Exhaling a cloud of smoke, he looked for his answer. “Clitoris” was what he got. Why couldn’t he just be given the answers to his questions instead of some ridiculous, indirect puzzle piece? This answer was actually relatively direct, requiring no more than three logical steps to determine the true answer, but sometimes he would be required to make upwards of ten steps.
Every time Pierre’s wife saw him smoking – and by “every time” I mean literally every single time – she would make some comment about how he should stop and how he’s shortening his life, how he’ll never be able to enjoy his grandkids if he keeps smoking because he’ll be dead. Half the time Pierre would not even hear her. If, after her most recent comment, someone had asked Pierre whether or not his wife had just spoken, he would say that she hadn’t, and he would mean it. After thirty years of marriage he had become so adept at tuning her out that he only actually heard 30% of the things she said to him. No matter. A full 85% of the things she said to him were completely useless, so he only missed 4.5% of the things she said which were actually important, but 99% of those things weren’t actually that important, and the .045% of all the things she said that were actually important could always be repeated.
It was tough for Pierre to find the motivation to quit smoking. He knew that the scientists had determined long ago that smoking causes cancer, etc, but his father, a two-pack-a-day smoker for eighty years, was still alive and well at 95 years old. He didn’t even need a nurse or a helper. He still wiped his own ass, still bought his own cheap whiskey by driving to the store in his own car. Perhaps he shouldn’t be driving at his age with his poor eyesight and hearing and arthritis, but Pierre would have liked to see anyone try to take away his father’s car keys. It would have been an ugly scene. His father was stubborn and independent. His mother, a non-smoker, had died of cancer when she was sixty. She too had pestered her husband about his smoking. Maybe the act of annoying others shortens one’s life, in a somewhat twisted kind of poetic justice.
As a matter of fact, now that Pierre thought about it, everyone in his family who was a smoker had lived, or was living to an old age. And at least half of the non-smokers had died relatively young. He considered that maybe his genetics were such that smoking actually increased his health. Regardless, he could never quit anyway. Smoking gave him the answers to all of his questions, and they were good answers, albeit often labyrinthine.
When I say smoking gave him the answers to all of his questions, I speak literally – Pierre would ask a question, take a long, slow drag from his cigarette, and as he exhaled the cloud of smoke, the answer to his question would appear amid the cloud in the form of a one-word answer. No one else could see the words, so Pierre had long ago stopped telling people about his genie-like clouds of smoke because they thought he was kidding. And when they realized he was serious, they thought he was stupid. So he stopped telling people, and they just figured he was a contemplative man, smoking his cigarettes slowly and deliberately, peering at the blown smoke with a furrowed brow. Pierre rather enjoyed the reputation of being contemplative because it made people think he was smarter than he was.
The answers were never direct. The question which had prompted the answer of “clitoris” was, “How can I get my wife to stop bothering me about my smoking?” Although he had not heard his wife’s latest nag, he had noticed her demeanor, which was that of a hands-on-the-hips mother looking down at her son for doing something mischievous. Pierre was very perceptive of body language, which is how he got away with hearing so little of what his wife said.
Although indirect, this “clitoris” answer was quite obvious. By paying more attention to his wife’s vagina, specifically her clitoris, by giving her oral sex and regular sex more often (i.e. ever), she would be less antsy and less nagging. She’d be happier. But the thought disgusted Pierre.
He married her when he was thirty-five and she was twenty-two, she being fresh out of college, he being a wealthy alcoholic. They met at a bar, drunk, and he took her home that night. When she nagged him for the very first time about his smoking that night, he told her he only smoked when he drank, just to shut her up. Even if that were true, he’d still have smoked a lot of cigarettes.
While she was very beautiful, she wasn’t good at sex at all, although she was very easy. It made no sense to Pierre how a girl could be so easy and so experienced, but so bad at sex. He didn’t plan on seeing her ever again, except that he got her pregnant that night, and in that time, when you got a girl pregnant, you married her. So he married her. And she got better at sex, and stayed beautiful, for a while. But thirty years later, at fifty-two, she had put on over a hundred pounds and decided that very short hair would be easier to maintain. That is to say, she had completely given up.
She had a naturally small head, and with her short hair and rotund torso, she looked as if someone had stuck a pin into a tennis ball that had grown stubby arms and legs and been draped in a loose, colorful, stained napkin. She always had food stains on her clothes. It would be tough for someone who ate so much food so often not to have as many stains. There was no way he was ever having sex with her again. Gross. He was getting his rocks off with the forty year-old neighbor anyway, so he had resigned himself to tolerating his wife’s condescending body language. Those hands on the hips and that fat face. How annoying, how disgusting. Her hips and body were so wide that her arms were almost straight out to the sides when she put them on her hips. It looked as if she were preparing to give a hug, but with a smug, demeaning look on her face. It made no sense. It was repulsive.
“Clitoris”. What a stupid answer. Still, he believed it was true, although he would never know for sure.