Thus it was not, I had originally planned to aver either during the ‘back’ nine or in the 19th Hole, that I claimed, as do some husbands, never to ‘snore,’ nor that I am unwilling to roll to one side or the other or to take reasonable steps to accommodate Hope when something has caused me every once in a great while to rasp, cough, gurgle, wheeze or breathe in any way obstructedly in sleep. Rather, that the true, more vexing or ‘paradoxical’ source of the present marital conflict is that I, in reality, am not yet truly even asleep at the times my wife cries out suddenly now about my ‘snoring’ and disturbing her nearly every night since our Audrey’s departure from home. It is very nearly always within no more than roughly an hour of our retiring (after reading in our beds for approximately one half hour, which is something of a marital ‘ritual’ or custom), at which time I am still lying in bed on my back with my arms arranged and my eyes either closed or relaxedly watching the walls’ and ceiling’s angles and distending exterior lights through the blinds, continuing to be aware of every sound but slowly relaxing and ‘unwinding’ and descending gradually towards falling asleep, but not yet in fact asleep. When she now cries out.
The real issue, in other words, is that it is Hope (who is well known for falling asleep the moment she has closed her current ‘livre de chevet,’ replaced it on her night-stand and struck the light in the brushed steel sconce above her bed—as opposed to myself, who have been a difficult and somewhat, as it were, ‘fragile’ or ‘delicate’ sleeper from childhood onwards) who is, in point of fact, asleep at these junctures, and dreaming, said dreams evidently consisting, at least in part, of the somewhat paradoxical belief and perception that I myself am asleep and am ‘snoring’ loudly enough to—as she puts it—‘wake the dead.’
I do, of course, have my personal faults, as do all or most husbands; but ‘snoring’ during the year’s cold weather months (like most, my hay fever is seasonal or, more technically, an ‘Auto-immune system’ response to certain classes of pollen) is not one of them. Not, of course, that it would even necessarily constitute an actual ‘fault’ as such, as it would not be an action which I was performing ‘consciously’ or had any voluntary control over. But I do not. Nor am I in the habit of being incorrect or confused about whether I myself am asleep or not—and it is an established fact in our marriage that it takes me far longer to truly fall asleep than it does Hope or my erstwhile first wife (we had joked about it together many times), as well as longer to fully awaken. Hope, in particular, moves quickly and easily between states of consciousness which, for me, are—due, perhaps, to professional stress—somewhat of a struggle. One could point to, for instance, the fact that it is nearly always myself who drives when driving any appreciable distance as a couple, or that it is frequently I who must rouse or shake her gently awake at the shore, or in front of the Home entertainment room’s television, or often at the end of a long piece of music or theater.
Since the prior Autumn, however, there simply has been no reasoning with her on this point. She steadfastly avows, in other words, that my putative ‘snoring’ is a waking reality instead of her own dream. And in the dark of our bedroom, when she suddenly wakes and cries out in such a way that I am myself jolted up-right, with adrenaline coursing through my system (just as when the telephone rings at night, its signal or ‘ring’ now piercing in a way which daylight never makes it), there is in her ‘snoring’ complaint a note of near hysteria which makes it perfectly evident that she has been asleep, or else has been in the type of semi-waking, oneiric state in which some people ‘“talk” in their sleep,’ confabulating past and present and truth and dream, and ‘believing’ it all in such a way that there is simply no reasoning with someone in such a state.
