Where Grief Overcomes Reason

I thought I had a good grip on reality, until last week.

I understood the difference between right and wrong, not based on some arbitrarily established criteria of absolutes but intrinsically, the way the Supreme Court said it could recognize the difference between erotica and pornography "...when we see it..." but could not come up with a reasonable definition of either.

Consequently, I lead a more or less moral life. Aside from a pre-teen experiment in shoplifting and some minor exaggeration of deductions on my income taxes, I never broke any laws. I'm the kind of person that stops for red lights at three AM in snow storms, when there isn't another soul on the road.

I got good grades in school, married my high-school sweetheart, on whom I never cheated (not even in my heart, like former president Carter admitted in that infamous Playboy Magazine interview) and together we raised two good kids, a son and daughter, and watched them leave the nest to make lives for themselves. I run a decent accounting business, pay my bills, rotate my tires regularly, and get check-ups from my doctor every year: a good, decent life, which, in the blink of an eye, evaporated.

The phone in my office rang, my direct line, and it was a policeman telling me my wife had been in an accident and was at the local hospital emergency room. I was leaving already as he asked if I would mind coming down.

A fog settled in over me then. Numb, I closed the office and went to the hospital, where, after being ignored for what felt like forever, I was informed by a bespeckled intern that Lizzie had succumbed to her injuries.

She was gone. I'd lost her, not to some tragic disease or act of God or war, but stupidly, because of a blown tire as she took a highway curve perhaps a bit too fast. Liz always had a heavy foot, and I warned her it would lead to trouble. I had expected a speeding ticket. Not this.

The next few days were a blur of phone calls I had to make and papers I had to sign. Cathy, our daughter (my daughter now) drove in alone from where she and her husband lived just across the state line. She was a grade-school teacher, and the spitting image of her mother. Seeing her was both agony and ecstasy. Thank God she wore her hair differently or I might not have known it was she and not her mother come back to me.

Her room was still pretty much the way she had left it before going off to college, and it felt comforting having her occupy it again, until she asked tearfully if she could stay, permanently.

Her husband, it seems, had taken to drink and physically abused her. She showed me the welts on the backs of her legs from his belt. The day before the funeral I called a lawyer friend and he started divorce proceedings and got a judge to issue a restraining order to keep that bastard son-in-law of mine away from her. Her local DA would be informed to contemplate criminal charges.

Alex, my son, had foregone school after two years and went to The Big Apple to become an actor. Three years later, he was having some success off Broadway, did some modeling, had been in a few TV commercials, and had some walk-ons in prime time dramas. His career was starting to shape up to the point where waiting on tables had become his part-time supplemental income instead of his mainstay. He arrived with Peter, another actor-in-the-works, and it quickly became obvious that they were lovers. They judiciously opted for a motel rather than stay at the house.

My world had crumbled. My wife, my love, my best friend, was gone forever. My daughter's idyllic existence had been exposed as a sham. My son was...different.

But, fate wasn't through with me yet.

After the funeral we had a reception brunch at a local restaurant. How odd, to go from a somber grave-side ceremony to the hustle and bustle of omelets and finger sandwiches served amidst happy chatter and so much activity. It was as if I'd crossed a threshold, passing from a former life that would never be mine again to a new one that I would eventually adapt to. Or drown in the trying.

Afterwards, family came to the house for a while. Her family. She had been mine.

Alex and Cathy were there, of course, and Peter, and Liz's sister and brother from out of state with their respective spouses and children, and some of her cousins I could never keep straight to begin with. We drank coffee and chatted about innocuous subjects like the weather and celebrities, and then all but Cathy left and that was that. It was just the two of us, alone in a house that suddenly felt huge and yet was also so very confining.

I napped, emotionally drained if not physically exhausted. Cathy straightened up the house, so that all vestiges of the day were wiped away. I awoke like a zombie, and we went through the motions of the evening; a small, quiet supper, some mindless television shows, and then to bed.

Quiet had become my enemy in the past few days. Without distraction my mind automatically wandered to my loss, and such sensations were only magnified being in the bed we had shared for almost thirty years. I put a classical CD in the player on my dresser and attempted to lull myself to sleep with baroque horns, strings, and continuo. In pajama bottoms only under the soft breeze of a ceiling fan (summer was finally making its presence known but not enough to warrant turning on the AC) I lay atop my bed, hands folded over my chest, eyes closed and twitching, and waited for sleep to overtake me.

I did not hear my door open, nor hear the soft footsteps that approached me, but the bed shook and settled on one side and as I opened my eyes I could have sworn that Lizzie had come back to me and was at that very moment joining me in bed. In the amber glow of the night lamp from across the room she seemed golden, unreal, and yet undeniably there.

