I didn’t actually believe it at first. You don’t make it to this age without some compromises, you know—you learn how to compartmentalize things, to ignore that they’re happening. You learn how to see the other way. This is the kind of thing you’ve really got to hammer into your head in this business, otherwise you’re looking at six years of weeknight dread and couple’s therapy and maybe throw in another year of trial separation before you finally get down to signing all the papers and now you’re as alone again as the day you were born. That’s worst-case scenario. You don’t even think about such things—there’s not enough letters in the alphabet to enumerate what level of plan that is, till death do us part and all. So you look away. Focus on the fruit loops, not on the milk.
I remember it started on a Thursday. The Packers game was on, and I’d spent all evening pretending to watch it while trying to think of the appropriate present to get Dave Ehrlinghaas for his fiftieth. Dave and I went way back—all the way to high school in Tacoma, in fact, where he’d been the manager of that abysmal mechanic job I’d picked up as a way to supplement my pocket money by doing some ‘real man’s work’ that my father claimed was necessary for my development. This was mid-’00s. We were a Seahawks family, and ESPN had done quite a number on him and pretty much everyone else in the region except Dave, who shared my misgivings about treating your children as sporting prospects and instead taught me how to ride a motorcycle. I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought us brothers—I’m sure a lot of people did. He’d been the best man at my wedding, and the only reason I’d been merely a groomsman at his is because he was attempting a reunion with his real brother Ralph that peaked in a fistfight over the marble cake. And after all that it was me who ended up speaking at the reception, anyway. The problem with knowing someone that well is that the birthday present possibilities are so diverse as to be paralyzing. I remember trying to explain this to Joanna and her responding with her characteristic ‘you’re always overthinking it, Patrick’ before getting on her phone and scrolling, undoubtedly, through lists with names like ‘50 best birthday presents for men who have it all.’ She always had a hard time understanding my objection to such things. In fact she’d been at home that whole day because of what she liked to call a mal à la tête—one of her idiosyncrasies was that she’d throw out little bits and pieces of Québécois every now and then which she’d picked up during her decade-long stint in Montreal as a teenager. At first this was something I found very endearing but by then I had almost stopped perceiving it—it was just the way that she spoke. She had also picked up this habit of making an onomatopoeic ‘tak tak tak’ sound with her mouth every time she was doing something mechanical like scrolling. These things together had made me very sour and disgruntled and of course Joanna could tell—one look at my face and the phone was resting back on the table where it belonged and the conversation shifted abruptly to work.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘We got Webster’s approval for the expanded edition. And we’re making good progress on the section on non-passerines.’
‘What’s a passerine?’
‘Perching birds. Birds who have this backward toe.’ I made a claw with my fingers, pointing out how my thumb bent away in the opposite direction. ‘Ravens, robins, pigeons—all the birds you see around her are passerines.’
‘Uh-huh. And what’s a non-passerine? I thought all birds could perch.’
‘Well, you know. Waterbirds like ducks. Or exotic ones like penguins.’
Joanna snorted. ‘Sure. Whatever.’
‘Hmm? What’s the joke?’
‘I heard you say “penguin.”’
‘Yeah? You know what a penguin is, right? Never seen Happy Feet?’
‘Of course I have, Patrick, don’t be stupid. You’re just acting like they’re going to be in your encyclopedia.’
‘Well, of course they are. The kids go crazy over penguins. Why wouldn’t they be?’
‘What? Penguins aren’t real.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I mean they aren’t real, that’s what I mean. They’re made-up.’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘Uh, no, Joanna. They’re real.’
‘Well, have you ever seen one?’
‘Uh, no, but what does that have to do with anything?’
‘Then how do you know they’re real? Do you believe in dragons?’
‘What? No, of course not. Penguins aren’t dragons, what are you talking about? I’m talking about penguins. Penguins are real, Joanna. Who told you penguins aren’t real?’
‘I can’t believe it. You believe in penguins?’
‘What’s there to believe? They’re real!’
‘Oh yeah? Where do they live, then? Antarctica? Pfft.’
‘Don’t tell me you don’t believe in Antarctica!’
‘What is this, like the south pole?’
‘Yes! The south pole is in Antarctica!’
‘Well, I mean, the Earth must have a pole, sure. Might as well be Antarctica, I don’t care. But there’s no way they’ve got penguins there. And what? They’ve got dragons in China? Giants in India?’
‘Okay, wait. I’m gonna step back for a bit. We’ve got pictures of penguins. I can show you a picture of one. Actually, Martin Hockney sent me some photographs he took for National Geographic last week—if I could just find them.’
She snorted again, giving a bewildered little shake of the head. ‘What does that have to do with anything? We’ve got pictures of Nessie. Doesn’t mean that the Loch Ness monster is real. Last year my brother took Delilah camping, they’ve supposedly got a picture of Bigfoot.’
Her voice was entirely nonchalant, which was such an unusual tone for her to assume that I knew right away she was putting it on. If it were Dave or someone at work I would’ve suspected that I was being played on as part of a practical joke, but Joanna didn’t make those kind of jokes, not even flirtatiously—while she did enjoy getting a rise out of me, it was from rendering me grumpy, not baffled. ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to do,’ I said. ‘Those are obviously fake. We’ve got real photographs of penguins.’
She shook her head, and the annoyance finally broke through. ‘Well, how do you know those pictures are real? I don’t see the difference between Bigfoot pictures and penguin pictures.’
‘Really? You can’t see the difference?’ I was trying hard to be as nice as possible.
‘They’re all the same to me. I don’t know what you’re trying to say, honey. There’s no way you actually believe in these things. Are you pranking me?’
‘No. Are you pranking me?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Like, what—these things live on ice, can’t fly, swim around, lay eggs and carry them around between their legs? And we’re supposed to believe that there are, like, entire cities of them down south? I don’t buy it.’
‘Okay, you know what—let’s stop here. Do you believe in birds?’
‘What, do you think I’m stupid?’
‘I’m not saying that—’
‘Then what are you trying to say? I just don’t believe in this whole penguin thing, that’s it. If you want to believe in them, fine. I don’t care. Write your encyclopedia, I’m sure it’s going to be a bestseller, but don’t expect me to buy it.’
‘Joanna…’
‘What?’
‘Let’s go to the zoo, babe. Let’s go there this weekend. I’m sure they’ve got penguins. We can take pictures. And it’s a fun thing to do, we can grab some lunch at a nice place downtown.’
