To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris Page A

first on top again, and so on, conveying to anyone watching an indescribable sense of satisfaction at another satisfying job complete. I tell you without exaggeration that I was brought to tears. I admit, it could not have been just anyone. I would not have been brought to tears watching Big Jim the Ranger hydrate his hands. It was Connie who brought me to tears and always made me sorry that I did not understand in a more intuitive and personal way the multitude of minor banes people everywhere around me were trying to soothe in what were so easy to dismiss as vain and empty rituals of comfort.
    “You’re doing it again,” she said, without looking over.
    “What?”
    “Staring at me. Objectifying me.”
    “I’m not objectifying you.”
    “You’re always objectifying me,” she said. “You idealize me, and then you’re disappointed when it turns out I’m not perfect. You blame me for not being godlike. It’s tiresome.”
    “Trust me,” I said. “If somebody knows you’re not perfect, it’s me.”
    “Then why do you do it? Why do you scrutinize me? Aren’t you sick of it by now? Especially when you’ve made it painfully clear just how far I fall short?”
    “I used to think you were perfect, but those days are long past.”
    “So please, stop looking.”
    “I wish I had let you teach me about lotion,” I said.
    “Teach you about lotion?”
    “Yeah, the reasons for it.”
    “The reasons for lotion are self-evident,” she said. “You put it on, you feel better.”
    “I never feel better. I always feel icky.”
    “Not after you rub it in. After you rub it in, you feel good. Your hands feel good. They feel moisturized.”
    “But what does that matter when they’re just going to become all liver spotted, bony, thin skinned, and tendony?”
    “Because it’s what you do with them in the meantime,” she said, turning at last and slapping my forehead with her palm. She turned back and, peering up at God, made a vigorous full-armed gesture of supplication that might have been comedic if it didn’t go on so long. “Now take a squirt and rub it in and see if your hands don’t feel better.”
    “I don’t think I will,” I said.
    “No,” she said, “because if you did that, you might like it. And heaven forbid you should like something, knowing what’s coming,knowing they just turn liver spotted and die. Better never do it at all than do it, enjoy it, and lose it in the end.”
    I stood up and walked away. Then I came back.
    “You didn’t return my call,” I said.
    “You have to stop calling, Paul.”
    “It’s the time of night. I’m not in my right mind.”
    “The time of night is half the problem.”
    “I try just to text.”
    “I’ve never once received a single text from you.”
    “Texting is for children, I hate texting, it hurts my fingers. But that doesn’t mean I don’t try.”
    “A call or a text, Paul. At that hour, they’re pretty much signaling the same thing.”
    “I wasn’t calling to get back together,” I said. “We said we could be friends. Friends call friends.”
    “We can’t get back together,” she said. “We will never get back together.”
    “And that wasn’t why I was calling.”
    “Why, then?”
    “Night.”
    She looked over at me for the second time.
    “It’s not my problem anymore,” she said.
    The phrase “pussy whipped” gets the job done, I guess. It evokes. You picture a milquetoast, a little pansy boy. He takes his balls off, like a pair of dentures, and places them on the nightstand before snuggling up to Queen Nefertiti to watch
Sleepless in Seattle
. If that’s your thing, God bless. Me, I never do anything romantically that doesn’t involve blood, fever, and the potential for incarceration. I don’t get pussy whipped. I get cunt gripped. I get cunt gripped and just hope to get out alive. What doesn’t kill you makesyou stronger, as the saying goes—so that you can look forward to that one irrecuperable battering ram of a