THE DISTANCE BETWEEN WIFE AND MISTRESS

compare and contrast, sorry

THE DISTANCE BETWEEN WIFE AND MISTRESS

In your particular case, the distance between wife and mistress is the length of a sperm crippled by birth control. The thickness of a condom, the depth of the womb-environment made hostile to impregnation by the Pill. And the zone of the Venn diagram where the circles “wife” and “girlfriend” overlap is the zone where neither party wants to have anything to do with you.

///

You were at lunch at Sam’s Café with Tony Larry and his boyfriend Brian. They’d come from slaughtering goats and still had some small patches of gore on their clothes. At Sam’s they were not alone in larping as butch farmers, especially in wintertime when the tacit rules on formal appearance seemed to slip down a few perceptible notches. This had no impact on the fine dining experience or the size of the check at the end of the meal. Tony Larry was a lavish tipper, you noticed. The kinds of farmer who ate at Sam’s could afford it, rustic arrivistes that they were.

Brian debated getting a salad. Tony Larry talked about the goat cheese he’d purveyed to Sam for his menu. Spinach salad with goat cheese and walnuts. So you felt pressured to order that for lunch. You’re dependent on some strange approval of Tony Larry’s, basic in nature, like carving out time to go to a soccer game or recital where your crush’s kid was playing or singing, to give the beloved adult the impression that you care, when in fact you may not. Eating someone else's produce was a lie to gain their favor. In this way, you treated Tony Larry like a royal to be flattered. It was in some ways similar with the apple cider, which you liked, but it was complicated by your role as the outsider. You order the salad, Brian orders a curried tuna fish sandwich, which is more like what you feel like eating, but you’ve been boxed in by these other considerations, these flatteries.

“Come on, Tony Larry,” you wanted to say at lunch, “how come you never joke around with me anymore? We used to work on your farm together, you’d drive your pickup out on the hillside to where we were driving fence posts for the goats to stay inside. You’d play the radio while we worked and we’d sing songs to make each other laugh. I made you laugh once, when I sang along with Chuck Berry singing that Johnny B. Goode used to ‘carry his guitar inside a bunny’s sack.’ Dumb male humor! Tacking up wires on the fence. I know you were checking out my ass. You once said, out of nowhere, ‘I got two balls, both are hefty. One to the right, the other’s the lefty.’ And it hit just perfectly to where we were in the workday, after a long exhausting day. Testicular male bonding jokes. I was thinking about that moment months later, driving around Oylesburg in my car, tears on my cheeks from laughing. I loved that man. What happened. Brian the Twink happened, that’s what. You’re not funny anymore, not with me.”

You wanted to say all this but it never came to pass. You couldn’t muster up the nerve. It’s buried deep down under many layers of sediment. Grit and powder formed from all past conversations you’d ever had with Tony Larry about your ex-wife Natasha and disaster gf Aubrey, as well as all the other women. You have constrained yourself, topically, in what you’re free to say. Complaints have set the tone somehow, to assert that you miss Tony Larry’s jokes would be unseemly. You can’t summon up humor from the balls of a friend, not with Brian around.

Over salads, he started telling tales of old boyfriends contacting him out of the blue to do “step-work,” making amends for past mistreatments because their AA sponsors told them to, and how it triggered a various deep conversations that Brian, perched atop his high hobbyhorse, got a lot of amusement out of. “Yes, let’s talk about it, let’s talk about what you did,” Brian narrated himself saying to these old flames. Tony Larry looked neutral as he ate.

You mention in a conversational dead spot how you once, not long ago, went to your ex-wife Natasha and apologized for your life, for your poor showing as a husband and a father. You said this in front of your daughter Leigh, on the front porch of their house in Oylesburg. It was tense, it was at night, and the porch furniture was glossy and black in the streetlamp’s orange glow. Natasha listened to your halting words, borderline tearful they were as you’d been thinking it over for years, trying to atone for the pain you caused to “your girls,” your wife and daughter. When you were done fumbling, Natasha looked at you there on the front porch with an utterly unreadable expression and said, “I appreciate that.” And that was it. No ripples, no affect on Natasha’s part. No cracks in the surface. And, importantly, no further acknowledgement of your apology, no evidence that she knew the depths of what you were truly apologizing for and how it had hurt you in life—

“It’s not for women to do the emotional labor of giving you forgiveness,” Brian said, interrupting you. “Her appreciation was plenty enough.” Brian looked away as if the matter were completely settled and we’re moving on to the next case to adjudicate.

