The soap smells good.

        The water feels good -- hot and good and right.

        Usually you don’t shower after work. There isn’t any
need in a desk job like yours is, yours was, but today you
simply feel the need to wash the grime of your recent
experiences off yourself.

        Too bad you can’t open a door to your skull and scrub
the shit off your brain.

        You lean down and let the water splash into your face,
rinsing the soap off. And you open your mouth, letting it
fill up with hot water, which you spit back out in a warm
stream. It hits the tile and runs down the wall.

        After another seven minutes in the shower, just
standing beneath the rhythmic beat of the showerhead, the
water begins to go cold, and you turn it off and pat
yourself dry with a too-old faded towel.

        Naked, you stumble into the bedroom, where your wife
lies in bed, a book propped open in front of her.

        She looks up from her book. She looks up at you.

        She says, “Are you going to tell me what happened
today or not?”

        “Nothing happened.”

        “You’re not acting like nothing happened.”

        You sigh. “What do you want me to say?”

        “The truth.” You shake your head. You feel so vulnerable,
standing in front of her, naked, being questioned about
your behavior.

        “The truth?” you say.

        Looks like it got past that deadbolt after all.

        “The truth,” she says.

        You walk to the dresser silently and slip into a pair
of flannel pajama pants and that helps a little bit. It’s
very hard to lie to a woman while standing in front of her
naked, your flaccid cock staring at the floor.

        “The truth,” you say.

        And then a pause.

        “The truth is,” you begin.

        Your wife nods her head expectantly, as if she can nod
the story of today’s happenings right out of your fat
lying mouth.

        “The truth is,” you say, “nothing happened. Nothing
specific. It was a bad ending to a bad week for no specific
reason, and I’m sorry if I’m acting strange. I’m tired and
want to go to sleep. Is that okay?”

        “You’re sure?”

        “Jesus Christ,” you say. “How many fucking times do I
have to say that everything is fucking fine?”

        “Oh,” she says, “I’m so sorry. Obviously you’re
feeling just wonderful. How stupid of me.”

        Fuck.

        “I’m sorry.”

        “It’s fine.” Staring at the book, unwilling to look at
you, look into your eyes. Probably reading the same
goddamned sentence over and over again, unable to process
it because she’s thinking about what a miserable fuck you
are.

        And she’s right.

        You fucked up again, you goddamned temperamental shit.

        You crawl into bed, and you wrap your arms around your
wife, and you kiss her neck and say,

        “I’m sorry.” Kiss.

        “Forgive me.” Kiss.

        “Please.” Kiss.

        She puts the book aside, and she reaches over to the
nightstand and clicks off the bedside lamp, and darkness
envelopes you, and she snuggles into her pillow, her naked
back to you, and she says,

        “Hold me.”

        And you snuggle in, your chest to her back, one arm
tucked under her pillow, another flopped over her, the hand
cupping the breast closest to the mattress, your face in
her shampoo-scented hair, and you close your eyes and you
can almost imagine that everything is okay.

        “Baby.”

        “Yeah?” she says.

        “Do you love me?”

        “Go to sleep,” she says.

        “I’m serious. I know you used to. But right now. Right
this second. Do you love me?”

        “Yes, I love you,” she says. “I think.”

        “But you’re unhappy.”

        Silence. You know the silence is an affirmation of
your last words to her, confirmation that she is unhappy.
Unhappy with you. Unhappy with her life in general.

        “Did you fall asleep on me?” you say.

        She sighs.

        “Not everybody can be happy,” she says.

        “You deserve to be happy.”

        “Almost everyone deserves to be happy,” she says,
“but almost nobody is. That’s reality.”

        “That’s not reality.”

        “What is it?”

        “Bullshit.”

        “Yeah?”

        “Yeah. Most people don’t deserve happiness,” you say.
“Most people don’t even deserve the miserable existence
they have. Most people are worthless stupid fucks. You,
though,” you say, “you do deserve happiness. And I’m sorry
I can’t make you happy. I’m sorry I’ve failed you. I’m
sorry.”

