Take 1: The wife wants to get back together with her husband long
enough at least to call his mother a two-faced vacuous cunt to her face and
watch her expression contort around “cunt” and go fucktarded around “vacuous”. She would really like to put her hands around
the mother-in-law’s throat and squeeze until she feels what it’s like to have a
real feeling. Do you feel that
Maureen? Does it hurt? Are you frightened?,
she think-hisses into her face, inches from it, enjoying her pain immensely.
But being who she is (not a real ninja) the damage of her words would have to
suffice, which is so hard when the other person knows the definition of so few.
Take 2: To hell with the mother, the wife wants the father-in-law. Yes, she does. Always did,
what with her daddy issues and all. Now
she really wants him. Sit and look me in the eyes Ron,
she think-hisses softly. Remember how
the last time you sat in the yard, and told the story of how your bosses, for
whom you’ve worked for 40 years, had just told you that “you were like family”
and thus “never had anything to worry about”?
It’d be a real bitch if you suddenly found out the hard way that you
weren’t jackshit to them, wouldn’t it? (Word of advice, next time you stab a
witch in the back, you better make sure you killed her.)
Take 3: The wife cannot think about anyone else but her husband when
she thinks about her husband. If the
lens widens any further, he appears to her surrounded by malevolent forces on all
sides, and then she suspects that if she could see herself from a vantage that
would include her in that entourage, that she herself would not be a force for
good in his life. He claims she is the
only such force, and everything else is hostile to his wellbeing, to his very
survival even. Not being able to tell
which perspective is the truth, she feels what little clarity she does when she
is alone with him actually or in her mind in an otherwise empty room. Inches from his face. Though being that close makes her shake, also. She has loved this person very much. That is true.
It is also true that she has been hurt by this person in a way that she
cannot fully comprehend and perhaps is ongoing, a cancer of mistrust metastasizing
inside her, though the affair itself has stopped. They talk of mostly mundane things, his need
to buy a car, his landlord, the roof is leaking at home. She doesn’t know how to talk about what has
happened to them; he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know how to talk about what
has happened to them. She feels keenly the primitive state of psychological
science in her era, limited access to care that is so crude it might as well be
leeches and bleedings. This is a
literary situation. She ought to be
better prepared. But when she watches
Jeopardy, she always clears the columns labeled such things as “home remedies”
and blows “contemporary authors” completely.
Perhaps centuries from now, in a situation like this, it would be
possible to put a bell jar to the side of his head and pull her husband’s mind
out through his ear, see it like a rabid deformed little fucker bang wildly and
harmlessly at the glass as she sets the jar on a shelf and says, “Jesus look at
that thing, glad that’s out of there eh?!” And he’d have to agree. Then she’d
safely fuck the living daylights out of him, having effectively treated what
ails him by beheading him just above his sensual mouth.
Take 4: I know from umpteen bouts of therapies and especially from what
is called “shadow work”, wherein you explore the things you hate the most about
yourself and learn how they are in fact exactly the things you also have relied
on most (you are your own closest worst friend!), that strengths are
weaknesses. Aarons’ strengths are that
he knows what to say to people (I don’t), that he is cool headed in an
emergency (I am not very much not), that he is even tempered almost always (I
have quite the temper), that he is flexible and ameliorating (I am rigid, fixed
in my habits and values). Let’s take those one at a time: the weakness of the
first is he might at any point be lying, or at least messaging the message into
what the other person wants to hear (I will say only what I mean, which means I
have usually very little to say to most people); he can dissociate completely
from other people’s feelings (I cannot stop feeling other people’s shit, their
moods, their every little thing, until their very proximity feels like a chore,
but if you’re not sure that you have a feeling I might be able to clue you
in); he internalizes his anger to the point of near oblivion then when you do
finally see it, he’s a GIANT ASSHOLE (I’m going to avoid conflict like the
plague, not wanting to feel my temper, which I cannot internalize in the
slightest, and am prone to hissy fits); his idea of right and wrong is relative
to the situation (mine is not at all, and forgiveness does not come easily to
me).
