Read Online The Funny Man by John Warner - Free Book Online Page B

is different and sexy. Her eyebrows have been trained by a professional into tapered arches that accentuate her truly excellent bone structure. Previously, if someone had asked him about his wife, he would have said she was “perfect looking,” and meant it, but here she is looking better than perfect , which would’ve seemed impossible until everything seemed possible. How is it that the boundaries of the possible can move? It is not possible and yet it has been happening to the funny man.
    Lately he has begun mentally listing those things that separate before from after: First the house, with its multiple floors and yard, as opposed to the apartment where they shared their bedroom with the child (the antiaphrodisiac, they joked) and where the kitchen and living room were one space, really; only formality and a two-stool breakfast bar designating them as different. There is now a car for each of them, new ones with six cylinders and leather, and of course, the true indulgence—the one thing he couldn’t imagine he was buying, could not justify buying even as he read his credit card number over the phone to the toll-free operator—the chair that massages him with thousands of tiny fingers while he sits in front of the TV, which unfortunately also makes the TV look like it is jiggling, something that was not noted in the catalog description of the magic chair; which, come to think of it, specifically mentioned being able to watch TV while enjoying the massage and the heat. But no mind. How many people even own such a chair? Enough to make it worthwhile to put out a catalog filled with these sorts of luxury items, the funny man supposed.
    And now this wife with professional eyebrows, not that they were a problem before (though she is half-Italian), but clearly, these are better—can he actually count the number of hairs left in the brows? He thinks he can. Yes, it is like they have been cut and combed, each hair the perfect length. There are people who excel at shaping a woman’s eyebrows and his wife now goes to these people because of him and his success. Is this a source of pride? Sure. Of course. Just a year or so ago, before he’d met the clapping man, he was not even aware of these needs, but now, here they are, permanent and obvious.
    And yet, every time he sits in the special massaging chair and tries to watch the shimmying television screen, rather than relaxed, he feels irritated, enraged even. Several times he has begun composing angry letters in his head to the chair-manufacturing company and the catalog that sells it. He added a three-minute bit about the chair to his act, pretending that he’d only tried one at a friend’s house, a friend who was clearly the kind of asshole who would plunk down two months of the average American salary for a chair.
    Seriously, though, had the chair company never actually tried watching television while utilizing both the heat and massage features? Seems inconceivable. They must have noticed this and suspected it was a fatal flaw, but chose to lie to save their own researched and developed hides. He should call. “Hello, this is … Yes, that is me. What is my concern? Let me tell you my concern… .”
    Boy, is he nervous. He doesn’t remember ever being this nervous. Not when he got married, not when the child was born. He had complete faith in the rightness of the outcome on both of those occasions, the bliss of ignorance. Both events were complicated, and one (the birth) was downright gory, but he does not remember any doubts. This time, there are doubts for sure, a sense that this could be it, that his career is a balloon that has been inflating from a tank of nitrous, with this gig as a giant pin of “fuck you, you’re not fucking funny.”
    His wife wears a black dress cut above the knee that rides even higher when she snugs back, settling deep into the limo’s leather seat. Beneath the dress, her dark nylons work in conjunction with her pressed-together legs