What he never really took into account in marrying a girl from Iceland was that she would never quite appreciate his jokes. Especially the pop culture references — music, movies, old TV shows, long-forgotten political scandals. And because most of his jokes involved such references — the essence of his humor being analogies, his vision of the world so comparative and relative — there was a panic, a cold stab, that came with the thought that he would never be responsible for drawing out that laugh of hers — that bird-like trill he occasionally heard when she read the Reykjavik newspapers on-line or spoke with her sister on the phone in that clicky-clacky reindeer tongue.
Other than that, he never heard it. There was a similar laugh, at times, that she mustered during sex, when things got wild or just awkward and silly — at a cramped instep, a smashed lamp. But that wasn’t comedy. Not highbrow, at least. Not intentional.
They’d been married for only a few months when Dan first realized this could turn out to be a big issue. It was the first time Solla asked to see what he was working on. He’d just finished a radio campaign for The Cartoon Network — they were holding a sweepstakes in which essentially everyone won something. He returned from the recording session feeling pretty good about it, so he popped the CD in and played it for her.
He’d chosen to use Droopy Dog in a send-up of self-help gurus, incanting a daily affirmation, pep-talking himself, in that lackluster whine, with trite tropes: that he is a winner, that today is a new day, and that he will enter that sweepstakes and he will not be a loser, he will look at himself in the mirror today and say, “ha-cha-cha!” — all with a music bed of lilting, harp-based New Age pabulum cascading underneath.
She laughed the second she heard the first word out of Droopy.
“How funny! This is all your own creation?”
“Well,” he explained, “that’s Droopy Dog. That’s how he talks.”
“It’s a very funny way to talk. You did a very good job making this.”
“No, see, that’s how he always talks. That’s not what’s funny. See…” But how could he explain the irony of making one fairly obscure pop culture reference — a Tex Avery basset hound that had always been a third banana in the cartoon universe and was always known for being the loser, the nebbishy bit player — and juxtaposing that against another reference, moving him into the slightly more worldly milieu of self-improvement and dysfunctional encounter groups and New Age “feel good” introspection that also made a subtle nod to the “Stuart Smalley” sketches of Al Franken on “Saturday Night Live” several years previous? Really, he’d need a blackboard to diagram it all for her. A big one.
“Forget it,” he said, extracting the CD. “I can’t explain it.”
Solla pursed her doll lips, turning defensive. “I get it. It’s funny because it’s a dog and he’s talking and he sounds so sad and dogs are supposed to be happy. And he talks through his nose like that – ‘hehhhh…lowwww, heeehhh…llloww’…. It’s funny.”
In that moment, he decided he not only couldn’t explain it, he didn’t want to explain it. And he tried, for most of a year, to avoid such conversations again.
But still, it bugged him. He tried to tell himself that a marriage, even a workable marriage, wasn’t always a meeting of the minds. A spouse wasn’t a guaranteed cheerleader. Marriage wasn’t a pep rally. Still, the thing that gnawed at him was the fact that it wasn’t reciprocal. Solla designed sweaters for a company back in Reykjavik that sold them exclusively in America as authentic Icelandic folk designs. So it wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate her talents, that he just loved her for her stewardessy looks and minxy ways and the fact that they both shared a sexual proclivity somewhere just left of the Devil. No, he appreciated the fuck out of her. Couldn’t he look at her designs just as easily as any Icelander she’d dated back home, enjoy the warmth of the finished product, (no matter how much they smelled, to him, of hay)? He got her stuff, no problem.
It wasn’t fair, really, and it made him feel sort of alone.
Part Two
One afternoon he heard her laughing in the living room and tiptoed in to find her watching the Three Stooges. “We have these fellows back home,” she said. “They’re known as the Three Cabbage-heads.”
He stood in the doorway and watched as Curly, ironing a pair of pants, worked his way down the ironing board to where Moe was bent loading a laundry basket and then inadvertently began ironing Moe’s head. Curly whistled happily away, oblivious, while Moe slowly steamed.
His wife cackled; hooted like a Viking; trilled with the icy jingle of sleighbells.
Dan just stood there staring, feeling like a cuckold. He was a witty guy, damn it. Witty as shit.
