Sputterpub's Blog

It was a bit after 4 PM on the third Friday in October. The sky was clear and there was little traffic. In fact, my ex’s Toyota and the Jeep that hit him were the only vehicles in sight. The CHP has invited witnesses to come forward, but so far no one has.

According to the report, Carl made a left turn onto the highway right in front of the Jeep. The woman driver said she tried to avoid the collision, but the front of her car plowed into him.

He was T-boned. His old Toyota isn’t known for side protection. He died on the scene, probably instantaneously, possibly without pain.

I got the news from my former stepson, four days later. Mark apologized for taking so long. That was weird; I haven’t seen Mark for over twenty years and haven’t communicated with his father for at least ten. He said he understood from his current stepmother that his dad and I had been in touch from time to time. That’s not true. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Carl occasionally raised my specter in his third marriage.

I always wondered if I’d hear. I assumed that if Carl died his old law partner might find me. Never did I suspect that it would be Mark.

I was chronologically insignificant in Carl’s life. He was married to his children’s mother for seventeen years, then with me for seven, and now with Hilary for about twenty-five. We had no children together. We parted amicably. There was infrequent communication afterward and my last birthday email to him, about a decade ago, went unanswered.

It was only seven years, but it was an intense seven years.

I was Carl’s midlife crisis. He was forty-one when we became a couple, and he already drove a red roadster. I was the younger woman (thirty-two). We met through work. We had an affair that only lasted about six weeks before he declared we were soul mates and had to marry. I didn’t disagree.

I wonder now, if a man’s forties could be his most significant adult decade. I asked my brother, and after consideration he opined that it isn’t an age as much as it’s the decade when you lose your father. He said that’s when you confront your own mortality, which is what it takes to make that final lunge into manhood. It happens that my brother was in his forties when our dad died. And so was Carl.

But there was more. Carl lost his law mentor, the senior partner in his firm, the man who introduced us, while we were together. He lost his younger sister to adult respiratory distress. He lost his career as his old firm imploded in the era of deregulation. In addition, we terminated an unwanted pregnancy, went through the subsequent vasectomy together, weathered the medical crisis that resulted in my hysterectomy, and parented four children who all needed counseling because of the abrupt dissolution of their parents’ marriages (our deal) and the questionable mental health of the spouses we left (theirs).

Those seven years felt longer than childhood. We lived half a century during the 80s.

And we were as intense as the years. Carl had been placidly married before. He never revealed himself to his wife. She was far prettier than I – slim and blonde and buxom – and she bored him to tears. They married right after college, and they prospered more than they expected. She led him to larger homes, season symphony tickets, high-ticket travel: the customary purchases of increasing wealth. She loved their life together but it seems she didn’t know him, for through those seventeen years he remained the repressed Republican drinker I encountered.

Like I said, I’m not so pretty. But I’m pushy, and I’m obsessed with figuring out life and making mine count. With me Carl opened up emotionally, described the military/sexual history about which his wife never asked, outlined the book he wanted to write, took up laughing.

And we didn’t last. There was too much stress, between challenging kids, dysfunctional offices, hysterical exes. There were too many occasions when I blew up about his drinking and he, ritually pouring hard stuff down the kitchen sink, promised to stop. Our fights grew more passionate as our tenure stretched. Ultimately he accused me of not loving him enough. By then he may have been correct – he was drinking again, crying again every time the booze took effect, otherwise stuffing his emotions. I realize now he had no idea what to do with them.

He left, to determine if we were driving him crazy or if he was doing it on his own. He didn’t return. Then an old college girlfriend looked him up. She’d been an also-ran to his first wife, but finally Hilary prevailed. She moved here to be with him, they took a place in the suburbs and, as far as I can tell, Carl resumed the type of boring but sane life he’d endured before me.

The last time I had lunch with him, it should have been civilized and amicable, but he took a pot shot at me. I was surprised. I knew he’d been angry, but I didn’t realize till then how wide it went. He criticized me for failing to explain the meaning of Chanukah to him. WTF? I mean, say what? I remember how stunned and almost entertained I felt. As if Chanukah meant anything to an adult!

