7th Avenue Film Series #11

No trailer for this one for some reason, so here's a piece from the soundtrack instead:

Marriage, Airwolf, Scott Bakula

Last night, at three in the morning, as Chiara and I were getting to sleep, we reminisced about television shows from the 80s. We discovered that we missed Quantum Leap desperately and could, neither of us, understand how they had a plot every week on Webster or Alice. We both definitively agreed that Airwolf was the stupidest show ever. A super helicopter? a helicopter?

This, for us, was a sort of impromptu renewal of our vows.

The Traditional Gift

While at dinner last night, I was describing to Chiara the list of "traditional anniversary gifts" that I feel quite sure no one has ever paid any attention to.

She asked what they were and I read them to her:

Me: "First year - Paper."

Chiara: "Money."

Me: "Second year - Cotton."

Chiara: "A tissue."

Me: "Third year - Leather."

Chiara: "A belt."

Me: "Fourth year - Fruit or Flowers."

Chiara: "A basket of flowers?"

Me: "Fifth year - Wood."

Chiara: "A broomstick to the head."

Me: "Sixth year - Candy or Iron. Candy OR Iron?"

Chiara: "Heavy candy?"

Me: "And here is this year's - Wool or Copper."

Chiara: "A copper sweater?"


Bonus Chiara non sequitur from later in the evening:

"Humphrey Bogart looks like one of those guys who has too much saliva in his mouth when he talks."

When I Was Single, I Thought Marriage Would Be Like This Song Sounds

It isn't of course, but both are still good!

Seven

Today Chiara and I have been married seven years.

I can only assume that she is hanging around for the insurance money, because I certainly wouldn't be married to myself for seven years.

And I have a kind of rule that I don't use this blog for serious, sincere things.

So, instead I will just report what Chiara said the other day about the angry man in the theatre, who shouted at the old woman using her phone during The Cave Of Forgotten Dreams:

"I know that all those people in the theatre were old, I mean, they were like archeologies, but that old woman was only playing with her blueberry for like one second before that old man yelled at her. Is he crazy?"

Love you, amore. You're the one who is crazy.

Oh, and P.S., Une Femme Est Une Femme is a DELIGHT, you brat.

Romance!

A quick update before I hop into the shower to have a drink. (who's gonna know?)

Chiara and I have apparently reached a point in our relationship where, when she comes home from work on Valentine's Day and finds me wearing pants, she asks me "Deed you go somewhere today?" in a suspicious tone.

I told her I had to get dressed for when the police came.

Chiara versus the Moon

When you are single for a long time and possessed of a certain temperament suited mostly to actors, English majors, and suicides, you coat your future romantic relationships with a kind of high-gloss shellac.

You lie in bed and imagine lie-ins with girls whose faces you meticulously construct from those of b-list celebrities. You picture yourself reading a poem or two aloud and her rapt with interest. You fantasize about the conversations you'll have about cinema and the arch witticisms she'll make from behind her novel that she's reading in only her underwear and her knee high socks.

In any case, you prepare yourself for romantic interludes and you imagine you'll be so good at them.

Real life is a series of shatterings of fantasies like these. If you're lucky you'll realize that you are much better off without these things.

Chiara is, in so many ways, superior to any girl I was ever with. She's lovely and sexy in a calm, collected, sultry way that never tries too hard or poses for the camera. She's smart and commonsensical and self-assured. She's easy going enough to forgive my neuroses, but neurotic enough herself to charm. One thing she is not, often to my great delight, is sappy or very much interested in traditional notions of romance.

I tried once or twice to read a poem I particularly enjoyed to her. I even tried in bed. Mostly this was simply tolerated. In the event that the poem in question was any longer than a stanza or three, she'd probably ask me if I could keep it down as she was trying to watch "The Biggest Loser" on television.

So I don't know what I expected would happen that night with the moon.

