Clark Fry is a very good programmer, and a very average lover. When he is not thinking about sex, Clark turns little numbers into genetic models on his laptop from seven in the morning until six at night. During his lunch break he likes to place his average sized Slim loafers onto the plant feeder outside his window and listen to Konstantin Scherbakov’s “Respighi” so loud he can’t hear anyone knocking. He nurses the one beer he allows himself to drink, and slowly, tenderly licks every last bite of the borscht his wife made him the morning before. Most of the time the soup is not flavored enough. Clark finds this endearing, that his little wife can’t figure out how much salt to add. He is amused by the image of her pondering on her own in front of the stovetop, rationalizing how much salt is too much for a growing man like her husband. Two pinches should be enough.
Clark has been married for two years. Clark loves his wife. He and Paulina have one daughter together. The baby is named Penelope. Clark loves Penelope. She looks so much like him, he thinks. This makes it easy for him to love her. It’s always so much easier to love someone that’s so similar to you.
Clark works in Pharmaceutical Sales, a business he got into after working in Yale’s public health department. He used to study cancer cells in South Asian populations. He thought it was great work but his ego knew he was worth more money. He also hated his supervisor, Julia, but never could tell her.
On his California Driver’s License it says Clark is a 6 '4 white male weighing 190 pounds. He carries his New Jersey license loose in his back pocket just in case he is asked to verify his identity while wearing his glasses. He doesn’t own a Connecticut driver’s license. Clark hasn't worn his glasses since he married Paulina, which is why she drives him to work, even though he doesn’t get scared driving anymore. Clark is an organ donor, and he likes this about himself.
On Thursdays the couple listen to Chopin on the way in. Paulina likes to drop him off by the back entrance because she gets to drive by the fountain in front of his office. She likes how the sight of water makes her forget about living. She wonders what it would feel like to lay her hand flat over the top spout. Something inside of Paulina rises at the thought. It is exciting to think of how the body reacts to water. We float, after all, she thinks. She doesn’t like to think about how after a while we don’t float.
The detour adds about six extra minutes of walking time to Clark’s commute. It was taxing on Clark at first, and they ended up getting into a fight about it. But they made up. They said they loved each other too much to let something so small keep them apart. Clark kissed Paulina on the forehead and she kissed his palms and they said “I love you,” again. So, they made special arrangements. They managed to both get what they wanted. Good couples are like that. They always are making arrangements to get each other the things they want. Not much else can be said about that.
At the time he got the job offer Clark was uncertain he would accept. He hadn’t met Paulina yet. He was still living in New Haven. He was used to eating what he wanted, drinking when he could, and he even enjoyed working all night sorting the data and writing his code. He once had dreams of being an author, traveling the world, living in Denmark. But growing older and seeing his friends and mentors turn into fathers and what he considered to be “well to do people,” Clark felt like he was missing out on something by staying in the same spot with the same people. He wanted to be great and those people weren’t. But they had been once, and that’s what was so upsetting to Clark.
When he was first making the decision to pursue relationships with any of his college friends, he had picked people whom he could have serious conversations about composition, philosophy, and other etymologies with. He picked people whom he could laugh with if someone were to fall down. People who recognized their wins as taking from someone else’s loss. He liked that idea about power, that it was always a give and take. He liked giving, too, but it was always satisfying to take. Above all else, the people he chose were winners.
Constructing his own Greek council, he wanted his inner circle to be a mirror of him. He sought out people who were destined for greatness, people who didn’t fail. And he loved them when they weren’t failing. But now, older and separated by busy lives, they couldn’t get together as much to talk about disease, or language-games, or even Homer. Now that time had passed, Clark thought that these people which he built such an infallible fantasy around just dragged him down. They asked him to pick them up from the airport, or told them about their problems with their girlfriends or boyfriends. Clark saw that they were losing, miserably, and he couldn’t be around that anymore. So, Clark moved across the country, got a job at one of the best pharma sales companies in the Silicon Valley, and met his now wife on a dating app the second night he was living in California. Sometimes life shows you your victories only after you suffer your losses. And life showed Clark he was a winner.
It was hard on Clark, of course. How could it not be? He cried in the shower for almost four weeks. He started eating ice cream to handle the emotions. It was something his father taught him as a child. Though to save himself the weight he saw his father gain, he vowed not to eat any more ice cream for the next couple of months. He bought forty-two boxes of Kashi Honey Almond Flax cereal within that time frame instead. None of this he would be able to write off. Not that any of that matters anyway. He had won big. He was happy. He was happy despite everything.
Clark considered all of his suffering to be an incredible testament to his strength of will. His father had also taught him this. It is strength, after all, to leave things that you once loved.
Today, the sales work consists mostly of Clark sitting at his desk and staring into a computer. He makes calls to various countries, and tries to talk lovingly to strangers he doesn’t really care about. This challenges Clark, he tells his wife, because he feels he is using all his love to make another person love something else. He says he feels like the cupid of drugs and technology, and pretends to shoot an arrow into his laptop screen. He wishes they would love him instead. Paulina puts the phone on speakerphone and walks far away when he says this.
