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Finally, a Husband Who Gets It

By Randall Brown

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Let me begin by saying that it was six months since my wife and I had “known” each other. Things kept popping up—well, every thing except you know—things such as twisted knees, middle-of-the-night projects around the house, migraines, reactions to food additives. Random things. Things beyond our control—the forces of the world set against our making love. So it seemed. We were in our late thirties. Too early for a sexless marriage. Just fate pitted against us.

In the last drawer of her bedside table, while searching for my airline ticket for the week-long Wisconsin Beer & Cheese Fest with some old college buddies, there I spotted it. Marked with the one-stringed “Bookmark Thong,” but I didn’t crack a smile. On the cover a woman smiled back at me, her hand gripping her knee. Above her, in quotes, “Not Tonight Dear: 100 Proven Ways to Get Out of It.”

I opened to the bookmark page. There were all one hundred, some highlighted, the forces of the world set against us. There they were, with their bright yellow smiles. Gotcha.

That night, after she finished the dishes, I was thinking of a number between 1 and 100. It turned out to be 38—not a particularly creative one.

“I’m going to bed early,” Mel said in the calm, even tone talked about on page 76. “Right after I do my Pilates.”

“Oh, why to bed so soon?” I asked her from the toilet, the door wide open so I could see what was up.

“I have an early morning meeting with a parent. Need to get up early to prepare. Early,” she repeated at the end.

The Pilates machine was in the bedroom. I sat on the couch in the sitting room off the bedroom to watch SportsCenter, a difficult task considering all the grunting and moaning coming from the bedroom. I reached behind the sofa cushion to get my stash—only a half-filled bag of Cheetos was left.

At the commercial break, I got up to grab a drink from the bathroom faucet and slipped on the wet towel I had left on the floor after my post-work shower. As I lay there, I caught sight of myself in the mirror—Cheetos spilled on top of me, my gut hanging out, my face and fingers covered in the cheese-like residue.

Now I had a headache. Jeez. Okay. I was beginning to get it. Or understand why I don’t get it. It was the first week of January. A new year. A new you.

A few mornings later, Mel stared at the grapefruit on my plate. “Let me guess. They’re creating bacon-flavored ones now.”

“How ‘bout a little support here?” I said. I picked up the grapefruit and squeezed the juice into my mouth.

“Support? For what? Eating fruit?”

“Well, yes. But bigger than that?”

 “What’s bigger than a grapefruit? Watermelon? Don’t tell me watermelon’s next?”

“Lifestyle changes. You’ve been sacrificing—giving up your waffles for that cardboard-tasting cereal. It isn’t fair for me to eat a doughnut, now, is it?”

“Where do you eat doughnuts?”

“The doughnut’s not the point. Me. I’m changing.”

“By giving up your doughnuts? So that was that electricity in the air. Big changes over here, folks.” She stood on the chair and pointed both index fingers at me. “My husband is now eating his first grapefruit in—how many years?”

“Hey. I thought you’d be happy.”

“Oh, honey. I am happy. Deliriously so. Enjoy your grapefruit. Could you buy some duct tape on the way home? I have that project tonight to finish.”

Crap. Number 72.

That night I came home with duct tape—and the catalog for the Sears home gym—delivery in 3 days.

“Hey look,” Mel said. “It even has a beverage holder. Think it will hold your 16 ounce can?”

“My can’s a little bigger than that,” I said, shakin’ my rump like some baboon in the jungle. Maybe I should paint my butt pink.

Mel at least smiled.

For the next month, I ate my grapefruit, my Ramen noodle lunch, my 1 serving dinner sans beer, chocolate cake, midnight cereal snack. And sometimes I even got my number—26, need to work out—into the conversation before hers.

As I was coming up the basement stairs a few days before Valentine’s Day, she stood there, arms crossed. Waiting.

“Who is it?” Mel asked.

“Me. Who do you think?”

“No. The affair. Who is it?”

“The cleaning woman. Petra. When she bends over to dust the floorboards, that big 65-year-old Russian booty is too hard to resist. It just happened. Right there in the dining room.”

“No. Really.”

“It’s you, Mel. You.”

 “Really? For me you’ve been doing this?”

She reached behind me and wrapped her arms around me. Before I could stop it, out came, “Not tonight, dear. It’s number 15.” A sore back.

She stopped. Took her arms back. Stared and thought. “You knew. You bum. You knew. And all this—it wasn’t for me. It was just for sex, wasn’t it?”

“Well, sex with you.”

 “You know what? This is perfect. No, really. I’ll print up a calendar and write the numbers in for you in advance. Then I don’t have to come up with these lame excuses for not sleeping with you. Just perfect. And pick up your goddamn towel after your shower.”

She stomped up the stairs. I thought of something she said a while ago about the towel I once again left on the floor. It wasn’t about the towel. I could give a shit about the towel. It’s what the towel represents.

I had focused on only one lump I saw in that mirror—and ignored that lump of a towel in the middle of the bathroom floor. Therein was the answer—finding out what the towel represented.

When I got him from work that night, I decided to seek help.

“Your problem,” Petra was telling me, “is that you thought only of the towel as a towel. You have to erase the towel from your thoughts.”

She was a wise Russian cleaning woman. “And replace it with what?”

“When you don’t pick up your own towel, what do you make her?”

 “A towel picker-upper?”

Petra sighed. A heavy sigh. Ah men, the sigh said. Idiots, all of them. “No, Mr. Norton. Think about it. You know it isn’t the towel.”

“Yes, yes. I know. What the towel represents.”

I stared at her dusting cloths on the table, thought of the wise old master from Karate Kid. Wax on; wax off. It looked like whacks off. Again.

“What are you doing?” Mel asked later that night. She must have been standing there for a while, watching me pick up and drop my towel over and over.

“The towel. I’m figuring out what it represents.”

“Oh. Good luck.”

 I followed her into the bedroom. “Don’t you miss us together at all?” I asked her. “I mean. Are you fine with us just being roommates? Maybe you could invite a girlfriend to live with us and I could change my name to Jack Tripper.”

“He was gay,” she said.

“No. He only pretended to be gay for the Ropers.”

“Right, right,” she said “Just like you’re only pretending to care to have sex.”

“I’m not pretending. It isn’t the sex. It’s what the sex represents.”

 “Don’t tell me,” she said. “The sex is the towel.”

 “No. Well, yes. The towel, to you, represents that I love you; the sex, for me, represents the same thing.”

She handed me a towel from the pile of folded laundry on the bed. “I love you,” she said.

I threw the towel back. “No mas, no mas. I surrender.”

“It’s that you knew,” she said. “That’s what makes it so impossible. You did this with one goal in mind—S, E, X.”

“Not the sex itself. What it represents.”

Mel thought about this—for about two seconds. “Okay. Let’s just do it.”

“Really?”

“Sure. I’ll go get ready.”

Minutes later, she returned wearing a transparent white gown.

“Oh my god,” she said, “You folded the rest of the laundry?”

I now understood married foreplay—the folding, the cleaning, the picking up, the working out, the single serving.

Mel spun around in her gown. “I feel like a kid. Kind of naughty.”

I jumped into the bed. Crack. My head smashed the headboard.

“That’s not exactly the look I expected, “ she said.

“I know. My head. I can’t even move.”

“I’ll move,” she said, climbing on top of me.

“Ow.” And here it came, the words I never thought I would be saying, “Maybe now’s not a good time. My head. It’s throbbing.”

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