I WONDER WHAT IT’S LIKE TO WALK AMONG THE STARS
More Sean and Roisin
My wife, Roisin, stands at the living-room window staring out into the night. She’s turned off all the lights in the house. She says, “I wonder what it would be like to walk among the stars?”
The question strikes me as the kind of slightly off-center type a first-grader might ask, but I’ve learned in fifteen years of marriage to Roisin to treat her musings, however bizarre, with deep caution.
As I stumble towards her in the dark, my leg whacks against the corner of the coffee-table. Pain shoots up into my thigh-bone, but I clamp my lips together and remain silent. Instinct warns me Roisin will not consider effing shit an appropriate response to her query.
I ponder what she might consider appropriate. My early-in-the-marriage howls of laughter generally bought me a night in the spare room before we filled it with kids, or on the recliner in the living-room in front of the TV, followed by a dozen red roses and profuse apologies. At the moment, I wasn’t in the mood for either.
I try to pull something intelligible together. “I don’t think you can walk among the stars, sweetheart. I mean, for one thing, you’d suffocate. There’s no air in space. For another, stars aren’t like stepping stones. They’re gazillions of miles apart. Besides, there’s no gravity to hold you down, and you’d freeze solid in a nanosecond.”
Her look is one of disdain. She’s obviously speaking to a moron. “That isn’t what I meant.”
I see roses and apologies looming. “OK. What do you mean?”
“Haven’t you ever wondered what it might be like to walk among the stars, like treading on black velvet covered in sequins?”
I’m utterly unable to make any connection between sequined black velvet and the night sky arcing over our heads. My leg throbs where it met the corner of the coffee table, and I’m missing Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. That Detective Mariella is one hot babe, delectable ass, great boobs. When she slams some creep up against the wall and tells him "You're under arrest, you scumbag", man, I just want to rip that uniform right off her. “No, I can’t say I have.”
“Well, that’s the difference between you and me. When I feel sad, I think about things like walking among the stars.”
“You’re sad because you can’t walk among the stars?”
Roisin doesn’t answer right away. One of two things is happening; either she’s searching for a thoughtful response to my question, which is unlikely since she seldom gives what I say serious consideration, or I’ve said something so not what she’s looking for, it’s rendered her speechless.
She could, of course, be planning to turn to me and say, “Let’s forget the whole thing and go to bed.”
In your dreams, pal.
Her expression shifts to one of awed incredulity. “I sometimes think we speak a different language.”
I decide to change the direction of the conversation since I’m not getting anywhere with the frigging stars. “What’s made you sad?”
I don’t really want to know since it’s bound to be me – it usually is - but asking seems the decent thing to do.
“I sometimes want to just explode out of my skin, like a spaceman whose helmet cracks or whose spacesuit rips.”
I seize the chance to diffuse the situation with a joke. “You’d do that all right if you tried to walk among the stars.”
Another disdainful stare. Ok, that didn’t work, so I ask, “How can you be sad without knowing why?”
Roisin perks up and I allow myself a giddy moment of relief that I’ve finally said the right thing, and I may yet come out of this in one piece.
“Don’t you ever just feel sad for no particular reason?” Her eyes shine with tears.
Shit. All I’ve done is make her cry. The thing about Roisin’s crying is that I never have the slightest clue it’s about to happen. I’m blabbering on in my usual innocent, mindless way when, all of a sudden, wham, the eyes fill up, the lips tremble, the sobs start, and it’s another night in front of the TV, followed by red roses, etc. etc.
I grapple around in the convolutions of my brain to come up with a suitably soothing answer. “I generally get pissed off. I suppose I might feel sad if Tigger got run over. I mean really squished, like the little pisser next door.”
Tigger was our cat, pretty decent as cats went: did exactly as he pleased and didn’t take shit from anyone.
Roisin’s perky look alters to one of utter amazement. “The little pisser next door?”
I can’t tell if the quiver in her voice heralds an onrush of waterworks or an outburst of uncontrolled hilarity. I pray for the latter.
Tears flood out of her eyes and pour down her cheeks, twin rivers that meet under her chin and start to drip.
“I’m talking about how I want to explode out of my skin with sadness, how I’m trying to distract myself wondering what it would be like to walk among the stars and all you get out of it is squished cats? You’re telling me you never, ever feel sad?”
I’m being accused of something; insensitivity, the inability to express emotion, gibbering idiocy when faced with anything that can’t be expressed as a mathematical equation, something equally heinous to the crimes committed on Law & Order: SVU.
“Perhaps you don’t.” Roisin stares at me as if I’ve just beamed in from Mars. “Come to think of it, when your mother died I remember you telling your brother well, the old bird’s finally fallen out of the tree.”
“She was a hundred and three for God sake.”
“And you kept her ashes in a cereal box.” She begins to sob in earnest and I look around the darkened room for tissues.
“Only until we got the urn.”
“I cried for weeks after my mother died,” she sobs.
“Years,” I mutter.
“Don’t you understand - I’m sad.” Roisin cries harder.
I finally locate the tissues on the malignant coffee-table and hand her a wad which she clutches to those soft, round breasts of hers, allowing the river of tears to drip off her chin unchecked.
I start to sweat. I feel as if I’ve landed on the roof of a runaway train hurtling towards a tunnel with no more than six inches clearance.
She glares at me. “Do you feel anything about anything ever?”
I remove my eyes from her breasts. What the hell. I’m not going to win this one. Don’t get me wrong. I love Roisin. Actually, I’m crazy about her but when she gets all weepy and starts moaning about wanting to walk among the stars, she loses me. I mean, I want to be her hero, her knight in shining armor, a warrior leaping to rescue her from the frigging dragon. I’ve no clue how to rescue her from wanting to explode out of her skin.
She presses the wad of tissues to her face and I wonder if I can take that as a signal it’s safe to move towards her. Maybe, if I keep my stupid mouth shut and do the hug thing I can save us both from exploding.
I put my arms around her and she jumps as if I just hit her with a high-voltage tazer.
“What are you doing?”
“I was giving you a hug. I thought it might help.”
She pushes me away. “You think sex is the answer to everything.”
Well, it pretty much is, but I know better than to say so. “I was just going to give you a hug.”
“I know what your hugs lead to.” She starts to cry again. “I’m really, really sad and I don’t know why and all you can do is talk about squished cats and sex.”
“I never said anything about sex.”
She stops sobbing. “You don’t love me. I bet you wouldn’t feel sad if I died. You’d probably call up your brother and tell him the frigging bitch finally shit the bed.”
She’s gone into rage mode. That’s good. Rage I can deal with. Rage I understand. Now, we’ll have a knock-down, drag-out, screaming fight followed by ferocious sex.
That way, we’ll both get to walk among the stars.