I’m waking at 3:00 now, it’s fairly regular.  And sometimes I read, or even work, and sometimes I resume sleep but it’s a terrible way to go about it.  For one, the worst thoughts come at 3:00.  Why is that?  It’s not the quiet.   Because in the day, sometimes, it’s quiet and the thoughts not nearly so bad.  So I suppose it’s the dark, though I turn lights on, but maybe it’s because they’re articifial.

It was heartbreaking to see A.’s apartment, that’s all.  That’s a silly thing to say, I know.  A wordsman with my skill should not fall back on “heartbreak.”  For one, you can’t break it, my heart.  Not now.  It’s lost the spring the bounce, the strength required of something to break.  You can kick it, I suppose, or squash it with your heel, but break, well the poor thing … If you could see it, you’d know.  My heart has cowered, it’s aim is to lie low.  It’s been beaten so badly it’s just waiting it out, hoping no one will notice it, hoping at best for small pleasures; a cookie in the afternoon perhaps, with tea. 

My heart sits on an old plastic-covered chair by a window, in a kitchen with cheap linoleum and smokes cigarettes back to back.  My heart tries not to think.  It drinks coffee and chews its nails and focuses on meaningless rituals like the paper and putting the cup in the sink.  My heart now takes sugar in its coffee for the comfort of swirling the spoon.  My heart’s great aspiration is just to be left alone. 

It was heartbreaking though, yes, the apartment.  My poor heart when it starts to relax a bit, I grab it violently by the neck and bash it up.  Like an old man passed out in an alley, that’s how I treat my heart.  I’m a no-good delinquent schoolboy, kicking and laughing cruelly. 

I grabbed my heart by it’s frayed yellowed collar and made it see A.’s apartment and my poor little heart summoned the strength, once more, to collapse.

You can scrub one from your life.  You wouldn’t think you can, not starting out anyway.  But you can scrub a person from your life, it appears to be quite simple.  If you walked into A.’s apartment, you’d see I was never there, in his life, not even casually passing by.  You could come into my house, here, and say the same of A.  Nothing.  None of it ever happened, not even a dream good or bad.  Nothing. 

There are children and people will insist they are threads, but I’ll tell you, because I’m here with them and in all of this, that strangely they’re not.  They’re acquaintenances passed back and forth.  “Oh, you know A.?  Yes, I knew him too, once.  But that was long ago.” 

Really, that’s all.  I look at them some days and forget where they came from.  Think for a moment how odd that they’re here, who brought them?

I’m giving the apartment more significance, I suppose, because it’s early in the morning and that was recent and the dark and the quiet are parading it in my mind.  And the mind, weighing the evidence, just asked — “if you can scrub one from your life, then what was the point?”

And then the ducts heard someone call, and freed up tears. 

This is the problem with 3:00am.

I’m in a hotel and everything’s great about the room save the outlets.  Can you believe this?  It’s never happened before.  Lousy outlets.  They’re loose.  How can outlets be loose, don’t they make them all the same?  But they are, they’re loose, the plug keeps falling out.  And before that I was congratulating myself on how well it all was, but now the outlets.

I was in need of something, desperately, and I didn’t know what it was but it was this.  A room of my own.  Without reminders or baggage or someone telling me I’m not the same woman he married.  A quaint observation, by the way, don’t you think?  Is any of us the same after ten years and two kids and the usual knocks and worries and fleeting moments of bliss that fill our time? 

No.

So my hotel room doesn’t talk, it reminds me of nothing, there was noise I had to escape, and except for the outlets, I might find peace here.  However small.

Noise, yes, there’s been too much noise, too much buzzing in my head.  Here’s one that kills me, though if it hadn’t happened I’d fixate on something else.  My husband introduced his girlfriend — Racquel Dixon, a Craigslist trolling whore — to my mother-in-law, his mother, when he took her with him to New York in September. 

It’s going poorly, me getting over that.  I wonder if his girlfriend liked them, my in-laws — she got to meet most of them if not all.  Of course she liked them, they’re charming.  What’s not to like?  I’m sure my father-in-law kissed her cheek, I’m sure H. told her one or two of her wonderful stories.  H. has a brilliant sense of humor, I wonder if Racquel enjoyed it. 

