Conversations 05

The author retains all copyright to and within this story. There is no sex so no need to affirm ages of characters.

A slightly longer short story in this series than normal, and one which reflects my mood today, I guess.

Enjoy – or not.

*****

"Hey Dad, you have a minute?"

I looked at my son, and felt that flash of pride that always went through me when I saw him. James Alex Foreau was now nineteen, and growing into a fine figure of a man. Smart, kind, passionate about the ills of the world and prepared to stand up and try to do something about them. On the other hand, he was a first-year student at University and trying to come to grips with the concept of balance – such as balancing the need to get pissed with his friends as often as possible, with the need to pass the year with good grades.

He was tall and rangy, somewhat like me, but a whole lot better looking than I ever was. His mother's genes had seen to that.

"Sure," I said. "What's up?"

We were in my workshop. Well, I call it my workshop, but it's really just a space at the back of the garage where I keep a workbench and my tools. In front of me on the bench was a disassembled clock, the parts carefully laid out on a white cloth to give me some small hope that I wouldn't lose them.

He looked a little embarrassed and somewhat shifty. He'd come to talk to me about something and wasn't sure where to start.

"Dad," he tried. Then he stalled.

I knew what he wanted to talk about, and it would be a tough conversation, but he needed to be adult enough to start, continue and finish. He'd had the courage to come and ask, and I was confident he would make me proud, despite...

"It's about Mum," he said, trying again.

"Yes?"

He looked at the floor, kicking at the leg of the bench distractedly.

"Dad, she cheated on you."

"Yes."

"And you kicked her out."

"Yes. You think I did the wrong thing?"

"No, I totally understand why you did that. I would have done the same."

There was a long silence.

"So how come she's back living with us again?" he asked.

"You're not happy with that?"

"I am... sort of. Half yes and half no, I guess. I mean she's my mum and no matter what she does I'm going to love her. So I am glad that she's here. But at the same time, I'm so damned angry at her all the time. And with you I guess."

"You don't think three months away from her family and having to live with friends is enough?" I asked. Again, I wanted him to learn, to understand through his own thought processes, not through a lecture from me.

"It seems kind of wimpy to let her come back," he said, a light of defiance in his eyes.

"Ah... wimpy." I said. "You think I'm a wimp to just roll over and take it."

"No, not you. I didn't mean you were a wimp," he said hurriedly. "But you forgave her so quickly. How could you do that? You're her husband, and she had an affair with another man."

"Yes, she did," I conceded, and sighed. "Okay, let's work through this. What would you have done?"

"I would have thrown her out, and left her out."

"So no forgiveness then."

"Not for that! Not for cheating!"

I looked towards the house. My wife was at the kitchen window, washing the dishes. Normally she would hum while she did that, never really trusting the dishwasher to do a good enough job. She wouldn't be humming now, not with the sadness and guilt in her. Before this shit had blown up she was so perfectly beautiful – but now she was thin to the point of being gaunt and the fine lines around her eyes and mouth had deepened very slightly. For the first time since we had met when we were both nineteen at university, she didn't look younger than her age. It was eating away at her from the inside as the whole thing went around and around in her head. I hoped my plan would divert those thoughts into something positive, so that she could get back to the happier woman she used to be. I wasn't sure, but I was hoping.

"Look through that window," I said, pointing. "You see that woman in there?"

"Mom, yes."

"Now tell me how much misery you want her to be in. You want her to commit suicide maybe?"

"No! God no!" He looked at me in alarm.

"You don't think what she did deserves that?"

"No!"

"But she cheated on me, and that means us, you and me. She took her love, time and money from us and gave it to someone else. She broke a promise to me and wrecked our trust."

"How did she take money from us?" he asked, trying to take in what I was saying.

"She bought clothes for her assignations, used some of that expensive perfume I bought her, used up fuel in the car, bought expensive coffee and snacks at the coffee house nearby. That's money from all of us. Two thirds of that was ours – yours and mine. That's stealing."

"I guess that's true," he admitted reluctantly. I could see it on his face. He didn't like to think of his mother as a thief. Especially not as someone who would steal from her own family. Somehow that felt almost worse than her being a cheat.

