Marrieds

By Victor Greto

He had given up on Carl a long time ago. The dude just never wrote, and Nick had stopped writing him because, he figured, if he didn’t write, why the fuck should I?

Nick lived in Wisconsin now, with his wife and child. How he got there is – well, the bottom line is, he fucked up. He went up there after graduating from college in Colorado because he figured he wanted to get a Master’s Degree in English and teach the stuff, or study literary criticism because it made his brain do gymnastics, or just keep going to school – anything but actually creatively writing English. The language had become much too precious for him to sully it with his own shit.

So, he had uprooted Dorothy and Annie from their Colorado home and taken them to Wisconsin. If you don’t know, it’s very cold in the winter in Wisconsin, and muggy and hot in the summer.

That sucked, but that isn’t what’s fucked up.

The part that was fucked up was Nick quitting school after only three weeks because it just depressed the shit out of him to hear his classmates and professors pontificate on Joycean ambiguity and the playful meaning of the text, deconstructed or not. But, really, it wasn’t the subject of Joyce or the play of meaning in the text that depressed Nick. It was the faces that spouted the stuff.

Here’s what I mean: When Nick watched the mouths of his professors spout, when he heard the florid responses of the students whom, he could swear, admiringly saw in their mind’s eye their own mouths spouting, saw them revel in the slavering, self-intoxicating words that dribbled from their lips like ink from a leaky pen – well, he just couldn’t stand it. Nick rolled his eyes at one kid he even had tried to befriend, just after the kid told him he didn’t have anything to say about Joyce’s Uncle Charles Principle – the idea that third-person narration becomes the person it’s narrating by using words the character may use – but who chose to speak at the class and the teacher for about two minutes on what it might mean, picking up on words Nick had mentioned to him earlier about how Uncle Charles, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, had “repaired” to the latrine to take a shit, and how Joyce used the word “repaired” in the narrative because it was how Uncle Charles would have said it.

It was bad enough hearing the words he had spoken to the kid said in such a glutinous, overstated way, but, again, for Nick it was the way the kid’s face looked down and toward a point in space; how his lips pursed and the hollows of his cheeks dimpled when he continued to speak solemnly about nothing. It was what sat behind the face he hated; the false gravity, the self-importance, the willingness to speak when you had nothing to say. Yes: the idea that – even though the kid may not be fooling anyone – he knew you had to listen to him talk because, well, you had to give him the benefit of the doubt. It was self-perpetuating. Everyone began to do it because it was so successful. The professor smiled, ironically or not, and you knew you could provoke that smile by speaking to the issue, if not knowledgeably, at least with empty-headed, intelligent circumlocutions that stunned listeners into either a puzzled silence or a corrosive apathy.

But there was one particular incident that ended it all for Nick. They went to class one gorgeous fall morning, when the Wisconsin air reminded Nick of Philadelphia in September, all mossy and gold. But Professor Cod, his English professor, didn’t want to deal with class. Instead, he passed his newly published book around. When it got to Nick, he held its hundred-page-or-so green hard-backed cover and saw the title, Joyce and the Uncertainty Principle, and leafed through its dense pages and swore, when he glanced up, that the professor blushed.

Again, don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t the book itself that set Nick off. It was festered behind the expression on Cod’s face, knowing that the response he got from the class was to be as thinly askew as Werner Heisenberg’s hair in the morning. Yet, yet, Cod did it, he fucking blushed. For Christ’s sake. That was it. Nick just couldn’t do it anymore.

He ran to his counselor in the English department, a disheveled Chaucerian named Professor Kemp. Kemp said he understood everything Nick told him, about Nick’s feelings concerning his classes, classmates and professors, how all beside the point it seemed to him now. This, despite the fact that Kemp was one of Nick’s professors. That was funny, because during one class with Kemp, when they were in the middle of discussing The Romance of the Rose, a medieval allegory about courtly love that, somehow, influenced Chaucer, Kemp said, “It’s all so complicated, so much goes into it, there’s so much going on,” waving his hand at the class in a worldly gesture of impatience. If that was true about a fucking piece of literature, what about his own goddamn life?

When Nick shook Kemp’s hand at the end of their talk, it felt so soft and limp Nick suppressed a gag. He liked the guy – he genuinely seemed to understood his point of view, his feelings of depression – but the dude, intelligent and well-read and o-so-complicated, was soft all over the way vanilla pudding is soft all over. Now, how the hell could he respect that?

Nick couldn’t stop frowning the day he left the university. He got some of his money back, but not nearly enough to make it all right. He brought back his textbooks to the bookstore and they gave him a full refund, but the semester tuition could be reimbursed only so much. He still had to pay more than two-thirds of it back over time.

