A Boilerplate Rendering Ch. 03

"I bet I do better than you," she said with a playful smile.

I tapped my fork on my plate, examined the pile of food, and then traced the frame of her smile. "What is this, Karen? This looks like a message."

"Not a message, no. It's a challenge. This," she indicated the food, "is the next thing we work on together." Then she unceremoniously shovelled a bite onto her fork, and her smile grew wider. "Let's get fat, honey. And let's do it together." And she shoved it into her face.

I looked down at the food again. "What if I'm not hungry?"

"Mphs mkay," she struggled around the bite. "Mmm not eevr."

Yeah, alright. I admit it. I laughed at the sight of it.

I even ate the food.

So fucking what?

-

It was very nearly summer when the unthinkable happened.

Maybe it was the little bit of weight she had put on during our "big breakfast" months, or maybe it was having some meat on my own bones again that did it (we never did actually get "fat,"...what kind of story do you think this is?).

Maybe it was something else. The calm, or her new haircut...she had styled it up into a sort of bob that frankly looked terrible on her, but with plans to experiment as it grew back out and find something new she could live with.

Hell, maybe it just came down to the seasons. Maybe it was that whole "breeding spring" thing, or some sort of...

No. I'm making excuses. I just got really drunk.

I got drunker than shit, and then I had sex with my wife.

It's funny the way that time is really the major player in this story. I feel bad, because I never even bothered to name it. I never introduced it, or kept you up to date on how it was acting and thinking. I never bought it flowers or kissed it goodnight, either. But Time seems to have decided everything in my life to this point, and probably will do so in the future as well. Hate, anger, fear, love, lust...they are all just subjects of the Great King Time, and It does with them as It pleases.

If I ever need to write a sequel, I'll start with that.

Now, you read stories where the characters get out of sexless marriages and just go crazy, bedding anything with legs that they can get their hands on. But the truth is, no sex life at all is still a kind of sex life, and your body responds to it.

That's maybe the first point where Time comes in.

After a while, your body adapts to absence, and it almost becomes difficult to even think about sex. I know that I barely thought about it at all, for a very long time (there he is again). But Karen suddenly looked and sounded like Karen...like my Karen, my long lost wife, and not the woman who had done those other things. It was striking how big that difference was. And it had been a nice night, and we'd spent it amongst friends, and I'd had a few more drinks than usual and laughed a little harder than usual and we'd danced again and...

Well, you know how it is.

I suppose you're thinking that this is where it all fell back into place. "Oh," you nod to yourself, "this is the part where all is forgiven, and I'm supposed to buy into 'happily ever after' bullshit."

But, no.

For as much as Karen had gone through, suffered, and grown in that year, there were some things that were just never coming back. There were flashes of anger or hurt that would come out of nowhere, clouding my every thought. They could be absolutely terrifying. There was a missing piece of the puzzle that we had once been that couldn't be replaced. And, to be honest, I just wasn't ME anymore. I was now as changed by her affair as she had once been. It took me years to see that one.

What were the differences? Oh, I suppose I was quieter. I was less emotionally engaged in the world around me, excempting the girls. I don't think I trusted anyone the way I'd once trusted the mother of my children. I just couldn't be that person, anymore. I hated him for what his trust had allowed to happen.

So there is a kind of isolation that lives on no matter what you choose, I suppose. But it's manageable, and I can outthink it enough most of the time to keep it from making my decisions for me.

If you're strong enough, anything is possible.

In the six months after that first drunken session, Karen and I coupled a handful of other times. I don't know a better word for it than that. We were never wild, never passionate, and never offered each other any motion besides the most basic. It never felt like it meant anything, either, or that anything was being communicated between us by the act. She seemed to accept that as her due, but she aged a lot while waiting for me to show back up.

Eventually, I guess she just figured out that she was waiting for no one.

That would be the day I came home to find her waiting with a bottle of wine and a manila envelope.

"It's an apartment," she explained to no one in particular, her eyes lifeless and fixed straight ahead. I studied her, sitting there and trying to be stoic while she ended the final chapter of our story together.

One way or another, I knew I was watching history unfold. I guess I was impressed with her repose.

I considered the envelope. "Is it for me?"

She shook her head. "For me."

I nodded. I didn't ask why. All that time when she'd been away...all those adventures that had gone on without her there...had cemented something between the girls and I that she never quite managed to acquire. Oh, she'd tried...but a dynamic had been established, and the best she could do was hover outside of it.

So she was doing like she'd promised. She was putting the girls first.

"You don't have to," I offered without knowing if I meant it.

"Yes I do."

"Things have been working well enough, here."

"It's been a long time, John. Long enough that we can do this right. And the girls are doing well." She tapped her wine glass. "Neither of us is living, anymore. Soon, those children will be old enough to understand what that means, and they'll start to consider what it says about us." She tipped the glass back, pouring the wine down her throat. "Don't you want to show them what it means for an adult to be happy?"