‘You mean Woodland Park?’
‘Yeah. Let’s go there.’
‘I know what you’re referring to. Those little squatters, waddling around like that? Yeah, sure, they’re penguins alright.’
‘So you’ve actually seen a penguin?’
‘If you want to call them that.’
‘What else would you call them?’
She narrowed her eyes, now almost hysterical. ‘Hun, you think those are really penguins?’
‘What else could they possibly be!’ I yelled.
‘They’re ducks, honey, they’ve just bred them to waddle around. Yeah I know they call those things penguins, sure. It’s just a duck. A doberman’s a dog, a cocker spaniel’s a dog. That’s not a penguin.’
‘What in the world is a penguin, then?’
‘Those things on television. The really big ones with the yellow neck and the long beak.’
‘You mean an emperor penguin.’
‘Sure.’
I pulled up the Woodland Park Zoo website on my phone—the only penguins they currently hosted were Humboldt Penguins, which I had to admit did not look all that different from fat ducks, especially when swimming around in the water; their tails and beaks emerged in an almost identical position, and they, too, had flipper-like feet. Really the only difference was in the colors and their bipedal posture, but that wouldn’t be enough of convince Joanna of anything. When I looked back up I saw that she was sporting a triumphant expression.
‘So?’
‘I don’t know what to say to you. Those are penguins, not ducks.’
‘Let’s just agree to disagree,’ she said, yawning. After another short round of those ‘tak tak tak’ noises she stood up and went to the bathroom.
All that happened, more or less. I can try to impress upon you the state of confusion that it caused, the way I instinctively recoiled at the very thought of our conversation, how I attempted to refocus on the Packers game with such ferocity that I ended up essentially imprinting the logo of the ESPN channel in my brain, the minutiae of the logo being the only thing that actually successfully distracted me from the incident—I can tell you that there’s a line slicing horizontally through the logo, or that the top of the S and P are conjoined into a kind of hemispherical cap that is fairly representative of the top quarter of a hockey rink. Or I could tell you that I wanted to ignore the conversation and set it aside as just one of another things I did not really know about my wife’s private affairs—this was a big thing going around at the time, that one and their spouse must have essentially equal and separate, complete lives in order for the union to be successful, though I didn’t really buy into such stuff and I don’t think Joanna had put a thought into it one way or another. But truthfully what I was trying to do is suppress the various thoughtcrimes that I was now committing with rapid abandon. Part of the problem was that Joanna herself was making the whole thing quite difficult to forget. Before we went to sleep that night she was subsumed by her usual bedside activity of reading a book (which in this case happened to belong to one of her favorite genres, a fantastical micro-genre following middle-aged woman in abusive households ‘disappearing’ and reinventing themselves in remote Nova Scotia towns, usually as a barmaid) and right before she pulled the light switch she looked and me and gave an impassioned little squawk before chuckling and turning over onto her side of the bed. The lack of seriousness was pretty devastating. When I finally drifted off I had a troubling dream in which she was involved in various courtship rituals with a human-size emperor penguin—which sagged its pants and wore aviators—such as her tripping over a large wave on the beach and the two of them falling into each other’s arms in the salty water. He really was a very suave penguin, and in the dream I was holding on to the hope that the feathers would be so slippery to the touch that Joanna would have to end the relationship out of an inability to ‘do it,’ whatever that meant (I have to tell you that I have very little idea of how bird let alone penguin penises work and in the dream I was imagining kind of like a bulging protrusion under the penguin’s sagging jeans) but there was a point in the dream where I mustered enough courage to challenge this penguin to a fistfight and I was similarly scared that this would end up in some kind of slippery, wet tussle, but actually ended with me getting whipped because the penguin had these little suction cups on its feathers that allowed it to make contact with things that had dry skin. After a particularly egregious blow of the flipper I was shaken awake and started floundering for Joanna, who was of course still curled up next to me. But something about the ambience of nighttime and her in-dream temptation finally allowed me to put into words an idea that I had been avoiding all evening and I pretty much hated having right next to her tenderly breathing form—was my wife just fundamentally a stupid person?
Not a great thought to have in your head, I must say.
Still, I tried to shove it aside for a long time. It took me a few days before I even told anyone—Dave was the obvious choice, but expressing these misgivings to him would mean making unflattering statements about not only my wife but also someone he knew and liked, too, and I really didn’t want other people to think less of my wife on account of a single stupid conversation. It just wasn’t very fair to Joanna. All this was internal, mine and mine alone, and outwardly I was of course still ready to be chivalrous in defense of her if the need ever arose. But that didn’t do anything to make me feel better. Fortunately by the time I had started considering spilling the beans I had already checked out these heavily annotated OCD management guidebooks from the library to help me manage these thoughts to the best extent possible, and one of their main recommendations was that it is healthy for a person to ‘vent’ their private intrusive thoughts, preferably in anonymous settings or support groups (hence AA or NA). Long story short, there was a point at which I found myself on seedy internet forum where I had the following conversation with an anonymous male from Germany who had racked up almost 1,100 posts about his complex natal attachment to his mother.
— Why are you so convinced your wife is stupid?