That day, the day he quit, he took the bus back to the cramped student housing and the sky was grayer than a block of dirty ice and he sat on the couch and just stared at the wall and the rain coming down outside the window. It was all such a shame, and Dorothy was forgiving about it, too, something he hadn’t expected. He was lucky. But he didn’t have a clue what to do with himself.

While Nick was earning his undergraduate degree in English in Colorado, he had worked at the college library. It was a great job because he made his own hours, had time to study, and everyone was nice as hell to him.

Nick learned a lot about libraries and cataloging, and, aside from the degree, the work looked fine on his resume, which is the whole point of this slice, because it helped him get a job at the Wisconsin state law library in Madison after he dropped out of school.

Dorothy had a job as a bank teller on the west side of town, which she loved, so they moved to an apartment building off Mineral Point Drive. She used the car to get to work. He took the bus to downtown and the state capital building, which, according to Annie, was the coolest place in Madison to work because it looked just like the U.S. Capitol and the bus dropped him right in front of the building. Taking a bus in Madison was different from taking a bus, say, in Philadelphia. People kept to themselves on the buses in Madison; they were going to work, not to the mall; they had brushed their teeth and taken showers before sitting next to you; they were just going downtown to their jobs because it was quicker and easier to do on a bus and there weren’t too many stops.

It was after he got the job at the law library when Carl finally called him. He hadn’t called since Nick had left Colorado. For something like the tenth time since Nick had left home, he figured Carl and he were finished as friends; I mean, what did they have in common after all this time? Carl had gone on to become a television producer of local sports events in Philadelphia. Nick had become a married whatever-happened-on-the-job-front-is-cool guy, who not only had given up on whatever artistic pretensions he’d had, but, now, had given up on seriously studying others’ artistic pretensions. But he still loved to read. Whatever. So, here he was married and had a kid he’d adopted while he was in college, and, at twenty-six, he was acting like he was eighteen or nineteen again.

Carl called him because Carl was getting married to Marta, a girl he had known for about two years, and he wanted Nick to be his best man. Nick had met Marta once, when both she and Carl had come out to visit. She was nice and bland, a person Nick would never – well, actually, Marta was kind of like Dorothy. Come to think of it, both Marta and Dorothy were women so different than what either Nick or Carl had been attracted to as adolescents, it would have been funny if they could have looked at themselves six, seven years later. Hilarious.

Not that there was anything wrong with either of them. There wasn’t. Seriously. There really wasn’t.

Nick agreed to be Carl’s best man. He got a couple days off from his new job so he could spend a long weekend in April at Oleaginier, in western Pennsylvania, where Marta’s family lived and where they had decided to get married.

It was a small town, green and warm and there was even a white-trellised gazebo at the center of a downtown of tiny storefronts and thick-trunked arching trees. Carl was there to pick him up at the airport with a big hug; big because Carl stood more than a half-foot taller than Nick; a hug because Carl was nervous and it was good seeing a familiar face. This, in spite of all the other friends Carl had invited, a string of about five, six guys who were to be in the wedding party. When Carl drove him into Oleaginier and Nick saw the gazebo, he smiled and patted Carl on the back.

“We’re just a couple of old, mother-fucking marrieds now,” he said.

Carl said nothing.

“You know Anthony’s getting married in July,” Nick told him.

“No, really?” Carl replied. “That’s it, then. We’re done!”

They were done. They drove to the place where Carl already had ordered their tuxedos. Nick withdrew a wad of money from the cash machine nearby, and they walked in the hot sun toward the store.

“Sure you want to do this?” Nick asked.

“Fuck you,” Carl said.

“You can still back out. We get back in the car, drive to Philly, get on a plane, go to Europe, and disappear. What do you say?”

“Fuck you,” Carl said.

“Fuck me,” Nick said.

“Nobody should look this good in a tux,” Nick said to the full-length mirror. His black mane of hair fell softly at his shoulders and he held the lapels of his coat tight as he swiveled from left to right on his heels.

Carl, head and shoulders taller, looked comical in his tux.

This is what it had turned into: Fuck you and Fuck me and cheaply laughing self-consciously about wearing stark white tuxedos after nearly inevitable decisions to wed and live separate lives.

They had gone to Europe together for three weeks just a few years before, the two of them driving in Carl’s father’s small car, from Darmstadt to Amsterdam to Paris to Avignon to the Riviera, south through Italy and Venice, Florence, Rome, north again through Innsbruck and Berlin back to Darmstadt, where Carl’s father had lived and worked for an airline – all the way taking back roads and stopping to piss by the side of the road and staying up late in bars and meeting girls as giddy as themselves. Even then, Nick knew it would be the last time they really did anything together. A week after he returned from Europe, he married Dorothy, another part of that fucked-up and moronic deal he’d made with her when he decided he just couldn’t live without her sorry ass.