I wonder if she (Racquel, the girlfriend) enjoyed screwing my husband in his mother’s apartment, in his mother’s bed.  Probably.  It’s a great apartment.  The location is fantastic, and I’m sure they screwed after attending a show of some sort, or a club.  They were probably screwing all the times that I called and A. didn’t answer.  I bet they looked at the phone and laughed.  Whee, what fun! 

And on top of it, no kids.  When A. and I stay at the apartment we usually have kids, our kids, the kids we had after we married.  But this time, what luck, A. and Racquel got good uninterrupted screwing time, completely alone.  

Bravo R. and A.  You pulled it off, you crazy loons.   And now, R. and I have both had sex with the same man in the same bed, in New York.  Talk about a small world.   Six degrees of women who’ve fucked A.  (In his mother’s bed.)

I made it all happen, too.  I deserve applause in this.  I encouraged A. to go, I watched the kids so he could do it.  I watched the kids so that my husband could screw his girlfriend in his mother’s apartment, in his mother’s bed.  I’m a pretty damn good catch, don’t you think?   

But fine, that’s all fine, it’s happened.  Kudos to Racquel Dixon for answering a sex ad.  Kudos to Anthony for placing one.  We’re all big, no one gets hurt, it’s just sex and lies for two years for God’s sake, right?  I mean we’re all grown-ups.  Nobody died. 

But the outlets, that’s a problem.  My plug won’t stay in the outlet.  I might have to insist on changing rooms.  You don’t think, do you, that they’re like this on all four floors? 

(I’m in a small-town hotel.  Four floors means I’m at the fancy one.)

The line, you may have guessed, is Bellow again.  Humboldt’s Gift. 

We told each other we wouldn’t speak of it, but that seems silly to me.  For ONE, it’s all I have to speak of, it’s almost impossible to think of anything else.  It’s why I hound you so with ants,  because there’s the unspoken thing, and little else.   It’s like I’m Monica Lewinsky right after Starr, and you and I are limited to talking about tea.  It would be hard, don’t you think?  After the dress and cigars and creepy interviews with old men, to just talk about tea?

Also, TWO, I’m not stoic like A. is.  I can’t not speak of things, or not talk of them, or amble through my days as if nothing’s going on – it makes me loony.  I am fascinated with A.’s ability to do it, I envy him, too.  I’ve tried for years to mimic it, but find myself after hours or days of being stoic, a raving nut.  A. is in that way a camel.  He can postpone emotion, like camels do water, for weeks.  I’m not a camel or a stoic, though I admire them both.   

Lastly, THREE:  This — what we do here, you and I – is technically writing and reading, not speaking.

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I cut Facebook ties with A.  I cut him from my Friends list (which automatically drops me from his) because I was stuck on his Friends list with his ex-girlfriends and would-be-girlfriends and almost-was-girlfriends and other people’s wives.  It weirded me out.  There’s not even an asterisk or smiley-face or yellow emoticon to designate me as his current wife, so yeah, I cut him loose.  You’re all free now to write on his Wall, I can’t see it. 

Scruffy’s crowding me and I’m in a sour mood.  Part of it’s the kitchen, I don’t want to clean it, I’m working.  But I hear it taunting me like it thinks it’s getting away with something. 

Also, I should have stopped for coffee.  There is coffee at my house, of course.  A. (“Facebook Gigolo”) made some this morning and it was good, but it’s in the kitchen and bad for creative energy.  There are spills and crumbs in the kitchen and 3,000 tomatoes, I can’t deal.  Then there’s Scruffy.  He’s not in the kitchen but he sits too close, no matter where I go; he’s a close-sitter.  And yes, my job, you may have heard my job’s not going well.  It’s much better today than yesterday, thank you.  Still.  I’d prefer a much easier job.  Like a tollbooth, today I wish I worked in a tollbooth, for lots of money. 

If you own a tollbooth send my resume here.

