Free Black Glass by Karen Joy Fowler Page A

times this week.”
    Claire tells him she is going for a personal record. In fact it is a headline she read while waiting with the ground meat for the supermarket checker that is making her rethink this issue of choices now. “Meet the laziest man in the world,” it said. “In bed since 1969 . . . his wife even shaves and bathes him.”
    Claire imagines that a case like this one begins when a man loses his job. He may spend weeks seeking new employment and never even make it to the interview. He’s just not a self-starter. Thoroughly demoralized, on a Monday in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, he refuses to get out of bed. “What’s the point?” he asks his wife. She is tolerant at first. He needs a rest. Fine. She leaves him alone for a couple of days, even brings in trays of food, changes the channel of the TV for him.
    This is no bid for greatness, this is a modified suicide. “Man collapses watching game show.” But staying in bed turns out to have pleasant associations for him. He begins to remember a bout of chicken pox he had as a child—how his mother would bring him glasses of orange juice. He feels warm and cared for; his despair begins to dissipate. “I’ve got such a craving for orange juice,” he tells his wife.
    Months pass; he has been in bed an entire year before he realizes what he has become. He’s not just some schlub who can’t find work. Suddenly he’s a
contender.
With stamina, perseverance, and support he can turn tragedy into triumph. He tells his wife that the only thing they have to fear now is a failure of nerve.
    How does she feel about this? In the picture which accompanied the story she was shown plumping up his pillow and smiling, a beefy sort of woman, a type that is never going to be fashionable. She may feel, like him, that this is her only shot. His greatness is her greatness. His glory is her glory.
    Or her motives may be less pure. Out in the world more, she is bound to be more worldly than he is. He has a vision. He is extending the boundaries of human achievement. She is speculating on the possibility of a movie made for TV. She may suggest that, as long as he is just lying there, he could be growing his fingernails, too.
    She is an ignorant woman. You don’t just grow your fingernails because you happen to have time on your hands. It requires commitment, a special gelatinous diet, internal and external fortification. A person’s nails are, in fact, most at risk during those precise hours a person spends in bed. She has her own motives, of course. She is tired of clipping his nails. “Why don’t you grow your beard out?” she suggests, rouging her cheeks and donning a feathery hat before slipping out to a three-martini lunch with the network executives. She will order lobster, then sell the exclusive rights to the tabloids instead. “Why don’t you make a ball out of twine?” The largest recorded string ball is more than twelve feet in diameter.
That
will keep him in bed for a while.
    At the restaurant she meets Solero don Guillermo, the world’s fastest flamenco dancer. She forgets to come home. Her husband grows hungrier and hungrier. He makes his way to the kitchen five days later, a smashed man. He contemplates slitting his wrists. Instead, while preparing his own breakfast, he manages, in twelve seconds, to chop a cucumber in 250 slices, besting Hugh Andrews of Blackpool by four cuts. The rounds of cucumber are so fine you could watch TV through them.
    Forty-two years later—a good twenty-four years off the record—he gets his wife’s note, placed in a bottle and tossed off the
Queen Mary.
“Kiss my ass,” it says.
    â€œYou
know
”—Claire’s son’s voice is accusing—“how much I hate raw hamburgers. This is all pink in the middle. It’s gross. I can’t eat this.”
    â€œI’m tired of