Isn't It Bro-Mantic?

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  We’re at the halfway mark in the show, which you can always tell because there’s a longer commercial break, when I hear the front door open.

  “Hi, honey,” my wife, who can’t sing, does a surprisingly impressive Ricky Ricardo imitation, “I’m home!”

  I hear the sound of things being dropped on the table in the foyer, high heels being dropped on the hardwood floor, and then my wife rushes into the living room, arms outstretched. The show’s just come back on. Still, I’m about to rise anyway when Helen skids to a stop in her bare feet.

  “Oh,” she says. “Hey, Sam.”

  “Hey, Mrs.,” Sam says. “I heard your honeymoon was good.” She tilts her beer in Helen’s direction. “Get you a beer?”

  Sam’s long been in the habit of offering me beverages in my own home. It can be occasionally annoying, but mostly I’ve gotten used to it.

  “Hey, honey,” I say, “you’re home early. How was your day?” When I say this, I feel very much a married man but in a good way. There’s nothing wrong with clichés when they work for you.

  “It was annoying,” Helen says. “People kept asking me if I was pregnant yet. I guess that’s what happens when you get married.”

  “Seriously? Huh, no one asked me that today.”

  “Probably because the only person you see is Sam. For years, people asked me when I was going to get married, like everyone has to live the same cookie-cutter lives. Now I’m married for about five minutes and everyone wants to know when I’m going to have a baby. Even the guy from the courier service asked.”

  “The guy from the courier service? What’d you tell him?”

  “I told him to shut up and leave my package.”

  Ouch.

  “At least I got out early,” Helen says. “There was an unexpected continuance in one of my cases.”

  “Cool.” I’d really like to hear more about her day, but I hear the voice of Carly Benson Quartermaine Corinthos Jacks coming from the television and my attention is torn. I love Carly. “Hey, you wanna watch with us?”

  “What’re you watching?” Pause. “Oh, GH.” Pause. “You’re watching GH on both televisions?”

  “I know, cool, right?”

  Sam gives me a dirty look, like she’s been doing all day whenever I slip up and say “I know, right?” like we used to. But this time, I give her one right back. Hey, I interjected a “cool” into it, giving it a different spin. And anyway, change is hard!

  “I don’t know,” Helen says after a long pause, during which her gaze has ping-ponged between me and Sam, apparently trying to decipher our dirty looks but then giving up. “It seems like it may be a gross misuse of the dual-TV system.”

  I hear feet padding away and look up to see my wife walking out of the room.

  “Hey, where’re you going?”

  “Dining room. I think I’ll look over those paint charts.”

  I shrug and turn my attention back to Carly.

  Show’s over and, swear to God, there are tears in my eyes.

  I look over at Sam and she’s blinking. “Damn stupid allergies.”

  “Oh, come on,” I say, “that was a killer, wasn’t it? When they told Robert Scorpio, I thought I was going to lose it. No parent should ever have to hear about his only child getting vaporized.”

  “Would it be any better if he had a dozen other children?”

  I think about that. “OK, you got me there.”

  Into my line of vision comes a furry paw and I see Fluffy, stretching himself before he returns to what has come to be one of my favorite of his positions. His back legs are extended behind him and a bit to the side, but his front paws are curled inward under his chest, head erect, very Sphinx-like—you know, if the Sphinx were a furry gray-and-white puffball.

  “I love it when he does that,” I tell Sam. “Doesn’t he look like a lion?” I think how Fluffy looks exactly like one of those stone lions that guard the front of the New York Public Library as I scratch him under the chin and transition into my talking-to-the-cat voice: “Who’s a proud lion? Who’s a proud lion? Yes, you are. Yes, you are.”

  I stop, suddenly horrified at what I’m doing, what I hear myself saying.

  “Oh no,” I say, turning to consult Sam. “When I call him a proud lion, do you think that confuses him? I mean, do you really think he thinks he’s a lion?”

