My mother can stop anyone cold with The Look. The Look could turn a Gorgon to stone or stop a train. My mother can get anyone to do anything she wants just by giving someone The Look. I’m mostly immune to The Look. She’s used it on me so many times over the years that I’ve developed a resistance to it, sort of like penicillin. But I can feel The Look, even over the phone. I can’t call Mackie before I leave, either, because she thinks this walk down memory lane is a big mistake, and she will try to talk me out of going to Palm Coast, again. And I need to take this trip.
Just yesterday, I read in the Perspectives column of The Miami Herald that “history chases us and catches us by surprise.” That is what is happening to me. My past and present are on a collision course.
Chapter Three:
Doing It at The Home Depot
[email protected]: You can’t fix your marriage by meeting another man at The Home Depot. If it’s a matter of intimacy…
[email protected]: Matt’s idea of intimacy is leaving town.
[email protected]: What if you get there and you want to go through with it? Where will you do it? In the restroom of The Home Depot? And how are you going to sneak Manny into the women’s restroom? Come to think of it, you hate The Home Depot.
[email protected]: I know. That’s why I chose it. It’s Matt’s favorite place. He says you can get anything you want at The Home Depot.
****
Maybe Matt is right. But The Home Depot scares me to death. They sell too many tiny things like nails and screws and nuts and bolts, and it freaks me out to even walk into that store. So maybe I’ll see the place, take one look at Manny Gellar, and turn around and walk right out of there.
The thing about all those tiny things is that in the store they’re all alone and isolated but when you take them home they all fit with something. And that’s the thing about me. Right now I don’t feel like I fit anywhere anymore.
And speaking of intimacy, when did my marriage deteriorate beyond repair? When did Matt stop noticing me? To say my marriage is going through a rough patch is an understatement. I’m talking about more here than just a random bump in the road, something closer to a street-swallowing sinkhole. The road construction crew is already descending into the cavernous depths of a crater that Natalie would call huge.
The glaring, gaping hole in our marriage wasn’t so noticeable when the kids were still in the house, but now that it’s just the two of us, it’s become painfully obvious that more than just the kids are missing. In terms that Matt, the Frequent Flyer, can understand, we share the same airspace and we’re both circling, but neither of us cares enough to make our connection.
So it looks like my marriage is not going to end with a bang (no pun intended). The spigot will simply shut off gradually until the flow narrows to a trickle and all that is left of it will come out in fits and starts, drips and drops. Plop, plop, plop.
Now, whenever Matt tries to joke with me outside the bedroom, or cajole or disarm me, or share a confidence, I think, No fair, you bastard. If you aren’t going to give me intimacy on all levels, then I won’t accept any at all.
Behavior that has only mildly annoyed me before suddenly sticks in my craw like a sharp chicken bone.
I am almost desperate enough to seek advice from my mother, until I remember that she once told me my father doesn’t say, “Good night, Sylvia,” before he goes to bed. Instead, he makes pronouncements, like “Eggs,” or “Oatmeal,” so my mother knows what he wants her to fix him for breakfast the next morning. Hardly a relationship model to emulate.
Okay, what am I missing? Something is very wrong in my own marriage. Matt is either boinking Gretchen’s brains out, which is why he doesn’t feel the need to boink my brains out, or maybe his libido is seriously out of whack. Either way, I’m screwed. Or not. All I know is that, intentionally or unintentionally, he is systematically destroying our marriage with his neglect.
When I tried making just my side of the bed to drive home a point, Matt wasn’t interested in my point. And that is the point, isn’t it? Matt is a great father, and the years we were married were some of the most wonderful times of my life. I wish we could get that feeling back. But the magic is missing. Maybe our marriage could benefit from a reassessment period. I’ll bring that up after Josh’s wedding. I just can’t think about it now. Hey, since I’m in Atlanta, there’s no reason I can’t channel Scarlett O’Hara.
