Puppy paused for a black coffee in the lobby of the Family Room, besieged by interminable video loops of happy couples talking about all they’ve shared, surrounded by growing numbers of children. Like building blocks, Couple A would show off their baby and, on the next screen, Couple B would have a grown child, followed by Couple C with two and Couple D with three until you ventured into grandparent land where they were engulfed by their children and their grandchildren squealing delightedly, all vids ending with Grandma’s proud smile and her Third Insight: “There is no Family without a family.”
Boisterous happy couples holding hands strolled past to sign up for their marriage licenses on the second floor. Other loving and adoring citizens, eyes brimming with endless wells of endless love, headed to receive extended benefits for upcoming children, either their own or adopted. That was the third floor.
On the fourth floor were the celebrants. One, five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, pick a number, if you made the wedding anniversary, you received some award. Furniture, car, clothes. The lobby echoed with videos of couples talking about their love and offering tips to siblings like Puppy, sipping black coffee and absorbing, well, barraged with wisdom from Alvin Dalton and William Li on their secret to happiness (a joke a day) or Pamela Landers and Patricia Pannarassa (cooking together, just chop chop chop and you’ll never mope mope mope) they beamed.
Love joy pleasure family Family children passion commitment.
Then there was the fifth floor for people getting divorced. Grandma’s belief was that you were never contaminated, but uplifted. Positive always triumphed even if you were too damn thick to understand. Making the divorcing couples share the same building as all these wonderful men and women immersed in love joy pleasure family Family children passion commitment would inspire reconsideration, a re-memory, a new path, a second chance, a nudge, a shove to where you’d once been and how you might get back there to love joy pleasure family Family children passion commitment.
You never knew what happened on the fifth floor. The first few times Puppy met Annette for their sessions, he was whisked into a room by a couple so delirious they about floated, where they asked him about his feelings of love, insisting he make up a song on the spot.
“I wish I were in love
Then I would feel like a dove
Just give me a cue
And I will love you”
He was able to use these catchy lyrics for further encounters/kidnappings, but Annette screamed rape when she was lured into an emotional intervention. Word got around. Leave those two alone.
But if you pulled back from the brink, oh boy. Just say you’re willing to try again and you and your potential love mate would be whisked away for a weekend in the Catskill Mountains to splash about in undulating bathtubs where a saucy HG oozed out of the faucet cooing about emotional longevity and multiple orgasms. Grandma was not a prude; sex was important in a marriage. If the massages and fine Wisconsin champagne and all that undulating worked, you might be taken from the monthly pre-divorce meetings and put into a marriage counseling group where you would be revered for your incredible courage in seeing the light of love joy pleasure family Family children passion commitment.
Suddenly you weren’t filing for divorce. You were a success story. You’d be on the vidnews. In the lobby. The fourth floor. Perhaps lurking in small rooms to persuade bitter men to compose music. Maybe someday, if you didn’t throw yourself under the D train, you’d make it to fifty years of marriage and have eggs and coffee with Grandma. Real eggs and coffee.
Then there was Annette and Puppy.
“Where the hell have you been?” Annette Ramos angrily pushed back her curly black hair, suggesting it was his fault the strands had dropped onto her olive-skinned forehead.
Puppy slid a folding chair by the table and nodded to the wary, silent guard. When they first started six months ago, enduring the more than five year cooling off period for time to reconsider their clearly stupid decision to divorce, they’d had an always smiling facilitator, eager to jump right in and smooth out any disputes. They’d gone through several facilitators. Now they’d been assigned a guard. Violence was not uncommon in these situations.
“I have a life.” Puppy placed his coffee on the table.
“Like I don’t?” Annette took the cup. “Is this mine?”
“No.” He sipped quickly so she’d think he spit into the coffee.
“Very unselfish, Puppy.” Annette applauded sarcastically. She looked gorgeous, with her hair sweeping onto her bare shoulders, large breasts struggling to come up for air in the low cut dress. The better she looked, the more she tormented him.
Their wedding video ran on a small screen on the table. Photos from their marriage were taped to the walls; smiling and happy Puppy and Annette. Several pieces of jewelry, birthday gifts to her, sat mockingly on a waist-high silver end table from their original apartment.
“Are you looking at the tape and thinking how much older I am?” Annette asked, worried.
“I wasn’t thinking anything.” He sighed.
Usually they sat in silence for the first few minutes, glaring, until the guard coughed, signaling they could sit in silence the entire hour but he would report their lack of effort at reconciliation.
“How are you?” Puppy kicked things off.
“Good. Busy.” She held up her left shoe, red with gold buckles. “My new line. Business at my store is wonderful.”
“Great.”
Annette exhaled slow disgust. “You don’t care.”
“Not really.”
“And you?”
“Baseball season started a couple days ago.”
Annette rolled her eyes.
“Right.” Puppy looked up at the picture of them on their honeymoon in Eastchester,