But Nick wasn’t feeling like plastic shit because he wished he hadn’t grown up. It wasn’t about not wanting to grow up, or even growing up. It was about change and feeling profoundly guilty about changing. He did not really miss Carl, and Carl didn’t really miss him. They missed what they were together, not all that long ago. They were stupidly awed by how quickly and irrevocably their lives had hardened, while weakly attempting to pierce each other with bits of sarcasm, cynical reminders of adolescent badinage they had once profoundly and naively felt but that now echoed falsely.

This is what marrieds did, when they wore tuxedos and listened to pious blather about forever when they exchanged vows of permanence with strangers, even when they knew they were changing and always would change.

This is what marrieds did when they stiffly stood buried up to their thickening necks in the wet sand of a career, routine, house, car, whatever. Waiting stoically for the inevitable tide to wash in, Nick and Carl smugly gazed at one another and then themselves.

“Fuck you,” they said in unison.

Then there was Maya.

Nick first saw Marta’s bridesmaid and older sister hanging out of a car and waving at the two of them when Carl and he had left the tuxedo shop to get a drink. She was actually waving at Carl, but it was Nick who waved back. Marta was driving, and when she saw Carl and Nick, she slammed on the brakes, jumping out of the car at about the same time it lurched into park.

“Best man Nicky!” Marta cried, and loped toward him, her wide hips snug in light blue polyester shorts.

They hugged in the hot sunlight and he could smell her perfume, hair and breath at the same time as his eyes locked on to her sister. She was thinner than Marta, and her eyes reflected the sun brightly. Her hands, Nick noticed while disengaging from Marta, flexed delicately as she hugged Carl and squeezed his shoulders.

Nick felt good again, and thought how he might describe Maya on paper, the spun-gold hair, the bulbous nose and cheeks, the hazel-joy of her eyes, her reedy hands. You see, this is how he felt when he had been a writer, how everything he saw became words of images; he literally envisioned black text on white paper as he observed her shy smile, thin and delicate shoulders, small breasts. When he shook her hand he knew he wanted her: her hand was as soft as it looked; he squeezed it gently and looked openly at her face. She turned away in genuine shyness. Looking down he saw her bare legs. He closed his eyes and backed away.

No, he didn’t want to sully the language with his images, neuroses, passions. But there were times (like right now) that he felt so much love, of himself, of another, of the air he breathed, that he wanted to communicate it to the world. How does one do that?

Marta shooed them away. The wedding was tomorrow and they should not be seen together. He and Carl went to a bar at a motel Nick had checked into. Carl was going to stay with him that evening. “I’m not supposed to see the bride like a day before the wedding day or something,” Carl told him.

“What a bunch of shit,” Nick said.

“Fuck you,” Carl said for the twenty-sixth time in five hours.

“It’s to make you all hard and excited for the honeymoon,” Nick said, drinking as quickly and as much as he could. It was quarter-to-three in the afternoon and it was his favorite time to drink. He hadn’t eaten, so he already felt a little high. “And to make you forget that after a month or two or three you’ll be so fucking bored with fucking her you’ll resume your jerking-off schedule.”

Carl seemed offended, so Nick tapped his shoulder and told him he was only kidding. Besides, he thought, the time would give them a chance to drink and talk about shit.

Nick and Carl didn’t say much for half-hours at a time, preferring to listen to the bar’s jukebox and look away.

Nick’s hands had grown into his old man’s hands. He felt it and knew it as he stared at his right hand holding the beer. He liked his hands more and more as the afternoon polished itself away, ribbed veins at the base of thick, strong fingers, putting away pints of booze like water. Dad never drank because of the medicine he took. Mom didn’t drink, either. Of course, everyone else of his parents’ generation and older drank, mainly high-balls and whiskey sours. No one drank beer or wine. Hard-ass liquor, every night, Aunt Carla and Uncle Stan put it away. He wondered if they were alcoholics. He’d never thought about it that way, but maybe. But that was a different generation than his old man’s; dad had missed the war, but not Uncle Stan.

His dad never did anything except play ball. And fool around. His dad had told Dorothy this the last time he was home. Nick’s mouth literally dropped when his wife told him; then, he asked Vincent about it, and Vincent looked at him with narrowed eyes and nodded: yeah, he’s said that before. Well, Nick was just following in his old man’s footsteps, wasn’t he? He didn’t do anything, either, and liked fooling around.

His hands.

Nick looked outside the motel bar window and saw the bright sunlight and winced. He was twenty-six years old but he felt, what, fifty? forty? How would he know? Let’s face it: he knew who he was every time he went home. Even here, in western Pennsylvania, he was too close. All during that time with Rachel and marrying Dorothy and going to college Nick had written his heart out, rewritten the same story with different players, in different voices, in different tenses, but it was all about his old man and who he, Nick, was, and how he would, in a final, glorious literary feat of the imagination, exorcise his old man’s madness and utter failure from the fabric of his life and reveal his self.

