February Sucks: Same Old Me (4of4)

When I'd stopped trying, content to just be myself, not putting on a show, and starting to feel comfortable in my own skin again, more than ten years had gone by. That's when I met Grace.

***

Grace was nice. I liked her right away. I wasn't thunderstruck, but I felt an immediate affinity for her, as a kind of a kindred spirit. She'd been cheated on and divorced, too. She also had two kids, like me. Chuck and Bethany were a little younger than Emma and Tommy. I didn't get to meet them for a long time, and she didn't meet mine, either. Although we agreed to be exclusive, we kept it casual and fun for months. Then, we began to understand that we were both putting up barriers that didn't need to be there. She wasn't going to hurt me. I wasn't going to hurt her. We'd both 'been there, done that' and didn't want to inflict that kind of behavior on each other. We didn't rush to the altar. There was no point. We were both grown ups with that particular rite of passage behind us. We weren't planning to make any more babies at our age, so what was the rush?

The sex was, frankly, magnificent. She was, by far, the best lover I'd ever had, in every way. She was a beautiful, confident woman who knew what she liked and she knew how to communicate it. She was sensitive to my needs and desires and was eager to fulfill them, and I was to hers. We were intent upon pleasing each other, and boy, did we ever. Each of us had expanded our horizons since our divorces, and we gave each other all the benefits of our respective experiences. But the techniques we'd learned wasn't what made it good, it was just... how we were with each other.

Curiously, the sex wasn't the point. Neither was the romance. Oh, it was abundant, and it was quite powerful, but it was there by choice. We weren't being swept away on waves of intoxicating hormones and neurological reward chemicals, no. We were cultivating it. We'd made some sparks, we set the kindling, and we blew on the flames and let them grow high before the fire settled into glowing coals, providing a deep, penetrating heat that would cook a meal and warm a hearth.

Falling in love with Grace was a completely different experience than with Linda, and a much better one. With Linda, I felt like I was just kind of along for the ride, holding on for dear life as our libidos, our eagerness for the future, and a misplaced sense of destiny lashed at us like the winds of a storm. With Grace, it was more like we were steering the ship- we knew these winds and waters, and the tides had told us it was time to bring the vessel to harbor. Each of us seemed to be looking for an ally, for a partner. Someone we could lean on, who'd be there even if things weren't perfect, even if we squabbled, even if we weren't always getting our way, we wanted to find some kind of bedrock-of-the-soul support for each other in this crazy thing called life. That's what we wanted. That's what we found. That's what we created, together. Grace is a good, decent person with a mighty heart. She seems to think I am, too. We make a lot of sense together and we make it work, and I know we both feel an enormous sense of relief from that. Being with Grace is like sliding into a hot, comfortable bath at the end of a long day. With her, I'm finally home.

We dated four years before we tied the knot. We'd been living together for two of them. The kids, in their late teens at that point, got along fine and seemed to accept each other and us. They could see what we were and I think all four of them were genuinely happy for us. The wedding was a simple, private affair- we didn't want to spend the money on a big blowout of a party with everybody's family, as if to say "look at us, we're adults now!" We took a honeymoon cruise around the Caribbean islands instead.

When Tommy turned eighteen, the four of us in the property trust which used to be our family agreed to sell the house after he finished high school and we could settle him into university housing. Freshmen were required to spend their first year in the dorms, but we decided to put the money from the house into a four-plex near the university and use it as an investment property, renting out all four units as student housing at first, then three units with Tommy in the fourth. After he graduated, we planned to sell that and each of the kids would have seed money for a down payment on their own homes. As it turned out, we waited another two years because as a rental property, it was cashflow positive and the housing market hadn't yet peaked.

While he was in high school and college, Tommy got into fencing, in a big way. I had no idea that the sword in the master bedroom would affect him so profoundly and change the course of his life. As I've gotten older, it seems that's how it goes- little, unplanned things accumulate and divert us onto new paths we might never have thought of. As I'd noticed years ago, Tommy was blessed with the ability to draw back and defend himself, read his opponent, wait for the right opportunity, and then strike swiftly and precisely. His college was partially paid for by a fencing scholarship and he even made the U.S. Olympic team, fencing with sabers and epee. After that, he branched out into kendo and other arts, and now at twenty-four, he works as a weapons master, trainer, and combat choreographer for theater and film productions. He's engaged to Berniss, a beautiful Belgian gymnast he met in Paris.