And yet I have largely refused to patronize or placate her about something which simply was not true. There are, even in marriage, limits. After an initial period last Autumn in which I would attempt to argue or reason with Hope ‘in situ’ in the darkened bedroom, informing her that I was in reality not yet asleep and to simply go back to sleep and forget all about it, that she was only dreaming (a response which so irked and provoked her, however, that her voice would begin to rise sharply in such a ‘tone’ as to so upset me that any chance of real sleep would then be impossible for the next several hours), I then, subsequently, attempted or tried refusing to respond ‘in situ’ or to in any way acknowledge her complaints that I was keeping her awake, instead waiting for the morning of the next day to remonstrate that I had not yet even been asleep, and to mildly observe that her agitated dreams of my ‘snoring’ were becoming worse and more frequent, and to urge her to make some sort of appointment and perhaps inquire about a prescription. And yet Hope has been wholly obdurate and unyielding on this point, insisting that it was I who was ‘the one who’s asleep,’ and that if I could or would not acknowledge this, my refusal to ‘trust’ her indicated that I must be ‘angry at [her]’ over something, or perhaps unconsciously wished to ‘hurt’ her, and that if anyone around here needed to ‘make an appointment’ it was myself, which according to Hope I would not hesitate to do if my respect and concern for her even slightly outweighed my own selfish insistence on being ‘right.’ Worse, on certain mornings, was when she, as it were, ‘took a page’ from her ‘true’ or biological sibling, Vivian (a twice divorced ‘halogen’ blonde and devotee of numerous so-called ‘Support’ or ‘self help’ groups and movements, to whom Hope was extremely close before their ‘falling out’)’s lexicon and accused me of being ‘in denial,’ an accusation any denial of which was held, of course, to be evidence in its own favor, maddeningly. Once or twice, however, in the early Winter months, I admittedly yielded and did, with a frustrated groan or sigh, take my own bed’s bedding down the hall to the ‘Guest’ bedroom and attempt to ‘drop off’ or sleep there amidst all of the frilled pastels, saffron joss and boxed detritus of our Audrey’s recent adolescence, lying perfectly still and motionless and scarcely breathing, and straining to hear, down the hall, any sounds of Hope perhaps once again sitting up-right and accusing a now empty or unoccupied bed of ‘snoring’ and ‘keeping [her] awake’—which would be indisputable proof of just who was asleep and who merely the innocent subject of someone else’s dream of being kept awake. Lying there alone, I envisioned something like myself hearing the vexed cries and complaints and arising instantly to quickly traverse the hallway, bursting through our bedroom door with something resembling a triumphant ‘Aha!’—so filled with frustrated and aggrieved hormones, however, and devoting so much effort and close concentration to vigilantly listening for any sound or movement from our bedroom, that I got scarcely one iota or ‘wink’ of sleep the entire night in Audrey’s former bed, and yet had, nevertheless, to still arise and go forth to attempt to stagger through my professional responsibilities at work and both sides of the lengthy commute the following day with my entire body, mind and psyche on the edge of what felt to be nearly complete collapse. It was, I was, of course, aware, perhaps petty to be so fixated on vindication or ‘proof,’ but, by this point of the conflict, I was often nearly ‘not’ or ‘beside’ myself with frustration, choler or anger and fatigue. One must understand (as it was my original intention to attempt to explain to her stepfather) that though, as in any marriage, Hope and I had had our fair share of conflicts and difficult marital periods, the evident vehemence, anger and persecution with which she now dismissed my protests of being awake at the crucial junctures of alleged ‘snoring’ were unprecedented, and, for the first several weeks of the dreams and accusations, I was concerned primarily for Hope herself, and feared that she was having a more difficult time of it adjusting to our Audrey’s ‘leav[ing] the nest’ than it had at first appeared (pace that it had been Hope, even more than Audrey herself, who had insisted or ‘lobbied’ for an out-of-State college, the relatively nearby Bryn Mawr and Sarah Lawrence Colleges having been Audrey and myself’s tacitly agreed upon choices as a compromise or [in the language of insurance regulation] ‘Technical compliance’ w
ith this priority), and that this difficulty or grief was manifesting itself as sleep disruptions and unconscious or misdirected anger or ‘blame’ at myself. (Audrey is Hope’s child by her first, short lived marriage, but was no more than a toddler when Naomi and myself’s own divorce was declared ‘Final, a mensa et thoro’ and Hope and myself were free to marry, which occurred sixteen years ago this coming August 9th. For all practical purposes, she is, essentially, ‘my’ daughter as well, and I too found her physical absence and the house’s strange new silence and schedules and the gamut of readjustments difficult, as well, as I tried to repeatedly reassure Hope.) After some further time had passed, however, and all attempts to discuss the conflict rationally or induce Hope to consider even the mere possibility that it was she, not myself, who was in reality asleep when the alleged ‘snoring’ problem manifested itself led only to a further entrenchment or ‘hardening’ in her own position—the essence of her position being that I myself was being irrationally ‘stubborn’ and ‘untrusting’ of what she could plainly hear with her own two ears—I essentially ceased, then, to say or do anything in the way of ‘in situ’ response or objection when she would suddenly sit violently up in bed across the room (her face often inhuman and spectral in the bedroom’s faint light because of the white emollient cream she wore to bed during the cold, dry months of the year, and distorted unpleasantly by vexation and choler) to accuse me of ‘snoring horribly’ and demanding that I roll over at once or be exiled again to Audrey’s former bed. Instead, I would now lie perfectly still, silent and motionless, my eyes closed, pantomiming a deeply sleeping man who could not hear or in any way acknowledge her, until eventually her pleas and vituperations trailed drowsily off and she would settle back with a deep and pointed sigh. Then I would continue to lie supine and motionless in my pale blue flannel or acetate sleep wear, still and silent as a ‘tomb,’ waiting silently for Hope’s breathing to change and for the slight, small chewing or grinding sounds she produced in sleep to indicate that she had once more fallen back to sleep. Even then, however, sometimes she now once again bolts awake only moments later, once again sitting up to accuse me of ‘snoring’ and angrily demanding that I do something to halt or impede it so that she might finally have some ‘peace’ and be able to sleep.
