Julius and Me (Part 6)
Kathryn M. Burke
The NFL Draft took place in late April. Julius was drafted in the first round--by the Chicago Bears.
My ears perked up at that. Chicago was just a hop, skip, and a jump away from here. It was conceivable (although not entirely practical) that I could commute to campus; and I was sure I could get some job in the Chicago area, where there are plenty of educational institutions.
I'm sure you get where this is leading. I was determined to stay with Julius--maybe even establish a permanent bond (yes, yes--by that I mean wedding bells). Would he be inclined to go along with that? Was a difference of twelve years between himself and his bride such a big deal to a famous athlete who had essentially become an instant millionaire?
I began to hint a lot of this to him, but in his taciturn way he remained noncommittal. But I did get him to agree to visit my parents during the week between the end of final exams and his triumphant graduation from our university.
My parents lived about twenty miles north of here; but in spite of our proximity we'd not seen each other in a while. I think they felt they needed me to live my own life, but I suspected that something else was going on. I didn't think their marriage was really in trouble--they'd been devoted to each other for three and a half decades--but I detected some strange undercurrents in the things my mother said (and
didn't
say) during my weekly calls to her. What was even stranger was that Dad rarely came to the phone at all, and when he did he only muttered a few meaningless commonplaces.
So we descended upon them in late May. They of course knew who Julius was--everyone in the state did--but I had a feeling they regarded my relationship with him as a bit odd. I guess it was. There were times when I myself felt I was something like a ditzy teenager with the craziest of crushes on a guy way out of my league.
Our arrival at my parents' house was, shall we say, eventful.
As we opened the front door (I still had my own key) and stepped in, I was about to introduce them to Katie and Dennis Osborne. My mother floated into the living room and caught sight of us. She stopped short and seemed on the verge of collapse. Her knees buckled, and she would have tumbled to the floor if Julius--ever the alert athlete--hadn't dashed forward and snatched her up by the waist to keep her upright. She flung her arms around his neck, clinging to him like a woman about to drown and desperately grasping for a piece of driftwood to stay afloat. Julius clumsily managed to steer himself to the sofa, where he sat down, my mother landing on his lap.
"Mom!" I cried, rushing over to them. "What's the matter with you?"
My mother actually giggled, her face flushed with embarrassment. "Goodness me!" she cried. "I don't know what came over me! I just felt light-headed all of a sudden."
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine, dear, thanks to this wonderful young man who rescued me." And she took Julius's head, pressed it to her chest, and kissed the top of it as if she was his mother and not mine.
I have to tell you that Mom had me when she was pretty young--a sophomore in college, just turned twenty--and she still looked fabulous, and a lot younger than fifty-four. Okay, she no doubt colored her ample and well-coiffed head of dark hair, but there were no lines on her face and she had plenty of curves at bust and hips that would make any man salivate. I hoped I'd look as good as her in two decades.
It was only now that Dad shuffled into the room. Dennis Osborne had never been the most outgoing person in the world, but lately he seemed to have lapsed into a sort of brooding melancholy not entirely characteristic of him. In the past, even if he'd never been the life of the party, he'd at least had a reasonably cheerful outlook on life. But now, at the age of fifty-six, that seemed to have vanished.
And yet, he still looked pretty good. Growing up, I'd thought he was just the most handsome man in the world--and now he had the classic gray at the temples that made him look distinguished and scholarly, but also a slim, rugged frame that belied his occupation as a schoolteacher. I somehow got the impression that he worked out a lot--maybe even compulsively so.
As he saw his wife draped on my boyfriend's lap, he didn't express any particular sentiment--only a kind of weary resignation that puzzled me. When she saw him, Mom leaped up as if having committed a faux pas (which in fact she had) and tried to start all over again as the beaming, welcoming hostess.
The next several days were... peculiar. Dad said almost nothing, although it was obvious he himself had developed a kind of man-crush on Julius, whom he'd no doubt watched on television for the last several years. But it was Mom who repeatedly embarrassed us (or at least me) by--well, by making a spectacle of herself as far as Julius was concerned.
She made every possible effort to please him with food, attention, and even little--or not so little--hugs and kisses. Once she came up behind him as he was sitting at the dining table, took his head in her arms, and held it between her breasts, breathing, "Oh, you're such a darling young man!" I could swear that one time, as she watched him puttering around in the kitchen, she actually licked her lips.
No, it couldn't be. Was Mom really wanting to--?
I had to talk this over with Dad. I finally collared him when Mom went grocery shopping and Julius was jogging around the neighborhood, making sure to keep in shape when the Bears summoned him to training camp in a few weeks. Dad was idly and distractedly playing a computer game in his study, and I sat down in an easy chair across from his desk and gazed at him.
