A Change of Needs

by Nate Allen

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  CHAPTER 16

  MEANINGFUL COINCIDENCE

  In the end it seems she didn’t really have a plurality of faces, she just had the one, and underneath the surface it wasn’t really pretty, just coldhearted, with a lack of originality surrounding the same sad, overdone story. He came to see her as not really having the range of characters in her repertoire he had first thought, not as if she played a number of drastically different roles, she just placed herself in different scenes and settings with an assortment of co-stars. Like a piece of driftwood, carefully arranged on a coffee table it can be a decorative centerpiece, placed in the yard it was just a stick, in the fireplace a log, or left alone on a beach …simply what it was all along, just another piece of unremarkable driftwood.

  She didn’t have that much variety about her, only adeptness and skill at the presentation, all of which hinged upon an unfamiliar and first-time audience because it didn’t have the depth or mystery that merited an encore, except unfortunately for him. Despite the fact it was a one-act play, it was still an enjoyable show, and during the course of its run he had been the villain, the hero, the audience and critic. But no longer that same man she had invited into her life. He’d suffered that moment when he saw himself in the mirror and caught the reflection of jealousy, deception, vengeance, and …obsession …not very attractive either. Not the image of the man whom he wanted to be seen as, or the man he once thought himself to be. She’d never meet anyone quite like him again and it’d be wrong not to at least suggest there’s a measure of loss and degree of sadness for her in that statement. In spite of everything you now know, the woman had never felt unloved by the man …even under some strenuous circumstances.

  As mentioned some time ago, peaks and valleys, extensive plateaus and piedmonts, had characterized his sexual life and so too their relationship. That was part of the allure, and the infrequency fueled the desire and wouldn’t allow him to get his fill, never satiated, and thus always hungry for time with her. That inability to get bored with each other had helped it endure, he hadn’t been saddled with the responsibilities of a typical relationship, only the strangely complex complications of the arrangement that were somehow attractive to the strangely complex and complicated man, even his uncomfortable awareness of her behavior and tendencies that should have turned him off, turned on his competitive nature. Like the image his tattoo presented, unrestrained the relationship would have devoured itself and expired in the process. It could not have survived at such a high altitude of emotion before suffocating, burned up with the expediency of a tissue in a furnace and been in the books or his library so to speak, and he already “moved on” like all similar liaisons in his past.

  In the end it was not how she did or did not feel about him that he missed or was of importance, but how he felt about her …and how she made him feel about himself. That was among the things he lost that night. It’s hard to understand, but like he would say “Don’t tell me you know where I’m coming from unless you’ve been where I’ve been.”

  He loved her, so much so he would even come to concede to understanding why she had done what she did. In all fairness to them both, she loved him too, but she did what was instinctual. She cared …to a degree, to the extent she was capable, that her situation would allow, like a sad story on the evening news, until another would come along. She was mired in her own sorrow, she couldn’t help him with his. She told herself it was the kindest thing she could do, but as far as he was concerned there were a lot of ways she could have cut that cake and this was the most unkindest cut of all…

  It would be painstakingly arduous, the long game is, but like mud on your shoes, if you try to wipe it off while it’s still wet it just makes a bigger mess. Instead he needed to give it time to “dry” before making any gestures. And with that in mind, the ending would begin, just as the beginning had begun, with words carefully chosen.

  There is probably no combination of meaningful words in the English language that haven’t been used together, but the assignment of meaning and the way they are heard can be greatly affected by the arrangement and timing of usage. Like the CD’s he would burn, he knew that he could take the same twelve songs and order them differently and it would have a dramatic effect on the interpretation, and someone’s appreciation for them. He was angry and intimately destroyed in a way only she could have done so …and only she could repair. She was just angry, what he said next had to be perfectly arranged. The situation was as delicate as Middle East peace talks, she had his mojo, and he couldn’t bring a verbal or emotional nuke to the negotiation, or there would be no further discussion.

  So he unnaturally tempered his communications, aware that she was analyzing his words for evidence of anything remotely resembling “needy” and things once said could not be unspoken where she was concerned. With that understanding, the landscaper surveyed the situation and approached it like an essay assignment, “In 500 words or less, defuse this woman’s anger and concerns, express yours in a non-threatening way, lay the groundwork for achieving your goal without revealing what that is.” It would need to be honest, to the point, shallow, and yet so deep she could fall in it and not get out.

  He needed to give her just the tip of that literary 12-incher and make her want for the rest. This is what he presented:

  I’m sorry but I can’t apologize, to do so would lack sincerity and diminish the words, and I reserve them for necessary occasions. I have to ask though, what was it that hurt so much when you busted in that hotel room and found Frank with another woman? Were those feelings relegated to the fact you were married, or that he broke your heart? That’s intentionally rhetorical of course, we both know the answer, but I’d like to hear you explain how that’s any different than what I’m feeling and the way that I reacted. I told you once that if “the time should come when the thought of NOT having me in your life as a friend/lover produced a greater sense of relief, than of sadness,” I’d be gone, all you had to do was say so …but you didn’t.

