12. Dana Gets Testy 1

Julian was futzing with his laptop when he heard Dana get home. Something was wrong with her car, and he could hear her coming from a mile away. He got up and went to greet her. He’d been blogging his ass off, and he needed a break.
“Hey, Babe. What’s the news?”
Dana hung up her coat, and started shedding her suit in the bathroom.
“You’re the news. A blog? You sent your class to look at a blog?”
“Sure. What’s wrong with that?”
“They seem to think it an outrage over at school.”
“Tough titties.”
“Perky titties, apparently.”
“Great writing. I think.”
“She’s what? Twenty five or something?”
“Wait a minute. This is too much info floating around. Who spilled the beans?”
At this she sat down on the crapper and peed her usual river.
“One of the students!”
“Which one?”
“That I don’t know. Confidentiality.”
This word made him uneasy.
“You mean there was a complaint.”
“Apparently.”
“Damn. I’ve got to show you this blog. It’s really well written and confessional.”
“All right, show me the blog.”
Dana scooched into her slippers and beat it for the booze locker in the kitchen. Julian didn’t always join her. This night was one of these occasions. He felt his cheeks reddening at the thought of some protracted battle over some ridiculous accusation at Blue Ridge. He needed to have a clear head to ponder. While she poured her drink and made her way to the living room and the couch, he hit the back porch and started bringing in some firewood. The fall chill had made this seem like a good idea. ‘Do the evil thing and burn some trees while you ponder your fate,’ he figured.
“Oooh. Good idea, Jules.”
“I occasionally have one, Dr. Fem.”
“Lemme get my computer.”
Julian set about making the fire. The room with the fireplace was also his study. The paneled walls, the high ceiling, the plasterwork, all of these elements made it a great room to write in. He sat on his ass, breaking twigs. He had a maul in the basement and when his frustrations ran high, he’d head down there and turn logs into splinters. Ideally, you had to start with twigs and work up to sticks. From sticks, you graduated to bigger sticks, and then finally, logs. He’d been using the sawdust and chemical logs for a while. They burned cleaner and thus kept the chimney freer of soot, but La Feminita had a meltdown about it at one point. She had a way of working at things that was all her own. Usually Julian loved her for it, but sometimes she could be a real pain in the ass. The fireplace logs disintegrated into a waxy mess if you poked at them to reposition a real log. Perhaps that’s why the instructions on the wrapper of the log warned against augmenting them with the real thing. Julian had been in the habit of routinely doing this, but now, post fire log meltdown, here he was on his butt doing it the hard way. Eventually, the flames began to glow and writhe around in his mound of twigs and sticks. By the time Dana got her first serious shot down, Julian had a roaring fire going.

She was perched in her chair, furiously typing away. He pondered. He acted.

“Here’s the blog,” he said, handing over the laptop.
“Oh. OK. Just a minute. Things are really heating up at master crafter’s.”
“Monster crappers.”
“OK, let’s see this stuff.”
She looked at “Amy Tells All,” which was open to the one about the evil sisters in the bar.
“I agree. She’s perky and funny. I don’t see what’s so bad about this.”
Her attention span was short at the moment. Bacardi. She looked at Amy’s bio.
“She’s very pretty. If you spruced her up, she could model.”
“Could be.”
“Oh, come on, Julian, admit that she’s cute.”
“She’s cute. I admit it.”
She looked at her husband for a longer than ordinary moment. She was trying to pull a counselor Troi, and empath her way to knowledge of her husband’s involvement with Amy Lissa. He looked blank.
“There was some talk in class about the possibility that she might not be even a woman. She spends a lot of virtual ink on the topic of airplanes.”
“Women like airplanes. Sometimes they get obsessed with them.”
“Yeah, I know that. I’m the one that told you about Harriet Quimby.”
“Right. The one you wrote that story about almost before we met, the one that spent her last night on earth trying to get laid.”
“I forgot about that.”
“You write too much.”
He hauled himself up and threw on another log. He took his laptop back and sat down. He went right back to blogging.