Every Third Thought (17 page)

“You didn’t
used
to get so worked up about it,” his mate will scold when he finally finds her, or reports yet another such alarming dream. So clearly now can he hear her saying that, half amused and half chiding, it’s as if that computer/cell phone/ whatever has spoken again.

“That’s because I didn’t used to be an Old Fart,” he’ll acknowledge, granting readily that the source of this prevailingly mild Separation Anxiety is no doubt his ever-growing awareness of the actuarial clock: that their so-blessed life together is mostly behind them, and that any year now, any semester (their academic-reflexive calendar measure), any
day
, really . . .

Is it
his
voice speaking that dear name as if in italics, or the cell phone/computer’s, or no literally audible voice at all, but the italicized next line of some new Newett-work in uncertain progress that goes on to say
Pretend you just want to tell her to
come listen to this weirdo Genie-thing in your study—which in fact you
do
want her to—and go check every room in the place again, plus walk-in closets, balcony, outside corridor, stairwell to the ground floor, garage, parking lot—the works. Then when you find her coming back from putting out the garbage or whatever, you’ll feel enormously relieved and pathologically stupid.

Not a bad idea. And if I don’t?

“Genie-thing,” he sees he’s written (not on that still-unfamiliar new word-processor, but with his faithful old fountain pen, a comfort to return to). Along with the djinns/jinnis/genies of the
Nights
, the word conjures his beloved’s long-since-discarded middle name.
Amanda Jean Todd
, her parents dubbed her, and although by the time G. met her she had long since dropped the “Jean” (on the grounds that double first names like “Barbara Ann,” “Susie Mae,” and “Amanda Jean” sounded redneck to her), he sometimes teases her with it still: “My wonder-working Jeannie,” he’d call her in their relationship’s early years, when her mere touch sometimes gave him an erection; or, stroking her pubes, “My Genie with the light brown hair.” Or—when he had introduced her to the
Nights
, with their varying transliterations of the Arabic word for those plot-escalating spirits—“Me G.I.N.; you Jinni:
Open Sesame
, sez me, and your devoted Ifrit will gladly enter.”

Stuff like that. Those were the days—not that these latter ones aren’t sweet, rich, precious.
Desperately
precious—there’s the rub, for the actuarial reasons aforementioned—and damn it to hell, why doesn’t he cap his fucking pen, stop imagining or pretending that he’s hearing voices, stop scaring himself shitless that his Without-Whom-Nothing mightn’t be where she normally is at this weekday hour or that it’s Bad News if she happens not to be, and
just go have a look
instead of imagining that he’s done that already, in vain?

“Hey, Mandy? Come listen to this.
Mandy
?”

Well of
course
she’s not in her study/workroom composing Mandy-verses, paying bills, making service-people appointments, and/or arranging the next Todd/Newett vacation trip (to Alaska, he believes it’s to be, next August): When G. exits his to get a swig from his personal spring-water bottle in the fridge, he notices that hers—a different brand, for ID purposes, although they usually refill each a few times from a gallon jug on the countertop before discarding—isn’t there. Gone also is their grocery-and-errand list from under its magnet on the fridge door and, when he now checks, the blue plastic ice-packs from the freezer door shelf and the small portable cooler from the laundry room that they always take to the supermarket. So okay: That means that her car will be gone too, from its
numbered space behind the condo, because—of course!—she had business on campus, including (as he now more or less remembers) lunch with the guy who succeeded her as Director of Stratford College’s Shakespeare House upon her retirement. How could he have forgotten? It’s probably even noted on his desk calendar, and she didn’t interrupt him to remind him because she assumed he was communing with the Muse of O.F. Fiction, not futzing with computer/cell-phone interlinkages, and she decided to pick up a few items at the market while she was in town: a chore that her mate much enjoys sharing with her except for those occasional Where-did-she-go? moments aforementioned. So relax! Not to worry! Write a sentence!

Or push a few buttons....

I’m here, Genie-lady. Where’re you? And
who
?

Here where?

Wherever
here
is. As to
who
, well . . . Who’s anybody? Who’s “who”? Who’s You?

G. I. Newett, as if you didn’t know it: Look him up in the Who’s Who of Postmortem Fiction.

All that Death-of-the-Novel crap, you know? Very big in late-twentieth-century English departments. ’Twas
born
a-dying, I’ve heard tell, like Yours Truly and the rest of us; been dying vigorously ever since, and can be expected to go on dying for a lively while yet. Over?

But you just said that it’s
not
over.

You know what I mean: Your turn now.

To die? Not my
métier
, friend: As you may have read, we genie-types can sometimes be tricked back into our bottles, but we’re afflicted with immortality.

“Afflicted,” you say? Is it maybe contagious, then? Sexually transmissible?

I’m listening to
you
, Dreamy Jeannie.

Provocative modifier noted. As some other oldie once said about his latter years, “Sex goes. Memory goes. But the memory of sex never goes.”

“Us” meaning, presumably, G. I. Newett’s uncorked jinni/ djinn/genie and his Patient Reader, should any such exist. To spare herself the details, perhaps, Ms. Jeannie-Voice goes on to remind him that increasingly of late, when his mate is out of the house or even just unexpectedly out of sight, G. I. Newett inclines to more or less alarming What Ifs. What if she’s taken a tumble down the condo stairs (less likely at her age than at his), or had an out-of-nowhere ruptured aneurysm? What if she and her pesto-green Honda Civic are carjacked in the Safeway parking lot (such things can happen, even in low-crime Stratford/ Bridgetown), or rammed by an errant driver, or squashed by
a falling tree such as they sometimes see along Avon County’s rural roads?

Sexy, are you?

