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On a bitterly bleak New York Saturday afternoon, as Felix Feinman sat beside a grim-faced, bed-ridden Mrs Feinman and read The Kugelmass Episode aloud to her, he raised his eyes above the black and white of the printed page, glanced at the sullen face of his wife of thirty-nine years and decided he’d had enough and resolved to proceed with his plan to engage in a clandestine affair with someone a tad more blithesome.
Had he and Mrs Feinman not been walking down 10th Avenue the previous Sunday, Felix doubted he would have even considered such an audacious act of adultery. After all, one doesn’t make such decisions lightly. But the events of the last week had driven him to the brink, and now beyond. For nearly forty years, Felix had endured Mrs Feinman’s temper and nagging tongue. No matter how small or how still he made himself, she always found him and found fault with him. And once caught in the crosshairs of her wrath—with her bluing face and her bulging eyes and her puffing cheeks and her clenching fists—Felix could do naught but cower as she unleashed a right royal bollocking upon him.
A casual observer of the Feinman marriage might well ask Felix, ‘Why do you tolerate such a harridan?’ To which Felix should have replied, ‘It’s none of your business,’ but to which he would have replied, ‘Because I can still make her laugh, and to hear her laugh makes my heart sing.’ For one bond remained steadfast throughout the four decades of the lopsided Feinman marriage, one adhesive that kept them together: Mrs Feinman’s sporadic sense of humour. On occasions, when Mrs Feinman’s face blued and her eyes bulged and her cheeks puffed and her fists clenched, Felix—in an act some would call brave and others would call foolish—would try to douse the flames of her rage with a quick quip or a pithy punchline. And on some of those occasions, Mrs Feinman’s face might pink and her eyes might contract and her cheeks might deflate and her fists might unclench, and she would release a raucous, jowl-wobbling, belly-jiggling, side-stitching laugh. But not for too long, mind you, as she didn’t want to allow her husband more than a moment’s joy. But long enough for Felix to remain content living, figuratively and physically, in the conjugal shadow of the much taller, much larger and exceedingly acidulous Mrs Feinman.
But on most occasions—and with increasing frequency in recent months—his attempted jest failed to alter his wife’s stern demeanour, and Felix, sensing a haranguing from her, beat a hasty retreat to the solitude of his study and sought solace by sitting in his battered leather reading chair and immersing himself in the printed words of a leather-bound classic or accompanying the dulcet tones of Pavarotti, Di Stefano or Caruso as they serenaded the world’s great divas.
But last week, on a bleak wintry Sunday afternoon prior to Felix’s adulterous resolution, Mrs Feinman suffered a most terrible loss.
As the Feinmans walked along 10th Avenue—Felix two steps behind his wife and dutifully hauling their shopping trolley—and they neared 54th Street, Mrs Feinman stopped and rummaged inside her handbag.
‘Felix!’ she said. ‘I can’t find it!’
‘Find what, my dear?’ Felix said absent-mindedly as he daydreamed about delivering a witty punchline during his debut performance on Saturday Night Live.
‘My sense of humour!’ She turned her handbag upside down, and its contents spilled onto the sidewalk. ‘I’ve lost it! And it’s all your fault!’
‘I’ve no doubt it is, my dear. When did you last have it?’ Presentiment stooped Felix’s shoulders.
‘I had a titter to myself while waiting for the pedestrian light on the corner of 52nd Street and 10th Avenue. Don’t stand there! Do something!’
Felix raised his foot and checked under the sole of his shoe. ‘Not under there, my dear.’ And he permitted himself a chuckle.
‘This is no laughing matter, Felix!’ Mrs Feinman raised and pointed a threatening index finger at her husband. ‘Go back and look for it!’
Having abandoned his trolley to his wife’s ill-tempered watch, Felix backtracked towards 52nd Street. As he looked along the gutter and inside trash cans, he lamented Mrs Feinman’s forgetfulness. She had misplaced her sense of humour with increasing regularity over recent months. She would enter the lounge room with a terse face and a temper and blame Felix and say either ‘You distracted me, Felix!’ or ‘You’re doing this deliberately, Felix!’ or ‘Felix, this is what you want, isn’t it? To get me into the nuthouse so you can take off with some wanton hussy!’. And all Felix could do was reply, ‘No, my dear.’ And he would abandon his newspaper or his book or his painting by numbers and search the apartment. At first, he found his wife’s missing trait with ease, either perched upon her head or under a couch cushion or on her bedside table, but in recent weeks, with the losses occurring daily or more often, his wife grew more irritable and the hiding places more obscure: in the Earl Grey tea leaves canister or in her bloomers drawer or bookmarking the dog-eared leaves of his battered copy of Tristram Shandy. Yesterday, he’d almost given up all hope when he paused for a cup of tea and bit into a cookie, only to crack a molar and spit the missing trait onto his plate.
