How the Happy Live

         
I was playing with a thumbtack in my mouth. I was running it along my front teeth, back and forth clicking and clacking over the tiny ridges and gaps in my teeth. Running the sharp metal needle point of the thumbtack over my teeth like a kid running a stick along a picket fence somewhere deep in Suburbia, somewhere where the sun is shining and kids still walk along the streets slapping a wooden stick against the wooden and wrought iron fences around people’s yards making a steady beat to set step to. Somewhere that really only still exists in my mind. The metal grating against the bone of my teeth made a sound both pleasant and nerve racking at the same time, frightfully loud in my own ear but which would be inaudible to anyone else. I didn’t remember where I’d gotten the thumbtack and I wasn’t sure when I’d first put it against my teeth. It had to have been somewhere in the kitchen but I do not have any use for thumbtacks and so I don’t know why I’d even have one. I didn’t remember why I’d sat down in the chair in the living room that faced the window looking out towards the front lawn and the street. I didn’t remember anything about the day. I felt drunk without the numbing buzz that I needed so desperately, just the ineptness, the depression, the forgetfulness and the turning stomach. I couldn’t remember where the thumbtack had come from.
         
It had been a long time since she’d even cared enough about me to be discreet. There had been a time when she hadn’t even done all that filthy stuff. Then she hid it from me, and then she stopped hiding it. It wasn’t honesty that compelled her to stop being so secretive, it was pure apathy. She just didn’t care anymore. She just would come home, say nothing and do nothing, sometimes she wouldn’t even look at me and I was too hurt to say anything either. The only conversations I ever had with her after she stopped being so furtive were about all the things I didn’t want to talk to her about.
         
I met her in a foreign country across the ocean and a couple of seas. It was after the war had scattered all of its ashes into the wind.

Love to a woman is something entirely different from a man’s concept of love. Many men will never once find true love, but when they do they’ll never leave it. Many men will stay on and profess true love for fear of being alone, but if a man finds true love he will never leave it. A woman will. A woman might fall in love half a dozen times in her life and with each new love she’ll leave the previous one useless and tawdry. With a woman it’s not that she never loved the one before, it’s just that she can leave it for something better, a man will never find something better. I guess this was the way it had happened with her. Except her new love was poor and I wasn’t. She loved money on an equal plane with this new man, so she figured she could have both just by cheating on me but staying married.
          
I had my head so full of the past that I couldn’t see past tomorrow and yet I couldn’t even remember where I’d gotten the thumbtack.
         
I’m forty-eight, too old to go back and too young to give up. I guess I should have seen this coming, she’s eleven years younger than me. She was only twenty-six when we met and I was the older, educated, sophisticated, veteran, she was just a little British girl growing up in a strange, primitive and crude country. She’d gone back to England for college but had come back to her home after that. She’d already been in love three times before she met me. A Mexican boy who was the son of the ambassador and went to the English school with her when they were teenagers, he had moved back to Mexico a year after graduation. An English boy in college had left to fight in the war and was killed in an airplane over the sea. And a local boy who worked as a servant in her house after she returned from college and was exiled from the community after the affair was found out. Then there was me and now this other man, this new man. She has been truly in love with five men and she is only thirty-seven.
         
It had been raining off and on for the past week but it had finally stopped long enough for the pavement to dry. It was dark outside but the pavement was dry for the first time in a week, that was a good sign I supposed. Some cheery people had already put up their Christmas decorations and it was only the first of December. My Christmas decorations wouldn’t go up until the week of Christmas if they went up at all. Everyone else in the neighborhood was so damn intent on trying to seem the most seasonally festive and loving functional family in the world, so they went overboard. They put nice little Christmas cards on everyone’s doorstep with a picture of the whole family, the kids and dog and all, with seasonal greetings from the Whatever family. They all did it and they all looked so phony and black-and-whitish. The Thompson’s had the dog wearing a Santa hat and big white beard and the father was holding a smoking pipe in his hand. I never once printed a personalized Christmas card and I’ll shoot myself in the middle of the street before I do. They were all just trying to cover something up.
         
The thumbtack slipped into my gums and I tasted blood, but didn’t feel any pain.
         
When drinking in that foreign city where I met her we used to play this game in the local bar. It was childish and pointless but we had fun with it. We’d get a bottle of whatever we were drinking that night, rum, whiskey, gin, vodka, tequila, or any sort of booze that was at least eighty proof. We’d get enough shot glasses for anyone who was drinking with us that night and we’d sit around the table slapping each other in the face. It was a game we used to play in the army and it was immature and the only point of it was to drink until you had no more feeling. We’d slap each other and if you felt the sting of the slap you had to take a shot. It took me about seven or eight normally but one night it had taken ten shots before I couldn’t feel Booth slap me. Booth was always my right hand man and accordingly he always sat to the right of me while we drank, the person to the right of you was always the one who slapped you, we went clock-wise and slapped left-handed always. There are rules to every game, even our dumb drinking game had rules. Booth took three swings before he hit me for the ninth time, he had already taken seven shots and was out of the game having not felt the eighth slap against him.
         
