My Life with Ashley: Or, How Pope Saved My Marriage

Jonathan Swift, poet, pastor, satirist, and misogynist? Swift wrote during the infancy of the Enlightenment and satirized the vices and woes concerning the reasoned modern man. Swift, a spokesman for the past even during his time, thought Man does not have the capacity to move forward. Human nature, he claimed, was static and the status quo will remain. The Enlightenment, however, gave Man the ability to better modern institutions and enhance the every day man's life. Unfortunately, Swift thought advancement and reason were blight on his modern societies success and obviously thought little more of women. However, as backwards and misogynistic as he may have appeared, the narrative arc of Swift's The Lady's Dressing Room to The Furniture of a Woman's Mind to a Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed reminds me of life with Ashley-my wife. I write this glancing over my shoulder to make sure prying eyes are not trying to catch a snippet of my latest fiction or a bit of my freelance work.

My wife, when I met her, was an ephemeral mystical flower unfolding each day to surprise me around every corner. She would show up for a date dolled up, painted, and smelling like a tropical dream. She, before betrothal, was my every desire. I swore she shat perfection and each fart she let smelled of daisies and sunshine. I would bury my head in her deep brown, curly locks and drink in the pheromones that drove me into a deliciously wild fit of passion.

After our "I dos," the first few months of our conjugal affection followed a definite pattern. The bathroom door was always closed and after every brief visit she would spend behind it, it would open anew with a fresh breathe of floral fragrances that had never once emitted from my malodorous outhouse. However, as the months wore on, the fresh fragrances slowly disappeared and eventually the smells of holy Satan's hell would occasionally waft across the bedroom floor. She may still blush but the honeymoon was apparently on the wane. Then, as we got closer to anniversaries and further from those first few months of matrimonial Utopia, the bathroom door started to creak ever so slowly open until finally entire conversations were held over the backdrop of a trickling golden stream.

One day, she out with her mother for the day, I tried to surprise her and take an attempt at the laundry. As I, a wayward Strephon, entered her domain, her guarded secrets revealed themselves and an aromatic nightmare arose from her hampers. Thongs that had provided such aesthetic pleasure suddenly provided horrid visions of natural bodily functions. Tiny baby doll shirts that had once made her sexy and desirable suddenly betrayed yellowed sweat stains and little black curly hairs.

My seraphic Cecilia fell to earth amongst the tools of torture she used to tame the savage beast within and pretty herself for me. Half-moon shaped scissored apparatus that I had once caught her holding to her eyelashes became sinister and disgusting. The make-up and accouterments used to gussy her up felt oily and smelly-Horse doctor potions from a matrimonial Mephistopheles trading beauty for souls. My wife's Promethean dressing room where the creature recreates herself each morning from a hideous Scylla to a ravishing Athena.

My dalliances through her dressing room were not the only gently nudging differences between my wife and me. Bopping along to work one morning listening to the sadly canned pop of 106.3 One Minute Inside a Woman's Head echoed throughout the car. Here was my epiphany moment--one of those when you actually slow down, turn off the air, adjust the volume, and all effort and intellect tune into the inanity of the words surfing the airwaves. Are those thoughts really the furniture that fills my wife's mind? If so, Feng Shui is highly in order.

Inspired and fundamentally disturbed by the radio bit dinner that night and since has become an interesting exercise in sociological, cross-gender studies. Since, over subsequent dinners, I listen to her with a new indifferent attentiveness as she lays out every detail of each day. Feigning false interest but actually thinking about the bills and work I dig a broken nailed finger deep into an ear only to withdraw it and stare studiously at my findings. She taps her neatly manicured, painted nail distractingly on the table staring at me.

"What," I ask.

"I asked you politely to stop doing that at the table."

All this from the smelling, spewing creature I call my wife as the ruby red, tapping painted nail disappears into a gaping mouth to retrieve an errant clump of food hiding persnickedly behind a molar. Then it's her turn as I stare in disgust.

"What?"

"Nothing dear," I say.

I am apparently one her largest and most dedicated pieces of furniture that must be rearranged daily. She cannot hold her tongue against my faults, however, yet, never finding her own. My clothes never match to her witting eye but hell what do I know as she points out, "you're only a guy."

Through dinner with friends, I listen to her same old stories contradicting and inappropriate as they are. She defends the poor yet clutches her purse as we pass the homeless in the street. I love my wife and all the furniture rattling around in the vast, deserted Diaspora of her mind. Little scenes like this are typical.

Don't get me wrong. I love the dinners. I love returning home. I love watching my little beautiful nymph deconstruct for bed. The oils and fragrances of the evening out are removed by other oils, creams, and bedtime fragrances beyond my comprehension of their uses. I watch as the Wonder Bra comes off and it dawns on me what Victoria's actual secret is: when the Wonder Bra comes off one is left wondering where their supported residents went. The jewelry and feminine décolletage come off too and present her to me as she really is in all her blemishes, pimples, and unflattering lights.

My nymph, after an hour of taking off what took her two to put on, parts the sheets and she as crawls into bed beside me. I bury my face in her hair and smell her in all her humanness and I realize Swift missed the point. The Lady's Dressing Room is an altar to the dedication and persistence my wife endures to show her love for me. The Furniture of My Ladies Mind reflects the idiosyncrasies that caught my heart in the first place and kept me coming back to hear more of her Siren's song. And, as my Beautiful Nymph Gets Ready to Go to Bed I get to see a woman as she should be naked, beautiful, a mother, and mine. Man, was Swift wrong?