I had to give it to him—that was a good question, that, and my first instinct had indeed been to verify whether there was any legitimacy to this accusation I’d been leveling against her (and don’t try to misappropriate it—it certainly was an accusation). I’d like to tell you that this conversation with the German had been occurring entirely on my work computer at something like 9PM around the time that work had become a kind of refuge from my domestic life. It didn’t take a long time for things to get all screwed up. And my boss was sympathetic to these woes, too, having gone through a recent divorce—her name was Patty, and ever since she and I had once come across each other in this Irish bar down by Kent we’d become ‘darts buddies.’ At the time she was in the process of getting her name changed back to Patty Bergen from the intermittent Hoss, which was undoubtedly rowdy-sounding and a poor choice on her part. Both of us had a preternatural faculty for darts which turned out to be pretty useful even apart from as a bonding exercise. I was editor at Richardson & Kindler at the time, and the liturgy of managers, analysts and (God forbid) agents we were subjected to proved a lot easier to handle if they were stirred up beforehand through humiliation in the form of a darts game. The great thing about darts is that it’s the kind of thing that’s hard to say no to while also allowing you to have a bunch of fallacious rituals about it which give the appearance of composure—I only played with the red darts, for instance, refusing to even touch blue ones lest bad omens ruin my game. This projected an aura of irrationality which made it easier for me on the negotiation table. Being an illogical hard-ass is basically best-case scenario in these kinds of things. It also proved to be useful after the penguin incident, because getting drunk and throwing darts is the exact kind of respite from the drudgeries of your life as a divorcée that guarantees you’ll be willing to overlook quite a serious number of mishaps to ensure that your darts buddy is going to stick around. So it was all pretty easygoing at work. The German guy had hidden his username, but he was such an essential poster around those parts that he was hard to miss: from a cursory glance I could gather that he was a lowly assistant chef at a run-of-the-mill establishment in Hamburg, and that he was very well equipped in the essentials of Freudian and even Lacanian psychoanalysis having previously applied all those tools to fix his own maternal fixation. I don’t know how much you can blame him, though, because his mother part-timed as a pinup model in the late ‘80s before transitioning full-time to digital pornography around the turn of the millennium—whether she made much in the way of money from this endeavor is unclear, but she certainly left behind a sizable amount of video evidence which he would consume at frankly alarming rates. I would laugh if I didn’t feel so bad for him. That said, he certainly seemed like a smart guy, and our initial conversations proved pleasant though tinged with this overwhelming sadness that came from the recognition that his mode of interaction was primarily literary—he just sat around reading a lot of books, and while he was too nice for me to say it I eventually came to the conclusion that what the guy really needed was to be simply cut off from the written word altogether.
To answer his question, though, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t tried to give Joanna a shot. In fact the very next day I’d dropped by downtown to Seattle Central to surprise-pick her up from work, something I used to do quite a bit in the early days—she had been a librarian there for as many years as we’d lived in Seattle and was always on about how she’d never swap her job for another, and seeing the glass-and-steel appear around the corner I privately understood her sensitivity. Entering the building always made feel like the present year was about a century behind the one inside. That said, the library only infiltrated my mind while I was parking downtown insofar as it being an awfully convenient location for my next assault against Joanna’s ‘belief’ in the non-existence of penguins. She was there, alright. My timing was near-perfect: she had been packing up after a day of managing the free tax services, work self-admittedly so boring that she found my subsequent attack more amusing than annoying.
‘I can’t believe you feel so strongly about this,’ she said, but she followed me up to the animal encyclopedia section just fine. This was on the second floor, giving me a short window to examine her. She was wearing the loose red top we’d bought in SoHo two summers ago and a pair of wide-bottomed jeans, and whatever fragrance she’d put on certainly seemed to be working well—it combined nicely with the general musky ambience of the library to give a more world-weary scent than otherwise. It went so well with the whole librarian thing that I asked her whether she’d done it consciously, to which she smiled.
‘You’re being awfully flattering today,’ she said.
Normally I would’ve countered this with something simpering, but I had more important things on my mind. ‘Did you?’ I pushed.
She pouted. ‘You mean I smell like books? I would assume that would be obvious, isn’t it?’ She grabbed my arm. ‘Are you okay, Patrick?’
I wiped her aside. ‘I’m fine.’
‘I don’t know. Has this penguin thing really gotten you so annoyed?’
‘It’s not that,’ I said. I hadn’t intended to hurt her, but even as my heart sank her face fell into a worried expression. ‘Trust me, it’s not the penguin thing, it’s just work.’
‘Can’t you ask Patty to push the deadline?’ she said. ‘Or maybe you can ask Mark—’
‘It’s fine, no, really.’
She held her hands out and did a tiny shake to clear her head, then narrowed her eyes again. ‘So it is the penguins.’
‘I didn’t—’
‘Look, okay, I don’t know what’s going on,’ she replied, assuming her old expression again. ‘You’re being ridiculous. I didn’t want to say it, but honestly I can’t believe that this is how you work, Patrick. You’re an editor. Do you just believe anything anyone tells you? Isn’t there such a thing as sources?’
‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ I muttered.
Joanna scoffed. ‘Sure, genius. Let’s see what you’ve got. And, yes, I’m well aware of how I smell. Do you want me to tell you everything? If I announced my tricks out loud none of them would ever work.’
‘Whatever,’ I said. One of my other musings during the car ride here had been about the difference between stupid and intelligent faces—I had noticed that stupid people often had a slightly quizzical look about them, mouth open and whatnot, but intelligent people had their face held in calm composure. As far as Joanna’s went, I couldn’t tell, but I did notice that her eyes were raised towards my own—although that might have simply been due to my height and not an underlying eagerness to please; the usual physiognomical arguments were not giving me much, especially because her dark hair had been curtained around her face in a way that hid most of it. She certainly was very good at making herself look pretty, however, consciously or otherwise. The red hairband was an excellent touch. After a while she took charge and led us to an isolated enclosure at the end which housed a magnificent collection of animal encyclopedias, and I pulled one out at random.
There they were: several pictures of large emperor penguins in all manner of poses, interspersed with factoids in little thought bubbles: ‘Did you know: Penguins mate for life!’ and the like.
‘Aha,’ I said. ‘Look at that.’
She nodded. ‘Sure.’
‘So penguins exist.’
She shrugged. ‘Whatever you say.’
‘But you’re not convinced.’
‘Well, I mean—it’s just some pictures, honey, you know pictures can be faked.’
‘But how is it that every picture of a penguin ever taken has been faked?’
‘Oh, follow me,’ she said. A short while away was the ‘myths and legends’ section, and she retrieved several volumes with names like A Field Guide to Cryptids or Biggest Mysteries of the Millennium. ‘All these books have Bigfoot pictures in them, look.’ She pointed to a black-and-white upscaled reproduction of an orangutan. ‘They’re saying that’s Bigfoot. Everyone knows Bigfoot isn’t real.’
‘Okay, but then why do you believe everything else in the encyclopedia? Do you believe in albatrosses?’ I wasn’t ready to give up, not yet.
She shrugged. ‘What’s an albatrosses?’
‘It’s the biggest bird in the world.’
‘I’m pretty sure that’s an ostrich.’
‘I mean it’s the biggest flying bird in the world, sorry.’
Joanna crossed her arms. ‘I think that’s a condor, honey.’
I couldn’t take it anymore—whatever train of thought I had assigned to her had dissipated completely. ‘How in the hell do you know so much about birds but don’t know what an albatross is?’
She scoffed again, and it hit me with a pang that the incredulity was mutual. ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry, babe, but I don’t think you know that much about birds, either. You didn’t even know the biggest one is an ostrich.’ She turned away and started placing the books back on shelf.