Emma became a clinical psychologist, perhaps influenced by her own experience with therapy. She also had the benefit of her summer job waitressing at The Willing Mind. I'm humbled to think of how much she must have learned from Lynn. She was finishing her state certifications when she got engaged to Bradley, who seemed to be a decent kid. He didn't do the old-fashioned thing about asking me for my daughter's hand in marriage. I suspected Emma had more to do with getting engaged than he did. Still, I felt obliged to give the guy at least a little bit of fatherly grief. I cornered him when he and Emma were over for dinner a few weeks before the wedding. He wasn't exactly avoiding me, but he'd done a pretty decent job of it.

"Bradley."

He looked at me like a deer in the headlights.

"I'd like to talk to you man-to-man for a moment."

"Is... is this the part where you threaten me with a shotgun if I don't do right by your daughter?"

He was kind of kidding. Kind of.

"Nah. I'll let Tommy do that. And he'd use a sword. This is something else. Look." I turned away, then turned back to him. "God. It's hard to say. I even practiced, but it'll still come out wrong. It's like this. Every father feels like nobody is ever going to be good enough for his little girl. No exceptions. You'll feel like this about your daughter, someday, when some boy comes along wanting to take her away..."

I suddenly got dizzy for some reason. It passed quickly. I got my bearings and continued.

"So, yeah. No. No, you're not good enough for Emma. But you know what? I'm not good enough for her, either. I haven't been a good enough father. This WORLD is not good enough for that young woman. No one and nothing on this planet will ever be able to give Emma the life that she should have, nobody can do her justice. It's just not possible."

Bradley didn't seem to know what to say, so I kept talking.

"All you can do... All any of us can do is Try. It's an impossible task. It'll never be complete. You can spend the rest of your life doing your damnedest to be good enough for that woman, and you'll always come up at least a little bit short. The important thing is that you keep on trying, for the rest of your life, and you never stop, no matter what.

"Do you think you can do that, Bradley?"

"Yes. Oh, for sure. I mean... all I can do is try, right?"

"Right. Now there's the other part."

"Okay..?"

"This is the part that you probably weren't expecting. Not only am I going to tell you not to GIVE my little girl any shit, I'm going to tell you not to TAKE any shit from her, either."

"Oh."

"Put it this way. If that young lady is anything like her mother, and believe me, she is, then there will come a time when she will try to walk all over you and expect you to just take it. Do. NOT. Take. It. Stand up for yourself, respectfully. Be firm when it counts and don't let her treat you unfairly. Marriage is supposed to be a partnership. If you put her on a pedestal, turn yourself into her slave, or let her use you as a doormat, it's not a partnership and you're fucking up the marriage."

"Got it."

"I hope so. If it helps, when the day comes that she says 'Me, Me, Me, I need to do this, You don't own me, I'm doing it and if you love me, you'll get over yourself and accept it because this is how it's gonna be'... well, just remind her of what her mother did to fuck up her own marriage and break up the family Emma was supposed to grow up in."

"What was that? I mean, what did Linda do?"

"Emma never told you?"

"No. It's never really come up. The only time we talked about it, she said she didn't remember what happened. She was only, what, seven? She barely remembers you two being married."

"I guess that's fair. She was young, and we did try to keep her out of it. Well, this story is going to require a glass of brandy." I went to the sideboard and poured us a pair of snifters. "Don't drink it too fast. Sip, a few drops at a time, and don't swallow. Just let it evaporate on your tongue."

I told him this whole long, sad tale. Grace stuck her head around the corner to check up on us once, but I twitched my eyebrow at her and she immediately understood; 'This is important man-bonding elder-wisdom and fireside cave counseling. We are not to be disturbed.' My years communicating nonverbally with Elizabeth had paid many dividends. Grace thankfully convinced Emma to leave us alone, however antsy she might feel.

