Thoughts Before Sleep

THOUGHTS BEFORE SLEEP

A Novel by

Neil Hetzner

© 2020

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My heart-felt thanks to Martha Day, Philip Hetzner, Mike Monahan and Jeni Martin,

who were extraordinarily helpful to me while writing this story.

All of the characters and events portrayed in the story are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to living persons or events is coincidental.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

OCTOBER

NOVEMBER

DECEMBER

JANUARY

FEBRUARY

MARCH

APRIL

MAY

JUNE

AUGUST

SEPTEMBER

NOVEMBER

OCTOBER

Instead of our usual walk on the beach, I took Deebs on the bike-path today. As he stopped, started, tugged, and sniffed, I was doing the same thing. Deebs was doing all that on the path where he was. I was doing it on the path where I’ve been. I was trying to understand what Clark and I still have in common other than our love for Deebs. It seems pretty pathetic that the only thing keeping a thirty-four-year-old marriage together is a thirteen-year-old Corgi. That’s not much glue. But I’m guessing it’s probably about as much glue as what holds Mom and Dad together. I’ve often thought how each of them would have had better lives if they had gone their separate ways years ago. If they could afford it. It could be their glue is economic and not their vows, or inertia, or a sense of duty that keep them married. If each of them had been given one hundred thousand dollars ten or twenty years ago, would they have called it quits? Who knows? My thoughts about Mom and Dad and marriage are intruding into my own.

What I do know is that coming back after our walk, Deebs did not want to get in the car. I used more energy getting him in than I used on the walk. After we took off, he whined all the way home. When I drove into the garage, I had a similar feeling to what Deebs just had had. He didn’t want to get in the car and I didn’t want to get out and go back inside the castle. That’s not a new feeling, but I had never felt it so strongly. I sat there feeling panicky. My arms were trembling and I thought I was going to retch. When I finally opened the door, Deebs clambered over me to get out, stuck his nose against the door and started whining. When I finally got up my courage to open the door, he raced in for food and water. I walked down to the koi pond and made myself worse by watching those fish go round and round in their clean, well-provisioned, properly aerated miniature environment. After the bike-path and its freedom, I’m sure the car felt claustrophobic to Deebs. When I got back to the castle, standing outside the mudroom door, I felt the same sense of closing in. Watching the never ending, never changing cycles of the koi made that feeling even worse.

I don’t like my ceaseless circles during the week, but the weekends are worse. Clark and I aren’t lovers. We’re not really spouses in any meaningful way. We’re definitely not friends. We’re not host and guest. We’re not even roommates. If we’re anything, I’m the put-upon innkeeper with no choice but to take the unwanted weekend guest.

I don’t know if I can do it for much longer. I’m too angry and too sad, but I think I may be too afraid to do anything about it. What would Deebs think or do if, on our next walk, I unsnapped the leash, got in the car, and drove away? Would he relish the freedom, or would he fear it? Would it feel like danger, abandonment, or overwhelming confusion rather than freedom? Would he soon start whining for the claustrophobic discomfort of the car?

I wouldn’t consider unleashing and leaving Deebs or removing the koi from their tiny pond and giving them the freedom of the ocean. But I may somehow have to find the courage to do that for myself.

Clark tried to remember the name of the movie, but it wouldn’t come. There was a woman with long hair dressed in a long white dress. She had her hands clasped in front of her as she moved about a shadow-filled room. She drifted around the room from fireplace to window to bookcase without seeming to move her feet, as if she were wearing roller skates and someone was pulling her from place to place. Judith was moving in that same ghostly way, drifting from the gas fireplace to the entertainment center to the window that looked out on the patio and pool. With what he assumed were bare feet hidden by the massive gray suede sectional that separated him from her, and with that part of her body that he could see covered in a tent-like batik shift, with her be-ringed fingers resting atop her laundry bag belly, with her lips drawn inside her mouth in concentration, and with her earbuds wedged into her ears providing something that demanded intense concentration, his wife of thirty-four years, gone missing for the last ten, was a too familiar sight. After five days and four nights in Fairfax, Virginia, he was back home in Sandy Cove, Rhode Island. Carefully setting his suitcase on the mudroom’s tiled floor, Clark leaned so the door frame took part of his fatigue as he tried to see past what he was staring at to what he would have seen coming home thirty years before.

A much smaller home. A much smaller wife. A wife who might have beaten him home by five minutes. A wife who would have stripped off her work clothes—and left them puddled on the floor in a way that always reminded him of the witch at the end of The Wizard of Oz—and thrown on a sloppy tee shirt and the kind of gym shorts that dared observers to resist looking past their baggy-legged hems. She might have had a can of Tab in one hand and an apple in the other. And he would have snuck through the front door in hopes of seeing her just as she was and, just as he was at that moment, he would have felt the need to lean against the door frame, but unlike now, not from exhaustion, but rather from weak knees brought on by desire for the barefoot, apple-holding temptress swaying to Joni Mitchell in end-of-day’s golden light.