        “You haven’t failed me.”

        If only she knew.

        But you can’t tell her. You can’t. The words. They
simply refuse to come out. Fishbones. You don’t even want
them to come out. Once they do, she will no longer even be
able to pretend that you haven’t failed her.

        “I’ll try,” you say, “to do you better than I have.”

        “Go to sleep,” she says.

        So you do.

        You sleep in fits.

        Then Saturday passes, an entire day, and you manage to
avoid mentioning anything out of the ordinary to her.

        Saturday night you have nightmares.

        The color of your dreams is red.

        When the alarm goes off at 7:30 on Sunday morning, the
first thing you think is:

        Another week of work.

        Then you realize today is not Monday.

        And a moment later you remember that even if it were
Monday, there would be no work for you today.

        And then you close your eyes and stare at the inside
of your eyelids. On the inside, you watch a mental sit-com.

        The I Got Fired Show.

        You can even hear the laugh track hahaing at just the
right moments.

        “Honey,” you say, “I’ve failed you.”

        “Hahahahaha!” twenty-five digital voices respond.

        “Hey,” a real voice says, “get up. We’re gonna be late
for church.”

        You open your eyes, and there she is, your wife, your
real life wife, not your sit-com wife, who, in your mind,
is somehow always played by either Parker Posey or Piper
Perabo while you’re played by Bruce Willis, who would never
do tv again anyway, so far as you can tell. Your wife is
sitting up in bed, leaning over you, saying for the second
time,

        “Get up.” Saying for the second time,

        “We’re gonna be late for church.”

        The thing about religion is, as absurd and ridiculous
as it is, it might not all be bullshit. The world is absurd
and ridiculous. Things happen all the time that boggle the
mind, that don’t make sense. In this fucked up, upside-down
world maybe anything could be true, even something as
silly-seeming as religion, with all of its bizarre rituals
and fact-denying stories and science negating beliefs.

        You doubt it.

        You doubt it on a serious level.

        But, fuck, maybe Jesus does want you for a sunbeam.

        You throw the covers off of your naked body and crawl
to the edge of the king size bed and sit on the edge,
cracking your neck and rubbing the eyesnot from the corners
of your tired eyes.

        Church.

        The thing about religion is that it turns all men into
hypocrites.

        After washing your face and brushing your teeth and
slipping into a pair of black corduroy pants and a white
shirt and a black tie, after brushing your hair and putting
on a pair of shoes, you’re ready, and you go to the living
room and sit on the couch and wait for your wife to finish
putting on her makeup.

        You sit on the couch, hunched over. Stare at your own
reflection. You look so sad and fat and useless.

        “This is your life,” you say.

        “Hahahahaha!” twenty-five digital voices respond.

        The thing about church is that it’s incredibly boring.
It shouldn’t be -- it deals with almost all of the
important questions in life -- but damn if it isn’t.

        After about fifteen minutes of sitting in that
godawful, uncomfortable pew, you get up and walk outside,
reach into your right hip pocket and pull out a soft pack
of Camel Filters. Tap one out of the little torn opening at
the top, wrap your lips around the filter, and slide it out
of the pack. It’s comforting as it is deadly, smoking. The
ritual of it is as comforting as the nicotine. The sliding
of the filter between your lips. The lighting of the tip
while cupping your hand over it to avoid the wind blowing
out your flame. The deep warm feeling of the first
inhalation into the lungs. The sigh of the exhale, as the
smoke drifts dragonlike from your too-large hairy nostrils,
spirals toward the sky and dissipates on the breeze.

