“The bloody shit, leaving me like that!”
A passing couple looked at me, startled. I realised I had spoken my thought aloud.
I was walking my terrier along the river path and for the millionth time was contemplating the ruins of my marriage. It was only the day before that the divorce had become absolute, and Vic was now free to marry his slut.
There are things that we know are going to happen, but never the less, we somehow can’t encompass them until they actually arrive. I have wondered from time to time how people condemned to be executed, can go on for days, weeks, even months, without falling apart. Perhaps it is a similar thing. Its only when the moment arrives that the reality hits home.
That’s how I was feeling that lovely Spring morning. The reality of being alone, without my husband of eighteen years, finally struck me in all its actuality. It had taken eighteen months to complete the divorce, and all the time he was living with his slut, the twenty-year old that had replaced me in his life. Yet, it had not seemed real, final, until yesterday.
When he first said he was going to leave me for her, I begged and pleaded. Amongst my other emotions now, was anger that I should have abased myself. He had made me feel ugly, unloved and unattractive. I was undesirable to him, and so was undesirable to any one else.
Nineteen years before he could not keep his hands off me. Then it was he who begged and pleaded. He wanted me like he’d never wanted a woman before, so he said.
He was good looking, personable, some years older than I was, and on his way to becoming a successful lawyer.
I was young, just eighteen when I met him at a party. I was flattered that this sophisticated man was attracted to me. I fell fiercely in love with him.
Despite my infatuation with him, I did not give in to his entreaties at first. He tried everything; expensive restaurants, concerts, theatres and romantic moonlight gazing. It was his endless reassurances that he would love me for ever, and I wouldn’t get pregnant because he knew what he was doing, that finally brought about my surrender.
He took my virginity one night in the back of his flashy sports car.
“Anyway,” he said, “You can’t get pregnant the first time.”
How wrong he was. Within a month, I knew I was pregnant. When I told him he said, “You’d better get rid of it. We don’t want to start off our married life on the wrong foot. We need to wait awhile before we have kids.”
He arranged with one of his medical pals to give me an abortion. I can’t complain about the care I received. He was paying, and he could afford the best. Yet looking back, that abortion gives me my most virulent grounds for hating him.
We married, and thereafter, for all the seed he pumped into me, I never got pregnant again.
How naïve, how stupid I had been! For the first five years of our marriage we…no…I was going to write, “we made love constantly.” Looking back now I can only write a word I never normally use. “He fucked me.”
And how he “fucked me.” I lacked experience in sexual matters, and at first, I was horrified at what he expected me to do. Perhaps I should have written, “Demanded.”
In fairness, I must admit I came to enjoy the things into which he initiated me: as well as vaginal sex, which I had obviously anticipated anyway, there was oral and anal sex, ejaculating between my breasts and playing rape games. In fact, sexually I gave myself to him totally. If ever a man was capable of giving a girl a thorough sex education, it was Vic.
It was some time during the fifth year of our marriage that I noticed a falling off in his sexual drive. As I wrote, he is some years older than I am, twelve, to be exact, and once more, I was naïve.
I thought that the decline of his interest was caused by a combination of the time we had been having sex and his age. I actually thought that a man might lose interest sexually speaking, when he was in his mid thirties! How silly can you be?
Friends tried to warn me that Vic was playing around with other women, and I roundly refuted them. I knew “he loved me deeply”, and I loved and desired only him. “He wouldn’t think of entering into sexual relationship with another woman!” Ha!
I was so sure of my place in Vic’s life, I did not even tax him with the things I was told about his, “Playing around,” as some put it.
It was only when he announced he was leaving me for his slut that the truth came out.
I suppose to try to make him self feel better, he then boasted of his infidelities. Even gave me the names of some of them. They included women I had thought to be my friends.
Painful as this was, it was nothing to the final revelation. Over the years of our marriage, I had gone to many doctors to try to discover why I could not get pregnant. I had begun by assuming that the abortion had done something to render me infertile.
Nothing was found to be wrong with me.
Vic always refused to have tests saying, “I got you pregnant that first time, so there’s nothing wrong with me.”
On the day of his departure, he made the final hateful thrust. He told me that after my abortion, the same medical pal had performed a vasectomy on him. If this wasn’t bad enough, he went on to tell me he intended to see if this could be reversed, so he and his slut could have children.
How do you live with someone for eighteen years, and not see the evil, the deception in him or her?
In the face of all this, I broke down completely. All that had underpinned my life had deserted me. Above all, my naivete and blindness rose up to haunt me. I spent two months in a psychiatric nursing home.
Now, here I was, still spitting out my venom, and doing it aloud in public. So what to do?
I had sworn there would never be another man in my life. For the period of my illness, this was no problem. Then I had desired nothing but release from the storms that raged inside me. Now, other desires began to make themselves felt.
Even right up to the time Vic told me he was leaving me, we had continued to “fuck”. I am a woman who normally needs a lot of emotional gratification, and Vic had given it me in the sense of regular sex, even if at a diminished level. Now here I was, with my aching need for satisfaction, and there was no one I could trust with my body.
Certainly, there had been several men who sought to “console” me. They usually suggested that “We could have a very meaningful relationship.” Most of them were husbands of my girl friends, and all of them were sent packing.
I considered the possibility of a lesbian relationship, but decided that it was not for me. So there I was, night after night, trying to satisfy myself with a dildo and vibrator, and weeping with every orgasm because it was not the real thing.
What messes we humans can get ourselves into!
Walking my little dog along the river path, he seemed to be the only thing left I could safely love. I looked into the future, and saw myself year after year, walking alone with my dog along that path.
Vic, of course, being Mr.Money Bags, had graciously provided for his cast-off. At first, my pride tempted me to refuse his grandiose offer, but practicalities intervened.
Marrying young, I had never established a career. I had no particular skills to offer, so getting anything other than the most menial work was about all I could expect. I frankly admit I could not face that situation.
“Something must be done,” I blurted out aloud. I looked around hastily, but no one was in sight, I’m thankful to say.
I sat on the park bench that is just where the river bends, and watched the rosellas swoop from tree to tree, then heard their angry squawking. Oh God, even they, for all their colourful beauty, can’t live in peace,” I complained.
A young couple walked by hand in hand. I watched them sourly. “Just wait till he clears off and leaves you,” I thought.
The thought was a little dampened when two minutes later an elderly couple came by also hand in hand.
I thought about the words of one of the counselors I had attended. “My dear,” she said patronizingly, “You must realise that lifelong fidelity is totally out of date. The modern person needs to be venturesome in their partnerships.”
I later found out she had been married four times.
People went past, some jogging, some walking with grim determination, others strolling contemplatively.
