as a politically independent website, we now present this essay in Republican (PDF) and Democrat (Microsoft Reader) versions
Before I get started, I just want to state for the record that yes, I realize spiders aren't insects. I know this. So please don't come up to me and tell me that actually, spiders aren't insects. Because I know this, and all you will accomplish by telling me is you will ruin my fun slightly and you will make me like you less. And why would you want to do that?
I suppose it started with my wife's message to me yesterday. Having said that, it might just as easily have started with me standing shirtlessly in the kitchen this morning. But my wife did call me at work yesterday and leave a message for me, and it went something like this:
"Hi, it's me. I don't have an actual reason to call. I just wanted to see how your day was going. Oh, and I wanted to tell you about my bee encounter today. So if you get a chance, call me back so I can tell you about the bee."
I love these kinds of messages from my wife. There used to be more of them. Had I been a more attentive husband, I would have chronicled them over the years, watching them grow in narrative strength and forethought, from:
"Hi, it's me. I was just calling to see how things are going and because I'm bored. And also I have a story to tell you about this weird straw I got at Starbuck's today that had this huge mutant bubble bulge in the middle, like it was growing a bubo or something. It was totally bizarre. (thoughtful pause here) Actually, I guess there really isn't a story so much as just the fact that I found the straw. Which I told you about now, so you don't have to ask me about it. Unless you want me to tell you again. Yeah. (another, somewhat less thoughtful pause here) Okay, well I suppose you can call if you want. Whatever. I don't care. See ya."
The bee message tickled me, and not just because it demonstrated that at last my wife has come to master the writer's trick known as the "reveal." Even fifteen years into our marriage, I love that my wife wants to share the Seinfeldian minutia of her day. It’s critical for us to have regular separate experiences, because with our having been together so long, our communication skills border on the telepathic. We have conversations that go like this:
Me (on seeing an ad for a program featuring American master carpenter Norm Abrams): It strikes me that he is--
My Wife: --the carpentry equivalent of the big hair guy from the painting shows. Yeah, I know.
In this, she has not only anticipated what I was going to say, she has stated it precisely the way I intended.
Friends of our who have witnessed such moments experience everything from marvel to stunned bewilderment to alarm, and once upon a time, we did the same. But after fifteen years of marriage, the element of wonder has faded. Now when she steals my moment, especially if I’m about to say something clever and funny and devastatingly insightful, she just pisses me off. I know I do the same thing to her, but she’s more irritating when she does it. Trust me on this.
Anyway, knowing she had an encounter I couldn't possibly anticipate filled me with glee. That she felt inspired to call and tell me about it made my heart leap. I knew that, if my latent insecurities were right and she had been having an affair since she last left me one of these messages, it was now over. She loved me again.
Later, she told me the bee story, which went something like this:
She was standing in our family room watching the end of a tennis match, when she heard a loud humming sound coming from somewhere. At first she thought it was the sound of motorized gardening equipment outside (it was a hot day and she had the terrace door open). Surveying the room, however, she noticed a large, furry bumblebee hovering up around our skylight and banging into it in an attempt to punch through the glass and get out. As my wife tells the story, this bumblebee was roughly the size of a grapefruit, give or take.
The skylight is in a vaulted ceiling, so there wasn't much she could do at that moment. On the plus side, as the bumblebee stupidly and relentlessly bounced around the skylight, it covered itself with all those hard-to-reach cobwebs that had collected up there. I have to imagine that it buzzed louder at this, because what’s more annoying than walking through a spiderweb and getting it all over yourself? I’m sure the fact that bees don’t have hands to remove sticky spiderwebs from themselves did not help the bee feel better about the situation.
My wife went into other parts of the flat to do some chores. When she came back later, the bee had moved further down one of the ceiling's supporting beams. Now, with the aid of a small stepladder and a long hooked pole we use for opening other skylights, my wife could reach it. The ladder gave her the altitude she needed to get to the bee. The pole gave her the reach she needed in order to avoid even the slightest chance of physical contact with the bee. A simple plan, but a workable one.
A humanitarian in most things, my wife attempted to coax the bee onto the end of the pole in order to gently carry it to an open window and freedom. Not surprisingly, the fat bee did not see the business end of a hooked pole (no doubt multiplied dozens of times over through its compound lenses) as a humanitarian outreach effort. It became agitated. Eventually, it flew out away from the wall and toward my wife.