But it was Cathy, in a tee-shirt and panties, and she was crying. I wrapped my arms around her and comforted her as best I could. She collapsed into me, her head on my bare chest, her arms draped lifelessly over my shoulders. I kissed her hair and murmured to her that everything was going to be fine, even though I had yet to convince myself of that. After a while she quieted, and I thought she was asleep, but then I felt her face move and she kissed my chest right where she was.

It was a kiss of gratitude. That it lingered made it hard for me to accept that, and that it was repeated again and again made it ever more so. With a bent finger beneath her chin, I urged her face up, to read what was in her eyes.

I saw deep wells of loss coupled with a fear that nothing would ever make sense again to her. I saw an unfocused need, and then she did the most amazing thing and lifted her face up to mine and kissed my lips.

It was not the kiss of a daughter thanking her father for once again exorcizing the monster in the closet. It was the kiss of a frightened and confused young woman clutching for something she feared never having again.

And, from within my own pain, I kissed her back.

With my eyes closed and my brain disengaged I could pretend it was Lizzie. They were much of a size and build. Her lips were warm and yielding. I held her close and felt the familiar crush of petite breasts against my bare chest. Her nipples rose on contact, brushing the inside of her tee shirt, sending tremors of delight along her arms.

The kiss intensified. She pried my jaws apart with her tongue, and as she invaded my mouth I unconsciously placed a hand over one breast, massaged the firm roundness, and reveled in feeling the hard nipple drag across my palm.

Cathy breathed heavily as we continued to kiss, and then her mouth broke free of mine and moved to my cheek, to my ear, where I could feel the lips begin to form words. I shushed her before she could say anything. One word would have destroyed the illusion for both of us, and while a part of me understood how wrong what we were doing was, that part was overwhelmed by the need in me to have a taste once more of what I would never have again.

She kissed the ear she was about to speak into, and as if understanding everything said not a word but continued to kiss my face, my neck, and then sank down to plant hot wet kisses on my chest. Her hands came around from my back and her fingers combed the hairs over my belly, her nails gently raking my skin.

In an emotional game of rock-paper-scissors, where grief overcomes reason and passion cuts grief, we spent the next two hours lost in an illusion. What little clothing we wore came quickly off, and pleasuring each other's flesh became our analgesic, anesthetizing us to the agony of our accumulated losses. For those two hours we had no losses, and we had no gains, we only had each other, and we had each other in every way imaginable.

I tasted so much of her mother on her, and inside her. I can still recall the fantastic aroma of her sex as I buried my face between her thighs. At the same time I could not deny her anything of mine she wanted, in whatever way she desired, and delighted in her attention to the minute details of my body.

We celebrated each other. I took her sex with my hands, my lips and tongue, and then my cock, and she likewise pleasured me in the same ways. Her mouth was agile, her tongue everywhere at once. Her hands showed no shyness exploring every part of me. We coupled in every conceivable position before falling apart from sheer exhaustion.

She swallowed my cum, and I drank her nectar. Later, as I pounded my cock inside her willing pussy, she held me captive with strong legs crossed behind my back and sharp fingernails sunk into the globes of my ass. and she screamed with joy when she felt me painting the inside of her womb.

Had the number of our orgasms counted I would be terrified that I lost track, but fortunately they did not, only the overall intensity of sensation mattered. By the time we were finally spent we lay together shivering in the heat.

We slept together as lovers, limbs entwined, touching and being touched. I awoke to sunlight and an empty bed.

The smell of breakfast wafted up the stairs. I walked naked on a cloud of bacon and coffee to the bathroom, freshened up, and came back marching to the tune of eggs and onions. I donned a robe and slippers and went down to the kitchen.

Cathy was just completing her task in a kitchen so filled with light I thought perhaps the roof had been taken off the house. She was freshly showered and in a robe as well, and while I sat she poured coffee and served us both the marvelous meal she had prepared.

Neither of us mentioned the night before. There was no need. The act was never repeated, and as more and more time piles up between the deed and the memory, our encounter that night becomes harder and harder to accept as anything but a fantasy borne of grief and desire, something that perhaps happened to other people of which we were only observers. I have no doubt that eventually it will slip away altogether into the realm of half-remembered dreams, and indeed that is where such things belong. But I cannot say I regret what we did that night, because the chrysalis formed by our joined bodies allowed us to emerge as new people, functioning in a new world.

I went back to work the next day, and a month later Cathy found a job with the local parochial school and took an apartment of her own across town. We see each other often (both on purpose and because, being in a small town, convergence is unavoidable) and our relationship is good, strong because we share so much love, but different because we are now, by virtue of age and experience, more on an even keel than we ever were as father and daughter. We are friends, now. Confidants. Close in ways that most fathers and daughters never can be because of that special night.

And I would not change a thing if I could.