My husband was in charge of the Nightly Improbable Joke, broadcast punctually every evening at 10:05 p.m., the world’s appetite for improbability peaking, he calculated, just before bedtime. One night he said, “How many polar bears does it take to light up the moon?” And I said, “Polar bears?” I said, “Moon?” He waited a second until he was sure everyone in the listening audience had mulled it over and come up wanting. He was known for his timing. “None,” he said, “because the sky over the tundra cannot bear such thickly insulated illumination lest the ice caps dissolve and return us all to the sea.” And then he added, “Ursus maritimus.” He covered his mouth to cork a chortle and I smiled at him. Blankly but sincerely. “Glub,” he whispered and he touched my lips. Then there was a moment for silent cogitation, and I could feel heads nodding quizzically inside the lit-up houses that shone beyond the radio tower in the blue-black night. We left the studio and went to our drafty home, and I lay down and curled against him and dreamed of bears lumbering down the winter boulevard in luxurious electric coats that sometimes spelled out words in tiny light bulbs: honeymoon, tumor, desolation, lunatic.
Now that my husband is gone, all the jokes are a good deal more probable and the townspeople, who’d been more reliant upon my husband’s thoughtfully implausible humor than they’d realized, seem vague, vitamin deficient, a look of postponement graying their faces.
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