All I know is, Matt no longer gives me what I need. I get more support from my eighteen-hour, cross-my-heart, hold-my-boobs-in bra. I’m out of practice and frankly out of patience with being a wife without privileges. Any sex we have at this point seems obligatory, and I am through settling for that. We’ve both just stopped trying, and now the well of resentment I am drowning in has become an ocean.
Matt pretty much falls asleep the minute his head hits the pillow. Sex is no longer important to him. But it’s still important to me. He keeps to his side of the king-sized bed, which leaves me alone on mine. Which is a problem, because I’m a snuggler.
Most nights we go to bed without saying a word, facing away from each other, lying still as statues, barely breathing (well, Matt claims I snore), each of us engrossed in our own private thoughts, me in my own private hell. Sometimes I actually ache at night for wanting Matt inside me. The emptiness and the loneliness are not vague, frivolous states of mind. They are real, and they are making me desperate. One minute I want to burrow into Matt, be banded by his arms, but then he makes some innocuous remark and I blow it all out of proportion, until the moment and the opportunity pass and it becomes easier to hang onto the old familiar anger.
It’s a civil enough situation—less like an armed camp and more like an uneasy truce that we almost break the night before I leave for our condo. I am determined to give my husband one more chance to make love to me and change my mind about going to Palm Coast, but he fails the test he doesn’t even know he is taking.
After what seems like hours of tossing and turning and stewing, I throw the sheet and the blanket off my bed. It feels like somebody is stoking a furnace inside my body.
“Turn the air on, Matt. It’s roasting in here,” I complain. “I can’t breathe.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the thermostat,” Matt says, in a voice still groggy from sleep. “You’re the one who needs a tune-up. You’re going through the change. Now go back to bed so we can both get some sleep.”
“Are you a gynecologist now?”
A strangled sound escapes from Matt’s throat.
“That better not be a laugh.”
“It’s a cough. I was coughing.” He couldn’t resist. “But I know what I see.”
My new gynecologist, Dr. Second Opinion, has probably seen it, too, during her exam on my last visit. I am at the end of my reproductive line. I am never going to have a period again. She just failed to let me in on her little secret.
Too worked up to sleep, and too nervous about tomorrow, I jump out of bed, grab my purse, and riffle through it in the dark until I feel the damning pink mini-pillow of plastic. I haven’t had a period for forty days and forty nights. Is there a biblical significance to that number? I don’t think it could be a coincidence. Being an optimist, I always carry around a maxi-pad, just in case. I crush my fist around it, switch on the bedside lamp, drag the entire bag of maxi pads out of the hall closet, and stuff the package into the wastebasket.
“Does this mean you’re going to be in a permanent bad mood?” Matt wants to know, before I grab my pillow and give him a resounding, satisfying thwack on the head.
This sudden onset of meanness and mood swings surprises me. One minute I’m content and the next belligerent, feeling put upon and entitled to my rage. The weight of the world is pressing in on me, choking off my breath.
“You’re crushing our marriage with your neglect.”
“You’re the one who’s crushing our marriage with your unrealistic expectations. I thought women going through the change were supposed to have a lowe
r sex drive.”
“What’s wrong with my expectations?”
He had no answer for that. It was a stalemate.
I’m sure the advice experts would toll the warning bells—that Matt is looking outside the marriage. Matt has needs, and he isn’t coming to me to fulfill them. So who is he going to? There has to be someone else. And I think I know who that someone else is.
I’ve pretty much heard every excuse from Matt. At night he claims he’s too tired. In the morning he lifts weights and runs on the treadmill, and then he’s too sweaty. During the week he’s never in town. The stars are never perfectly aligned. According to Papa Bear, the porridge is either too hot or too cold. The time for having sex is never Just Right.
“I’m exhausted,” Matt says. “I’ve been working hard.” Left unsaid is, “And you haven’t.”