There were several women in his past who he knew for a fact he had landed only because of the jokes, the patter, the clever ribbing. “I don’t know,” they told their friends, in explanation of his inexplicable charm, “he just makes me laugh.”
And now here was the one woman he was sure he never really made laugh and what had he done? He’d married her. This was not going to be something that would pass, that would be different next time around. For the rest of their life together, it would probably never change. It wasn’t that she couldn’t speak English. She was probably fluent enough to work as a professional translator. Nor was she dim — she had an MFA from RISD and all kinds of strange degrees from places he’d never heard of, back in her land of hot springs and steaming volcanoes.
But how could she — even eventually, over years even — develop an understanding of an entire lifetime of nuance shaped by an alien culture? She couldn’t.
So that was how it would be, he now realized — sentenced to a life without the joy of really amusing the woman he adored; no moment when she’d tip her head back and really let loose and lay her hand on his shoulder in that way and say, “Christ, you make me laugh!” Not with wit. Not with the type of unforced humorous asides that came naturally. True, he could probably draw something out of her if he tried, if he wasn’t himself, if he resorted to slapstick, but he couldn’t stomach the thought that he would be reduced to pratfalls and tummler shtick, banana peels and whoopee cushions, just to force a solid laugh out of her.
And so he told her.
“It bothers me,” he said, “that you don’t find me funny. You don’t get my jokes.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She waggled those thin little fingers at him dismissively. “I find you amusing.”
“Amusing, sure, but I’m no Three Cabbage-heads. Right?”
“Well, no one can be all three cabbage-heads.That’s absurd.”
Now she was just trying to confuse the issue with math. It didn’t hide what he knew was the truth: in her eyes, he just wasn’t that funny. Maybe if he banged himself in the head with a claw hammer or poked himself in the eye.
In his study, he got down his old yearbooks. He read the nice things people signed for him — girls signed for him: You’re so funny!… You always made me laugh…
And he was voted Class Clown. He’d forgotten about that. He could take this in there and show her the awards page. But the term was a bit misleading — clowning she would apparently understand: exploding shoes, confetti farts, squirting boutonnières. That kind of thing she’d get just fine. Crap like that would go over like gangbusters. The universal language of the low-brow.
He opened his college yearbook. He’d worked on the Lampoon. Didn’t that mean anything? But she wouldn’t know what that was. He put the yearbooks back up on the shelf.
She’d probably think it had something to do with whaling.
Later that evening, in that jittery energetic lather he worked himself into every Sunday night since he was back in school, zipping around the house in a last-ditch effort to check little chores off his weekend list and gather up materials for work and generally squeeze out the last drop of weekend, he dashed into the study, carrying a file folder and wearing only lounge pants, and plowed right into the stepstool he’d used earlier to locate his old yearbooks, stubbing his toe with a sharp white pain that dropped the folder from his grip. He let loose a hiss through his clenched teeth — “cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” — that he gauged at about fifty PSI and which took him the length of the room bent at the waist, gripping the injured foot and hopping on the other in a grotesque approximation of a very un-hip version of Chuck Berry, minus the cherry red Gibson.
And then he saw her.
Solla was curled up on the loveseat in her cashmere and tight capris, reading. It was a snapshot of the exotic sex kitten internationelle he’d first fallen for. Exact, no change. She looked up at him from the book — one of the hardbound Icelandic classics her mother had sent that she read and re-read. Her hand shot up, covering that perfect mouth, but he saw it in her eyes as she sunk low behind the barricade of the book.
He couldn’t stand it. “Don’t tell me: that would have killed in Iceland, right? The reindeer people would be splitting their sides right about now?” He knew she didn’t like him calling her fellow countrymen “the reindeer people,” but he didn’t fucking care. His toe was going to be the size of a mango.
The following weekend, driving back to Chicago from a trip up to Manistee, they ran into a roadblock and detour around Newaygo, not yet out of the national forest. It wasn’t clear what the problem was, but the National Guard was out in force, with their green canvassed trucks and soldiers in new, ill-fitting uniforms and too-crisp caps; all vaguely Elvis in Germany. He wanted to know how big a deal this was, if he should get on the cell and cancel dinner with his folks, and so, when he spotted a scrawny, slouching Guardsman just up ahead on the shoulder, prodding the cars along with a repetitive, slightly annoyed wave, he pushed the button for Solla’s window and told her, “Ask Beetle Bailey how long this is.”