‘I don’t know, I guess it slipped my mind.’
‘I’m sure,’ she replied, patting me on the head. ‘Mon fou.’
‘Okay, look. Albatrosses are pretty popular. You’re a librarian. You’ve read a lot of books. Haven’t you read that one about the sailor with an albatross around his neck?’
There was a flicker of recognition. ‘You mean the one by Coleridge?’
‘Yes,’ I said, eyes wide. ‘That’s the one.’
‘That’s a real bird?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, almost pumping my fists. ‘An albatross is a real bird.’
‘If you say so,’ she said, delighted. My enthusiasm deflated.
‘I don’t know how you’re so unconcerned about this,’ I said. ‘Why did you just believe me when I said that albatrosses are real?’
‘Well, you’re the one writing the encyclopedia.’
‘I’m telling you that penguins are real.’
‘And I disagree,’ she said, scowling. ‘What’s so hard about this?’
‘It’s a fact,’ I pleaded. ‘You can’t disagree with facts.’
‘Sure I can,’ she said, scoffing again. How had I missed how aggravating these expressions of her were? It was all I could do to not grab her by the shoulders and shake her clean. ‘I just did.’
I sighed. This was going to get nowhere.
How do you explain to someone that this is a conversation you had with your wife? That this is something that happened to me? How do I express the incredulity of what I witnessed to a guy with mommy issues who’s reading my words off a screen? The mood turned even sourer during the drive back—it took me about a second to see through her transparent facade of cheeriness. The bizarreness was far too much. This was my wife I was talking about. Not a friend, not a lover, not even a sibling; my wife, who I had lived with for what was coming on six years now, who I had proposed to under Niagara Falls, who I kissed to sleep every time she had a cold. My wife did not believe in penguins. Her reasoning abilities rivaled that of a schoolkid’s—or worse than a schoolkid’s, really, because even kindergarteners believed in birds. What was going on? Had I missed something fundamental? How had I never seen it before? Was I so blinded by her looks that I had somehow forgotten to have a rational conversation with her throughout all of the eight years I’d known her? Did I know anything about her at all? That adage about not knowing how quickly it sneaks up on you had proved quite a killer—by the time we arrived home I had a hard time seeing her as anything but an odd manner of creature that had crawled its way into my life, or whatever was left of it. It was an odd feeling, as if I was stuck in an endless present. Despite all my attempts to assign some kind of logical rationale to Joanna’s inner state I found it quite impossible to figure out any kind of world in which albatrosses existed but penguins didn’t, which led me again to the same conclusion—was Joanna simply just an idiot?
Of course, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that the problem was hardly whether Joanna was an idiot or not but rather whether I perceived her to be so. What was also clear, however, was that the easiest way to get rid of this whole affair altogether and reunite with my wife was to simply prove without a doubt that Joanna wasn’t stupid. The first suggestion that my newfound German friend gave me was that of making a taxonomy of intelligence and seeing how she did in a systematic evaluation. I would later come to know that his name was unfortunately Heinrich Heinrich, which was another heavy burden to bear, and the reason why we were so keen to communicate with each other was because there was a parallel crisis going on: he had recently read some Dostoyevsky and come to the apt conclusion that his self-loathing was nearing some kind of optimum and that he should take radical measures to improve his situation lest he actually fall prey to one of the variety of death threats that would flood his inbox on the daily (although he did tell me that this was par-for-the-course and that I needn’t worry). What Heinrich had done was fully lean into the fact that he was a repressed homosexual and move to Berlin. Whether he was actually a repressed homosexual is anyone’s guess, but somehow this did lighten his mood, and so I was in support of it. I was also under the impression that he held hidden eunuch-like wisdom—surely being so sexually and habitually repressed must awaken some inexplicable monkhood within a person, and added to that the fact that when I read his correspondences in my head they were spoken by the same heavyset German voice that I attributed to a Kantian, I was sold on whatever this guy said. The first thing we did was stop taking ‘stupid’ or ‘idiot’ at face value, because Joanna wasn’t a bumbling fool—she was a perfectly regular woman who was able to live a regular life without anything in the way of intellectual support. There was this time I was visiting my parents’ place upstate for a few weeks during the in-between period after graduation but before beginning my new job in Seattle in which I spent a lot of days just wandering idly about suburbia; the new place was their newly-purchased retirement home and not the (larger) house I’d grown up in Tacoma. On every one of those wanderings I’d see this one guy hanging outside the 7-Eleven saying something that was generally incomprehensible but could be inferred to be the tone of someone asking for a hot dog or two. He wasn’t really the dangerous sort, and I don’t know who dressed him or bathed him, but he had this roundedness to his eyes which I was later told by my mother was a chromosomal affectation. I didn’t hate the guy or anything, and the one fine day I was so bored that I decided to actually engage him in conversation he proved to me that he had the ability to mumble through the entirety of basically any Eminem song on command; one of my own affectations is my tendency to not give people much leeway and preemptively judge them for things beyond their control—of course I’d like to be the opposite, you know, because I’ve been lucky enough to have been surrounded by such nice and wonderful people with all their beautiful and complex inner lives, I really am grateful. And it was that principle when applied to my wife that was giving me all these nightmarish thoughts about her being unintelligent and generally stupid, on the whole, or not living up to whatever mental model of intelligence I had that I wanted to get to the bottom of. But the one that I could safely exclude was that she wasn’t brain damaged in the sense of that guy outside the 7-Eleven. Like, she obviously wasn’t even close to what more unkind people would refer to as ‘retarded’. All this I dismissed basically the instant I started making this taxonomy of intelligence to correctly pinpoint why it was those particular words that swam to my mind about Joanna and the penguin and not something like ‘irrational’ or ‘womanly’—there was a strong feeling pointing me towards unintelligence.
But the problem is that once you open the floodgates it all starts pouring in. And you can’t stop it, either, just as you can’t help noticing that every time Joanna was left to her own devices she would put on reality TV and never anything in the way of clever or interesting—it was all something like Survivor or sometimes even shows that involved a variety of rich housewives parading themselves around fancy cities like Paris or New York or London, that sort of thing, and while I wouldn’t necessarily use this as a point of reference for diminished intelligence in itself—I mean, I myself couldn’t go three days without football on TV—there was also something to how she engaged with these things in general that got me. There was this time a few years ago when I had asked her what she even saw in these stupid TV shows and I sat down with her and watched an entire, complete season and really even got very engrossed by the whole thing. But then when I tried to bring it up after the fact she just wasn’t very interested in discussing or recollecting the things that happened in it so much as just wanting me to watch it.
