I prefer to call myself a puncher.

I read this play called: How I Learned to Drive in my dorm room. And as I read the first page, I somehow remembered reading it before. Then I remembered, how months ago, my ex would carry the same play around when she was taking the same class last semester. And how I at one point, playfully snatched it out of her hand and read the first page, probably kissed her afterwards. Its hard to imagine that ever happened.

Today, I am slightly drunk. I came home from the university with 50 or more papers to grade about how Edward Said’s text, Orientalism impacted American cinema, and I just slept with a student a few hours ago. I situated myself at the dining room table and looked over the counter to the refrigerator and thought maybe I should drink a few beers to calm my nerves, and then I am slightly drunk after around 7 cans.

I sit at my office room upstairs, across from the bedroom where my wife is watching TV, and I am wobbling my pen over words I read and then forget.

I stand up on my chair, and reach for a film art textbook near the top of the bookcase. I swing my arms around upwards in small arcs trying to grab its spine. After a few swings I manage to grasp it for a second, and then inadvertently throw it to the ground, after which I trip over the arm of the chair and fall after it.

My wife hears the thump, and sprawled on the ground, with my ear near the wooden floor, her footsteps sound like an angry mammoth’s.

Her red-tinged hair falls over her face as she leans against the doorway. She examines the scene and I turn my head around, like a flapping lobster on wood. She looks into my eyes for almost a full minute.

            “Are you seriously drunk right now?” She says finally. I am suddenly angered. I have 50 papers to grade and here she is, giving me shit.

            “Fuck you Lucy. Go fuck someone.” I say as I pass out on the ground.

The next day, when I wake up, Lucy is already gone to work. After majoring in East Asian studies in college and writing for various sustainability magazines, she now works for Zenith, a computer hardware company in their advertising department. Given her educational background, she should hate her job. The SIM cards and silicon microchips they produce are probably assembled in hyper-polluting sweatshops in China. But Lucy never expressed any dislike towards her work.

In fact, she seems to like it. Last month, when she was promoted to head of her department (which I don’t know the name of really), she actually took me to a dinner party her co-workers arranged for her. I usually chose not to go to these gatherings, because I was certain would never have an engaging conversation with one of my wife’s coworkers about the benefits of using the Python programming language. And then after enough drinks, there may be no intelligent conversation at all.  But she insisted I go with her this time.

            The party was at Cody Jensen’s house, her co-worker in the advertising department. It was a humble home, not in a gated community, but he had a well-kept lawn and an oak tree with a tire swing near the driveway. He greeted us at the door with gelled black hair.

            “Lucy! Congrats! You’re my boss now.” He said as he hugged her, and I think smelled the nape of her neck simultaneously. I shook his hand and said hi. They began chatting and laughing near the doorway about Fred or whoever was their boss. Already I hated him. I was not worried about her sleeping with him; I hated him for having gelled hair.

            “I’m going inside to get a drink.” I said to Lucy, and proceeded into the house. Some poor generic jazz, probably Kenny G, was playing from somewhere around the house. The walls were painted strange whimsical colors and there were highly stylized and probably fake Mayan antiques strewn over countertops to make the family seem interesting. Where was his wife? I wondered. She probably should have greeted us at the door, I thought. But these small questions of social formality were what made me seem paranoid, so I stopped thinking them. For example, Cody probably shouldn’t be smelling my wife’s neck, but to think he is, would be a paranoid thing to think.

            I walked over to dining room where people were talking and laughing, and downed a couple shots of tequila which were handed to me. I talked with one woman for a remarkably long time about Nintendo, and then decided I was tired and wanted to go home. I went to look for Lucy, and couldn’t find her after bumping through people, searching the living room and dining room. Some doors were locked so maybe she did end up fucking Cody, I thought. But I quickly caught myself, and un-thought it and sat down instead on a couch in the living room.

            I then fell asleep for a while, talking to Susie, Cody’s wife, about pasta. She kept asking to touch my hands which I thought was weird. She said that my hands were good for rolling dough for pizza.