By this point in time, the Spring thunderstorm’s downpour had receded or ebbed to the point that individual droplets’ impacts’ sounds were individually countable against the striped canvas awnings of the 19th Hole’s large bay windows—meaning being discretely audible, but in sum arrhythmic and not what one would term pleasant or soothing; the larger drops sounded almost eerie or, as it were, almost ‘brutal’ in their impact’s force. Inside, Hope’s father was leaning back and slightly to the side in his heavy ‘captain’s’ chair, running the fine cigar over his upper lip in order to savor the aroma as he searched in a side pocket (this is what is making him lean; it is not a distortion) for his clip’s special monogrammed case. Without informing Hope (an omission which was, I confess, petty, and that I was in all likelihood unwilling, by that point in the conflict, to give her the ‘satisfaction’ of it), I, during my annual Physical exam, requested a referral from our P.P.O.’s Health Plan’s ‘Primary care’ physician to one of the Plan’s designated ‘Ear, Nose and Throat’ specialists, who then subsequently examined my nasal passages, sinus cavities, trachea, adenoids and ‘soft’ palate, and pronounced that he saw no evidence of anything unusual or out of the ordinary. I later, however, made the mistake of ‘throwing’ this clean bill of health ‘up’ in Hope’s ‘face’ during one of the increasingly heated and upsetting arguments (these often occurring over the following morning’s breakfast) respecting the so-called ‘snoring’ issue, whereupon Hope seized on my failure to have told her about the ‘E., N. & T.’ referral as evidence that I ‘. . . kn[e]w the snoring [was] real,’ and was secretly concerned about it, and that I had been unwilling to tell her about the appointment in advance for fear that the specialist’s diagnosis would identify something amiss in my ‘soft’ palate or nasal passages and that I would have to admit openly to her that the ‘snoring [was] real’ and that all of my accusations that she was asleep and simply dreaming that I was snoring had been merely so much self serving ‘denial’ and ‘projection’ of the problem on to the ‘victim’ of it (referring to, of course, herself). These brief, bitter arguments—which came in waves or clusters throughout the Winter- and early Spring months, and most often tended to occur or ‘erupt’ at breakfast, fueled by a sleepless night and anxiety about facing the demands of the coming day on insufficient sleep, and were often so bitter and upsetting that I would then go through the subsequent commute and the first several hours of work in some type of emotional daze, mentally ‘re-playing’ the argument and conceiving of new ways to present or arrange evidence or catch Hope in a logical contradiction, sometimes going so far as to interrupt work in order to jot these ideas or cutting rejoinders down in the margins of my professional Day-planner for possible future use—were terrifying in their sudden heat and the speed with which they escalated in intensity and ‘spleen,’ as well as in the way Hope’s dry, dark, narrow, increasingly haggard face across the breakfast nook sometimes becomes nearly unrecognizable to me, twisted, distorted and even somewhat repellent in its anger and stony suspicion; and, for my part, I must confess that, at least once or twice, I had felt an actual urge to strike or shove her or up-end the nook’s breakfast hutch or table with rage, so ‘beside myself’ with irrational rage had I been ‘driven’ by the strange, stony, bitter and irrational obdurance with which she would flatly refuse to consider—to acknowledge even the bare possibility, despite all of the reasonable rebuttals, rejoinders, reasoned arguments, evidence, facts not in dispute and citations of precedent (there had, in the course of our marriage, been other conflicts in which Hope had been utterly convinced of the validity of her position, but had had to acquiesce in the face of subsequent proof that she had, in point of fact, been wrong, and had then had to apologize) which I advanced—that it was I who was awake and she who was—‘just possibly’—asleep, and that the ‘snoring’ issue was in point of fact in reality ‘[her] issue’ and was in fact capable of real resolution only by her ‘making [some kind of Medical, or even psychiatric] appointment.’ My hands sometimes literally trembled or shook with frustration and fatigue related disorientation as I started my vehicle, with a series of rapid, indistinct and unwelcome ‘images’ or hallucinatory distortions often also moving in rapid, arrhythmic succession across my ‘mind’s eye’ as I undertook my commute north up the Garden State Parkway. (In one of the most heated and upsetting of these arguments, I had only brought up the Ear, Nose and Throat examination as evidence that at least I, unlike Hope, was willing to entertain at least the possibility that I was somehow wrong and might in reality be somehow truly ‘snoring,’ and thus that any workable compromise or resolution was going to be impossible unless there was at least some slight mutuality about our willingness to concede, pace the information of our senses, at least the ‘theoretical possibility’ that we might be wrong about just who was asleep and dreaming andor ‘snoring’ and who was not.)
