“My parents are Regan fanatics,” Josh said. He isn’t really speaking to me, but I am the only one listening. “They actually liked his movies they would sit down with popcorn and everything.”
“What did they think of Iran/Contra?” I ask.
“What?” he said, his eyes flutter under bleached bangs that are supposed to be platinum, or blond, but have a greenish hue.
My wife’s best friend, whom I refer to as Selma due to her resemblance to the film actress, has come back to the states after three months abroad. She just happens to arrive back the same day we are set for our own vacation. And as we are just going back to the place where her and my wife grew up, she meets us upon our arrival.
Inquiring as to where Selma had been on her travels South Africa is mentioned. That is supposed to put a stop to my line of questioning. I acquiesce knowing how pleased it makes my wife. I listen to the two of them converse and wonder if Selma had really been gone anywhere at all.
There is a party, Selma advises us both, a homecoming for her. That is when all of it comes into focus, the impromptu vacation, the curious destination.
Three years prior my wife had a job opportunity presented to her. We both mutual agreed that it would not be in her best interest to accept. She took it anyway, and I followed her across three states even though we had discussed doing the opposite. We moved because of Selma.
It is disheartening to go through the hassle of getting time away from work just to visit some place that you used to live. It feels like crawling back into the cradle.
Lynn, my wife, was unable to disguise her own nervousness. She is short on the plane, and in line for the rental. She almost explodes when I am made to circle the hotel three times because of construction.
It takes her two hours in the hotel bathroom. She tries on every outfit she brought with her. She did the same thing the night before we left. She settles on one that she usually wears to work, black slacks, loose blouse slowing cleavage. I tell her that she looks good, and she accepts the compliment like a person that knows they are being intentionally placated.
“You are wearing that?” she asks looking at me. I go stand in the bathroom for a couple minutes then come back out and we ready to leave.
The restaurant we are to meet Selma and the rest of their friends is less than a block from the hotel. We take a cab. It saves Lynn’s feet. She wears four-inch bone white heels that have been in her closet since high school.
A long table is perched in the window of the restaurant. We can see all the women seated at it. I am a counterweight for my wife as we walk inside. I have no idea what this is doing to her.
Selma sits at the head of the table. She put her hand up as we approached and the chatter at the table stopped. She rushed to my wife and embraced her. A show for the table. Slema’s obscenely long dark hair fall across my wife’s chest like tentacles.

A seat is cleared beside Selma. A splotchy faced women reluctantly gives it up. She slinks down the table casting one look behind her like a sulking teenager.
Not having a spot for me close to my wife was expected. I procure a chair from a neighboring table and sit at the end opposite Selma and my wife. I watch everyone lean forward to try and pretend they are still included in the conversation of the people that matter.
I attempt an exchange with the woman beside me. She is blond with a short boys cut, chewed on fingernails and an oddly masculine torso. She nods politely at my inane inquires basically ignoring them. I feel like dog excrement on a neatly manicured lawn.
Drinks, mostly wine, and a few appetizers, most of which does not make it to my end of the table. I watch my wife head to the restroom with Selma in tow. She smiles at me, a smile you use on someone you recognize in public, someone that you have no intention of interacting with.
“So, you were raised conservative?” I ask, but I am disinterested. I look up at the empty stage well past the time the first band should have been on.
“Yes, I suppose,” Josh says, “it just didn’t take.” The silver ball threaded through his tongue clicks against his teeth.
I ask him another question that he feigns interest in, then starts scrolling through his phone. I do the same.
Catching my wife on the way back to the table. I stand blocking her path. The way we lean together it must look like we are about to kiss. We don’t. I stupidly remind her about the concert, which was what I used as an excuse for the whole trip to begin with. I already know what her excuse was. My wife tells me I can go without her.
Selma invades the tiny bubble of our forms. A questioning look is exchanged, and my wife goes on to tell her about the concert, not remembering she supposedly spoke to her about it previously. Selma, with exaggerated excitement calls out to her friend Josh, who she claims loves live music, and would be more than happy to go with me.
I had mistaken Josh for a woman. I wonder how many other women at the table are men.
I suggest walking. I always suggest that, and no one ever seems to want to.
Josh’s car, just the two of us. It is cramped and odorous. As we make our way out of the restaurant Josh moves like a disinterested adolescent left behind by his parents.