            Lucy woke me up a couple hours later. I looked around. People were filing out of the front door, exchanging pleasantries, Susie was standing with Cody at the door saying goodbye.

“Let’s go home.” Lucy chuckled, probably at me being asleep.

“Yeah.” I said. We walked out of the door. Gelled hair Cody hugged my wife again, for a whole minute. And then again, I was sure this time, he moved in and smelled her neck, his lips very close to her soft exposed skin. Susie stared at me as this happened, but she didn’t say anything. She smiled.

            From then on, I policed myself viciously against unacceptable thoughts. Thoughts of locked doors at Cody Jenson’s house, and what smelling someone’s neck might mean, arose occasionally, but they were put down swiftly after watching TV or a few beers. For the month after he smelled her neck, I felt in the back of my mind and in dreams an image of vapor streams rising up from volcanic ground, and me frantically stepping on these cracks in volcanic crust to cover them up.

            One day, Lucy told me at dinner that her work hours would be longer now, and she wouldn’t be home by 5 anymore.

            “There’s just a lot more to do now that I am in charge of a project committee.” She said spinning some noodles around on her fork.

            “That’s completely fine. I understand” I said, with no trace of spite or malice. She smiled slightly, but I could tell she was troubled. Her eyes were focused intently and her mouth was a thin line.

            “We don’t have to talk about it now. Let’s watch a movie after dinner, okay?” I offered. Movies always made her feel better. So after dinner that day, we sat down on the couch and watched Manhattan Murder Mystery and some sitcoms afterwards. The sex we had that day I remember vividly.

We went upstairs to the bedroom and I unbuttoned my jeans as if they were the portal to the world of happiness and ethereal light. She took off her shirt and the rest of her clothes slowly and reverently, and I felt her breasts with static excitement in my fingers. All the while, when we had sex, the TV was on downstairs and I heard certain phrases buzz out occasionally.

“Eat fresh” it whispered. After we were dirty with sweat and panting, and I turned over and we held each other, the TV was quiet for a moment and then:

“I love you. I love you. I love you.” repeated from a telephone in an NBC sitcom. Maybe Friends. I don’t know exactly. I’ve never watched Friends. When we went to sleep that night, I imagined a strange blue mark on the back of her neck, like a flower. In the morning however, it was gone.

            Customarily, since I always came home earlier than Lucy, I would prepare dinner. But after she was promoted to project manager, she wouldn’t be home till 11 or later. When I was done with the day’s grading and dinner, there was not much left to do, but wait for Lucy. Many days, I sat at the dining table and watched TV, until I imagined what possibly could keep my wife from me for 8 straight hours, until I imagined different positions in which Cody Jensen fucked my wife, and until I un-imagined all this as well.

To fill those surplus lonely hours, I became more talkative to my students. After class I would often have conversations with interested students who wanted to show off that they had seen all of Mizoguchi and Kurasawa’s films already. Most of them would stop to talk after class sporadically. But one in particular, Claire Roberts, a film and English literature double major, began attending my office hours regularly.

            At first, she talked to me about how she was planning to write her thesis for the film studies double major requirement on the prominence of the American Western in Kurasawa’s and Kobayashi’s films, and I told her that such an assertion was too obvious. We discussed her essay for a few weeks. And it became regular for her to set her messenger-style bookbag, riddled with buttons advertising local indie bands, down on the floor of my office and eventually even recline in her chair, propping up her feet up on my desk.

            Sometimes she would talk about her boyfriend, and his lack of taste for bands like Joy Division and The Smiths. At one point, (probably unwisely) I brought in a Joy Division record and we listened to it in my office. She would mouth the words cutely to dark, distortion-heavy post-punk songs, and strum on an imaginary guitar, and then embarrassed would burst out laughing.

            “God I’m sorry you had to see that!” she exclaimed, one time. I would chuckle slightly, change the subject and remark on the syntax of her essay, and be slightly uncomfortable because I found her very attractive. She had short dyed red hair, a headband, pale skin, freckles near the nose, and she looked straight at me whenever she spoke, as if she knew herself that she had enough sex appeal to ruin my career.