All these very fundamental differences set the stage for what happened
to us, and though I see all that, I cannot still wrap my head around what to do
with it now that it’s occurred. When I
talked to the mistressexgirlfriendwhatever, the story of the affair left me
psychologically speechless. This is not
a woman with whom I have much, if anything, in common. That part would make sense – if you’re
unhappy with what you have, you choose otherwise, right? Okay, so far so good, it makes sense. She offers him a friends with benefits
arrangement, has no compunction about telling me as much, though she knows he
was married, but it had died a long time ago like marriages do whatever, and he
has the hots for her and so fine, let’s have some fun she tells him. Right there, at that juncture, it would make
sense for an unhappily married man to
either leave his wife and ease his way into being single with a ready piece of
ass already waiting, or for him to take the piece of ass for a while and not
tell his wife, as men as are apparently wont to do. But he did neither of these things. What he did do is replay our entire
relationship out with her, almost to the word.
The things he told her, the words he used, the plans he wanted to make,
in the same sequence. The emails that my brother-in-law decrypted suggested
something of this, and the sense of betrayal I felt in that was more than any
merely sexual connection between them could ever cause. But when I got the WHOLE story, it was not that
he had just taken her to a restaurant he had taken me to. He had recycled EVERYTHING, and attempted to
recreate the exact storyline of us, to relive his early relationship and
marriage to me EXACTLY. The first hotel,
it was the first hotel we ever stayed at together. The whiskey sours, we’d learned together how
to ‘muddle’. The poor woman didn’t have one single original joke to report, not
one term of endearment that actually belonged to her, not one memory that wasn’t
a relived one. “Lay down, I want to talk
to you”, a phrase that just struck her as just odd though she knew it was a sex
cue, all a language that Aaron and I had invented and pieced together between
us – that was what my grandpa would say to my grandma when she’d get good and
mad at him. And Mistresswhatever,
playing the part of me, did a shitty job of it, being herself and not me after
all.
And the weirdest part, the one I just cannot fathom or forgive, is the
going along with this playacting that his parents did. As when he met me, they told him “if you love
her go get her”, the same phrase to a word.
The birthday party, the family functions upon functions, they just
rolled her right into them the next day like they do on those daily afternoon
soap opera when they switch out one actress for another but the character role
stays the same. Even the accessories
were switched out, two sons she had in their pool playing with the noodles they
had for mine. And the mother-in-law so
excited that he was going to be settling down. Plus, she was egging him on long
before the fact, wanting for herself a more extroverted and breeding stock
daughter-in-law. All those nervous phone
calls he’d have with his mother, out in the backyard, about which he would only
say “she’s just up my ass”. Then in less
than a heartbeat, the in-laws are showing the mistress the family wedding
albums, to which her own life story would be added, just like they did with
me. Even down to the witch shit, the
mother-in-law planning that trip with her son’s woman to Lilydale, like adding
the few things that the woman might need to be a complete replacement for me,
able to read tarot after some classes - ?
She was always into that about me.
Otherwise, I could be switched out for someone more likely to show up at
Polish weddings every weekend, and my name not even spoken, as if I had not
existed just a fucking minute ago.
And all the while, Aaron is trying harder and harder to say all the
same things, do all the same things, and have it turn out the same way, with a
loving wife who gets his jokes and makes breakfast, step-kids tumbling around
(except fertile as the Nile would be one nice adjustment – otherwise, he’d like
her to be exactly me). But she isn’t
me. Her kids aren’t my (our) kids. She doesn’t make breakfast. She does jello-shots. And he comes apart. And gets a tattoo on his ass. And tries to come back to the home he
inexplicably tried to recreate when he already had it, except for the making a
baby business, about which the mistress says “I hope it didn’t take” as she
orders her fifth shot, loud bar noise in the background. “I had no idea I was his mistress!,” she
laughs bitterly. And I find myself on the
phone with a woman who fucked my husband, apologizing to her for the playing
the role of me that my husband put her through. Mistresswhatever is sorry she
met any of them, except for me, who seems really great.
Take 5: He runs his finger across her top lip at the edge, slowly. “I love this collagen line”, he says. She is
happy with an almost cloistered life.
Without any access to reasons to do otherwise, it might be that he could
utter nothing at all but things so peculiar to her that they could never be
repeated and make any sense. He could never use that endearment again unless he
could find a woman with loose morals who had an enviable lip liner contour and
an inherent stillness enough to be caressed along the length of it. Could he be cured of a tendency to cheat by
being left mute except for phrasing that makes sense only in a small specific
context and would otherwise be complete gibberish?
Take 6:
Take 6:
 |
| or not |
