from “In the Suavity of the Rock”
Greg Gerke | In the Suavity of the Rock | Splice | June 2024 | 292 Pages
I sit on our new dark-blue couch, looking after my daughter in the p.m., as I often do. My wife is not happy with the couch, though she chose it. No one sat on it to test, it came through the Internet, all we did was press a few buttons, then it arrived. I refuse to believe that there is a poorer way of coming to a decision. The couch is a few inches shorter than the old one, and my wife likes to sit close to me, not on top of, but close—yet the partition between the two cushions is now constricting her ability to be based more in the middle. If we both sat in the middles of the twin cushions, it wouldn’t work, because a projector is anchored (snug against a recess in the wall) just above the right half of the couch, where we don’t sit. The projector gives off heat, but the problem is more the ray of light. Someone sitting there would block it, thus curtailing our most common relaxation in the evening. The couch cannot be moved to the left, because it would start to enter the space of the kitchen table; and if to the right, then the ray of light might be partially blocked by the person sitting on the left cushion. We would both need to move to the right side and thus be at an oblique angle from the screen, too diagonally, and we paid too much money to have a bad seat. The projector could be raised, if we had a mount tall enough—and we do. A cheap rectangular bookcase, a few feet from the projector, would fit in the recess well enough and raise it up. This would free the right cushion to be enjoyed, even by a third person, though no one visits, and few prefer to be near us with our propensity to bicker, or at least play out our brand of passive-aggression than to enjoy their home, solitarily phone-lounging. Yet we don’t move the bookcase; it is as if the threat of losing our standard, tense place together on one cushion is enough not to make us one day do it. We would lose much more than our legs’ almost always touching if we did—we might lose our edge, which is the basis of the relationship, the grind we unconsciously agree keeps us on our toes, with both thinking the other is lucky to be put up with. So moving the bookcase isn’t actually about making things easier—moving the bookcase would take us out of our cycle. And, finally, we don’t move it. It stays and gathers dust with a green upside-down Frisbee precariously balanced atop a wine box full of heavy books, itself precariously balanced on the bookcase, itself a four-foot repository of the large, weighty hardcover cookbooks made heavier by the thick expensive paper inside, with professional photographs of meals we have nowhere nearly enough energy to prepare. These books were unthinkingly placed on the two top shelves of the bookcase when we unpacked three years ago, with my wife’s detritus books: paperbacks like the slim Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, a Norton Critical Edition of Paradise Lost, Be Thrifty: How to Live Better with Less, and Learning to Drive, 5th Edition, on the lower two. The result of this, the top-heaviness of the bookcase (along with the added wine box and the Frisbee and a small baby umbrella we recently bought for Heather—one dollar at a stoop sale—though I don’t let her play with it because of its pointy spokes) is another reason neither of us has tackled the chore. Our eighteen-month-old is not strong enough to carry out this task, though plenty willful. Heather has progressed from targeting the cranberry bookcase across the room, her father’s small square four shelves holding his coveted favorite authors’ books. From seven to thirteen months she again and again went to nudging down first editions specially ordered from Europe and acquired through deceit from libraries, yet the owner of the books was too lazy to move them to another section of the apartment, rather than keeping them in her sanctioned play area of five by twelve feet. I wished she would grow out of the phase, and, unaccountably, she did. At the onset of her thirteenth-month she magically graduated across the room, to the top-heavy bookcase—maybe because the small coffee table, in breaking up easy entry to the bookcase holding lesser-valued books, had been relocated seven feet north, in front of the old red sofa (soon to be new blue), to serve as a leg rest for my wife at the southern end of the left cushion. She likes her feet up when watching a film. I used to have to move the Ikea chair from the dinner table about four feet away, but the wickerwork began to break apart—it had to be trashed, and rather than continue bringing over the sturdy oak-chair replacement, I simply turn the rickety oval coffee table a few inches—by day our daughter’s private eating table, until after her bedtime it transforms into a less plush but lower footrest. Obstruction removed, our daughter was free to investigate the bookcase’s disjecta, as well as a photo album of her grandmother’s wedding in 1976—undoubtedly the main draw, because she cannot read. The coveted-books bookcase has no picture books, and the covers of the novels and other works of prose are the kinds of covers that don’t have pictures of unicorns, bohunks and their demoiselles, or glitzy thriller lettering—just the title and the author, albeit one book of essays has a few reprints of paintings, though they are smallish and in black and white. The photo album is plumbed through daily, but Paradise Lost remains untouched, not even the Cranach cover, a wormy Adam and Eve with fig leaves, is entrancing enough.
But I was speaking of us on the couch, squeezed in, and the matter of our legs touching while we enjoy a movie or film. Years before, I was already well into my “not to be touched too much” phase when I read the English translation of Paul Cézanne’s grandson’s interview on a PBS special detailing how his grandfather didn’t want anyone to touch him and I seized upon this as further ammunition in my fight against touch. Though a few months later I moved to Eugene, Oregon, and though not well-publicized, this bubble is the capital of hugging not only in our country, but in the entirety of both Americas. Hug everyone when going into a party, everyone there. Everyone. Then hug them all when you leave. Every one of them. I hugged constantly for five years. It made me a better angrier man. When I arrived in New York, I carried in the happy knowledge that I would now be living in a place where one is nothing, unseen—you don’t stick out, no matter height or tits or hair—and so no one will hug you. I had no good excuse for the five touch-heavy Eugene years—brainwashing? Wanting to fit in?—which is close to brainwashing. In typical Eugenian fashion, though standing on Van Brunt Street in Red Hook, I let it go. Most of the women I dated then lived in Brooklyn. You can’t touch them too quickly, but then—strung out cold, with not even a piddly methadone-program dose to see me through the day—I wanted to touch them very soon, right away. They destroyed me, and I admired them for it. They weren’t ready for me, and wouldn’t be until I changed.