"You do the crime, you do the time, yes? What I should have done was take all our money and hide it away and then divorce her. That way I'd know I'd stolen that money right back. Fair's fair, right?

"I mean there are shelters she could have slept in, food she could have got from handouts if her friends had refused to take her in. Hell, if she sold all the shit she had in her wardrobes, that would keep her fed for a couple of months, even if second hand clothes aren't worth more than a few coins. Doesn't matter. We'd have got back what was ours."

He looked even more uneasy. His mother – as a bag lady?

"So let's look at the time she stole," I continued. "Your mum used to work at the local surgery before she fell pregnant with you. Man, those were the best and the worst of times. You made her... us... so happy, and yet you made her sick as a dog for months. It didn't make any difference. We just couldn't wait to meet you.

"You were born and she stayed home to raise you, get you to school, take you to your after-school stuff, cheer you on at sport, clap for you in school plays, make those outfits for Roman day, or Space day or whatever other shit your teachers dreamed up. That's her time that she spent on you. And she loved every moment of it. So I guess we owe her some time – a lot more than the time she stole from us. So it evens up a little.

"And then you were in high school and she didn't have that anymore. So she went back to work. Unfortunately, the place she chose happened to have a horndog cunt working in the same department as her."

James' eyes opened wide. I rarely swore, and almost never in front of him.

"It took him three years to get through her defences, but he got there in the end. And on three successive Wednesdays she spent an hour with him at that fleabag hotel."

He knew the one I meant. It was the one the kids used after Prom night each year. I knew he'd planned to take Serena there after his Prom. It didn't work out that way.

"How is Serena, by the way?" I asked. He put the two thoughts together and knew what I was inferring.

He had the grace to look embarrassed. "She's okay, I guess."

"I know you two aren't together any more. She step out on you?"

To his credit, he took the time to think about it.

"I don't think she did. We just drifted apart."

"How long until she had another man?" I asked.

"A couple of months I think. I didn't ask."

"Didn't want to know?"

He shook his head.

"Residual feelings," I sighed. "You have something good in your life and then someone else has it. It never feels good."

"No, it doesn't," he said. "I mean, I was going out with Roxy by then, so it shouldn't have bothered me, but there was a twinge in there every now and again."

"It's okay to feel that way," I said, patting his shoulder. "We don't like sharing our toys. It's genetically programmed into us. As men, we can only bring in so many resources for our family, and the imperative is to get our genes into the next generation. If the woman sleeps around with other men, there's a chance that those resources are going to be used to bring up someone else's genes.

"For the woman, if the man sleeps around then she might lose his protection and the resources for her offspring, her genes. It's all about survival of the fittest in the wild. Darwin was spot on, no matter how religion may try to fudge it.

"When humanity managed to get together and create society, we had changed and become rational enough to find ways to create weapons. That levelled the score some and it was no longer all about who was biggest and strongest any more. It was more about who was sneaky and nasty enough to use the first rock, stab with the first knife, throw the first spear, loose the first arrow, pull the first trigger. Which meant that a lot of men died or were crippled – which in those days meant dead anyway. Think Game of Thrones with a lot more attitude.

"Humanity was trying to wipe itself out."

"Hasn't changed much," James said gloomily.

"Well, it did change – to a point. We invented marriage – a social contract where the two parties agreed not to spend each and every day trying to fuck each other over and other people. Religion wasn't involved in marriage until some 800 years or so ago. Before that it was simply a contract between a man and a woman and their families. No man wanted the wealth he had accumulated to go to some other man's bastard offspring when he died. Same with women – they wanted all the wealth to only go to their offspring. Genetics. And even in modern times, it still comes back to that genetic contract we all sign at birth."

"I get that," he said. "And I suppose it makes sense in a very inhumane way. But what about gays and lesbians and all the other degrees of sexuality?"