Tony Larry reached over and clasped your shoulder with one strong yet soft hand. “You cleaned your side of the street,” he said. “You did it for your soul, and that’s good, for you.” You were still staring at Brian trying to decide whether you should hit him between the eyes as hard as your fucking body would allow you, right there in Sam’s Café by the window, or whether you should do it later. The rest of the lunch passed in appropriate ways and you left before the two other men, joking and smiling. Tony Larry paid for the lunch, and he said this almost as if in reference to the slight discomfort that Brian had caused you.

///

The psychic (sike-ic), hive-like roar of Manhattan’s accumulated homosexuals could be heard via ESP outside your hotel room on the first leg of your honeymoon with Natasha back in December 2002. You were staying in midtown. The noise, which fit inside or under the physical noise, taunted you, called out to you, piquing what was understood at the time as frightened curiosity. You don’t know what it was then, other than a low-grade fear. A test or ordeal upon embarking upon the love odyssey of Marriage with a capital M.

But then a year later, how you and Natasha fucked after your childhood friend Hank’s wedding in Cicero, NY when you got back to your private bedroom with your uncle and his friend right on the other side of the door—the notorious horniness of women right after a wedding, some signal passed off, like that of honey-mad bees, that snagged all women guests. Natasha said, snarled in damp bedclothes afterward, “I think, of all your high school friend group, I got the best one.” How moving such a statement is, in retrospect, in its innocence and blinkered naivete, which you shared in. You didn’t suspect then you were the worst one, the least suited for marriage and fatherhood. At Hank’s wedding reception, all the wives of your loser friends, who knew each other, chattered away, excusing their husbands’ visits to exotic dancers at central NY’s strip joints, which Natasha hated. But those men are still with their spouses years later. Maybe if you’d made it rain on a stripper named Essence or Destiny, some abstract philosophical noun for a name, you would still be married. All pressure valves in perfect working condition, the woman put there to discharge men’s toxic energy in dancing pulchritude.

What was Natasha thinking? And how had you never gained precious access to her inner thoughts when it was most crucial, most needed? Maybe it is that these passages, these chinks in the wall through which communication happened, have all been buried by the built-up sediment of the post-divorce years, just as your general impressions of love’s difficult sticking points (love’s porcupine spines with their sharp edges) have been lost to numbing time. Naturally manufactured opiates sprung up within the body to conceal the pain.

Maybe, like a cruel paradox, you only attained the sensitive antenna to pick up Natasha’s signal via the transformation that occurred, the software upgrade (or downgrade, hullo machine analogies) when she left you. You only matured into husband material when the love left you behind, when the proximal capability of perceiving another person’s thoughts was wrenched away. Sensibilities, in your case, may only be gained by a condition of sensory loss, forever. Measuring this new sensitivity, whether it is a presence or a lack, doesn’t matter. It’s that you want to spend time with your departed ex-wife to read her thoughts again, closed off to you for all time. Now you would treasure them, and pay attention, you have that capability now, but it’s too late. The ex-wife is like a distant prison warden the inmate never gets a chance to see again, only hears about through taps on pipes and whispers in the exercise yard.

The praying mantis, decapitated post coitus, gains powers of perception that lead nowhere in the Central Nervous System: insights driven into blind alleys where they can’t be synthesized into thoughts and actions from that point forward. The severed head of the ex-husband is majestically enlightened with experience, knowledge, but for no purpose, not even, in spite of the naturalist’s arguments to the contrary, for future mating, dances, rituals. The insect is dead, each marriage was a life. And you don’t believe your body image could get better. Mating has happened, the life is over.

Maybe millennial couples have been thrust into a state of affairs where pregnancies cannot be naïve. It always seems to be an ethical or political act with them now. “I don’t want to bring a child into this.” For Gen X it was more naïve and hopeful even with the Global War on Terror raging. You and Natasha wanted a marriage and parenthood at least tangentially as a response to the Twin Towers’ collapse: the “State of the World” made tangible and prodding you to cling to each other in a world consciousness of objekts beyond all control. The geopolitical nursery, if you want to put it that way, prepared for Leigh’s delivery where she would be pampered, would lay on her back and giggle and smile, transporting you completely, was different. Also, and you couldn’t know this fully at the time, but the sex was better with Natasha then, so much better. It was love-making, it was baby-making, even when no baby immediately resulted for months.

