaking tree.
I yell for Mom, and she comes back down the stairs and sees and rushes into the kitchen for a towel to press down on his head and tells me to call an ambulance but I don’t know the number, so she tells me to hold the towel and press hard and I keep watching his lips to make sure he’s still … still breathing. And my eyes are stinging and I can’t wipe them because I have to use both hands. The ambulance guys take over and put him on one of those wheely beds and I wipe my eyes on my T-shirt with my shoulders because my hands are all bloody, and then he’s gone, it’s just me and Mom. And the blood. God, so much blood.
Please, just tell me if he’s okay. You gotta tell me.
***
I think everyone I know has slept with a professor, it’s not some big deal. Catch up, man, the sixties already happened. Ha, yeah, that’s it, Homewreckers’ Club meetings are on Thursdays. Drop in why don’tcha, some of the girls are into cops.
I sure do have a smart mouth, my mouth is probably smarter than your whole body. Why do you need to talk to me, anyway? I didn’t do anything wrong. Oh please, it’s like you’re all still wearing Puritan clothes on your souls. The 1660s already happened, too.
No, I didn’t tell him I loved him. Did he say that? I didn’t tell him I wanted anything beyond what we were doing. I certainly didn’t tell him to go ask his wife for a D-I-V-O-R-C-E. You ask me, he had that can of corn upside his head coming to him. Mushroom soup, whatever.
I mean, come on, he’s Richard Wilcox. Have you read “The Book?” It’s fucking hot! It’s a bunch of Medieval swingers! They say it helped start the whole goddamn sexual revolution, and writers are supposed to write what they know, so I just assumed this wasn’t anything he hadn’t done or wasn’t doing. Both of them, I know who his wife is, I saw her coming out of the Rustic Inn one time while I was having a little smoke on the veranda. Don’t write that down, I’m kidding. There’s no veranda, the place charges by the hour and you’re lucky to get clean sheets and a towel. All the professors go there. She teaches psych or something. Human sexuality? Now, that’s funny, write THAT down.
You know, in my poetry classes, the professors always say not to conflate the poetic voice in the poem with the poet. Maybe that goes for the novelists as well.
May I please go now?