"For some it's a choice. For others, well I guess genetics does what it always does, mutate and create off-pattern people. The sun up there sends out massive radiation, and there's always some shit in the atmosphere from the idiots testing out their latest toys. And genes are very susceptible to being knocked around and having chunks blown out of them by radiation. That's why it takes male and female genes to get together to produce offspring, so that each can try and repair holes in the other...

"Look, I think we've drifted off the subject here. You can look that stuff up on the net. I wanted to ask you something. You used the word 'wimp'."

"I didn't mean you, Dad," he protested. "You know I didn't. I know you better than that."

"It's okay. I didn't think it came from you. Probably one of your friends, yeah?"

His shoulders slumped. "Yeah. We were all messing about in the pub, and Nigel just suddenly said he never suspected you were a cuck."

"A cuck. A cuckold, from the cuckoo which lays its eggs in another bird's nest and then leaves it to be raised by the nest builders. I get it. But it's taken on other contexts as well."

His face was red, and his fists clenched. "Dad, I know what those are and that bastard deserved everything he got, even if I had to take a few punches in the process. He said Mum was a slut and you probably got off on watching Mum her with ... someone else."

"What do you think?"

"Hell no! I saw what you were like when you found out."

"Yes, I did want to kill both of them. I was so far from wanting to see it that I felt I was going to vomit every time I even thought about it. Not really sexy when it makes you want to puke."

"So why..."

"Apparently there are men who need to be humiliated so badly that it's the only way they can operate," I said. "I don't understand it at all, and in fact even the very idea itself is repellent. But then, I don't get people who need pain to feel pleasure either. How badly do you have to be wired for that to happen? I mean your mum and I have played spanky spanky now and again..."

"Jeez Dad! Too much information!"

"Hey, it is what it is. This is an adult conversation and I'm not going to censor either of us. That would probably leave at least one of us in the dark and wondering what was behind the redactions."

"And by one of us, you mean me!" he grumbled.

"I didn't raise no fools," I said, grinning at him. "The point is, we played the game, and in my understanding, it's as much about the anticipation of each spank as anything else. Then there's the caressing and the playing...

"Ahem, sorry about that," I said after a reflective moment of days past. "I got lost in memory for a moment there. Anyway, I don't understand it, and definitely don't want to do humiliation or pain or peeing on someone or anything else I consider weird. But who am I to judge their lives, their backgrounds and their histories? It works for them, so I leave them to it.

"Some people are cheated on, and their pain is so bad that they automatically call anyone else in that position a cuck, to spread the load and try and make it more bearable, I guess. Others wouldn't make the minimum requirement to apply for the post of village idiot, and just throw the term out everywhere.

"But have you ever stopped to consider why everyone was calling everyone and everything gay a few years ago? It was a trend, and a hurtful trend for those who actually were gay. It was basically using their whole life choice as an insult. Personally, I think it was just a lazy way of trying to insult someone without actually engaging the brain first. And I think this cuck thing is pretty much the same. It's the automatic go-to for those people who have no clue about what lies behind something. Someone who has no clue is ignorant by its very definition and I don't want to deal with ignorant people. Those who can't be bothered to think or find out are wilfully ignorant. And that's a sin! It's not in any bible, but it damn well should be. It should be in every bible and every other book, starting with school books."

"Dad, calm down," said James. "Get off your hobby-horse. I know how you feel about wilful ignorance. If I've heard it once, I've heard it a thousand times. Although I don't know the actual number, and I can't be bothered to find out."

He was teasing me.

"Little shit!" I responded. "Too snarky for your own good sometimes. Should be outlawed."

I was playing the grumpy dad, and he laughed delightedly that his shaft had gone through.

"So no," I continued when his laughter died down. "I'm not a cuck or a wimp. Yes I was cuckolded by my wife, but that wasn't down to me. I didn't know about it and there was nothing I could have done about it. I know, because I asked her."

"You believe her?"

"Yes, she didn't... doesn't lie to me." I stated. "I'm not a total fool, James. You're going to find that the older you get, the more I seem to know. It happened to me with your granddad and it probably happened to him with his dad. It's the way of the world. When you're a teenager your parents are so stupid, you don't know how they remember to keep breathing. Then, every year that goes past, you discover that they've learned so much in that year. It's how parents keep some sort of control over their obnoxious children, by playing the dumb card. But don't forget, everything that you've done, I've done first."

