Whereupon: ‘Do not even take up my time in mentioning this, as any man knows what an absurd and trivial issue it is compared to many other marital conflicts and problems. In other words, “de minimis non curat,” or, the whole matter is, ultimately, beneath my notice’—for such was the gist or ‘thrust’ of the dismissive hand gesture which Hope’s stepfather made in response to my broaching of this delicate subject, making the derisive gesture which all of my wife’s other siblings still associate with him from throughout their youths, and which her eldest stepbrother, Paul, a successful entrepreneur in automated, out-sourced Medical and Dental billing, can imitate so uncannily to this day when our families all get together over the Holiday season at Paul and his wife Theresa’s extraordinary vacation home in Sea Girt, where the Winter surf booms against the rocks of the light-house tower which the Coast Guard closed once G.P.S. or ‘satellite’ navigation rendered its functions redundant, and where all of the both ‘true’ and ‘step-’ siblings and their spouses and families will gather in Norwegian sweaters with insulated thermi of hot cider on the basalt outcroppings amid gulls’ pulsing cries to watch the booming surf and the distant lights of the Point Pleasant ferry moving north-ward up the Inter Coastal Waterway towards Staten Island, the vistas all iron greys and profound maroons and, privately to myself, desolate in the extreme. Consciously or otherwise, it is a hand gesture ideally designed to make its recipient feel like an otiose moron or bore, and ‘Father’’s feelings about myself and my place in the overall ‘family dynamic’ had never been what one would call well disguised. Audrey Bogen, whom our own Audrey had played closely with as small children before Jack Bogen’s affairs had unraveled and their lives took such dramatically different paths, and was now already an ‘unwed’ mother and a career beverage waitress at the Raritan Club’s 19th Hole (she was, to many of the nubile adolescents in our own Audrey’s peer circle, a kind of cautionary tale, one of her children being plainly inter-racial), now appeared with our Feigenspan lagers on a small, oaken blonde-wood tray, and Hope’s stepfather exercised a prerogative exclusive to men of advanced age with young women, which was to look frankly and speculatively at the young, voluptuous waitress’s face, uniform and physical body as she set down the frosted steins and stated her intentions to bring us more snack mix. ‘Father’’s advanced age and physical senescence, in other words, making the frankness of his gaze—which, in Wilkes Barre during my own youth, was termed ‘Look[ing] her over’—appear ingenuous, child-like and apparently almost ‘innocent’ or harmless to young women instead of salacious or lewd. This was a quality (or, as it were, lack of it) which I myself was, of course, all too conscious or aware of, since, as our own Audrey had entered the adolescence whose onset, in contemporary times’ girls, seems to become earlier all the time, and had physically ‘matured’ or (in my wife’s phrase) ‘fill[ed] out,’ so also, of course, had the other members of the peer group whom she ‘hung’ around with or brought to the house or along on seaside vacations andor inland canoe trips in June, July or early August; and, in the case of some of the more prematurely ‘mature’ or voluptuous of these peers, the conflict between the natural urge or instinctual drive to look at them as would any adult, ‘red-blooded’ man, v. the obvious social restrictions erected by my role as their friend’s adoptive father, became, in some cases, so awkward or painful that I could scarcely bring myself to look at or scarcely even to acknowledge them at all, a phenomenon which our Audrey, not surprisingly, rarely even noticed, but which sometimes vexed Hope to the point that once or twice, during marital arguments, she would mock my pained confusion, and would aver that she’d prefer it—or the term she used might more aptly have been that she would ‘respect’ it more—if I would simply, openly ogle or leer rather than the stricken, affectedly casual avoidance which I feigned as if I expected it to fool anyone with eyes in their head as they watched my sad pantomime with pity and disgust. Because of the severe sleep disturbance, discord with Hope and trouble in my Dept. of the company for which I served as Assistant Systems Supervisor (which provided out-sourced data and document storage facilities and systems for a number of small- and mid-sized insurance providers in the Mid-Atlantic region), my chronic distress had reached the point at which sometimes I felt near tears, which, of course, in the 19th Hole with Hope’s stepfather, would be an unthinkable happen-stance. Sometimes, often while driving, I feared that I was going to have an infarction. Next, in a predictable yet far more disturbing stage of the wave of disorientation, came the appearance of a strange, static, hallucinatory tableau or mental ‘shot,’ ‘scene,’ Fata morgana or ‘vision’ of a public telephone in an airport or commuter rail terminal’s linear row or ‘bank’ of public phones, ringing. Travelers are hurrying laterally past the row of phones, some bearing or pulling ‘carry on’ luggage and other personal possessions, walking or hurrying past while the telephone, which remains at the center of the view of the scene or tableau, rings on and on, persistently, but is unanswered, with none of the ‘bank’ of phones’ other phones in use and none of the air travelers or commuters acknowledging or even so much as glancing at the ringing phone, about which there is suddenly something terribly ‘moving’ or poignant, forlorn, melancholic or even foreboding, an endlessly ringing and unanswered public phone, all of which appears or seems to occur both endlessly and in, as it were, ‘no-time,’ and is accompanied by an incongruous odor of saffron.
