Caring

And the fun has nothing to do with doing anything. We don't. All we do is talk. The fun has been in getting to know each other, getting to know Nancy but Helen, too. The fun has been all about growing out of what I am, growing out of the morass I had created of my life, liberating myself from the constraints I had created. My 'fun' was in learning to care about Nancy and through her, Helen. The fun was in learning I could care, that I wanted to care. My fun was in the connecting. My fun was in my newfound selflessness. I had opened myself up and Nancy had crawled in and latched onto me and neither of us wanted to let go.

That's what last night was all about. I didn't think it was sexual, that she wanted me to see her connect with Helen, maybe she did but that wasn't the real reason she wanted me there. The real reason was the phone call we had this morning. There is nothing between us now. Our intimacy is now virtually absolute. She wants me deep, deep, deep into her life and I want to be there. And Helen wants me there, too. There was something wonderfully transcendent about this. It felt like I finally had a reason for my life. Everything about my day is more exciting now, more vivid, more full of hope, even joy — except goingThere is an even greater pointlessness to that now: in giving myself to Nancy I could feel myself pulling even further away from my wife. I had mentioned the condo but when I thought about it — and it has only recently occurred to me, I didn't see her there. I was thinking of the sale of our house as the beginning of a new life... without her, and that was making me feel like a total asshole. How can you revel in the joy of giving yourself to somebody — actually opening yourself up to the feeling of being some kid's dad when you're plotting to dump your wife? There is a bit of an inconsistency there. The joy I was feeling was in giving myself. Going home each night felt like I was killing that joy.

It helped to go home late — she must have felt the same because she was never there, or already in bed.

Next day I had to push forward my date with Nancy, a crisis had arisen at work... then the next day I had to cancel again: Helen called, she was at the hospital, would I pick her up? Don't tell Nanc.

It happens, every time. When you take, you eventually have to give. And I had been taking, that's what these last few weeks were all about, opening up so they could come in, so I could take from them, be nourished by them but I always knew I was going to have to pay for it. There are no freebies.

She was by the street near the main entrance waiting for me and got in the moment I stopped. Got in and slumped, ignoring the seat belt.

"Are you alright?" She looked any thing but, her usual weird, scattered, run-amuck enthusiasm was nowhere to be see; she was focused on the dashboard. "No, I'm a fucking wreck. You've got to help me."

"Sure," I said, because I had to, I owed her.

"I need a drink."

She drank it quickly. I ordered another. "Nancy can't know any of this, you have to promise me that."

Her pain was as unmistakable as her fear. Her mother died of breast cancer, her grandmother died of breast cancer, she was going to died of breast cancer, she always knew that, the only question was when. She is 36; her mother lasted until 35, her grandmother didn't make 40. She felt her breasts for lumps, she didn't do it very often — it terrified her when she did it. She almost always imagined they were there. She had gone to the emergency ward three times in the past 18 months, each time more sure of it than the last. She was wrong each time but she was going to be right once, and soon. She couldn't take it any more. She had made up her mind, she was going to have them cut off — some celebrity had her's cut off, and when she did she was going to lose Nancy, she was sure of it.

Her anguish was gut-wrenching but what could I say? I tried some platitudes but they sounded empty, offensively empty like I had no real understanding, an empty compassion. I nursed my drink while she had a third then we left and she sat in the car in silence for ten minutes while I wondered what to do next.

I didn't want to say it but I thought she had to hear it. "You have to tell her."

"I know. She'll leave."

"You'll work through it together. You don't have a choice. It's the hand you've been dealt. You have to tell her, you have to hope she has enough character to stay by you — why would you want her if she doesn't?"

"I'll be... sliced and diced and scarred... I'll be a mess."

"You'll be you without the tits."

"I've been afraid of them ever since I got them. I've always known they were going to do me in."

"Things have changed, they're a lot better with cancers these days, breast cancer, too. Early detection can..."

"Early detection? I can't dare to explore these things. I feel lumps all over them... even before I touch them."