        You remember the first time you ever smoked a
cigarette. You and your best friend were hanging out at the
park two miles south of the duplex you lived in with your
folks. Your folks had been fighting again. They were always
fighting again. It seemed like it anyway. Every time you
turned around someone was yelling at someone about
something so trivial it wasn’t even worth mentioning. So
you were at the park, sitting on the bridge that ran over
the dry creek bed which cut the park in half, your legs
dangling over the edge of the bridge, kicking back and
forth, as if you were walking on air, and Charlie pulled
out that pack of mentholated cigarettes he got from his
older brother, who was visiting from Germany (he was in the
Marines), and he asked you did you wanna smoke one and you
said no, do you, and he said no, and five minutes later you
were both coughing and trying to look cool as fuck.

        After the end of that cigarette you had smoking down,
and having it down, smoking made you feel good. It made
your stomach twist, and it gave you diarrhea when you got
home that night, but it made you feel good too. It made you
feel like a man. And feeling like a man, you felt that you
could handle anything.

        Anything at all.

        But that was a long time ago, and you know better
these days. You know that smoking doesn’t make it so you
can handle anything. It doesn’t do anything but speed up
the firing of the synapses and give you some serious
morning phlegm that must be hacked up and hawked up and
spit into the basin or the toilet before you start your
day. That and blacken your lungs, and clog the pores within
your lungs, and inhibit the flow of oxygen, and kill you
slowly.

        Maybe that’s part of the reason you still smoke.

        Aside from the addiction.

        Maybe you like the knowledge that with every cigarette
you are shortening your life by just a little bit.

        A little less life to suffer through.

        A little less shit to swallow before the blackness
overwhelms.

        “What are you doing out here?”

        A man’s voice.

        You turn around and see Frank Lemont standing in front
of the church door, which is just swinging shut behind him.

        You’ve always liked Frank. He’s this old guy, maybe a
thousand years old, with some of the deepest wrinkles
you’ve ever seen cut into a man’s face, grey hair that
whisks wildly in every direction off his white scalp,
skinny as a lightning rod and just as conductive.

        “You got an extra one of them Chesterfields?”

        You give Frank a cigarette and tell him you didn’t
know he smoked.

        “I don’t,” he says, as he inhales deeply.

        “So?” he says.

        “What?” you say.

        “What are you doing out here?”

        “Smoking,” you say.

        “You can say that again.”

        “What does that mean?”

        “You’re burning up.”

        “Is it obvious?”

        “Everything’s obvious if you’re observant enough.”

        You take a drag off your cigarette, feel the warmth
and danger of the smoke swirling through your lungs.

        “Frank,” you say -- through a sigh -- “is it always
wrong to lie to someone?”

        “You’re a grown man,” Frank says.

        “Don’t ask me a child’s question,” Frank says.

        “You know the answer already,” Frank says.

        You nod.

        “What is it that’s burning you up?”

        “Life.”

        “Life burns everyone up. If it didn’t we would live
forever. We’re like,” Frank says, “we’re like these
little,” Frank says. He pauses. “Shit. I got nothing.”

        Frank smiles.

        “Some days you got it and other days you don’t, I
guess. Today I don’t got shit.”

        He shrugs.

        He takes a drag off his cigarette.

        Then flicks it off into the parking lot and turns to
head back into the church building. He’s in the building
and the door is swinging shut behind him when you turn to
the building, and you say,

        “Hey, Frank?”

        “Yeah?” he says, coming back out of the building.

        “I was fired on Friday.”

        “Shit.”

        “Yeah.”

        “How’d your wife take it?”

        “She didn’t.”

        “She seems okay today.”

        “I haven’t told her.”

        “Why not?”

        “Because,” you say.

        Frank nods.

        “Yeah,” he says. “I figured that was the reason. It’s
a good one.”

        “It’s a cowardly one.”

        “No,” Frank says. “Self preservation is never
cowardly. It often requires doing things you’d rather not,
it often requires living in a way other than the one you
intended, but it’s never cowardly.”

        “I don’t see how not telling her has anything to do
with self preservation,” you say. “I didn’t tell her only
because I’m afraid to tell her.”

        “Did you make it through the day yesterday?”

        “Yeah.”

        “Would you have made it through the day if you told her
and she left you?”

        “Probably not.”

        “That,” Frank says, “is self-preservation.”