Don’t laugh.

He could see his reflection in the beer bottle, and knew his bullshit, crooked-ass smirk was the same as his father’s; knew that the tired, deceptively compassionate look in his eyes was the same as his old man’s; knew that his own maddening introverted thoughts mirrored his dad’s. He knew it, and blindly continuing this horseshit with Dorothy, tacitly approving of other such matches, now with Carl, later with Anthony, he was just carrying on the old traditions. He didn’t want to be different for difference’s sake, but different because he was different. But he wasn’t. He just fucking wasn’t.

He knew now that he knew nothing more about the human condition and the depths of relationships and personalities than he did before he started, before he had left home in a frenzy of driving. Maybe he knew even less. After all, he had regressed. He liked sitting quietly behind a gauzy film of drunkenness, or introspection, or silence, or print. There was nothing to say because now he could no longer tell the difference between himself and everything around him.

The only time he was happy was when he drank. Even so, he didn’t do it very often; he enjoyed his own sadness. And he looked so sad. That look had actually gotten the attention of other women who seemed to feel sorry for him, who walked up to him and asked what was wrong. It was the same story, whether you meant it or not. Even now, as he drank with Carl and grew increasingly drunk, he felt increasingly sad about everything.

Carl didn’t even look at him. He couldn’t. He knew what was happening. Nick hadn’t changed much, after all. He had done the same thing throughout high school. His sadness was palpable. But Carl was not in the mood to make anything better. He was thinking of his own plight.

The more he drank, the more Nick felt maudlin. He literally wanted to cry after his third trip to the bathroom to piss. He felt sorry for the whole fucking world. That was it, you know. It was all about sorrow, for himself, for others, for the insects on whom he accidentally stepped, for the ultimate limitations of space and time.

You name it.

Nick and Carl slept in the same bed that night, a king-sized monstrosity. They began snoring almost as soon as they threw themselves on the bed.

It was a dead night of no dreams. Nick awoke with Carl’s arm thrown around him in the most loving and affectionate manner. Nick felt almost afraid to move, but he gently kicked Carl, who rolled over, snoring lightly. Nick took a shower, dressed, and went downstairs for aspirin and water and coffee. When he came back up to the room, Carl was in the shower.

Except for the thrumming headache, the day zipped by. During the ceremony, Nick solemnly handed Carl the ring, and Carl solemnly took the ring and placed it solemnly on Marta’s thick hand. A triple-solemn.

Nick had decided – about the time he had downed four aspirin that morning – not to care, and stayed close to Maya the whole day. At the reception, they softly swayed to one dance after another. He discovered she was engaged to be married to the photographer of the wedding, a pale kid with a thick black mustache that made his large nose larger. Maya liked Nick, though; she danced with him to all the slow dances, but wouldn’t let her kiss him when he tried. Her future husband, after all, was right over there. By five o’clock, Nick was drunk again. He decided to be satisfied with just squeezing her hand and caressing the sides of her arms. She did nothing to resist that.

But after the reception, there was nothing left to do. Carl and had gone off with Marta to a nearby inn, and Nick wasn’t returning to Wisconsin until the following morning. Other members of the wedding party were staying at the motel that night, so many of them reconvened at the bar, where they drank and danced. It was there that Nick met a woman who was not a part of the wedding. In fact, he knew nothing about her except that she liked to dance with him and had that hungry look in her eyes.

She wasn’t pretty, but Nick didn’t care. After only an hour, they went up to her room, groping each other in the elevator. He was thinking of Maya when he removed her clothes. She was chunky and had a peculiar smell, but Nick closed his mind to it all. Everything flowed to his penis, and he gripped her hair tightly as she sucked on it for a long time. Nick made sure it was a long time. When he pulled her away, he brought her to the bed, and, kissing and licking her body, carefully positioned her on all fours.

He mounted her. He closed his eyes and thought about Carl consummating his marriage at the same time. It made him smile, and he just had to slap this woman’s ass. She liked that and asked him to slap her harder. He took her hair and pulled it. Her neck and back arched and Nick suddenly thought how beautiful Maya had been, how great it would have been to have had sex with her, and to write about it afterward. Then he looked deliberately at this woman’s ass and began slapping it. Soon, she screamed her orgasm.

Nothing bothered Nick at that moment. He couldn’t stop thinking of Carl and Marta while he dispassionately watched this woman’s ass repeatedly swallow and vomit his penis. He didn’t know for how long, but he couldn’t stop watching it happen, over and over again, until, quite by accident, he caught a glimpse of the woman, her hair matted to her face and the pillow, straining to look up and back at him with tears in her eyes.

© 2026 Victor Greto