by Nate Allen
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CHAPTER 15
WHEN THE DEVIL BEAT HIS WIFE
He told himself he was making the trip to Raleigh because he needed to get out, but it was Christmas …where was there to go? Rae was supposed to have called earlier that day to let him know when to come by, they had communicated back and forth about it for weeks, but when she hadn’t …well, we’ve been there before …and some mechanisms, some de-vices don’t need much oiling and it could not have gotten any worse, until of course …it did, …when he saw the unfamiliar car in the driveway.
He became that guy, that guy that does the thing many of us would’ve thought about doing but wouldn’t have the nerve. And he did so understanding the consequences, or maybe misunderstanding them as much as one can in that moment of temporary sanity. He stopped his truck in the middle of the street and paused for a moment, staring at the house he knew to be holding secrets like an oversized heart-shaped box, its lock now broken. He then proceeded to walk up another man’s driveway to confront a wife about being with someone other than her husband, someone other than him. What the fuck?
If there’s been any justice done to the telling of this tale, there’s no need to try and explain what was going through the man’s head at that moment, it would probably be easier to say what wasn’t. They’d been intimate in ways few people ever are. In retrospect he had kept so many secrets, as much as anything he just needed her to know that he knew who she really was, and that he had for some time.
He studied the car, a Porsche 914, candy-apple red, nicely restored and in typical fashion he committed the plate to memory. He paused to look in the carport window. He could see them in the dimly lit kitchen, barely a breath’s distance between them. He had been there in that moment with her, had been that guy, he knew what she intended to happen. It was her play and he knew how it ended.
Who knows if a heart makes a sound when it breaks, but he could tell you. His eyes became moist at the sight …and then he had that “thought,” that thought which was “unthinkable,” that thought he hadn’t allowed himself to “think” because it meant that in that month’s time he had been driving himself to doctor appointments and making decisions about his health, quality of life, of life and death …of her and Nicole, that she’d been thinking about the diagnosis as well and perhaps come to the decision that if he wound up not having any value to her as a sexual partner, then he had no value to her as a man, as a friend, and she was already interviewing his replacement or had hired a “temp.” It wasn’t just that he might need her …it was that she wouldn’t need him if he couldn’t help her with her “needs.” It was “unthinkable” in that way a parent won’t allow themselves to think of their child dying, as if simply thinking about it might somehow superstitiously make it come true, because if it were more than a thought the reality would be unbearable and unspeakably “cruel,” …like Merriam-Webster cruel. And somewhere deep inside the man that lonely, ostracized and once unattractive child felt an overwhelming anger and familiar pain. He couldn’t have been that wrong about her. Only weeks before they had shared another loving and unforgettable experience …and he had the ink to prove it.
So he stepped to her door, that boundary he had crossed thirteen months prior, only now he had the attitude and appearance of a man intruded upon and not the intruder. He then began to pound the door as if it somehow represented Timothy, Tony and the half dozen other men she’d slept with …aside from her husband since their involvement began, knowing there would be a swell of anxiety inside by doing so. Rae answered it surprised and alarmed at first to find Jake uninvited, looking prodigious and surly like that mangled dog come in the yard. He’s a sizable man and the fella inside looked understandably concerned, but he wasn’t the object of his ire, she was. He was swollen with emotions, sober yet inebriated by a dangerous cocktail of anger, betrayal, and immense disappointment and hurt. Inflamed …and at the heart of it all was the friendship, fidelity among the unfaithful, about the “love” that existed between them …or the apparent absence of it …but he wouldn’t get past her.
There are two times when a dog is truly dangerous, when it’s hurt and when it’s scared and he was both. But however imposing he may have been, if there’s one thing unanimously and undisputedly more dangerous in nature than that rogue male it’s the mother looking to protect her pups, her cubs or whatever the fucking analogy you choose, and he was not going to present a threat to that. She might have cared less about Glen as a man in that moment, but Glen represented the stability of her kids’ present and future well-being, and she wasn’t going to jeopardize that for Jake. She loved her children, beyond that everyone else was conditional and a matter of convenience. It was such an intense confrontation that he wouldn’t really remember all he had said, but he would never forget what she had as she minced no words and delivered her message very clearly, all with a scornful yet trademark southern twang. “Don’t tell me what you’ve done for me, after all I’ve let you do to me. I didn’t ask anything of you. My advice to you is not to do anything you don’t want to do in the future. Now get off my property, I never want to see you again,” and then she stood there to make certain he left, the fella inside peering around a corner, in his own state of “shock and awe,” and he looked a lot like that guy Vincent.
Jake briefly pondered busting in and making a mess, in light of recent events it would not have been surprising. He hadn’t been thinking clearly, and it was unplanned …but it’s doubtful it went as he had thought or planned. He had hoped she would apologize, cry …lie, or something that would make him feel justified, an attempt at making him feel better, but instead he only felt dissatisfied at the outcome and even more hurt if possible. In hopes and need of a gentle kiss and a lover’s warm embrace that evening, he had instead gotten a tongue-lashing and verbal bitch slap, as if the stud horse he had been was gelded on her front porch.
