Couplehood Read online

  COUPLEHOOD

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam hardcover edition published October 1994

  Bantam paperback edition/October 1995

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1994 by Paul Reiser.

  Library or Congress Catalog Card Number: 94–28101.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-57447-3

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  v3.1

  To Paula, who makes the dance so fun.

  And so worthwhile.

  “Happiness is the quiet lull between problems.”

  —My Father

  “Loneliness is when you sneeze and

  there’s no one there to say ‘gesundheit.’ ”

  —My Mother

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Warning

  The Final Frontier

  Waking Up Is Hard to Do

  Let’s Do Something

  I Just Need Two Minutes

  The Selfish Monster

  Negotiating in Good Faith

  Alone Together

  Don’t Look at Me, I Just Live Here

  Chicken or Fish

  How Are You?

  Tonight We’ll See a Movie, Tomorrow We’ll Kiss

  The “Turn Around and Look”

  Bing-Bang-Boom

  Pain, Humiliation, and the Great Outdoors

  Wish You Were Here

  Dear Japan, Stop!!!

  Is This Kid Beautiful, or What?

  I’ll See You in My Dreams

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Author’s Warning

  You will notice in just a second that this book actually begins on page 145. Don’t be alarmed—this is not a mistake. Don’t try to get your money back. You didn’t miss anything.

  It’s just that I know when I’m reading, I love being smack in the middle of the book. Pages behind me, pages ahead of me. It’s too overwhelming to know there’s so much left and you’re only on page 8.

  This way, you can read the book for two minutes, and if anybody asks you how far along you are you can say, “I’m on 151—and it’s really flying. It just sails, baby.”

  You’ll feel like you’re accomplishing something, and I get credit for writing a bigger book. Everybody wins, and it costs us nothing.

  —P.R.

  Los Angeles

  The

  Final

  Frontier

  When I was 12, I remember holding hands with this girl—I want to say, “Patty,” but I’m guessing here—and something about the way she held hands was just … wrong. Our fingers didn’t line up right.

  You know how when you grab someone’s hand, the fingers sort of automatically slide into place, your thumb next to their thumb, second finger next to their second finger? Simple, right? Not a lot of ways to screw that up. This girl did.

  I think what she did was slide her fingers in too early so they were all out of sync with mine. (I’m sitting here, holding hands with myself to try to explain this to you.) Okay … here’s what it is: I like my pinkie to be on the outside. And she started one finger too soon, so her pinkie was on the outside, and my pinkie was smushed up between her third and fourth fingers.

  Now, I’m not saying she’s a bad person. But the second we held hands, I knew she wasn’t for me. We just didn’t fit.

  And I knew I couldn’t explain it to her, either.

  Because, the way I figure, there are two types of people: those who get it and those who don’t. If they get it, there’s nothing to explain, and if they don’t, there’s no point in trying to explain. They don’t get it. Move on.

  But I remember thinking that if you’re going to be with someone, you should find someone who gets it. And someone who fits.

  Now, the search for this person starts early. From the minute we’re born, boys and girls stare at each other, trying to figure out if they like what they see. Like parade lines, passing each other for mutual inspection. You march, you look. You march, you look. If you’re interested, you stop and talk, and if it doesn’t work out, you just get back in the parade. You keep marching, and you keep looking.

  I was lucky. When I met the woman of my dreams, I knew. I saw her, and I was immediately unable to speak. My throat locked up, my stomach was in knots, I was sweaty, clammy, and nauseous. I had learned years before that feeling nauseous often means you’re in love. (Other times, it simply means you had bad clams, and you want to learn to distinguish between the two.)

  But I knew this was it. And the more time we spent together, the more convinced I became—we fit.

  Interesting thing: Ask most guys why they marry the woman they do, and they’ll tell you, “She’s the first one who called me on everything.”

  All the things you tried to get away with in the past, all the games you designed and mastered for the express purpose of keeping people at arm’s length were, it turns out, all just a weeding-out process, a search for the one person who doesn’t fall for it—the one who can sidestep your tricks and see right through you. And, ironically, you’re not upset. In fact, you’re impressed. You think, “Wow, good for you.” And the message goes forth: “Okay, no more calls, we have a winner.”

  I remember officially proposing. Actually asking this woman to literally, legally, officially, marry me. I couldn’t get the words out. I couldn’t stop laughing. It felt so dopey. So cliché. “Asking for her hand in marriage.” I felt like I was in some bad Ronald Colman movie.

  And it was a moment, after all, I had started planning when I was four and saw a girl jump off the monkey bars and watched her hair bounce off her shoulders. I had given this moment a lot of thought. And suddenly, there it was.

