brett

I’m not saying she should go back to wearing the hat with the beak jutting out the front of it. Frankly, that thing was always a little much. But when your wife is sneaking out of games and thinking you’re not gonna notice? That’s like me not noticing when Layla claims that she’s twenty-seven. How ’bout we make that twenty-nine? We’re both teetering on the edge of the big three-oh, and hiding from it won’t help. I don’t know what it is about chicks and their age, but none of them ever want to give you a straight answer.

Tell you what: Take the current year, subtract the year you were born, and there’s your age. There’s no three-year curve, there’s no two years off for good behavior, and unlike most other situations, your boobs don’t count for anything.

How is it that every girl I went to school with is now two years younger than me? You want honesty in every relationship, and the first thing you do is lie about your age? Is it a mortality thing? Do you think the Grim Reaper isn’t going to double-check? You lying about your age is the same as us lying about our income or penis size: Eventually the truth is gonna come out. Not that I lie about that kind of stuff.

But I do lie—I mean, you have to lie if you want to stay happily married. People who say you need one hundred percent honesty have never been in a lasting relationship—and by “lasting,” I mean the kind where both people are actually speaking to each other after the first three months. It’s immature and frankly insulting when people peacock with that moral “I never lie” high ground. And I’m not just talking about the standard “No, you don’t look fat in that,” “No, your friend is not hot,” and “Yes, I will always be attracted to you, even when you have three hairs growing out of your chin and tuck your boobs into your pants.” That stuff’s a given. I’m saying you have to lie through your fucking teeth if you want to avoid a life of pure hell. Especially when your family is involved. And Layla? She’s a lot more family than your average wife. She’s probably more family than anybody’s wife in the history of marriage.

Layla is to my mom what my lesbian sister, Trish, can never be: girly, giggly, and, most important, in need of a mother. Trish and my mom have a fine relationship, but it just isn’t the quintessential mother-daughter bond that Layla and my mom share.

And Layla is to my dad what every corny, bad-joke-telling average Joe needs: an audience. And not an audience that will consistently groan and roll its eyes as blood relatives tend to do. Layla really thinks my dad’s lame jokes are charming, and she’ll genuinely laugh at them every time. Sometimes she’ll even request that he tell one again, which he sets on like a dog with an errant chunk of sirloin.

My little brother, Scott? He worships her. He didn’t look up to me the way little brothers look up to their football-star big bros for advice on dating or school or CD collections; he thought that Layla was a goddess, and he couldn’t believe she’d settle for a mere mortal like me. Of course, he’s still living at home, playing World of Warcraft online and drawing half-naked demonesses with her face—for his classes at Medina Art College, he swears. God love him. I guess I do, too, the little perv.

I may sound like an asshole just point-blanking this stuff, and yeah, I’ve certainly made more than my fair share of mistakes, but isn’t that how we’re supposed to grow? By learning from our fuckups? Character is defined by the choices we make under pressure. And lately the soundtrack in my head has Bowie’s and Queen’s song of the same name on a constant rotation.

I don’t need silk underwear—I mean for her to wear, not me, and frankly neither arrangement has even come up for discussion. But there’s some abstract notion floating around my pesky little brain that tells me Layla’s nighttime uniform of my old boxers and a stained T-shirt isn’t meant to turn me on. I’m not sure when exactly the switch flipped and she went from buying those sexy matching bras and underwear to this. And of course she doesn’t have to put on some barely there number and do a dance for me every night before bed. But there was a time when she did. So how am I supposed to not notice when it stops?

It’s not just the lack of frilly things—honestly, I don’t care. If I had to pinpoint the one factor that’s been making me crazy lately, it’s the way she is around my family. Or rather, the fact that she’s always with at least one of them at any given time. I know it’s partially my fault. I always encouraged her to spend time with them. But there’s a difference between spending time and becoming one with. I guess Layla never got the memo.

I mean, aren’t you supposed to hate your mother-in-law? This isn’t natural. Isn’t it against the laws of physics somehow? When I was growing up I got in a fight with my little brother every day. She’s never gotten in a fight with him. Not even once. Well, once she got in a fight with him: He was mad because she got a better present for my dad for Father’s Day. And seriously, while we’re on the subject, how did she know my dad would love that electric tie rack? He watched that thing spin for hours, like it was a mobile and he was an infant.

It didn’t used to be like this. I didn’t used to resent her. In fact, I used to feel invincible around her. My football team was a disaster a couple years ago—losing nonstop, which was a real blow after Coach Wells and I came from winning with our high-school program—but somehow she made me feel triumphant. You might think it odd that the miracle we were waiting for was a close loss on a crazy play I dreamed up, but when you’re a small school with a program that can’t use scholarships as bait (damn Division III rules!) and you don’t have one recruit who’d be even third string on many of our competitors’ teams … well, you take what you can get.

Some had been saying, “Yeah, every time the Condors get this close, they find some new way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.” Not Layla. She had me feeling like anything was possible. She’d be there, directly behind me on the sidelines, wearing that red-and-mustard jersey that always stood out in a sea of green and gray. And a hat with a beak on it. She has a heart big enough to make everyone around her wish they were her. And a body that makes just about every one of my college boys wish they were me.