  Before Sam can answer, though, a voice comes from the dining room.

  “No, I don’t think the cat thinks he’s a lion. In fact, I’m fairly certain of that.” Then: “I’m going upstairs to take a shower. When you get a chance, you might want to look at these colors I’ve picked out.”

  I hear my wife’s tread going upstairs, the bathroom door closing and the shower being turned on.

  “It’s that Alanis Morissette song all over again,” Sam says with a sigh, “except that this really is ironic.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Last year you got a cat to impress the girl and you started watching GH to impress the girl. Well, it turns out the girl doesn’t like either. In fact, I think it’s safe to say she hates them both.”

  “Wait. What? What are you talking about? Helen doesn’t hate Fluffy. How could anyone hate Fluffy?”

  “So maybe hate’s too strong of a word, but she’s certainly not in love with him. Not like you are.”

  “I am not in love with my cat.”

  “‘Who’s a proud lion?’ Seriously, Johnny?”

  Before I can object any further, my best friend has one more thing to say.

  “And, since this is Me Giving Advice Away For Free Day, even though you didn’t ask: Yup, you’re definitely getting on her nerves.”

  A Problem with Paint

  Paint: It Never Lets You Down. That’s the motto of the business my dad, Big John, originally started; the business I then worked side by side with him on for years; the business I now carry on with on my own, keeping his name and legacy alive even though, you know, he’s not dead.

  So the idea that paint, that substance that I love, should somehow turn around and bite me on the ass is beyond belief. And yet that is exactly what has happened, spectacularly so.

  Not really knowing what to say after Sam informed me that I get on my new wife’s nerves—or at least that some of the things I do have that unfortunate effect; which, I’m positive she’s just wrong, wrong, wrong about, particularly the part about Helen disliking Fluffy—I head into the dining room to look at the paint charts Helen mentioned; Sam’s right behind me, but she may just be going to the kitchen to grab herself another beer.

  What I see when I get to the dining room, the chosen colors circled in heavy black marker…

  I’m not even sure I can say.

  “This is just so…wrong,” Sam says.

  “It’s gotta be a joke, right?” I say.

  “Absolutely. Must be. I mean, no one in their right mind would…”

  We mull. And we’re still mulling fifteen minutes later when Helen comes into the room, hair slicked back and wet from the shower, work makeup scrubbed off, shorts and Mets T-shirt on. I smile. I love when my wife looks like this. Hell, I love all of her looks: buttoned-down for work, casual like this, fancy, stark naked—really, it’s all good.

  “So,” she asks, excited, expectant, “what do you think of the colors I picked out?”

  Unless she’s an amazingly good actress who’s also pulling my leg, the thought occurs to me that the colors she circled are no joke to her.

  “It’s been a long day,” Sam says, “so, yeah, I think I’m just going to go now. Same time tomorrow, Boss?”

  I nod my head and she’s gone.

  Helen jams her hands into her pockets and does a slight bouncing thing, like she can barely contain herself. “Well?” she prompts.

  “Well, um, yeah, these are…different.”

  “But good different, right?”

  “Well, I guess they’re not all different. I mean, Canary Yellow. Which room is that for, by the
way?

  “The kitchen.”

  “Ah. Canary Yellow for the kitchen—that’s pretty conventional.”

  “Conventional?”

  “It’s”—the word is out of my mouth before I think about it—“cliché.”

  “Cliché.” The dead sound to her voice clues me in to the fact that I have made a verbal faux pas. And yet I can’t stop myself.

  “Everybody does it,” I say. “You can’t swing a dead cat in Fairfield County without hitting a Canary Yellow kitchen.”

  I at least exercise the restraint needed to keep from saying that Canary Yellow kitchens are anathema to me.

  “What about the other colors I picked out?” she asks.

  I regard the two colors in question: Pink Panties and Paint It Black.

  “Which rooms were you thinking of these for?” I ask. I’m thinking: Maybe guestroom for one, garage for the other?