Also, by this point in time, our routine (or, ‘ritual’) for preparing to retire and go to sleep in the bedroom had also often become almost indescribably tense and unpleasant. Hope often would not acknowledge or speak to me, and when, from my side of the room, I ‘caught her eye’ as she was emerging from her clothes closet or the washroom or applying emollient at her beige enamel ‘Vanity’ ensemble’s lighted mirrors, her expression was often that of someone regarding a distasteful stranger. (Hope’s stepfather and stepsisters, Meredith and Denise [or, more familiarily, ‘Donni’], are also accomplished at this expression, as I first noted upon my first or initial introduction to her family, which occurred at a dinner at Dr. Sipe and his wife’s large, Victorian style home in the historical ‘Fourth Ward’ district of West Newark, in the course of which, at two different points, ‘Father’ asked me some
type of personal or biographical question and then, in the midst of my attempt to reply, interrupted in order to publicly indicate that he was becoming impatient or wished that I would ‘Cut to the chase’ in a blunter or apparently more time efficient way.) Often, by the time the bedroom’s lights are now extinguished, I will have become so over-wrought and tense that any likely prospect of falling asleep in the near future vanished altogether, despite the fact that I was often now so exhausted as to literally tremble and my vision, as mentioned, regularly went in and out of different states of exaggerated focus, depth and abstract flux or ‘retroussage’—for instance, the way Audrey Bogen’s once fresh, voluptuous and innocent face seemed to tremble or shudder on the edge of exploding into abstract shards when she brought Dr. Sipe’s ash-tray, which was formed of heavy, black glass and emblazoned with the Raritan Club’s heraldic crest and Latin motto—‘Resurgam!’—in virid red.
As well, of course, as the fact that the absurd ephemeracy, triviality and obvious displacement or projection of the whole ‘snoring’ conflict—of which, between Hope and myself, only I seemed truly aware or frustrated at the absurdity and irrelevance of the whole conflict—made it that much worse. I myself simply could not believe that Hope and myself’s relationship at this crucial, ‘Empty nest’ point in our marriage could founder on such a trivial issue, one which, even in far less happy or viable unions than our own, must, for the most part, be resolved or ‘worked through’ rather early on. Like conflicts concerning, for instance, partners’ differing communicative ‘styles,’ amounts of time spent together as opposed to physically apart, division of responsibilities for household tasks and so forth, mutual compatibility of sleeping ‘styles’ and arrangements is simply part of the domestic compromise of living with a spouse, as, of course, almost every man of any worldly experience knows. I could not, for several weeks or even months, even bring myself to raise the issue of the conflict with personal friends or family. It simply seemed too silly to credit. I even went so far as to try consulting or ‘seeing’ a professional Couple counselor—again, an action undertaken on my own and, as it were, ‘sub-rosa,’ as I knew quite well Hope’s, her stepfather’s, and the bulk of her true and adoptive family’s (with the exception of Vivian, whose allegedly ‘Recovered’ memories and hysterical public accusations at the extended family’s Holiday get-together at Paul and Theresa’s extraordinary vacation home off the Manasquan inlet had led to herself and Hope’s ‘falling out’ and to the entire extended family’s unspoken prohibition of any mention of the entire subject, besides which were Dr. Sipe’s own sentiments respecting the issue of ‘therapy’’s eligibility as a Medical expense for the purposes of Health Care plans and ‘Managed Care,’ which were well known and vociferous) feelings vis à vis the ‘therapy’ issue, and knew also, by that point, that Hope’s flat, tight-mouthed refusal, were I to broach the issue, even to consider ‘seeing’ the counselor with me as a ‘couple’ would frustrate and aggravate me all over again, and simply escalate or further the scope of the marital conflict—only, there-upon, to my considerable chagrin, to repeatedly have, suffer or endure a series of ‘therapeutic’ exchanges such as, in substance, the following: