(Desperation for an Affair)
Jean didn’t want any vague spiritual romance,
she wanted a long and lasting and pleasant affair—like so many other folks had,
or at least so she told herself, believed. She wanted something different, even
if superficial, even if vulgar, perhaps without emotion—but was that really
possible?
She didn’t know or indulge much thought in this area—she just went
looking, shopping as they say. She blamed her separated husband for her menace
way of thinking, and motivation. On the other hand, perchance this was exactly
the right medicine she needed, the optimum therapy, the one no one prescribed,
a natural medicine, one that come out of the jungle, and cured all. She needed romance, yes, that is what she
pondered on, what she really needed, wanted, to be loved the way she wanted to
be loved, a romantic love, something that was not really possible before, or
seemed impossible, or became impossible, who’s to say—it just didn’t develop,
happen.
Thus, once looking around, looking around at all the people that did as
they pleased, seemingly with no price to pay, no penalty for it, she felt,
‘What the hick, if I don’t like it, I’ll simply withdraw from it’ …and she
found herself the right guy: the right specimen of a man: tall, sandy hair,
broad shoulders, lean, an older man, appealingly educated, sensitive, yes even
a little vulgar, but so what: aren’t most men vulgar anyhow? Their lips
tightened against each other the first time they met, enmeshed like white on
rice. For once she was smiling.
Henceforward, her mind, and her thoughts were clear as new church bells
for once: she even had a sense of being
un-cuffed from this old madness. She knew her greatest sin was to delude
herself, but it felt good. Perhaps it would be a long hard lesson, learned at
its end, but it wasn’t at its end, it was at its beginning, and it felt good,
and that meant the entire world to her.
“Do you like what you see?” she asked him, the first time they made
love, per near every time they made love together, thereafter.
“Very much,” he replied, told her as he pulled her closer. She pushed
away and cried. She could be offensive, more accurately than nice, and she had
been at this moment, more so than he had expected. Her smile left— it would
return in a moment; it was again, the first night, as often it would be
throughout her desperation for an affair, always the first night—old behavior
repeated.
“I suppose my mother was ill, and I’m ill by heritage, so there we are,
and my ex-husband was a drunk, is a drunk, like my father, does that satisfy
your curiosity?” she manically responded.
He narrowly knew what she was talking about; he went to kiss her
again… Seeing that her remark had meant
moderately little to him, she burst out laughing away the flat effect; although
without saying, he noticed after all was said and done, she was a slight
problematical: exactly how much he didn’t question, not at this juncture
anyhow.
Whatever this new lover said was becoming—in the weeks and months to
follow, her everything; her separated husband a ghost in the background. If
anything, one thing was clear, she had a thrill of delight in thinking of
herself in a new way.
He struggled the first night with her likened to every night he made
love to her—even while in his strange vulgarities, like a decapitated animal,
she sank deeper into the moment, more conscious of the fly navigating overhead,
near the ceiling than him, as she lay arms spread out wide on her back on the
bed—the kids sleeping (also
deeper into her mental illness she sank, holding back only an inch of falling
deeper into the pit, failing her desire to be more than what she was, or could
be…)—even to the point of
asking her estranged husband, near this strange affair’s end:
“Is sodomy wrong for a man to want to do with a woman and for a woman
allowing the man to do this so called pleasure to her? Is it a part of love
making?”
What could be the answer to such a question, other than, a reverie? So
he thought, plus, he knew she knew the answer; then what was she looking
for—absolution? He was not a priest.
The estranged husband knew she had forgot about who she was with this
fellow, that she had a foretaste of his vulgarities already, that she was
slipping backwards, that the romantic experiment was not going as either one of
them had expected. Although he felt nameless in all this, he knew that this was
just the hum before the storm. (The
affair would last three months, and then she’d end up in a psychotic ward; as
for the guy, he made it up to visit Jean in the hospital, but he just couldn’t
make himself go through those iron doors and comfort her: the very thing she
was waiting and longing for.)
#936 (7-4-2012)