Sometimes a minute is painfully brief, like the minute after the last call “Now Boarding” as you say goodbye to a loved one at the terminal, or painfully long, like the minute holding your breath underwater, but in the end, both are just sixty seconds …just a minute. And this would simply be one of the most painful of his life …the anguish written all over his face, the indifference on hers, all with a few harsh words, however deservedly spoken. And just like that utility became futility, “a part” became “apart.” They say there’s inevitably a straw that breaks every camel’s back, but it wouldn’t be the number of men in this case as you might suspect, but the woman unaided in the long run who would bring him figuratively to his knees.
There’s no understating their intimacy and involvement, she was the woman in his life …he her lover, confidante, and stalker. He knew her secrets and had kept them, especially the ones she hadn’t shared with him. Love is a primal emotion, the earliest beings knew the feeling of love …they “felt” it, the word served as an acknowledgement of it, but it would complicate their situation. Every time it was written at the end of an email or spoken at the end of a phone call, in the throes of passion or at the announcement of a cancer diagnosis, it brought with it implications of concern for one another, expectations of caring, an intimate contract. At its very least, reduced to its molecular level, an indication of friendship, it wasn’t afforded a casual reference. He had that for her, it was evident, even if evidenced in some very disturbing behavior and obsession, but he had also felt it from her, he trusted his assessment of that, it wasn’t merely wishful thinking. She had offered the words and sentiment willingly of her own volition …but if affirmation is a statement of truth, and confirmation proof of it, her love was unconfirmed as her actions were continually at odds with the connotations the word demanded.
He knew she had other allegiances, stronger alliances and commitments, and there are two sides to every coin and Jake would not deny where he fell in the great scheme of things, he had always known as the person outside the marriage he was dispensable, but the timing was unforgiving and so was he. He cou
ldn’t cast any stones, he wasn’t without guilt or sin, but like some romantic hit-and-run he was wounded and she knew it. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t be there for him in some limited capacity, she’d simply chosen not to be, had simply chosen not to offer any comfort …again, and he was having some extreme difficulty with the accumulation of similar events.
He went through something akin to the five stages of grief on the way home …at least twice, Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, un-Acceptance, rinse and repeat. He hadn’t cried like this when his mother died, hadn’t wept at the announcement of his wife wanting a divorce. The death of a loved one, the death of a love were mournful but could be buried. How could he put to rest something that never really existed? The profundity of that awareness at a moment of such great need for compassion, compounded by all the collateral issues of anger, illness, insecurity, and …fear, made it exponentially worse, and it damaged him. If you had possessed some psychological 3-D glasses the man would have resembled a fragile emotional mosaic …his life in pieces, yet invisible to anyone, and the love and responsibility to his son the only thing holding it all together.
But …it was unacceptable. And in the days that followed, like the boyfriend who realizes he has left his favorite shirt at his ex’s after the breakup, or the young man who had given an heirloom engagement ring to a girl and not gotten it back after they called the wedding off… Rae had something that belonged to him, and he intended to get it back. Inadvertently honest, he had shown her his underbelly, he wanted his relationship with her to be the one where it was safe to be vulnerable, to be afraid, to be human, but she had demonstrated her aversion to his drama, and graphically displayed her ability to disappoint. She only had room in her life for relationships that had benefit to her, it had always been about Rae you’ll remember. But the view from the inside looking out is very different than the view outside looking in, and each of their perspectives was naturally skewed as a result.
He was well beyond the point where sex was the only commonality between them. He’d missed that exit entirely, or to be honest, willfully ignored it. What he had wanted more than anything was some semblance of affection and verification that he was more than just the unpaid hired help, but in a painful analogous vein, they say people don’t pay for sex, they pay to leave afterward, and that all too familiar, and now hypocritical realization that friends-with-benefits was a misnomer, there was no benefit without the friendship, disagreed with him on numerous levels. If he could balance that equation he could walk away and call it even, but she was noncompliant. And he had the tenacity of a back creek turtle, or “cooter” as they were called, which the local lore said would hold onto something until it thundered, and he had latched onto her and was holding on to his place in her life whether she liked it or not, …hanging by that worn out thread. It was about as productive as trying to milk a bull, but he was nothing if not persistent.
Like a tire that begins to wobble when it’s out of balance, he had lost his center of gravity, that ability to trust his gut that had been key to his survival, thinking unclearly and dangerously close to losing his shit. If someone asked him how he was doing, he would reply with the habitually “great” automated response, but it was a bit like asking a man how his roof was holding up to which he replies “Its fine, except when it rains.”