  “The master bedroom. Both of them. I was thinking two walls of each.”

  “That’s, um, radical.”

  “Is that better or worse than cliché?”

  How best to answer this…Neither? Both? Certainly, I shouldn’t answer it truthfully.

  I decide on a different tack.

  “I guess I’m just a little surprised, that’s all,” I say.

  “Surprised?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, I figured we’d be picking out colors together. And, you know, paint: it’s what I do.”

  “So that means I shouldn’t have any say in my environment here?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Since you’re the expert, you should get to decide everything and I just have to live with it?”

  “Let’s put it a different way. Your expertise is the law, and I respect that. I certainly would never presume to interfere with one of your cases.”

  “Oh no? Hel-lo! Loopholes? Does that ring any bells with you?”

  Loopholes.

  Crap.

  Before I met Helen, Steve Miller, one of my clients who’s now my friend and who happens to be a defense attorney, asked me for help finding a loophole for one of his clients, because legal loopholes are kind of a hobby with me. It turned out that Helen was the losing D.A. on the other end of that case, which I found out only after meeting her, which eventually led me to trying to throw her off the track by telling her that I don’t like loopholes at all; but rather, I favor ice holes, sinkholes, peepholes, and blowholes. I don’t think I’ve left anything out, other than the fact that I wound up looking like a real asshole. Also, apparently I wasn’t as smooth with the talking as I thought because, apparently again, Helen has clearly known it was me behind that loophole all along.

  “That was before I met you,” I say. “I would never interfere with one of your cases now.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  I look at my wife. She doesn’t look happy.

  Wait a second. Are we having an argument here? No, of course not. That can’t be it. Still, she doesn’t look happy.

  “If we try with these, er, colors,” I say, “will that make you happy?”

  She considers. “Yes,” she says simply.

  “OK, then.” Really, how bad can it be? Besides, it’s just paint. (I can’t believe I just said that. Just paint? It’s never just paint nor is paint ever necessarily just.) Still, we can always paint over it if it doesn’t work.

  Then something occurs to me.

  “Hey, Hel,” I say, “back when I first met you, those colors you had me paint all the rooms in your old place—how’d you arrive at those? I mean, those were so different than these.”

  And they were. Those colors were all so…tasteful, if noneventful. But these? Canary Yellow, Pink Panties and Paint It Black? It’s like a Benjamin Moore horror show.

  “Oh, that,” she says. “I consulted an interior designer.”

  She con—

  Shoot me now. I hate those people. Sure, sometimes they’re right about things—I mean, I don’t want to malign a whole group of people who aren’t Ponzi scheme artists or anything—but so often they’re just so wrong. And the results of the wrong ones? They never really say anything real about who their clients are.

  But wait another minute.

  Does this mean that my wife’s real self is Canary Yellow, Pink Panties and Paint It Black?

  To console myself, I drink lots of beer. And then, I start dinner.

  It’s only our third day here, so Helen and I are still figuring out the who-cooks-what-things-when logistics, but it seems fair that whoever gets home first should make dinner, which today would be me, even though she was also home well before four.

  We have steaks, which is good. Any man can make a decent steak. It’s almost embarrassing if he can’t. After a quick call to Aunt Alfresca, I know how long to nuke the potatoes in the microwave. Considering what the plates will look like—dark-colored meat, at least on the outside; light-colored potato, at least on the inside—I think we’re going to need some vivid color for an accent. Consulting the freezer, I settle on frozen spinach, read directions on the back of the package, and voila.

  We eat in the dining room, even use candles instead of electric light. And it’s…nice.

  It occurs to me that for the first time in my life, I went to work this morning, came home from work in the afternoon, and my wife came through the door not long afterward. Being married to Helen—it is just one constant stream of firsts.

  Between the beers and my thoughts, I’m feeling all rosy and warm, and when Helen laughs at something I say and I see a piece of green spinach caught in one of her dogteeth, I think: How cute is that?