The woman over there, the one who curdled his thoughts and darkened his feelings, who made the weekend longer and more draining than the work week, was also, through some complicated, inexplicable, yet sequential array of twelve thousand days the enchantress who had overwhelmed his ability to describe, understand, or accept the exquisite havoc she caused inside his mid-twenties’ self.

Clark stepped back into the shadows of the mudroom to prepare himself to be with his wife.

He never should have married me. Wrong. I never should have married him. If I hadn’t married him, he would have had to keep his Peeping Tomism outside, peering past the edge of a curtain, past the slats of the blinds, rather than spying from the shadows of a mudroom, or in morning’s light while he thought I slept. Does he think I need to turn around to feel the anger and regret he is emanating? Helen Keller could have felt that venomous anger, that long tally sheet of regrets.

What explains the depth of his disgust? The hamburger patty’s worth of meat that makes up my jowls? The teaspoon-sized divots on the backs of my thighs? Are you so shallow, Clark, that those imperfections can generate such rage? Why do I suspect if my present weight and waist were the same as they were when I was twenty-five your rage would still be the same? I’ve come to realize you never were in love with me. You were in love with my surface and my sex. If you had ever taken the time to think, to look around you, you might have noticed that people, all of us, even that made-up mannequin Melia, age. People droop, sag, shrink, and wrinkle. People lose hair where it was and grow it where it wasn’t. Peoples’ skins misfit them—too small and looking about to burst, too big and settling in unexpected places. Back in the beginning, instead of leering at me as I was, you should have shifted your attention to my mother and granny to see what I would become. You couldn’t do that. Too much reality would have weakened the fantasy, wakened the dream. Better to ignore the inexorable. You were a Scarlett O’ Hara in khakis who would think about it tomorrow. And, now, it’s tomorrow and when you are around me all you can think about is how I’ve betrayed you by aging. Back then, your thoughts were about the person you loved, adored, idolized. You called her Judie Shelilter, but you thought of her as a blow-job gifting, waist-straddling, ear-licking, guttural-moaning, Schtupping Beauty. Always the same. Never to age. What horror has it been for you, Clark, to watch the fairy tale grow real, to watch Schtupping Beauty grow older, grow bigger. To have a horror so big it fills your mind with my imperfections.

Everybody loathes somebody sometime. Thank you, Dean Martin.

I’m coming to the conclusion that almost all of the men on Tinder either are or should be selling used cars, replacement windows, magazine subscriptions, annuities, or vacuum sweepers. I learned the word oleaginous when I was at BU. I’ve always liked the sound of it, but I don’t think I ever felt the need to use it until now. If Ted Bundy had been around for Tinder, he could have doubled, tripled, quadrupled his number of victims. There’s probably someone on Tinder right now who has Bundy’s history on his bedside stand. More than half the photographs I’ve been swiping through look like they’ve been cut and pasted from a Land’s End catalog. I look at those pictures and I imagine a guy with teardrop tattoos in some maximum prison in Louisiana flipping through the catalog figuring out which of the models he wants to use for his profile. I still like Tinder. I like the efficiency. I can reject two hundred guys in less than an hour. Even in my best days, back in a bar or bowling alley, I wouldn’t have been able to reject more than five or six an hour. If I tried that now, after pushing my quota of losers away, I’d be nervous walking across a darkened parking lot to my car. Maybe being grateful that it was only my tires and not me that got slashed.

There was one guy that I almost swiped right. He had a sweet-looking face, most of his hair, maybe mischievous eyes, wrinkles that might have come from smiling, and a gut not half as big as Santa’s. He says he’s been widowed for three years. Has two sons and two grandsons. Steve is a solo practice attorney. And, the thing that almost got me to swipe right, he confesses to being a cereal-killer with a preference for Raisin Bran topped with extra raisins and made justifiable by using almond, rather than regular, milk. As someone who in my worst of times could kill a family-sized box of Frosted Flakes with no milk in less than a day, I felt a connection.

I’m positive that I want someone with hair and certainly not because Clark has his, but because having a man with hair would reassure me that I’m still in the third quarter of my life, with lots of good times to come, rather than in the fourth quarter with nothing but garbage time ahead.

I’m considering. Steve. Steve. Not really my favorite name. Steve and Judith. Steve and Judie. Judi. Stevie and Judi. He definitely is heavy. Not obese. But I wonder which way his weight is going. Has be gained weight since his wife died? Feeding the emptiness, the ache? Or, has he lost? Lost his wife and then lost interest in other things? Hey, Steve, can I see a before and after widowhood picture? Hey, Steve, would that smiley face of yours stay smiling if I said something mean, put on ten pounds, slid back down into the sludge I’ve been wading through, preferred to listen to podcasts about relationships rather than have one with you? Sorry, Steve, nice talking at you, but I gotta go. I’ve got a lot of catalogs to go through to find the face of me that I’ll use in my Tinder profile.

