“MY dad’s idea of fun,” my friend Tait once told me, “is having a few drinks and then telling either me or my brother how beautiful his wife is.” Tait’s mother, Sandy, is very beautiful. Elegant. She speaks with steadied attention and just enough breaks between her thoughts, like someone rummaging through her purse for a pen. Some women sound as if they are working through their ideas out loud, open to doubt but not impaired by it. Some women hand you a pen before you even ask for one. Sandy is one of those women.
She looks nimble and ready for whatever; capable of contorting her body like a woman from Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities series. In fact, if I remember correctly, Sandy was one of the women Longo depicted in charcoal and graphite. Makes sense.
It doesn’t surprise me that Tait’s father’s idea of fun is telling his two grown sons how beautiful his wife is. What entertains Tait’s father, at least as Tait tells it, is Sandy.
But more so, what I’ve always enjoyed about that anecdote is how Tait expressed it to me the first time. The construction of his telling. How Tait chose to describe Sandy not as his mother but as his father’s wife. The indication being that his father was speaking about marriage, about his wife, Sandy, and the woman in the Longo, and while he was speaking to his two sons about their mother, he wasn’t.