Wrongful Reconciliation Page 4

  In his excitement, Budge forgetfully returns to point-blank interrogation. “So how old are you anyway?”

  “Oh, honey, you don’t have to know that right now.”

  “Yes I do. Why can’t I know it?”

  “Because I’m not telling you, that’s why,” she laughs, gently rapping his chest with her knuckles. He reacts by taking her in his arms.

  “Aw, c’mon, Matty!”

  “C’mon, Budge. Don’t be a broken record!”

  Again the brick wall, but her kisses are warm and inviting. One-track Budge quickly forgets his critical attitude—of himself, of her—as he succumbs to the stirring of passion.

  Oh, what does it matter? I’ll find out sooner or later. Meanwhile, I’ll appreciate her for what she is—a ripe, yielding lover with vast experience in pleasing a man. Responsive, even-tempered, fun to be with. She must’ve been a hot little number back when old Harold married her—she was eighteen. He sure was one lucky fellow!

  Yes, that’s another solid clue: she married while still a teenager—she imparted that to Budge on their first date. They’re in her bedroom now, undressing on separate sides of the mattress, not in a rush, but deliberate and pensive. The teasing is over; in this household, sex, like dinner, is taken seriously. Again, Harold must’ve set the tone—even though he’s been dead for two years. Suddenly, Budge has a flash of inspiration: all he has to do figure out how long Harold and Matty were married, then do the necessary subtraction.

  “What year were you and Harold wed?”

  “Oh, let me see …” She ponders for a moment. “Gosh, sweetheart, I can’t remember. It was such a long time ago.”

  “Do you remember the number of your last anniversary?”

  Unhooking her bra, Matty attempts some mental calculation, but gives up. “No, I don’t—that is, I’m not sure.”

  Her breasts are exposed, pendant and hypnotic. She’s no pinup anymore, but that doesn’t make her any less desirable. It’s her wanting him that turns him on.

  “Did you reach your fiftieth?”

  “Fiftieth what, darling?”

  “Wedding anniversary. Golden anniversary, as some call it.”

  She reacts with a smile, reaching to him across the bed. “And why do you want to know that, sweetheart?”

  “Just curious. I got a little more than halfway to mine.”

  Budge’s admission opens the trapdoor in his brain, the trapdoor he’s trying hard to keep shut.

  Twenty-six years! As marriages go, that’s a respectable stretch. A long run. My wife and I had plenty of time to get to know each other, and ample opportunity to bridge our differences and take each other’s idiosyncrasies in stride. What’s more, we had the leisure to build an edifice of mutual trust and respect. So what happened? Well, I’m not the one qualified to answer that. I was Mr. Steadfast. Nothing happened, as far as I was concerned. For more than a quarter of a century, I was married to this woman, and then suddenly I wasn’t.

  “I really don’t remember,” Matty is saying. “Yes, I guess we did make the fifty-year mark. But Harold was so sick that it must have passed without my noticing it.”

  She is sitting on the bed—the connubial bed—naked and vulnerable, with a sweet puzzled expression on her face. Budge feels churlish for interrogating her. Inwardly, he castigates himself. This is neither the time nor the place. This woman is his lifeline; she is offering herself to him, not withholding anything of real consequence, not pressing him with a barrage of inquiry. Across the broad mattress, he scuttles over to her, enveloping her nakedness in his arms.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” he says.

  She looks at him with tenderness. “You really want to know my age, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do, but right now it doesn’t matter.”

  “Good, because I’m not going to tell you. One of these days you’ll know, when I’m ready to tell you. Not now.”

  “Fair enough,” he says before kissing her hard on the mouth to change the subject.

  A few days later, though, Budge’s restless brain devises a new tack. Instead of asking Matty outright, he’ll obtain her birth date by stealth.

  I’m angling to get a glimpse of her driver’s license which will reveal the number loud and clear (if I happen to be wearing my reading glasses), but so far I haven’t been successful. I stood behind her at the checkout line at Wal-Mart the other day, but she wielded her I.D. too quickly. I got another chance at the liquor store and muffed it, too.

