I can’t blame her for how I feel. I let my guard down,
knowing what I could have had back then, but blew it, knowing now I would never
have become “the one,” her insatiable need never able to be fulfilled by
someone like me, always a temporary arrangement, my back just another rung on a
ladder to someone else, a stepping stone; a man like me needs to learn his
place in her world or have no place.
I still see her face when I close my eyes, as vivid now as
when she sat across from me, forbidden fruit, dangerous but tempting, yet
always just out of reach.
I can’t blame her for stoking up this fire in me, when I
laid the kindling there first, desperate for the right match to set me ablaze,
as she ultimately did, she more than just another face in the crowd, someone
filled with a potency I could not resist, but should have, and even now, thinking
if I had kept to that high road, I might have retained my place, if not as
lover, then maybe a friend, and now, thinking, it might have been enough
They say you only know who your friends are in the midst of conflict,
the hand that holds your elbow when you struggle, the word whispered in your
ear when you come near to giving up.
But what do you do when you’ve already won; who do you trust?
What is it that inspires you to this “serge to fight?”
Are these shadows you box against?
You say you’ve gotten used to the smell of dirt, having fallen
so often, exhaustion dragging you down, and still you rise, torn and bleeding
to resume the struggle – instinct telling, you’re not done yet, even though you
keep telling yourself to give up, you never will.
It is not in your nature to surrender without a fight, even
when the odds seem overwhelming and the whole world dead set against you.
The world refuses to understand you, though a few doe, those
true friends you’ve hand picked who pick you up with you call, and treat your
wounds, and feed you words of encouragement, telling you again and again, you’re
quest is right
I prick my finger each time I try to pause and sniff what is
beautiful in the perfect world, where everyone has a two-car garage and plastic
seat covers and drive to places most people in my neck of the woods would walk to.
Only unlucky workers walk, the maids from the bus stop side by side with the
nannies. Men come in pickup trucks trailing trailers full of garden equipment,
leaf blowers where a generation ago they were forced to use rakes, piling up
the remnants from the previous fall so they can no longer burn, as laws
prohibit them from filling the air with fumes we used to love smelling as kids,
now instead of piles of leaves, we get big orange bags.
Gardeners plant rose bushes or fill trellises for grapes,
men with gnarled and bloody fingers, gloves unable to hold back the bite of
thorns, or is it the sticky touch of the rose they resist, not even
appreciating the scent, as if sweat mingling with it all ruins even that for
men and women who labor their lives to maintain the houses with fancy lawns and
picket fences, roses that in any other time or place would smell so sweet.
It took ten years for my Ex and I to talk about those final
days before we split, those nights out with the girls that ended up with men,
in back seats of cars or sleezy highway motels.
“If I was getting what I needed at home, I wouldn’t have
been looking for it elsewhere,” she said so matter of factly, I felt like a cuck
again, but refrained from mentioning how she sometimes brought some of those
men home, screwing them while I was at work, she telling me they had no other
place to go, which was why she insisted I let them sleep on our couch. I’m sure
she would have moved them into the bedroom and put me on the couch, if she
could have found a way to justify it.
“You had your nights out with Hank,” she said, suggesting I
might have been doing what she did while out on the town, when I stayed loyal,
even when she did not.
Jane, on of the girls she went out with, did not warn me
about what went on, how my ex acted like a slut in the clubs near the mall, and
sometimes took on more than one man at a time, and often many more men in sequence
during the long night, I catching a whiff of cum and cologne when she got back
home.
During those nights, I took care of the baby. When I lost my
job, she suggested she might get a job instead and leave me to become a house
husband.
She told me I was good at cleaning, doing dishes, and other
chores. She was extremely disappointed when I resisted.
“You’d look real pretty wearing a French maid’s outfit,” she
said, while later I wondered just how far she would take it, dressing me up as
a sissy for the amusement (possibly pleasure) of her male friends.
I suspect she might not have left had I agreed to her terms.
She really wanted a life in which she had total control.
“I’m sure you would have had a great time walking the baby
to the park everyday,” she said during our recent conversation, suggesting she
still felt sad about the turn of events. “You might even have gotten lucky with
some of them.”
I didn’t want to fuck lonely housewives; I wanted life to go
on as it was supposed to, husband, wife and baby.
It took me a decade to get over my failed marriage; she got
over me right away.
“The way you get over a man is to get under another man,”
she told me.
Why she had contacted me again was a bit of a puzzle, since she’d
had a string of men after me (including several additional ex-husbands), but
assured me none of them were anything like me.
“You know we could make it work if we tried,” she said, with
that same glint in her eyes, as if she already pictured me in that French Maid
outfit, and was already calculating how good life would be if she could once
again bring her male friends home, where I could feed and entertain them, maybe
hiring me out to those lonely housewives she envisioned me with long ago, or
perhaps to the parade of lonely house husbands.
I felt the same twinge as I felt back then, intense jealousy
over the men I knew would be fucking her, and a pending “what might have been,”
over me serving them when she got finished.
“It doesn’t matter who you fuck or who fucks you,” she said.
“As long as you fuck.”
This made it clear that even after a decade, nothing fundamentally
had changed.
“I think you would look very pretty in a dress,” she said as
an afterthought. “And I’m sure some of my friends would think so, too.”
Needless to say, we never got back together, although from
time to time, I still wonder what might have happened if we had.
It is still the same urgency, and the same question as to how
it might be resolved, no one to relieve it but myself, and that often a
disappointing resolution, dripping out instead of a gush, despite the same effort
and heat, like a Gennie in a Bottle that promises to fulfill all my wishes, but
if I rub too hard or for too long, what pops up is only a ghost of what I want.
Do we leave it, refuse to stroke it, let it brew on its own, this potency I crave,
must appease, or have it bring me to my knees, not her fault, she’s just the
match that lights the fuse to something that has always existed, waiting to explode,
this Gennie in a bottle, this urgency that consumes me.
