He lets his keys fall on the counter. They ring with authority.
Yeah, he thinks.
He opens the refrigerator—it seems like the right thing to do. But he knows what is inside. He bought it all himself. He eats something with his fingers, because he can, looking around as he does.
Why doesn’t somebody clean up?
He smiles at himself. It's funny.
He knows what will be on television. He knows what will be on the radio. He read the news that morning.
God damn!
He flings the food back into the fridge and slams it.
Why shouldn’t he watch tv? It’s still funny. Things are still funny, even if she’s gone. And who won the game? The Cardinals still play baseball, with her or without her.
He thinks he could sit on the sofa with food on his lap and watch tv. He can do whatever he wants. He doesn’t really want to. It’s stupid to pretend.
He looks at the reporters as they speak, and he wonders how much money they make. Just for saying what they think—so many people, he ponders, do that for free. He has been hearing what people think for days. Days and weeks. They ask him what he thinks, and he only tells them what they already said. What’s funny is that they know, they and he. If I could get clear what I think, he ponders, I wouldn’t have problems and I wouldn’t give the time of day to other people’s opinions.
The game analysis ends and a show comes on. But it isn’t funny. Guys and women are not funny now, if they ever were. When a guy says something clearly wrong, and everybody watching knows it was wrong but he doesn’t, what's funny about that? And there she goes…everyone watching knew it was coming, and it’s supposed to be funny that the guy didn’t?
What’s funny is that she used to always ask him what he was thinking. She could ask it so many ways, to irritate him or seduce him—he wonders, now, if she knew the difference when she was asking. Sometimes he would want to grab her and she would look so surprised. He would get irritated and she would look so surprised.
Everybody was explaining it now. Maybe he should have been asking all along. If he had known to ask, he wonders, would he have done it?
He could throw the remote control into the screen. He could throw the tv through the window. He can do whatever he wants.
There were times, before she was gone, when he wanted to do things like that. Throw the tv, break glass. Could he have done them back then? He wonders. Because she’s gone now. Instead of doing those things, he ate with his fingers, with the bowl propped on his belly. He did it instead of throwing the tv, and hoped she would not notice. Even though he was careful, though, she is gone.
Songs keep running through his head that, he thinks, sound like they were written for him and his situation, but he doesn’t believe in that artistic intuitive bullshit. It happens to everyone, he thinks. Even songwriters and guitarists, even guys in the Cardinal post-game analysis, even Ray at the office, who asks how things are going and then nods like a guru as if all the answers were only to be expected.
You may know all this already, Ray, he thinks, but for me it’s today’s news. I didn’t know you could feel this way. I didn’t know there were things you couldn’t just drink off, or sleep off. I didn’t know you could actually lose something valuable. My mom took good care of me when I was a kid.
He wonders whether he ever had anything valuable, before. He wonders if it might help to buy something new, something expensive. But, he thinks, does he really want to? He thinks that he doesn’t.
(first published on 7.14.07, 8.53pm)
Have you ever had the peculiar sensation of having your hands tied?
