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L-I P: Hip-hip-hooray. They've done it.
Awakened by the rustle of newspapers. Not clear-headed. Before I knew it, an entourage from the Sardine column had gathered around my bed.
What are you talking about?
"For they are jolly good fellows... which ...deny."
Could they be this excited over my twenty-eighth column? Then I noticed McNulty and Honey beside my bed giving each other pecks on the cheek.
"This gets me into another column," Frank Weathers giggles.
Wal-terr, you can't do that. The injunction forbids me to include alcohol in...Christ, don't open that beer on the desk top.
Everyone laughed. And he chipped the formica.
"He did the same thing on my countertop," Joe T. remarks, stopping long enough to remove his tongue from his girlfriend Antigone's mouth. "Didn't think we'd still be together, did ya?"
"You should've made the creep pay for wrecking your kitchen," she says to Joe.
"Be quiet," he whispers, "or he won't be giving your dad free drinks at the bar."
"Or Joe," Frank snickers.
"He steals our money from the bar," she sneers, "that's how we get them free."
"Part of his charm," says Frank.
"Talkin' about me, again," says Wal-terr,
"Told you he'd hear us," says Joe.
Well, it's great you came over and wake me. What's the big celebration?
L-I P: It's their fifty-second wedding anniversary. A milestone. A successful marriage if there ever was one.
*
"Til death do us part."
The single, never-married Sardine often misunderstood these words. Not because he never had a relationship last more than two years. Not because seventy percent of his friends have or will be divorced (one pending and one infidelity to be discovered - Wal-terr's). Not because most marriages turn barren in five years. Not because those marriages which last until death probably weren't worth the struggle.
How did the notion of marriage lasting forever enter the fevered human brain? Was there anything about human beings to suggest that they could live up to this forever standard? Especially when you consider the conditions under which humans mate! Infidelity over a lifetime is the least problem for a marriage.
The closest case, the McNulty marriage of 52 years, probably has distorted my judgment in this matter. What can I do?
Honey McNulty was 18 years old when she married. I've no reason to disbelieve McNulty when he said he's never had sex with another woman; I shouldn't think it's different for her. With four children and eight grandkids, sentimentality veils the reality of their marriage. Generally, theirs is held up to public view as a matter of human triumph over the vicissitudes of life. Held up as the standard against the usual selfish, impatient drives that take millions to divorce courts. From a distance, the McNulty marriage might advertise the benefits of being in the Catholic Church, as well as showing how its tenets actually keep the self-instincts in tow.
Should it matter that they're the most miserable couple to be around? That McNulty would launch onto thirty minute tirades against Honey with the prefatory sentence: "I love my dearest wife, but when she...." Does he remotely see how deeply he resents most aspects of her being by being near her for so long? Does Honey herself entertain such a fiction?
Well, she comprehends nothing that he speaks about (in a way, she's become proud of her particular insularity to most of his topics of conversation that do not include the family). If this were not enough for him to suffer through (he who hates two things more than this: noise and canned laughter on television, the latter becoming a wedge between them), Honey in her non-comprehending pose still interrupts his treatises with a question to derail his train of thought.
At movies she constantly talks and half the time he sits in a row ten or fifteen aisles from her.
Why does he put up with this - has put up with it for thirty-five years? Curiously, he doesn't remember the first decade or so of his marriage as being so awful. Now he's helpless without her. Or he has simply molded his being to a pitiful dependence.
She raised the kids, packed his clothes for trips, bought his clothes, cooked his meals (although he can make a sandwich). The memory of his dependence contains more force than was the reality - for he now believes he did nothing around his house except mow the lawn and rake leaves.
This very helplessness has gotten McNulty through his day now that he practices law so seldom. His helplessness, as well as having separate bedrooms for twenty years, have kept the marriage together.
He clings to the threads of this weakened state; Honey has all but given up. As she told me: "When we got married people weren't expected to live this long." Yet, her brand of dependence has made her helpless. She can't write a check or figure out bank statements. Her husband handled everything: insurance, mortgage, other loans, car payments (and buying the car). She never held a job and understands little how the world works economically.
That's what she really resents. Having been kept in the dark. Her response reflects the resentment: abandoning all belief in the Church and God. What good did they do but tie her more firmly to McNulty.
Her nihilism, besides dark comments about anything religious, focuses primarily on his rituals and social pets. Her goal seems to be to run down as many of these as possible and cause him maximum mental discomfort.
The Sardine's essays, articles, and stories have appeared around the Internet in the last few years at 3 A.M., Facets, Eclectica magazine, Fiction Funhouse, The Fiction Warehouse, 5_trope, and several film journals. Who and what he is probably will be revealed at various points through the articles appearing at this site. The first fifteen installments of his saga can be viewed at the old Unlikely Stories.