Hope’s stepfather, a career Medical executive for Prudential Insurance, Inc.—or, ‘The Rock,’ as it is often popularly known—as his own father before him evidently was, as well, as well as being a ‘Fourth Ward’ historical district native born and bred, knew Feigenspan lager by its original trademark, ‘Pride of Newark’ (or, ‘P.O.N.’), and made rather a point of referring to it in no other way, also affecting to brush across his upper lip with a knuckle after drinking, in the way of the city’s ‘working-’men, reaching then into a pocket of his vest and producing his cigar case and clip, as well as his slim, modernistic gold lighter, a gift from his wife (and accordingly inscribed), and commencing the ritual of preparing to smoke an expensive Cohiba cigar with his draft lager, gesturing peremptorily in the direction of the bar for an ash-tray, at which juncture I noted once more how exceedingly thin, sallow and, as it were, escharotic or flaky the flesh of his left wrist and hand in the air appeared. His ears, which had always been quite large or protrusive, were flushed from recent exertion. When asked if, upon reflection, he thought a cigar this early in the day was perhaps such a good idea, Dr. Sipe, who was due to turn age 76 this coming July 6th (his birth stone was known to be ‘the Ruby’), responded that the sole indicator of his desiring my input on his personal habits would consist in his explicitly coming to me and requesting it, at which I cleared my throat slightly and shrugged or smiled, avoiding Audrey Bogen’s dark (our own Audrey’s being grey-green or, in certain lights, ‘Hazel’) eyes as she placed on the table a small bowl of very shiny nuts and an ash-tray of clear glass on whose bottom was reproduced the Raritan Club’s escutcheon, which Dr. Sipe pulled closer and rotated slightly to satisfy some obscure criteria in his ritual for enjoying a cigar. Twice already, I had yawned so violently that a popping noise and sudden, as it were, ‘stabbing’ pain manifested just beneath my left ear. ‘Father,’ whose physical health’s minutiae were a topic of endless colloquy among his different children, had apparently suffered a number of tiny, highly localized strokes over the previous several years—or, in the language of Health Plan underwriting, ‘Transient ischemic accidents’—which Hope’s younger brother, ‘Chip’ (whose actual given name is Chester) had confirmed, in the bland, almost affectless or subdued way evidently characteristic of practicing Neurologists everywhere, were almost ‘Par’ for the ‘course’ for a septuagenarian male of Dr. Sipe’s history and condition, and were, evidently, individually of little account, producing little more in the way of symptomology than transient dizziness or perceptual distortion. Empirically, the evident result of this was that ‘Fa
ther’ was now one of the particular sort of well to do elderly (or, as some prefer, ‘Senior’) men who appear well preserved and even still somewhat distinguished from a certain distance away, but whose eyes, on closer proximity, reveal a subtle lack of focus, and whose facial expression or affect appears to be, in some subtle but unmistakable way, ‘off,’ resulting in a perpetual ‘queer look’ or mien which sometimes frightened his younger grandchildren. (This notwithstanding the fact that our own Audrey, now 19 and Dr. Sipe’s second oldest grandchild, had, on the other hand, never once reported being frightened of or by her ‘Greatfather [a childhood sobriquet which had stuck],’ who had, in turn, addressed Audrey as—sans any detectable trace of irony or awareness—‘My little Princess,’ and had, together with his wife, ‘spoiled’ Audrey with such lavish and excessive indulgence as to sometimes arouse tensions between Hope and this latest Mrs. Sipe, the two of whom were not [as Hope would have it] the ‘closest of friends’ to begin with. [By mutual and unspoken consensus, our Audrey customarily addressed Hope as ‘Mother’ or ‘Mom’ and myself as ‘Randall,’ ‘Randy,’ or, when angry or trying to make some ironic point in the perennial struggle for youthful control v. independence, as ‘Mr. Napier,’ ‘Mr. and Mrs. Napier’ or (with decided sarcasm) as ‘the Dynamic Duo.’]) Besides his forehead’s four distracting, pre-cancerous spots, or lesions or ‘keratonesis,’ it was only in recent years, too, that Hope’s stepfather’s mouth had developed the habit of continuing to move slightly after he had ceased speaking, either as if savoring the words’ taste or silently reprising them, and these movements sometimes reminded one of some type of small animal which has been struck or run over and continues to writhe wetly in the road-way, which was, to say the least, disconcerting. There is also the issue or matter of ‘Father’’s bowed upper back and consequent jutting head, which causes him to appear to be thrusting his face and mouth forward directly at one in an aggressive, almost predatory fashion, which is also disconcerting, which may be a matter of geriatric posture or disc compression or else the beginning of an actual ‘hunch-back’ or ‘hump,’ which he is evidently very vain and sensitive about and which no one in the ‘family’ is ever under any circumstances permitted to mention except his wife, who will suddenly touch or push at his jutting head impatiently and tell him, ‘For God’s sake, Edmund, straighten up,’ in a tone which makes everyone at the table uncomfortable. Then an extremely brief and almost ‘strobe’-like associative tableau in which Hope’s stepfather and herself, at some past or distantly prior point in time, are seated together in an unfamiliar coupe or sports car which is speeding along a rural or markedly under-maintained inland State route in the sultry light of August or late July, and an interior scene of a somewhat younger and unescharotic ‘Father,’ with his iron grey hair, small, cruel mustache and thin, calf-skin gauntlets or ‘driving’ gloves, driving the vehicle, as well as views of the exterior vistas and divided center or median line distending and rushing past at an unnatural rate of speed, as if the vehicle were traveling far too fast for extant road conditions, and of a younger and noticeably more lissome and voluptuous Hope applying facial products in the small, inset mirror of the sun shade or visor as ‘Father,’ posture erect and distinguished and gazing stolidly ahead at the road, assures her that it isn’t so much dislike or ‘disapproval’ of the fellow per se, while the powerful vehicle recedes up ahead in the radiant late Summer haze, the whole brief tableau or interior ‘vision’ or shot so rapid and incongruous that it can only be truly, as it were, ‘seen’ in retrospect.