It was late - the middle of the night. I woke up thirsty and padded down the hall to get a glass of water. On the way back from the kitchen I passed by the window and caught a glimpse of the moon and it was fucking huge. I never saw a moon so full and so large. It was as big as a house seen from across the street and as bright as a searchlight pointed at your head. It positively hummed with proximity and I could feel its gravity tugging on the hairs on the backs of my arms. I remember thinking for the briefest of moments that something had gone horribly wrong in the Earth's orbit and that the moon would crash into us at some not too distant hour.

I rushed to the bedroom and woke Chiara. She'd never have believed me if she hadn't seen it with her own eyes.

She swam slowly up from unconsciousness and asked me what was the matter. I told her that she simply had to see the moon because it was the most amazing moon she'd ever see. Groggily, she got out of bed and allowed me to tug her into the living room where I positioned her between the window and myself. My mouth was slack and I beamed at the back of her head.

"Isn't that the most amazing moon! Did you ever see a moon like that?!" I whispershouted in her ear.

"It's the moon," she said, and turned to shuffle back to bed, "I've seen the moon before."

And I don't know why - now it seems so stupid - but at the time that felt like a real rejection to me. I was hurt and felt like I'd taken some wrong turn in my love life. I stayed a while to look at the moon. As it rose higher in the sky it shrank and faded and I got tired again and went to bed. I felt cheated for a while after that.

But now it all seems so dumb. Every emotion and event and vision and idea isn't going to be experienced by one and one's wife in the same way or with the same force. I know that Chiara would be insufferable to me if she were one of those hearts and roses and diamond rings sort of women. I even know that the story wouldn't exist at all if it had turned out just how I'd hoped that night, and I know that the story is better than some gigantic fucking moon four years ago.

And I further know that if Chiara was prone to my whimsy and impulsiveness and romantic flights of fancy, we'd probably be professional balloonists by now rather than urbanites who pay our bills on time.

Come to think of it, ballooning might not be so bad. I could have a balloon painted to look like the moon. But not the real moon. The sort of Edwardian moon of Little Nemo comics or early silent films. The one with the horrible face and the greenish tint (from the cheese, I expect).

After I finish writing this blog, I'm going to get in bed and tell Chiara my idea for a hot air balloon and she is going to get the most quizzical expression on her face and then she will roll her eyes and nod in that way one does to lunatics when one wants to mollify them.

I'll love her all the more for it.

She's a Debutante

Once, while laying in bed at night, Chiara and I got to talking about our friend Joe being in the Army.

"How crazy is it," I said, "that Joe, the mellowest person I ever met, knows how to kill a man?"

"Well," said Chiara after a moment's pause, "it isn't hard."

"C'mon, are you kidding me? Not hard to take another man's life?"

Chiara propped herself up onto one elbow, facing me. I could only see the outline of her against the window in the dark.

"It's not hard to keel a man," she said flatly, "I just wait til you are asleep, I get a sharp knife, and I skkkttt."

She drew her fingernail across my throat slowly, then she plopped back down onto her back and said good night.

I lay a long while in the dark, not feeling very sleepy.

The Vacuum Cleaner Always Rings Twice

Chiara is in love with a vacuum cleaner.

She’ll deny it, but mention the name of our new household cleaning appliance (or speak about its specifications in a pleasant English accent) and watch her pupils dilate and her lips part.

The pathos isn’t lost on her. Here she is, an educated, liberal, feminist woman, but she’s totally enamored of the most potent symbol of domesticity anyone can think of and its associated attachments.

“One is especially for curtains!” she gushed at me.

Many of you already know the iron fist with which Chiara rules our home when it comes to the forever war against entropy. I am - at best - a sort of tolerated condition of this war and I am forever being lintrolled or washed or dusted.

But the day after our (exorbitant) vacuum purchase, I found myself on the sofa pulling at a stray thread from my shirt. I wound it into a little ball and got up to throw it into the trash when Chiara grabbed me by the forearm and - with a gleam in her eye and a toothily sexual rictus - invited me to simply toss the ball of thread onto the floor. I gaped, slack-jawed.

