February Sucks: Same Old Me (3of4)

I'd been spending the rest of my nights in the house, with Elizabeth, and Linda across the room in her own bed. She'd dropped hints here and there, she'd flirted and made sure to let me see her undressed. I steadfastly ignored all of it. It helped that, while I was away in hotel rooms in other cities, I'd been jerking off like a fifteen year old. But, it had been almost eight months since I'd actually gotten laid.

Then, that one day in September, Linda tried to force the issue. She'd crossed the room early in the morning, nude, and politely shooed Elizabeth off the floor before I woke, and carefully attended to my morning wood with her mouth.

It worked for a while.

As I roused myself, it felt good.

REALLY good.

Too good.

Linda wasn't that good. She hadn't gone down on me in years. Not since the kids were born. I guess she'd decided we were past that part of our relationship. She SHOULD have been out of practice. But she'd apparently learned some new tricks, and she was trying them out on me.

God Damn It.

I looked down at her, and she SMILED up at me.

It was her second-best smile.

Behind it, there was no real joy in her eyes. Just despair.

My up-utill-then proud erection promptly went 'sad trombone' and wilted on us.

I wanted it to be okay. I was ready. I wanted my wife again. But all I could think about was her... with HIM. And no, that really did not do it for me.

"It's okay, Jim," she said hopefully, "We could still..."

"No."

"I mean, you could still..."

"No."

She leaned back, showing me her breasts. "Jim, I love you so much. It's okay, honey. I guess it's still too soon, but that's okay. You're still all the man I'd ever want. You're still the man of my dreams. I can wait. When it happens, it'll be good."

"I don't think that's true."

"I just thought..."

"Just go. Go back to bed."

"Jim..."

"Go."

"I don't want to leave. Just hold me, please."

I got out of bed and went to the shower. Elizabeth padded in after me, to keep me company and maybe drink from the floor when I was done.

***

It was coming up on a year.

This February was as miserable as the last one. The storms weren't quite as harsh, but it still Sucked. Again.

We'd spent the fall and winter as housemates, barely speaking, living in a state of carefully negotiated but regretful detente. Linda had tried to seduce me several more times, weeks or months apart, and god help me, I almost let her. I would have. But my body... and by that, I mean my dick... refused to cooperate. I guess at some deep, deep level, I was just never going to try to compete with the best sex any woman had ever had in her life or even in her wildest dreams. Who can really appreciate driving a plain old Toyota when you'd had the thrill of your life at the wheel of a Maserati? That's how Linda had once eloquently put it during one of our counseling sessions. That one stuck in my head.

It had been months since we'd seen Susan Manette. We'd been repeating ourselves for too long. I think Linda and I had come to understand each other better, but it didn't bring us any closer and it didn't lead us to reconciliation. Linda had come to accept some harsh truths about how she'd conducted herself in our relationship. So had I. I'd idolized her in ways that were disconnected from the reality of the situation, and I learned that I really hadn't known her or seen her for who she really was. The Linda I loved existed only in my head, after all.

Maybe I was being a jerk about it. Maybe I could have gotten over it. I'm sure that there is at least one Possible Reality out there somewhere in which we'd somehow stayed together. Maybe we might have even been happy. But that Reality wasn't this one. I could barely imagine such a thing.

Emma and Tommy knew not to talk to us together. They'd speak with me, or with Linda, never both. They'd correctly intuited that we existed on different channels. I was gone half the time, and some of the rest of it I spent with Dave and Pete and Frankie, or out by myself at The Willing Mind. We arranged playdates for the kids and Sven with the Nessmans and their little dog Charlie, but Linda and I didn't socialize with Phil and Jane. Jane wouldn't even look at me. Phil and I were allied in our silence.

Emma had dealt with the situation by making herself the center of everyone's attention. Sometimes, that meant that she created drama or outright trouble. She got herself into a few fights at school. She cried and threw fits for reasons that no one saw coming. She managed to get herself sick, unable to sleep, constantly throwing up or having to use the bathroom. But it wasn't all negative like that. On the contrary, sometimes she would have manic periods where she drew dozens of pictures of everyone and everything she knew, or spent the day dancing around and singing at the top of her lungs. She included Sven in absolutely every aspect of her life, staging plays and dressing him up in her clothes, concocting elaborate stories of her fantasy life. It was charming when she was like that. It was as delightful when she was "up" as it was nightmarish when she was "down."

Linda and I agreed to get her into counseling, which really did help.

Tommy had become fascinated by the sword in our room, which had stayed where it was, thank you very much. Sometimes he'd come into the master bedroom and sit on the floor and just look at it, dreaming of god knows what. He kept quiet and removed himself from Emma's hurricane of distraction. I would have worried that he'd become introverted and possibly violent, but when he was with his sister, they shared a silent accord. It's like they were psychic with each other. I eventually recognized that my son had the rare talent of stepping back, assessing the situation calmly, and taking carefully considered, correct action at the right time. During that year, the correct action was to wait.

If anything good had come of this past year, it's that I successfully reconnected with my Mom. I'd had the kids out to see her in Colorado twice this past summer, and all three of them were over the moon about it. I also managed to peel myself at least partially out of my "couples" identity. We didn't have "our" friends anymore. We didn't do the things "we" used to do. I started looking at things that "I" might do which "we" never would have considered. It hurt, god, did it ever hurt, but it was also liberating. I felt like a crab molting away its old carapace.

Mercifully, perhaps, we didn't make it to the end of the month. It was Valentine's Night, the third anniversary of Don's suicide. We hadn't made plans. Linda came up to me and simply said:

"You don't look at me the way you used to anymore."

"No. I suppose I don't."

"You used to look at me like you loved me. Even when you didn't say it, I could feel it. Even if it was just an ordinary day, and we weren't doing anything special, I could feel you looking at me and I could feel you loving me."

I said nothing.

"I miss that, Jim. I miss that about us. It was part of my life for so long, that, that, I'd gotten numb to it, I guess. I failed to appreciate it after a while. All that love had just faded into background noise. I didn't even notice it until it was gone, and it left this hole, this emptiness that I'm getting from you now. And that emptiness, it's been screaming at me."

Still nothing.

"I didn't even believe it at the time. All those years. I felt like it couldn't possibly be true. No one could love me that much. So I brushed it away. I didn't let myself think it was real. I pretended that you couldn't really mean it. I just kept telling you... and myself... that I was just plain old, same old Linda. That you were wrong to look at me that way. But I loved it. God, how I loved it. I know that now. That was my oxygen. That was my light. That's why I loved you so, so, much."

Tears were rolling down her face again. Months of silence, not exactly fighting, just... nothing. And now this.

"It's gone, isn't it, Jim? It's gone, and it's not coming back."

"Yeah. Pretty much."

"I'm sorry. God, I'm sorry. I killed it. I killed us. What I did was awful. I didn't understand what it would do to you, and I didn't understand what it would do to me, either. I'll always regret what it cost me, what it cost us. But I'll also regret who I was, and what I did, and how I did it."

She took a step back. Resolved. She held her left hand in her right, slid her rings off, and handed them to me.

"I'll sign the papers. I'm... I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

***

The story concludes with February Sucks: Same Old Me 4