According to my own pocket watch, no more than five or six minutes had passed since we had first entered the 19th Hole. The rain against the window’s convex and mullioned and glass window came in what now appeared to be vascular or peristaltic ‘pulses’ or ‘waves,’ and during the brief, rhythmic lulls or troughs of these, one could make out the Eighteenth fairway’s ‘dog leg’’s copse of trees being bent and wrung by the storm’s violent winds, as well as tiny and fore-shortened golfing foursomes running hard for their carts or the Pro-shop’s shelter, their shoes’ spikes producing the exaggeratedly high stride of men almost running in place. Those wearing hats held them down with one hand. The 19th Hole’s long, mahogany bar and tables began gradually to fill as more and more men chased in off various parts of the course by the storm came in to get warm and wait out the rain before going home to whatever was left of their families. ‘Father’’s hand trembled as he manipulated the clip, which supposedly required great precision. Much of the more recent entrants’ conversation appeared to concern lightning and inquiring whether anyone had seen or heard lightning on the course, as well as whom among the Raritan Club’s regular members might still be ‘out there.’ Many of the men’s faces appeared unusually smooth and pinkened, their color high from the adrenaline of sudden flight. Actuarially speaking, lightning kills an average of over 300 denizens of Western industrialized nations per annum, more than the average number of accidental deaths due either to recreational boating or insect stings combined, and a substantial number of these electrocutions occur on the nation’s golf courses.
Since our Audrey had graduated as Salutatorian of her class and left the ‘nest’ of home for her freshman collegiate year at out-of-State Bryn Mawr (although she calls home faithfully once or twice a week) the previous Autumn, my wife and myself’s marriage’s single major conflict has now been over the fact that she now suddenly claims that I ‘snore,’ and that this alleged ‘snoring’ was preventing or depriving her of much needed sleep. I will, for instance, be lying quietly supine upon my back with my forearms and hands arranged across my chest (which is the customary way I prepare to gradually relax and fall asleep), and our bedroom upstairs will be pleasantly dark and quiet, with refracted lights from the light traffic on the quiet or ‘tree muffled’ residential intersection below running slowly across the bedroom walls and elongating, distending or collapsing interestingly at the north and east walls’ angles, myself gradually relaxing and descending in peaceful increments towards a good night’s sleep, until Hope suddenly cries out angrily in the darkness, claiming that my ‘snoring’ is making it impossible for her to fall asleep, and insisting that I either turn on to my side or else leave and go sleep in the ‘Guest’ bedroom (which is what, by unspoken agreement, Audrey’s former childhood bedroom is now referred to by us as) and to ‘for God’s sake’ grant her some ‘peace.’ This now occurs almost nightly—more than once on certain nights—and is intensely frustrating and upsetting. In my relaxed state, the sudden vehemence of her crying out floods my nervous system with adrenaline, cortisol or other stress related hormones, and the violence with which she thrashes up to a seated position in her bed—as well as a note of deep vexation or even hostility in her voice, as if this were an issue which had been silently aggravating her for years and she had finally come to the end of her ‘rope’ or ‘last straw’ with it—produces in myself a set of natural, physiological ‘stress’ responses which, subsequently, make it nearly impossible for me to fall asleep, sometimes for hours or even more.
In the past, particularly during head colds, or in some calendar years’ Summer months when the ‘pollen count’ is high and my hay fever is active or severe (I suffer from hay fever, and as a boy, in Wilkes Barre, my sister [whose allergies were even more severe than my own, as well as suffering from congenital asthma] and myself had to be brought by our mother twice a week to the local pediatrician for allergy shots for several years), I have, admittedly, suffered occasional bouts of snoring which have disturbed or awakened Hope in the course of our marriage. But these past bouts or episodes had always been easily resolved by her gently suggesting that I roll on to my side, which I always, immediately and without objection, did, often resolving the problem without either of us even coming fully awake—the whole exchange was friendly, and so unexceptionable that Hope could often compel me to roll over without awakening me or getting either of us ‘worked up’ or aggravated.