        “But it can’t last forever.”

        “Nothing does.”

        “But what am I supposed to do now?”

        “Shit,” Frank says. “If I knew anything about life I
wouldn’t be out here smoking a butt with you, now would I?”

        Driving home from church, you suggest that you two
stop at the Denny’s on Sunset and Van Ness for a bite to
eat and maybe a talk. You figure you tell her today or she
finds out on her own tomorrow when you have no job to go
to. You know which will be worse. She says okay, and so you
go.

        Parking in the lot, you see a homeless guy
masturbating against the wall. That could be you this time
next year. Not masturbating probably. Your sex drive isn’t
high enough that you’d stroke your cock in public. But
homeless. You could be homeless this time next year. The
way the world works, that’s a possibility. Scary but true.

        You could be sleeping in your Celica, the car lined
with newspapers which you use as blankets. Your car will be
parked on some street, and you won’t have a permit, and the
city will put a boot on your car, but that won’t matter
because you won’t have anywhere to go any fucking way.

        “Are you coming?”

        Your wife is standing outside the car, looking in at
you. You, sitting and staring into your own future
masturbating against a brick wall.

        “Yeah,” you say.

        You climb out of the car and slam the door shut.

        Walking toward the front door of Denny’s you put your
hand into your wife’s, and you squeeze her hand tightly in
yours and you think about the first time you put your hand
into hers like this, and how she squeezed your hand back.

        Ten years ago.

        You were twenty-six, and thin, and you still had all
of your hair. You wore a lot of flannel and Levi’s with
holes in the knees and Chuck Taylors. Your hair was long
and you had strings tied around your wrists for bracelets.
You worked in the mailroom and Gary had not yet been hired
in order to fire you. You went to bars a lot, and sometimes
even convinced some chick with a short skirt and an
unnatural love of Jane’s Addiction to come home with you so
you could bend her over the edge of your black futon and do
dark things to her.

        And then you met her.

        And it was all over.

        It wasn’t necessarily love at first sight, but it was
sure as shit lust. There were sparks between you. Lots of
sparks.

        You both lived in Long Beach at that time; rent was
cheap and apartments were large. The commute to Hollywood
was a bitch, but it was worth it.

        You were on the 710 going north and it was eight-
thirty and traffic was a nightmare and you were hung over
from too many Jack and Cokes at O’Connell’s the night
before (and no tail either), and this bitch in a Volkswagen
Beatle cut you off, and you slammed the brakes, only it
wasn’t the brakes, it was the gas pedal, and zipped right
into the ass end of her car, bang and pow, and you both
pulled off to the side of the freeway, and she got out of
her car, and the first thing she said was,

        “What the fuck, man?”

        God, she was beautiful.

        She was wearing a black skirt and tights and a long
pair of boots and a tight shirt and a vintage jacket over
all of it, and her hair was shoulder length, and you could
see her nipples through her shirt, not the color but the
shape, and her hands were on her hips and she was looking
from you to the smoking back end of her Volkswagen and she
said for the second time,

        “What the fuck?”

        “You cut me off.”

        “Cut you off? I was merging onto the freeway. Where am
I supposed to when my fucking lane disappears? You want I
should drive into a concrete wall or something?”

        And you said, “Look, I’m sorry I hit your car. Maybe,”
you said, “maybe I can buy you dinner or something sometime.”

        “You rear-end me and then ask me out on a date?”

        You nodded.

        “You’re really beautiful.”

        And her hands dropped from her hips, and you were
given the sound of her laugh for the very first time. A
wonderful sound full of life, deep and loud and not at all
show-offy the way some women’s laughs are. No. Hers was
just real and just right.

        The thing about laughs is that so many of them are so
obnoxious that when you hear a really good one, you can’t
help but notice. And hers was better than good. She had a
great laugh. Such a great laugh.