‘Mm-hmm,’ she would say, simply.
‘What do you think’s going to happen with Shannen next season? You think she’ll get her kid back?’
‘I guess we’ll have to wait and see.’
Or there was the fact that every time we’d sit down to watch football she would always inundate me with these really simple questions I’d told her the answer to a thousand times like ‘what is a quarterback?’ or ‘why do they stop the clock sometimes and not at other times?’ While this wasn’t annoying to me because I’d cleanly rationalized this thing that she did as merely a ritual that she liked to do to feel close to me (and it was a pretty good ritual, actually—I did feel close to her after that) the possibility that the reason she was doing this was because she literally just failed to understand what I was trying to explain to her was now seriously viable. That’s a scary thought, you know—hits you like a truck, you’re on the freeway and then it just comes and slams right into you smashing your windowpane into itty-bitty pieces and when you look out you’re bleeding and can only make out the faintest traces of Mount Rainer among the evergreen PNW landscape; instead it’s all just a blurry soup of shattered glass and disarray. I really wished that she show interest in football not out of some kind of obligation to partake in the husband-wife ritual or even because she simply enjoyed spending time with her husband but because she was just genuinely interested in the game itself. Was that too much to ask?
Needless to say I spelled this whole thing out in tedious detail to my German friend online, and when the response finally came it was damning.
— Jesus Christ, dude. Has she always been that retarded? How did you never notice?
Which was of course a far more complicated and difficult question to answer than the first one, and by the time it came I hadn’t even conclusively established the first. I was concocting a scheme via which I could unknowingly administer Joanna an IQ test of some kind, but just as the ideas started to cohere into something tangible my plan—and by extension my life—was thrown into complete disarray by a sharp pair of bombs straight across my way.
The first of these was a call from Dave. This must’ve been about a month after the incident in the library, right around late February. I was driving back to Beacon Hill along the 5 and I’d let the window down for the first time in months—might’ve been the first good sunny day of the year, really, and right then the sun was setting on my right across the bay, filling the car with a vibrant orange that bled into the pink sky up above. Then suddenly I hear the phone ring and it’s Dave instead of Joanna, for once—but then he starts speaking and right away I can tell there’s something wrong. I’d never heard him be so shifty and guarded.
‘You doing okay, Patrick?’ he asked. This wasn’t too unusual a question, but there was element of concern there that I’d never heard him use before.
‘Sure I am,’ I replied. ‘What’s gotten you so hung up?’
He paused. ‘Listen, I’m not sure I should tell you this. I promised not to, but what the hell.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘It’s about your wife,’ he said.
‘About Joanna?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘What about her? Is she in trouble?’
‘No, nothing like that. It’s not really about her, per se.’
‘Then what’s it about?’
He paused again, this time for longer. I tapped the dial on the dashboard—the audio in my car wasn’t the best. ‘Hello?’ I said.
‘I’m here.’
‘What’s the problem? Spit it out, will you?’
Dave sighed. ‘Might as well, if I’ve gotten this far. Look, Patrick—you been treating her right?’
I recoiled, rolling the window back up. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Well, couple days ago I get a call from her. And she’s worried. Real worried, Pat. Been asking me if I know what’s up.’
‘What’s she so worried about?’
‘About you, o’course—what else?’
‘What’d I do now?’ There were honks in the background, and I put my foot on the gas.
‘I’m not sure, really. Dunno how to put it.’
‘Put it straight.’
‘Alright, here goes, then. She’s saying you been odd, shit. Like cooped up at work. And you had some kind of argument, and since then you’ve been all weird. Believing in stuff that don’t exist—that’s her words, not mine.’
‘She’s saying I believe in things that don’t exist?’
‘Uh-huh. Says you’ve got some kind of delusion. Like Bigfoot or something, I don’t know. And there’s something else, too. It’s a weird question, I don’t know what to think about it. Again, she promised me not to tell—but you know me, I’m not one to keep secrets, ‘specially not from you.’
‘What’s the question?’
‘Well—she asked if you were a bit kooky when you were young.’
‘Kooky.’
‘Not kooky, no. That’s my word, not hers. She’s wondering if you’re stupid, more like. If it’s just her or what, because she’s started thinking that you’re stupid. That you’re dumb, or something. Says that you do stupid things, sometimes—like she’ll ask something while you’re watching football, and then you’ll give her a straight answer though she’s asked the same thing like twenty times. You just answer it every time.’
‘Let me get this straight.’
‘You do that.’
‘She—Joanna—she thinks I’m stupid.’
‘Yeah. I don’t think she thinks you’re a retard, or anything, you hear me. Just a bit dull. Unintelligent, more like. I don’t know what’s gotten into her.’
‘Did you ask her what our argument was about?’
‘That’s not my job, man. What’s between you’s between you.’
‘I’ll tell you what it was about. You’re gonna love this one, Dave, it’s straight out of Hollywood. My wife—Joanna—doesn’t believe in penguins.’
No response. There was a large hummer up ahead with a baby-on-board bumper sticker, and with a pang I realized that I’d missed my exit—the streetlights were on and the sun had almost set, but the little strands of light were enough to illuminate some strip malls along my left. There were markers for another exit in a quarter mile, but I made no move and passed it by.
‘Hello?’ I repeated.
‘I heard you.’
‘You get that?’
‘You okay, Patrick?’
‘Am I okay? Why are you asking me if I’m okay?’
‘Are you fine? You hit your head recently or something?’
‘I’m fine. I’m not retarded, Dave, what the fuck is going on?’
‘You said your wife don’t believe in penguins.’
Another exit. I kept driving.
‘She doesn’t.’
‘How could she not believe in penguins? They’re real.’
‘They are,’ I said. ‘They sure as hell are.’
‘Listen, is penguin like a code word or something—’
‘No it isn’t. I mean the bird. Antarctica, snow, flippers. I mean penguins. Like actual penguins.’
‘You sure you heard her right?’
‘I sure did.’
Long pause. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said.
‘Join the club, man. It’s not like I get it, either.’
‘When was the last time you got your health checked?’
‘I’m not crazy. Why do you keep thinking I’m crazy?’
