Steemit Life Style Is Amazing

I’m in my pajamas looking out the window, peering through the
blinds like a weirdo, watching my neighbor move out of his house.
He’s stretched this out over the course of the last week, showing up
at ten each night, backing his douchey Land Rover into his driveway,
and going about the process of leaving his wife one cardboard box
at a time.
I’m morbidly fascinated by this, which explains why I’m rubber-
necking through mini-blinds. Why doesn’t he just get a U-Haul? He
could get it over with in one fell swoop. And why does he show up
so late? He’s got a normal job, just like everyone else. Maybe he did a
Google search and found that it’s less traumatizing for kids if they’re
asleep when their dad loads his golf clubs and diplomas into the back
of a $90,000 car.
His name is James. Not Jim—James. He’s one of those guys who
wears his cell phone on a plastic clip attached to his belt. He’s talking
on it now as he Tetrises another box next to some other boxes. I’ve
found that there are two types of guys who clip cell phones to their
belts: sweet nerds who fix your computer at work and white-collar
criminals who guzzle Red Bull and swindle old ladies out of their
Social Security checks.
I suspect that James is among the latter.
Sometimes Ellen, his wife, comes out and stands there in the drive way and watches him. She wears these brown clogs and her nighttime
things and crosses her arms. She hardly ever says anything to him. In-
stead she just sort of stands there glaring either at him or out vaguely
at their browning front yard.
He’s smiling as he talks, standing in the driveway. His teeth are
startlingly white. I can see them glowing from here. My guess is he’s
talking to her—the other woman. She’s a pharmaceutical sales rep,
of course. My wife and all of the other wives refer to her, simply, as
“The Blonde.”
Kristine comes into our bedroom. I don’t really look at her be-
cause I’m pretty busy leering at James, but I get just enough to see
her drop a magazine onto our bed. “Do you think that asshole got
his teeth whitened?” I ask. “Does that really work? Maybe I should
pick up some of those white strip things at CVS next —”
“I found this in Bradley’s room today,” she says, stopping me.
“What?”
When I look over I see my wife standing at the side of our bed
next to a Playboy magazine. My first reaction is to laugh, because this
is funny, but I bite my lower lip instead, like I’m being thoughtful.
I’ve learned this trick slowly over the last fifteen years. I bite a little
harder when I notice Kristine’s shirt. Take Me Drunk, I’m Home, it
says across her chest in faded letters. It’s mine. I bought it in stupid
Dewey Beach years ago to be funny. It’s too big on me—way too
big—and so it’s downright cartoonish on her.
I sit down on our bed and pick up the magazine. It’s all wrinkled
and dog-eared, and the girl on the cover is blond and airbrushed
to the point of looking like a slightly blurry computer animation.
Breasts and lips and hips and a crop-top thing and a gleaming navel
ring. We got rid of our movie channels last year, and so it’s been while
since I’ve seen a girl dressed like this.
“Well, it’s . . . good to see him reading.”
Kristine is prepped for this sort of reaction, and so without pause
she says, “I don’t think it’s funny, Mitch.”
“It’s kind of funny?” I say. I add a question mark at the end in an
attempt to lighten the mood with punctuation, but no luck. On the
TV, the day’s baseball scores are running across the screen. I find myself wondering about the TV in James’s new apartment in the city.
I imagine it’s the size of a foosball table, which is a thought I keep
to myself.
“No,” she says. “It’s pornography.”
The word sounds weird. My wife has a slight speech impediment,
like she’s talking with a very thin sheet of paper at the back of her
tongue. You can hardly notice it, but it flares up on oddball words
like cinnamon, chrysanthemum, and, apparently, pornography. She
touches her mouth, hiding it—a reflex wired in since adolescence.
“Weelllll,” I say, drawing the word out. And for a while that’s
all I say, as if this, alone, is a solid argument. “Let’s keep things
in perspective here. Remember that freaky kid with the vampire
teeth? The one on the news—from Towson? He shot up that TJ
Maxx last month with the hunting rifle. They found cat skulls in
his room.”
“They were squirrel skulls,” she says. “And it was a K-Mart.”
I’m not sure how these details weaken my point, but somehow,
strangely, they do, and so I just sit there for a moment, deflated. On
the Playboy’s back cover, there’s an ad for cologne. A good-looking
actor I kind of recognize from a cop show is having a pillow fight with
a pretty brunette girl in her underwear. I briefly consider grabbing
one of our decorative throw pillows and smacking Kristine across the
face with it. I wonder what would happen. Would she laugh and strip
to her underwear and forget, if just for a moment, about our pervy
son down the hall?
It seems doubtful. They should include a warning at the bottom
of the ad in legal type: *Outcome unlikely in most situations involving
wives.
Outside, there’s the gentle thud of a car door closing. I can still
hear James’s voice, blathering on into his cell phone. I can’t make out
any words, just happy mumbling through our well-sealed windows.
“I’m just saying . . . it could be worse, right?” I say.
She shakes her head and sighs. I’ve found that women sometimes
pretend to be more infuriated with men than they actually are in
order to make larger, more general points. But I can see by the look
on her face that she’s genuinely mystified “How can this not make
you mad? Are you really that . . . clueless?” “Kris, have you heard of the Internet? Do you know what kind of
stuff is on there? Compared to that, this magazine is really kind of
charming. The fact that we haven’t caught him watching fetish videos
on the computer represents probably our greatest achievement as par-
ents. You didn’t have brothers. You don’t know boys like I do. Trust
me . . . this is perfectly natural.”
She’s prepped for this, too, and her eyes roll. I get the feeling she’s
been rehearsing this conversation with a stunt husband. “Oh, right,
right,” she says. “The ‘it’s natural’ argument. That’s very in-fashion
right now, huh? You’re all just animals. It’s all evolutionary. There’s
no way to control you or your overwhelming masculinity. We should
all just get used to it, right?”
This seems like something different than what I just said, and I
briefly consider hiding out in the bathroom and pretending to brush
my teeth. But then something dawns on me. “Wait. How did you
find this thing anyway? You weren’t going through his stuff, were
you? He’s not a little—”
“No, I wasn’t going through his stuff. It was sitting in his under-
wear drawer, Mitchell.”
“His underwear drawer?”
“Yes. I’m his mother. I was putting away his laundry.”
To articulate her point, she moves to the basket of unfolded clothes
that’s been sitting on her reading chair for three days and starts an-
grily balling socks into haphazard pairs. This seems like a little bit of
a stretch, barefoot and folding laundry. She’s a corporate lawyer who
makes twice what I do. And so as she continues taking her frustration
out on our clothing, I think about the Catholic-guilt-ridden Play-
boys of my own youth. When I was Bradley’s age, I hid five of them
elaborately with Cold War paranoia in the false bottom of a giant
cardboard box of baseball cards. My goal—and I’d actually thought
this through—was to hide them so obsessive-compulsively that if I
were to die in some freakish, crazy accident, no one, particularly my
goddamn mother, would ever find them. My knuckleheaded son has
been a hell of a lot less careful, and now we’re both paying for it. It
doesn’t seem fair.