Synopsis: A very stupid couple of newlyweds embark on a life of meaningless things and aimless wanderings, constantly weakening the bonds of their already shaky relationship. Nothing they do matters and nothing they think is reasonable.
Mr. and Mrs. Schwachkopf decided they should reproduce. Something inside them told them it was their job to send offspring into the world, a world that would be stained with the Scwhachkopf bloodline if they had anything to say about it. As often as their inexperienced bodies allowed them to, the freshly married couple tried to make children inside Mrs. Schwachkopf’s warm womb. They tried in Boston but no child ever came. They tried as they left Boston for Europe, but the rocking of the boat must have torn something in Mrs. Schwachkopf’s womb, because things just weren’t happening. She was a fragile woman whose appearance was that of a haggardly old maiden, untouched for decades by the hands of a man. She was old. But not as old as others thought she was. She was not her husband’s mother, like some on the boat liked to say. No, her body had just paddled quickly down the river of time to be graced by its curses and none of its blessings. She was forty years young, fifteen years the senior of her husband. He didn’t get sick and vomit into the ocean on their voyage across the seas to Europe, but she did. She made a habit of puking every day. It was her morning ritual. So fragile and unequipped for the struggles of travel she was.
Mrs. Schwachkopf hadn’t seemed so old when Mr. Schwachkopf had married her after a series of back-room French kisses in her nail salon. No, she had seemed young and vibrant as a woman ought to seem.
Glen Schwachkopf was a Harvard poet whose words were a red waterfall of bleeding metaphors and wet dreams. Like the other poets at Harvard, Glen saved himself for marriage, fearing the pleasures of the flesh through his teenage years and early twenties, lest the carnal delights of a woman interfere with his prose and his vocabulary that his relatives said was very advanced for someone his age. When confronted about his asexual behavior by his friends in Harvard’s Yacht Club and swim team, or even worse, the peasant-minded miscreants from Yale’s men’s tennis team, Glen called it living straight. He self-identified not as asexual, but as purity-driven. He wished to remain pure of spirit, pure of mind, and pure of mouth so that when he found himself in marriage’s loving embrace, he could drench his wife in a purity so fresh and clean that she would have no choice but to further purify their romantic bond with her own savage purity. Purity was Glen’s badge of honor, a badge he looked for on the breast of women he fancied. He dated women, he even kissed them if a situation called for such flagrant behavior. But when he showed them his badge of honor, a badge that had been merely a figure of speech until Glen decided to cut a badge from index cards in the Harvard library one evening, girls lost interest in him quickly. Girls instead wanted what Glen called “gutterboys”, men who, in his mind, were nothing more than diseased, treacherous scumbags with porcupine whiskers for fingers, and sewer drains for tongues.
Mrs. Schwachkopf’s name was Beatrice, but she taught, rather, trained, Glen to call her Camel-Lynn-Wales, a triad of nicknames she’d gotten back home in Kentucky. His mother wept for days upon meeting Beatrice, considering her a horrifying specimen of a woman, but finally smiled in quiet victory as she learned they would move to Europe, and she would never cast her eyes on Beatrice’s ancient form ever again.
Beatrice first laughed at Glen when he told her how he had kept himself pure for her, but then cried, because she too was pure. She’d dreamed she would die a virgin, and knew she would only be saved from such a fate if a man inexperienced in the ways of love, unfamiliar with the treasure that is sex, came along to share clumsy sexual disaster with her. If a man could turn a beautiful moment of sexual energy into awkward conflict, Beatrice would know he was the one. She held him close and let her tears wash over him. “Kiss me that way you have been kissing me,” she said.
Glen told Beatrice he’d learned to kiss not by experience but through stories from the dirty lips of his Harvard friends, a group of sweatered men who knew a thing or two about open-mouth sports. Their kissing became frantic, dangerous, and propelled them into interesting feelings and bizarre sensations they didn’t understand. After they kissed for a long time, almost for hours, Beatrice listened to Glen’s poetry wherein he elaborated on how he had kept himself pure for her and lived a life devoid of physical pleasure so that he might one day find it on the other side of the treasure chest that his purity was a kind of key to. When his words detailed his straight-living, Beatrice would scream in orgasm. Her wetness touched Glen and he would kiss her again. The music of romance in their ears was loud. It was like the 90’s.
When they first met, Glen had no intention of marrying Beatrice. Her snowstorm eyes and her fire engine nose were off putting to him and she was only a friend. But when he came into her nail salon one afternoon and saw her watching the volleyball scene in Top Gun and filing her nails with an electric nail file, he sat down to watch the rest of the movie with her. It was a slow day, and they danced to Kenny Loggins’s “Playing With the Boys” as it blasted from the small TV. Their eyes met, and Beatrice rewound the scene so they could hear it again as they danced. Then he kissed her. From that day on they kissed behind closed doors.
When they were married, Beatrice warned Glen, “I’m a squirter.”
“It’s OK,” he replied. “I’m a swimmer.”
The night was a disappointment to them both, as they fumbled with ignorant hands and nervous movement. Neither reached climax or could say that they had enjoyed their first sexual experience. Beatrice had been a masturbator, and knew herself well enough to let a man inside. Glen had never touched his own penis save for moments of using the urinal or showering. Even then, he liked to keep contact between his fingers and his member to a minimum. After six failed attempts at sex, Beatrice fell asleep from exhaustion and Glen walked the streets to look through windows at unsuspecting couples fornicating in the early hours of the morning. It taught him nothing and he retreated to his home to show Beatrice he was ready to try a seventh time, but she slept sound into the night. Glen sat in bed and wrote poetry until morning.
