My husband was too quiet, his eyes concealed behind sunglasses he hadn't even wanted to buy, much less wear. He was thinking, it seemed to me, of how to avoid kicking something, and terribly focused on just breathing. I am always caught off-guard by the physical discomfort I experience in the rare moments when I know he is choosing his next words carefully.
I thought this punishment extreme for my "offense," and told him so. "I told you not to do it," he breathed, "and you did it anyway!" I had thought he might be a little upset. I had miscalculated. More than six months I had deliberated--and he had been privy to it--smiling while telling me firmly, "this discussion doesn't matter, because you're not going to do this."
I suppose I should have known he was serious. The smiling threw me off, because it usually accompanies all kinds of admonishments to slow down, relax, and lay my burdens down. My husband knows that I am calibrated to run circles around him most days, and that his job is to find the button, switch, or turnkey that will shut me down when I simply cannot. He smiles in such moments because he also knows that some days he might as well stop the wind from blowing or the tide from coming in.
I was serious, too. I began to entertain the idea at first because I just couldn't keep up with my own default setting. My life had begun to outstrip my stamina, between the bills, the messages, the calls, the to-dos... Then it occurred to me that it would be nice, to be able to hold and polish all that concerned me in he palm of my hand. The risks--and the price--of such convenience weighed on my mind. To hold so much information so readily would make that information not only more accessible and useful, but so precious and easily lost or misused.
It wasn't until later that what I will call the shinyness of it began to grow on me. I want to be clear about this and say that it was first convenience, and later the shinyness. It makes me feel more justified and less shallow...somehow less easily led astray. The shinyness lay in that I would be able to see and hear and do so much with the touch of a finger, that I could customize and accessorize and somehow make a statement about my life and why it mattered. Neither the convenience nor the shinyness mattered now, and neither gave me any comfort in the face of this silence and this breathing. I had shattered some idyllic dream of his, and the world would now be different.
I laid on the bed next to where he sat, the sweat of a day's work pouring off of him. I could see the accusation in his eyes now: he had been slaving away to impose order on chaos, to turn a profit while I had frivolously been throwing it away. Indignation rose into my throat, and I reminded him that I, too, toil to make our living, and that my work in part had motivated my choice. I could not even look at the thing I had brought into our home--it sat lifeless on the bed between us. My eyes were glued to his, which were staring at the wall.
He looked down at the bed, over at me, and picked up my new iPhone. I could tell that my husband, the ludite technophile, was conflicted in this moment. He had never even wanted a cell phone. When his Army instructors cajoled him into getting one when we were brand new lieutenants, he had "stuck it to the man" by buying the cheapest, most obscenely large, brick of a phone he could find. This is also the man who convinced his roommate to heft a typewriter to class in protest against the laptop girl who clicked and clacked a little too loudly in our "Milton and the 17th Century" class in college. Setting the margins as small as they would go in order to maximize the bing! that punctuated every sentence, he even duped the professor, who just laughed and baptized the obnoxious behavior as a clever ludite protest. At the same time, he is the techie who introduced me to StumbleUpon, Skype, Newsmap and Pandora. I can't even listen to Aphex Twin without the music seeming to paint images of his face in my mind, I feel so indebted to his obsession with the marriage of art and technology.
Now, he browsed the first page of apps, without looking at me once. He sighed deeply. In that sigh, I sensed some lofty, dying desire that the two of us would, on a whim, sell all our worldly possessions to go live in the mountains, or go halfway around the world. We would subsist in a desert, like monks, meditating on all the great books and wines and cigars we had ever sampled, without consuming more than the bare necessities ever again. Stripped of everything, we would feed on our rich inner lives and be able to enjoy each other's company unhindered by the world and its ploys, its crassness, its responsibilities. Perhaps in his sigh was also the knowledge that one more radiation source had just been added to our daily routine. With this, the fear of succumbing to brain cancer or distracted driving crept to the forefront of my thoughts, as I watched his fingers learn their way around YouTube and the stock quotes on the smooth touch-screen.
I was fairly certain that I had not been motivated by vanity, even as I knew that it was not modesty, contentment, or survival that had motivated me, either. I had wanted to a tool that would enable me to manage my life more calmly and happily. I wanted maps, answers, raw data, transaction and relationships at my fingertips, because life as I wanted to live it demanded this. I laughed as I watched him nibble at the idea of this new reality, hoping that with time he would only see that it was good. He threw a fiery glance my way, and I was quiet. I hoped that this was not going to get us expelled from our thus far paradaisical experience of marriage.
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