N.I.C. REDUX

Hot under the collar and her bosom heaving my wife stormed into the kitchen after a long unappreciated day at work and dropped her overstuffed faux-Gucci purse on the butcher block island with a thud. The Terror of Muirfield Court squealed with delight and raced to greet her while the noble Akita similarly abased herself , tail wagging and head shaking as she sniffed every strange scent on Rochelle’s pant leg.
“Hi, honey,” I said from my designated place on the couch, where I had been doing some of my best thinking all afternoon long.
“All of my friends at work think I am married to a meth addict,” she informed me.
“Hmmm, that seems like a bit of an exaggeration.”
She played with the child and the dog for only a moment before returning to her object of rancor.
“Did you write in your blog that you got a DUI?” she asked me.
“Not to my recollection,” I said, quoting a long line of American political crooks.
“Did you write you were in the County Jail?”
From the look on her face the last two words of this sentence evidently left a feces-like odor in her mouth.
“You know,” I told her. “You’re still quite a sexy babe when you get your color up like this.” I’ve had a lifetime of dealing with bitterly disappointed and angry women and I have found that lavish flattery will often, but not always, accomplish what outright lying can only hope for.
She didn’t take the bait. “Did you get a tattoo that I don’t know about?”
“Only in an existential sense.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Glad of an opportunity to veer her off course, I expounded, “Aren’t we really, all of us, tattooed by life? Doesn’t life, with it’s unceasing series of cosmic beat-downs and casual cruelties, just tattoo the living daylights out of us?”
I can’t dance, and I can’t jump, and I can’t write, but I can sling the shit with the best of them.
Unfortunately she was not buying what I was selling.
“What did you write in your blog?”
“N.I.C.”
“What?”
“N.IC.,” I repeated in a particular voice I have that makes it seem as if I am having to explain basic subtraction to an especially dense 3rd grader.
My wife hates this voice.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“If the first words out of Vivienne’s mouth are shit and fuck, you will only have to look into the nearest mirror to find out whose fault that is.” I love playing the guilt card.
“Back to your blog,” she told me.
“No Impulse Control,” I said and pointed to where The Terror had the poor dog pinned in the corner and was tearing out tufts of tail fur and screaming with delight. “I give you Exhibit One, Vivienne Finn. No Impulse Control.”
“What the hell does that have to do with your writing in your blog about drinking, drugs and DUI’s. All my friends think I am married to a crack addict.”
“Exhibit Two,” I said and turned my head to where The Princess of Pandemonium was now standing atop her Choo-Choo and clambering from than onto a rickety old wooden chair, from whence she was headed for the large cast iron wood burning stove where, having imperfect balance, she could topple and kill herself.
“Vivienne, get down from there right now!” my wife screeched in a harsh voice.
Vivienne, of course, ignored her.
The dog had settled somewhere between us, her dark gaze moving from one face to the other as we further danced our long tango of love in the 21st Century. Though she may not have known the words, the dog seemed to be getting the gist. She turned her regal head and somberly regarded the high flying child on her precarious perch with a look that said, “Please fall, Devil Child, and thus end this reign of terror”
Rochelle removed our daughter from the heights and placed her on the floor where Vivienne renewed her assault on the canine population with emphatic vigor. The dog shook her off and stood by the window looking longingly at the great outdoors.
“What does Vivienne’s lack of impulse control have to do with your writing about getting thrown in jail for a DUI?”
“Poetic License.”
“Are you trying to irritate me?”
“Oh, after ten years of marriage, I no longer have to try.”
“Ha, ha, now you’re being funny. 2 weeks ago you were Mr. Cranky Pants, and now you want to be funny.”
If I was being funny, she didn’t seem to find the humor in any of it.
“Look,” I said, the very soul or reasonableness. “Vivienne suffers from N.I.C. and so does her dad. I was just trying to make light of the situation, that’s all.”
“I think I liked you better when you were depressed.”
“No, Dr. Moses fixed me.”
“And when you weren’t blogging.”
“Hey, it was your idea to get me blogging, there’s no putting the genie back in that bottle, Sister.” She also loves it when I call her ‘Sister’. “Have you actually read the blog?”
“No,” she had to admit. “But I heard enough about it at work today. All the nurses read it. They think you’re fucking hysterical.”
“Every artist loves to be admired,” I admitted.
“I’m going to go read the blog,” she said and picked up Viv and headed to the computer room.
The dog came over by the couch and stood in the perfect position to have her butt rubbed.
Naturally I obliged her.
“You don’t mind if I blog about you, do you, Kebu?”
“I have a brain roughly the size of your fist. I can’t waste precious gray matter on extraneous concepts like blogs.”
“You fascinate me endlessly,” I told her.
“Likewise, I am sure.”
“What is it you do think about?”
“I spend most of my time dissecting and cataloguing smells,” she told me.
“I believe you.”
“This world is an amazing cornucopia of odors. I find it fully engaging. For instance I could smell the anger on The Woman when she came in. And I could smell the fear on you.”
“I’m not afraid of my wife.”
One of the things I am best at is lying to my dog.
“No, of course not,” she agreed.
I scratched her butt some more and we let the subject of fear ebb away like briny water from a tidal pool.
“I like to think about food,” she admitted.
“I’m with you there.”
“That recent batch of Biscotti you made is most delicious.”
“Perhaps you’d like a piece.”
“Or two.”
“I live to serve you. All this fussing and fighting with the missus has given me a raging hunger.”
I heaved myself off my blessed couch and lumbered towards the cookie jar. I had a few more minutes to live before the wife returned from reading my blog, and so I figured I might as well spend it doing something I was really good at; feeding Italian cookies to a dog.