She rubbed the back of one hand with the palm of the other and explained:

“I can vacuum eet!”

That was more or less when I knew I had been replaced.

I had it coming, I suppose. I don’t pull my weight around here with the cleaning, and I’ve been so busy with lawyerly pursuits that I haven’t properly been attending to Chiara’s needs.

I had some measure of the depravity to which she’d sunk when I walked into the bedroom the other day to find her engaged in a truly unnatural act of cleaning:

She was vacuuming the old vacuum with the new vacuum. She looked flushed.

It was like some kind of unholy threeway. In fact, I was curiously aroused by the whole scene.

Later that same evening, Chiara squealed (in either glee or horror) as she accidentally inhaled the Swiffer into the vacuum’s see-through dust chamber. This is what I called the “Richard Gere Moment” for our new machine and I advised Chiara that now was the time for some damage control.

We both agreed that the vacuum ought to be left alone for a few days.

Nevertheless, This afternoon her friend dropped by for some risotto and gossip, and the two of them spent several minutes admiring the sleek lines and meticulously designed ergonomics of the new vacuum in much the way I might have liked to be regarded.

I don't really expect anything of the kind, of course, but I hope I don't soon find a photo of James Dyson taped to our headboard.

I certainly don’t have the attachments to compete.

While the Cat is Away

. . . the mouse will sort of sit around, feeling bored and kinda lonely.

So Chiara took a jetplane to Italy on Sunday, and she left me and the cat (the actual cat) to hold down the fort. The cat might disagree, but I think it’s going all right so far; I almost always remember to feed her.

I mean, sure, the place is getting a little frayed around the edges, but nothing catastrophic. It is like the end of the Roman empire: it just gets more decadent and unkempt, and the dustbunnies make some inroads into the interior (in this metaphor, they’re the Visigoths), and eventually Chiara comes home and clucks and tsks a bit and we clean house and presto, Renaissance!

Thing is, when your wife goes out of town for a month or so, you spin these gossamer webs in your mind’s eye about what it’ll be like. You imagine that now, at last, you’ll have that poker game, or smoke those cigars, or watch those pornographic movies, or go to those bars with your bachelor friends. You think that you’ll play music as loud as you want because no one will be in the other room trying to watch the Biggest Loser. You think you’ll go out every night and the cat thinks she’ll be allowed to sleep in the bed.

Of course, the reality is somewhat more tame. Mostly you just wish you had something to do. You feel sort of depressed and suddenly feel sure that, were your wife around, you’d be having sex. And you feel sure it would be way crazier than any sex you actually have with her. The bed is noticeably colder and the house noticeably quieter.

I guess you play the music (mostly so you don't feel so alone) and you get to dance like an idiot, but that’s more fun when someone is there to roll her eyes at you.

And you don’t really like cigars or strip clubs or whatever anyway.

And the cat? Hell, she’s batshit crazy. Who knows what she thinks about cigars or stripclubs? And if I let her in the bed, Chiara will probably knife me.

So, unless someone gets me out of the house, This’ll be more or less just a great opportunity to catch up on some reading. I’m looking at you, Grapes of Wrath.

Well, and the porn. That part is just like you imagine it will be, more or less.

The Fortress of Not So Solitude

I do my best thinking in the shower.

Really. I find something about the experience conducive to clear, organized thought. Maybe it is the hot water, or the white noise of same, or maybe it is simply being in a small room without distractions - like a deprivation chamber.

Like in Altered States.

It could be that the act of showering has been repeated so many times that it requires no thought whatsoever anymore and that rote quality itself frees my mind for other things. Maybe a Freudian would tell me that it approximates the warmth and wetness of the womb and thus unconsciously calms me.

In any case: I do my best thinking in the shower.