At this point, my wife realized an important flaw in her plan: should the bee fly directly at her, standing at the top of a stepladder would prevent her from running away. So she was left to simply stand, trying to work out how to use a skinny aluminum pole to shield her from the strafe of an antagonized flying monster.
In a fabulous anticlimax, the bee swerved and flew out the terrace door.
My wife shared this story with me in the evening when I returned home from work, and I, caring and grateful husband that I am, found it harrowing and humorous at all the right moments. And I didn't predict any of her lines.
The next morning I awoke as usual to get dressed for work and to prepare breakfast for our two children before they went to school. For reasons unimportant to mention here, the combination of dressing and breakfast-making placed me, at one point, simultaneously in our kitchen and without a shirt.
As I poured myself a glass of orange juice, I felt something flutter down from my head and onto my belly. Under different circumstances, I might have thought it was a hair ejecting itself and gently tickling me as gravity lulled it to the floor. However, these different circumstances would have involved me being a person with hair that A) was longer and B) grew out of some kind of ejector follicles.
A glance down at my navel revealed a spider, which, as I watched, crawled unashamedly toward my most personal space. It was a brown spider with maybe a three-inch legspan. For the splittest of seconds I felt like Sean Connery must have felt in that one Bond movie--I think it's Doctor No--where the bad guys sneak into his room during the night and put a tarantula on his bed. What makes me a better person than Sean Connery, apart from my lack of misogyny, is the fact that unlike Mr. Bond, I did not pulverize the offending creepy-crawly with the nearest footwear. Like my wife, I am a humanitarian.
(Another point: I am aware that not killing spiders doesn’t really make me or my wife a humanitarian. I realize there is probably a better word to use, but I can’t think of what it is, and anyway, “humanitarian” sounds good here. You may very well know what the better word is, but I don’t care, and anyway, you should be paying attention to the story, for crying out loud.)
No, I did not kill it, this spider the size of a small mouse, this spider exploring me so intimately. Instead, I emitted a girlish, "GAH!", and shuddered spastically and pelvically until the spider hung from my groin by its own webbing, making me look like some sort of curiosity in a Soho museum or gag gift model in a sex catalog. With two fingers I disconnected the web and let the spider fall to the floor, where I covered it with a glass. The incident concluded with one final series of shivers and my releasing a noise like "bluh-blallallall."
Slipping a coaster under the spider glass, I prepared to toss it out the window. Before doing so, however, I carried the specimen from room to room to make sure my recent exploit was fully fathomed by my the fairer-sexed members of my family.
My daughters, who love me, gasped at the size of the beast. Though she did not say it, I could tell that my older daughter was happy to be sitting on the far side of the dining room table in order that, should the spider escape, she might tip the table onto its side to be used as protective cover. My younger daughter looked at me, appropriately I felt, as one might look at a man who had wrestled a grizzly or carefully extricated his leg from the jaws of a killer shark. And she summed up the feelings of us all when she uttered her simple, "Oh my God."
My sense of my own heroism now affirmed, I proceeded to the girls' bathroom to present my prize to my wife. Already bored when she opened the door, my so-called better half took one look at the spider and uttered an unimpressed, "Oh. A daddy long-legs."
She was, of course, wrong. I believe deliberately so, and I see this as proof that my wife does not love me. This and the affair she has been having.
I know what a daddy long-legs looks like. It looks exactly like a smaller version of the ship in which Dr. Sin used to tool around in the old Johnny Quest cartoons: spherical body with no apparent ornamentation and six gangly, impossibly thin legs of identical length. Come to think of it, in my adult life Jim Carrey has always, for some reason, reminded me of a daddy long-legs.
The spider I captured looked nothing like this. It had the bulbous butt section that so many spiders have, with a tinier round bit on the front where venomous fangs are connected in the larger models. There were three pairs of legs, each a different length from the others, so that it moved a bit like a dragster. And the legs were thin, but not impossibly thin. If a daddy long-legs is Kate Moss, then my spider was more of a Kiera Knightley.
My wife is many things: mother, humanitarian, likely adulteress. But she is no entomologist. I know this because, as you will undoubtedly have discerned from my descriptions above, I am. That is, I'm as close to one as a person can be without spending a lot of time around bugs or reading anything about them. And it is with that authority that I can say in no uncertain terms that, when my wife called the thing in the glass a daddy long-legs, she didn't know what the hell she was talking about.
