Birthday

Your wife says she plans to get you a gun for your birthday. You got fly guts on your hands once and it made you throw up. You tell her this. She says, “You can’t shoot flies with a Mossberg riot gun.”

“I’d prefer this book,” you say.

She says, “What book?”

You say, “This book of poems by Pablo Mohel,” and show her the title copied onto the back of a Taco Bell receipt.

She says you read too much, need an outdoor hobby, back to nature, a chainsaw maybe. “Is he Jewish?” she says.

You say yes. She says she knows him.

“Are you sure?” you say.

She says, “Yes. Are you?”

“I don’t know,” you say, “but I think he’s circumcised.”

You really want this book. She sighs and holds a pair of yellow-handled wire-cutters up to the lamp.

* * *

You’re not sure she’s going to get you the book. A Sharper Image catalog on her nitestand is open to a section near the middle. The picture of medieval, bikini cut, chain-mail briefs is circled with crow-blue lipstick. You want to touch it, “morbid acuteness of the senses,” but you withdraw.

Your wife slouches at the bedroom door before coming in. She’s got a black plastic pocket comb stuck in her wet hair and a towel wrapped around her waist. “When’d you get home?” she says.

You look at your digital depth-finder analog compass chronograph watch — waterproof to 3,000 fathoms. “A few minutes ago,” you say.

She rakes networks of hair from the comb. You look at her raw-meat face in the mirror. The towel disengages. You quickly turn and look into the pencil sharpener on your nitestand. You say, “You shouldn’t scrub so hard.”

“I don’t scrub hard enough,” she says, “look at the size of this zit.” She pinches a point on her forehead blue. A faint tear of blood trickles into a brambled eyebrow. She picks up a single-edged razorblade from the oak-framed Coors mirror beside her jewelry box. “Cut the calluses off my feet, will you.”

“Sure.” Your stomach growls. You think about your circumcision. Do surgeons feel pain?

* * *

You’re watching a National Geographic special about Jane Goodall’s family when your wife swings by and changes the channel to Three’s Company. “You get tomorrow off for your birthday?” she says.

You read the fine print on the bottom rim of your heart-stamped paper cup. “Nope.”

“What time you gonna be home?” she says and bites a cold hot dog.

“Same time, I guess.” You suck the last bit of Coke out of the cracks in the slivered ice.

“Don’t,” she says.

“Why?”

“I can’t tell you. It’s Freudian.”

“Freud fucked society,” you say. “It’s in that book.”

“What book?” she says.

You show her the worn Taco Bell receipt again. She looks at it. You look at her oiled thumb smearing the erasermate ink. You think about contracts. You eat the ice.

* * *

The smell of her Avon toilet water made you drunk with lust for weeks before you signed the license and rented the priest. Later you drank some from her green, chrysalis-shaped bottle. Love. You retched for three days, smiling thankfully for every glance she passed you on your bleeding knees. She dropped plates of leftovers on the bathroom floor for you. You probed her armpits for ingrown hairs. Synergistic intercourse; short-lived.

* * *

You’re taking the garbage out when you notice a train of ants on the patio. Your wife’s ex-brother-in-law told you once how running your finger across their path confuses them. You look for a break in the line big enough for a finger. They’re too tight. Thousands of them on a one-way ticket with no windows. You think about the first one. What makes it a leader? You imagine yourself running blind with six legs. You think about the three-legged race you lost on the 4th. Ants. What kind of brain?

Your wife descends from behind you spraying a stream of bug napalm down the track. Ants derail right and left. You stand back as she makes a second pass, lower altitude. Bodies blow up against the stucco wall, where stains of past generations fade in degrees of time served.

You take up your garbage.

What kind of brain?

During her third strafing, your wife tells you she’s invited her sister and her sister’s husband Hank over for Trivial Pursuit. You don’t like her sister. But you never tell her to her face. She smokes. Cartons. You read her once, in passing, the amount of tar in a pack of Kools, and pulled out your wallet-sized 834 function solar powered graphic scientific calculator with 422-step programmability. Under the portable ultraviolet lamp that her husband carted with him wherever he went — he had diagnosed himself as vitamin-Q deficient — you added up her minimum consumption of tar for a monthly total of somewhere around one and a half gallons. She snorted, coughed, then spit a cockroach-looking wad into your near-empty glass of iced tea. The light burned out. Hank blamed it on your calculator. You re-read the owner’s manual.

“What time are they going to be here?” you say.

She says, “They’re setting up in the den right now.”

“I think I’d like to learn sign language,” you say.

Infra-red goggles on, she stalks other insects in the lawn. “Why?”

“I want to improve my other senses,” you say leaning on the bag of trash to force it into the can. A topless pink and white container half full of fuzzy-green cottage cheese erupts from a hole in the bag and tumbles to rest against your crotch.

