Aftermath

The sounds of morning. Harison preparing his breakfast downstairs, occasionally throwing a short fit of coughs, or a sudden burst of sneezes. The raging of his loud coffee bean grinder. The slightly loose downstairs bathroom door clunking open and shut. Harison spitting out water in the sink while he is brushing his teeth.

Earlier in the morning. The newspaper delivery person in their car, turning to our little alley on his route, just below the window closest to the bed. The newspaper delivery person distributing the paper into mailboxes. The newspaper delivery person turning their car around in the far end of the very short cul-de-sac and returning to the street. The floorboards’ tactful yawns and unassuming stretches, preparing for another full day of stomping feet upon them; almost silent little whines and noises, almost, but not quite. A faint creaking sound from downstairs. That used to drive me mad when we were brand new homeowners. Now I know it is just one of this old house’s many quirks and kinks.

Ever earlier. The night train traffic. East to west, and vice versa, every few hours, the swoosh, or swooooosh, of a train, depending on whether it is carrying freight, or people, who can also be defined as freight. Although possibly, deducting from the length of the sound, the night trains are solely freight trains. I think of Swoosie Kurtz and how much I used to love Sisters as a young woman. I think of the romance of trains, train yards, rails stretching far on their man-made little mounds of rocks and pebbles just near the waterline. The gnarly pine trees that jewel a long stretch of such a railway. How breathtakingly beautiful I found it all. How breathtakingly beautiful I still find it.

 

I feel no personal shame or regret or even guilt over what happened between Chris and I, even if I do feel he handled the aftermath of our night together horribly, and for a while there the jury was out on whether it had really been worth all the pain and heartache his sudden skedaddling was costing me for such a long time afterwards.

 

Youth is wasted on the young. I have never before in my life found this to be so acutely and grimly true as I find it now. Chris was my fantasy come true. He was in his late twenties, blossoming, fuming, emanating freshness and untaintedness and an extravagant gusto for life as if he himself had been the first man to embrace it fully; a young man physically in his prime, although spiritually, not so much, as I was to discover in such a gruesome manner. He was so beautiful, limber, smooth. Intoxicating in his plentifulness, his mysterious and seductive half-smile, even his naivete, as well as his pristine apartment and hospital corners. He had an intense way of looking at a person, the intensity of someone still in possession of that ultimately fading interest in things around one – although Chris’s interest in things around him lasted right about exactly to the point when I decided to go to bed with him. The usual story. A classic really, as old as time itself.

The funny thing is, that this had happened to me before, many years ago, when I was a young woman, and therefore, as an older woman now, I should have seen it coming, and quite obviously at that. But I was oblivious. I was riding high on my own stupid little feeling, thinking it meant something, that it was important - way too high to notice any signs. And boy, were they ever there.

Of course, there is nothing in this life quite as annoying, and futile, as hindsight.

Maybe it was all bullshit, but for me, the greatest devastation was realizing there would be no more surprises in store for me. No more starting over even in a small, adult way of erotic role play, no more unescapable passion, undeniable desire, or falling in love, however loosely one wants to throw that dangerous word around. It had happened finally, the thing all middle-aged women dreaded. I had lost my allure. I no longer could hold a new person’s interest. Harison was it for me. Harison and me, for life, apparently. It reminded me of a movie I had watched years ago. A line: “Everyone has an emptiness. But we grow up, we don’t go running around trying to fill that void discarding everything else, we find happiness where we are.”

Betrayal; tiny, insignificant evils and easily forgettable misconducts, a delivered text message immediately erased, a blush promptly hidden by turning away quickly, tell-tale insignia hiding behind the candelabra of a happy marriage. How terribly prosaic and boring. Even the word itself feels outdated, biblical, almost meaningless in its menacing undertones. Adultery. Hawthorne’s scarlet letter with Hester Prynne’s total social obliteration. Anna Karenina’s fall from social grace and, ultimately, into her death. Madame Bovary’s ornamental, condemnable cheating. How largely the go-ahead, issued by Harison years before, during one of our periodic slumps, in an especially painful discussion on our withering love life, had ultimately dominated my emotions underneath all those years between the permission and the actual deed itself. The entire conversation was most likely forgotten by him already, since I had never before invoked the amendment and the whole idea had been discussed in theory only, and now, I could not bring myself to confess, because what on earth could possibly motivate such an asinine act, except inclination to wish harm upon the betrayed? The fact that technically it wasn’t outside the rulebook limits of what constituted our relationship felt utterly unimportant and like pretense.

 

I dream of Chris, almost every night. The dream, invariably, is a variation on the rejection, only the degree of harshness, dialogue, and location change. His line, most of the times, is “I don’t owe you anything”, or “No, I don’t agree, there is no apology needed.” Sometimes he says nothing, and I only see the back of his head as he keeps walking away from me as I follow, pitifully, asking for him to say something. Sometimes he appears as someone else, but I always know it is him. Sometimes we are in bed together when he does it. Sometimes at a party, and it turns out he is a friend of a friend and in attendance because of that. Never does he appear there because of me. Even my subconscious is cruel.