But now, for the first time, Mrs Feinman had lost her sense of humour beyond the confines of their apartment. And Felix feared she’d lost it for good this time.
As he made his way down 10th Avenue, he continued his search, but Mrs Feinman’s sense of humour was nowhere to be seen. All he found were a couple of senses of obligation, a single sense of purpose and dozens and dozens of senses of wonder. Good God, he thought, it’s no surprise the world’s so apathetic these days, what with people’s wanton abandonment of their sense of wonder.
When Felix reached the pedestrian lights on the corner of 52nd and 10th, a glint on the sidewalk caught his eye. Could he be this lucky? he thought. He bent down but then cursed. No, not Mrs Feinman’s sense of humour, but a sense of dread, soldered to a quarter. Following a glance back towards Mrs Feinman, he picked up the coin and pocketed it. He figured he’d be needing it when he returned to Mrs Feinman and delivered the bad news. As he walked back, he prayed for his trouser pocket to fray so his sense of direction could drop and roll down a drain so it and him could disappear.
***
‘Oh, you’re hopeless, Felix!’ Mrs Feinman said. ‘You’re just like your mother!’
‘Yes, my dear.’ Felix gave the sense of dread in his pocket a squeeze.
‘So what are you going to do about it?!’
‘Me? I … I … let’s try the local police station.’
But a police officer at the 20th Precinct informed Felix that the station’s lost-and-found box contained dozens of senses of entitlement, several senses of occasion, one sense of belonging but not a single sense of humour.
While a stern-faced Mrs Feinman sat in the waiting room, Felix filled out a report.
‘Good luck,’ the police officer said to Felix, casting a glance at Mrs Feinman.
‘Thanks,’ Felix said as he dotted the i’s in his signature.
‘I suspect you’re going to need it.’ And the police officer gave Mrs Feinman another furtive glance.
***
When they arrived home, Mrs Feinman sat stony-faced on the couch while Felix placed advertisements in all the newspapers. He drafted posters that offered a significant reward. All evening he roamed the neighbouring streets, searching and pasting posters to lampposts and alleyway walls. When he climbed into bed at midnight, his wife stirred, turned her back to him, and with a huff and more than her fair share of the blanket, she muttered to herself into the wee hours of the morning.
All Monday, Felix wandered about the streets of their neighbourhood, searching for Mrs Feinman’s lost sense of humour. He spoke to dustmen and washerwomen and street-corner vendors, and all gave him a wry smile and an apology and wished him all the best in his ongoing search.
Again unsuccessful, Felix returned home late, and again his wife gave him the cold shoulder and little of the blanket.
On Tuesday morning, the phone rang.
‘Mr Feinman?’ a voice said.
‘Speaking.’
‘It’s Sergeant Peppa, down at the 20th. We’ve had a sense of humour turned in.’
‘I’ll be right down.’
‘Thank God!’ Felix said as he rushed out the apartment door. He ran all the way to the station and arrived at the desk, puffing and panting.
‘Feinman … here … call … Peppa … collect … wife’s … sense … humour.’
‘Ah, yes,’ the duty officer said. ‘It’s right here.’ He reached below the counter and then placed a crumpled package on the bench. ‘I’ll just need you to sign for it.’
Felix grabbed the pen the officer offered and scrawled his signature on the form presented to him. ‘Thanks,’ he said. He turned his back to the counter, ripped open the package and looked inside. ‘Oh God! No.’
He dinged the counter bell and waited for the duty officer to return.
‘Yes?’ the officer said.
‘I’m afraid there’s been a mistake. This is not my wife’s sense of humour. Hers is capricious and fleeting. This one’s black with a hint of sarcasm.’
On Wednesday, Felix took Mrs Feinman to a matinee performance of The Mikado at the Met. While he hummed and toe-tapped, Mrs Feinman sat grim-faced and slouched throughout the performance. Once the final applause had quiesced, she turned and gave her husband a death stare and whispered, ‘One is not amused, Felix!’
On Thursday, Felix spent all day sitting beside his wife as they watched I Love Lucy reruns. Despite copious servings of Earl Grey and her favourite macaroons, all she could offer at the end of each episode was a ‘Not funny, Felix!’ said through gritted teeth.
On Friday morning, Felix—now desperate and losing all hope—stood before a flinty Mrs Feinman, stripped to his white Y-fronts, pulled the elasticated briefs up over his head, hunched his back and sang “What would I do for my Queen?” from Esmeralda. ‘You’re a bigger fool than your father, Felix!’ Mrs Feinman said. ‘A gold-plated, certifiable, fourth-generation village idiot!’
When a melancholic Felix woke at dawn on Saturday to the solemn silence of a humourless house, he knew the death knell to his doomed marriage had rung. Thirty-nine years of marriage, he lamented, and with a whimper rather than a bang, a simple lost sense of humour had snuffed out the connubial flame. No love, no banter, no laughter. Just cohabitation with a prune of a woman—dark, shrivelled and, to be perfectly honest, now giving him the shits. What’s the point of being married if you can’t share a few laughs along the way?