"Get her to do it. Teacher her what to look for and get her to do it every week... every day if that's what it takes. Take them off if you have to but if you don't get her to look after you — she's not into you for your tits, she's into you for everything else. You've got to trust her."

"I can't tell her, I wouldn't know how to tell her."

"I can. Let me. Do you love her?"

"Of course I love her."

"Then you owe this to her and you have to trust her. Let me tell her."

I did, in my car, five minutes after I dropped Helen off. It took me three minutes to get it out then she was running across the parking lot.

I went home immediately after Nancy raced to Helen — I never go home this early, maybe that's why she was there. I gave her a hurried 'hi' and changed quickly and went out for a run. When I got back she was gone. I went down to the basement to size up the work I'd need to do if we moved and started randomly organizing things. I would phone the realtor tomorrow.

When I came up, she must have come and gone again because there was a note on the kitchen table. 'I've gone online the last few days. I didn't know what I was looking for so I dragged a bunch of links into a folder on the desktop called Sites. Looks like there's something for everyone.'

Our main computer is in a spare bedroom upstairs which has become her 'office' or her space, I seldom went in there. I don't know what my expectations were, to see a bunch of condos, I guessed but I wasn't the picture type, I needed actually to see them... and I wasn't sure I wanted to see them with her.

The picture that exploded on the screen was of a big woman with hair under her arms and between her legs. She was grinning at the camera while holding a glass of wine and one of her enormous breasts. It shocked me, of course, but it didn't excite me, not in the least, what the picture meant to me was fun: the woman had a funny little smile and a twinkle in her eye and she seemed totally OK with her body, even proud of it, certainly there was no shame there, no embarrassment that she was overweight.

There were other links at the bottom of the page. I tried a few and got the same fat, hairy type who, the more I looked at them, became all the more appealing for their nonchalant innocence. I had the feeling I would like to get to know a couple of them, which surprised me.

I scrolled through the folder to get a sense of how many there were. There were scads of them, she must have spent hours pulling the webpages into the folder. I wondered what she was thinking. I eventually got an erection, of course, I got one after the shock wore off and I realized the girls wanted me to look at them.

Then it occurred to me, was she into big hairy woman — these could be Angela. It gave me a rush to imagine her with a secret side; to imagine her pining away for an Angela. I hadn't seen them touch on the bed but was that what it was all about?

Probably not. A couple was fucking in the next one, a woman masturbating in the next, and on it went, lesbians, transvestites, gays, guys, girls, transgenders, they were all there as rich a tapestry of human excitement as I've ever seen. It got to me. I found myself slowly stroking while paging through them. I had pulled my pants down early on, then up when I heard her come in. I sat as casually as I could when I heard her coming up the stairs.

"You found them," she said, peering in from the doorway.

"We humans come in all shapes and sizes, don't we."

"I didn't know what you wanted to see so I got you a little bit of everything," she said. "Night."

I could have stayed there all night scrolling and stroking but it was already after one and it was feeling a bit weird with her in the house. And when I got to bed it felt a bit weird being as horny as I was and with her in the next room. I thought about it, I thought about it for maybe ten minutes until my horniness won out.

Her light was still on, she was reading. When she saw me she put her book down, watched me come to the bed and when I pulled back the covers she turned over on her left side. It seemed chillingly remote, chillingly sacrificial, chillingly mechanical. I know why she did it: it's the way I had always done it, from the back, fast, then I'd leave.

Even as horny as I was the sight of her obedience disgusted me — her obedience to my boorishness. We had never gotten along but she had never once denied me.

As I lay down I looked to do anything rather than do what I always did. Instead of pressing into her I told her about Helen. The moment I started she turned and looked at me, real concern in her eyes. She listened carefully, waited for me to finish then asked a few questions about how she was taking it, then how Nancy was taking it. It was something all women feared, she said and to have it that deep in the family had to be scary.

Gloria is neither sympathetic nor empathetic... outwardly. Inwardly she has to be, why else has she more or less sacrificed her life for others? Caring yet never appearing to care is a weird mixture; it makes her impossible for me to read. So I never try.

