the madison review
our meals on the couch. There are some chairs we put the plates on. I always use a chair, but Angie only uses one if the meal requires some support. Last night we both used them. I turned on a documentary about nuclear exposure in Kazakhstan, but we had to switch it over to The West Wing because the mutated orphans were too much for us while we were eating. I probably could’ve soldiered through, but Angie started feeling sick. I didn’t mind. The world seems like a pretty nice place until you’re sitting there watching footage of kids with swollen, tumored heads. Luckily, we can just turn it off. We watched a couple of episodes and then it was nearly midnight. I started nodding off and asked Angie if she was ready for bed. She said she wanted to watch some more TV. We don’t go to bed together often. School’s out for summer now so she doesn’t have to get up at any particular time. When school is in session, I usually stay up a couple hours later than she does. We’ve been together so long and I’m not sure either of us is really sure why. Four years. I think she thinks she knows, but I think she’s afraid to really contemplate how it’s all going. I’m not afraid to contemplate how it’s going but for so long I’ve been afraid of doing anything about it. I always just thought she’d get tired of me and drop me. But she stuck with me through the bad times, when I was drinking—although she tried to leave several times. I begged her, broken, crying, out of my mind, not to go. I think I forced her into a permanent decision somehow. And now that’s all over and she already made up her mind that she was with me and I was with her. But seeing me like she saw me doesn’t make for anything good. I’m not a man to her. And I think anyone who respected herself would have left. When I was drinking I would make excuses for myself. Family history, frustrated ambition, bad breaks. I had a response for every critique of my behavior. Once she told me I made her feel like the girl in Five Easy Pieces. She said she didn’t want to feel like a blonde bimbo who couldn’t understand why she couldn’t make her man happy. It wasn’t fair that I got to be Jack Nicholson. Dark, complicated, intelligent, and complex. She said this in tears, and I was flattered. She was right to be upset about that, of course. There’s no way she sees me that way now. I wasn’t thinking about these things last night. I was just thinking about how lonely you could be in a bed even with someone else in the other room. Someone who would even be in the bed in a matter of minutes or a matter of hours. But it wasn’t enough. What could ever be enough? I don’t know. After a couple of hours of waiting for her to come to bed, listening to 75