  It has occurred to me to sneak a peek at her wallet—just fish it out of her handbag for a second or two when she’s in the bathroom or something—but that wouldn’t be playing fair. No, I won’t stoop to that tactic. I may be a blackguard, a layabout, a bullshit artist and an advantage-taking rascal, but I am no snoop. I categorically refuse to rifle a woman’s handbag.

  Still, Budge is not dissuaded from achieving his goal. If anything, he’s more determined than ever. What had begun as a casual inquiry now carries the intensity of a do-or-die investigation. He needs to know how old she is! This crucial piece of information will make everything about her and their relationship fall into place.

  Her reticence about her age, the so-called woman’s prerogative that’s keeping me in the dark, frustrates me to no end. For all I know, she could be fifteen years my senior. She doesn’t recognize most of the great Bob Dylan songs. She thinks the Grateful Dead are a black group. She’s dismissive of James Taylor and Janis Joplin, never heard of The Beach Boys or The Doors. From what I’ve been able to piece together, she’s older than I thought, at least in her late sixties—possibly even seventy!

  When we first started dating and one voluntary revelation after another sprang forth, I remember her saying that she preferred that I get to know Matty the person, not Matty the number. That was a rather profound way of putting it, I thought. I see now that she was only trying to make things easier for me. She knew what I needed most of all—a sexual partner, the same thing she needed—and she didn’t want to spoil anything. As the saying goes, a little mystique only adds to a woman’s allure.

  So there we were, new lovers overwhelmed by pleasure and release. The past was receding; we were forging a new beginning. A sexual reawakening of this intensity heralded endless possibilities. Did her age matter? Of course not! Did mine? Not in the least. Despite the fact that we both were high-mileage people, we felt young again.

  Today, I look at her closer than I did back then. She’s taken amazingly good care of herself—and no wonder, considering the money she spends on nostrums and capsules from the local health food store.

  All of which makes her even more of a curiosity, age-wise, to Budge. She’s every bit as fit and energetic as he is, and it puzzles him. What exactly is it that gives her an inside track on longevity? Has she discovered a fountain of youth?

  Matty shrugs off his inquiries. She makes no secret of popping small handfuls of vitamins before mealtimes and quaffing mysterious tinctures before bedtime, but other than that—plus a daily hour of semi-strenuous exercise—she leads an ordinary life. She eats organically whenever possible and imbibes plenty of red wine. She also drinks a lot of water, and in this he attempts to emulate her, although it results in bloatedness and annoyingly frequent urination. In addition, she plays golf, as previously noted, and encourages him to join her. He promises that one day he will, but his journal indicates otherwise.

  Golf is one sport I abhor. Golf is the end-product of idleness—the murderous thwacking of an insignificant sphere by a virtual club. Then the delicate iron play, nudging the sphere down the hole. Talk about passive/aggressive behavior!

  There’s something unsavory about this sport. I see it as an outlet for irritability and irresponsibility. Walking the fairway provides a brief cooling-off period, but tension builds anew on the putting green. I postulate that those who have the time and inclination to play golf may have homicidal tendencies. I am emphatically not in that number.

  Matty, naturally, is exempt from su
ch a harsh observation. Budge deliberately exerts little control over his private prose. He lets his demons out. He spouts off whenever the urge strikes him, which is often. Still, it’s just a harmless exercise, not meant to be taken seriously.

  What Matty isn’t exempt from, however, are his interminable attempts to make her reveal as much about herself as she possibly can. Again, it’s just a normal case of writerly inquisitiveness; he has set her in his sights. And she is willing enough to comply—what individual, after all, is reluctant to talk when the peppering of personal questions is flattery itself? Budge can be a charming inquisitor, easygoing and affable. He smiles, he jokes, he cajoles his way into her confidence. He’s endlessly collecting material, and Matty is game enough to share remnants of her lengthy dossier of experience.

  I learn, for example, that she and Harold—in their younger years, to be sure—used to bite each other during lovemaking—sometimes drawing blood. She unequivocally brags about it, daring me to try it. Bite me and I’ll bite you back. That’s real passion, she says, when a little pain’s thrown in. Well, I tell her that on no uncertain terms am I a lover of such propensity. Passion I have aplenty, but it’s a turnoff for me to even consider bloodying her, or have her bloody me.