And I didn't try now, but I could see her concern for Helen and Nancy, that was obvious and I found it so unlike her, so compelling, so sexy, that my horniness returned. I leaned in and kissed her gently on the lips, more a kiss of appreciation than anything — a reward for her compassion.

She accepted my peck with her usual reserve, her intensity fading for a moment into a smile which seemed more condescending than encouraging: it told me to tread lightly... not a message I wanted. I pulled back a little pissed off and only then realized that she was wearing a negligee, not her usual cotton nightie, and I could clearly see the outline of a breast beneath it, an outline that looked very much like a breast I had seen earlier in the week, a breast of sagging skin that wasn't quite full, a breast tipped by a stiff sharp nipple, pink and excited and being fed into Helen's mouth.

I avoided her eyes; I didn't seek her approval; I leaned down, carefully rested her breast in the palm of my hand so I could more clearly see it through the fabric, more easily imagine the smaller, more youthful, more excited one. It didn't take much from there: she would be so eager, so willing, even expectant. I moved in and as I kissed the nipple I gently tugged on her negligee and pulled it up, at first so I could just see a hint of her hair. But I knew that would do it, that even a brief glimpse of the narrow hips and the pale red hair would do it. Suddenly, my face was in it, pressing hard against the wiry softness while my hand squeezed her breasts and I pushed her leg open.

I could feel her squirm, I waited for the protest then I could feel her tugging at my leg, tugging hard. "Oh, God, yes, Mike, yes." She broke away, nimbly pivoted and brought her pussy down to my face and her mouth down on my cock.

I was embarrassed when I woke up, embarrassed and ashamed and disgusted with myself. She wasn't there, mercifully, the bed was still warm, her negligee was carefully draped over the comforter.

The porn made me do it; as I showered I convinced myself of that. And I convinced myself that it wasn't sick to think of the niece while I was eating the aunt, it was just a trick of the mind: we always choose the younger. Even so, I didn't look at her when I went down but then she wasn't looking at me either. She was at her usual station by the counter, intent, as always, on whatever she was doing.

I quickly bit into my toast, sipped my coffee and eventually stole a look at her ass, wondering what colour of underwear she was wearing and wondering if it was me she had been sucking last night or, like me, someone else.

Routines are seductive. When you are caught in one you never have to think. My life up to now had been one long routine, at least since I started my business — and, like all routines, it had one central focus: to succeed, to earn enough money to support a family.

Driving to work had always kick-started the daily routine. It was my time to plan. But it wasn't any more, not for a few months now, not since I no longer needed to push my business, not since my business began to pull.

My thoughts could stray now, they could think of other things. In the past few weeks they had been locked on Nancy; in the past few days Gloria had crept in. I had thought of her more in the past few days than I had thought of her the whole time we were married, an realization that totally shocked me. And when it occurred to me, I had to admit, yet again, that I didn't know the woman, didn't know her at all. Oh, I knew the woman with the maniacal intensity, the humourless soldier who played her role soundlessly, without complaint but I knew that wasn't really her.

In our first year together she had taken in a stray cat, then two stray dogs. Then her passion turned to people and she gradually waded into the community with increasing determination. It started with school lunches, it grew to feeding the poor, then housing the homeless, then it settled on the full range of women's issue, from women's shelters to equal pay — this from a woman who was only occasionally in the professional workforce, professional in the sense that she was pulling down a paycheque. That never much mattered to her. She trusted I would bring in the money, when I faltered she would help, but otherwise, no, that was my gig, humankind and later the more specialized womankind, that was her's.

None of this was planned, we never had a sit-down to assign our roles. They just eventuated, just as the inevitability of our twin solitudes eventuated: other than for an income, she never needed me and I never needed her, so never the twain did meet. I looked after her, she looked after me and we seldom had to be together; in the mornings always but that was about it; not even phone calls; the plate would be in the fridge; she would be home at night, as she always was, but seldom in the day or evening and then only to cook and clean. Weekends? I worked them, every one of them and so did she.

