Study in Perfect (11 page)

Q:
My husband has a sweet body odor after even one drink. I have a good nose and can always tell. Mornings, the bedroom smells syrupy, like peaches soaked in brandy. The odor has soaked into the pillows, sheets, even my own nightgown if he holds me at night. I can hardly sleep. I used to shower every other day. Now, it's every single morning. He's a teacher and I'm worried one of his students will notice too and he'll lose his job.

A:
The smell comes from ketones. In alcoholic ketoacidosis, alcohol causes dehydration and blocks the first step of gluconeogenesis. The body is unable to synthesize enough glucose to meet its needs, thus creating an energy crisis resulting in fatty-acid metabolism and ketone body formation. It happens in diabetes too. Is your husband Asian, by any chance? They often lack a certain enzyme, causing booze to be metabolized differently (and making them feel as if they are taking Antabuse)
.

In any case, I suggest your husband visit a doctor
.

The cat is back, bearing on his back an enormous box like a redwood Jacuzzi. He flips the hook and two blue-haired spawn rush out dressed in miniature full-body sleeper suits. But no, they aren't sleeping; they are
flying
, followed by contrails and rapid ink-slashes. They pause briefly to shake hands with poor Sally and her brother, then like gunshot dash off again. Thing One and Thing Two like to fly kites! High, higher, highest! In the house! No matter the spillage and untidiness! In comes mother's polka-dotted dress on a string. Down goes momma's vanity, perfume, and brush. Sally is blown off her feet. Brother grips a doorjamb for dear life, as two Things careen around corners, tear up the stairs. This is worse than any argument or fender bender. Says the fish, “No! No! / Those things should not be / In this house! Make them go!”

The kids knew he liked his ice chipped from the fridge door and a French jelly glass set to the right of his special chair. He had
them well trained by age five; snack of Smokehouse almonds before dinner, or Goldfish in a salad bowl. He was their hero as he sat and sat and sat with his laptop, building mountains of cool stuff from eBay—antique fountain pens, Bakelite, letterpress furniture, or custom-made knives. Two dozen Catalin poker chips, spilling over the coffee table and onto the floor! Packages of fonts so heavy the postman wondered out loud if they weren't bars of gold. The knives were impressive, made of rippled steel, inlaid pearl on the grip, and blue-black blades. He called the girls to his chair, snapped his wrist forward to show them the cutting edge etched with curlicues. Again and again, he flipped the knife open. With each click he growled like a wolf and the startled children jumped back.

I stood before them, straining like the fish from its fishbowl: “Stop, please. Put that away. What are you, Crocodile Dundee or something?”

Who loves the fish? Prickly finned, frowning with wrinkled pink fishy skin. Each word overpronounced, clipped. No-fun fish, too strict, and always worrying about homework or junk food. Too easy to mock, lots of fun to run from with a snicker and hoot.

Shaving one morning, my husband lingered outside the girls' bedroom. Their noses were pressed to the back window, which was large and framed their small bodies with room to spare. In each hand they held a pastel-colored My Little Pony, and there were more on the floor behind them, piled in a heap. They paused in their play to stare down into the alley, a stone's throw from the house. On the asphalt, a drunk lay face down, his jacket oily, pants crumpled, and one of his shoes missing. He resembled a filled-in version of a police outline at a murder scene, right hand and knee raised, cheek turned to the left.
Drivers backed up, honking, then inched forward, negotiating their vehicles around him, but no one stopped or called. The man had a head of thick, black, only slightly disheveled hair, which unsettled Laura. “That looks like Dad,” she said, turning to her sister. “Make that cat go away!” said the fish. “Tell that Cat in the Hat / You do NOT want to play.”

Once I took a walk with my father, in town for just a few days. Showing obvious restraint, weaving the question around and about, he finally asked me if I thought my husband had a drinking problem. “Well no,” I said, “he can handle a lot. Hardly ever gets drunk. He's a big guy.” This I reported with only an ounce of concern, “Right, honey?”

Later, a famous poet came to visit, widow of a fiction writer well known for his addictions. She had thick hennaed hair and a maternal touch, waiting all day till they were alone before she took him out to the back porch: “Maybe you ought to shorten up on the booze, friend.”

Spirit signals, like buoys blinking in high sun. In the moment they seemed irrelevant, unconvincing. But, peering out from the dark descended, their swaying lights formed a neat line straight to the shore.
I should have paid attention
. But he did pay attention in a backdoor way. Their warnings slipped in and smoldered along with his own low-register fear.

The mind grows languid that has no excesses
.
—
FRANCIS BACON

The sun spreads in the west like Courvoisier with a lick of blue flame. Excess, ecstasy. A going out, beyond, loss of possessions, self-possession,
excedere, excessum
.

Temperance is like wholesome cold, it collects
and braces the powers of the mind
.
—
FRANCIS BACON

Patient, calm, sedate.
Abstinere
. I abstain, keep, hold. Where does
your
mind work best?

Like so many other writers, he suspected drinking was fuel for creativity. There was the evidence: books published, plays produced, grants won. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, James Wright. Still, he noticed the lapses, skin blotchy and cold; nerves when he gave a poetry reading or presented the same old material to his class as if he didn't know how. Once, a Target clerk called the only number she could locate in a stack of poetry portfolios left by the register. The student drove by to pick them up that afternoon and brought them to class. “Hey, absent-minded professor. Look what I found.” They all had a good laugh. Ha! Ha!

Sally's bow droops like rain-heavy pansy petals. Mother's dress has been dragged across the carpet, spotted with lint, cat hair, cake crumbs. Brother holds an upside-down kite, and the fish issues commands from its teapot. What to do with a mess this wide and deep and tall? Every object has fallen cockeyed: frame on a wire, telephone off its cradle, crooked plates in a crooked
pile, vase toppled, pink chair on its side kicking its fat little legs. This is some kind of hairbrushbowlsoapdishteacupbook soup! Where to start, where to start, if that is at all possible? “This mess is so big and so deep and so tall, we cannot pick it up. There is no way at all!” The children's arms hang like loose rubber bands; they're up to their middles in crap.

Lindsey B. Zachary points out in “Formalist and Archetypal Interpretations of
The Cat in the Hat
” that nearly half of the book's sentences end in exclamation points. There are several ways to voice this form of punctuation: One, with an excited lift like the cat's “Look at me! / Look at me now!” Two, with a scolding, insistent tone, as the fish declares, “He has gone away. Yes. / But your mother will come. / She will find this big mess!” To add heft Seuss uses caps: “Now what SHOULD we do?”

Zachary continues, examining the book through Northrop Frye's mythos of satire: “Throughout
The Cat in the Hat
there is … a comic struggle between two domains, one emphasizing traditional morals while the other is a fantastical explosion of chaos and entertainment.” No wonder teachers and parents were worried the book would displace the staid and incredibly boring primer
Dick and Jane
. Imagine a classroom turned upside-down by the suggestion of FUN, not to mention AUTHORITY teetering on the slippery handle of a crooked umbrella!

Children love to be brought to the edge but rely on adults to be pulled back to safety. As Zachary notes, Sally and her brother “are watching the comic struggle between the worlds of order
and fantasy, and they maintain their balance in the midst of the chaos simply by staying silent, eyes open.” The fish does the talking, and like the fish, I tried to arrest the cascade of events set into motion by someone else's out-of-bounds behavior. Planted my body before him, pointed with my index finger, declared what he should or should not do. Control (or the attempt to control) was my disease, and it encompassed things large (drinking) and small (pillowcase folded just so).