  I suspect on some level you must wish your husband cared as much. If I’m sorry for anything it’s that I miss the way I’ve felt about you, you’ve made me want to be a better man and not demanded it of me. I really wanted to write and tell you how bad you hurt me, but I kept defaulting to the realization that I let myself get hurt by you instead. That was a jagged pill to swallow to say the least, but I needed to take my medicine where it was concerned. If you take the emotion out of our equation it’s really rather pedestrian, and we both know it’s been anything but ordinary. We’ve delighted in the fact that it existed, …even if only in capsules and on the edge of our lives. Knowing it was there has given us both comfort, and unrest.

  The good news is I still have feelings where you’re concerned, just not the feelings you’re accustomed to …I couldn’t resist ;) You deserve a good spanking… Keep an open mind will you, good/bad, yin/yang, love and hate …sometimes the difference can be as indiscernible as the difference between “something you’ll always remember,” and “something you can’t forget” …however slight the distinction, the distinction remains, that point where the two meet, where the one becomes the other. We’re in that crevice, the gray area now. You’re scratching your head I suppose …or maybe not.

  I know you don’t want to hear it, but it needs to be said just the same …we have unfinished business. The thoughts that are arcing through our heads and hearts right now, like the loose ends of a downed power-line, need to be tied up and dealt with. You mentioned you never wanted to see me again, but Never and Always are big words and you’re going to find yourself missing me, and I’m not lost. I’m of the opinion we can still be of some value to one another on this journey. We have some hard-earned familiarity that would be a shameful waste and angry sex can be very gratifying, or so I recall… You’ll hear from me at some point in the not too distant future …if I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume you’re okay with that.

  -Jacob

  He signe
d it with his given name, it was the first time he had done so. Like Raen, it was that name which only family and chosen family called him by, and there was an insinuation buried in the usage. Like that high-pitch whistle only a dog can hear, if she was keen enough to pick up on it, he wouldn’t hear from her. And that would be a good thing. He needed to score a run here, but to get to home-plate you have to touch all the bases. Things were extremely fragile right now. It would be ill-advised to try and knock it out of the park right off the bat, just get to first base and go from there.

  He had an agenda you’ll recall, but he couldn’t just ask for his dignity back …that would have been demeaning, and unsuccessful. So a second dialogue would begin, not one between two strangers who were curious about each other and exploring whether or not to act on that curiosity, but one between two people who knew each other all too well, and deciding whether or not that knowledge had a value greater than the attack against it, whether or not to maintain contact …or so it had to seem. You have to build trust, you can’t manufacture it, theirs had been broken and it would take a considerable amount of time to repair. He wouldn’t wait anxiously this time to see if she responded, he knew that she wouldn’t, because he knew her.

  She was relieved to get the email, she had been concerned about where his head was at, and preoccupied about what he might do next. Son-of-a-bitch had come to her house like he owned it. Besides, he was right, she would come to miss him. She needed him to remind her how special she was in case others didn’t take notice. So she took the bullets out of the metaphorical gun, and waited to hear from him. He would take his damn time in doing so.

  Start to finish it would take fourteen months, fourteen months of listening to her complain, of telling her what she wanted to hear from him, pretending to be her cheerleader, her therapist, pretending to understand and be concerned, sympathetic. He had played many roles in his life, pretended to be many things …among the most requested of them pretending to be “interested.” And he did, and he did so very well. He should have been something other than he was. He would need to make her want to summon him, just as Cleopatra had pulled the asp to her own breast.

  There wasn’t a lot of sex the coming year, as if the cancer was an affliction he didn’t want to expose anyone else to, obviously itself not contagious, but the tension and anxiety it brought potentially so. He was prepared to endure that himself, but not willing or able to infect someone else with it. It would’ve been unfair to burden another with that heaviness and he had enough to worry about in terms of how it might affect him, much less someone else …and then there was the small matter of potential for disappointment, and he’d had enough of that. So the women he did encounter, he made no mention of it, he wouldn’t see them again anyway, nor was it a topic available for discussion with Rae, she had forfeited that security clearance, and seemed unaffected by the loss.

  It must’ve been difficult to have such strong feelings, but be inhibited, be incapable of being truly honest with someone you had been so intimate with, as if honesty was appreciated …to a point, but it always had to be flattering, even when flattery was the furthest thing from his mind he would find something to say, even if it was just to echo what she was voicing. Jake would willingly confess that it was the kind of honesty akin to enabling, but the alternative was that there was no alternative. She had booby-trapped the relationship, and set up all kinds of metaphoric warnings, trip wires, to alert herself to any unhealthy attachment not to her liking, any potential threat, but the truth was he was not that nimble a man and each time he got close to what he sought, she withdrew.

