Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [122]
“Exactly. A few months ago we were at dinner with a few of her coworkers, and I came back to the table after using the restroom and told them about the one gallon per flush thing. And the evaporation stuff. I thought it went fine, but on the way home, she asked me why I couldn’t just enjoy a peaceful dinner without complaining about toilets and the water cycle. But that’s the kind of stuff I’m interested in. Not toilets, exactly, but stuff other people don’t notice. You know?”
“Sure. But from Christine’s point of view, she might think that the dinner table isn’t the place to be talking about urinals, especially if you’re out with her friends. Her coworkers, even.”
Milo didn’t know what to say. In the car, it seemed as if Emma had taken his side of the marital dispute, and that had brought him both relief and satisfaction beyond measure, particularly after he realized how frustratingly insightful she could be. But now it appeared that she was standing alongside Christine, making the same kind of arguments that his wife would make. In fact, she had just sounded eerily like Christine. Milo wondered if his attempt to delay their departure with his urinal observation had just cost him Emma’s allegiance.
“Don’t get me wrong, Milo. I’m not bothered by it, if that’s what you’re worried about. We’re done eating anyway, and McDonald’s is hardly fine dining. In fact, I think you might be right about this urinal thing. One gallon does seem suspicious. I’m just saying that if you were out with your wife’s coworkers, she’s probably hoping that you’ll make a good impression on them, and talking about urinals at the dinner table, as insightful as your observation may be, might not make the impression that she was hoping for.” She waited a moment for Milo to speak before adding, “Just something to think about. Okay?”
“Sure,” said Milo, feeling torn between Emma’s frustrating yet seemingly sensible position and his desire to find someone who would allow him to simply be himself. Throughout his entire life, he had been forced to hide so much of himself from the world, so much so that his desire to reveal the parts that he did not need to hide was enormous. He didn’t want to pretend to be a wine-drinking cosmopolitan who refrained from urinal talk at the table. If he couldn’t share his mastery of “99 Luftballons” or his need to pop ice cubes from their trays, he wanted to at least be himself in the other facets of his life, in the parts that he had hoped were somewhat normal. But maybe he was wrong. Maybe his need to smash Weebles and peel price tags and trick people into saying words that thundered away in his head was just the tip of the iceberg, one group of oddities piled upon others that he had not been sensible enough to hide.
It occurred to Milo that perhaps Christine had finally gotten sick and tired of all of Milo’s strangeness. Maybe in the end, it hadn’t mattered if Milo hid his incessant demands from Christine, because his entire life was nothing but an enormous, pulsating mass of oddity and strangeness and abnormality. While he had been focused on keeping his inexplicable demands a secret, perhaps he had failed to realize that he was odd and strange even without the demands, and that his relationship with Christine never had a real chance.
It unnerved Milo to think that perhaps he was no different from Louis the Porn Fiend or Michael and Emily Bryson or Arthur Friedman or Eugene or even Linda the pancake saleswoman. Just like him, these people were imbued with qualities that made them different, sometimes outright bizarre. Even relatively normal people like Edith Marchand had their quirks and eccentricities. Yet these were people willing to live their lives out in the open and share their differences with the world. These were not people burdened with secrets like Milo was, and in many ways, Milo admired them for their honesty and courage. But as hard as he tried, he could never imagine sharing his life with all its strangeness and peculiarity the way they had.
He was simply