Dreadful Nonsense

Here, mere months since the last time, lovely Dave Eggers has used my name in a short short story. It's love for sure this time.

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There was a writer, named Sharon, who wrote stories and was known far and wide and was deeply read. Her stories were, more often than not, about unhappy marriages, about infidelity, about malaise and marital dyspepsia. She wrote about such things not because her own marriage was troubled, but because she was happily married - to Gil, a life coach whose clients were motivational speakers, chiefly - and she wanted to write fiction that was clearly fiction. Stories about happy people in happy unions would seem, she thought, to be based on her own contented life, and thus to maintain the privacy of her husband she wrote about sadness, rage and betrayal - things foreign to herself and Gil. But her readers, thinking themselves savvy, assumed she was writing about her own life, subtly disguised, that she, Sharon, was trapped in a loveless home, that she found refuge in these semi-fictional outlets-slash-cries for help. About this, Gil was not happy. People stopped him on the street and advised how he might work things out with the dear and talented Sharon. And because so many of her stories involved men with small apparati who cheated on their devoted wives, most people - thousands of strangers! - suspected Gil of infidelity and diminutive prowess. About this, he also was not happy. He brought it up with Sharon, and she laughed and called him silly. But did she consider it silly when Gil began to spend time in clubs where women danced without their clothes on? Was it silly when he took up with a dancing woman named Chesty Bazoombas (the surname was Greek), who listened to him and was a great comfort in many other ways, too? Sharon did not find this funny or silly, and was not smiling a year later when the divorce was final, when Gil and Chesty were off together living in some suburb named Moonpie, and when Sharon had nothing to do - for fiction would only allow her stories of the happily betrothed - but to switch to memoir. And the world had far, far too many memoirs already.

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Last time I decided it was a secret proposal for my hand in marriage. And the time between that one and this one is obviously just the time it's taken him to write it, get it to the Guardian, and get them to publish it, so obviously this is his way of letting me know that he's accepted my acceptance, and now we are to be married for sure, just as soon as he gets rid of his pesky wife. He has confirmed he will indeed be one of the many Daves I am to marry.

This entry was posted on 25 September 2004 at 9:35 pm. 0 comments

Dreadful Nonsense

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