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| Sometimes, you settle for a spare. |
A diversion seems salutary what with all
this waiting for an email from my son’s stroke-victim biological father who
seems to be playing “guess what this art work means” game with my
already-addled brain.
Because what’s with these evocations of
our affair when it was full, like the moon, the glass, the untested heart? My
guess: pernicious nostalgia. I'm not falling for it. He made his cowardly choice two decades
ago, and you won’t see me swoon just because he saved 1 lovelorn poem I wrote
back then.
Aside: I do wonder if he
saved all 34 of them. I didn’t make photocopies, damn it. And that little ekphrastic [delicious word] poem on the
Rossetti tryptich wasn’t
half bad [http://tinyurl.com/44zqhm7], and the final poem I wrote to the Pater Unfamilias—“Obstetric Haiku"-- was penned the night before Jamie’s birth with the onset of my first labor pains.
Man,
“ekphrastic,” “tryptich” and “obstetric” in a single sentence! I just hit the Uncommon AND Rhyming Diction Trifecta
with that one. High linguistic five.
If PU's got those poems, I want them back from the
Bastard. Just because he had a stroke doesn’t mean I can’t call him
Bastard. Disabled Bastard.
Whoa, that’s sledding high speed down the bad karma
luge run, and exactly why I need to
refocus with a diversion.
To wit: Lovers' Lane
What the character desires: casual sexual intimacy [CSI].
Obstacle: men in academia less appealing than men in
tights, though often metaphorically indistinguishable.
Internal Conflict: suffering high levels of toxicity from relentless exposure to nuclear families.
Character's actions undertaken to achieve desire:
I joined a singles bowling league 23 miles away from where Jamie and I lived.
This was not out of character for me. I grew up around bowling balls
and pinball machines, not bookcases and opera and people who say “LIT ra
chure.” My father managed the
Lucky Strike Bowl-O-Rama in the Northeast Kingdom of Vt where we lived for some of my malformative years. My
mother worked the snack bar where hot dogs rolled around and around on shiny, grease-slicked heating rods. The
bowling alley was playroom for us kids—albeit a playroom thickly hazed with cigarette smoke and the mingled scents of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and disinfectant shoe spray.
When I was 11, my social studies
teacher sent a note home to my mother saying that her very smart daughter was becoming the object of some mean-spirited teasing because she often smelled like cigarette smoke. My mother bought me a
bottle of Emeraude at Jerome's Five and Dime. I think you can still buy Emeraude but you probably wouldn't want to.
But I digress from the diversion.
I was just looking for some action, and with a bowler guy I could keep
at a 23 mile arm’s length from my home, where I had a 9 year old in his advanced C.S
Lewis stage [Screwtape Letters; by 9,
Jamie’d finished the Narnia cycle].
A guy like Phil.
The important detail is that Phil, too, lived equidistantly far from the bowling alley but in the opposite direction, so the first several encounters--and technically we're talking foreplay here and that's all I'll say because this is not that kind of blog--took place in his Econoline utility van, which didn't bother me, frankly. In fact, it brought back some not unarousing [we've gone too long without litotes] memories from high school. We finally decided to go for a motel room, some musty old cabin Phil paid for in advance. I'd arranged the babysitter to stay a couple hours longer than usual.
In the cabin, I sat on the bed, unbuttoning my bowling shirt while Phil was in the bathroom. He cracked the door a hair and said: "There's something I gotta tell you before we do this."
I stopped unbuttoning my shirt. "Then come out here and tell me."
"Hold on," he replied.
"No. Now or I'm leaving," and I stood up and started rebuttoning my shirt." I was sure he was going to tell me he had herpes. Herpes were big in 2001.
He opened the bathroom door, its fluorescent tubes back-lighting him and humming unmelodiously.
"I'm married."
It wasn't the married part that did Phil in with such immediacy and finality.
It was the sight of him, standing there, holding a spray can of Right Guard and wearing boxer shorts, a tee-shirt, white athletic socks, and his bowling shoes.
You can't go home again. I should've known that.
After I paid the babysitter, I went up to Jamie's room. The lights were out and he was tucked in but awake. We snuggled and he started to drift off, so I said "nighty night, little man--I'm gonna go shower."
In a fading voice coming to me from half-way down the road to dreamland, he said: "That's good, momma. You smell like cigarettes."