He does, for the present anyhow, and scribbles instead his resolve, when Mandy attends the two-day Eastern Shore Writers Association Conference—scheduled for this weekend, is it? down at Marshyhope State U.?—to abstain from such grim and admittedly far-out (but not
unimaginable
, Q.E.D.) worry-wart worries. They are, he acknowledges, inspired not by love alone, but also by self-concern: his practical as well as emotional dependence upon his mate in so many life-departments, from loving companionship and moral/ethical compass-correction to menuplanning, bill-paying, copyediting, laundry—the works. He does his share, he hopes: managing as best he can their uncomplicated finances and home-office accounting; vacuuming the floors before she does all the rest of the weekly cleaning; handling a few guy-type things like car tire-pressure and fluid-level checks and simple household repair-and-maintenance chores; serving as her
sous-chef
in the kitchen—but although neither of them can imagine life without the other, he believes (despite her ardent, exclamatory denials!) that in the dreadful event, she would somehow cope better than he. At their age, needless to say, they’ve seen friends and colleagues aplenty widowed or widowered—some
by fluke accidents like those afore-imagined, others by mercifully brief or painfully extended illness, and at least one by her spouse’s alcoholic suicide. Remarkably, to us Newett/Todds, the survivors seem in the main to carry on, thanks no doubt to networks of supportive friends and family-members. Although a few succumb to chronic depression, most of their acquaintance, aided by their grown children, stoically exchange their houses for apartments or assisted-living quarters, sometimes in a different part of the country. They attend social-club events, do volunteer work, and in a few cases even remarry. Unimaginable!

May one inquire just what the fuck you’re suggesting?

One may. You having conjured my Mandy-like voice out of these office-gadget interlinkages into your quote “Creation Space” unquote, I’m suggesting that you now take advantage of Ms. M.’s presumably temporary absence to conjure into your Business Space my also-temporary but (literally) fabulous physical presence: naked as a jaybird, slim and frisky as your mate was back when the pair of you first frisked—but with darker hair, I guess, we Jeannies being of Persian/Arabic extraction—and we’ll get down to Business, me straddling your magically restored youth ful virility with my pert young bubbies in your face and humping your geriatric brains out. Or
in
, rather, until you’re ready to fire off not yet another O.F.F., but
a B.&B.T.D.F.: Brash and Brilliant Tour De Force! When wifey then returns from her in-town and on-campus business (if she ever does, and if that’s where she is and what she’s up to), you’ll surprise her with a very different sort of Capital-P Performance from the ones you’ve been laying on her lately. Whatcha say, Boss? Come have yourself one last Capital-V Vision!

Well: Since you ask, I say
A,
that I’ve never understood why we say “naked as a jaybird,” when every jay
I’ve
ever seen has head-to-tail plumage....

And
B
, that that’s quite enough Old Fart Fantasizing for today. Back into the bottle you go, girl: I’m off to meet Mandy for lunch at Bozzelli’s and do our weekly grocery shopping.

Quit fooling
your
self, George Irving Newett says or writes, whether to “her” or to himself or to both or neither.
She’s out checking the mailbox; back in a minute. She’s doing stuff in town; back after lunch. She’s prepping her poetry reading for the Shore Writers conference
(which, despite his pride and pleasure in her verse, he has reluctantly decided not to attend, because its venue evokes so many bittersweet memories of his brief first marriage). Or none of the above?

For the first time, he uses his new cell phone to dial hers—and gets her voicemail voice, as reminiscent of “Jeannie’s” as was
her
voice of his wife’s:

“Mandy? Where
are
you? Sweetheart?”

“An instrument of Satan,” Mark Twain called Samuel F. B. Morse’s newly-invented telephone. George Irving Newett inclines to agree, granting however that like other of the Devil’s bright ideas—television, the Internet, alcohol, human curiosity and imagination—it has its virtues, to the point of nearindispensability. Himself rather a telephonophobe, more inclined to exchange e-mail messages with friends and colleagues than to dial them up, and appalled by the hosts of cell phone chatterers on the street and in shops, restaurants, and stadiums (not to mention driving vehicles!), he nonetheless grants the superior closeness of phone calls over written messages.
Closerness
, rather, to face-to-face conversation: the audible voice, the spontaneous give and take. He’s thankful that videophones never caught on back in the twentieth century, as many believed they would, and he quite understands the popularity of Facebook, YouTube, and suchlike audiovisual intercommunication among twenty-first-century young folk—but not for him, thanks. Like the desktop computer in his study’s Production area, the telephone in its Business area and others here and there in the Todd/Newett condominium are instruments of home and home-office business: G.I.N. doesn’t turn to them for pleasure.

Especially in that unimaginable unlikelihood.

Shame on him for that—but he here reminds all hands that Creative Imaginings are as non-responsible as dreams. It’s what one
does
with them that matters.

He further reminds all hands (himself especially) that his Mandy’s “absence” is not indefinite, as to either whereabouts or duration: She’s attending ESWAC, the annual Eastern Shore Writers Association Conference, down at Marshyhope State University on the lower Shore, remember? Where more than half a century ago George Irving Newett commenced his academic-pedagogical career as an entry-level Instructor of English Composition.

What Narrator wishes is that either his wife were back up here with him (as she was supposed to be by now, and no doubt soon will be: weekend traffic delays, most likely; you’d think she’d’ve called—but he knows she knows he dislikes phonecalls) or he down there with her—preferably the former. Hates eating and sleeping alone; making up their king bed singlehanded in the morning; fixing meals and watching TV by himself, here where they do just about everything together except on the toilet and in their workrooms! He
much
wishes now that he’d gone down to Marshyhope with her, but—