Driving to his half-time teaching job in New Jersey (how he hates this gloomy morning commute, especially now that Daylight Savings Time has robbed him of an hour, turning 5 a.m. into 6 a.m.—the lights on, defroster blowing, wipers thwacking ineffectually at frost, the radio filling the car with the latest floods, genocides, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, floods and famines) he relives the fight he had with his wife over the weekend.
They had gone to Little Italy to join a group of people learning to speak Italian, a conversation group. They were to meet in a pastry shop somewhere in Little Italy. On the way there in the same muffler-challenged Mazda he drives now, the topic of freshman comp came up, always a sore subject. He’d mentioned the topic for their latest essay, saying how some of his students had been confused by it, wondering how in hell they could possibly find his carefully articulated instructions so bewildering. “All I said,” he explained to her as she drove “is for them to summarize a single passage or scene of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ from the husband’s point-of-view. Does that sound confusing to you? Honestly, does it?”
“Honestly, I think it might be confusing,” his wife had said. “You may have to give them a little more information, maybe.”
Such is the stuff marital spats are made from. What information? Well . . . you know. No, I don’t know. Yes, you do. No, I don’t. Are you saying I should define point-of-view, is that what you’re saying? It’s not like I haven’t done that, you know, like a dozen times at least. I’m not stupid. And so on, with the traffic thickening on Canal Street, trucks and taxis shoving and crowding in on them in their little Japanese box, he doing his prosecutorial cross-examination and she predictably turning to tears and as inevitably from tears to rage of the blindest sort, banging on the steering wheel and yelling to shred her lungs, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!—and he, sensitive to such outbursts, saying he would leave the car if she didn’t stop. She didn’t. And so he did; he left, saying, “You’ll blame me for this, too, I’m sure. You always do,” slamming the car door and running out among the blasted horns of bumper-to-bumper traffic, making his way through the river of chrome and steel, Chinese signs and faces looming everywhere, augmenting his sense of confusion, no idea where he’s going, or why. When he turns back to face the Mazda again, ready to beg forgiveness, the car’s gone, swallowed up by the traffic and exhaust fumes. He’ll spend the next hour and a half pushing past people on crowded corners, searching every pastry shop in Little Italy for a group of people speaking poor Italian, his wife among them, feeling this time that he’s really done it, oh yes he has, he’s lost her for good, oh, what an ass he is, what a damn bleeding stupid ass. At last, in a cafe called Bella Luna (she always did love anything to do with the moon), he will catch sight of her head bobbing in conversation, her natural curls dyed ash brown to cover up her gray; her eyes (despite reiteration by the pastry shop’s mirror-tiled walls) will fail to see him standing there, out in the street, his eyes raw with tears as he watches her enjoy herself with the others, doing perfectly well without him. Before she knows it he’ll be behind her, touching her, saying to her, his voice trembling, his eyes streaming tears, his accent more genuine than any at the table, “Mi dispiace; mi dispiace.”