            I almost knew it was inevitable that we were going to have sex. She would suggest too much by the way she lightly touched my chest when she said goodbye. The day it happened, it was late afternoon. I had brought in a Smiths’ record that day, and she was humming along to This Charming Man as she re-read the corrections I had made on her essay the seventeenth time. That day, as she said goodbye, she playfully pushed me lightly back into the room. I walked back to the doorway and propped my arms against it.

            “Why did you do that?” I asked.

            “I don’t know.” She said, for the first time not looking me in the eye.

            “Stop being weird. Go read up on Film Art today. Pay attention to how Bordwell handles Mizoguchi” I advised.

            “Shut up.” She said.

            “What?” I confusedly managed to blurt. Then she pushed me again, this time hard enough to make me land in the chair in front of my desk. I got up angrily, but she came inside and closed the door. Locked it. That’s when I picked her up and put her on my desk table and took off her clothes. As I looked at her pale white breasts, I wondered why I was about to have sex with this girl. I must hate my wife, I thought. My wife must hate me, I thought.

Then, I remembered that Cody smelled her neck. Put his lips up very close to it. And I wondered what sort of remnant behavior I will exhibit towards this girl after we begin having sex. Will I smell her neck? Will my secret symbol be different? Will I ruffle her hair instead? That was the day I came home and got drunk.

I am awake in the morning, remembering that I told my wife to go fuck someone the night before. I call her five times, each time she does not pick up. I decide not to leave messages. I nap. Drink some beers, until I am all out. Sleep again.

It is 7 pm when I hear the lock being undone at the front door.

“Lucy” I say as she enters. “I am sorry. I may have said some rude things yesterday.”

“Yeah, it’s okay. You shouldn’t get drunk like that.” She agrees, and grabs an apple from the fridge.

“I’m really sorry, if you think I have a drinking problem we can go see someone about it. I am prepared to do that.” I say. She looks up from her apple for a second.

“It’s fine. We don’t have to talk about it.” She says.

“Yeah. I guess it’s not a big deal.” I concede. We eat dinner and watch TV. After watching the first two Die Hard movies on TV, Lucy changes into her pajamas, and begins to make the bed. I watch her, as she crawls on the bed on all fours, carefully smoothing out the creases and folds in the sheets. Her soft hair falls down the side of her face, and I remember the telephone in Friends: I love you. I love you. I love you. I agree with the TV.

“I love you” I say as we get into bed and turn off the lights.

“Love you too” she mumbles, yawning. “Goodnight”

“We don’t say it enough do we? The: I love you. We used to say it everyday.” She is silent for a second, her head turned the other way. She shifts on her side, and looks at me.

“Maybe we don’t need to say it anymore.” She almost whispers. The image of vapor jets near molten surfaces comes to mind again. I have almost plugged all of them. I realize I have to ask her.

“Lucy. Why did Cody smell your neck?” 

“What?” she blurts, confused.

“Last month, at the office party, when Cody said hello at the door, he hugged you and smelled your neck. And then again when Cody said goodbye to you, he almost kissed it.” I say.

“Oh..that?” She hesitates, slightly off guard. “That’s just,” she pauses. “A weird thing he does.”

“A weird thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Why were those doors locked at his house?” I ask.

“How the hell am I supposed to know? What are you trying to say?”

“Nevermind. I am being stupid. Forget it.” I cut it off.

“Go to sleep. I love you.” She says, and begins running her fingers through my hair. She repeats it softly “go to sleep.” When she stops and turns over again, I say again,

“Lucy?”

“Yes?”

“I slept with a student.” She begins crying. Sobbing into the pillow. “Do you want a divorce.”

“Yes.” She sobs. “Yes I do.”

poopisalwaysfunny:

I want to get a beautiful girl.

Just once.

Now that I’m in college.

So that I know I can do it.

And have the confidence to do it again.

You are a beautiful guy :)