There is no sex in this chapter.
********
I was floating in that heavenly ether that exists somewhere between sleep and awake when the memory emerged from the black. I could see us riding the crowded bus that stirred the dry dust on a meandering road along the shoreline of Jamaica.
Karen and I had only been married about a year, and we had finally managed to scrape together enough money to have a honeymoon. Those few romantic days were over, and we were herded onto a bus with a tired mosaic of silent and sunburned faces. A high-school girl with teased black hair and heavy mascara sat one seat behind her parents. She stared out the window, longing to be home like the rest of us, while the period's number one Billboard hit,
Time After Time,
played softly from her small boom box.
Karen slept. Her head rested on my shoulder and her hair smelled of fresh shower. Her limp and exhausted body swayed with the motion of the bus. I felt the slow rise and fall of her breathing. I savored the warmth of her womanly body against mine. Her hand rested on my thigh and I watched the glint of bright sunlight flicker off the meager gold around her finger.
I took her delicate hand in mine. Her fingers were slender and fragile. Her nail polish was the color of cantaloupe. I touched the ring, and I thought to myself, "
We're on our way into a life together. It's her and me. It's just her and me.
"
I watched the palm trees go by while I relished the sanctuary resting on my shoulder. Everything seemed so perfect.
The high-school girl pressed rewind and
Time After Time
started again.
I hoped that bus would never reach the airport.
The curtains fell on my wonderful memory and I awoke facing the urn-style lamp on my nightstand. The bedroom was dim, but slits of horizontal sunlight leaked through the venetian blinds and painted bright stripes across the polished blue-gray swirls of the lamp. In one of the wing-back chairs in the seating area of the room, my reading glasses sat on an archery catalog, which straddled the open pages of a technical publication titled,
Data Acquisition Processes for EEG-based Electro-Biological Interfaces
.
I lay still and basked in the quiet smell of fresh linen. I remembered Lauren "telling on me" about talking with Amber in the grocery store and I couldn't help but to chuckle, quietly. She and I have a long history of sparring with each other. We've always been especially close and to this day she carries my old Tau Beta Pi bent on her keychain.
But cheerful thoughts of her whimsical antics moved aside as a pensive mood strolled in, and I felt the melancholy stillness of a deep forest.
I missed my kids. I missed helping Alex with his calculus. I missed his well-informed thoughts on politics and the economy. I missed telling him to get his gym bag out of the family room.
I missed Lauren, her irrepressible liveliness, her quips, her unpredictability. Karen called her "Christmas cheer 365 days a year." Curled photographs of her popularity remained tacked to her old bulletin board, which leaned against the unpacked boxes in her room in our new house.
For so many years I had a Sunday morning ritual of cooking us all breakfast, whether at home, a rented beach house in Florida, or a ski chalet in the Rockies. We all sat around the table, stabbed at ham and eggs and pancakes, and shared our highs and lows and our hopes for the future. That ritual was a family fortress, but now, with the kids gone, broken walls formed an outline in the sand and the people that used to gather there, they were never coming back.
Behind me Karen moved and I realized she was awake. I rolled over to face her.
"I thought I heard you laughing," she said.
I chuckled again. "I was thinking about Lauren telling you about the grocery store. I'm sorry. I hope I didn't wake you."
Karen chuckled too. "She's a pistol, isn't she?"
"She called me the other day and said, 'Daddy do we have a good lawyer?'"
"I said, 'Yeah, darling, what do you need a lawyer for?'"
"I just punched a man in a chicken suit."
I shook my head. "How many parents do you think get a call like that?"
Karen laughed. "Why did she punch a man in a chicken suit?"
"It was a new restaurant opening near campus. She said he grabbed her ass."
"That would make Lauren swing," Karen admitted.
"I asked her if she thought she hurt him, and she said, 'How would I know? He was in a chicken suit!' Then she added, 'But I told him I was sorry.'"
Karen burst out laughing, but it quickly subsided.
"I embarrassed her yesterday," she said. "'Mortified' is a better word."
Karen's face blushed red with humiliation. She was about to say more, but her effort to talk crumbled and she began to cry. Tears streamed from the corner of her eye and dripped off her nose. I pulled her against me, embracing the caring mother with a few extra pounds she was perpetually trying to lose.
She cried openly but softly as I held her, both of us hoping that I might soothe the welts that her parents had whipped into her self-worth. But there was nothing I could do. The open cuts had festered with time and her caustic memories sat like a roiling stench in the pit of her stomach.
I propped my head on my elbow and ran my fingers through the hair at her temple. Her wet cheek glistened. Dust particles sparkled in slanted gleans of sunlight.
"You need to go talk to someone," I said softly. "I'll go with you if you want. I'll do whatever you need, but you need seek some help, Beautiful."
She nodded and dabbed her eyes with the sheet. "If I could just find a job..." More crying smothered her apology.
"Karen, we don't love you because of your job. We love you because of who you are."
"But I need to be worth something to people. I need to..."
"Karen. Sweetie. You've raised two wonderful kids; you were the Director of IT for a major corporation; we have a great marriage. We live comfortably; we have a generous retirement already. There's nothing left to prove. It's time to ease up and start enjoying life."
She nodded in agreement, but the relentless indoctrination of not-good-enough still raged inside her and she only cried harder.
"Remember when I wanted to go back to school for my PhD?" I said. "The kids were young, you were working, and I would have to quit work. I didn't think we could handle it, but you said, 'Go for it. We'll figure it out one way or another.' That's you, Karen. That's always been you. Fearless. Undaunted. You've never been afraid to take life head on.
You
led us to where we are."
"I am afraid now," she sniffled. "I don't know what's happened to me; I'm falling apart. I feel it inside me. I don't know who I should be." She looked away from me. "I'm scared, Russell. I'm really scared."
I pulled her into my chest and spoke in a soothing voice. "You've never learned how to deal with the anger. You've never learned how to let go of the demands. You need to talk to someone." I looked down at her. "We'll get through this, Beautiful. You and me. We'll get through this."
We lay cuddled together, her forehead at my neck, her body in my arms. The house was quiet.
The once powerful lioness was succumbing to the jackals.
********
By the Christmas holidays Karen's drinking had gotten much worse. She made little effort to hide it anymore, or so I thought. She was seeing a psychologist and we both had a better understanding of her struggle, but that didn't make any difference. She no longer met her friends for coffee on Saturday mornings; in fact, she almost never left the house. She rarely put on makeup and she even gave up her beloved painting. Her downstairs studio of waiting easels and rectangular landscapes sat collecting dust like the forgotten vault of some dead artist. She had been paid as much as $1,800 for some of her pieces. So much talent wasting away.
But it was the holidays and the kids were home, so I tried not to think about it. I made dinner reservations at Mahogany, my favorite restaurant, a place that specializes in the art of aged beef. I was hoping a night out with the kids might allow Karen and me to take a deep breath from the constant tension that burned in our guts.
Lauren drove herself and Alex to the restaurant. Karen and I took my car. We arrived wrapped in coats under a gray sky just as the lights of the city were beginning to glimmer. The valet, same age as my kids, approached with a ticket in hand.