Before you go getting all judgmental on her ass, I should explain that my wife's ignorant outburst was a result of her illness, a kind of pronounced Sympathy Deficit Disorder (SDD), as a result of which, she is incapable of generating any feelings of sorrow for the plights of her husband. My formal investigation of this condition began several months ago, when I bent over in our bathroom to reach something on a low shelf. When I stood up, I cracked my head on the corner of our bathroom counter. It was exceeding painful. I believe I still carry the scar. I believe I will always carry this scar.
As one does under such circumstances, I used vocabulary which made me hope my children were far away or at least not nearly as impressionable as they seem. I then stumbled out of the bathroom to seek solace in the arms of my loving spouse.
I found her in the kitchen. She turned, saw my hemorrhaging skull, and her face softened. "What happened?"
"I whacked my head viciously on the counter in our bathroom."
All facial softness disappeared immediately. "Oh. Well, that was stupid."
Yes. I stood before her, painfully concussed and bleeding from the scalp, and she chose literally to add insult to my injury. The gentleman in me wanted to phone up the man with whom she conducted her affair and make sure he understood just what sort of woman she was, in case he wanted to start shopping around for someone new.
But I didn’t phone him. I complained about her behavior, of course, but ultimately, in my heart of hearts, beneath layers of self-esteem and denial and also I suppose beneath the layers of other hearts that my heart of hearts lies at the heart of, I knew that I deserved it. My sympathy-free marriage, like the spider on my midsection, came as karmic retribution.
When I was a sophomore in college, I took a course called The Artist’s Journal, a humanities course exploring the ways painters, poets, and authors have of expressing themselves in their personal diaries. As part of the course, we not only read these diaries, we were expected to maintain our own journals. Occasionally, our professor asked us to share excerpts from our journals with the class.
I will forever remember this class if for no other reason than the three words with which I was introduced to it. Running late on the day of the first class, I made my way through the submarine tunnels in the basement of the university building, trying to puzzle out the stochastic sequence used to number the rooms. By the time I came to the door I needed, I had forgotten if in fact the number on it was the right number. Thus it was that I had my face buried in my course guide when I opened the door and stepped inside to hear those three words:
“Oh. A male.”
Never before, and rarely since, have I been summarized so succinctly and accurately. Well, I say accurately—I suppose that depends on whom you ask. I own both a Y-chromosome and occasional facial hair. My wife would point out that I knit better than she does, know less about professional sports than she does, and enjoy figure skating as much as she does. But she only says these things to hurt me.
Looks of stark disappointment fell over the faces of my eighteen female classmates the way I always imagined those plastic masks fall in depressurized airplane cabins. I don’t know how long the women there had entertained the notion that theirs might be an academic boy-free zone, but clearly they all had. In the years since the course ended, I have on occasion allowed my mind to speculate as to what sorts of secret female activities they might have tentatively scheduled for the semester. Perhaps the upper-classwomen would use one class to share the spell that caused male-pattern baldness in the men who broke up with them badly. Other classes might have been earmarked for arm-wrestling and farting. They might have planned times to play with Legos, write naughty limericks, and try out recipes for all those mixed drinks you always hear about but no one ever orders, like Mai Tais or Zombies. Before I arrived, they would have made plans to exchange secret woman handshakes, share secret woman code words, pass along secret woman intelligence. All the plans would have been joyous, exhilarating and fun in a way that was not possible in the stifling presence of maleness. In those scant few moments after the professor took attendance, a staggering supply of expectation and hope and anticipation would have accumulated.
Then I entered, and effectively peed on the territory they had been decorating with the throw pillows and chintz curtains of their plans. Now class would be just class. And it was my fault.
So they resented me a trifle. Fortunately, they reserved their bile only for those times when I actually attended class. Particularly harsh were the readings of my journal entries, which often began with a pedestrian observation (“He has a very self-conscious voice in his journal”) but invariably veered into psychological profiling (“It’s as though in his awareness of his reader, he’s trying to write what he thinks we want to read, rather than using his journal to explore his true self. We don’t really see how he truly feels. Which suggests he has intimacy issues.”).
One cold November day, I found myself in The Artist’s Journal class seated behind an athletic blond wearing a knitted sweater with large decorative lumpy bits on it. The lumpy bits made the sweater appear a bit pilly, even though the bits were intentional. Personally, I thought the bits looked like insect larva. In any case, she came in wearing a denim jacket which she had slung over the back of her chair.