Since the job can be done from home, he chooses three days a week to spend time with his wife and kid. He likes to walk around and sit in the living room while his wife works on vowels with the child. It’s lunchtime by the time Clark comes to the table, and he massages the delicate, soft hair on his daughter's grapefruit sized head with his pursed lips. He blows a raspberry and can feel her skull right beneath his mouth. He thinks that humans have such thin skin. There aren't any jokes we can make about this that will make this funny. It’s just true. His daughter laughs as she tosses her lunch at Clark, who jerks to let the flying peanut butter and jelly sandwich hit the green cabinets behind him. Paulina moves the wooden letters to the side and walks over to the window.
Paulina is thinking about the natural stacking order of her arms when Clark asks her to make him lunch. The mailman is making a delivery into the neighbor’s mailbox now, and she notices how short the man is. She wonders if she has ever seen a tall USPS worker. She doubts this, and reflexively strokes her left forearm. It’s usually her right over her left, she realizes. She grew up right handed, but right now she has her left arm stacked over her right arm. She has been trying to make her body listen to her mind more. She wants to master new habits. She wants to master her body. It makes her feel proud to feel change like this. Change of any kind is good, she thinks. Change reminds her that she is something alongside the wind, not just something that moves because of it. She inhales and languidly moves her eyes back to meet her husband, pleased by some completed internal processing. When she’s happy like this she would do anything for him. She tells him she will make his favorite lunch.
“Steak and kale with sourdough toast and fig jam,” they say together.
Paulina has a west coast drawl that overpowers Clark’s clipped east coast speech and they smile hearing each other speak. They laugh over this difference. This is something they are good at. Paying attention to differences is something all couples are good at. Saying it out loud can easily turn bad, but for them it’s good. They like to know what is different about each other. It makes them feel better about who they are. When the baby squeals, both of them feel old.
Caring for his child is one of Clark’s favorite things. Paulina is better at it, naturally. But Clark just loves it so much. Clark thinks it is so wonderful to have someone to love. He thinks it is even greater to have something that loves him. Like Paulina. He loves Paulina. He gets butterflies in his stomach when he thinks about the way she looks at him. He thinks she looks at him with admiration, and he loves the way she smiles everytime he tells her he loves her. He wants to know how to keep her smiling like that forever. He wants her to never see him fail because that would mean she would leave him. But she never would. She loves him. He picks up Penelope’s rubber spoon and feeds her applesauce.
Looking at Paulina standing with her arms crossed looking out the window distracts Clark from feeding his daughter and some of the applesauce misses her mouth. It falls to the floor with a soft plopping sound, like a plover moving around the dunes. Penelope whines a little bit and Clark lets her. Clark feels a lightness inside him. He stares at his wife until the lighting around her becomes harsh and blinding. He covers his eyes abruptly and walks down the hall to the bathroom. Penelope makes a grunting noise and Clark steps over the applesauce.
When he returns, Paulina is standing by the framed Jackson Pollock poster she bought when she lived in New York. She’s behind the couch close to the front door. She is staring at their daughter, who has been picking at the rubber spoon with her small, ravioli sized fists, trying to spoon the applesauce into her mouth. Paulina thinks about how wonderful it is to love something so much that it could love you back. Paulina thinks about all the applesauce on the floor. Paulina thinks about how her daughter prefers her left breast to her right. Her left side is her weaker side. Still, the baby wants milk most from it. Paulina thinks about how much she loves her child.
The two, husband and wife, stand on opposite ends of the front house thinking on their own for a while. The baby plays with herself in the middle. She seems happy.
“Clark,” Paulina eventually says.
“What is it, honey?” Clark says.
His voice makes it sound like he is scared of what Paulina is about to say. He thinks maybe she will tell him she doesn’t love him anymore, that she never has, and that she wants to leave him. Penelope stops putting the rubber spoon in her mouth and turns her small head to look at her father. The skin on her cheeks jiggle when she moves.
“When you cross your arms, which side do you instinctively place on the bottom?”
Paulina turns her body toward Clark, who moves to lean against the edge of the counter where the toaster is. The circles beneath his eyes sink. Paulina studies his face. Without his glasses, he actually seems kind of handsome. Without his glasses, Clark assumes Paulina looks vacant, too. He absorbs this information slowly.
His two hands gently push off the counter to create a sort of bobbing motion. Paulina realizes he isn’t wearing shoes, and she looks at her husband’s feet. The human foot turns into a lesion of the body once looked at for too long. There is no foot that can be made absolutely familiar, and Paulina stares openly at his narrow, defenseless goose-looking feet. They look like they belong to a stranger, she thinks. Has she ever met the man who owns these feet?
Clark moves suddenly to grab a glass of orange juice from the fridge. He drinks this quickly, then looks up at Paulina with orange residue around his mouth. She fills the silence by thinking about areas of her husband’s body she does not know about.
At the courthouse after their marriage, Paulina had agreed to identify her husband’s body if any fatal incident were to occur. She signed on a line claiming to be responsible for loving Clark completely and unduly. She said she would do these things. She accepted those conditions. And she will do them. She does not quit or back down from something when she has set her mind to it. She just has to recognize her husband's feet first.