Bradley didn't have to take me up on my advice until nine years later, and I didn't find out about it until almost three years after that. Their children were small, and Emma was just a few years older than Linda was on that fateful Leap Night. I don't know precisely what, if anything, actually happened. Maybe Emma was just feeling her oats and stepped too close to the line, if not over it. Whatever it was, Bradley stood his ground, kicked Emma out of the house, and demanded that she go visit her mother and learn how her own first marriage ended. Emma returned showing levels of contrition that he'd never seen from her before. Apparently, the term "Mommy's Asshole Boyfriend" had triggered a memory. But that's a whole other story, and that's all I know of it. Whatever it was, they survived it, and seem to still be doing well.

But this part is about Emma's wedding, so let's get back to that.

Grace and I were the hosts, sitting on the bride's side, along with Chuck, and Bethany's husband, Carl. Bethany was up front as Emma's matron of honor. My mom and Bob made it down for the ceremony, too. They were now in their early eighties, having given up their sprawling Colorado ranch house and moved into a condominium that could step up into an assisted living facility. That house had hosted me, Emma and Tommy, and our significant others, many, many times over the last twenty years, and Bob's family eventually softened and he was able to host them a bunch, too. Linda and her current husband Glen were with us in the next row back, with Tommy and Berniss, who was doing her best not to upstage the bride with her beauty and almost succeeding.

It was amazing how much Emma had come to look like her mother. It would have been impossible to miss over the years, but now that she'd come into adulthood, the mother and daughter could almost pass for twins. Linda had been right- my little girl had my brain, and in a lot of ways, she'd been more my daughter than hers, but physically, seeing Emma in her wedding dress was like looking at the ghost of my first bride.

Grace, bless her, noticed my discomfort, intuited the reasons for it, slipped her hand into mine and gave it a gentle squeeze. 'Relax, Jim. She's not Linda, and you're not living through that again. Not while I'm here. Now, step up and be the proud father of the bride.' God, I love this woman. She's the wisest, kindest soul I've ever known. She makes old L.W. look like Barney the Dinosaur.

The wedding was lovely, but not ostentatious. The reception had food and dancing with live music and promised not to extend past ten p.m. When the time came to do the obligatory father-daughter dance, my fourteen years of dance lessons really brought the house down. Grace and I had been practicing for weeks before the ceremony. Everyone was standing around us cheering and clapping. Emma apparently had no idea what I could do on the dance floor. I was whirling her around like a toy. It was all she could do to keep up.

When the music stopped, she beamed at me. It was a mixture of astonishment, joy, and admiration.

"Wow! Daddy, you're really GOOD."

"Years of lessons. You encouraged me, remember?"

"I do. Wow. It really paid off! I love you, Daddy."

"How far?" I was switching our roles, hoping she'd remember this bit from her childhood.

"To the Moon and back again. Then to Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune!"

"And all the way back home again?"

"And All The Way Back Home Again."

Then she smiled.

It was her second-best smile.

That dizziness, the same thing I felt when talking to Bradley a few weeks earlier, hit me in the guts again, and I staggered backwards a step.

FUCK.

I understood.

After twenty years, I finally understood.

"Daddy!" Emma said, stepping forward. But Grace was at my side in an instant, one hand on my shoulder and another at my lower back, bolstering me up.

"I'm okay," I insisted. "It's okay. Just needed to catch my breath. Not as young as I used to be, you know," I lied. I'd been thirty-two again, just for an instant, and holy hell, that's disorienting.

"He'll be fine," said Grace. "I've got him." The band lapsed into a mercifully slow number in four-four time, and my wife and I meshed into an easy waltz step like the gears of a smooth-running machine. "Your husband is waiting," she nodded towards Bradley, who'd finished stepping on his mother's feet during the last dance and had come over to Emma.

My daughter skeptically looked back and forth between the two of us before joining Bradley in a dance. I saw, out of the corner of my eye, that Linda had gotten to her feet and was about to start towards me, until Glen had grasped her by the upper arm.

"What was that?" Grace whispered in my ear when we were far enough away not to be heard, "Was it the dancing? Or that Emma looks so much like her mother right now? You looked like you'd seen a ghost."

"I did," I replied. "I've told you how my dog taught me how to speak without speaking. That's how I could see it. It was right there in front of me twenty years ago, but I didn't know what I was looking at before."

"Yes. I know how you miss Elizabeth. I wish I could have met her."

"I do, too. I think she would have liked you. I think she would have approved of you. She told me, while she was... while she was dying, that I'd find another mate. I have to believe she was talking about you."