"That's a bit heavy to lay on me," he grumbled. "You don't know..."

"The time you managed to pay that homeless guy to get a bottle of tequila for you, and then drank it with your buddies and ended up puking all over Mark's room? With me it was bourbon and the back of Al's truck. Luckily we passed out and didn't try to drive home. Even so, the trip home at noon the next day was very hairy and very, very painful."

His mouth had dropped open. He had no idea I knew about that little episode.

"You knew? Then why..?"

"What did you learn? You learned not to drink neat alcohol when you have no idea what it can do to you. You learned not to have a big fish supper before you go out drinking. You learned you need to get to the porcelain telephone a lot faster than you expected. And you learned that pain is the price of overdoing alcohol. What else could I have taught you? I could have told you of my experience, but that's just words. I can't give you my experience. You need to have your own experiences to really understand.

"And the same goes for girls. I know about you and Sam with Robin and Casey and Josie, playing twos-up and swap-swap at the hotel. With me it was just Betty and Sally and I out at Far Point at the lake. It was a lot of fun, but there was very little emotion involved. We hadn't promised each other anything, and none of us was in a relationship."

James looked uncomfortable, almost hopping from foot to foot.

"But Josie was in a relationship though, wasn't she?" I remarked. "How did that turn out?"

He was deeply embarrassed that I knew about Prom night. "Nothing, I guess. Nigel never found out."

"You think so?"

He nodded.

"Actually you're wrong. He saw you guys leaving in your car and followed you, trying to catch up. He actually climbed the side of the hotel like fucking Spiderman and saw what you were up to. Then he went home and cried all weekend."

James' face was white. "Jesus Dad! That... It's... "

"Yeah, pretty fucked up. Especially as he never said a word to Josie or you about it. His mother heard him – and what he was saying to himself as he beat himself up over it – and was so bewildered and worried about him, that she came to us, told us everything and then grilled us about you. What's interesting is that he never told Josie or anyone else. Are they still together?"

"Yes, but he treats her like shit."

"That's why. In his mind he thinks he's forgiven her. But he hasn't. I'm betting he hasn't forgiven you or Sam either, so I'd be careful about dark alleys for quite a while."

"You think that's why he calls you a cuck, because he's one?"

I nodded. "Probably partly why, and partly because he wants a legit reason to hurt you without all that mess spilling out. I think he's desperate to keep it quiet, because if anyone says anything, he'll be forced to do something he doesn't want to do. He loves her, but not enough to forgive her."

"Shit, if I'd known, I would never have..." he trailed off into miserable silence.

"James, I want you to be honest with me. Did you know she was Nigel's girl?"

He nodded again, even more miserably.

"Was she difficult to talk round, into going with the four of you?"

"Not really. Not as tough as I'd expected."

"You'd been around Nigel a lot. Heard what he'd said about her, her likes and dislikes."

The nod came again as he realised where I was going with this.

"Hell, it must have been like shooting fish in a barrel! The dancing, and I know what dancing at the Prom is like – it's pretty much fucking while standing up. Somebody spiked the punch – somebody always spikes the punch. Was it you this time?"

He shook his head vehemently.

"Good. Even so, there was alcohol loosening things up, and you whispering in her ear all the things you knew she wanted to hear. Easy target."

He stared at me, tears in his eyes.

"James, I'm not blaming you for anything. I get it. You're a horny teenager and you did what you had to in order to get into her panties. And she probably enjoyed the evening. After all, she's almost an adult – and is, at least legally, old enough to be responsible for her own conduct. She isn't a child that has to be marshalled everywhere, kept out of danger and away from doing stupid stuff that will kill her. If she loves Nigel, she's probably in a world of guilt right now. And she thinks he doesn't know about her and is treating her like shit because that's just what guys do."

"I'm sorry," whispered James. "I never wanted that for her."

I gave him a hug and he clung to me for a moment like he had when he was a child. "I'm so sorry."