I don’t remember what we were discussing in class that day (Sylvia Plath, I think), because I didn’t pay a lot of attention. The window behind me suffered from poor insulation, and a breeze down the back of my sweater served as a distracting reminder of the outside temperature.
As it was so cold out, you can imagine my surprise when I saw a mid-sized black spider making its way across the classroom floor at my feet. It occurred to me that I didn’t actually know what spiders did in the winter months, and I spent a few happy minutes puzzling that out as I stared at the spider, which made its way steadily toward the chair of the athletic blond. Upon reaching the back left leg, it started to climb toward the sleeve of her denim jacket.
At this point in my memory, I find it useful to consider the spider’s perspective: as it made its way up the chair leg, it stared into the dark, warm, blue cavern ahead. In the distance, its compound eyes no doubt detected my face, looming above it like some peach-colored
The cold air from the window sent a chill wind scuttling across the floor; the spider edged upward, toward the slightly swaying sleeve. It would have peered inside, undoubtedly thinking that in spite of any structural instability, the sleeve would offer shelter from the cold.
But then it would perhaps have seen through the sleeve to the girl’s pilly sweater beyond: dozens and dozens of pre-wrapped insect carcasses, all laid out like a cold cut platter for the spider who was bold enough to take advantage. The
And so, I watched as the spider made its way into the girl’s jacket sleeve. And I said nothing. And a minute later, class was over. As I gathered my books to leave, the girl spoke with our professor. Not until I was walking out the classroom door did I see her lift her jacket and begin to put it on. The closed door muffled her shriek.
Thus you understand why I say my wife’s reaction to my own spider situation was karmic retribution. Had I been kinder, had I issued some kind of warning, the Universe might have proven kinder to me.
By the way, just so we’re clear, the Universe wanted me to warn the spider, not the girl. The girl had expressed her anti-male hostility at me on more than one occasion, so I felt confident the Universe wanted me to make her find a creepy-crawly in her clothes. But the spider was an innocent in this equation, and I used it as an unwitting pawn in the Universe’s game of cosmic revenge.
From here, I imagine the chain of events went something like this: I expect that the spider was ultimately discharged from the girl’s clothing and landed safely on the floor, where it hurried away, never looking back. Over time, it found itself in whatever interior heating duct over whatever disused submarine tunnel housed the winter home of
In time, many spiders would leave their worried mothers at home as they sought the Spiders’
After fifty generations of futile searching, many spiders would give up on their faith. The descendants of the original spider would now be scattered all over the world, and the belief would be stretched thin by the distance. Many would argue that the Fields never existed. Doubt and hopelessness would cast its shadow over the spider world.
And then, in 2006, eighty generations from the day that first spider laid eyes on the Cave and the Fields beyond, the spider world’s equivalent of Dan Brown would offer up a story to rekindle interest in the legend. This spider would claim to have infiltrated the darkest recesses of the spider priests, to have spent time exploring the holy of holies. And he would claim that the priests themselves knew for a fact that the Fields existed—they knew it for a fact because as part of the rites of initiation into spider priesthood, they all memorized the exact location of the Fields!
Such a story would spread like wildfire across the worldwide webs. Spiders everywhere would once again yearn for adventure and the promise of food without work or struggle.
One such spider, idling a morning away on the ceiling of a kitchen in London, would glance down from his webmaking to have what he at first believed to be a spiritual vision: below him was the very peach-colored Easter Island sculpture of which the ancients spoke! The sculpture which marked the entrance to the
Not wasting a moment, the spider dropped onto the sculpture and raced to the ground to find the wooden leg reputed to be nearby. Before he could find it, however, he found himself encased in glass and paraded around by giants as though he were some sort of trophy.
And the rest, as they say, is karma. I’m sure my spider, initially frightened, ultimately saw his release without harm as a confirmation of the fact that he had indeed located the secret entrance to the Fields of Plenty. No doubt he went off to become the greatest spider prophet of his generation.
No doubt also you will find all of this very hard to believe. Nevertheless, we are dealing here with three very closely connected bug-related ordeals, and apart from the above account, I am at a loss to explain their coincidence.
Naturally, if you have a more reasonable explanation, I’d love to hear it.
No comments:
Post a Comment