Looking back, he realized he should have just said “him.” Ask him. But stressful situations brought out his sarcasm; caused him to temper it all with banter.
Rather than asking the Guardsman (who actually did look, in that moment, with his saucer ears and his cap tugged scornfully low, like Beetle Bailey), she turned to face Dan again, just as they were passing the Guardsman, and asked, “Who? Bill Bailey? Who’s that?”
And then it was too late. They’d missed the moment. They were past the checkpoint, rumbling along planks and potholes and who knew how many miles of dust-choked backroads.
“Forget it,” he said. “Never mind.” They were silent for a few more potholes. Then he said, “You didn’t have to understand the crack. You just had to ask him the question.”
“But I didn’t understand this ‘Bailey.’”
“That part, I was just being a wiseass. But the rest of it — I did want–”
“I didn’t get it, okay?”
“What am I supposed to do — footnote everything for you?”
She folded her arms and slumped low against the door. “I’d prefer you didn’t. If I don’t get it, I don’t get it. No big deal.”
“Fine,” he said. “No big deal.” But it was starting to feel like a big deal. To him at least.
Part Three
The first time he visited her family, finally meeting them almost a year after they were married (alone, in a civil ceremony at the Cook County courthouse), the men dragged him along on an ice fishing trip. He and Solla only had the four days in Reykjavik, but his new brothers-in-law seemed very insistent. (Seemed, because he had no clue what they were actually saying, having only a few words at that point — Hello and thank you and goodbye.)
It was miserable. The only thing worse than the actual physical discomfort was the fact that he had no idea what was going on; what the hell they were all guffawing and grunting about. With his own mouth otherwise unoccupied, he naturally wound up drinking almost non-stop. What burned him was he normally had plenty to say. Here he was, the main radio guy back at the agency, maybe in all of Chicago, surrounded by these snowbound halfwits and dullards so clearly in love with their own rumbling voices. Though he hadn’t the faintest what they were saying as they elbowed and ribbed each other in that side-of-the-mouth, stroke victim-like slur that fishermen everywhere engage in, he was convinced, without getting one word, that these morons would be unfunny in any language. They spoke that universal tongue, Doofus.
He had awards for his radio spots. And radio was all about the words. You could argue that it was the most cerebral segment of the ad world — not a very high distinction, but a distinction nonetheless. Back at the agency, they treated him like Noel Fucking Coward. And he was, in a way, compared to some of those college-skipping slacker creatives they had working there now — those twenty-year-old copywriters who marveled and shook their piercing-encrusted heads at his ability to discern whether they’d written a complete sentence or not and who all gathered around like he was Moses the day he showed them how a semi-colon worked. And beyond basic language skills — actual tenets of comedy: how to build a triple — two items in a list, to create a logical pattern, then the third to offset it, to be ironic, to be more truthful and dead-on than the first two. They ate that stuff up; thought him some sort of humor guru and word wallah. And yet here he was, freezing, reduced to grins and gestures, raising his bottle and just nodding a lot, nodding his fool ass off. Suddenly, he was that one retarded guy that everyone in a small town knows and tolerates. The village idiot. There were no fancy words for it: the whole situation just sucked.
The only big laugh he got during the ice fishing was when they were trying to hand him yet another bottle of brennivín, the mixture of brush cleaner and seal piss that passes for their regional mash, and he was shaking his head and waving it off, trying to refuse it. By way of explanation, he pantomimed, his eyes rolling back into their sockets and his head wobbling, his flitting hands acting as imaginary cartoon bluebirds circling round. They all roared and slapped him on the back and he was, momentarily, a person, a bona fide individual. Other than that one moment, he felt like part of the gear, one more thing to remember not to leave out on the ice when they stumbled back into their trucks and DWI-ed their way back home through the gloom.