“You need to find a job or a hobby or something to do,” Matt chides. “You need some stress in your life, and you need to engage your mind. Otherwise you’re just a protoplasm.”
Me, a protoplasm? I don’t know what that means, but when I look it up, the word is defined as “the colloidal and liquid substance of which cells are formed, excluding horny, chitinous, and other structural material.” Horny is a concept I can definitely relate to. Maybe I’ve already turned into a protoplasm, like Abercrombie.
“You know, we’re not twenty anymore,” Matt says defensively whenever I bring up the subject of sex, or the lack of it. “We used to do it all the time, remember?”
Frankly, I don’t, and that’s part of the problem.
“I’m not asking for all the time,” I counter. “Just once, again. I’m fifty, not eighty.”
“You’ve been reading too many romance novels.”
“You’re gone all the time,” I say.
“I’ve always traveled. I was never romantic. I’m the same person you married.”
“You’re not,” I insist.
“Nothing’s changed.”
You’re wrong, Matt. Inside my head, everything about you has changed.
“Maybe you need to see someone,” Matt suggests.
“Oh, so now I’m the one with the problem? Maybe I do need to see someone, and I don’t mean a shrink.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The room resounds with silence.
“Is it someone else?” I whisper, not really wanting to know the answer to that question. “All those times you had to go to New York to meet with the investment bankers? And to Germany to meet with the buyer, when I asked you to take me with you and you refused?”
“No, of course not. It was all business, Julie, I promise you. We wouldn’t have had a spare minute to spend with each other. I was in meetings all day and night.” Meetings with Gretchen.
A year ago, I would have believed him. Sexy as the fräulein sounded, I didn’t think then Matt would ever cheat on me. He hated change. He’s had the same secretary for the last twenty-five years, the same job, the same house (until he moved us out of it unexpectedly), and the same wife. But he might be tempted. The Germans almost conquered the world—twice. How hard would it be for one German woman to conquer one man? My man! Things between us haven’t been the same since Matt started traveling to Germany a year ago. I know there must be more to the story.
“I’m not having an affair, and I can’t believe you would even think that,” he insists.
I wonder whether disinterest qualifies as an explanation.
Apparently he isn’t turned off by all women, just me. “Well, then, is it me? Do you still love me?”
He pauses, considers his answer. “Of course I still love you.”
“Talk to me, Matt,” I urge, as the tears slide down the side of my face. I reach for his hand. Even in the darkness, I see a look cross his face that I have never seen before. Beneath his hooded eyes, it appears almost venomous. Like he wants to punish me. And then it is gone. Maybe I’ve imagined it.
He only hesitates a minute before he says, flippantly, “I think I have indigestion.”
“That’s lame, Matt. That’s like saying you have a headache.” Matt doesn’t get headaches, he gives them. Matt is a consummate power player. He likes to mess with my mind, not my body, and is looking to lay blame. I am just looking to get laid. In fact, I am so frustrated that if the next UPS man who comes to the door shows even the slightest interest, I will be tempted to see just what Brown can do for me.
“When’s the last time we did it?” I ask Matt lightly, trying not to sound too judgmental. When he doesn’t answer, I try a humorous approach.
“I know for sure we’ve done it at least twice,” I joke, while seriously trying for the umpteenth time to seduce my own husband.
Then it is my turn to be contrite. Because I know what he is thinking, although he’ll never say it to my face. He’ll be contradicting me in his mind, “At least once.” But saying that would be a betrayal of Josh. And Matt thinks of Josh as his own, even though he isn’t my son’s biological father. I never doubted Matt’s love for my son. In all the years we’ve been married, he’s never once thrown Josh’s paternity back in my face. The bond my husband has forged with my son is one of the things I love most about him.
When the kids aren’t around, we call Josh “Fabio Jr.” because Matt still believes my son was fathered by an Italian playboy who got me pregnant when I was going to school in Florence, Italy, during my senior year abroad. He doesn’t know who Josh’s real father is. And he married me anyway. He made a commitment to my son and me, and he kept his word and honored it. I tried to tell him the truth about Josh on several occasions, but he didn’t want to have that conversation. He dismissed the whole thing by announcing, “The past is in the past.”