By the way, I’m a salamander on Facebook.  That’s the picture I picked because it reminds me of Stevie, who died when we saved him from the pool.  Maybe I don’t have new or ex-boyfriends coming to my Facebook because they think I’m a salamander.  If you’re my ex-boyfriend or you want to be, and you also want to Friend me but are worried about Salmonella, let me assure you that I, sir, am no salamander.  You’ll be fine. 

[Post script:  I tried your song, D., but it reminds me of Reservoir Dogs and then it makes me want to watch it.  Find me another one.  Chop-chop.]

Update:  Okay, I guess there is a Facebook thing to show wives, but you have to be Friends first and I’m currently not Friends with anyone I’m married to, so the point is moot.   

Remind me to show this (Maurizio Savini) to my artsy, gum-chewing son.  I also meant to go see Tom Sachs in the city but now we’re not there.  He does big giant sculpted art, including but not limited to a Hello Kitty and (I think) a blue whale.  Oh well. 

A. and I didn’t talk Saturday night, for reasons mutually to blame or probably me more, but then A. decided on Sunday that he was done and we’d be chatty again.  I decided not.  I don’t think he gets it, that I seethe when he’s not talking to me.  He goes about his day and thinks nothing of it, moves on without care, or maybe with care but either way not talking, and I seethe. 

Not only that, I grandfather in all the other times he didn’t talk to me, or nonchalantly pretended there was nothing wrong when there was, and so the seething is compounded exponentially.  The second time it happened, for example, the effect was squared, the third time cubed, etc.  For perspective, Saturday was ”Going-to-Bed-in-Separate-Rooms-Without-Talking,” number 4,325.  Seems odd when we’ve only been married 3,616 days.  Still. 

Seething turns to ice at some point, I think.  The glacial kind that is only undone by centuries of carbon pollution and bad light bulbs. 

While we weren’t talking, though, G. and Jr. made pizza popcorn.  It was excellent I recommend it.  I’ll send the recipe if you’d like.  We munched it to What’s Up Doc? — not Bugs Bunny, but Streisand / Ryan O’Neal, and the riddle of the red plaid handbag.  (Nice mindless fun.  O’Neal is hot in boxers.) 

I still have a cold, send cough drops.  G. is watching The Electric Company.  The Times was boring today, one can’t go two paragraphs without an insult to Hillary.  If you insist on examples, glance through the book list the Pompous Writers suggest candidates read. 

Remind me please, when TGW has ushered in fame so swift and heady I can barely stand on my own diamond-studded heels, NOT to weigh in.  Unless it’s on badminton, I’ve got very important cultural views and opinions about that.   

[More Bubble Gum Art by Maurizio Savini here.]

And he was snappish.  Curt.  I’ll need more attention if we’re going to proceed. 

For the rest of you, cocktails in the garden at 5:00.  Don’t be late.  And “The Spruce Goose” was made mostly from Birch.

 me + A. =   

You do the laundry, all the time,
and fold it, too.  I love you.

You roll out garbage unless you forget,
you never fret.  I love you.

You get tattoos even if they will bug me,
and then you hug me.  I love you.

You dispose of horrible stuff.
(I saw the forks – eww, yuk.)  I love you.

You watch shows I like,
and ride your bike.  I love you.

You wake up all night from the dog.
Sometimes you jog.  I love you.

You burst into push-ups out of the blue.
You stick with me like glue.

I love you. 

No one in my family likes fondue, so I’ve decided to make it a tradition — New Year’s Eve fondue.  If there are other things you don’t like, family, please inform me so I can schedule them.

Netflix has a “Local Favorites” feature that lists the top rentals in my zip code (yours too, I’ll bet).  Here they are.  Also, A. – the pool’s about to overflow. 

1.  Even Money

2.  The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn

3.  Montana Sky

4.  Firehouse Dog

5.  Hostage

A. and I are arguing about our Christmas list. 

I want: Furniture; a Wall Knocked Out in the Bunkhouse; the Bile Gray Carpet that Poisons the House like an Incurable Disease to be RIPPED UP, Beaten and Burned. 

A. wants sex. 

[Junior, for the record, wants an R2-D2 robot.]