My phone rang at 8:15 a.m., a bit early by New England phone etiquette standards. It was Mindy, a woman in my writers group. She sounded distressed and wondered if she could come by to talk. She mentioned something I couldn't quite make sense of, regarding marital issues, something I was no expert in, except that I had had some of my own. This morning in fact.
My wife and I had made love upon awakening, before she was to leave for the week at her out-of-town job. And as we lay there in what I thought was a quite pleasant afterglow, she, for some reason, reached back into the past and snipped, "Was that as good as with Rebecca?"
What followed was our perennial argument.
"That was years ago, honey."
"But you still want it. I know you do."
"I told you before we got married, that I could not do monogamy."
"I should never have married you."
"But we have had so many wonderful things to celebrate in our 45 years together."
"And one thing that I never will."
With that, she got out of bed, showered, dressed, and headed off for the week, after just a peck on my lips to say goodbye.
Mindy was due shortly, so I didn't have time for a shower. I pulled my clothes on, over my used body, and went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee.
A few minutes after nine, I heard her knocking. Melinda Arroyo, an Anglo woman in her mid-60s, came in. Mindy, as she preferred to be called, was pretty, a little matronly plump after having had four children, but she still had luscious brown hair, without a strand of gray, just shy of shoulder length, matching her brown eyes, and framing a face with an omnipresent smile. This morning, though, she was uncharacteristically disheveled, smelling of cigarettes. Her hair was unusually mussed, and there was no hint of a smile on her face.
She accepted a cup of coffee, and we sat at our breakfast table to talk.
I knew little about the individuals in our writers group which had been meeting for a number of months. Only what we shared in our writings, which I assumed were somewhat autobiographical.
Mindy wrote mostly about straight couple matters. I wrote about people too, but mostly those encompassed in the rainbow coalition. Maybe because of our mutual interest in relationships, she thought to turn to me this morning to talk about hers. She began quite bluntly.
"I just found out that Ramon is having an affair. He's got a sex drive which we need to satisfy by love-making two or three times a week. This morning while we were doing so, he came inside me screaming "Maria, Maria" so when I asked who this Maria was, he faltered, tried to fabricate a story, then confessed."
I wasn't sure what to say, especially because I was feeling more like Ramon, although my interests were in men as well as in women.
She didn't look good. In fact, there was a slight tremor to her hand, as she brought the coffee cup to her mouth.
"Are you OK?" I asked.
Obviously, she wasn't. It was a stupid thing to say.
"Do you mind if I have a smoke? I don't regularly smoke cigarettes, but I keep a pack on hand for times when I feel stressed. It seems to take the edge off."
I didn't like cigarettes. I had been a smoker over forty years ago, before our kids were born. Both my wife and I smoked, in fact, but we had decided to quit when we started to conceive. Ever since then, the smell of cigarettes had made me nauseous, especially when going into the house of a friend who smoked.
But there was something about my wife's attitude this morning that bothered me. I felt annoyed. Angry. Maybe tinged with an underlying shame that I could never shake, even though I generally liked myself, and my polyamorous side. Her attitude toward me made me feel like I was a bad person. So I was going to be bad. Even badder.
Not only did I tell Mindy that she could have a smoke, but I asked her if I could bum one off her, too. She looked at me quizzically, but then offered me the pack. She then took one herself, lit mine and then hers. We sat in silence for a few minutes as we both inhaled and blew the smoke out, filling the room with a dense haze.
"Do you know what it's like when you give everything to your husband, including having sex three times a week when you're really not interested, and you find out he's banging another girl?"
I honestly did not know because my wife was faithfully monogamous. Though at times when I had fantasized about such a thing, I found it turned me on. Especially if she promised to let me in on things from time to time with her other man. But I couldn't really tell Mindy that, and so I just said in all honesty,
"No. I don't know what that's like."
I asked her to tell me more, which she obligingly did.
I mostly listened, taking a drag on my cigarette, tapping the ashes into my empty coffee mug, but maintaining my eye contact all the while. For some odd reason, when she explained in a very sensitive way what she was feeling, I looked beyond the smoking habit and her unkempt appearance and found myself feeling an attraction. Getting aroused, in fact. Something I shouldn't have been doing. I mean, it almost seemed like I was preying upon her vulnerability.
Our sharing a smoke seemed to help her somewhat. Her tremor was less noticeable now, as she continued to sip her coffee.
At one point, though, as the conversation continued, she got very tearful, and I moved my chair closer to hers, slid my arm behind her shoulders, and laid my other hand across her two hands clasped in her lap.
Her shaking returned a bit more violently, and she began to cry. I drew her head closer so that she could rest it on my shoulder, as I continued to sit and listen.