  She retreats. “I was just kidding,” she says, but I know she wasn’t kidding. She and Harold rode the bronco of lust night after night and spared themselves no injury. Even now, she’s twice as passionate as a woman half her age. That’s what I like about her: she’s a tigress, a real man-eater. She’s no passive receptacle, but a gimbaled extractor of her partner’s essence, a sexy suction pump. She tells me over and over again how much she likes the smell of a man.

  He learns a lot more about her than she learns about him—or does he? Perhaps by his informational demands, he reveals what makes him a writer. Moreover, he’s no shrinking violet when it comes to spilling his own beans; he is needy for the illumination that only she can shed upon his truncated marriage. Matty, whose marriage wasn’t truncated until the death of her spouse, proves to be an astute prober.

  “Why did your wife leave you?” she asks. “Was it because you insulted or hurt her in some way?”

  “Dunno. She told me it was because of ‘a lot of little things.’ Those were her exact words. I really had no idea what she was talking about.”

  “Did you ask her to enumerate them specifically?”

  “Oh sure, I tried, but she mentioned stuff that I had completely forgotten about. Like one time long ago when I walked out of a church service. Or another time when I didn’t offer her a ride home. Or another time when a college friend of hers dropped by for a visit and I was rude. Stuff like that.”

  “Maybe she didn’t see you as a caring husband.”

  “But I was a caring husband!” Budge blurts defensively. “I cared deeply for her, from long before the first day of our marriage to well beyond the last. She knew it, too! Her griping was groundless. My little slip-ups of behavior, if you can call them that, occurred along a timeline of many good and positive interactions. Many, many more good than bad. It was odd—and unfair to me—that she’d bottle up all the negatives and regurgitate them all at once as an excuse for dumping me.”

  “She must’ve had her reasons, honey.”

  “Oh, I’m sure she did! But her treatment of me wasn’t all so hunky-dory either. She did plenty of things that pissed me off, only I let them slide. I don’t hold grudges.”

  The memories make Budge indignant.

  To think that the minutiae of marriage can sink the vessel itself! To think that silly arguments and petty disagreements can overwhelm the smooth-sailing of two joined hearts and minds. What about the laughter, the post-coital serenity, the intellectual rapport? Wasn’t the sharing of these more important? They certainly took up a major portion of time.

  When I think back, I’d give anything to have talked to my ex just once more. Face to face minus the separation bullshit, minus the righteousness. I’d demand to know why ‘a lot of little things’ tilted the balance so drastically. Why she threw away so much for so paltry a reason. But why am I excoriating myself so? It’s over, goddammit, it’s so over that it’s ancient history at this point.

  Herstory, that is.

  In his introspection, Budge catches only the tail end of what Matty is saying.

  “… and if so, it seems to me that she didn’t really love you. If a person can’t forgive, how can they have the capacity to love?”

  “Oh, she loved me all right,” Budge says glibly. “I’m sure of that. She always said she did.”

  “Well, saying it is one thing, but proving it is another.”

  Budge has to reflect on this. Nobody in the whole world has ever been able to prove someone else’s love. The surest form of love only goes outward. What comes back is assumed to be reciprocal, but who can ever be sure?

  “If she loved you so much, Budge, then why did she leave you? No, I don’t think she loved you, honey. You thought she did, but you were fooling yourself. All those years, she was using you. She was asking, what can you do for her, how can you further her comfort, her status, her credibility in the eyes of the world? She waited and waited, and you didn’t deliver. She concluded that you weren’t good enough. You didn’t earn enough money, you didn’t write the right kind of books, you didn’t live up to what she expected you to be.”

  There is a lecturing tone in Matty’s voice, and it irritates him. He hates being talked down to. What he doesn’t realize, though, is that he often speaks in a similar cadence—it comes with the territory of a man of letters. He can’t help his authorial intonation; it obligates people to perk up their ears.

  “So don’t say she loved you,” Matty continues. “Because if she did, none of this would have happened.”

  Budge is chastened.