He wanted to scream at them, “I’m considered quite the personality, you fucking trogs! Most people think I’m quite witty!” He wanted to scream, “I’ve won awards for my funny words!” If he had his One Show awards here, he would knock them in the head with them, shove them up their fucking whisky-suntanned noses. It was not beyond a physical possibility: the One Show awards were oversized, cast-metal pencils, pointed on both ends and heavy enough to split firewood. And the targets, the nostrils on these prehistoric men, were roughly comparable to the nostrils on the reindeer they’d passed on the way in to the ice shacks. It was doable. Or, clobber them with his Clios — grab them by the slender, silver, up-reaching arms and dash the weighted base against their brainpans. But more than likely, if he somehow had his radio awards with him, they’d use them as sinkers for their fishing lines. They’d smelt them down and drink them, the louts.
The weekend after the trip up to Manistee, they again found themselves in the car, heading back to Michigan, this time to a wedding in Ann Arbor for one of the account guys at the agency. They’d turned the radio on in the middle of “This American Life” and were just catching the last part of a personal essay by a teenaged girl living in San Francisco whose friends were all lesbians. It was a nice little piece, touching at moments, about the nature of friendship and about the barrier that ultimately separated them. How close they could be; how much they could be inclusive, yet in the end, no matter how much she admired them, and no matter how hard a few of them campaigned to win her over to their camp, she found she couldn’t just will herself to be a lesbian because on a real simple, primitive level, it just wasn’t what she wanted. There was a biological urge that she couldn’t ignore. As dumb as it made her feel intellectually, physically, she needed a guy.
Then Ira Glass, the host, came on and back-announced it, crediting the story, with no apparent irony, to the young fledgling correspondent whose name, it turned out, was Anita Johnson.
Dan practically choked. He turned to Solla, but she wasn’t laughing, wasn’t even smiling, just listening away.
He knew she knew cock, she knew dick. But johnson, schlong, junk, tackle, rod – all these were probably not in her vocabulary. And he wasn’t sure she could hear Anita that way; if she even understood homonyms and knock-knock jokes.
She punched him lightly on the arm. “What?”
He shrugged her off. “Nothing. I’d have to footnote it.”
As part of the ceremony, there was a short Bible reading — though it felt long, endless — from the Song of Songs. Dan grew restless and began to joke around. The language, he thought, verged on freaky:
How beautiful you are, my darling! Oh, how beautiful! Your eyes behind your veil are doves…
He whispered to his wife, “Smooth talker, this guy…”
Your hair is like a flock of goats descending from Mount Gilead.
Your teeth are like a flock of sheep just shorn, coming up from the washing…
“I’m sorry,” he said, pretending to double-check the program, “is this from the Gospel According to Sonny Boy Williamson or the Book of Howling Wolf?” Solla produced a small frown, but it didn’t seem like scolding, like chiding him for making fun of the Bible. It was that “I don’t get it” frown; that facial “huh?”
Where could he possibly begin? Launch into a hushed, historic overview of the voodoo element in the lexicon of transplanted southern black blues — the references to mojo ritual and animal husbandry — how most of the imagery was half biblical, half barnyard, and then add to that the fact that Sonny Boy Williamson, more than the rest, was really out there to play the harmonica and so his lyrics often felt arbitrary, almost a last minute thought, and therefore, largely illogical and bizarre. Would he sit her down and play select examples for her — tracks like “The Goat” and “Fattening Frogs For Snakes” — like some sort of college lecture? Would there be an exam? The thought made him tired in his bones.
But there was a snicker, a female titter, directly behind them. Somebody thought he was funny. But maybe it wasn’t for him. He couldn’t be sure.
The reading went on, with mention of a pomegranate and lips with the sweetness of a honeycomb. Then it really heated up, addressing the breasts:
Your two breasts are like two fawns, like twin fawns of a gazelle that browse among the lilies…
“Jeez,” he said, a little louder now, “you think this Bible’s got Fabio on the cover?”
There was that tinkling sound again, right on cue. Call and response. He swiveled in the pew and for a moment, was eye to eye with a woman with a black hat and a wide knowing smirk. A stranger gets my jokes, he thought. A stranger.
Part Four
Afterward, at the reception, she sidled up in his periphery and gave him a little hip check by way of introduction, banging her champagne flute against his. “Nancy. Friend of the bride. You’re funny.”
“Thank you. You’re basing this on what — my choice of tie?”
