Pug

   by Dennis Vannatta

Kirk Adair, Stan Dean’s best friend since their schooldays, said that the way to preserve a relationship was simply never to say that one worst thing, the thing you couldn’t come back from.  Although Kirk had never married nor been in a relationship longer than a Netflix miniseries and therefore could hardly claim to be a font of wisdom in such matters, his declaration made sense to Stan.  Hence, Stan was always on his guard when the subject turned to his wife’s nose.

           Pug nose.

           The nose didn’t bother Stan, not a bit.  It was his wife, Charli, who was obsessed with it.  She was liable to mention it at any time day or night, and instantly Stan would find himself straddling a big bomb with a short fuse.

           They were dating the first time she called his attention to it.

           “Hey, I think it’s cute,” he said, confident in his response.

           His confidence was misplaced.

           “Bullshit bullshit bullshit!” she shrieked, hurling herself out of his car on the Shakey’s Pizza parking lot.  “I can’t be with a goddamn liar!”

           He got out of the car and followed her around the lot apologizing profusely even though he wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for, and somehow he made things right.

           No, her nose wasn’t cute, but it wasn’t exactly ugly, either.  In fact, it might have been sort of cute on a different woman.  A short woman, say, with a round face, maybe dimples.  Short woman, short, upturned nose.  Kinda cute.

           But Charli was tall and slender with long straight coal-black hair, Nefertiti eyes, and lips that stretched out into a smile that seemed to say, “I’m onto you, Bub.  I know what you’re thinking.”  That smile still made Stan weak in the knees after fourteen years of marriage.  Bottom line:  her pug nose just didn’t go with the rest of Charli.  Hardly ugly, though.

           Don’t bother explaining that to her, though.  Don’t go there.

           What bothered Charli most was the way the nose sloped downward from the tip to the philtrum, fully exposing the nostrils.  If you were on the same level with her—which Stan was, Charli being almost as tall as he, and taller in heals—you could look right into her nostrils.  A thing, generally speaking, you did not want to do.  There might be something in there.  Erk!

           Stan knew this bothered her because she was forever probing those nostrils with a tissue-wrapped index finger.  Women tended to be much more assiduous about cleaning their noses than men, Stan had noticed.  A man will just blow his nose and give it a follow-up wipe or two, bingo, done.  But a woman will really get in there and root around, then often as not peer closely at the tissue to see what if anything had been extracted.  Ack!  Stan once asked a girlfriend, pre-Charli, why women did this.  End of relationship.  Lesson learned.  He never mentioned her maniacal nostril-cleaning to Charli even though it was hard not to watch, like a really cheesy reality series.  She’d go at it with a will, using both index fingers, digging into both nostrils simultaneously.  Then inspect that tissue.  Happened several times a day.  Stan loved her anyway.

           He did, he did love her.  He loved her every day of the fourteen years of their marriage, enduring three miscarriages, a combined three career changes, a devastating house fire, and a scary neighbor with four pit bulls.  He loved her, and it drove him crazy to think it could all be put in jeopardy by one wrong word about a goddamn pug nose.

*

           Twice, in fact, he’d slipped, nearly bringing disaster down upon them.

           They’d been married only a couple of years the first time.  They were taking a walk in the neighborhood when a tiny dog came flying around the corner of a house at them.

yap yap yap yap yap yap yap

           It danced a circle around them, yapping and glaring at them with bug-eyed fury.

           Then a woman in robe, curlers, and house slippers big as the dog emerged from the house.

           “Oscar!  Oscar!  Get back!  Don’t worry, he’ll bark but he won’t bite.  Oscar!”

           She padded down the steps and walkway and finally corralled her dog.  She held it in her arms cooing to it.

           Stan joked that he was relieved to be saved from the “vicious beast.”  Charli, who disliked all small animals and most children, said that Oscar was adorable and made a gesture of patting it on the head, not quite making contact.

           They walked on off.

           Once they were safely out of earshot, Stan said, “Those pugs are ugly critters.”

           They jarred to a stop simultaneously, Stan stunned by the enormity of his utterance, Charli to hear it.

pug                              ugly

            They finished their walk in silence.

            Back home:  silence.

            What should he do?  Speak up, confront the beast, lance that wound, air it out, let it heal?  Or say nothing, pretend nothing had happened, wait for it eventually to blow over (hours, days, weeks, who knew?).

            He couldn’t stand the mounting pressure of silence.

            “Look, Charli, I can tell you’re upset, but you know I was talking about the dog.  You know that.”

            Sudden tears, trembling, tendons in neck taut to the point of snapping, face turning various hues.

            “Pug ugly!  You said it and you meant it.  Pug ugly!  Hell, it’s the truth, isn’t it?  Ugly freaking pug dog named after an ugly freaking pug nose.”

            “You know, I could be wrong here, but I’d guess it was the nose named for the dog, and not the dog for the nose.”

            Apparently not the right thing to say.

            Days upon days of domestic torment followed.  Something like normalcy was finally restored when both realized that they loved each other and each felt that life was better with the other in it.  A near thing, though.

