My husband talks in his sleep. His chatter is about fixing things. Always. What exactly he is fixing is never clear. All I know is that they are so, so earth-shatteringly boring, these nighttime monologues of his. I mean he will go on and on and on. One night he was fixing something, or giving a lecture on how to fix something, or observing others fix things and offering commentary on their processes—as I have said, the specifics are unclear, what with his mouth full of drool; all I can discern is that components are being rebalanced or recalibrated or stripped down and then refurbished—for nearly an hour. While listening to him I was clenching my fists so tightly that in the morning there were nail marks in my palms. Like little bird tracks.
The curious thing is that he is not a man immersed in a life of repair. His existence is one of paper, ledgers, ballpoint pens. Buttons in desk drawers. Why, when a fuse blows, I am the one to throw on a bathrobe and tromp into the basement to flip the breaker. I am the one who knows where we keep the Philips screwdriver, the one to install a light fixture or replace a carbon monoxide detector. When I do these things he just shakes his head and says, “Marjorie, one phone call and I could get a guy do that for you.”
Who that someone is I am sure I do not know as his friends are few and belong to the same world of erasers and ink and receipts. I snort and say, “Okay Don Corleone. You do that.”
But do you want to know what’s most annoying about his unconscious ramblings? This is embarrassing but I will tell you. It’s that when he speaks in his sleep so, about connecting sprockets and splicing wires and hoisting block and tackle pulleys, he is always physically aroused. And remains so for the duration of the soliloquy.
I must say I fail to see the connection.
When he sleeps, is my man tapping into some primal man-zone the likes of which a sensible woman as myself must inevitably be denied access? Some realm where the business of assembling, disassembling, and reconnecting random components is deeply, autochthonically fused with some dimwitted, reptilian sense of eros? Is this a singular trait, his alone, or are other men’s wives lying awake too in their beds just as I am, most every night, feeling terribly left out as they eavesdrop on their husbands lying there, tumescent and tuned in to their private bandwidths?
One night, lying there in our bed, him slobbering about ball peen hammers and suspension cables, me burning a hole through the ceiling with my stare, a thought came to me. As thoughts will do. As the hymn goes, Distant cousins climb out of The Well, emissaries from Beyond the Veil. Anyway, the thought came to me: what if my husband were to have two penises. And then when he embarks upon these middle-of-the-night lectures, I might readjust them. Position them in different directions, like antennae. It might have the effect of changing that insufferable Fix-It station inside his brain. He just might sync into some other astral network. And a different monologue entirely might thus spill from his lips. True, hearing him expound upon some new obsession might not help put me to sleep. If anything I would likely become more awake, more attentive, even eager perhaps, to hear what new altered commentary might issue from my mate’s vocal chords. But at least there would be something else for me to focus on. Something other than that incessant mumbledy gumble about wrenches, valves, and elbow joints.
Recently I had a dream. In it my husband was an ant. The same paunch, the same comb-over, but with two floppy antennae protruding from his forehead and which looked suspiciously like flaccid cocks. And he was overcome, my ant-husband, by a deep, boundless sadness extending from a place far, far beyond the endpoint of all expression. As if all the sorrows of the world, indeed the universe, ours and whatever others might exist parallel, had been distilled into a super dense mass no larger than a kiwi and were now sitting in the very pit of his stomach. This weight was so overpowering, so profoundly debilitating, that my husband could not move in the slightest, could not even bring himself to open his mandibles in despair, but just stood there leaning, frozen, like a block of granite.
So I took my own antennae—for in my dream I was, as usual, a bee, a worker bee—never a queen bee, to be sure, as I have no illusions of grandeur nor am I burdened, so far as I know, with any latent, unfulfilled sense of superiority—and nuzzled them up and down alongside his own. I attempted to communicate with him in this way, one insect to another, albeit of different species. And in this manner I was able to bring life to those appendages of his, which surged and grew erect and started to quiver in the salty air, twitching this way and that, “sniffing” for whatever information might at that moment be carried across the waves. And when he began to speak, my husband, in his ant language, though I could not understand his words (nor he mine), well, there was some undeniable zappy exchange conveyed between our four antennae.
How long must I coax yours so, husband, to keep you strong and hard? For we both know this cannot continue indefinitely. For now, however, it will have to suffice. I will continue to discharge the necessary currents from my feelers into yours, passing energy into your aerials, so that you might continue to speak in your foreign tongue which, for all I know, might still be fixated on the subject of fixing things, though perhaps on a scale more commensurate with the machinations of ants.