“Everyone says.”
It was the woman who’d been sitting behind them. Tall, attractive. Black dress, black hat. Audrey Hepburn with a nastier sense of humor.
In minutes, she had him laughing too. She worked in packaging, writing copy for food labels, but she was starting to do improv and sketch comedy in a Chicago troupe he recognized. He was impressed and thought she would be good at that, the way she seemed to knock back whatever he zinged her way. And her looks wouldn’t hurt her — too striking for a comic, you might think at first, but definitely watchable — that rare, magnetic “it” meant for the spotlight.
While they talked, Solla glided up directly behind her, waggled her eyebrows as if to say hubba-hubba, but kept moving, smiling now at the bride and some stooped old lady the bride wanted her to meet — her grandmother or aunt or somebody. With her exotic charm and Old World grace, his wife was so good at that stuff — introductions, small talk, the nodding and smiling. No question: she was the Grace Kelly of the glaciers, the Princess Di of the tundra. (Only with even less melanin.)
He told Nancy he’d love to catch one of her shows sometime and so she asked for his email address. Having run out of business cards, he scrawled it on a cocktail napkin and glanced over at Solla and saw she was watching again. She gave him two thumbs up and a big fake grin and grabbed another champagne flute off a passing tray.
Eventually, after starting to think she might ignore him all night, Solla did finally dance with him. He’d been talking to this Nancy for a while, but every time he scanned the room for his wife, she seemed to be occupied and doing perfectly fine, flashing that improbable set of teeth. She was a hit. She was fine.
Then Nancy went off on a mission with one of the bridesmaids to locate a misplaced gift and Dan slipped into something akin to a coma with an energy broker who asserted, endlessly, that the secret to economic turnaround was boycotting pistachios imported from the Middle East. Finally, he managed to break away to use the restroom and, on the way back, almost plowed into Solla out in the hall. She’d been heading in the opposite direction but she reached out and hooked his arm and yanked him back into the ballroom to dance.
The song was something popularized by Dean Martin. One of those string-heavy crooners that anyone can handle. You just hang on and sort of drip around the room.
When she turned her head up to him, big-eyed, she smelled of champagne. She looked like she had an announcement to make.
“You’re pretty to me. Very pretty.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“It requires no translation. Pretty is good in all languages.”
“Okay,” he said. “Got it.” He felt her hand slide down to his ass and pat him lightly.
“You know what I first noticed about you? This rear end.”
Now she really grabbed a handful.
“Hey!” he yelped.
She ignored him. “You have a very nice, manly, square rear end.”
“Square?” What the hell was she talking about? He scanned the room to see if anyone had seen.
“I like it, your rear end. I liked it before I ever heard you open your mouth. I would have liked it before I understood a word of English.”
She’d told him once that she started learning English at seven or eight. He didn’t like the sound of this: some second grader getting hot for his ass. They were a lot more sexually free in her homeland, but he had to think she was exaggerating here, trying to make some kind of a point.
“I would have liked your rear end in Iceland or Greenland or China or on the moon. I still do.”
“But…” He looked at her gazing up at him. It was sweet, but she was missing the point. “I want you to get my jokes. Damn it, babe, it’s what I do, it’s how I make a living…sort of. Anyway, it’s a big part of me. A bigger part certainly than my big square ass… It’s really square? Are you kidding me with that?”
He couldn’t stand that plaintive look she wore; how much his disappointment hurt her. But wasn’t he supposed to be open and honest with her? Wasn’t that part of the whole marriage deal?
She lay her head against his arm and he felt her shrug as she said, “Go ahead and give me the footnotes then.”They retired to the Campus Inn and because he wanted to check his messages and hop in the shower — and because he got distracted in the mirror, assessing this square ass of his — she was asleep by the time he got out of the bathroom. The TV was still on, Dennis Miller ranting with the sound muted. When he snuggled in beside her curled-away body and jostled her gently, kissing her white shoulder blade, he could see now that she was out cold, the silent TV flashing light across her unknowing face.