But I can’t seem to put the past behind me.
When Manny Gellar began his e-mail seduction campaign in earnest, it was only a short slide from shock to vulnerability, allowing the sly wolf that had been my friend and former lover to seductively blow his way into the house of straw that has become my life.
The first dozen yellow roses arrived the day after Manny’s first e-mail. There was a card: “Meant to Be Together.” I didn’t need a signature to know who had sent the arrangement. The flowers seemed harmless enough. Who could get hurt by this distraction? Not Manny’s wife, my longtime rival, Nita, who I blame for stealing Manny away from me. As far as I am concerned, she doesn’t have feelings.
The flowers were followed by late-night phone calls.
“Are you alone?” Manny asked in his husky, sneaky, still-so-sexy voice. Always, I thought, and then, not anymore. “Jewels. I can only talk for a minute—”
“I know,” I whispered, praying he wouldn’t mention her name. “I got your flowers. They’re my—”
“Favorite, yes, I remember,” Manny says. “I had to call to hear your voice again.”
More huffing and puffing on the wolf’s end.
“If I can’t have you, it’s the next best thing to being there. I want to be there with you now, holding you, kissing you.” More heavy breathing by the Big Bad Wolf.
“Jewels, I need to see you again,” he implored.
“Why should we get together?”
“To complete the circle.”
“What good would that do?”
“I think we both want a taste of what we once had. Besides, this thing between us isn’t over.” Same old confident Manny.
“I…” was all I could manage, still flustered and tongue-tied whenever I was around him or even heard his voice. I can listen to Manny’s voice forever. I usually have trouble sleeping when Matt is away, but I drift off easily after one of Manny’s calls, until the guilt sets in.
“I’ve got to—” I manage, “hang up now.”
When I tell Mackie about our encounter, she says, “Did he ask if you wanted to join in any reindeer games?”
“He didn’t quite put it that way,” I answer. “It was more like—”
“Do me, Rudolph?” Mackie speculates.
“Not quite that crude, but close.”
It’s true what they say, “It takes two to tango.” Or not to tango. The tango is what Matt and I have NOT been doing for the past year. While Matt’s mind is focused on acquisitions, I have the urge to merge. And maybe that’s just what I’ll do when I get to Palm Coast.
Chapter Four:
The List
[email protected]: My horoscope says I will exude sex appeal today. But who will I lure? Manny? Or my husband of twenty-five years?
[email protected]: You make your marriage sound like a life sentence. What horrible crime did Matt commit? Did he leave the cap off the toothpaste?
[email protected]: How would I know? He’s never around. I don’t even see him brush his teeth. He’s just not romantic, you know, passionate, any more.
[email protected]: LOL. Little Jon says “unbridled passion” has a half-shelf life of eighteen months.
[email protected]: Well, then I guess that puts me on the shelf permanently.
[email protected]: It would be hard to stay passionate for twenty-five years. When you’re young you just can’t get enough sex, and when you get older, you just can’t get enough sex.
[email protected]: What about the next twenty-five years? The average life expectancy is 77.6 years. It must be nice to be married to your own private therapist.
[email protected]: He’s so drained—emotionally and physically—after a long day of seeing lunatics, and then he has to come home to the lunatic he married, so there’s not much left over for me. He shuts up tighter than a drum. You know that recapturing the past is just a fantasy.
[email protected]: No, it’s a real thing. There are a couple of books out about first loves and second chances. Apparently it’s common for old flames to reconnect. They say first love is powerful, and the attraction is practically chemical. That’s what’s pulling at me. I’m having trouble fighting it, getting him out of my mind, not thinking about the way things were. This psychologist who wrote a book about it said it had something to do with imprinting.
Stones Page 3