* * *

The house reeks of eucalyptus oil and mackerel. Your sister-in-law is draping a towel over her husband’s head.

“Hank’s vitamin deficiency is acting up,” she says, then stands up to adjust the pyramid shade on the lamp.

The towel has folded upon itself exposing one corner of the stainless steel cool mist ionizing vaporizer on the floor.

“How’s he going to play?” you ask.

“I can play,” says the towel. “Hey, why don’t you have that football game on?”

You turn on the TV.

“I want to be brown,” the towel says. His wife says she wants pink.

“Brown’s the only manly color in this game,” he says.

Your wife gives you the blue.

“Oh, I have to show you what I’m giving him for his birthday tomorrow,” your wife says to her sister. They leave and go to the bedroom.

You pull the first card and read the Entertainment question to yourself: Where did the kids sit on TV’s Howdy Doody Time? Flip the card over: The Peanut Gallery.

“Jesus!” the towel says. “They gotta get rid of that sonofabitch. He can’t run worth shit!”

You look at the TV.

The towel says, “We gonna play? You go ahead and roll first.”

You roll a three. “Sports and Leisure,” you say. His hand laps up a card.

“What’s the captain of a curling foursome called?”

“Captain of a what?” you think. “Captain,” you say.

“No, you dumb shit!!” he says farting himself forward in the chair. The towel drops to the floor. “The question was what the captain is called. The Skip! That’s the answer.” He flicks the card and it hits your breast pocket. “Jesus,” he says.

You look at the card. Science and Nature: What inventor said, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration?” You look at Hank’s poached cod face. “Your roll,” you say.

He gets a five. “Entertainment,” you say. He puts his head back into the towel. “What 1951 film featured Ronald Reagan raising a chimp?”

He collects the towel at the back of his neck. “Have you seen this commercial?” he says.

It’s an ad for the Catholic church. Four alterboys light candles while a voice makes the invitation.

“Have you ever wondered what it would be like to ream an alterboy?” he says. Eucalyptus oil or something oozes along the ledge of his upper lip.

Your wife and her sister return from the bedroom. “You guys already started?” her sister says, tucking her silk tank-top into her two sizes too small designer jeans.

“We can’t play now,” she says. “You guys have already seen the answers.” She looks at your wife and smiles. “That’s okay,” she says, “I’m exhausted anyway. Want me to help you get the lamp in the car babe?”

Her husband stands up, throws his shoulders back and the towel to the floor. “I’m not weak,” he says. He pulls a flattened, yellow cellophane wrapped plug of chewing tobacco from the rear pocket of his Levis and takes a bite off the end with the blue and white fuzz on it.

“Want some?” he says, tapping the fuzzy end once on your chin. “It’ll put hair on your chest.”

You decline and bend over to pick up the vaporizer. You can’t smell anything.

“Don’t do that!” he says. “I’m not handicapped.” He stuffs the tarry wad back into his pocket and takes the vaporizer from you. He unplugs the lamp and puts on the car cigarette lighter extension.

“Hey, I never answered the question,” he says, and spits in the direction of the fireplace. Turning to you he says, “Bonzo goes to Washington. I get a piece for that one.” “Make sure I get a piece,” he says to your wife who leans smiling against the open front door.

From behind the torn screen door you watch the car leave, the interior glowing ultraviolet.

In the den, the towel is limp on the floor.

It’s time for bed. You take a couple of game cards with you.

* * *

After work, you’re pulling out of the Taco Bell drive-thru when you run over the curb. A lady several feet away grabs the arm of a young boy in front of her. She yells something at you in Spanish and crosses herself. You hit the brakes. Your Coke hits the floorboard. You think about the church commercial. You think about your birthday. You think: the earth eats every sunset while shadows of bean-gas pass silently between the ubiquitous blue cheek and the chair. Who’s to say what selfish iconoclast lies beyond the purulent clouds or scabs of asphalt?

You just know your wife didn’t get you the book.

* * *

There’s a car in your driveway. Your sister-in-law’s spyder. You park along the curb, roll up the windows, and brush burrito crumbs off the seat. Lock the doors.

You walk across the burned-out lawn (too much fertilizer, not enough water). The front door’s unlocked. You take off your tie and undo a couple of buttons.

An opened postal package with a Sharper Image label on it straddles the arm of the loveseat.

You take off your shoes and shuffle to the bedroom.

A pair of chain mail bikini briefs slump heavily on the threshold floor. You cautiously step around curiously inspecting them, from a distance. In bed, your wife and her sister are naked, french kissing. Indentations from the chain mail weave a fine pattern on your wife’s hips. They stop and look up at you, smiling. Your wife catches her breath.

“Happy birthday,” she says. “Did you get your book?”

You think about the priest, Freud, the game — ants. You can’t remember the last time you looked at her naked hips. “I read too much,” you say, and take off your socks.