I thought it might be useful to explain a little bit about my relationship with my wife. You know, just in case you were wondering. And I thought I would begin by explaining the death of Teller.
As you will no doubt have already gleaned, I refer to Teller, the mute half of the Penn & Teller magic act. I realize that limiting the man to “the mute half of Penn & Teller” does him a disservice; he has a broad and deep list of extremely impressive credits to his name. One would think that such a disservice would matter more to me, now that he’s allegedly dead. But one would be mistaken.
About a year ago or so, my head decided that Teller had died. Don’t ask me why it decided this; my head just does things like this from time to time. It had come up with an elaborate story in order to fool me: one with lots of colorful detail to make it feel that much truer. My head told me that Teller’s death had been a shocking tragedy. Sitting down to lunch by himself in a restaurant in
In any case, this fish--notorious for its boniness--was nevertheless served whole from the grill. Teller tucked in while reading an esoteric book on magic. At one point, so immersed was he in his reading that he stopped giving his meal the attention it required: he swallowed two particularly pernicious fish bones. They went down badly and lodged in his throat, closing his windpipe. His arms flailed; his eyes bulged. More than usual. Someone nearby attempted the Heimlich maneuver, but the upward thrust only served to embed the bones more firmly. Within minutes, Teller had suffocated.
See what I mean? Pretty vivid for a load of complete rubbish, isn’t it?
The special beauty of the way my head works is that once it comes up with a gem like this, it doesn’t send me out immediately to preach my drivel to random acquaintances. Oh no. It plants little fallacious land mines, then sits back and waits for them to detonate. Which can happen any time.
So I’m hanging around one afternoon in January and my wife says to me, “Oh, I meant to tell you - Yvonne de Carlo died.” One of the reasons I know my wife still loves me is that she still tells me things like this. I know maybe five people in the world who both A) know that Yvonne de Carlo played Lily Munster (and also a couple parts on truly fine episodes of Fantasy Island) and B) care. My wife is one of them. I figure if she didn’t love me, she’d talk to one of the other four people about Yvonne de Carlo and leave me out of the loop. At least, this is what I tell myself. In my darker moments, I consider that she may tell all five of us, and I’m at the end of the list.
Let’s not go there now.
So it’s a grey rainy afternoon in
And I reply. “Oh no--really? Jeez. First Teller, now Lily Munster.”
My wife got that look on her face that a person gets when they ask someone for directions to the bank and the someone says, “Flipknot hammock furry jinkle buttress.” It was as though she hadn’t experienced enough confusion in her life to be able to fill her question with the right amount:
“What?”
On some level, I sensed her perplexity, but it didn’t register with me, because I considered what I had said matter-of-fact, normal, and entirely a part of the fabric of reality. “What what?” I replied, unhelpfully.
“What did you say just then?”
“Just when?”
“Just then--before the thing about Lily Munster.”
“Jeez?”
My wife did not slap me for this, which demonstrates the full extent of her capacity for restraint. “No, you said someone else died. Who else died?”
“Oh, yeah. Teller. You know. Teller’s dead.”
My wife searched her deepest recesses frantically for more confusion to offer to me. After all, she had turned to me in her hour of need, presented all her confusion and hoped that I would dismiss it with a soothing clarification. Instead, I had taken the big mess of her confusion and before her very eyes sculpted it into an enormous flummox-shaped bafflement.
Her face scrunched up more and she leaned into me and said (with just a vague hint of desperation to her voice), “What the hell are you talking about?”
For a moment my resolve flickered. For a moment, I questioned what my head had told me. But no--it happened. Of course it did. Mentally, I shrugged off the flicker.
“You know, Teller. He died a little bit ago. The fish bone in the restaurant?”
My wife giggled a nervous giggle. “Teller? From Penn and Teller?”
“Yeah. He choked and died a few weeks ago.” I narrated the event for her - the lunch in LA, the whitefish (hake?), the book on magic, the well-meaning bystander, and Teller’s untimely and tragic end. With each detail, the amusement on my wife’s face expanded, and my resolve withered. I found I couldn’t place my source material for the account - had I read it in the newspaper? Unlikely, as I rarely read the newspaper. Television, then. But would TV news have had that book detail in it? Maybe a friend told me about it? Thing was, I hadn’t spoken with those other four people in a long time...
