Wings
So here I am, as I am every morning at precisely 11:00, at the Seven Eleven, ordering my six pieces of fried barbecue chicken wings for $3.21. Six pieces are all I want, and all I can eat, at this time of day, though they are ten for $5.00– a better deal, especially when you add it up on a daily basis. But five does it for me just fine, and I hobble out with my cane from the condo we are renting in Miami Beach and sit on the bus stop bench in the morning sun and get my fingers and lips all greasy with the barbecue sauce, which is delicious, and I am, essentially, a happy man.
Eleven o’clock is the perfect time for me to do this, for it’s at precisely at that time each morning that my wife commences an hour-long phone conversation with her sister Marie in the South of France. She loves the telephone, which I hate. So I can buy, and devour, my chicken wings in piece, followed by a stick of gum, and no one will ever be the wiser.
My wife Catherine is a good woman– too good a woman, in fact, to be married to a man like me, a lifelong hypocrite and dweller in the world of moral ambiguity, a state of affairs my beloved wife has little sympathy for. No, Catherine is a moral absolutist– the kind of person who, as she perpetually reminds me, the world would be a far better place for, were everyone only to follow her righteous example. She is a champion recycler, a patron of locally harvested, organic fruits and vegetables and free-ranging, grass-fed meats, a user of ecologically sound, long-lasting light bulbs, a purchaser of only organically grown fair trade coffee beans and a boycotter of all products marketed and sold by Del Monte, Walmart, Amazon and the large pharmaceutical companies. She ingests only homeopathic medicines, natural herbs, organically harvested essential oils and water from sustainable sources. As I said earlier, she is very very good- far too good to be married to a man like poor poor pitiful me.
Mixed feelings have been my specialty all of my adult life– mixed feelings of love and hate, mixed feelings of laziness and ambition, mixed feelings of political engagement and passive bystandership– above all, perhaps, mixed feelings of moral decency and I-don’t-give-a-damnship. Which is where my troubles with my wife usually begin.
I am a Lecturer on Sustainable Agriculture and Human Ecology at Dartmouth, a position I’ve now held for eight years. I met my wife– both of us dizzy and nearly incoherent from lack of oxygen– near the summit of l8,000-foot Mount Chimborazu in the Ecuadorian highlands during the spring of l992, just prior to the onset of the Clinton era. I had come– typical me– with a high-priced eco-tourism group from Cambridge: she had arrived with her best friend Monique to do volunteer work at an orphanage in Quito. You put your body, as the saying goes, where your heart is, or something like that.
My wife was very pretty at the time– thin, yes, but pretty nonetheless, with slightly melancholic brown eyes, small breasts, and a classical French nose. She had the kind of hips made for giving birth and the kind of shoulders ideal for cooking and cleaning. To say that she aroused some deep maternal need in me, lack of oxygen and all, would be to put things quite accurately. The fucking was good enough, as Winnicott had said about mothering, though hardly inspired. But the mothering was first class indeed. In fact, there’s little I actually remember about the fucking, except for the fact that– as witnessed by the birth of our son almost exactly nine months later– we must clearly have done it.
When we got back to Cambridge, where I was doing graduate work in Environmental Studies, several months later, my wife was quick to voice a rather unique, but nonetheless original, complaint against the site of the world’s greatest university: There was nowhere– repeat, nowhere— to find a good organic tomato. Much less a pomegranate. And she was right. The nearest Whole Foods, located some five miles from our house in Brookline, was prohibitively expensive on a Graduate Assitant’s salary. The coming wave of gustatory decency and nutritional high-mindedness had not yet hit, and– if you weren’t married to an organic farmer (my wife, to her increasing chagrin, wasn’t) or out to be one yourself, pesticides and herbicides were part of your gastronomic destiny. We were poisoned, therefore we were.
Take, for example, my TIAA-CREF account, which– under the management and supervision of God-only-knows-who, has been doing very well indeed for me and my family these past seventeen years, providing me with a comfortable nest egg for retirement. The money, no doubt, is invested in all sorts of morally deplorable stocks and bonds, among them Exxon, BP, Weyerhauser, Haliburton, and only the devil knows what else. But it, along with my wife’s stash of gifts made from only recycled materials, keeps growing, and that keeps me, if not happy, at least satisfied.
Fortsetzung