Sputterpub's Blog

You’d think I would have it figured out by now. I’m a bright person, very observant, and I’ve been studying two couples for twenty years. I ought to be able to make wise statements about their marriages. But the more I watch them, the more they resist simplification.

It’s true my study hasn’t been continuous. There were long periods in my partner Pat’s marriage that were too boring to discuss, too unstimulating to invite any contemplation. And Jeff and I have had a sporadic love affair, eighteen month seminars every seven to nine years, so my examination of his and Vickie’s union has been selective. I guess I can say I’ve watched John and Pat when they were doing something (I’m like a sociological lizard who only sees what moves), and Jeff and Vickie when he and I were doing something (I had to. He made those calls in front of me. He talked to me about the boredom).

I’m accustomed to observing four interactors. My parents had me and then identical twin brothers; Mom and Dad shared a room and made one pair, and Gary and Greg shared a room and made another. Even now: each of my brothers is married and I’m not, so when we get the family together it’s them and their wives, plus me. But the marriages I notice most often, the ones that keep getting in my face, are the mayonnaise mating of my partner Pat with her lumpy husband John, and the lines of lies strung between my lover Jeff and his wife Vickie. Now those four have met. Now my net narrows.

They’re all of an age. I was born in early 1950; they are five to seven years older and not really part of the post-war boom. They live in the suburbs, and the two I don’t know well, Pat’s husband and Jeff’s wife, are heavily involved respectively in Boy and Girl Scouts, so it’s probably inevitable that they would meet, and maybe not improbable that they’d be friends.

Pat’s my junior partner although I’m five years her junior. We are management consultants with a specialty in small business; we help one- to twenty-person firms secure the structures and/or services that will enable them to operate smoothly. I get all the business and do ninety percent of the consulting, but I need Pat to write up my recommendations and to follow through and make sure they’re implemented.

I remember her twenty years ago. She and John were relative newlyweds; I was early into my first marriage. She was cute, frisky, fiercely agnostic. She’s about five foot three and small-boned; she had a great figure then. Dainty size five feet, slim ankles, shapely legs, generous breasts for her narrow frame. Her face wasn’t beautiful but she had thick dark-blonde hair with bounce to it and freckles across her upturned nose; Pat was cute. She had a number of lovers for someone born in 1945. She married John partly because the sex was so good. She even had a few affairs in those early marital times before kids, but she’s been into the community church and monogamy and scouts since she became a mom nineteen years ago.

She still has the good hair and the small feet, but now her breasts ride low and her hips are wide. Her fingernails have ridges and appear chalked. The freckles hide her wrinkles but the glasses hide her eyes.

Pat gave up sexual gratification years ago, along with high heels. She brags that her husband hasn’t slowed down (it’s that Italian blood, she habitually conjectures, referring to his one-sixteenth Sicilian genes and his tendency to initiate intercourse or fellatio about once a week). She’s happy to accommodate him; she considers it basic marital maintenance. She’s always needed his hand or mouth to achieve orgasm herself, but she’s less willing now to give it the time needed. Her orgasms aren’t as deep or rolling any more, not even those she does herself Tuesday or Thursday mornings when John leaves their bed early to work out in the basement, or Wednesday nights when he plays cards with the guys. Most of the time now she’d rather receive John in the morning, quick and hard. He kind of reminds her of himself young then. She can almost get off on that.

As for John, what do I know about John? He too was born in 1945. He’s of medium height, was always a bit chubby and is now fat. Besides the smidgeon of Italian DNA, he’s otherwise a WASP. Pat told me he was a randy boy: fathered two kids on two different girlfriends and even briefly married one of them. She said he settled down when he met her, and maybe he did. But his self employment seems to take him to bars and coffee shops a lot, and I’ll never forget the last time I socialized with them, nearly a year ago, for Pat’s birthday. A dozen and a half of us for five hours in a good restaurant. When we hugged goodbye, John reached down and very firmly very unmistakably squeezed the left cheek of my ass. I backed out of that hug and didn’t look up at him but I could feel his eyes trying to get down into mine.