As I try to masturbate now, after being with Chris, I find that the night which should in all honesty be a horn of plenty for years to come for me as a self-love template, what with the fingers knowing what they were doing, how incredibly well-endowed he was, his long hair which was an immense turn on for me, his towering height, has turned sour almost overnight, and is forever tainted as a masturbation aid because of how he treated me when it was over. I realize I am not one of those people who can take the incident away from its context and just have at it. At least right now I cannot.

Whenever I am enjoying some alone time and my mind accidentally wanders over to him, I at once feel completely deflated and sorry, and the orgasm takes its sweet time to come. Sometimes I even feel I won’t be able to at all, after such a moment. But I am nothing if not tenacious, and in the end I always come.

I will not let Chris take that away from me.

 

At work, I imagine scenario after pathetic scenario, in which he walks in, magically knowing which restaurant I am working that given day, and begs to talk to me, or tells me simply that he wanted to see me, or that he is sorry. These are what I call daytime fantasies. The White Palace ending, where James Spader, who has followed Susan Sarandon across the country because he has realized he is, in fact, in love with her and what the rest of the world thinks be damned, appears in the restaurant during lunch rush, and they argue, and finally make up and decide to be together and kiss passionately. The young, stubborn, sad James Spader with his twenty-something’s medieval black-and-white morals, who sees the light in the end and allows himself to be happy.

Of course, I never was exactly free for the taking, and everything happening so fast and in that magical way things sometimes do, I never got the chance to tell Chris about my situation – or maybe he never showed enough interest in my affairs so that a natural opening would have emerged. Whichever way one wants to consider it, the conclusion remains that perhaps I am being a tad self-serving with my beyond-pitiful Cinematic Climax Scene fantasies. I guess I was just, paraphrasing the great Emmylou Harris, feeling single and seeing double and the night was, indeed, going get me in a whole lot of trouble.

 

The first period I get after Chris. A somber anniversary to our glamorous lovemaking turned into nightmare.

It is a beautiful autumn week when the blood start flowing. Fitting that the season’s change is marked so pointedly by my uncooperative, untimely, bloated body’s surplus fluids, as they marked the one time I had sex with him. There, another one in my long, and getting longer by the day, mental list of options on why he treated me in such a cold-blooded way after, excuse the pun there. I should spit on the idea alone that he would be so idiotic to be repulsed by something so natural, but I am what I am, a prime example of the last generation of women who always succumb into thinking it must be all their fault when love goes sour, or a man suddenly changes into Mr. Hyde.

Menstruating always makes me pensive and poetic, and I linger in the loveliness of everything, or the sadness, and write long, meandering ruminations in my journal on such philosophical topics as broken hearts and pancakes, when only a month ago it would have been orgasms and pancakes, with all the fixings. The birches are golden, the vines flaming dark red, blood red in fact. The pines shed enormous amounts of golden-brown needles that heap on the side of the road, making walking a hazard because one can slip and fall. The needles cover vast stretches, walking in them is a little like walking on the beach in soft beach-sand, even the color is similar. The maples are especially exquisite right now, red and yellow and a fading poison green, the rowans a glowing orange with a glorious, fierce purple right at the top, the aspens aggressively bright, sun-like blast of yellow, the elms and poplars and hawthorns and rare oak trees here and there, even the shrubbery, the ferns and thistles and whatnot, all flaxen and brass and lemon and mustard and okra, and all shades of both pink bubblegum and red wine.

Things like putting on my purple corset right before, debating whether it was too much, or perhaps not enough, come to me in the colors of the trees. The luxurious feel of the unyielding bones in the depths of the garment pressing into my waist as I pull, in an awkward angle, the satin cords in the back to tighten the magnificent pieces of fabric, laboriously and meticulously sewn together by a master seamstress, wrapping the thing around my body. The thin silk dress underneath it against my skin. Silk, the most erotic of all fabric, the seductress, the dramatic overture, the invitation into pleasure, heartrate escalating, shortness of breath, moisture surging between the legs; the high priestess of sexual charisma. The mouth-watering, sensual promise of the evening.

 

Like Francesca in The Bridges of Madison County, I now fill my life with details. My life in detail. What needs to be done. Lunch. Mending clothes. Getting firewood from the shed. Dinner. Buying deodorant and toilet paper and pasta sauce. Fixing the storm windows in place. Making sure all the summer paraphernalia is safely tucked away. Changing the sheets. Vacuuming. Making a hair appointment. Grocery store, followed by hardware store, followed by liquor store. Lists, schedules, timetables. That’s the only way to go on, day by day.

 

There’s an orange moon tonight. I am that orange moon. Another line from another movie: “Sometimes I think if you listened to my heart you could hear the ocean. There is no man, Gilly. Only that moon.” I know technically this is not my case at all, but emotionally, it is. Marriage and romance, in the long run, and I say this with the utmost gravity and poignance and without even a hint of sarcasm, are mutually exclusive. When someone becomes so close they integrate into one’s family and immerse into the family history, the romance, inevitably and for all eternity, is over.