"That's nice to hear. Thank you. But... tell me what you saw."

"It was her smile. Emma showed me her second-best smile, the kind that doesn't reach all the way behind her eyes. It was... Exactly... the Same Smile that Linda gave me moments before she ditched me at the dance club to run away with Marc LeValliere. Exactly. Except this time, I knew what it meant. I was able to read it, in a way I couldn't before."

"What did it say?"

"It was 'Goodbye.' Without speaking, my daughter just said "This is it, this is goodbye, even though I don't want to admit it to myself. I want you to stay where you are, so I'll know you will always be there for me. But I'm leaving you behind now, because I'm doing this other thing and I really don't think I'll ever be back- at least, not all the way."That's what that smile means."

"God. That's heartbreaking."

"I was prepared for it, with Emma. We all knew this day would come. And yeah, it's a mixture of sadness and triumph. The children grow up, they become their own people, and they leave us. That's always been the deal. The thing that shocked me just now was realizing what it meant twenty years ago. That was goodbye. Neither one of us was expecting it. Neither one of us even understood it at the time, but that was the moment it all ended. All that other stuff, the separation, the counseling, the split-up house, none of it made any difference. It's a hell of a thing to realize."

"Are you okay?"

"I've got you. I'm great. I've never been better."

"Good." She somehow snuggled closer. "I'm never going to do that to you, Jim. Never ever. I'm home now. That kind of thing won't come until the moment of my death, or yours. And I'll be waiting on the other side if I go first."

"Now, now, don't be saying that. You're only fifty. We've got another fifty years in us, lord willing."

She chuckled. "Yeah, and for thirty of those, we'll be too old to remember what we're even doing."

"Never say never. Look at my mom." She and Bob were slow-dancing twenty feet from us.

"It's a deal. Old man."

"I'll hold you to it. Old lady."

The song wound down and we made our way back to our table, but we were stopped halfway there by Linda.

"Excuse me... Jim? I'm sorry, Grace. I apologize. I just saw... well, Jim, you had a kind of a moment, there, at the end of your dance with Emma, and I wanted to make sure you're alright." She gave a shy, nervous half-smile. Plain old me, same old me as always. Damn her.

"I'm fine. I promise. Thank you for asking, that's very kind of you," I said. We'd been civil during the planning for this event. Not overly friendly, not overtly hostile. Just businesslike. And, whenever possible, we kept ourselves in the presence of one or the others' spouses, just as a buffer.

"Good. Good. That's good to hear. Um." She winced a little bit. "Grace, I know this is awkward, but if it's okay, I'd like to ask your permission to borrow Jim for a dance. Just one dance. I'll give him right back."

Grace snapped her eyes towards me. Then Linda. Then back at me.

"You old dog. You sly fox. This is what that whole thing was about, isn't it?"

"Ah. Yeah. Guilty."

"Ah... what?" Asked Linda.

"Come." She marched us back to our table. "Sit. Both of you." She sat between us. "I'm Sorry," she said to Linda. "You see, Jim sat me down yesterday, held my hands, looked me right in the eye, and promised me that, aside from the father-daughter dance, and one dance with his mother, that he was going to dance with no one else but me today. He said he wanted it to be special for us, as a couple, not just for Emma and Bradley. This, despite more than a decade of ballroom lessons where he's danced with hundreds of women, he went out of his way to tell me that tonight, he was all mine, and no one else's dance partner."

Linda went pale and silent.

Grace gave me a sly side-eye. "And here I thought he was just trying to assure me he had no intention of showing me up with Berniss or one of the young bridesmaids. This was about you. And oh my god, that promise not to dance with anyone but... How could I not have seen it? This was about That Night."

Linda stammered. "I'm... I'm sorry. I'll just go. Enjoy your evening."

"Wait. Stop. Don't go anywhere, Linda." Grace had her hand on Linda's shoulder. "Jim owes you an apology for this."

"He doesn't."

"Yes, he does. He maneuvered me into rejecting you, publicly. You don't deserve that, not after all this time. And you, buster," she said to me, "Don't think you're getting off easy. Here's how it's going to go. Linda: I'm going to politely accept your request. You have my permission for One dance. Don't ask for another, don't stay with him for the next slow one, and don't speak a word. Also, I'm dancing with your husband while you dance with mine."