I was close to death, I was on the very verge of it. Or maybe I wasn’t but it felt that bad about twenty minutes after my last shot. Nobody went over ten that night, I don’t think anyone ever topped twelve. You had to wait at least ten minutes in between shots to let the alcohol take effect. The most stimulating conversation I’ve ever had was in the ten minutes in between shots. We normally talked about the war, or about English and South American soccer. I was the only one calling it soccer and I never learned to call it football like the others. I was the only American in the group, the war had not been a very American affair. Mostly British and South American.
         
I had been completely sexless since we’d left Budapest for this tiny shit country somewhere in between two of the greatest nowheres ever. They spoke about ten different languages, they had none of their own and like most countries in the world they had once been part of the British Empire. The mark was still left from this regime as well as the French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch regimes that had also at one time or another called it part of their foreign territory. The most comforting mark the British left on the country had been her, as soon as she’d come into the lady’s restroom that I was puking all over I loved her. She had asked me if I was okay and I’d asked her where my drink was. I don’t believe it was love at first sight for her, but it was for me.
         
Booth had run off with some Persian whore and I was left alone with the bottle of gin, to this day I cannot drink gin. Booth had been in the war with me and had never once failed me as a soldier but he lost his steadfastness somewhere in between all the bars we passed through on our way from the war. We were diehards. The war had been over for six years but none of us had gone home yet, we’d pledged never to go home. We never touched any American continent, or any British island which had been our respective homes before the war. Anywhere else was fair game. It left some of the shittiest places in the world as our homes.
         
She fell in love with me somewhere in between Cairo and Hong Kong.
         
In between my Spanish, her French, Kern’s German, Russian, Pharisees and Arabic, Booth’s Mandarin, and our English we could go anywhere without language barriers, without borders. They say that more than eighty percent of the world speaks either English or Mandarin, if not as a primary language at least as a secondary one. Booth spoke Mandarin like a Chinese poet and Kern was born and raised in Germany before moving to Britain, the rest of us were proficient in our respective foreign languages, but no other Englishman spoke Mandarin like Booth did. Kern died in Ecuador from alcohol poisoning. He just slipped under the table and never woke up again. After that we quit playing our slapping/drinking game, which we had named the happy game, and never went to Germany, Austria, Russia or the Middle East out of respect for both Kern and his lingual talents. Berlin was my favorite city during all of our travels and after Kern died we never went there anymore. While he was alive we never once had any trouble with going to whatever country we wished but after his death we found our mastery of travels somewhat lacking. Apparently there is still a large portion of the world that cannot speak Spanish, French, Mandarin or English.
         
“We need a truly universal language.” I said aloud to myseld allowing the thumbtack to stick into my lip by accident, again no pain.
         
Her French was passable but had a distinctive colonial tint to it.
         
Her father was the ambassador to a country given its sovereignty too early, he was the de facto governor to a de facto British colony. He was full of de factos. He was a great man in a very de facto sense. She was a girl who knew more about coups than slumber parties all the way through her life. In Paris they preferred to speak English with her rather than French. She named our first daughter Paris anyways. She named all of our kids after foreign cities and countries. Paris, Cairo, Holland, and Israel. And even they know what she does. Our kids know why she goes away for so long at night.
         
I wish I could make everything better now but it’s past that. If I weren’t so afraid of loneliness maybe I’d get a divorce. But instead I’ll sit for hours in the armchair in front of the front door playing with a thumbtack in my mouth waiting for her to come home. I still love her and that’s the cold hard truth. I can’t leave her, she’s too much in me now. Love is a bastard thing to have.
         
I wish for a time better than this, like the times when boys would run along the white picket fences with a stick knocking it against each fencepost. I think everyone must wish they were living in another time at one point in their life but this is very strong with me. I wasn’t born in the right time. I’m too old fashioned for this year. I should have fought in one of the wars with reason instead of the war I did fight in. I should have lived in an age of advancement. I should have been so much more than I am now.
         
I decided I would wait only another hour before going to bed.
         
The thumbtack went back and forth over my teeth hypnotizing me with the rhythm it created. I stopped noticing it at all when it would slip into my gums, lips or tongue. It would slip in and I would just pull it back out and start all over again without noticing it. I didn’t even taste the blood after a while. No I just waited for her to come home and thought of her in Cairo. Cairo was such a better city than this one. She would never have done this in Cairo, I thought.
         
Somewhere there is a boy in the suburbs running home from school with a stick in hand hitting the fences as he passes, but that boy isn’t me. I’ll never be that boy and I never was that boy. Jesus Christ, that depresses me.