So the ass I had looked at this morning was in many ways a foreign ass, so foreign that it surprise me how shapely it is and it amazed me that when I speculated on what colour of underwear she was wearing I had no idea what the possibilities were, except the grey or white, the ones I had sniffed.

So, ya, I really didn't know anything about her. We never ate together, that times with Helen and then Angela were the first times in years; we never went anywhere together; we never did anything together, including talk. We just were: twin solitudes. In my routine, this was fine, outside of the routine, I had to question why we were together. And I was questioning.

It was troubling.

Nancy called me when I was on the plant floor, the noise requiring me to escape to an office. She was bubbling over. "Guess were I am. You can't."

I didn't try.

"I'm with Helen, guess where we just came from?"

I didn't need to try, she couldn't wait to get it out. Gloria had called her just before noon; she told her to get Helen and go to room K437 at the hospital at 2pm; they were to meet with Dr Jonas, a top cancer surgeon who would check her out and advise her on how to plan for the future.

"She was terrified when we got there." I could hear Helen in the background protesting.

"You were so. But it's all good. She's fine. Dr Jonas did all the tests, showed us how to do the checks and she laid out a plan. Ya, she's got a problem but if we stay on top of it, it's a manageable problem. Helen is walking on air."

I could hear a protest again.

"You are so, and you should be. She wants you to bring Gloria camping with us. And she's got a tent, you don't need to get one. We'll bring a comforter, you bring yours, we'll bring sheets. You bring all the cooking stuff. There's a town just before the campground. We can buy food there. And talking about buy, bye — this was the best day ever."

When something is so out of sync from the norm you often push it out of your thoughts, unless it's so far out of sync that it dominates them. I have thought of that Angela night as an outlier, an aberration that just happened — exciting, definitely kinky and maybe even to be repeated, but it did little to alter my perception of my wife: it was just too shockingly unusual to stick to her. The porn thing did: getting porn for me showed a libertine tolerance I never knew she had — I just assumed that porn would be totally off limits with her, especially given her efforts on women's issues.

And then there was the sex, not her surrenders to (what amounted to) my attacks, but the time with Angela and last night. They showed a passion that far belied her intense remoteness and a willingness that I had never seen before. What has changed? I brooded on it all day, brooded because I concluded early that what had changed was me and once I realized that it didn't take much to realize that I had essentially neglected her from the beginning; I was the cause of all this dysfunction; I had never been a real man to her, a proper husband. That was tough to deal with; brooding stuff; something like that sticks in the mind and refuses to go away.

Maybe that's why I had forgotten all about it. I had booked a six day trip to visit my suppliers, I usually do this twice a year because it pays off to stay close to the supply line — sometimes you really need these people so it helps to know them, to have spent a little time with them.

I hadn't actually forgotten about the trip it's just that my mind had been on other things... I had pushed the trip away, especially the part where I had added in the weekend to give me a little R&R, something I now very much regretted.

But I scrambled all afternoon and made the late flight, a bit harried but I relaxed with a drink at 33,000 ft and I relaxed right through the six days, where I ate well, slept well, exercised often and had good, productive meetings with some very nice people. These last few months were the first time I have ever felt truly successful. And these people knew it and wanted in on my ride, that was the big change — they saw all the possibilities in my company; they treated me like a king.

But Nancy was treating me like a deserter. She phoned me on the Saturday to ask me to take them hiking, they wanted to practise before the camping trip next weekend. "You're where?" She found it unfathomable that I would leave town without telling her, that I wouldn't be there for them. Then she accused me of leaving town so I didn't have to do my part in getting ready for the camping trip.

I toyed with her, I found I was doing a lot more of that — it was fun, she liked it, too. Anytime I didn't jump at the chance to be with her she pretended this little daughter abandonment thing — we were sorting out our relationship; it was getting closer by the day, bordering on intimate, which added a weird element: it was fun but there was a slightly troubling aspect to it, too.