All around her, always, like a personal choir, are four people who think the sun shines out of her—well, who love her sometimes, it seems, almost more than I do: Mom, Dad, my sister, and my brother. Layla would get them to come to my games even though our record losing streak wouldn’t exactly have them racing to the car. She’s the type who’s so purely good you almost resent it because you look so crummy by comparison.

I remember once, after a particularly hard loss—another game when we’d got sort of close to winning—she gathered a selection of our most die-hard fans and had them waiting right outside the locker room to give the team an ovation as they filed gloomily past. As they got onto the bus, I could swear every man on that team held his head a little higher.

When my grandmother was dying, Layla was the one who sat in silence with an understanding smile on her face as Mimi cussed out the shit-brain Democrats, the dirty Europeans, and the nurse she thought had stolen her favorite wig. After six months of that, everybody else in the family gave up. Layla kept on for another year. That’s right: a year. Twelve months. You try it.

Once, she got it in her head that the team needed a different kind of talking to, and she organized a sit-down with them. She’d listened to what I was trying to do, and she told them they weren’t playing like a team—and that they needed to air their grievances so they could move past them. I was about to laugh my ass off, imagining football players ready to “share their feelings,” when suddenly I heard some freshman guys saying they were pissed that they never got to play, other freshmen complaining about the pranks, seniors mad at certain guys who were only out for themselves … and lo and behold, the players actually started communicating. After that they all came together behind John Simms, our fullback, after that one goal-line fumble—well, I’m not certain that one powwow wasn’t what turned the team around.

Yes, she was always there, behind me, backing me up. And I have to say it helped knowing that in the end, win or lose, I got to go home to the sweetest, kindest, craziest, hottest woman in the entire crowd. Sounds corny, I know, but seriously, how lucky was I that she happened to be my wife?

I met Layla in high school. She was pals with my friend Doug. She had dark, wavy hair and this arch of freckles across the bridge of her nose, which I thought were adorable and which she hated—the freckles, not the adoration. Her eyes had little flecks of gold that matched her hair when the sun hit it. And her smile? It’s like she’s in on some secret and you’re desperate to find out what it is. I fell for her instantly, which was romantic to Layla but not nearly as endearing to Claudine DeMarco, my girlfriend at the time.

I wasn’t going to cheat, and I wasn’t going to lie (teaching me early on what a mistake that is, as you’ll see), so I sat Claudine down after fifth period and broke up with her. She screamed bloody murder for a minimum of a half hour. I was very late to geometry. I sat and listened—it was the least I could do—as she wailed and sobbed and wiped her runny nose on her sleeve and yelled at me some more. Tears spilled down her mascara-streaked cheeks, and she kept at it until her eyes were slits and her voice sounded like she inspired the word “hoarse.” It was madness. Finally, it stopped. She blew her nose, regained her composure, and looked seriously at me for a moment. Then she shrugged her left shoulder and calmly tossed out, “I guess I should have given you oral, huh?”

I was ridiculously proud of myself for somehow managing not to reply with “Hell, yeah.” But the truth is, that breakup had nothing to do with the lack of oral. It was the lack of something else. Something I didn’t even know existed in the world until I met Layla.

But, yeah, oral would have been cool.

We started out as a group: me; my buddy Doug (who was always too much of a clown to have a girlfriend back then—now he’s in IT, which I always joke is equally attractive to women, though he just got married); Steve; Steve’s girlfriend, Michelle; and Layla. The five of us would hang out during lunch and every day after school. Weekends were ours to tear up the town—which mostly meant Doug, Steve, and me playing video games, Layla and Michelle making fun of us, and then all of us dropping by the multiplex to see whatever new movies had been released. Eventually, Steve and Michelle broke up, Doug moved away, and our party of five became a table for two.

Layla was the first person ever able to make me behave. And I don’t mean by scolding me or laying down any kind of law. She was the first person who inspired me to not be a dick. I actually cared what she thought of me, and wanted to do things that would make sure she kept liking me.

Apparently, it worked, because we got married about five minutes after we finished college. I’m not sure it was the wisest move, since neither of us had ever been with anyone else, but at least I knew I’d never suffer by comparison. It just seemed like the natural thing to do. It’s never been a secret that I’m not the poster child for impulse control. So, sure, we may have been a little young and may not have put in the right amount of forethought, but luckily for me it worked out. I took no small amount of ribbing from my buddies over getting hitched so soon and so young, but I knew that there wasn’t a single guy among them who hadn’t been secretly in love with Layla since she burst onto our scene, so I took every crack with a grain of salt.

I knew I loved her the first time she called me an asshole. Romantic, huh? Sad but true. She was the only person to call me on my shit, and she wasn’t bitchy or controlling. Just honest. And usually right—though I rarely admitted it.

I like to say I grew up with Layla, but I bet Layla would insist she’s still waiting for me to grow up.

All of our friends started to get married about five or six years after Layla and I did, and about twelve years after we started dating. But there was something intrinsically different about those relationships. Maybe because they hadn’t been there for every first, good or bad. Maybe because they were based on a more adult foundation. Either way, watching my buddies and their wives, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something missing from my own marriage. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

Don’t get me wrong—I love her. I know she’s the best thing I ever found. She’s solid. She’s every guy’s perfect girl. She’s definitely, one hundred percent without a doubt the girl I’m supposed to spend the rest of my life with.

I think.

She really should have stayed for the whole game.