From an essay I'm working on about my cat

When I pulled the tab off the can of tuna shreds to feed our new cat for the first time, there was a crack, and then a hiss, and a briny, tinny odor that up until that point, had had no place in my life. I remember thinking, This is what it smells like to be responsible for someone else.

Cut from an untilted essay I'm working on

It was something that at this, my thirty-fourth summer on the planet earth, “heart problems,” this bog of hurt in quotes, would come back to taint the ground on which I’d built my life—a nice life, a small one. A log cabin. A cat. A husband.

Cut from "I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You"

Although the fact that our student visas were running out would have forced our hands either way, Anne and I decided to move back to Paris after grad school because it seemed like an easier and more affordable place to raise a child than the American east coast.

Cut from "I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You"

I would have been grateful for an emergency vehicle at that point so me and my conical structure could sink into the ground. Christ on crutches, was it possible to be so detrimentally wicked? And had she actually depicted a smiley face after the word faithful, or was I going mad?

            What a wench! I mean, the nerve! White tiles? Good sex? As if I cared about her stupid kitchen! Or her weekends in the country! As if I gave a shit whether her new man drinks coffee or tea! But no, Dave drinks both! Dave is versatile! He can have a cup of coffee and only hours later sit down and metamorphose into a tea drinker! Well, blimey! What a modern, modern man!

            And where the hell did she come off lecturing me about creativity? Last I checked, the International Herald Tribune was full of spelling errors, substandard word play, and second-rate writing, and The Daily Mail was a semi colon away from smut. And just what was she photographing in London on the weekends? The bobbies in their helmets? A double decker bus?

            Granted, there was no mention of The Blue Bear or of my show at the Premier Regard, but I’d changed my mind about her. A woman so desensitized to my feelings that she pens letters about her home renovation was capable of purchasing a painting I originally did for my wife. If, as a genuflection to the healing process, I hadn’t erased Lisa’s number from my cell phone, I might have actually phoned the demoness to find out for sure.

            If Lisa was going to be out of my life, she needed to be out, not this half-ass situation in which she sent me handwritten letters with the interest level of a To-Do list. Maybe I should give up drinking? Maybe she should give up writing me for God’s sake! She said she didn’t love me, but her actions proved the opposite. Women! Intent on our destruction, they leave us no escape.

            I folded the letter back into the envelope and waited for a hearse to haul away the sordid remnants of my morning. No emergency vehicle came, and no funeral. It was just another grey beginning to a grey Parisian day, one in which I was going to have to find the courage to tell my wife that The Blue Bear sold.

Cut from "I Am Having So Much Fun Without You"

On my walks, I sought out fleeting moments. Intimate little poems. A man’s hand on a door and a woman passing through it, the man watching just two beats longer than he needed to to admire her as she walked by. And then his hand on her back, the revelation that he knew her. That he often had the opportunity to admire the mundane entrances and exits of her life.

Cut from "I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without YOu"

I cut back to Harold and Rosie, fast-forwarding to a moment when Rosie had become emotional about something she’d admitted, and Harold pulled her up into his arms for a long hug. Harold’s ass was pressing against the wooden table in his green corduroys and Rosie had forgotten to take off her apron; it was riding up her bust. The angle I had filmed them from captured the slack under their necks, and Rosie’s cheeks were red and her hair was huge and messy, and they couldn’t have given a flying shit that I was there.

Cut from "I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You"

With my parents’ section almost finished, I had moved on to the footage of Harold and Rosie. I put my headphones on and pressed the black arrow in the center of my computer, and the frozen frame of Harold’s kitchen came to life.

            “Is there anything you’d want to change about her?” asked my voice. On screen, Harold shifted uncomfortably in a wooden chair, and Rosie started to laugh.

            “He’d like me to lose two stone, I think!”

            Harold blushed. “No, no,” he said. “Nothing.”

            “Oh, come on!” said Rosie, flicking him with a hand towel that had been sitting in the middle of the table. “I know there’s stuff! He wants me to be blond, maybe?”

            She placed her hands under the clouds of her pitch black, curly hair and struck a pin-up pose. 

            “And definitely, two stone.”

            “You’re going to get me in trouble, mister,” said Harold. “I’ll never hear the end of it.”

            “Oh, I’ll have a go at it then,” said Rosie, “If you’re going to be a coward. My Harold has horrid feet! I’m sorry love, but you do! They’re flat and long and his toe, that one there, it stretches out past his big toe!”

            “In many cultures, that’s a sign of wisdom.”

            “It’s a sign of ugly feet in mine!” said Rosie, stretching out her legs. “I’ve got lovely feet myself, lovely plump toesies with a nice, firm arch.”

            “That’s true,” said Harold, touching her sweater. “She has a lovely arch.”

            I put the film on pause, and cut back to the edited version of the film I’d done of my parents. I fast-forwarded seventeen minutes in.