‘I didn’t say that. You’re putting words in my mouth. I didn’t say anything.’
‘What are you saying, then?’
‘I’m just saying, it might be time to get checked up. These things happen to the best of us—last time I got my health checked they found this tumor in my knee that I never would’ve guessed. Turned out to be benign, of course, and there was no problem but you never know what they might find—’
‘You think I’m crazy.’
‘I mean, do you hear yourself?’
‘Yeah I hear myself. Are you hearing me?’
‘You’re not getting home on time, you’re spending all your time on your computer, you don’t sleep with your wife anymore—and you’re saying this is because she doesn’t believe in penguins?’
‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘You’ve got it.’
‘Does that sound healthy to you?’
‘It sounds crazy to me, but that doesn’t stop it from being true. Hey—some things are true, Dave. Some things just are true. It’s facts. Not opinions—you can’t disagree with opinions. It’s facts. Why don’t you just ask her? Didn’t she tell you about all this? Didn’t she mention the penguins?’
‘She didn’t mention anything of the sort, no,’ he said.
‘Guess what—it’s real, alright. It happened.’
‘Hey, Patrick—look, I gotta go now, okay. I got some work to do, my wife’s waiting outside with the car—how about you take it easy, huh? Take a couple days off work. Go spend some time with Joanna. God knows she needs it, she’s a hardworking girl.’
‘You’re lying,’ I said. ‘You don’t need to get off anything—’
‘Coming, honey!’ he said, suddenly. ‘Alright—see you.’
The call ended. The Hummer had gone, and from the looks of it I’d crossed SeaTac. I took the next exit and found myself on the way to Kent, thinking idly about Sam Darnold. Even after the whole penguin thing, Joanna and I had watched the Super Bowl together at the Millers’—right around halftime the announcer had gone on a long tangent about Darnold and his comeback from the Vikings, Joanna had turned to me and asked for the God knows how many-eth time how the draft worked. The fucking draft. She goddamn knew how the draft worked—she’d been there on draft day, wearing that same white XS jersey I’d got for her half a decade ago that was so large she was constantly worrying about exposed bra-straps. I didn’t know how I’d missed it. Maybe it was the punch, who knows? So that’s what she was thinking, then? Not about the game, or the halftime show, or the fact that Drake Maye had something like 20 passing yards the whole first half—no, the only thing that was on her head was that I was a fucking idiot. It was one thing to screw up my marriage, but now she’d fucked up my Super Bowl. And apparently she was trying to screw up my closest friendship, too, from the sounds of it. Yeah, right—I was the one who was stupid. Great move, really. Get ‘em before they get you. But guess what—she’d picked a fight with the wrong guy, and her warning system better be working good.
It was already dark by the time I pulled into Hopper’s, but my watch said that it was barely six and there were only a couple regulars playing 8-ball by the corner. It took the bartender precisely five seconds to realize that this was a man in crisis. He was a lanky man with a dirty moptop and whatever he was wearing looked like it was missing a top hat, but his voice was startlingly deep. ‘Rough day?’
‘You bet. Miller lite.’
He snorted. ‘Miller lite for a rough day?’
I shrugged. ‘Blonde, then. And maybe a shot of bourbon.’
‘Right on,’ he said, gesturing to the youngsters down by the pool table. One of them was wearing red flannel and a Bass Pro Shop cap and sat down on the barstool next to me as if on command, while the other was clean-shaven and sporting a large North Face jacket; before I knew it I was four pints down and would’ve trusted them with my life. The three of them proved surprisingly good listeners, too, gasping at all the right moments, patting my back when the time was right.
‘So as I see it, let’s look at your options,’ said the guy in the flannel.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Can I see a picture of your wife?’ said the guy in the North Face jacket.
‘Shut the fuck up, Drake,’ said the bartender. ‘Can’t you see the guy’s really going through it?’
He shrugged. ‘Shit, man, it’s a slow day. Besides, I never see any bitches around these parts, anyway.’
‘Yeah ‘cause it’s fucking 6:30 on a Wednesday.’
I unlocked my phone and shook the wallpaper in their direction. ‘That’s her.’
‘Shit, she’s good,’ said Drake. ‘Nice one.’ He offered me a fist bump, which I gladly accepted.
The bartender nodded. ‘Yup, that looks like a keeper. That her natural hair? You know what she uses on it?’
‘You mean what product she uses?’
‘Okay, that’s not the point,’ said flannel. ‘Yes of course Pat’s wife is pretty, the question is whether she’s smart or not.’
‘She’s a scheming son of a bitch,’ I said. ‘Smarter than she looks.’
‘Can I see that picture again?’ said Drake.
I gave the phone to him. ‘Su-weet,’ he breathed.
‘Let me see that hair again,’ said the bartender. ‘Are they naturally straight, or—’
‘Faggot,’ said Drake. ‘Of all the things—’
‘Hey!’ said flannel. ‘None of that ‘round here, can’t you see the man?’
The bartender offered me the phone back, and I returned it to my pocket. ‘I gotta get home, you know,’ I said. ‘And then I’ve got to talk to her about this shit. What am I even gonna say?’
‘I mean, she’s your wife,’ said flannel. ‘You can just say whatever you want, right?’
I had little idea what he meant by that. ‘Of course not.’
‘I mean, isn’t that the whole point—’
‘Do you have a wife?’
The bartender winced, while Drake threw his head back in laughter. ‘Let’s just keep it at no,’ replied flannel, making a face.
‘Well, if you ever get one, try saying “bitch, shut up, are you on your period?” and we’ll see how she takes to your whole “saying whatever” business.’
‘I think what he’s trying to say is that she doesn’t sound too stupid,’ the bartender offered. ‘If she were stupid, she wouldn’t be thinking you’re stupid, see? She wouldn’t be thinking anything at all if she was stupid.’
‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t make any sense.’
‘I don’t get it,’ said Drake. ‘How could she not believe in penguins?’
‘Beats me,’ I replied. ‘You have no idea how much I’ve driven myself to the ground pondering that same fucking question.’
‘I mean, can she do, like, math and stuff?’ he asked.
‘Like addition?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘She can add up the grocery bills just fine.’
‘Einstein failed his high school math class,’ said flannel. ‘That doesn’t mean anything.’
‘Yeah but just ‘cause she can’t do math doesn’t mean she’s a retard, but if she can do math she’s gotta be pretty smart, no?’ said Drake.