There’s a scene in the movie Pulp Fiction where Bruce Willis’ character Butch asks Marsellus, (Ving Rhames) “You okay?” after he’s been ass-raped by a redneck, to which he replies, “Naw man, I’m pretty fuckin’ far from okay.” …Jacob Arnett was a long way from being “great,” his heart not only broken and scattered, but parts missing, and he would not be whole for a time to come …an emotional Humpty Dumpty. For a man who was no stranger to unfriendly moments, it would stand as the unfriendliest of all. He thought himself to be immune to it, vaccinated so to speak, but he wasn’t. The self-imposed romantic solitary confinement that had defined most of his adult life only revealed to be what he thought a “safe distance,” his aversion to hurting others, in reality a fear of being hurt. The pride he had taken in his self-reliance, his ability to get by without needing anyone but the boy …what he had perceived as strength now exposed as weakness. The child who had grown up with much love to give, became a man who loved deeply, and conversely hurt deeply as well and he wished for a pain that he was used to.
There were now blind spots in his confidence and shadows on his psyche. She had knocked loose the keystone of his being, and the ground underneath his life left unstable. It was a difficult time for the man, he missed some people he had lost …and some he had given away.
The emotions would exhaust and consume him, until like the influenza, he had sweated them out, and once he had it became something all together different for the man. Like the romantic squatter that he discovered himself to be, he had imagined it like some adverse possession that if he hung around long enough without being evicted he could eventually lay claim to some permanent part of her landscape by default. He should’ve had a bag of essential emotions packed though, ready to go at a moment’s notice, but he hadn’t seen it coming. In that minute she had stolen a lifetime’s worth of hard earned instinct and intuition, the utilities that had kept the man alive. See, “Sometimes gettin’ what you want ain’t a good thing”…be careful what you wish for. He hated himself for being such a fool, but he found it necessary to continue to be her secret-keeper and wouldn’t tell anyone. His illicit association to a married woman wouldn’t find a sympathetic audience anyway, so he subsequently sequestered and quarantined it from the other aspects of his life. Life waits for none of us and important decisions still had to be made and he was wishing he had a mulligan of the love variety right about now, an emotional do-over. It was as if the sky had darkened with arrows all pointed at him. Poor fella….
None of us is more than the wrong heartache or the right misfortune and tragedy from coming off the rails, and anyone of these things singularly might have been enough. It was as if he had one foot on the platform and the other on a train waiting to pull out of the station, that being his feelings towards Rae. As a consequence he couldn’t be all in with Nicole, and as time would tell, she wasn’t one to wait. At a most inopportune time Rae had vacated the premises …or asked him too, and he found himself alone with both feet on the platform as Nicole and those possibilities had already exited the station in the opposite direction. He had invested in something that had no future, and not invested in something that had. It was the concurrence of two opposing forces, like loving someone and hating them in the same moment, finding what you seek yet getting lost in the discovery, like rain on a sunny day …when the devil beat his wife.
It felt as though his life was being drawn and quartered, and the bittersweet ambiguity of what was happening tugged at him like a riptide. You’d think that indignity, that inhumane and gross insensitivity of the moment would have been enough for him to wash his hands of her, but you’ll remember the boy had gotten his ass whooped in a weakened state before, and he knew he would get up. If he had to walk her down to square things, then that’s what he was gonna do. The reality of what had just happened wouldn’t enable this man to move forward, so instead he would tell himself he understood her fear, the innocent considerations that lay within the confines of her life, and how it didn’t provide for disruptive emotional entanglements …she had all she could handle, and it was he who lost sight of the boundaries, erased and redrawn them, and in so doing trespassed on her precious properties. Maybe she did care, maybe she always had, but there was too much weighing in the balance. The gravity of which outweighed his needs. His forgiveness however would not be altruistic in nature, only a necessary lie he had to tell himself. He wanted to get back to being the man that he was, but something inside his peculiar makeup wouldn’t allow him to leave without collecting what he had lost, what she had taken from him.
At some point, you had to feel sorry and concerned for the girl. In a sense Glen had picked the ripest peach
and chosen not to eat it, or maybe to be more accurate, it had fallen in his lap, and he had chosen not to eat it. Regardless, he was letting it go to waste, and there’s not much distance between ripe and growing rotten. And Jake had become like a feral dog …check that, a rabid feral dog. She had offered the man a very nice arrangement conducive to his lifestyle and inclinations. She told him the parameters and he agreed to them, but the rules had not really been enforced …and not enforced, they might just as well not existed.
Something beautiful and unique had happened unexpectedly to them both in the beginning, and it had bloomed magnificently several times, but she was able to let go of it, and he wasn’t. Truth be told, if she’d been readily available like all the other women that passed through his life, he probably would have had that same awkwardness in the morning in asking her to leave, and it would have lasted as long as that carton of milk, but she wasn’t. She began to feel as though she had picked up some psycho-sexual hitchhiker, and couldn’t very well call 911 or ask for help, cornered, instead of slamming the door in his face, she had flung it wide open so that he could get a good look at the reality of their situation.
Two roads had diverged in a yellow wood, and he could not travel both …and be the one traveler, and so he took the one his heart demanded of him that turned out to be a dead-end, and would’ve done so again, it would have been uncharacteristic of him not to. Was it worth the pain “that it might inflict? ” Only he could answer that. He may have been some other folks’ best friend …but he was his own worst enemy, and that was never meant to be anything other than a sad, heartrending truth.