He contemplated separation, even divorce, but neither was a viable option. Despite marrying money—serious money—he lived on a pitiful allowance allocated by his wife. He had no occupation and no money of his own. He’d published his one and only collection of short stories decades ago, a book that climbed The New York Times Best Sellers list, but he’d since frittered his royalties away. An ‘exceptional talent’ the critics had trumpeted of him and his thin book, only for Felix to fizzle out to a writer’s block now beyond its third decade.
Then there was the problem of Mrs Feinman’s family. His brother-in-law was New York’s best divorce attorney, his sister-in-law was New York’s leading gossip columnist, and his muscle-bound, floral-shirted nephew may have fooled the IRS into thinking he was a florist, but all the family knew he dabbled as a hitman on weekends.
No, there was no way he could get a divorce and not end up destitute, smeared by the New York dailies and at the bottom of the Hudson River in a barrel filled with quick-dry cement.
What about an extramarital affair? Felix thought. A little dalliance in a cheap hotel with a winsome creature who could do nothing but laugh at his witty repartee. No, he lamented, who was he fooling? Aside from his cash flow problems, there was Mrs Feinman’s grey army with whom to contend—her network of sleeper cells posted throughout greater New York, who with a speed dial could report his transgressions or infidelities.
Yep, she had him by the short and curlies, and he would just have to grin and bear it until either someone found Mrs Feinman’s missing sense of humour or he could arrange a replacement.
But then on Saturday afternoon, as he sat bedside and quietly read The Kugelmass Episode to his ailing wife, the solution to his dilemma presented itself.
***
That night, Felix tiptoed into his study and closed the door with a prolonged creak. He placed his ear against the door, held his breath and listened. Nothing. Just black silence in the still of the night and Mrs Feinman asleep and ignorant of her husband’s soon-to-be treachery.
Thrill and fear bubbled at the surface of Felix’s daring. His plan was simple. All he needed to do was sit at his desk, feed an unsullied sheet of paper into his old typewriter, then set his perfidious fingers upon the keys and take one of the Canon’s great beauties—at the depth of her despair and on the cusp of taking her life—and type himself into her harrowed heart. Sure, it wasn’t the real deal, but, to him, it was the next best thing. He admitted he was getting them at their most vulnerable, but surely he, in a shiny suit of armour and upon a trusty steed, could ride into their cursed lives and offer them hope for a better life with a better suitor than those whimsical, chisel-chinned, self-centred bad boys they’d taken up with. Let him be their Perseus, their saviour. And he was sure they, in the throes of gratitude and love, would gift him the most glorious of laughs. All he had to do was get it down in black and white, and all the colours in between would weave their magic. Yes, let the hues of his imagination fill the void that was his humourless heart.
But whose harrowed heart should he win? Madame Bovary, that seminal heroine of literary realism? They did have dour spouses in common, after all, but, no, Emma was just a tad too promiscuous for his taste. All those late nights, all that partying and drinking and dancing. No, not her, thank you very much. Besides, despite his taking a dozen lessons at his local Arthur Murray Studio, he couldn’t dance.
Felix ran his eyes along his crammed bookshelves until he spotted his leather-bound copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Surely the Bard could spare one of his beauties. What about Ophelia? Surely he was a chirpier suitor for her than that sullen, dithering Prince of Danish Darkness. Or Juliet? Just before she plunges that dagger? No, too big an age gap, and he wasn’t too sure his wonky knees could cope with climbing up to that balcony. Besides, speaking in all that iambic pentameter would do his head in.
Felix’s eyes fell upon his dusty volume of Tennyson. What could the good Lord Alfred offer him? Of course, he thought, the Lady of Shalott. No, not her. She’d be all smoke and mirrors. Never look you directly in the eye and declare her true love. And any woman who’d spent so much time cooped up on an island called Shalott must surely reek of onion breath when releasing a laugh or kissing.
Felix sighed and picked up a bust sitting on his sideboard. Helen of Troy, all coyness, avoided his inquisitive gaze. Why not a Greek goddess? he thought. The personification of ideal beauty who’d no doubt have the most perfect of laughs. Surely she whose face launched a thousand ships could release a thousand laughs. No, she was trouble. Real trouble. All those suitors. All that kidnapping. All those wars. He knew that even if he put in all the groundwork, some Trojan on his high horse was sure to sneak in and steal his way into her heart, and then all three of them would gallop off over the horizon.
Felix looked about his study, beyond his bookshelves and upon his wall, and that’s when he saw her, posing in a black and white still surrounded by a gilt-edged frame. 1967. During Zarkhi’s classic making of Tolstoy’s masterpiece. In the photo she stood on the station platform, graceful yet forlorn. Of course, he thought, she would be perfect.
And with a shiver of glee, Felix Feinman placed his fingers upon the keyboard and typed.
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