  I worried I might do it wrong. Should I be on my knee? Two knees? Should knees even be involved? Should we be somewhere else? Should I have hired a band? Would someone else be doing this better?

  But I asked. And for all the silliness, I was amazed when she actually said “Yes.” I mean, not that I thought she’d say “No.” We’d discussed it. We knew we would be doing this eventually, so popping the question wasn’t a real risk. But still, there’s something so powerful about a woman saying “Yes.” The mutual agreement, the shared desire, the consent—it’s staggering.

  Think about it. The first time you’re intimate with someone, is there anything more exciting than hearing them say “Yes”? It’s wild. You can actually get dizzy.

  “I could lean and kiss you, and that would be alright?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really. Hmm … You have no problem with this?”

  “No.”

  “You’re saying, I could put my hand for example … here … and that would be alright?”

  “Yes.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  So there we were, on the brink of the Next Big Thing. Forever. The Final Frontier. We stared at each other for a moment, and then I thought, “Uh-oh, if this person’s going to be with me forever, she’s going to find out what I’m really like. That can’t be good.”

  I mean, she’d already learned some things. That’s what th
e first few years are for; you tiptoe into the water and reveal the not-so-appealing stuff one thing at a time.

  “You know, don’t you, that I won’t always be wearing cologne? That was really more of a ‘while we were dating’ kind of thing.”

  Start small.

  “You know, when I butter a piece of bread, I don’t butter the whole thing. I do each bite separately. Each piece gets buttered individually.”

  “I know. I think it’s cute.”

  And then you can tell her the whole story.

  “Well, the only reason I bring it up is because I once lived with a woman who left me because of that.… Or at least that’s what she said. I remember, I was in the middle of buttering a very tiny piece of bread, and she looked at me, swiped the bread out of my hand, and said, ‘I don’t think this can continue.’ … It may have been other things, too.”

  See, a lot of times we’re just clueless. We walk around, scarred from previous relationships, thinking we’ve learned something, when in fact, things that may have been deal breakers in the past may not even bother the person you’re with now. (Learning what actually bothers the new person is how you spend the rest of your life.) But there is this need to disclose potential problem areas.

  “I snore.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “No, but I snore in odd, little rhythms.”

  “Doesn’t bother me.”

  “I once snored a medley from The King and I.”

  “My favorite musical.”

  “Alright.… I just thought you should know.”

  And you keep raising the ante. Not that you want to scare them off; it’s just that if they’re ever going to leave you, let’s get it out of the way now.

  “You may notice that in the bathroom, I tend to flush a few seconds before I’m actually done. I don’t know why, I just do. And there’s no way I can change. Do you understand this? Can you accept this? Because it has cost me dearly in the past.”

  And she still hasn’t changed her mind.

  So you think, “Maybe this’ll work.” And ultimately, they find out everything:

  How you chew, how you sip, how you hum, how you dance. How you smell at every point in the day, how you are on the phone with your mother, the fact that many of your friends are shallow, that you always have to sit on the aisle, how you never really listen, how whiny you get when you travel, how you’re not gracious to her friends when they call, how certain game shows make you really really happy, how cranky you get because you’re too stupid to remember to eat, how you manage to get confrontational only when it’s with the absolute wrong person to be yelling at, how you don’t like the way you look in any picture you’ve taken since 1974, how you’re unable to get off the phone when you’re running late because you don’t have the ability to say, “This isn’t a good time; can I call you back?” How you have to lick certain fruits before actually eating them, how you have no ability to save receipts—all these things, and they still want to sign on. They still like you.

  This feels good. For about a minute.

  But the next thought is, “Wait a second, why is she being so understanding? If this stuff doesn’t faze her, her stuff must be even worse.… Oh God—what don’t I know?”

  And every day, bit by bit, you find out.

  Waking

  Up Is

  Hard

  to Do

  Here’s how I wake up.

  The alarm goes off, I slap it as fast as I can. Whatever song was playing is already stuck in my brain, and I sing it for a while until I realize I don’t really know any of the words.

  I turn to see my young bride sleeping sweetly, and a series of thoughts comes into my head:

  “Isn’t she beautiful?”

  “Isn’t it wonderful I get to see this face I love every morning?”

  “Aren’t we lucky?”

  “Isn’t life good?”

  “I wonder if my dentist can move my ten o’clock cleaning to the afternoon, because I want to bring the car in and get the tires checked before lunch.”

  For the life of me, I don’t know how I make this last jump. But I do. Every day. I wake up, it’s good, it’s good, everything is good, and then—“Boy, I just thought of four things that might go wrong today.”

  There are just too many things to do.

  We all have Things To Do. Big things, little things—doesn’t matter. They’re things, and they’re yours to do.