Before Chris, I had never really accepted this as truth.

Now I know it, with absolute certainty.

I did have an emptiness, I still have it, only now, it is bigger. I had a taste of what it would be like to love in that special, rare way again, and I lost it almost immediately. Love is a kind of emptiness, as another famous lyric goes. I went ahead and finally fed that hunger, and felt for myself how vast the hollow inside, how much love there still was to give, how easily the idea of love came once again, how good it was – until it wasn’t. Some might argue I was begging to get hurt, that I deserve every unhappiness that comes my way. Maybe they are right to think that.

 

Harison is not a bad man. He is a decent, somewhat self-centered, brilliant man ten years my senior who has trouble taking others into account, who tends to cut people off when they are speaking, who loves to hear himself speak, who is accustomed to being the smartest person in the room. “When I met you, I stopped being that person, my dear”, he said to me once, as I was especially peeved at him and giving him a hard time. It is one of the nicest things he has ever said to me.

Ours is not exactly a bad marriage, either, although it also may not be the happiest one of all time. I love him not as a brother, but as a companion, a sometimes infuriating, fussy old man who loses his glasses and tries to masturbate quietly in the shower and never tells me when his meetings are running late and smokes cigars at the back porch when he thinks I have already gone to bed. Secrets. We both have them, and we let them be. There have been two instances in our marriage when he has gone missing for a length of time, and I still have no idea where he was. I, on the other hand, tell him almost nothing about my daily life at the restaurant, because every time I do, he focuses on some little detail and starts prattling on about it, most often criticizing me or my actions in the process, and after years of pointless fighting, I have decided to just say nothing. I make a point of never asking for his permission or opinion when I go see my friends.

This was how I was able to get away with seeing Chris all those times, before we ended up doing something that made an ass out of him, and a chump out of me.

 

The fact that Harison and I decided not to have children has most certainly played a part in our gradual estrangement, the enormity of time we have in our hands while our friends are so busy with their offspring and their various hobbies and tutors and sniffles and family life. We wanted to talk and make love and write books and read poetry. It used to sound deep. Now it only sounds vague and like an excuse. Chris’s kid came with him to the restaurant a bunch of times. I was nervous to meet him at first, since I know nothing about children and they tend not to bring out the best in me, but this boy was absolutely charming and joyous and we got along famously, which in itself was kind of a shock and surprise to me, and I think he liked me a lot. Which, in some way, makes everything even more terrible.

How could he do something like that? Bring his son to see me, let him get to know me a little? What point could there possibly be?

But I shouldn’t lose my head. The hardest part is already over. Chris is gone, and won’t be coming back, and after weeks of trying to weep as silently as I possibly can, my turn to try and be considerate to Harison, I no longer feel like I actively have to keep from dying from one second to the next.

The warm autumn sun keeps on shining, reminding me of Chris, but eventually the rains will come, and hopefully wash away at least some of my self-pity and sorrow and inertia.

So, I let youth blind me for a second. Maybe I got lost inside the idea of being young forever or tried to regain my youth through poor young Chris. Don’t think for a second I haven’t thought about it, because I have. Yet another pair of lines from another movie: “Why do men chase women?” “Because they fear dying.” Is this, ultimately, what drove me to handsome Chris’s arms? My own fear of youth finally lost, fear of becoming an unattractive old lady with a tea cozy and knitting needles and pince-nez and a dry, forgotten membrane? Did I honestly believe it would work out?

I don’t know. All I know is what I felt. And if it wasn’t love, it was something as strong. Perhaps the strict division into physical and spiritual manifestations of love is inconsequential, trivial even. How the flesh commands us, makes us do its bidding, how strong the urge to fill that void, to see our own desire reflected back to us from another person’s eyes, how supernaturally irresistible and uncontrollable the need of the body and its demand to be touched, until we are all love’s bitches. And maybe I just need to step up and be woman enough to admit it.

 

Harison leaves the house. He walks to work, it is a very short distance, the school is only a half a mile away. He assembles his papers in his canvas bag, puts on his Sherlock Holmes cap, takes an umbrella from the umbrella stand by the door, an enormous, ancient metal shell casing, one of a pair we own. He was elated, bordering on delirious, when he discovered them at a rummage sale in a neighboring village ten years ago; remnants of a long-ago war, I don’t even know what they are exactly. But Harison does. He cannot remove the teacher from his person even at home, even with me. He, too, is a person of great detail.

Only the details of life that worry us or excite us or make us happy or aroused or sad, exultant or rapturous or enraged or contemplative or passionate, are totally different. It is these very details that separate us from one another.

 

 

 

Dedicated to Anna-Maija Järvi-Herlevi

 

 

This story contains segments of the following works by some of my heroes – thank you, I love you:

Sarah Polley, Take This Waltz, 2011

Griffin Dunne, Practical Magic, 1998

Norman Jewison, Moonstruck, 1987

Erykah Badu, Orange Moon, 2000

Florence + the Machine, Hunger, 2018

Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, S3ep8 Lover’s Walk, 1998