Notes from the Upper West Side. You think? Yeah. You're hurting my jaw?
She giggled. It was four days since our first meeting and I still didn't have the willpower to tell her to back off when I was entering the home stretch. One thing I learned from my first few sessions with Fern is that it's really easy to procrastinate in a blowjob. That worried me a little.
My lack of self-discipline at the moment of truth. I decided I'd work on it methodically, gradually. I also decided to bring a stopwatch to start keeping records of my progress and focus on the trend line. I was going to be scientific.
When I got home to change before my shift, I paid off the teenage babysitter from next door just as Junior walked in from her shift at Moium. Then I quickly told her about the rat and her jaw literally dropped. And I do mean literally. The only thing that kept it connected to the rest of her skull was the skin in her cheeks.
Then she asked how I knew for sure the boys were okay. I walked them to school, hun. And when I ran out the door a few seconds later she was in the boys' room saying, show me your arms. I closed the door on the chaos and headed for my bus.
The news of La Faire du Rat set off a cascading chain of events in Junior's brain and that night when I got home I heard all about it. I usually get back to the fam castle around 12, 30 in the morning after my shift. Tonight was no different except the wife was up and waiting for me. Terrible sign.
Since it meant I didn't get any porn time at the computer and if Cami maybe sent me a can't wait to bite your pipe email, I'd have to wait a day to see that too. The house smelled like bleach and the windows were wide open. The wife was looking kind of chunky in a sweatshirt and panties in white socks. She was sitting on the sofa under the only lit lamp in the room.
It was an pool of amber with her face in her palm. What's up? I asked as I walked down the hallway to order. The apartment is laid out so the second you walk in the door and look to the right you can see anybody sitting on the sofa at the end of the really short hallway that takes you past the bathroom in the boys' room.
Turns out the place smelled like bleach because the wife had spent the entire evening scrubbing wherever she thought a rat might have taken a whiz. And her imagination had carried her into virtually every corner of the apartment. Now she was beat and sad and had no fight left in her. Still, I was braced for an onslaught like the grasshopper must have braced for the praying mantas.
But it didn't happen. Old Junior wanted out of that night for us to talk about how we were going to pay for the exterminator plus our quote forever debts. Like the boys' college funds and our own still outstanding loans plus new expenses like the Jim subscription and the newbie school. She said, Can't you use dumbbells for most of those workouts?
They have to cost less. I said, Can't you read books instead of going to the newbie school? They have to cost less. It felt like the beginning of a large round of bitter fighting.
Like the marathon, bitter fighting my mom and dad engaged in just before they started French kissing the neighbors. Or maybe it was just after they started. The delicate point in family history. But we didn't fight that night.
The praying mantas just stayed in her corner of the jar and looked weary. And like I said before, the wife had recently begun seeing Wayne the therapist and was that ever paying dividends in the form of her at least pretending to listen to me. That's pretty much what it means when you're seeing a professional hunch wrangler like Jessica or Wayne. You learn to listen to people so they'll start thinking of you as a person who actually cares what they think.
Then maybe they'll start listening to you in return. It's a risk. Sometimes a big one. When you're listening to them and they start telling you what a tremendous asshole you are.
So the wife and I did the big listen for each other. I pretended to earnestly care what she wanted in the hope that she would listen to me and convince me she was really really into my thoughts and dreams. We agreed we wouldn't bug each other about marginal expenses. Yeah.
Marginal expenses. That was Junior's phrase. Or maybe it was Wayne's. When your spouse is in therapy it's sometimes hard to know who you're actually having the conversation with.
Her theory that night, which I listened to with morbidly earnest interest, was that we each had our own jobs so maybe we should pay for our own stuff every month after we got done funding the boys and paying the cable bill and the mortgage on our stupid dump of a co-op. She could have the newbie school and whatever else she could afford. And I'd keep the gym subscription and whatever else I could afford. Which probably didn't add up to a small latte.
Then the conversation kind of morphed into a plan. A, once a month we'll have a meeting plan. We agreed we would use this meeting to calculate what we could afford to increase for the boys since we didn't want to shortchange them out of enthusiasm for our own hobbies. I was a little resentful that she thought I would be tempted to shortchange the boys but okay, why not have a meeting?
It seemed too easy. Like the wife had just said without my even asking her that she would let me have my own time and some of my own money. And that made me a little scared. Notes from the Upper West Side is a work of fiction.
The people depicted in this work do not exist. Notes from the Upper West Side copyright 2013 to 2019 by Dan Rench.