He told me Hilary was Unitarian. She’d taken him to her church and that’s where he heard the Maccabee story. Somehow he found the story, or my failure to tell him the story, significant. As if.

I think that was our last face to face interaction. How the profound had fallen! After that were a few birthday emails, where we found nothing to discuss other than the kids. We really hadn’t been about parenting; of course we petered out.

Now Carl is dead, and his forty-four year old son is seeking pictures. Carl was always the cameraman, so there aren’t many with him in front of the lens. Maybe I have them all. His first wife moved recently, and put things in storage. His third wife has not stepped up with photographs. When we split up, we agreed I’d keep the snapshots. Carl knew he could always visit them.

They’re all snapshots. My father and my first husband were slide photographers. They had backlit viewers and portable projection screens. They debated the merits of carousels versus cartridges. And after Carl left came the age of digital photography: first in camera-shaped machines that stored images on memory sticks and then of course on smartphones. The Carl era, also known as the 1980s, is all on snapshots and mostly in three albums.

As far as I’m concerned, my job is to support and respect Carl’s kids, but not to insert myself or intrude. Asked to find photos, I’ve now spent days poring over the shots in the albums and the shoe box of fuzzy unbound pictures. Scanning them to Mark. I’ve been pushed down memory lane. I’ve been awakening each morning to recollection.

Viewed now, I wonder if I was the love of Carl’s life. It didn’t feel like that at the time, but I was the only one with whom he tried to be himself. His first and last wives were attractive and conventional and comfortable. They used subtext and practiced passive aggression. They never asked him the important questions.

There’s a reason I have his poetry, the pictures of him laughing or mugging for the camera. There’s a reason I have his anger.

I knew him. I’m sure he was still drinking. The liquor that spiced our initial affair and the first couple of years of marital sex became a drag for us in time. We recognized that he had a problem. We made a few rehabilitative attempts. Home attempts, doomed to fail.

It got worse with Hilary. I had lunch with her once, at her request, ostensibly to discuss Carl’s awkwardness with peri-adolescent daughters. But as soon as I said, “and the booze,” Hilary jumped into the conversation with what seemed like eagerness. “Do you think he’s an alcoholic?” she clamored.

“Certainly,” I said. And then she dumped. She revealed how much worse he then was. Hiding bottles between the wall joists in the garage. Blaming Hilary for driving him to drink. She even mentioned a few car scrapes.

I’m sure Carl was still drinking because, if he’d found a way to stop, he would have let me know. He would have sought some resolution. Or closure. Something.

And I’m pretty sure Carl never got comfortable with Hilary’s daughters or his own. Poor Carl. He had a younger sister but he was sent away to military boarding high school, out of state, when Amy was just 12. His son Mark was an only child for ten years. Then Robin was born, four months after my son, and we raised those babies like they were twins till we split up when they were seven. I wanted the kids to keep seeing each other, but Carl insisted on a clean break. My son got years of therapy; that wasn’t the case for Robin. Hilary said she was obese (at ten) and had trouble with honesty. So was my boy. But he got better.

Here’s what I know. Carl died a bit after four on a Friday afternoon. On Robin’s thirty-fourth birthday.

Here’s what I think. He was driving home from his job, a now unnecessary position but Carl’s a workaholic too, so he’d keep at it as long as possible. He’d had a few nips from the bottle in his office. It might be Jack Daniels. It might be vodka. It was certainly hard liquor.

He was a good driver. He was seventy-five but he still had reflexes. He was in his Toyota and he made a left turn directly in the path of the only other vehicle in the area. He always got sentimental when he drank. I’ll bet his eyes were watering. I’m not saying it was a suicidal turn. I just think his vision was blurred by tears.

We talked to Cindy first. We arrived and went straight to the dining room; we were into big salads and iced tea when she found us. In five minutes she was complaining about Beth.

“I shouldn’t be talking like this,” she interrupted herself to say. “I’m telling tales out of school” with a head shake, and “Oh wow I can’t believe I’m bitching” she interspersed. But she continued.