*

            The second slip was fourteen years into their marriage.  You’d have thought that Stan would be used to it by then—Charli’s endlessly examining herself in the mirror amid sighs, low moans, and grunts, canting her head left and right, up and down, minutely inspecting her nose from all anatomically possible angles, always finding it lacking, no, worse than lacking, finding it an obscene excrescence smack in the middle of an otherwise faultless visage. 

            “Come on, Charli, nobody’s perfect.”

            It popped out before he knew it.  He certainly hadn’t intended to say it—he wasn’t crazy, after all.  But, although he might deny it to her, he couldn’t deny it to himself:  it was what he felt and had always felt.  Maybe, after fourteen years, he’d simply had enough pretending.

            She turned from the mirror, so slowly and ominously that he thought of the old Vaudeville routine—“Slowly I turned . . .”—and hiccupped a laugh which, from the look on her face, Charli took to be directed at her nose.

            Normally, this would have been the point where Stan would have crumpled into a quivering, cringing heap of apologies.  Instead—fourteen years, remember—he continued the attack, sending in the reserves and the Old Guard.

            “Charli, Charli, look in that mirror again, take in the whole picture, not just that one thing.  Look.  You’re a lovely woman, the same lovely woman I fell in love with and still love.  Why can’t you be as satisfied with that as I am?  But no, you demand perfection.  Well, sweetheart, who’s perfect?  No one.  Everyone has something wrong with them.”  Charli sagged back against the vanity, eyes welling.

            “So you really do think there’s something wrong with my nose.”

            They stuck it out for a few more months.  Then one day Stan returned from work and found a note from Charli on the vanity.  He skimmed it to the last line:  “I hope someday you’ll find someone who matches your high standards.”

*

            Apparently Charli hadn’t consulted a divorce attorney, or she never would have gone back to her parents, abandoning the house to Stan.  Not that Stan wanted the house.  He wanted Charli.  But it was over.  He knew that.  He made a few calls to her parents’ house anyway, got through to her once, ran into her once in the produce section of the supermarket, but it was no good.  Over.

            The divorce proceedings were more amicable than most.  They sold the house and split everything 50-50.  Charli got the Volvo, Stan the Jeep.  No alimony.  Hell, Charli had a better job than Stan.

            It wasn’t until after the divorce was final that Stan found out that Charli had moved in with Kirk.  Stan didn’t think that the affair had started until after the split.  Kirk wouldn’t do that to him.  Charli . . . ?

            A few months later, Stan ran into Kirk at a Humane Society fundraiser.

            Kirk beat his breast three times in a penitential act that might well have been genuine and asked, “Do you hate me?”

            Stan said no and was surprised to find that he meant it.

            “If it hadn’t been you it would have been somebody else,” he said.

            “Things hadn’t been going well for you two for a while, then?  Not that it’s any of my business, not at all, but Charli never talks about your marriage.”

            “I guess it never did go as well as it should have, not even at the beginning.  We never could get past that pug nose,” he said with a bitterness that he regretted.  He didn’t regret feeling the bitterness—he couldn’t help that—only showing it.  He wanted to be above such things, didn’t want to show the world his pain.  What did he have left except dignity?  Or at least an attempt at dignity.

            Kirk frowned at him a moment as if he couldn’t understand what Stan was getting at with his pug nose reference.  But then it seemed to dawn on him.

            “Charli’s pug nose.  Isn’t that funny,” he said, not quite laughing.  “That’s what sort of sealed the deal for us, so to speak.  I mean, after we got together.  After you were separated, I mean.  We met a few times, just for coffee or a piece of pie, like that, not dates really at first.  We never got through one of those dates, whatever, without her taking out a mirror and looking at her nose.  I don’t remember saying anything about it, but I guess she noticed that I noticed, so she told me how much she hated her nose.  I said I thought it was cute.  That’s what did it.  She just opened up, you know, like a blossom.”

            “Thanks for that image, Kirk.”

            Kirk held his hands up placatingly.

            “No no no.  I don’t mean sexually.  I just mean Charli seemed to come alive.  She accepted me.”

            Stan fought the bitterness, lost.

            “Well, isn’t that just super.  I told her I thought it was cute, too, and I about got my head taken off for it.”

            “Yeah, Stan, but I meant it.”

*

            It was on the tip of his tongue to say, “Well, it was a close race, but you won by a nose, Kirk.”  But he didn’t say it even though they could have parted with a laugh, and Stan would have left with at least a modicum of his dignity.

            Kirk would have left with Charli, though, and there wasn’t anything funny about that.

            Stan knew you could tell the story of his life, the most important part, the Charli part, wryly, or wittily, or even as farce, but he didn’t see anything funny about it.  His life had been a series of false starts and missteps, of good intentions misinterpreted and just plain bad luck.  Where was the humor?  And what now?

            He was thirty-five.  He was halfway there.

 

Bio:  Dennis Vannatta is a Pushcart and Porter Prize winner, with essays and stories published in many magazines and anthologies, includingGreen Silk Journal, River Styx, Boulevard, and Antioch Review.  His sixth collection of stories, The Only World You Get¸ was published by Et Alia Press.