Shielding you from the glare

SHERWOOD KIRALY

Our daughter’s been gone for two weeks, at writer’s camp in

Idyllwild, on a kind of dry run for college. This leaves Patti Jo and

I home alone together for the first time in a long time.

These are the days when one partner, who has been focused largely

on her career and her daughter, may notice things about the other

partner, which she hadn’t had time to notice before.

Such sudden revelations have inspired some of the oldest and most

reliable lines in drama: “You’re not the man I married.” “I feel like

I don’t know you anymore.” And the poignant query from Joe Martin’s

“Willy ‘n Ethel” comic strip: “Why aren’t we drifting apart?”

Patti Jo hasn’t said any of those yet, but the other day she gazed

at me for a little longer than usual and said, “Your insides don’t

match your outsides.”

That didn’t sound good. This, I thought, is what comes of being

noticed.

Patti Jo went on to observe that although I am at heart amiable

enough and kind to dogs and smile for photos, my face, in repose,

makes people think I’m angry about something. I glower. And it’s

true: If you see me on the street, or driving behind you in your

rear-view mirror, I look like an old-time Eastern European

revolutionary, and not one of the fun-loving ones.

Maybe it’s gravity, maybe it’s the mustache, but this is what

happens to some of us who, in youth, cultivate an intense, brooding

look. As young men we’re trying to be accepted as suffering for our

art, or at least serious about something. By middle age the look is

carved into our faces, even though by this time all we’re trying to

do is remember why we came into the living room.

Downtown I see other men like me, walking into Hobie’s or Jack in

the Box, their faces set as if they’re in charge of homeland

security.

When he was in his 70s, the director Elia Kazan was habitually

asked by family members, “Why are you mad?” To which he would reply,

“I’m not mad. It’s just my face.”

The late columnist Sydney J. Harris once wrote that we should

endeavor to become more like peaches on the inside as we become more

like prunes on the outside. On those terms I guess I’m aging normally

enough.

Still, no wife wants to embrace an angry prune, so I’m trying to

make my expression more benign. It’s not easy. It takes a strong

muscular effort to wrench my face out of its present alignment. I

lapse a lot.

So, if I glare at you in the grocery, I hope you’ll be tolerant.

I’m probably just wondering if this is the correct aisle for yaki

soba noodles.