By the time I finished, my wife could barely contain her hysterics. Not that she especially tried. If I’m honest, I should admit that my rising, burning embarrassment did nothing to quell her laughter, nor did my sheepish mutterings of “Shut up.” Suffice it to say that we deduced, together, that the fatalistic Teller anecdote was merely a fantastic lie that I had concocted for a reason that would remain an indefinite mystery.
In any other marriage, that would have been the end of it. As faithful readers of my work will no doubt have discerned by now, however, my marriage differs somewhat from other marriages.
For the next several weeks, the pseudo-spectre of Teller haunted our conversations. Upon learning of Sidney Sheldon’s passing, I said to my wife, “That reminds me...did you hear that Teller from Penn & Teller died?” Initially, my wife could not be sure if I had forgotten our previous conversation on the matter (she held numerous irrefutable precedents upon which she based this uncertainty). To be fair, at this point I wasn’t sure if she had actually had the conversation about Teller, or if it was just a marvelously complicated memory by head had invented for my aggravation and its own amusement (again, my head does this sort of thing from time to time). The idea being, I can hardly fault my wife for her suspicions.
“Teller isn’t dead. You made that up,” she reminded me.
Anna Nicole Smith’s accidental drug overdose: “Wow. She was even younger than Teller when he died.”
“He’s still alive. Why do you keep saying that?”
Ian Richardson’s surprising demise: “His doctor said he was in good health. I think they said Teller had just had a physical.”
“Teller is not dead!”
Kurt Vonnegut’s death following his head injury while at home: “That is a real shame. One of the great black humorists of our day. Speaking of black humorists--”
“NOT DEAD! STILL COMPLETELY ALIVE! LET. IT. GO!”
As you may have surmised, by now I had taken to offering periodic faux-bituaries just to rankle my betrothed. I’ll own up: seeing her flip out because I said Teller was dead when he wasn’t sent ribbons of childish glee up and down my person. I realize this may mean I’m even more disturbed than my behavior to this point suggests, but I don’t care. I’m not proud of this needling torment, mind you. But, given the chance, it’s probably more than fair to say I’d do it again.
One night, we prepared for bed, and I switched the news on. A report came through stating that Charles Nelson Reilly had died of pneumonia. I made my obligatory connection to Teller. My wife, completing her evening’s ablutions, stepped out of the bathroom in order to issue a roary groan (or a groany roar) and howl, “Why do you keep saying that? He is not dead! What is it with you?”
At this moment, my head suggested I ask a question: “Why does it bother you so much?” I can’t imagine why such an obvious line of inquiry hadn’t occurred to me before.
Clearly my wife hadn’t asked this question before either, and she deflated almost visibly before me, as though she had suddenly and involuntarily re-routed all her irate energy into the part of her brain designed to work out problems. Trying to save face, she converted her fluster into annoyance: “I just don’t think it’s a nice thing to do! The poor guy is out there, still alive somewhere, and you keep telling people he’s dead.”
Not people. Just you.
“Well, so what? You still talk about him like he’s dead. And I just don’t think you should because it’s mean.” By now my wife had worked out that she didn’t have enough fluster to generate an annoyance and would have to settle for a sort of medium-strength petulance.
I pointed out that Teller was a much wealthier man than I am, and that he had a great many distractions in his life which might prevent him from hearing that some nobody living in London had fabricated (albeit somewhat comprehensively) a myth concerning the man’s death and refused to let go of it. Actually, given the sorts of shenanigans Penn and he get up to, part of me thought the myth might actually amuse Teller. Even if he wasn’t, he could always seek revenge by telling people that in fact I had died. And he had access to better information-dispersal systems than I did, so his lie would likely reach further than his widow...wife, that is. In short, while my beloved’s defense of the man was admirable and a little cute, I felt fairly confident Teller himself didn’t suffer a whole lot at my hands.
My wife’s final volley fell far short: “I still think you’re mean.”
In the months that followed, I explored my wife’s sensibilities on this subject: why didn’t I let it go? Was the thrill of getting under my wife’s skin really worth playing with the fate-tempting hand-grenade of another man’s suggested death? Did Teller really mean so little to me that I would use him in this way?
Of course, by the time such musings made their way around my head, I knew the answer: yes, I would tempt fate. Yes, my concern for the man approached non-existent. Yes, I would continue to make jokes at the expense of his failing vital signs.
After all, he was dead to me.
(Snook, maybe?)
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