"Dad," I said, "what do you make of Mom?"
I thought a little shudder went through him. Without bothering to look me in the face, he said, "It's pretty obvious, isn't it?"
"What's obvious?" I said, although I was probably thinking the same thing he was--I just couldn't admit it to myself.
Now Dad did tear his gaze away from the computer and peer intently at me. With absolute precision he said, "She wants to sleep with Julius."
I thought I'd fall off the easy chair and land in a heap on the floor--just the way my mother would have done when she'd first met Julius.
"Dad," I whispered, "you can't be serious."
"Sandra," he said severely, "you're brighter than that. You know this is exactly what she wants. She's wanted it the moment she set eyes on the man."
"But--but why? I mean, she could be his grandmother!" Just barely. Then, as Dad resumed his lugubrious gaze at his machine: "There's no trouble between you, is there?"
Dad's lack of response sent shivers down my spine.
"Dad, is there?" I cried. "You don't mean to say that you--"
That you've cheated on my mother?
Dad wasn't slow on the uptake. Instead of being shocked or outraged, he merely let out a kind of derisive laugh.
"You'd better ask your mother what the problem is," he said--and he made it clear that that was all he intended to say about the matter.
How I was to raise two extremely delicate issues with my mother (
Do you want to sleep with my boyfriend?
and
What's wrong with you and Dad?
) was no easy task, so I just decided to be blunt and go for broke. When Mom came back and was putting things away in the kitchen, I strode up to her and said: "You want Julius, don't you?"
A little shiver ran through her, and she tried to evade the question.
"What on earth do you mean, dear?" she said in a high, fluty voice.
"Mom, you know exactly what I mean. You want to take him to bed."
The directness of my statement almost staggered her, and she had to hold on to the kitchen counter to keep her balance.
"Sandra!" she cried. "That--that would be highly immoral. I would never--"
"Oh, come on, Mom, you're not fooling anyone. Dad knows--he told me."
"He said that?" she said in an appalled whisper.
"Yeah, he said that. And the incredible thing is, he didn't seem all that surprised. Saddened, but not surprised. So what's going on between you two?"
Mom stared through the kitchen window off into the distance. Then she turned to look at me, sighing heavily.
"Your father," she began slowly, "was diagnosed with high blood pressure a few years ago. So we got him on some medication. It works fine, but it has an unfortunate side effect."
I closed my eyes. I'd heard about this.
"You mean," I said, lowering my voice so no one but Mom could hear, "he's become impotent."
"Not exactly, dear. He can still manage--barely. It's just..."
"He can't get it up, you mean."
"Dear, you shouldn't speak about your father like that."
"Oh, come on, Mom, we're all adults here."
"Let's just say it's a lot more difficult than before--and sometimes it's just not possible."
"Mom, there are pills for that sort of thing."
"Of course there are--but your father is very proud. He doesn't think he should need help like that."
"Oh, what a pig-headed man! That's just ridiculous."
"That's the way he is. For a guy who's always been pretty mild-mannered, sometimes it's really hard to convince him of something."
"Well," I said with determination, "I'll see what I can do about that. Meanwhile, back to the issue at hand--Julius."
Another little shiver from Mom. "Wh-what about him?"
"You do want to cuddle up with him, don't you?"
Her shoulders drooped in defeat. "Yes. I--I've never felt anything like this for anyone, except maybe your father when I first met him." Then, sadly: "Maybe not even him."
"I have to agree with you, Mom: Julius is something special."
"But," she said, continuing to flagellate herself, "he's not going to want to sleep with an old lady like me."
"Mom, you're not an old lady--you're a vibrant example of ripe womanhood. No man could keep his hands off of you."
Mom blushed crimson at that. "Sandra, please!"
"The point is not," I pursued, "whether Julius wants to sleep with you. Probably he does. The issue is whether his morals will allow him to do that."
"Yes, I thought of that."
"I'll talk to him and explain the situation. He may come around, just for my sake."
"That would be nice, dear," she said, as if I had offered to take Julius to a church social.
"And you're sure Dad's not going to mind?"
"I guess your father wants to see that I'm happy too."
"Okay, fine."
And I marched off to wait for Julius to come back.
To my surprise, he heard me out without a word as I told him the story. He just nodded, mostly to himself, from time to time. At the end he simply said, "I understand."
"Then you'll do it?" I said in a tone of almost unholy anticipation.
"If she wants me to," he said with something of resignation.
I got the impression that this was one more instance of Julius's much-vaunted "respect for his elders."
My girlfriend's mom wants me to bed down with her, so I guess I will.