I want them to be happy. But maybe you're right, and that's the next step of making sure that happens. "Can we afford this?"

She just nodded, expressionless except for the slackness in her jaw. "It'll hurt, but I can work more."

"You've BEEN working more."

Another nod.

I sat down. "The girls?"

"They should stay here with you. I'd like to come by in the evenings and be here for them, too, if that's okay. I won't get in the way." Her lips thinned. "But if you try to keep me away from them, I'll kill you."

I smiled, bigger than I ever thought my face would allow, and put my hand on top of hers. "I'm so glad to have you back," I said.

-

So there it is.

I never really knew for sure if I'd done the right thing, in those early months after discovering my wife's affair. There were flaws in my logic, and any number of child psychologists would tell you I was making a mistake by staying. Some people probably doubt it's possible to hide that much pain...I don't really know what to say to them, except to wonder if they've ever seen the matching smiles of two happy children. Even during the hardest months, every second that I was with my girls was a second where I felt no pain. They were the salve I needed most.

But I won't pretend I was thinking clearly during that time, but I won't say that I would do it any differently if I went through it again today.

I've probably been a little biased in my telling the story of it, and I apologize for that. I find it easier to admit to the things that I don't regret, so those are the things I open up and tell you about. I don't regret putting my pain a distant second to my responsibilities as a parent, so I put that to page. I don't regret risking the hope that I could spare my children from disaster, so the words flow easy.

On the other hand, it's hard for me as a person who worries about morality to reflect back now on the part I played in what happened to Carl. But even that...

Ahh, but I didn't tell you about that, now, did I?

Like I said, it's harder to admit to the things that you regret. These days, I find that I feel the world is a cup full of suffering. It makes me sad to remember the ways that I have helped to keep it full.

Even on those occasions when it felt justified.

Anyway, years later when the girls were sophomores in high school, they granted me the smallest but most important trophy of my victory.

They were tall, then, and turning out to be the kind of young adults that make you so proud it hurts. They'd come home from school one day talking about a friend of theirs who was going through a terribly hard time.

See, her parents were getting divorced.

"It's so sad," my oldest told me. "Her dad lives in an apartment kinda like Mom does, only it's worse because he lives so far away. Ever since summer, she only sees him on the weekends. She says so much happens that she forgets to tell him about things. She's scared that eventually, it will just feel like her dad doesn't even really know her anymore."

"At least her parents don't fight all the time, anymore," my youngest interrupted. "Remember when we were over there for the Fourth, and they started screaming at each other?"

"Oh! That was awful!" Then she turned to me, eyes wide and wet. "We missed all the fireworks, because we had to spend the whole evening trying to get poor Elizabeth to stop crying!"

"And her parents were so busy being mad at each other, they never even checked in on her."

"I don't think they noticed that she'd heard anything," my oldest explained. "They probably thought she was out having fun, not being hurt by what they were doing, but it was really just that they were too busy being angry to think about anyone else."

My youngest nodded. "They're still like that, always talking trash about each other in front of her." She shook her head solemnly. "I'm so glad you and Mom never went through anything like that, Dad. I don't know what we would have done."

I thought about that for a minute.

"I could never get so angry that you stopped being my number one priority," I told them. "Not with anyone, not about anything."

"I hope I'm as good a mommy someday as you are, Dad." She smiled.

I chuckled. "Don't worry. There's a special kind of love that a parent has for a child that decides everything. And maybe that sounds strange, or a little scary, but it's also better than anything else you'll ever know. The two of you take up so much of the real estate on my heart, and you keep it so well, that I only have to take up a little and it's all I need. Someday, when you have kids of your own and they look at you and smile, I really think that you'll understand what I mean. Now," I leaned forward on the counter, "I don't suppose you two are interested in getting some pizza?"

Thank the good gods above, they were.

-

Thanks to SirThopas, who easily deserves a co-author credit for this story.

People are complicated and contradictory creatures. They are inconsistent, dynamic, and tend to gravitate around an idea or behaviour rather than just abiding to it at all times. ST did a lot to help me put that into these characters without losing the threads of what best defined them. He helped make them dynamic.

John obviously, is not me. He doesn't talk like me, think like me, or behave like me. He doesn't always agree with me. That's not his function. But I admit that I didn't fully bother to understand him, either. ST helped me see very early on why HDK's magnificent story had drawn me in so thoroughly: this character's primary motivation when responding to tragedy was not protecting himself. It was (to my mind) his children. And because they were his PRIMARY motivation, they were the only real factor which could determine success or failure. Either they came out unscathed, or they didn't. End of story. By the character's own values set, everything else was a side detail.

So I tried to give him his victory, on exactly those terms.