  I’m not particularly organized, but I try to make lists. You can have your Master List of what you’re going to do. Or else you have lots of Little Lists, and one Big List, listing all the Little Lists.

  “Things to do today.” It’s always stupid things like “Call cable guy,” or “Pick up dry cleaning.” This is why you get out of bed that day—to “pick up blue jacket.”

  Some people have stationery that already says, “Things To Do Today.” Why do we need that? The reason you’re writing it down in the first place is because you want to do it. I think that’s fairly obvious. Who writes down things they don’t want to do? There are plenty of things I don’t want to do. “Don’t slam your knee against the dresser drawer.” I don’t need to write it down. I remember from last time. “Don’t eat a piece of melon that’s so soft you wouldn’t enjoy it.” I know that.

  There are, of course, grander things you want to do with your day, larger goals you have for your life that also don’t need to be written down. “Work toward world peace.” I don’t have to jot that down. “Leave the world better than you found it.” I got it, I got it.

  So I’m lying there, awake no more than two minutes, already running down my list of Things To Do. My bride is up now, too.

  She says, “What are you thinking about?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  I’m still not sure what the rule on that one is. The “tell-me-exactly-what-you’re-thinking” thing. Sometimes it’s helpful, but generally speaking, not-so-much.

  She persists. “Tell me.”

  “I’m serious, it’s too dumb to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking, if they don’t have tomato soup at lunch today, I’m not going to get soup at all. Because their other soups are pasty.”

  A moment of quiet.

  “That’s what you were thinking about?”

  “I told you it wasn’t good.”

  She says, “That’s alright, ask me what I was thinking about.”

  “What?”

  “The card my sister sent me.”

  “Would you forget about that card already?”

  “Why would she sign it ‘Fondly’? She’s never used the word ‘fondly.’ Ever.”

  “It’s the same as ‘Love,’ only a little … fonder.”

  “I just really don’t like that.”

  So, we’ve been awake less than eighty seconds, and we’re already lost. Whatever sense of magic and wonder there is to the start of a new, fresh day has long ago been shot to hell.

  Even if you woke up and didn’t do this, even if you woke up and heard nothing but the song of the birds and the love in your heart, there’s still one moment every morning that’s unavoidable and invariably gets your day going wrong.

  You know how you get out of bed, drag your feet into the bathroom, flip on the light, and stand in front of the mirror? You know how you squint your eyes and look? That. That’s the big mistake. Looking in a mirror that early in the day.

  It’s always a disappointment, no matter who you are. You just see your reflection and think, “That’s not what I was hoping for. I could have sworn I was better looking than that. I must be thinking of someone else.”

  Nobody looks in the mirror and goes, “That’s about right.” They always start fixing, moving their hair, tucking their cheeks … “No, that’s not working either.” So you go into the shower, you soap up, clean up, fluff up, dress up, take another look: “Nope, still not working.”

  It’s The Face. Something scientific happens to
your face when you sleep. You go to bed normal, you wake up —you have no face. The features have gone away while you slept. I think it has to do with the earth’s rotation. As the earth revolves, facial features move with it, so that while you sleep, your face is in Europe. Because there are only a finite number of faces, and if the Europeans go to work with no face, it looks bad for them. So this way everybody gets a shot.

  I think it’s all nature’s way of keeping us humble. At night, you’re thinking of your problems, you’re thinking of yourself. “How come this didn’t work out? How come I live the life I do?”

  You wake up, you look in the mirror, and you go, “That’s why! I have no facial features and a T-shirt with orange juice stains from 1983.” It gives you perspective.

  First order of business for every couple is negotiating Shower Rights.

  “You want to go first?”

  “No, you go. I’m sleeping.”

  “Okay, but don’t get upset if I use all the hot water.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I can’t control how much hot water comes out—it just comes.”

  “So get out sooner.”

  “Alright, I’ll try.”

  “And don’t puddle up the floor.”

  Hmm. “Maybe you’d better go first.”

  My problem is, I like long showers. I enjoy everything that goes on in there. And I get distracted.

  I’ve discovered that while showering, the areas of our body that we spend the most time scrubbing are not necessarily the areas that need the most scrubbing. There’s a gap between Scrubbing Supply and Scrubbing Demand.

  For example, the mid-chest gets an awful lot of scrubbing. Right around the chest plate. We love scrubbing that chestal area. Now the fact is, nobody really ever has dirt there. You couldn’t get this part dirty if you wanted to. You’d have to come out of a pool and trip with your arms out. Or eat soup naked and fast.

  But we scrub there because it’s convenient. It’s nearby, it doesn’t take any effort, you can think about all the Things You Have To Do while you’re scrubbing. So we spend forty minutes scrubbing needlessly.