Late night trumpet calls

My husband has been away these past few days and I have been sleeping like a top, sleeping so soundly the hours pass in an instant. And it’s not because I do not miss him.

How can I write this without seemingly taking the mickey out of the man I love? I have been thinking on this issue for some time now. Ever since I read Lynn Freed’s wonderful book on Reading Writing and Leaving Home.

My husband has left home, albeit briefly, and I am left lonelier, but free from his incessant snoring. Lynn Freed writes about snoring stories as the great stories of revenge, the way in which at dinner partes, women, and it is usually women, tell stories about the nature of their husband’s snoring. They can keep their fellow dinner guests in stitches as they regale them of the horrors of those late night trumpet calls, while the husband, the poor perpetrator of said snores is left humiliated and in shame.

Two generations – asleep and snoring?

It’s true. I do not write about such things as a rule because I do not want to humiliate or belittle the ones I love, or do I?

My thesis topics pops back into my mind. It has been absent for several months now. I’m still waiting to hear whether or not I have passed. Life writing and the desire for revenge. The way in which a desire for revenge can inspire writing, not that I want to take revenge on my husband or do I?

I cannot talk easily about his snoring. He finds it insulting. He tries to stop. He rolls over when I nudge him, but even then within minutes his throat constricts and he is back at it again.

Is it his helplessness against snoring that causes him to want to throw it back at me? ‘You snore, too.’ The gut impulse. The talion principle, an eye for an eye. You insult me and I’ll insult you back. Or is it something else?

Please, don’t talk about sleep apnoea or other common ailments. I do not believe it to be the case here. I put it down to age and occasionally too much red wine, but even when he drinks lightly or not at all the snoring persists. I play musical beds until it subsides.

The past few days I have not needed to move about. I can stay put, hence my sleep is more sound.

I have a friend whose wife snores. She is the culprit, and the same principles apply. They came to our house one day overjoyed to have found a new treatment, a sliver of something or other than you put on the back of your tongue, a wafer like substance that dissolves in your mouth and apparently stops the snoring.

My friend is a beautiful and dignified women in her sixties. How can it be that her snoring is enough to wake the dead? She smokes, her husband says by way of explanation. She smokes. Maybe that is the cause.

Smoking’s to blame. It seems we need to find some point from which we can blame the perpetrator of snores, hence the additional shame.

Snoring is treated as a crime, and yet it is one from which we all suffer. It cannot be a crime. It is only a problem when the person who shares your bed finds it too much. Or when it suggests some malady in need of attention.

As I said earlier, I put it down to aging. I am like my mother here. She ascribes every bodily ailment that slows her down to her aging. I, too, imagine that my husband’s snoring comes of his aging and he like me is ashamed of both.

Why be ashamed of our aging?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Didion puts it well in her recent book, Blue Nights:
‘Aging and its evidence remain life’s most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored: I have watched tears flood the eyes of grown women, loved women, women of talent and accomplishment, for no reason other than that a small child in the room, more often than not an adored niece or nephew, has just described them as ‘wrinkly’, or asked how old they are.

‘When we are asked this question we are always undone by its innocence, somehow shamed by the clear bell-like tones in which it is asked. What shames us is this: the answer we give is never innocent. The answer we give is unclear, evasive, even guilty … there must be a mistake: only yesterday I was in my fifties, my forties, only yesterday I was thirty-one…’

Didion’s thoughts about her daughter’s adoption, life, and early death lead Didion into thoughts on her own aging and frailty.

It’s a thing that dogs us all, this aging business. I talked about it recently among a small group of friends and most resonated, though the youngest of our group, a woman in her early forties with a small child at home, brushed it off. It’s too far away from her.

I used to be like that, too. I used to think that I would not worry about getting old until it hit me and then I’d die. But these days it hits me daily with a ferocity I had never imagined possible.

It is like wading through mud. The fact that I used to have a school aged child and that my mother is still alive convinced me that I was still a long way away from needing to reflect on this, but my daughter has just now finished school and my mother who lives on and now plans to reach one hundred, reminds me of my age.

‘You have to recognise you are old,’ my mother says, ‘when you have a seventy year old son, a forty year old granddaughter and a six year old great grand son.’

Where did the time go?

Revenge

My mouth full of toothpaste, I look into the mirror, at my white pasted lips. The lips of the dead. There is one last job to do before bed. I check the email and there: his words on the machine: cold words, empty words, sterile without feeling.
‘Message received loud and clear,’ I want to write back. Press the return button, send my response, the same empty words, toxic in their simplicity.
But no, I think no. I consider. No, I say to myself, as I sit staring at the screen, wondering over and again, how can I undo this? There must be something more.
If I do not respond there will be another message and then I can explain myself. Ask him to explain himself. Then all will be revealed.
But silence is powerful, I tell myself. Silence will leave him guessing. My silence will ricochet back over him, echoing the hollow sound of rejection in his ears. And he will be left wondering, too.
Did she get the message?
Did she see the words?
On the machine?
Or are they lost?
In the ether?
Floating somewhere?

I can see his head in front of me. It stands high above the headrest five rows in front. He has been to the barber recently and his neck has the clean shaved look of new mown grass. I can see the line where his hair follicles and pink skin meet, a line in the sand. This is the distance I intend to keep between us.
He has not seen me. Of that I am sure. When he came onto the bus two or three stops after mine I had my own head stuck in my book, he would not have noticed me. I only noticed him by chance when I looked up from the pages and saw the back of his head, taller than the rest, and I knew at once, it must be him.
Why would I want to speak to him now, this man who has been so cruel? To give him credit he may not realise it, but he should, and given that he does not realise, then I do not want to speak to him again. I do not want us to walk side-by-side or to sit any closer than we are now, with five rows of seats and people between us.
I do not forgive easily. Why should I? Forgiveness demands something of the one who has caused you pain.
He does not even realise why I chose to sever connections. He severed them first, only he would not see it that way. He prefers a cosy distance or some movement closer from time to time, but always under his control. He makes up the rules, while I have to obey them. And they change. Let me tell you, those rules change, faster than I can keep up with. But I have had enough.
He blows his nose into his hanky. His head moves up and down like a rooster’s head, the tuft of his hair a cockscomb. Then I remember the feel of his hand around my waist, his fingers brush against my cheek, and I am left in a welter of desire all over again. But I must resist the pull.

I went out once with an electrician by the name of Kevin. Kevin was a good-looking young man with sandy coloured hair and a bright smile on his innocent face. A good Catholic lad, his parents had brought him up well: Mass on Sundays, observe the holy days and the sacraments, don’t eat meat on Good Fridays. But Kevin, like all the boys I met in those days, despite, his pious upbringing, was as corruptible as the next.
I fancied myself in those days as a femme fatale. Beware any man who came under my spell. I would ensnare him, draw him into my lair, steal his virginity from him, lure an erection from his otherwise limp body, and force him into a penetrating relationship he could not resist, until finally I would dump him.