  It would not be an easy year for the married girl either though. He had scared her, and in doing so reminded her of all that she had to lose and how those she cared most about could get hurt in her selfish pursuits. But that itch wouldn’t go away, and it wouldn’t scratch itself. In a sense he had forced her further underground, reduced to anonymous one-night stands and while that can be a bumpy road for a single gal, it is much more so for a middle-aged married woman with three schoolage children. The ability to screen her playmates and control the environment lost. He had long since closed the peephole into her activities, now unable and uninterested in protecting her, relying only on his knowledge of the woman, her behavior …and his imagination, for what she might be doing extramarital-wise and how he could adapt to get in the game.

  He shared his philosophy on life with Chunk once while tailgating one afternoon …or at least his perspective on that day. He was of the opinion that the universe was comprised of dichotomies, opposites as it were. There could be no “light” without “dark,” no “joy” without “pain,” no “Yes” without “No,” and infinite shades of compromise existed in between. That Good and Evil, Heaven and Hell exist within each of us, and there’s an endless subliminal crusade going on to see which will prevail, a constant tug-of-war and balancing of the two. You remove one or diminish its presence, well it’s true what they say, nature does abhor a vacuum, the other fills the void and the scales tip.

  For a time they had been like a lock and key, she the place where he fit, where his heart felt at home; he the key that too perfectly filled a “loving” void in her life, but she had exiled him, and in the emptiness his departure had left, in the darkness of the underground she’d been forced deeper in to, perversion and deviancy flooded the space he had occupied. She’d had more intimacy with Jake than her husband since they’d met, more orgasms by the man than all others combined, important only in the level of comfort and trust it required. She had come to think of herself as the prize, he had done that for her, given her that gift at a time she felt inconspicuous, and she had been that rare love interest in his life, that top-shelf in his library.

  Perhaps it had happened by accident, but it was of her design. Of course she would miss the man, she just couldn’t admit it …doing so would have resembled remorse and she couldn’t shoulder that on top of everything else. So she pushed in the other direction, as people in denial are apt. But deviancy and perversion are not entirely the property or province of deviants and perverts. Just as we all have the physiological potential for addiction, we similarly have psychological proclivities for a departure from the norm, and she had been deprived of exploring hers. Sexual appetites, much like our appetites for food, evolve as we grow older. When we are young our taste-buds are incredibly sensitive, our appetite easily satisfied and our menu small, simple, bland and predictable, but as we age, those taste-buds dull, and we hunger for things not always on the menu, things we once thought unpalatable. Just as when we are young, the slightest of things excite us, as we grow older, some people require more stimulation to arouse, and more importantly, satiate that instinctual craving and appetite, and variety is the spice of life. The girl had an unmistakable kink to her no doubt.

  Her opportunities had always been limited, but with Glen’s mother now living with them the cage that was her life had grown smaller. Like a driver at a red light who has waited for what seems like an eternity for it to change, and grown weary of waiting decides to run it, she would have to make her own opportunities, and unknown to Jake, taking incredible risks, exploring her limits and pushing the envelope. The establishments she found herself in not unsavory, but the patrons less appreciative and while she was often a trophy, she was never the prize.

  Perhaps the Preacher’s daughter had wanted to be punished, not because the “good” girl had been “bad,” had been disloyal to a man she didn’t love and should have divorced. She had done wrong to be sure, but been no more “good” or “bad” than Jake had. But she had turned her back to the most loving man in her life at a time when he needed some particular kindness, and she the sole possessor of it, knowing full well he would have stolen it for her if the circumstances were reversed. He had silently pardoned her for that, but the truth of the matter is, there are those sins others can forgive us for, which we can’t forgive ourselves. And so we continue, as this was never a typical man/woman love story, but a lov
e story nonetheless, and in the love, the betrayal, the pain, …boo-coo sex, at the end of the day, in its essence …a very human story.

  Still insanely in tune with her, on an accurately forecasted unromantic Valentine’s Day, like an assassin who had lain in wait for months disguised as Cupid, he sent her a pointed text, and in a moment of weakness, or want, she would steal away and call. He had succeeded in worming his way back into her life, into her confidence, that endearing fuck of a man. Not in the name of love so much as some sign that he had not been entirely wrong in his assessment of her feelings for him, to retake the trust in his instincts and intuition, and the accompanying self-respect he had shat on her porch. The dawg had succeeded in treeing the cat.

  No longer a rescue mission, but salvage and recovery. And though he’d insinuated that it was no longer about the sex, that’s a half-truth, it was about all of the things you know and imagine, but the sex was the manifestation of their feelings, the stage where it was acted out. It was and always had been first and foremost, a sexual relationship that had bled into other areas. The year they were involved had been a good year for the man, there had been much sex, but he’d only made love with the one woman. And he couldn’t move on without picking up some necessities he had left behind.

  When he met her it was as if his heart had eclipsed his mind, the two were in agreement for the first time in years, if not ever. But that moment on her doorstep, another eclipse had occurred, only this time his head eclipsed his heart, and the emotion that had colored the affair would fade into stark realization. She looked the same but he now saw her very differently, no longer full of vitality and sensuality, but sadness and exhaustion, still beautiful but unattractive, her sultry simply reduced to imperfection. They would meet at the place where it had all begun, Leon’s.