His wife took the wheel driving back from the wedding. She claimed he’d had too many mimosas at the brunch, though he thought, if anything, she’d matched him glass for glass. (And he did have over a hundred pounds on her.) But she seemed determined, so he chose not to argue, and when they got about an hour from Chicago, almost to the Indiana border, she pulled into a shadowy rest stop that offered no facilities, just a few garbage barrels and a scenic overlook of a steamy marsh, draped round, almost gothicly, with drooping willows.
She pulled in under the canopy of one of the largest of these, all the way at the end of the little patch of crumbly asphalt, shut off the engine and turned to face him. At first he thought they were going to have some sort of important talk, something she’d been icily brewing all afternoon. Something about that Nancy. But that wasn’t it at all. She studied him for a long moment, bit her lip, considering, then grinned and undid her seatbelt. Reaching across, she popped his seatbelt too and it shot free, retracting. And ducking to avoid hitting her head on the roof, she climbed onto him, straddling his legs, kissing him.
“Hey,” he said.
She kept kissing him, moving in closer, grinding against his crotch till he was hard. He wondered if she’d had this in mind all along; if she’d picked out this spot when they’d passed it the day before.
It was almost dusk, he reasoned. Whatever… and reached over and hit the power locks, just to be safe from creepy truckers and cross-country spree killers. She guided his hands up her blouse, as if showing him something he’d never seen, never thought of, as if he were some sort of sexual retard. But what the hell — he went with it. She unzipped him, stroked him, pulled her panties aside and mounted him.
Collapsing against him, her hair covered his face, blocking everything out as she pumped and gyrated and did all the work. He wondered if she was truly enjoying this since, in this position, she was unable to grab his big wonderful square ass.
“Talk to me,” she breathed in his ear.
He didn’t feel like it. What they were doing, he liked just fine — the spontaneity of it, the danger, the unthinking stupidity. All right, so they maybe thought alike sometimes. So the two of them had a thing, a spark, a fit. Granted. Point well taken. If anyone said there wasn’t a strong, basic chemical connection between them, he would have to say Ha! Of course there was. This part was fine, wonderful, rare even. But right now, he just felt like being quiet.
“I don’t know…” he said. “I’m not sure what to say.”
So he didn’t say anything, which left them with nothing but their breathing and the wet noises their bodies made and the vinyl complaint of the seat and the Doppler effect of cars approaching and passing into the distance wistfully, and after they finished, they didn’t say much either, all the way home.
Part Five
Getting ready for bed, he was vaguely aware that she was in her little office off the bedroom, doing something on the computer. He didn’t think much of it, but then she strode into the room, took his arm and made him sit down on the bed, facing him.
“I’ve been doing a little research,” she said. She wore her glasses, looking as intently serious as a grad school librarian. “Last week, when we had to take that detour, you made that joke about the army man.”
At this point, he didn’t know what she was talking about. She had a little scrap of paper she kept unfolding and glancing down at.
“I looked it up on the Internet and I think I get it now. You called him Bill Bailey and that’s also the name in an old song that was a standard pop song for many years called ‘Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey.’ So. I think what you were doing was referring to the fact that we wanted to get home and the army man–”
“Army man?” Wait — he remembered now: he’d made some dumb comment about Beetle Bailey. The Guardsman, coming back from Manistee. That was it.
“We wanted to make sure the detour this army man was pointing us to would actually get us home sometime in our lifetime. So we were begging him that we could come home. Therefore: ‘Bill Bailey.’Am I close?”
She actually had notes. The little piece of paper had notes she’d taken. And there were numbers by each piece of information which corresponded to websites listed at the bottom: footnotes. She’d made notes and footnotes. Her information was all wrong and cockeyed, but boy, had she tried.
He took the paper from her small white hands and stared at it, the carefully hand-printed block letters, until he thought it might almost break his heart.
God, he was so stupid. He’d married the most amazing woman. In the world – he was sure of that because he certainly hadn’t married the most geographically convenient, the girl next door, the high school sweetheart. No, here was the kind of woman you get when you take the search global. This was the kind of woman you have to import.
He started to tell her yes, she was right, she’d figured out the joke, though she hadn’t — hadn’t come close — but the words didn’t come out too well. “Wow,” he said instead. “Wow. You know, it…uh, it was probably not that funny, actually…”
He pulled her into his arms, corralling her, squeezing tight, knowing there was no reason in the world to correct her.
