Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,106

fine cigar over his upper lip in order to savor the aroma as he searched in a side pocket (this is what is making him lean; it is not a distortion) for his clip’s special monogrammed case. Without informing Hope (an omission which was, I confess, petty, and that I was in all likelihood unwilling, by that point in the conflict, to give her the ‘satisfaction’ of it), I, during my annual Physical exam, requested a referral from our P.P.O.’s Health Plan’s ‘Primary care’ physician to one of the Plan’s designated ‘Ear, Nose and Throat’ specialists, who then subsequently examined my nasal passages, sinus cavities, trachea, adenoids and ‘soft’ palate, and pronounced that he saw no evidence of anything unusual or out of the ordinary. I later, however, made the mistake of ‘throwing’ this clean bill of health ‘up’ in Hope’s ‘face’ during one of the increasingly heated and upsetting arguments (these often occurring over the following morning’s breakfast) respecting the so-called ‘snoring’ issue, whereupon Hope seized on my failure to have told her about the ‘E., N. & T.’ referral as evidence that I ‘. . . kn[e]w the snoring [was] real,’ and was secretly concerned about it, and that I had been unwilling to tell her about the appointment in advance for fear that the specialist’s diagnosis would identify something amiss in my ‘soft’ palate or nasal passages and that I would have to admit openly to her that the ‘snoring [was] real’ and that all of my accusations that she was asleep and simply dreaming that I was snoring had been merely so much self serving ‘denial’ and ‘projection’ of the problem on to the ‘victim’ of it (referring to, of course, herself). These brief, bitter arguments—which came in waves or clusters throughout the Winter- and early Spring months, and most often tended to occur or ‘erupt’ at breakfast, fueled by a sleepless night and anxiety about facing the demands of the coming day on insufficient sleep, and were often so bitter and upsetting that I would then go through the subsequent commute and the first several hours of work in some type of emotional daze, mentally ‘re-playing’ the argument and conceiving of new ways to present or arrange evidence or catch Hope in a logical contradiction, sometimes going so far as to interrupt work in order to jot these ideas or cutting rejoinders down in the margins of my professional Day-planner for possible future use—were terrifying in their sudden heat and the speed with which they escalated in intensity and ‘spleen,’ as well as in the way Hope’s dry, dark, narrow, increasingly haggard face across the breakfast nook sometimes becomes nearly unrecognizable to me, twisted, distorted and even somewhat repellent in its anger and stony suspicion; and, for my part, I must confess that, at least once or twice, I had felt an actual urge to strike or shove her or up-end the nook’s breakfast hutch or table with rage, so ‘beside myself’ with irrational rage had I been ‘driven’ by the strange, stony, bitter and irrational obdurance with which she would flatly refuse to consider—to acknowledge even the bare possibility, despite all of the reasonable rebuttals, rejoinders, reasoned arguments, evidence, facts not in dispute and citations of precedent (there had, in the course of our marriage, been other conflicts in which Hope had been utterly convinced of the validity of her position, but had had to acquiesce in the face of subsequent proof that she had, in point of fact, been wrong, and had then had to apologize) which I advanced—that it was I who was awake and she who was—‘just possibly’—asleep, and that the ‘snoring’ issue was in point of fact in reality ‘[her] issue’ and was in fact capable of real resolution only by her ‘making [some kind of Medical, or even psychiatric] appointment.’ My hands sometimes literally trembled or shook with frustration and fatigue related disorientation as I started my vehicle, with a series of rapid, indistinct and unwelcome ‘images’ or hallucinatory distortions often also moving in rapid, arrhythmic succession across my ‘mind’s eye’ as I undertook my commute north up the Garden State Parkway. (In one of the most heated and upsetting of these arguments, I had only brought up the Ear, Nose and Throat examination as evidence that at least I, unlike Hope, was willing to entertain at least the possibility that I was somehow wrong and might in reality be somehow truly ‘snoring,’ and thus that any workable compromise