Couplehood (15 page)

“Well,
I
say,”—little dribble—“we get a second opinion.” Gargle, gargle, cchhwip, pttooey.

(Incidentally,
Cchhwip Pttooey
is not only the sound of someone spitting, but, interestingly enough, the Minister of the Interior of Sri Lanka.)

E
very night, you brush and talk and spit and catch up, racing to beat that Conversation Curfew.

See, you don’t want to drag the world into bed with you, because there’s enough going on there already. Beds are complex, multipurpose arenas, and it’s important that the two parties specify which activity they’re undertaking.

“Are we talking, or are we reading?”

“Are we sleeping, or are we fooling around?”

You have to clarify.

“Are we not talking because we’re mad, or because we both just don’t feel like talking?”

“Are we thinking
ambitious
fooling around or
let’s just do what we’ve got to do, and not kill ourselves?”

The good thing is, when you’re together forever, there’s less pressure to make any given night magical. You always know you have another shot tomorrow. And the next night.

That’s the whole beauty of Forever—nothing but tomorrows.

Of course, if you cash in the Tomorrow Chip too often, you break the bank. One day you roll over, notice each other, and say, “Hey, we used to do something here involving rubbing and touching—any idea what it was? No recollection at all? Hmm … I know I enjoyed it, I remember that.”

S
o you negotiate, you clarify, and settle in. You find your position, you fix your pillows, and arrange your mutual blanket.

That blanket, essentially,
is
your relationship: one big cover concealing the fact that two people are inside, squirming around each other trying to get comfortable.

How you handle that blanket is crucial.

Sometimes I wake up and I have
no
blanket. There’s nothing there to handle. The woman of my dreams, who is sleeping very cozily, has somehow accumulated the bulk of what’s at least half mine.

I tug at it gingerly. She stirs, and seemingly unaware, she tightens her grasp and rolls farther away, taking with
her another good foot and a half of blanket. I watch her and calculate my options. I decide it’s not worth waking her up or being spiteful, so I try to make do without.

I stare at the ceiling and count the little paint bumps, hoping I can bore myself back to sleep. Within seconds, my brain comes up with five different parts of the house that need painting and fixing, and then I think about how the guy at the hardware store who was so helpful doesn’t work there anymore and how the new guy is really unctuous, and I should probably find someplace else. It’s 3:25 in the morning and I’m looking for new hardware stores.

N
ow I’m more irritated and much more awake. I look over and see my bride dreaming blissfully, secure, cradled and warmed by what is now over 90 percent of the blanket. Despite my affection, I resent her deeply.

I sit up. I look at her. I watch her sleep. I think to myself, “How can this be? After all the negotiating and maneuvering and tap dancing we’ve done, how is it that this person, who, by my own initiative, will be placing her head twelve inches away from
my
head for the rest of my life, is getting such a better end of the bargain? It just doesn’t seem right. Will we never get better at this? Must one of us always be less content than the other?”

I pull up the pathetically small segment of blanket left available to me and scoot up next to the woman of my
dreams, partly because I hope that her sleep will rub off on me, and partly because I figure she’s got to be warmer than
I
am.

And as I hold her close against me, it dawns on me:
Now
I remember.
This
is why we go through all of
that.
Because holding The One Who Fits in your arms simply feels this good, and nothing else really does. And to earn
this
, you must swat away all that stands in its way.

A
t this point, my wife senses I’m staring at her and opens one eye.

“What,” she says.

I say, “What do you mean ‘what’?”

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“What are you looking at me for?”

“I wasn’t looking.… I was just thinking … are you really going to be right there every night?”

“Yes.”

“Forever?”

“Mm hmm.”

“You’re saying, that of all the people in the world, the one to whom you will donate your Naked Self, night after night, is
me?”

“Uh-huh.”

If I let it go there, it would have been a nice moment.

“And the reason would be what—because I’m
that
appealing?”

Now she opens both eyes, props herself up on her elbow, and before she can say anything, I say, “I went too far, I see that now. You just go back to sleep, and I’ll say nothing.”

She slides toward me, and we find homes for our arms and legs. Before long, we’re sleeping.

And in the morning, the dance continues.

I want to thank my wife, Paula, without whom I have no act; Dan Strone for asking me if I wanted to write a book; Arthur Spivak for telling me that I did, and making it all happen; my friends and family who put up with me being “so busy because I’m writing a book”; Irwyn Applebaum and all the nice people up at Bantam who made me feel at home; Louie Maggiotto for transcribing and translating; and Rob Weisbach, editor extraordinaire, who took all these shovels full of stuff and made it look very much like a book.

P
AUL
R
EISER
is the star and co-creator of the critically acclaimed NBC series
Mad About You.
This is his first book. (That he has written. He has read many others—we just don’t want to make a big deal out of it.)