‘She can add up simple things,’ I said.
‘What else can she do?’ asked the bartender. ‘What do you guys talk about apart from her stupid football questions?’
‘Work and stuff.’
‘What does she do?’
‘Librarian. She works at Seattle Central.’
‘Shit dude, librarians are pretty smart,’ said Drake. He turned towards the others. ‘Emily’s mom is a librarian. And she’s, like, the smartest woman I know. Trust me. The other day I was, like, “What’s that movie where Ben Affleck is flying the planes?” and in ten seconds she’s like “Pearl Harbor.” And guess what, it really was Pearl Harbor. That’s where Emily gets her brains. She goes to UW,’ he continued, returning to me. ‘So librarians are, like, really smart. Her mom also gave us Hawaii tips. We’re going to Maui for the summer.’
‘Uh-huh,’ I said. ‘Bon voyage.’
‘What’s that?’
Flannel sighed. ‘Shit, Drake, he’s wishing you a happy journey. It’s Italian, numbskull.’
‘It’s French, actually,’ I said.
‘Whatever,’ said Flannel. ‘So she’s a librarian? She read a lot?’
‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘Although she doesn’t really like to talk about it.’
‘What does she read?’
‘Pretty much anything. But she likes these books about women going on road trips and stuff.’
‘Huh,’ said the bartender. ‘That’s pretty generic.’
I shrugged. I’d been doing that a lot these days. ‘I guess.’
‘I don’t know, something’s missing,’ said flannel.
‘Elaborate.’
‘Something doesn’t seem to add up. How did you meet?’
‘Friend’s wedding.’
‘You see that?’ he said, looking at the other two, who nodded. ‘Friend’s wedding? That’s crazy.’
‘I’m not following,’ I said.
‘Where did you propose?’ asked Drake.
‘Underneath Niagara Falls,’ I said. They all immediately laughed. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘Did you get married in a barn?’ offered the bartender.
‘Um, yeah,’ I said, and they all laughed again. ‘Alright, at some point you gotta let me in on the joke.’
‘I don’t think she’s stupid,’ said flannel, ‘but she doesn’t really sound like a real person.’
‘Except for the penguin thing,’ said Drake. They all muttered and nodded.
‘What about it?’
‘Okay, let’s do this,’ said the bartender. ‘Your perfect woman. What’s she like? Like really? I mean, you can’t say your wife, because that’s not true.’
Drake stood up, suddenly, and looked around. ‘Hey, how come there’s no one here still, Andy? Isn’t it ladies’ night?’
‘That was yesterday,’ replied the bartender.
‘I thought you had a girlfriend?’ I asked. ‘Emily or whatever?’
‘Oh no, she’s just a friend,’ he replied. ‘It’s, like, purely platonic. Except for this one time at Manny’s party in sophomore year when we got really drunk, but, like, since then it’s been totally chill. She’ll, like, spend the night over sometimes, but that’s it, really.’
‘Uh-huh,’ I said, while the other two gave me side-eyes. I took another sip from my glass.
‘So?’ asked flannel.
‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘Well, she looks like my wife, at least.’
‘Right on,’ said Drake, giving me another fist bump.
‘She’s pretty smart, I guess. And she’s funny.’
‘Is your wife funny?’ asked the bartender.
I thought about it for a while. ‘She’s not a stand-up, that’s for sure.’
‘The penguin thing is pretty funny,’ said Drake.
‘I don’t really think that one’s a joke,’ said flannel.
‘Didn’t she call your friend?’ asked Drake. ‘Maybe that one’s a joke.’
‘I don’t think that’s a joke, either,’ I said.
‘Are you funny?’ asked Drake. The other two glared at him.
Suddenly I felt the whole trip to Kent had been a mistake. ‘I—I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Make a joke,’ said Drake.
‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’
‘No, no, no,’ said flannel. ‘Like a good one.’
‘What’s a good joke?’
‘Emily made a really good one the other day,’ said Drake, looking at nowhere in particular. ‘We were watching “Pearl Harbor” and she said that Ben Affleck looked gay. That was really funny.’ He laughed. ‘Because he has the weird chin. That’s a great joke. She’s really funny.’
‘I—’ I didn’t even really know how to respond to that. My stomach was churning uncomfortably. ‘Do you think you guys are funny?’
‘I think I’m funny,’ said the bartender.
‘Make a joke, then,’ I said.
‘Fuck you,’ he said, and the other two laughed.
‘This one’s real good, Andy,’ said Drake. ‘I love this one. You should come by more often,’ he said to me.
‘I’ll keep that in mind.’
‘Anyway,’ said the bartender. ‘What else?’
I sat back and thought about Joanna for a bit, but the thought just made me red-hot. ‘Okay, look. That’s not the point. The point is that she overstepped her bounds. She wasn’t supposed to go ahead and tell my friend all that stuff, but now it’s all fucked up. That’s the question. The question’s not whether she’s funny or not.’
‘Well,’ said Drake. ‘If she’s allowed to tell one person about the penguin thing, then you’re allowed to tell one person too.’
‘Right?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ said flannel. ‘You don’t want problems, do you?’
‘Well, he’s already got problems,’ said the bartender.
‘She’s being shitty,’ agreed Drake. ‘Maybe this is your opportunity to show her how smart you are. Because she thinks you’re stupid. And unfunny. Prove her wrong.’
‘It sounds like she’s in a bar out there of her own,’ said flannel.
‘You think the bartender in that bar is hot?’ asked Drake. ‘Or like the female me? Like Draqina or whatever.’
‘Or a duck,’ I said.
‘I don’t get it,’ said flannel.
‘Like the male of duck is drake?’
‘Oh, like goose and gander?’ I nodded.
‘Dude,’ said Drake. ‘You really gotta work on your jokes, man.’
‘Point taken,’ I replied.
‘I guess you could just tell someone to ask her about penguins,’ said flannel. ‘That’s not offensive or anything, and you’re not spilling any beans. She’ll just have a funny conversation. And, I mean, it’s not super insane or anything.’
‘That’s an idea,’ I said, and the cogs were already turning. ‘There’s this girl at her work—Brenda. I went to her kid’s birthday party once. I have her Email ID. I could send her an email asking her to question Joanna about penguins at work.’
‘That seems safe,’ said the bartender. ‘I mean, it’s also the kind of thing that could pop up naturally. She’s a librarian, right?’