Remember how, in Leigh’s nursery, you and Natasha sat, Natasha in the recliner, you on the floor like a pet, and you were expected in a household regime to say what you were grateful for. Gratitude Time, as Natasha wanted to instill it into your daily routine, to create an atmosphere of love and worship of married life and parenthood Natasha had never known herself. You were so self-pitying and selfish that you couldn’t play along. Or you would mutter something bullshit. You were working at the hotel and dying inside. What was it about being a father that you had such a problem with? Why did it drive you mad? You love Leigh more than life itself. It isn’t her that caused you to become unhinged and implode. Not her as a person. But fatherhood and marriage, family life, brought out the cracks in your personality makeup. Your encounter with normal, conformist American life, married happiness that Natasha sought with your help, failed. It became like a wind tunnel that you couldn’t stand up in. You’re like many men in that way. It’s only because of Leigh, or whatever Leigh represents, that you survived it all. So in a way the praying mantis head severed from its body did learn love in its last moments of consciousness and interconnection with society. The cutting-off and death were co-instantaneous with the linkage of love, without which your life would be over.

This is what you’re afraid of, adding this tender insight to your tawdry little joke-book! Why, why do you feel an impulse to subvert it lest it render the circle complete, 360 degrees round? Do you want to take that away from your daughter, ripping it out of her hands like a dangerous toy given before its time?

You didn’t want to have a child with Aubrey, your ex-gf, which she understood, but not all the way. And you realized you mustn’t make too explicit the reasons why, or it would have impacted her fragile ego. Biology makes insuperable demands, that have repercussions in the sike-ological realm. These were delicate spots, the Achilles heels in the woman’s body. The sick mind-body dyad that needs approval, love. What could be subtler, what could be more fresh than to say that a woman was confused as to her own defensiveness at a man not wanting to impregnate her? Aubrey was offended that you said it so matter-of-factly without any cushion for her self-esteem: you were expected to say it the right way, just like you’d be expected to feel out the correct words, the savoir faire of talking to the volatile lovelorn woman holding a .357 to your head. But you knew about having kids, what she didn’t know. You had empiricism on your side, in a way perhaps none of Aubrey’s other boyfriends ever had. Your terror of pregnancy was informed by reality, and in a bout between Aubrey and reality, with you as referee, reality had to win. You were sorry to say it. But you paid a price. Aubrey called you a little bitch because you wanted to avoid pregnancy by pulling out. She was on the Pill but still wanted you to ejaculate inside her, some kind of role-playing, you weren’t wise enough to understand. You didn’t trust the Pill. What does the Pill do, it absolves men from knowing how the universe works. In your weakmindedness, you felt skepticism about it and fearful doubt. This is what made you insufferable, and still does in so many other ways. Maybe if you had trusted the science you would have relaxed and come inside her pussy and just enjoyed it like you did with the Metalhead so many years later. It was an excavation of your belief system around sex. Having been a father meant you couldn’t trust a damn thing and relax into the meaning of an orgasm. Which insulted Aubrey, made her feel like shit, because on a deep level she wanted to feel worth having kids with, while not in fact wanting to get pregnant. Still you fucked her. But it was a wrong act. Birth control was a complex problematization ironically, instead of a solution absolving the man from thinking about anything other than fucking the woman’s brains out. It made you more fearful and crazy. Especially when she missed a day (dodging her own salts, just like you do with sike meds?) and you felt your sperm were unduly exposed.

It’s not playful. There’s no way to tell it now. The metaphysical implications you attached to orgasms for your own mentally ill reasons, were not matters of play. They were, and still are, negotiations with destruction. “I don’t think we should have sex anymore,” Aubrey said, initiating a debate over your post-orgasmic neurasthenia, as Natasha had done once, but with less heat and force. Your pregnancy fears caused cracks in the structure of your relationship with Aubrey that never, in your memory at least, developed into a deep enough critique for you to stop having sex. A sike-otherapist, such as the one Aubrey wanted to set you up with in Oylesburg before she disappeared, might say that this was an indication of some sexual attitude introducing a problem. Still, you went through with it every time you saw her and it was hot sex. Sex was immune to pragmatism, regardless of the love you felt for your partner. All skepticism had been reserved for the present moment, this epoch of great doubt you then found yourself in. You became a monk then so you allowed the caustic substance of celibate doubt to dissolve the sexual complex from the outward edges inward, and saw what was left over, what residue, what clean surface. The paradox is that, deep down, you suspect that neither chastity nor libertinage leads anywhere good when you’ve got a mindset like this. It’s all a cringing development whether you fuck or not: no one act is better than the other when the will itself is sick, since the introduction of the devil MTV/HBO in childhood. It’s all evil. But not fucking will at least reduce harm to you and other people. Like you have a choice.

The dawning suspicions of love for Tony Larry did not equate to fucking, no intersection of flesh was guaranteed to happen. All crossings were internal, hypothetical, platonic, all harm was virtual, against objekts within that in the first place, you could not prove the existence of, let alone tally the damage. Most you could do was write about it and hope that some understanding of this middle-aged, doubt-racked love came to pass, in some unknown reading.