Jeff Poreé, Plasterer

It’s Your Last Day of School, my wife said, unsuccessfully hiding her resentment, maybe not trying to hide it, what are you going to do with your summer?, but I was listening to a story on NPR about a woman who had taken the Muslim veil and then taken it off and then written a book, and I was wondering what life act I could perform and capitalize on as a way to escape my life. The questions my wife asked me—not just on this but every morning, every day—were the perfect expression of the paradox of my failed humanity because, on the one hand, there was no one else who cared enough to ask me a question like What are you going to do with your summer?, or at least no one who cared enough to ask it and then listen to the answer, I had no friends, just people who were pleasant to me, and so it would not be going too far to say that my wife’s questions made me human. But on the other hand, nothing made me hate my humanity and want to check out of it more acutely than the questions my wife asked me, usually (as on this morning) in the kitchen, that most ominous of domestic settings, and usually (as on this morning) when I was in the middle of something else, and far too often (as on this morning) when I had already taken a step out of the room. Unless I want to heel to her desire to interrupt the natural course of my life—which is in fact a desire to kill me—I am forced to bite off an I don’t know and get quickly out of earshot, and in truth I don’t know is the only possible response to questions like I wonder how much of a cunt my boss is going to be today? or What do you think the babies—our cats—are going to do today? or What are you going to do with your summer?, because these aren’t questions, they are opportunities for my wife to hear herself speak and tyrannize me with her preoccupations, to nonplus me to who knows what petty-sinister end, to momentarily convince herself that she is interested enough in life to ask questions about it. And this time (as often) when I mumbled my I don’t know and got away, always fleeing communication—one of the thousand killing ironies of my life—the truth of my awfulness as a husband struck me with such force that it seemed the only fitting restitution I could make for seventeen years of compelling my wife to ask un-questions just to hear human speech would be if all my leaden I don’t knows could be forged into a blade that could tumble my offending head in apology at her feet. Husbands who hit their wives at least have the virtue of directness. Yet, I reflected as I brushed my teeth with characteristic negligence, there can be no doubt that my thorough inadequacy as a husband and person is merely an appropriate response to the thorough falseness of every adult person around me. One finally takes it for granted that every statement made by people is a lie, but their questions are equally false. No adult ever asks me a real question. I have not been asked a real question by an adult person in years. A question like When does this bell ring? isn’t spoken by a person to a person but by a machine to a machine. A question like Did you see the Saints game? is not a question but a funnel through which the questioner seeks to pour the noise in his mind. Who would you rather fuck, Beyoncé or J. Lo? isn’t a question but a firecracker lit by one exhausted teacher to distract another. If Bob asks me whether I think the Ernie’s chapter is necessary in The Catcher in the Rye, what he wants is...