‘Yeah,’ said flannel. ‘She could make something up about the books in the kids’ section or something.’
‘Right on,’ said Drake. ‘And you can use my Email ID so she doesn’t know it’s you. It’s drake.heffler01@hotmail.com.’
‘Hotmail,’ I said. ‘That’s a blast from the past.’
‘Yeah, my mom made it,’ he said.
The next couple days were quiet. Then on Friday evening I was making coffee at home when the door opened to reveal Joanna.
‘Honey,’ she said, glaring. ‘You won’t believe what happened to me at work today.’
‘Really?’ I replied. ‘What happened?’
‘I had the funniest conversation with Brenda. You know Brenda, honey? From the front desk?’
‘I’ve heard of her,’ I said. ‘Is she pregnant again?’
‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘You won’t believe what she wanted to talk about today.’
‘Oh really?’
‘Yeah. She wanted to know how things were going between us. If everything’s okay. If things are all fine.’
‘Well. Did you tell her everything’s perfect, like it is?’
‘So everything’s perfect? Nothing fishy going on?’
‘Of course. You know, I had a conversation like that, too. Funny how these things happen. I got a call from Dave, if you believe it.’
Her tone immediately changed.
‘Did you now? What’d he want to talk about?’
‘The same stuff. Wanted to talk about birds, you know.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, surprising, isn’t it?’
‘What kind of birds, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘Seabirds, mostly.’
‘I see. Any particular seabird?’
I shrugged. ‘Nothing that comes to mind. Oh, and he also wanted to know how we were doing, of course.’
‘Did he, now? What did you tell him?’
‘I said things are fine. Aren’t they?’
‘Sure they are, sure they are. They’re perfect, actually. Couldn’t be better.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ I said. I got up and put my arms around her waist, and she didn’t so much as flinch. Instead, her arms carefully found their way around my shoulders.
She smiled. ‘What do you say we go to bed early tonight?’
‘I think that’s a good idea,’ I said. ‘You—you mean you want to have sex.’
‘It’s been a while,’ she replied. ‘Couple weeks, isn’t it? I’m starved.’
‘Uh-huh. Me too,’ I said, heart sinking.
‘In fact,’ she said, tightening her arms into a chokehold. ‘Let’s do it right now.’
‘R-right now?’
‘What do you say?’
I suddenly picked her up, causing her to squeal. ‘I think that’s a great idea.’ With that I carried her off to our bedroom, and tossed her on the bed.
‘Come here,’ she said, pulling me closer into a tight kiss. I felt squeamish the moment our lips touched, but powered through. The ruthless nature of her slobbering made it pretty clear that she had zero actual desire to be here, either, but there was no way I was dropping it now that we’d gotten this far. I reached down and clasped her top, pulling it off, while she started fumbling around with my belt. It was all very disorienting—I can’t remember the last time we’d been this unorganized about it; I had half a mind to pull the covers over. By the time we’d gotten it all done and I’d slipped it in her face was oscillating between a vague repulsion and a put-on ecstasy, and her moans became loud and relentless just as her fingernails were sharply digging into my skin.
‘Oh, Pat,’ she moaned. Apparently my look was one of profound discomfort, because she closed her eyes. None of this caused me to stop, however.
Then, without meaning to, somehow, I leaned over to her ear and whispered a squawking sound.
This was so shocking that Joanna momentarily stopped, wide-eyed. I had no idea what to say. Then she closed her eyes again and continued what she was doing, but now with an additional flopping not dissimilar to that of… well, you guessed it.
After a while her moans crescendoed into the fakest orgasm I’d ever heard in my life. I put on a similar performance before collapsing back on the bed—truth be told, I wasn’t even certain if I had gotten it up. It seemed like something about this had pleased her, however, because when I finally turned to look at her her face was red with not trying to laugh. I had no idea what I was experiencing—my whole sense of self had completely collapsed.
‘I’m going to go the bathroom,’ said Joanna. ‘That was great.’
‘I enjoyed it,’ I said, though I couldn’t have told you whether I was lying if you’d put a gun to my head.
— you did what
— Idk, I don’t know how to explain it.
— like mid-sex?
— Yeah.
— and then she ‘flopped’???
— Or slid around, whatever you want to call it. She definitely seemed to be into it.
Joanna was still asleep
— have you possibly considered the fact that you and wife both may be sexually attracted to penguins?
— I’m pretty sure I’m not.
— how do you know that. did you try?
— Doing what?
— jerking off to them, of course. perhaps you do not know this, but the mind can actually train itself via pavlovian conditioning to be sexually attracted to anything.
— I’m not going to jerk off to penguins man.
— and she thinks you’re stupid?
— Yeah. She told my friend that she thinks I’m an idiot.
— it’s possible she’s simply operating from a post-rationalist framework. my ex-twitter friend’s (side note who also briefly owned a pseudo-legal opium den in tokyo that was frequented by among other people a taekwondo expert who claimed to be bruce willis’ secret estranged son and this japanese ‘celebrity cannibal’) brief situationship was this avowed irrationalist who made it a point to under-optimize her lifestyle though in her case it was a poor coverup for clinical depression. among other things she was an avid gymgoer and would settle arguments through physical violence not dissimilar from the hellenic episode of plato flexing his muscles instead of actually responding to the argument. your wife may be similar, she may simply not recognize logic as a means to an end.
— Okay but that doesn’t explain why she believes in albatrosses.
— sure it does, she recognizes evidence.
— But evidence for penguins isn’t enough??
— she may simply find penguins harder to believe in than albatrosses. i mean, i can show you a picture of a dragon and you’ll think it’s fake while i can show you a picture of your wife fucking your dad and you’ll immediately lose it. ultimately i just showed you a single picture of both but one of them was ‘enough’ while the other wasn’t.
— You’re not allowed to make any allusions to my wife and my father.
— fucking retard. do you get my point though.
— So she’s not stupid, just irrational.
— is my guess.
— It still doesn’t change the fact that I can’t really stand her anymore.
— yeah of course you can’t because it’s not about penguins at all, but i’m pretty sure you already knew that.
— I was beginning to suspect it, yes. How are you doing?
— being gay is sweet. you can get laid whenever you want.
— Yeah but you also live in like the gayest city on earth.
— that would be where your dad’s from, actually.
— I don’t know why I even talk to you…
Whatever the incident in the bedroom had been, the conclusion was that Joanna and I had settled into a quiet truce.