THE EX-WIFE’S STORY

I am an ex-wife, and thus I am inclined to agree with other ex-wives, and so I can hardly breathe when I open the PDF. What has Brent Vintner done? How has he ruined this woman’s life?

CAN I BEAR TO READ THE MANUSCRIPT?

Just because you download something doesn’t mean you have to read it.

Her name is Joyce Pernell. Oh crap, she begins with her family history. I really wish memoirists wouldn’t do that. If I have one piece of advice for memoirists: avoid discussing your parents. WE DON’T CARE. Your family, they’re dull and they’re your problem.

She includes, upfront, photographs of her parents and two sisters and one brother. These people don’t look alike. It’s when siblings look alike that it gets eerie. It’s like you’re examining a flock, not individuals. You have to keep turning the knobs of your attention to get a fix on any one of them.

I am skimming away, allowing myself little bursts of egotism and outrage. The way she keeps using the word “robust.” I suppose that’s to hint at the future moment when she will discover Brent Vintner, whose body is nothing less than robust. This woman is using the word “robust” when referring to a sand castle at Cape Cod. As a child she performs in dance recitals. Thank god she soon becomes an adult after which she undergoes months of auditions. At last she gets roles on television, usually playing a murdered woman. Too many scenes spread out on a morgue table. I’m feeling sad for her. A difficult life, playing a dead woman.

I skim faster. Oh no. Brent Vintner comes into her life. The intimacies. The obscene moments of candor. The various locations for their unnatural natural acts: once at a funeral parlor! No! Her great uncle dies and this is how she honors the man. Then the wedding ceremony on a beach. Like one of those destination weddings that earn your relatives’ hostility as you snort up their vacation time and retirement savings. Except this woman and Brent—they don’t invite anyone and neither Brent Vintner nor his bride are as famous as they will become and she has a different name before she has any genuine luck acting and he has a first name: George. Brent is his middle name. I didn’t know that. Gradual diminishment of affection on her part. She complains that he reads too much! Good god, she’s a monster.

As if a man could read too much. Thank god Brent Vintner reads too much. In fact, it would be impossible for him to read too much. Poor Brent Vintner, formerly married to a woman who has no appreciation for reading even though she’s expecting us to read her book.

Does this woman never get rejected—for anything? At least I don’t have to wallow around in page after page about rejection—that’s a plus. It’s not like I’m reading a printed-up version of a reality show. It’s always painful when anyone asks why they have been rejected in those shows, isn’t it? Asking why you’re rejected: it’s like pushing a tack into your eye and attached to the tack is a note that says “Not you.” There’s never a reason. Although once when I was subbing for Leon behind the bar a woman told me she had a reason for rejecting a man on the first date. She showed him a few of her drawings she had on her phone and all he said was, “I don’t really like art.” So all she said was, “I really have to go, it’s an emergency” and then moved one barstool over. That same woman, she’s the one who told me about bears. She read somewhere that bears give birth while hibernating. The cubs get born and suckle while the mother bear hibernates, totally unaware, and later the mother bear wakes up to find cubs frolicking beside her in the cave. The bear hadn’t even known she was a mother. Those mother bears lead lives that even Kafka couldn’t dream up.

At the bar this same woman—I wish she hadn’t only been passing through Midlothian—told me she had a unique ability: whenever she saw a movie starring Matthew McConaughey she could smell him. “That’s right,” she said. “I see him—on television or in a movie, it doesn’t matter—and I’m sure I can smell him.” I asked her what he smelled like. She said it depended on the movie. I asked if she could smell anyone else, but it didn’t work with anyone else. She said, “It’s like there’s some oil that collects on Matthew McConaughey and it transmits fragrance through the airwaves.” Why am I remembering this? I guess it’s because of Brent Vintner’s ex-wife’s memoir—as I read her memoir I could smell perfume inserts.

Two more chapters. Why did Brent Vintner think this is a quick read? Much cleverness involved in buying a floor lamp. Perhaps this person’s book is a vanity project meant to burnish her reputation as not only beautiful and wealthy but literate. Oh, here we go: she’s buying a horse sired by British royalty. No, something squirrely with the syntax. The horse was only mounted, possibly, by a member of British royalty, a dim cousin. So much good luck otherwise—this woman is drowning in it.

You have to appreciate someone with good luck, don’t you? Sometimes when I’m especially sad and disheartened and wondering how I can be a more purposeful person I try to think about a friend from ages ago and her good luck: her career as a pioneering engineer, her successful marriage, her twin children who are often seen on Facebook wrapping their arms around her neck (lovingly)… It seems like her good luck might rub off on anyone who contemplates her. Maybe this book is meant to create good luck for the reader by showing how there are a lot of dead spots in our own luck but it’s still, basically, luck?

Why can’t I jump into the practice of wicked optimism! Optimism so far-reaching that it is a force unknown in nature. Then again, how did Brent Vintner ever survive this woman?

And yet, he’s lucky. His ex-wife doesn’t report many truly ugly things about him at all. He was only nineteen when they were married and she’s gone on to other alliances. What can she hold against him? He snores? So do I. Leon told me the truth when I stayed over in his guest room. Apparently there are high pitched moments when I sound exactly like a weasel. Her other complaints? Brent Vintner is boring? She doesn’t know him, obviously. It doesn’t sound like they ever had an actual conversation. He has trouble advancing himself and saying exactly what he wants? Oh no, flog him! Or don’t! She put him through such a sexual obstacle course. But outside of all that exercise she found him too Midwestern for her taste, like he was her own little flyover country.

Nevertheless, I can see why he doesn’t want another book about himself or even a pamphlet floating around in the world right now. The book will be available in early August—still in time for beach reading. And it will sell because his ex-wife is highly descriptive about not only Brent Vintner’s body but the body of men and women with far longer careers in movies than Brent Vintner has enjoyed.

I study every photo of her in the PDF. Reader, he married her. He married the long dark glossy hair and the heart-shaped face and the wide, luminous eyes. How could he have helped himself? She looks so crushingly small…which makes me feel tenderness toward her. How could Brent Vintner not have felt the same?

The book is called My Life’s Journey Through the Stars.

I really hate that journey metaphor and yet—here I am at a waystation. It appears to be an old stage coach that I’m stepping out of so that the horses can be watered and unsaddled. I’ll stay for the night in a small hostelry (in my mind).

I will say this: Brent Vintner’s ex-wife can really handle a frothy sex scene with various women and men, including Brent Vintner. I never knew condiments could or should be involved. Now I am suspicious about Tinker Flatts’s tattoos.

The thing is, Brent Vintner’s ex-wife isn’t what most people would call “nice.” Is that what attracted him to her?

THE PROBLEM WITH NICENESS

What if niceness is a form of capitulation and spineless conformity? Not at all! Or evidently! I want people to be nice to me. But do I have to be nice to them? And yet I am—possibly. At any rate, I want to be.

Or am I just jealous of some not-nice people because their bodies look so nice it would upend the balance of nature if their behavior turned out to be nice?  Cleopatra experimented with poisons on people and watched them drop dead. Not nice. But she was the memorable one. She got the perfumed barge.

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Tabitha, Get Up is available from Sagging Meniscus now.

Lee Upton is a writer and poet whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, and in many other journals as well as three editions of Best American Poetry. She is the author of books of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism.