Excerpt from Crust (P2)
Not yet completely awake, Sara yawned, turned on her back, and placed her hands on her chest, the tips of her long, slender fingers meeting just below her breasts. If you’ve read Eldon Partridge’s authorized biography of me[10] or, for that matter, the shameless piece by Priscilla Karsh, which had appeared in Vanity Fair[11] just six weeks before the morning of which I speak, you know how shaky we were at this point. Like any nine-year couple, we’d known our share of problems, but we’d never been so far apart. We’d met at Harvard, when she was my student during my year as a writer-in-residence, married two years later. In the early days she’d often called us love at first sight, but these days she used the phrase ruefully, if at all, with no small trace (especially in her blogs!) of embarrassment. Everything changed when her career in publishing took off. It didn’t help that I’d gotten her the job at Murgate or that she’d been the editor on my last five books, as well as - since I usually wrote so quickly it needed vetting - my blog. For the last three years, in fact, my software had been programmed to email it to her automatically. If she was at her desk, she’d have it edited and back in my mailbox within an hour, and except for those rare occasions when I disagreed with her suggestions, it went back to her when I uploaded it so that, if she liked, she could publish it in the weekly online magazine she edited, MurgateLive. We talked as much as always but the listening I’d once been able to count on from her was rarely in evidence. Her nods were halfhearted, her arguments impatient and inflexible, and often as not, her answers began before I’d finished talking. Needless to say, we’d also - as Karsh notes[12] - lost the dependable sex we’d once been able to take for granted. It was rare that we managed it, self-conscious and goal-oriented when we did. In the last seven months, we’d given up trying. It didn’t help that she was a star in her office and I close to catatonic in mine. If she’d noticed that I wasn’t working, or not at least producing anything but the blog, it was not apparent to me. Her emails, for the most part, were forwards from newspapers, magazines, or manuscripts which crossed her desk, and her IMs were about schedule - parties and openings, dinner invitations, movies, plays, concerts, and readings.
Anyone with the slightest knowledge of Nasalism knows that such alienation alone would have been enough to inhibit my response to the crust with which I had awakened, but even in our early days, when I was free to act on almost any impulse in her presence, her view of the habit we used to call “nose-picking”[13] had never been in doubt. Like most of those whom Marcus Klondyke (Figure 2), in his seminal Rhinotillexis, calls “AntiNasalists,”[14] her disgust was clear and unequivocal. The sight of me scratching my nose or even stroking my upper lip could lead her, with a sigh of exasperation, to hand me a tissue. Though she writes in her memoir that I had often “picked” in front of her[15] (indeed, to my amazement and sorrow, she says that my “habit” had once, in our first months together, made her question her attraction to me[16]), I had always tried to hide it from her, turning my head away, retreating behind a newspaper, sometimes even leaving the room. Certainly, I’d never allowed myself the sort of wholehearted investigation that called to me now.
[10] Partridge, Eldon. Linchak, a Biography (New York: Murgate, 2011).
[11] Karsh, Priscilla. “Linchak at Home,” Vanity Fair October 2010: 61-65.
[12] Ibid.
[13] See Natalia Premonova’s wonderful history of the word: Nose-Picking, A Semantic Pilgrimage (New York: Harcourt Brace, 2011).
[14] Klondyke, Marcus. Rhinotillexis (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008) 32-56. Various explanations have been advanced for this condition. Klondyke believes the “overwhelming disgust” which characterizes it derives from a dysfunction of the endocrine system, but no one who has studied this habit will be surprised that there are those - Johannes De Kooning, for example, in The Wisdom of AntiNasalism (New York: Basic Books, 2008), or Pheobe Hawkinson, in Healthy Disgust (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007) - who believe it to be an expression of “maturity” and “mental health.” For an excellent, balanced overview of such opinion, see Hamilton Hamm’s Nasalism - Pro and Con (Moscow: University of Idaho, 2009), and Dean Albarelli’s Nasalism, An Overview, in The New York Review of Books, January 12, 2006.
[15] Martinson, Sara. Then and Now, A Memoir (New York: Murgate, 2012) 25-26.
[16] Ibid.