  Count on a woman to analyze another of her sex with accuracy. Perhaps she’s right, perhaps my wife didn’t love me. But if she didn’t, why did she stay with me so long? Why didn’t she cut her losses after the first year or two, throw in the towel when it would have made more sense? Leaving after twenty-six years smacks of masochism. She put up with me, with my so-called bad behavior, all the while compiling this huge inventory of grievances. Jeez, no wonder she vamoosed in a flash when she finally did. Had she stuck around, she might have exploded from the sheer pressure of holding so much in. She was never one for emotional flatulence.

  To Matty, he says, “You are one wise woman, sweetie. I should have hooked up with you earlier!”

  Matty laughs. “Well, as they say, wisdom comes with age.”

  Not missing a beat, Budge picks up where he left off. “At what age did your wisdom come?” he asks.

  “When I got my wisdom teeth!”

  “No, seriously. How old do I have to be before I’m as wise as you are?”

  “There you go again, honey. You’re asking me my age again, right?”

  “Sorry, I can’t help it. I feel like I have a right to know.”

  “Well keep guessing!”

  “Sixty-eight? Sixty-nine?”

  “You’re not even close!”

  Their repartee is playful. From their first date, they’ve gotten along on this joshing wavelength. Together they take life a little less seriously than if they were apart. Grinning, he kisses her lips. He feels that the truth is about to alight on his shoulder like a big friendly bird.

  “Aw, I’m tired of guessing. Just tell me flat out and let’s get it over with.”

  Matty searches his face with merry, trusting eyes like twin live coals set within her crinkled features.

  “I’m seventy-five,” she admits proudly.

  Chapter Four

  Have you ever lived within a gated community, Gentle Reader? If not, let me acquaint you with some typical details. Be forewarned that it’s not a pretty sight.

  Budge thus addresses his imaginary audience in the high dudgeon with which perusers of these pages are already acquainted. The gentle reader conceit should fool nobody;
in actuality, what Budge is doing is talking to himself.

  The first thing you’re aware of is a sanitization of nature. The ragged or tangled or unkempt has no place here. A manicured vista of sameness extends in all directions. Lawns undulate verdantly. Nowhere is there tall grass except of the ornamental variety. Nursery stock has long supplanted the original arboreal cover. Wildflowers have ceased to exist. Birds and insects are few. In mild weather, the dominant sound from dawn till dusk is the roar of mowing machines—operated not by the homeowners themselves, but by minimum-wage Hispanic employees of lawn care services.

  The people who dwell here are so homogeneously affluent that they all appear to lead identical lives. They rarely venture outdoors except to walk their dogs or, occasionally, themselves. Their houses, each rising like a cheap chateau on its own acre, manifest little differentiation save for the number and placement of gable peaks. Vinyl siding is de rigueur; it informs a crisp, maintenance-free exterior bordered by evergreen shrubs in plump beds of pine bark mulch. Flagpoles are common, as are polystyrene mailboxes. Leading away from two- and three-car garages are blacktopped driveways linking to a network of well-crowned, well-ditched streets and cul-de-sacs. On a low post beside every driveway entrance is a prominently displayed house number, so the ambulance that is eventually summoned to cart off the stricken homeowner can weave with surety through the indistinguishable plots in the neighborhood. Ditto for the fire truck when a residence threatens to burn down.

  The gate itself, guarantor of community security, is a horizontal steel ladder that rolls sideways upon the correct entering of a five-digit code on a touchpad at driver’s window height. Nonresidents are required to park outside the gate and register—via footpath—at the community welcome center, just within. I submitted to this silly protocol for about two weeks before Matty divulged her code numeric. Believe me, the temptation was—and remains—strong to crash into that damn gate and send its flimsy bars flying.

  This bilious description reflects not only Budge’s unease with his surroundings, but also his ingratitude. By rights, he is a member of the community, so he should willingly abide by its rules and regulations—and, what’s more, enjoy himself. But Budge is cut of a different cloth; as a long-term creative striver, he perceives himself as a rebel—in fact, a rebel’s rebel—and he is not willing to abide by anyone’s rules except his own. Nor is he having a particularly good time. He lives within the gated community in body but not in spirit. While he cares for Matty—cares for her in such a way that he looks forward to going to bed with her at night and waking up with her in the morning—he doesn’t give a hoot about that aspect of her conventionality that places her in the midst of this carefully engineered suburbia.