Clark does have a growth on his shoulder, though. This she knows. She has felt this late at night before. She wonders if Penelope will have his acne on her back when she is older. Clark wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
He says, “My right side is my dominant side.”
“So you think you naturally put your right on the bottom?”
“Why would I put my dominant side on the bottom?” He asks
“To support your submissive side,” Paulina says, and walks into the kitchen. Clark watches her move without caution.
He doubts himself watching his wife grab the cast iron pan with her left hand. He tries to think about the wedding, and if she used her right or left thumb to squeeze his ring on. He remembers briefly looking at his father in the first row and then to his step-mother holding his brothers as they silently wept during the ceremony. How can he remember so many things at once? The brain seems to want certain things and will not stop at punishing the body when it cannot get it. The brain does not fail. The body inevitably loses. Clark’s head throbs from the sugar in the orange juice. He fishes pulp out of his molars.
Clark’s tries to answer all the questions flooding his mind logically and strategically. There is a hitch in this process, like a gear is clogged or stuck. He grows frustrated and forgets to breathe. When Clark gets upset his hands tremble, and his face gets pale. Paulina turns around when she begins searing the steak. The steak is probably about two days too old. She didn’t bother seasoning it. Paulina sees Clark’s hands trembling, and looks at his face turning white, then looks towards Penelope, who looks back apprehensively. Paulina relaxes upon seeing her. You do not need to be scared, Paulina wants to say to Penelope. The child hasn’t learned “O” yet. She wouldn’t know what Paulina said. Paulina uses her eyes to signal happiness instead. It’s fake happiness, she knows, but Penelope won’t know. Not yet, at least. Penelope gurgles and grabs the rubber spoon again.
Clark watches the child’s legs underneath the high chair move elastically. He takes in all the physical information before he turns to his wife. She isn’t looking at him anymore. She is mixing the kale around in the pan. Somehow he feels like she is always mixing kale around in the pan. The sound of cooking reminds him how researching leukemia would trigger his heart palpitations, and that time he suddenly lost all hearing on his left side. One day the sound moved into the center of his ear and it sizzled like bacon in a pan then went out fully. He never told anyone about it, and eventually it went away. It was only in his left ear, never his right. Most cultures consider the left to be the feminine side. The submissive side, he thought. Paulina’s weaker side. Penelope’s favorite side.
Clark needs water. He inhales it from the same glass he used for the orange juice, and Paulina watches as water from the faucet joins the residual pulp in the glass to make a dirty tangerine color. It looks like the byproduct from finger painting with watercolor. He starts choking but pounds his fist against his chest and tells Paulina he’s fine, it was just the wrong pipe. He’s fine, he’s okay. He promises Paulina everything’s okay.
Paulina serves his lunch on a big burgundy plate, and places matchsticks of ginger into a mug of hot water for him to drink. She knows Clark likes this because she has his child. She knows this because she watches him closely.
Clark sits down next to his daughter and he can’t discern if she prefers the green rubber spoon because of its shape or its color. He looks at his wife and forgets if she eats meat or if she’s been pescatarian like his last roommate, and as he chews he asks himself what side of the bed he liked to sleep on before he met Paulina.
Clark’s boss once said, “Always know your product Clark, if you don’t your client will know, and you’ll lose the game just like that,” and that scared Clark because he wants to do well for the company. He wants to do so well and he feels guilty when he doesn’t. It’s probably the most human thing about him. Humans feel guilty when they don’t do what’s right because they are constantly trying so hard to be good. But Clark needs to be great and he doesn’t know how not to be. He was a child prodigy for poetry, for god’s sake. Clark has never known what being average is. Clark has never known what it means to sell someone a product that he himself has never known before. Clark realizes that the pharmaceuticals he has been selling have nothing to do with genetic populations or disease control in South Asian populations. Clark realizes he has been lied to, and that he has lied to others. Clark realizes that there are people in his life that he has never learned to love. And Clark is scared and confused and hurt by Paulina’s question about his arms. Because he crosses with his right arm underneath his left and he feels underneath his armpit for skin tags. And Clark knows greatness, and he can sequence eleven target genomes from two million genetic structures. And he has learned how to walk into a room with confidence and not arrogance, and he even is speaking with clients in Mandarin, Spanish, and French. And he doesn’t know yet why his daughter likes the rubber spoon but he is trying to learn. All he can do is keep trying to learn. He looks at Paulina cleaning the kitchen and he hates her. He hates her for making him think about himself. He hates her for making him feel like his efforts are not enough for her. He is not a failure.
When she finishes cleaning she grabs a bottle of Mexican beer and stands next to Clark who is still eating. The beer is in her left hand, and her right arm falls into her left elbow. All her life her body has responded differently.
Someone on the internet said learning new habits would help with neural plasticity. That could help you live longer. Or at least, you could be happier for longer. Paulina said she couldn’t be sure if that was true, but she tried it anyway.
Clark has always complimented this trait about his wife. He has always said how much he admires her desire to try new things. He has always said she is the only woman he has ever loved.