        And it was after dinner the next evening, when the two
of you were walking from the restaurant over to the theatre
to see a movie when you reached out and took her hand in
yours, just as you were crossing Vine, walking along
Sunset, and she let you take her hand, and she squeezed
your hand, and you looked over and smiled at her, and she
smiled back, her face flashing red on and off as you neared
the flashing red don’t walk light on the corner, and she
was simply the most beautiful creature you had ever seen,
and her eyes were so full of experience and light, and you
knew that you were done looking.

        You had found what you wanted.

        But that was a long time ago.

        And things change.

        They haven’t changed for you, but you know as you pull
open the red Denny’s door to let your wife walk in, that
she too stopped looking, and even though you don’t regret
your decision, you’re willing to bet she does.

        You were young and handsome and full of promise.

        Now you’re old and fat and full of shit.

        The hostess smiles at the two of you as you enter and
she says, “Two?”

        And you say, “Seventeen. I have multiple personality
disorder.”

        And she says, “When will the rest of your party be
arriving?” and smiles and stares with dull dead eyes.

        You explain the joke.

        “Oh.”

        She doesn’t move.

        “So it’s just the two of us. You can seat us now.”

        “Oh.” Another moment. “Oh!” She laughs, presumably at
your stupid joke, “Right this way, you two.”

        When the waitress shows up you order a coffee, an
orange juice, and the grand slam breakfast with a bowl of
fruit on the side.

        Your wife orders a coffee and one of the omelets.

        And then she says, “You were right.”

        “About what?”

        “I’m not happy.”

        “I know.”

        “When we were younger everything was full of so much
life and everywhere we turned was a possible direction but
now every time I turn a corner it’s like there’s a dead-end
and I just want some of that life back that we used to
have. I was thinking of leaving you for a long time but now
I’m not even sure it’s you I’m unhappy with but I am
unhappy with our life. I want a change. I need a change.
This is simply not working.”

        The thing about marriage is that it turns all men into
liars.

        If not in words, then in silence.

        “What do you want to change?” you ask.

        “I don’t know. I just know I’m not happy.”

        And then it hits you. You can’t tell her now. She has
managed to make it impossible for you to tell her the
truth, even if you wanted to, and you’d be lying to
yourself if you even tried to believe you wanted to. It was
to be a purging of necessity, and now you can’t do it.

        You don’t know what you’ll do tomorrow when you’re
supposed to be at work, but you simply cannot tell her now.
Not sitting across from her while she is telling you she’s
unhappy, doesn’t want what you two have.

        “Well,” you say.

        “I understand,” you say.

        “I’ll do whatever I can to support you.”

        And she goes far away for a moment. When she looks
back at you there is a sad sparkle in her eyes.

        “Really?” she says. “You’re not mad at me?”

        You shake your head.

        “I’m not stupid. I know you’re not happy. I told you
that. All I want is for you to be,” you say. “Happy.”

        “Even if it means leaving you?”

        A fist to the gut.

        “What?” you say. “I thought you said … you weren’t
unhappy with me. You were unhappy with our life. Our life.”

        “I just don’t know. I’m not saying I will leave you. I
just, I don’t know. I just want to know to what limits
you’ll support me.”

        Even without her knowing you lost your job, she’s
thinking of leaving.

        Fuck.

        And:

        Fuck.

        First you lose your job, and now this.

        And now this.

        Once you can breathe again (it takes a few moments for
you to be able to pull air back into your lungs) you say,
“Your happiness means everything to me. I’ll do whatever it
takes.”

        “You really mean that, don’t you?”

        You nod your head.

        “Jesus,” she says. “For so long I’d forgotten why I
loved you.”

        “Loved.”

        “I don’t think,” she starts, pauses, considers; “I
don’t think I’ve loved you for a long time.”

        What does someone say to that?

        “Do you think you could ever love me again?”

        She shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “That’s what I
want to find out before I make my decision.”

        “Before you leave.”

        The food arrives in the silence between you two.

        It’s hot and it smells good.

        You pick up your fork, and then immediately set it
down again.

        Suddenly, you’ve lost your appetite.