Cindy and Lloyd are a gregarious couple from Seattle. When we met them three years ago, we also became acquainted with Beth and Joey from Atlanta. Everyone but 50-year-old Beth is in their mid to late 60s. We’ve seen one another for the same week, each year since then, at the same health resort. Many guests sign up to return annually; some of us look forward to encountering our resort buddies.

When the men first met they immediately hit it off. Seattle Lloyd is an extreme extrovert, attempting to get to know the majority of resort guests each year. So of course he acquired Joey and Beth, just like he added us to his coterie around the middle of that week. It just happened that Lloyd and Joey had compatible eating disorders and competitive natures, so they took to hiking, playing, and working out together. And they made a series of fitness bets.

The two couples ate dinner together every night. We joined them at least half the evenings. So we got to know them all.

Lloyd and Joey hiked before breakfast. They did circuit training and boot camp and spinning by lunch and they spiced their non-class afternoons with volleyball. Cindy and Beth were not as compatible as the husbands.

The women got along okay, but they would never have picked each other for a friend. There was a fifteen year age difference between them. Both had been married twice and liked her current husband better than her first, but that was where similarities stopped. Beth was a career woman; Cindy had worked but spent most of her energy raising kids. Beth was fit and had a healthy appetite for food and wine; Cindy visited a gym now and then and was forever trying a new approach to food. When the husbands were around, they did the talking. When not, Cindy tended to chatter about her grown daughter and Beth was most often silent.

Between the first meeting in 2014 and its anniversary, Lloyd and Joey had a bet about who could lose the most weight. Joey dropped more pounds but their loss-as-a-percentage-of-initial-weight was identical. The loser was supposed to host the winner for a visit, but the men decided the year was a tie, and extended the bet for another six months.

By the following spring, Joey lost the most pounds and the highest percentage. In total he dropped 112 of his 340 pounds (33%). Lloyd lost 78. His starting weight was 253 so his percent lost amounted to almost 31%.

Accordingly, it was up to Lloyd (and Cindy) to entertain Joey (and Beth) in Seattle. That visit occurred in July, and Cindy was telling us about it in October.

“It was a fiasco,” she declared. “They were like lumps of coal. I mean, we went out of our way to show them a good time. It was Beth’s fiftieth birthday, so Joey asked us to book a table somewhere special. We picked the restaurant at the top of the Space Needle (it’s been awful for years but it’s got new management now, and it’s turned into quite a place, and – you know – the spectacular view!). Anyway, they were hosting that one, but we offered to buy the wine. I couldn’t believe it! Beth just asked the sommelier to pick a good bottle of white. The price tag was $130!

“But that’s not the worst of it. Oh shit: I really shouldn’t be talking like this…”

We hurried to assure her that it was normal, natural. We wanted to hear the “worst of it.”

“They were with us three nights. We had a dinner party for them the first evening (we invited four other couples), and we did the birthday blowout at the Space Needle the next night, but for the final dinner I decided to cook. We bought beautiful salmon at Pike’s and I really did up a meal. They seemed to like it okay. But get this: Beth didn’t help, at all. She and Joey sat in our family room, on their iPads, while I cooked. Lloyd set the table. Afterwards Beth didn’t even offer to do the dishes.”

We ouched and wowed. I’m sure we exhibited enough empathy, because Cindy went on to repeat her complaints. Especially about the dishes: “I mean, can you believe it? Who doesn’t at least offer to help clean up?!”

After that, of course we paid attention to both couples. We could see they weren’t as friendly as before. They took most meals separately. We think they only dined together twice that week. Both times we were with them. Everyone was amicable but there wasn’t as much laughter as before. And we noted that Joey wasn’t hiking in the morning. Lloyd wasn’t doing the same training as before. In fact, both men appeared to be regaining weight, and neither looked like he was doing enough upper body work.

On the evenings when the couples didn’t dine together, Lloyd and Cindy found new friends and Joey and Beth looked for us. So at the two dinners when we didn’t ask for a deuce and avoid others, we shared the table with the Atlantans and, as it turned out, an amiable chubby couple – Paula and Rob – from Huntsville, Ala.