I come up with ideas for the Great American Novel, I practice speeches to the United Nations General Assembly, I imagine solutions to the problems of the Iraqi constitution, I invent inventions.

All while I am shampooing my hair!

I have even extended the range of this effect by studying in the outer chamber of our bathroom. I can’t study in the loft because that is where all the books are and the computer. I can’t study downstairs because that is where Chiara and the television are. So, I move my books and papers onto the bathroom counter, turn on the overhead heater (for the noise - it drowns out the Oprah Chiara is inevitably watching) and get cracking.

The shower (and the bathroom) is like my Fortress of Solitude - it is white, it is quiet, and nobody is allowed in.

The problem with having a Fortress of Solitude is that Lois Lane knows all about it.

Chiara doesn’t seem to respect my study-system. I swear she follows me around the house to check up on me, and few of my activities perplex her more than studying while standing up in the bathroom. Moreover, she hasn’t the least concern for my privacy.

To me, the shower is like my inner sanctum. She isn’t supposed to be in the room unless there is to be shower sex.

Now look, I’ve dated women who wanted an open-door policy in the bathroom; girls who either wanted me to do everything without privacy and/or girls who, themselves, wanted to expose their bathroom activities to me.

I’m not a believer in it.

And, in point of fact, neither is Chiara. It is only that, for her, these other, academic, functions of the bathroom are not deserving of the same privacy.

And, to top it all off, she is constantly grooming me when I am in my Fortress of Solitude. It is like having a gorilla for a wife. I’ll be shaving, let’s say, and she’ll come up behind me and inspect my shoulders for the stray hairs that occasionally try to colonize that otherwise bare expanse of skin. If she finds one, she’ll pluck at it with tweezers until she gets it out. If I have dried my hair, she’ll start stroking down cowlicks and flyaways. If I am getting dressed (she watches me do that, too), she will pluck at places where the fabric is pilling, or tug at where the material has bunched.

God help me if she finds a clogged pore on my face.

And I am nearly always being lint-rolled.

Now I know why they usually build Fortresses of Solitude in the middle of Ice-bound, antipodal plains.

Of course, maybe Superman has stray hairs on his shoulders.

An Argument Concerning Houseplants

Chiara and I had an argument today about houseplants. The crushing weight of the domesticity is not lost on me.

I’m not proud of myself. At one point I believe I actually said that she hated all living things.

This because she rather misliked my plan to purchase an indoor palm.

We sulked and traded the occasional barb for the better part of the afternoon. After the worst of it, she went to watch the home and garden channel on television (I ache with pleasure at the possibility that she sat through a landscaping show where they extolled the virtues of the single trunked kentia palm), and I retreated to the bedroom to read a novel I don’t care for.

This was not really resolved until I came into the living room an hour later and found her wheedling away at our small space heater with a screwdriver.

Mostly the space heater is used to placate the cat when it complains bitterly about the cooler evenings in winter or to warm Chiara’s feet while she hunches over on the sofa to watch plastic surgery programs which send me scurrying out of the room, nauseated.

Thing is, she isn’t repairing it or anything; she wants to vacuum inside the thing.

This is part of her larger vacuum crusade.

Some of the items that I have seen her vacuum in our time spent together: the bed, her clothes, my clothes, me, the cat, books, the out of doors, the insides of shoes, the leaves of plants.

I have learned not to question her wisdom on these matters.

Wordlessly, I helped her to separate the housing of the machine and to clean the accumulated dust of a decade of use out of the corners and electrical whorls and from behind the surprisingly sharp fan blades.

When we finally managed to put it all back together and turn it on, it caught fire, melting the electrical wiring inside and leaving our living room smelling acridly of burnt plastic.

She laughed and bit her finger and raised her eyebrows contritely. I shrugged and we went into the bedroom to escape the smell and to watch a truly disgusting Jessica Simpson biopic.

I still don’t know if I can buy my palm tree. I’m afraid to ask.