NOVEMBER

Deeb’s death is hitting me hard. Much harder than I ever would have imagined. He was there two days ago. Giving me a herding nudge as I left for the airport. Now, he’s gone. No last pat. J was sobbing tears on the phone. And more tears when I got home. I just said family emergency and that I’d be back tomorrow afternoon. I have no idea what they made of that.

We buried him in the hole he had gouged out for himself to take dust baths in. J shoveling alongside me. A day later and I’ve yet to get sarcastic about J holding … using … a shovel. For a half-hour we were working together. I’m so used to her being impregnable, shut off from the world, my world, by her earbuds. To see her sobbing and sweating while shoveling took me by surprise. In a way, watching her distracted me from what I was feeling, that I had just lost the last simple thing in my life.

J, the marriage, work, the house, Melia, Linda, the landscaping, my investments, my body. Not a simple one in the bunch. Every thought, or, if I manage to get that far, every decision is immediately followed by a ‘Yes, but.’ Except for Deebs. Throw the ball twenty-five, fifty times. Oh, Deebs, back then, I didn’t begrudge you the time, or become frustrated at the repetition. Recently, if I only threw the ball three or four times before you tired, I didn’t judge you. Every change in J, every pound, wrinkle, and divot, every abandoned interest or new hobby, every idea that might conflict with one expressed a decade before I observe and judge. Deebs, gray snout, doing the wriggle walk because of the extra pounds, smelling oilier, huffing while getting up, and plopping rather than sitting down, I observed, only observed, observed with deep affection. J does something that irritates me, opens or closes the blinds at the wrong time, changes toothpastes, put raisins in the oatmeal cookies, and six months later I remember. Deebs would take a shit in my tomato patch or gnaw through my new garden hose and a day later it would be gone from my mind.

Clark came by tonight and brought me a pound of cooked back fin crab meat. That is a good incentive for not dying in my sleep tonight. I don’t know if he was being generous, thoughtful, or making a peace offering of some kind. If it was supposed to be the latter, I’m not sure what he considers his infraction to have been. It has been the second time he’s come in a week. That contrasts with the once a month drop by when he first took the job in Fairfax. Those first visits usually were no more than an hour. Now, he is here for three, sometimes four. He never comes at dinner time. He says he works late, but I suspect he is terrified of what he might find if he came her for a meal. I’ve saved myself untold hours in the kitchen by inviting people to dinner in a very non-specific way –just a generic invitation with no set day, date or time. I offer the possibility, but plant the idea that if they tried to pin me down on a time that what might await them upon arrival would be a 1950s haute cuisine offering of a casserole of tuna fish, cream of celery soup, egg noodles, and stuffed green olives all topped with a Ritz cracker crumb topping. When extending invitations, I use my eyes, hands, and voice in such ways that the invitee isn’t sure whether he or she is hearing irony or my true intentions.

I’m sure Clark is telling himself he doesn’t arrive at dinner time because he doesn’t want to put me out. Yet, that same argument about putting me out isn’t made as time first flies from eight until nine, trudges from nine through ten, before finally staggering past eleven.

As Clark always has done, he begins his visit with the niceties: hopeful about my health, inquisitive as to my doings, saddened by my limitations, and praiseful of my hair, dress, foot-ware, jewelry, and fragrance. After whirring through those first ten minutes about me, the time comes to get on about Clark. Him and his trials, triumphs and proceedings.

An intriguing thing about Clark is that he never talks about himself as he is at the moment. His talk is always of the past, whether that be ten years, two days, or three hours before … or the future. I think he might avoid the present for two reasons. The first is that having some temporal distance gives him the opportunity to organize and shape the narrative. The second, and probably more important reason is that it allows him to be an observer, moderator, or narrator rather than a participant. Both of those have obvious benefits, but they do prevent Clark from the intimacy of sharing what I think of as unintelligible anguish—when what is shared is more sounds than words and the string of sounds are more gibberish than sentences. My strictly limited experience is that allowing myself to blather often precedes insight.

There are times when I want to suggest to Clark that he show me the wounds while they are red, raw, and oozing rather than displaying the scars after he has been healed. Other times, particularly when the hour hand has trudged past ten and the contents of my bladder are probing for any weak points, I harbor the notion of snapping out something that would draw blood, and once that wound was made, immediately sticking my long-nailed finger into it to poke and twist.

I feel like I have been wandering through Stop and Shop on a perfect beach weather summer Saturday.

The day-trippers have pillaged and plundered. The shelves are half-empty. What is left is knocked over. The produce section looks like Sherman’s army has passed through. There are some beets and radishes that don’t look too bad, but pretty much everything else that remains— the tomatoes, lettuces, green beans, peppers and zucchini—are bruised and broken. Wounded. Rejected. I’ve had e-mail correspondence with Charles, Johnnie, Wes, and Wilhelm. Wes may be able to type, but he can’t write. Johnnie and Charles don’t know