Filling the space with pathetic small talk is what I do because I can’t stand silence. Luckily, it is not a far drive, but it would have been quicker to walk.
The venue is small and dark. It smells of molding hops. Josh sticks to me like a shadow, which I knew was what Selma instructed.
“Oh, I love this scarf,” he says plucking the end of a light lavender strip of rayon tied around the neck of a bird like girl. The rings in her right ear look like a staircase. She looks back at Josh and smiles.
“I could have her if I wanted,” he says casually. I’m not sure I ever hated anyone in my life more than at that moment.
The first band is not good. The sound system is not good. All the band members have long hair covering their features like curtains and matching suits that are supposed to look like they were plucked from a thrift store bin.
Josh performs as well. His hands aloft like a ballerina he rotates in small circles. I try to put some distance between us, but he twirls right into any of the space I give up.
A woman with hair shorn close to the scalp save a few errant whisps severs the connection between me and Josh. She starts speaking to me as if we are old acquaintances. The hair that would not surrender to vibrating clippers moves under my nose like tickling feathers as the woman talks. I swat at her staticky hair and try to maneuver away from both her and Josh. Then I see the swell of her pregnant belly under the tank top made for a man.
She steps on my foot with her wine-colored steel toe boots. She apologizes, but her orange lips form an ominous smile. The heavy powder on her eyelids is an ugly sort of blue.
When the music evaporates, I try to seek out the dense shadows near the back wall, she follows. Josh seems to float away with a smirk. Her words are gunfire behind me. Her hands feel like a dogs’ nose when she touches me.
I am forced to tell her that Josh and I are more than friends. It takes a moment for the words to penetrate her soft looking forehead. She pretends not to be upset, and does not abandon me immediately, but she wants to. After a minute of silence, I offer to get her a drink. She no longer looks at me as if we know one another.
“What’s the matter?” Josh asks like a voice inside my head. We watch the pregnant woman waddle away. “Not interested in that. You know it’s okay, I would never tell.”
I want to leave and tell him as much. The band I want to see has yet to take the stage. I don’t care. I want to get my wife. When I tell Josh he looks at me as if I said my personal hero was Oliver North.
“They aren’t there anymore,” he says with actual joy, “at least not your wife and Selma.”
I text several times. I receive prompt, generic responses. I sleep in the hotel room alone.
They are both there in the morning chatty and loud. They carry food in damp looking brown bags. They appear slightly inebriated, still.
Selma helps herself to a shower. My wife keeps up a syrupy unencumbered stream of words that I am hardly able to wade through, which is the point. While my wife uses the shower Selma stays in the bathroom with her. The hairdryer is on ceaselessly.
The rest of that day I spend in the room alone.
There are only one pair of seats together on the flight back. I am subjugated to a middle seat near the back as Selma is on our same returning flight. The aroma of the restroom sits with me like an unwelcome memory.
Back home they stay up all night talking and giggling in the living room.
In the morning I make coffee and toast and we drag plastic chairs and alcohol out to the street like the rest of the neighborhood. The parade takes a year to start, and it seems like seconds before the last float is disappearing into the sun.
We wade through the trash in the street: Aluminum cans, condoms, pasties, napkins with egregious red lip prints, flags with rainbows, a bottle of teeth whitener, water-based lubricant, voter registration cards, torn plastic gloves, a photo of Nancy Regan with a boot print on her wrinkly neck.
I work the following week. Lynn takes a couple extra days off.
I am not as stoic as I assumed I would be seeing all her things gone, empty closets and drawers gawking at me when I return home.
I listen to music without headphones. I turn on all the lights. I call in to work the next day and stay home watching movies. I masturbate like a teenager. I don’t get out of bed the next day. I don’t say a single word to another human being for several days.
She contacts me, and it is like the pregnant woman at the venue, like we are old acquaintances that never shared spit, sickness, or any plans for an intertwined future.
I don’t get angry or argue. Somethings must be how they are.
For some reason it makes me think about Ronald Regan. That revolution where they talked about, family, country, and faith. Yet, there was always that hint of selfishness and greed. I’m not sure how it pertains to me other than I know someone that worships at the altar of the Gipper would never let his wife just walk out on him.
We talk all the time now. Lynn sounds melancholy most of the time, although that could just be projection on my part. Overall, our sad little relationship didn’t have the cultural impact of say arms dealing in the Middle East, but for me these events have had just as much lasting damage.