They were a cheerful pair. Rob was in aerospace (“I have rocket scientists working under me”) and Paula had a job involving food chemistry. I had no idea what it was like to live in Alabama, and talking to them sparked a little interest for me. My roommate and BFF had spent some summers in Mississippi with her stepmother’s family, Beth was originally from Florida and now Georgia, and Joey was a southern transplant from Massachusetts, so coastal me – born in New York and raised in California – was the odd guest out. I paid attention to their talk.

Not that it was regional. The first night the most memorable topic was phobic dogs. Joey described a firework-shy pooch so spooked on July 4th that he used to take her down to the windowless basement to protect her. He said after a couple of years, neither that nor the therapeutic vest worked well enough; he and the dog went to visit his nonagenarian mother in Boston, to get away from the ruckus. Paula and Rob outdid Joey’s anecdotes with stories about their two terrified pets; Rob described soundproofing a room for the animals and using it for Independence Day and also Halloween. My roommate and I learned that houses are far more spacious in Georgia and Alabama than where we live. When you occupy 7,000 square feet, you have room to create asylums.

I was hungering for some perspective then. I needed an order of magnitude. “Hold on,” I said. “I want to visualize.” I turned to Joey on my left. “What kind of dog?”

“Oh, Sally is an 80 pound German Shepherd.”

Then I looked right. “Ours are Chihuahuas,” Rob said. “One’s six pounds and one’s almost eight.” He pulled out his phone and showed us a picture of little matched black-and-tan couch-cuddlers.

I was quietly entertained. My BFF is a cat person, so I don’t think she appreciated the conversation like I did. But both of us noted and savored the table talk the next time we dined with those four.

It was the second to last night at the resort. Paula (and Rob) asked Beth (and Joey) how they met. I’d already enjoyed the story a year ago. I prompted Beth: “Come on! Tell them about that steak!”

So Beth spoke. Usually she’s the last to talk, but she narrated the story about how they met at the job, after Joey transferred from Massachusetts to Georgia. They clashed initially because he was in sales and she worked in accounting, and he didn’t appreciate her questions about his numbers. But after a while they started to enjoy one another, she asked him out, he chose a steak house, they went for dinner. Joey ordered a big steak, but Beth surpassed him with her 24-ounce ribeye. She’s a little slip of a thing but she plowed right through her entree and then looked around for dessert. Joey was charmed.

This year, Beth added to the story. She went on to describe her first visit to Joey’s extended Italian family. Everyone greeted her warmly. Joey’s father was impressed with her knowledge about college football. But the quality that really charmed his family, according to Beth, was when she got up immediately after dinner and started working on the dishes.

“It was no big deal,” she said. “I mean, of course I helped with the cleanup after my hosts fed me. Everyone does. But I remember it really opened the door for me with Joey’s mom and his three sisters.”

I loved it. Another situation where just letting a person tell her story hands me a narrative gem.

Back in our room, we discussed dishwashing. My BFF wanted Cindy to confront Beth about her unhelpfulness. Not because she thought Cindy would receive satisfaction or wisdom, but because she figured it would make an interesting next chapter.

I contended that Cindy’s locked into her own viewpoint – didn’t we also hear her complaints about Lloyd’s “crazy” sister and about her own estranged stepchildren? – In all cases, Cindy “knocks herself out” doing for others, and reaps nothing but ingratitude in response. Personally, I think my BFF wanted Cindy to speak up because that’s work my BFF is doing herself, with her therapist, and she may have tunnel vision about it.

I suggested that we let Cindy know how Beth charmed her future in-laws. Perhaps Cindy would notice that Beth isn’t socially deficient about dishwashing. Which means maybe Beth didn’t offer to help because she was having a terrible time and indulging in a little passive aggression. Then again, maybe Beth told us her dishwashing story because she’s been carrying the subject around, unresolved and subconsciously rued, since July.

Finally, I stayed silent too. I listened to my BFF when she opined that attempting to enlighten Cindy wasn’t going to help either her or Beth. And the fact is, I’m as into attempted enlightenment (my work) as my BFF is into speaking her mind.

Two days later we bid fond goodbyes to our resort friends. We couldn’t help but notice that nobody asked anyone else if she, he or they would be returning next year.