  And later on, when Helen and I snuggle on the couch watching some new-to-us TV show, Shipping Wars—that one trucker Roy really cracks me up, the way he leans out the window and shouts at another driver, “Why, yes, I do own the road!”—and Sam buzzes my cell to ask how things went with the paint chart, I extricate myself from the snuggle and take the call in the kitchen, where I tell Sam that the paint situation is fine and about how cute my wife looks with spinach in her teeth.

  “I’m just going to say this once,” Sam says. “Beware how the spinach turns.”

  What the hell is she talking about? I stare at the phone in my hand. Is that the name of some new soap opera?

  TGI-Poker-F

  Between the rehearsal dinner two Fridays ago and being still on the cruise ship last Friday, it’s been three weeks since we’ve had our regular poker game so by the time the end of the week rolls around, I’m itching to play.

  Of course Sam’s already in the building before the others arrive. She’s been here since we knocked off work early to watch GH. What an episode. There’s a lot of crazy shit going on. Kate Howard, highbrow fashion mogul, who was born Connie Falconeri, now has a split personality. You can tell when her alter ego, trashy Connie, is about to take over, because it happens whenever Kate puts on this dark red lipstick. Now Connie wants Johnny Zacchara to sleep with her and if he says yes, Sonny Corinthos will go absolutely nuts. Like I say, crazy shit.

  Sometimes the guys arrive for the game one at a time at two-minute intervals, almost like they arranged it with each other in advance, meaning I might as well just stay there standing at the door until they’re all in.

  The first to arrive is Big John. Even though he uses the wheelchair most of the time these days, he uses double canes when he knows there will be steps, like my front porch, and that’s what he’s doing now. I’d offer to help but he’s got his fierce leave-me-alone-I-can-do-it-myself scowl on and it’s only a few steps so I let him.

  “Johnny! How’s married life treating you?” he asks when he reaches the top.

  Now there’s a question I’ll never tire of hearing.

  Maybe it makes me some kind of sap, but I don’t care. I spent over three decades on the outside looking in, thinking I’d never have this thing, marriage, and now—poof!—I have this thing. I’m so grateful to have it, I will never get tired of hearing people ask me how it’s going.
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  “Great,” I answer. “How’s things going with Aunt Alfresca?”

  “Well, you know your aunt.”

  I do indeed.

  Next up is Billy.

  “It hasn’t been the same without the game the last few weeks,” he says.

  “I know,—?” I feel Sam’s glare and stop myself mid-word, switching gears to “I hear what you’re saying.” I look to her for approval but she rolls her eyes. Crap.

  “So how’s married life treating you?” Billy asks.

  “Couldn’t be better.”

  And here’s Drew with a case of reinforcement beer. It’s the cheap stuff but you gotta admire Drew’s insistence on economizing even though the recession hasn’t hurt him any. Plus, Stacy doesn’t like him to spend too much on beer unless she’s there to drink it.

  “How’s married life treating you?” he says, shoving the case into my arms.

  “Terrific,” I say.

  Finally, there’s Steve Miller.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he says. “I had trouble getting out of the office.”

  “You’re not late.” I do the math. “The first one only arrived six minutes ago. Well, unless you count Sam. She’s been here for about four hours.”

  “So, how’s married life treating you?”

  What is it with these people and the constant questioning? It’s like everyone’s trying to take my marital temperature or something.

  “Supercalifragilisticexpialodocious,” I say.

  “Come again?”

  “It’s dynamite.”

  I shut the door.

  I’d clap my hands together to show it’s time to get down to business, but I’m still holding Drew’s case of crappy beer.

  “I’ll take that,” Sam offers.

  As she goes into the kitchen, I clap my hands. “So, who’s ready to play?”

  People grab beers, Sam pours a spare bowl of chips, and we all head for the basement. Big John makes it down the first short flight, but then we get to the landing, which is crowded with Fluffy’s stuff, and he sees the longer flight extending downward.