My wife came to life on the Upper West Side, but now we are married. She wants a husband who touches her more than periodically and who says that he loves her more than in a monthly “I luv u” text. I have a flip phone and don’t respect words when texting, mainly because I don’t respect texting. Anyone can do it. Not everyone can write a love sonnet in iambic pentameter. I sometimes text my wife the picture of that sonnet (written during the courting phase—the original is folded up on her nightstand). I send that when I probably have to buy flowers to cover a misdeed, send it as a sort of reminder of my more special quality, however jejune and bastardy—I even put the word “jejune” in the sonnet because without the French prefix, that’s close to my wife’s name. As for holding each other during the watching of movies or films, I have strict guidelines—if a scary scene is upon us, I will by all means hold my wife’s hand, the same for emotional bloodlettings, tragedy. If nothing out of the ordinary is going on, I don’t enjoin to hold hands; it is a distraction from the images I prefer to watch unblinkingly, because I like to see every frame of film, even though they’ve been digitized and aren’t frames anymore. Yet I understand the interstices of the psychics and metaphysics underlying our couch saga, the struggle to keep love from turning brittle. I understand because a man is supposed to take care of a woman, it’s Biblical, as regular as eating the bitter herbs dipped in saltwater every year on Passover, as regular as Tax Day.
I have to make allowances—all marriages do. In honor of our thighs being so close, I take to patting my wife’s left one, the closer. I’m excited about the pat as a form of affection. I think it’s been given a bad name, literally. From the Middle English, it’s also a man’s and a woman’s diminutive—make up your mind! No wonder it has bad connotations, as in someone is patting you before they kill you, evidenced in The Godfather and countless other films. “Pat” is close to another word, “tap” (its obverse lettering), and a tap, many people don’t know, is the staple of the healing art called tapology. Introduced to me in my Eugene, Oregon years, it is a process wherein the medical professional or licensed “tapologist” taps the patient, who rests before them in a sitting position. They tap at the parts of the body giving the patient fits and also some of the main energy points, many of which overlap with the chakras. I visited one for a mysterious problem, which was just stress, as all mysterious problems are. I had a constricting feeling in my neck, as if my throat closed while a Geist strangled me—the oldest stressor in the book. Added to that, as I stood in public places, I had the sensation that I was about to faint and, as in a bad story getting worse, no one would help me—I would die. Massive amounts of pot didn’t help. I read Siddhartha again—no. So I went to Elf, the tapologist. A smiling woman with a limp, she brought me into the darkened extra bedroom of her house and pressed play on a didgeridoo CD. Please, I requested, no didgeridoo. Sounds of a barren strand, Maui edition, seemed fine. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Neck, shoulders, chest, temples. Tap tap, tap tap, tap tap. Everywhere. At one point I asked if the teachers of tapology ever experimented with doing a “pat,” but she didn’t answer. The surf went on and on, and she kept asking if I felt different, if I felt better, and just by her asking me that every five minutes, I had to admit that I did. I really didn’t, but I thought I must, she made me believe so.
These days I particularly enjoy a kind of four-part pat on my wife’s left thigh. That is two brief, full-handed pats, but then a pause (hand on flesh or clothing), and a brush, up the thigh, with mild pressure, before I relinquish, raise up and come down once again with a light, fingers-only pat, and then I return my hand to my own thigh or belly. To pat any more than four, and really three times in a row, risks being heaped in with the bad-connotation pats, and I’m keen not to upset the closest person in the world to me. I offer the most exquisitely loving pats—heart-delivered and heart-aimed—better than flowers, because it is my own body, though intercourse is in the netherest zone from my pat-happy consciousness.
So we watch, I pat, she makes a little noise at something funny in the film—then one of us, or both of us, fall asleep well before the film’s end and sometimes only twenty minutes into the picture. After awakening some thirty to sixty minutes on and not recognizing the new trouble in the film, I start to undo all the computer cords to the projector. My wife begins a truncated routine in the bathroom, just brushing—no flossing or tweezing or creams. I will not brush my teeth, because I am too tired (I don’t want to get too energized by brushing, because when I do it, I do it competitively) and will just go to the bathroom, remove my contacts to prevent pinkeye, and have a small sip of water, to not be taken with a more powerful urge to pee at four a.m. than I usually do.
We flow, one a few minutes behind the other, into the bedroom with a catwalk, though between the two sound machines and toe-tips, our daughter has never woken up. We nestle, briefly, and I try not to pat, keeping that sensation unique, though readily on call. We turn and gather our pillows into our favored pillow placement. Peace descends.
From In the Suavity of the Rock by Greg Gerke.
Copyright © 2024 Greg Gerke.
Reprinted with permission of Splice.