Dress your family in corduroy and denim by David Sedaris

Author:David Sedaris
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Literature: Classics, Relationships, Literary Collections, Humor, Form, Form - Essays, General, Topic, American, Humorous stories, American essays, Essays
ISBN: 9780316143462
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2004-06-01T16:54:48.243000+00:00

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

The End of the Affair

O N A SUMMER EVENING in Paris, Hugh and I went to see The End of the Affair, a Neil Jordan adaptation of the Graham Greene novel. I had trouble keeping my eyes open because I was tired and not completely engaged. Hugh had trouble keeping his eyes open because they were essentially swollen shut: he sobbed from beginning to end, and by the time we left the theater, he was completely dehydrated. I asked if he always cried during comedies, and he accused me of being grossly insensitive, a charge I’m trying to plea-bargain down to simply obnoxious.

Looking back, I should have known better than to accompany Hugh to a love story. Such movies are always a danger, as unlike battling aliens or going undercover to track a serial killer, falling in love is something most adults have actually experienced at some point in their lives. The theme is universal and encourages the viewer to make a number of unhealthy comparisons, ultimately raising the question “Why can’t our lives be like that?” It’s a box best left unopened, and its avoidance explains the continued popularity of vampire epics and martial-arts extravaganzas.

The End of the Affair made me look like an absolute toad. The movie’s voracious couple was played by Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore, who did everything but eat each other. Their love was doomed and clandestine, and even when the bombs were falling, they looked radiant. The picture was fairly highbrow, so I was surprised when the director employed a device most often seen in TV movies of the week: everything’s going along just fine and then one of the characters either coughs or sneezes, meaning that within twenty minutes he or she will be dead. It might have been different had Julianne Moore suddenly started bleeding from the eyes, but coughing, in and of itself, is fairly pedestrian. When she did it, Hugh cried. When I did it, he punched me in the shoulder and told me to move. “I can’t wait until she dies,” I whispered. I don’t know if it was their good looks or their passion, but something about Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes put me on the defensive.

I’m not as unfeeling as Hugh accuses me of being, but things change once you’ve been together for more than ten years. They rarely make movies about long-term couples, and for good reason: our lives are boring. The courtship had its moments, but now we’ve become the predictable Part II no one in his right mind would ever pay to see. (“Look, they’re opening their electric bill!”) Hugh and I have been together for so long that in order to arouse extraordinary passion, we need to engage in physical combat. Once, he hit me on the back of the head with a broken wineglass, and I fell to the floor pretending to be unconscious. That was romantic, or would have been had he rushed to my side rather than stepping over my body to fetch the dustpan.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.