Poifect
Martin’s wife crawls onto the lap of the politician. Martin’s wife feels that she and Martin must become more civic-minded. They are local business owners, after all. And all politics is local. This is the logic by which she has convinced Martin to attend the political fundraiser, and perhaps the logic by which she has crawled onto the politician’s lap. Earlier, she had convinced Martin to finally put on the blue tie with the embroidered yellow anchors she got him for his thirty-ninth birthday, which he has never worn, and which she tied for him, cinching it so tight he felt the knot’s hard nudge against his windpipe, still feels it now.
Martin’s wife is cozy as a cat in the politician’s lap. To avoid looking at his wife in the lap, Martin gazes sternly at the Mai-Tai in his hand, which helps to keep it from sloshing and dribbling onto his cuff as it has done several times. The fundraiser has been over for an hour or so. Just past midnight the soberer folk had gone home to relieve their babysitters, leaving the evening in the hands of the childless and the drunks. Of whom the politician, Martin’s wife, and Martin himself, are three.
The politician plucks appetizers from trays that are, miraculously, still being butler-passed, adding each to the scrum of shrimp toasts, miniature egg rolls, pigs-in-blankets and the like he has assembled before himself on the tablecloth, perhaps as a replica in miniature of the phalanx of voters that turn out in his dreams. As the politician draws one of these tidbits over Martin’s wife’s shoulder, a drop of hot brie dribbles from its puff pastry pouch and lands on the shoulder strap of her green dress, where it congeals and trembles coquettishly.
The politician is a large-sized man with an expansive lap. Contains multitudes, etc. The politician possesses the blooded cheeks of a certain kind of real estate developer, which he is, or a Kennedy, which he is not. Another area real estate developer in Martin’s circle of acquaintances, this one not of political bent, refers to this spit of land jutting out into the climate-swollen Atlantic, soon to be reclaimed by it, as “unreal estate.” That little real estate developer is getting “the fuck out of dodge,” as he puts it, to invest in something safer, like lithium. That little real estate developer has “seen the research” and the speculatively re-drawn maps. But this little real estate developer-cum-politician would scoff at the research and the accompanying maps. This one is sticking around, planning more subdivisions and shopping plazas, running for state office. All while the Atlantic huffs and puffs and gets ready to blow down the houses of man and all his good works.
The politician possesses nothing of the political talent or the good looks of a Kennedy and is trailing his opponent in the polls, though of the two he is surely the more pro-business and therefore the candidate for entrepreneurs, such as Martin’s wife considers herself and Martin to be, though which appellation Martin tends to doubt. Martin, it should be noted, has a tendency to doubt, a fact which is duly noted by his wife, who at times, and in good fun, refers to him in a faux-Boston accent as “Doubty-Marty,” which, in said brogue, sounds like “Dawty-Mawty.” Martin’s wife grants doubt no quarter. She speaks about their frozen yogurt shop franchise in terms reserved historically for things like the discovery of fire or peace in the Middle East. “This,” she often says, “changes everything.”
Martin’s wife has two accents in her repertoire: one, Bostonian; two, Brooklynese, which she retains for one word and one word only. When something pleases her, she exclaims, “Poifect!” cute as Betty Boop.
The politician’s lap possesses Martin’s wife but looks ready and willing to possess other wives. How many wives could a lap-lap lap if a lap-lap could lap lap? But Martin’s wife is the only wife left for the politician’s lap to lap. Just out the plate-glass window of the hotel ballroom, across a beach cluttered with styrofoam cups and spent tubes of tanning oil, the Atlantic broods in all its magnificent implacability. Suddenly his course seems obvious. Martin must go to the water’s edge. A good husband knows when he’s extraneous, knows when like the tide to go out.
Martin excuses himself in a way that would make anyone’s mother proud, though Martin’s mother would discern the slight slur of his words, the rummy slouch in his posture. Martin’s mother is not a woman who missed a trick during her life. Martin’s wife’s eyes are gooey with gin and emotion. “Love you, Mar-Mar,” she says. The politician discovers the berry of brie on her shoulder strap, plucks and eats it.
Martin leaves the hotel and strides —S-T-R-I-D-E-S! — to the water’s edge. At the water’s edge in the dark he is alone. We must all come to the water’s edge, is a line that must somewhere have been written, or was just now. Martin feels purpose here. Or he feels purposeful. Martin allows the purposefulness to build into a shout, but it is less than a trifle next to the roar of the mighty sea: “My wife is no appetizer!” The Atlantic, of course, pays him zero attention, only laps at his loafers, ruining them.
The ocean pays heed to no man, though the moon holds some sway over it. The moon is a no-man’s land. False. Men have been there, have trod and left imprints like the ones Martin has left behind him in the sand. The moon is a no-woman’s land. True. No women have been there, or trod, or left imprints. The moon has possessed no wives. False. The moon holds sway over the tides, oceanic and menstrual, and so has possessed all wives. To the moon, Alice!, many men have said to their wives, only some of whom were named Alice.
Martin’s wife is named Sylvie. He wants to shout her name at the ocean, but the ocean has made it clear it will not listen, to Martin or to any human being. The sea is a notorious snubber of mankind. And one can’t snub it back. Try it and see what happens.
Martin has been married to Sylvie for seven years and he thinks that if she could cinch so hard his head popped off she just might. Sylvie had a husband and the head popped off! Neither the moon nor Martin has been able to give Sylvie what she wants, which is a baby. Not for lack of trying, on Martin’s part, or on the part of several reputable fertility specialists in Norfolk. Sylvie does not blame the moon, and does not blame the doctors. She doesn’t even blame endocrine disrupting chemicals in plastics, though Martin has shown her a recent article claiming they may be causing modern sperm to swim wrong, to wiggle without getting any place. No, Sylvie blames Martin, all the live-long day, though she doesn’t say so outright.
A little girl or boy with a sweet face as round as the moon is all Sylvie wants, to hold sway over their lives and give them purpose. Pay heed! Martin unknots the tie with the anchors, tugs it loose from under his collar and casts it down among the skittering ghost crabs in the wet sand. The tie lands in the form of a figure eight or an infinity symbol or the body of a woman cinched tight by a girdle, depending on your point of view. “Here comes a wave,” Martin says to the tie. The tie tumbles in froth, losing all shape, then slips away with the wave. “My tie,” Martin says, waving. “Bye, tie.” The tie waves in the wave and is lost.