The next day they left for Europe, and tried feverishly to make a child on the boat, as Glen so loved the idea of a parasite living within his wife, and even more loved the idea of watching it emerge from her mature body. His poetry came to reflect his obsession with this idea. The poems were becoming very popular among the other passengers on the boat. They arrived in Paris and tried to make a child. The sex was getting better, but no baby entered into existence inside of Beatrice. They left Paris for Dijon, where they knew many people from the boat were going for the chance to study at a university there, and without knowing anything of Dijon other than its famous and strong mustard. Glen did not care for mustard because a Harvard man doesn’t allow himself to eat pedestrian foods that require relish. Beatrice loved mustard, having grown up in Kentucky and being raised mostly on hot dogs and lunch meat sandwiches on white bread. It was Beatrice who convinced Glen moving to Dijon was a good idea. They found that Dijon was a horrible place and there was nothing at all to do there but meddle in the affairs of others and write poetry. Glen, being the poet of the family, wrote poems, while Beatrice, being the Southern belle of the family, meddled in the affairs of others. Glen’s poems were becoming longer to reflect his heart’s increasingly more complicated feelings and his deeper sense of failure. Beatrice typed his poems after he scribbled them down on napkins, tissues, and the insides of cereal boxes. The poems were long, sometimes exceeding 10,000 words, and many times they would not rhyme, the words were not lyrical, there was little, if any, rhythm to them, and Beatrice remarked more than a handful of times that they seemed to be senseless clusters of words randomly placed together instead of coherent thoughts. She said that they were meaningless and accomplished exactly nothing that a poem should accomplish, and that where a good poem was typically a flowing movement of pictures and ideas and emotions, Glen’s poems were a stagnant portrait of the most mundane, uninteresting, and insipid corners of life that no one with any good taste or sense would want to read about. Glen screamed at her, and she cried every time with tears that went for miles. They tried to make a baby several more times before they left Dijon.
The Schwachkopfs went to Paris and were followed by their various friends from the boat. Everyone was tired of Dijon because it was a shit city that didn’t matter to anyone but mustard enthusiasts and people who liked to say they “relish the thought” and other things like this. Everyone had come to Dijon from Harvard or Yale or Princeton, and had started a blog about their adventures overseas, and detailed their experiences that no one read about except their friends from Harvard or Yale or Princeton who also went to Dijon for a few weeks. They wished they had gone somewhere else, but it took only four hours to get to Dijon from Paris by train, and the train had a number of DVDs to watch during the trip, mostly French-dubbed movies made in America that everyone had already seen but watched anyway because they were much better in French.
In Paris, the group’s extreme xenophobia was worn on their sleeves as they avoided crowded places by day out of fear of foreigners, an irony lost on all but the clever man from Princeton who had actually majored in irony and was postponing a Master’s degree in the subject to live in France for a while. Eventually, the Schwachkopfs rented a chateau in Touraine and Glen had a large group of friends who admired, even adored, his poetry. Some were other poets who comprised poetry street gangs, France’s analog to America’s rough inner-city gangs of freestyle rappers. Mrs. Schwachkopf begged her husband to buy a ticket for her friend back in America, from the nail salon, to come over and live with them because she hated her husband’s friends, calling them Frisbee-necked well-wishers, and Ivy-skinned Big Leaguers, and she became a better, more interesting person when her friend came over, and they cried together every day because it was something to do.
The three of them, with several of Glen’s friends who called him Hod, the Blind God of Winter, a name Beatrice didn’t understand, went to the chateau in Touraine. Touraine was like Kansas, according to Glen’s friend from Princeton, the irony major, the cleverest of the bunch. Glen had written enough poems by now to publish a book. As it was, his work was so unimpressive that the only publisher who showed any interest in putting out his work requested a check from him for $5,000, instead of paying Glen any sort of advance, as is standard for real writers.
The increasingly Kansas-like flavor of Touraine depressed the friends of the Schwachkopfs, and they ran off with a rich poet who continuously called himself the Michael Stipe of street poetry, a reference everyone got and laughed at but also appreciated on another level. They were all very happy and content, each day validating one another through poetry jams and conversations over coffee.
Mr. Schwachkopf kept on at the chateau in Touraine because he had nothing better to do, and no other place to do it. He and Mrs. Schwachkopf continued to try to make a child in the hot bedroom. Mrs. Schwachkopf began learning Braille in case she ever became deaf, and took to learning the difference between HTML and Microsoft Word, a task which took her weeks. The girl friend living with them was typing all of Glen’s manuscripts and was very good at it. She seemed to like doing it because it made her feel important, which was something she never felt at the nail salon because she didn’t know the first thing about nails, but she knew how to make a customer laugh and feel comfortable, which was all she needed.
Finding it difficult to take himself seriously as an American poet living in France without also being a heavy drinker of wine, Glen took to drinking white wine and moved all of his things into his own small room in the chateau, which he called a studio. It was closer to a closet than a studio, but a studio, like home, is where you make it. He stayed up late each night writing poetry, sometimes losing all track of time since there were no windows in his office, and the only light he had was the light of his computer, on which he’d disabled the clock. When he emerged from his studio he looked very tired and sometimes Beatrice remarked that he should shave and he would lash out at her with a belt or a branch. Mrs. Schwachkopf and the girl friend slept together in the large bed in the bedroom, the one Glen no longer slept in. They cried together often. It was the only thing they did and they did it almost all day long, every day. When night rolled around and Glen was not writing poems, the three of them sat together in the garden under the stars or the clouds, whichever showed itself, and the warm French wind blew through them as Glen drank his wine and the girls talked to each other and everyone was all smiles.
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