Pat and John have two kids, an overweight immature nineteen year old daughter and an overweight immature fifteen year old son. They’re raising these kids on the other side of the hills, in the suburbs, where everyone sleeps. The family is into scouting and their church. In these things they parallel Jeff and Vickie.

Jeff and I have been lovers three times before. I don’t mean on three occasions; I mean three separate love affairs. The first time was twenty-one years ago, when I was new to the extramarital game and he wasn’t. He already had an established pattern of cheating on Vickie, although he spoke well of her. He’s become less complimentary with each affair. Now he complains.

Our second time started twelve years ago. We hadn’t seen each other for seven years after he broke us up the first time. Not that we were avoiding each other: our paths just didn’t cross. When we accidentally re-met, we rekindled for awhile. But I had already started a relationship with the man who was going to be my second husband, so I broke it off with Jeff after a year. And he moved out of the area.

He and his family returned five years ago, and we had brief but intense fun before his wife got the calls from a bitter ex-girlfriend. This happened at a time when Jeff was in professional crisis; he couldn’t tolerate the idea of his marriage coming apart too. He straightened up fast, lied as much as he deemed necessary to Vickie, and started to behave. Jeff was good for five years. He said it wasn’t that hard. He’s no longer restless like he used to be. That’s what always got him into trouble, that restless need to leave the house, and when he left the house, he usually ended up at a bar, where he’d get to talking to a woman, and one thing would lead to another. He’d finally reached a time in his life when it was possible for him to just stay home at night. Not get into trouble.

He was good for five years. He was like a survivor of a serious health issue: dealing first with doom and then with remedy-induced euphoria, loving life and vowing to live it better, returning slowly to the habits of careless existence, getting bored, forgetting. He was like a diet-breaker when he called me: just to check in, just to check me out, he told himself… like I’ve sometimes quickly eaten something I didn’t even want, just to blow the day, so I could then accept my lapse and settle into a nighttime binge.

We talked about it before we took my clothes off again. After five years of good behavior, why? I hadn’t met Vickie then, but I knew about her. I knew she’s a very good woman, nice, not stupid. I’d seen a few pictures; I knew she was lovely. She certainly has treated Jeff well. And their kids, the same genders and ages as Pat’s and John’s, are attractive, socially ept, well-raised. By Vickie, of course: Jeff was rarely emotionally present.

He didn’t have an answer to the question. He gave me a perfect look of chagrin and he told me he was attracted to me. But Jeff finds women attractive.

I think it’s partly a nostalgia thing for us. From the first we misbehaved sexually; doing it now makes us feel young. I look around my world and see most people repeating the vices of their youth. Pat said it just the other day, discussing John’s exasperating tendency to gain weight because he spends so much time in bars and coffee shops. She wondered aloud why people don’t get out of their own shadows.

The most recent first time with Jeff was funny and erotic. We always seem to manage the erotic part, but the older we get the more we laugh. It was erotic because, the way it worked out, after we’d tried to get together twice before and been stymied by the unpredictable social schedules of my teenagers, we stole an hour one Thursday evening, when he called from his car on the way home from some business banquet and I just happened to be alone and slightly inebriated. I’d had two glasses of champagne with a light dinner out. My kids were not expected home for an hour, but one can never be sure about kids. I was already in a silk robe. Jeff arrived wearing a suit. The inequality of attire was preserved as we embraced. Nice visuals.

But I murmured as he pulled my unharnessed body into the woolly scratch of his suit, “You don’t have to do anything you’re not comfortable with,” and he lost his serious composure and laughed into my mouth. When he left an hour later, he whispered down to me, “I’ll be sure to drive carefully.” We crack each other up.

Twenty years ago Jeff always spoke of Vickie with respect and admiration. He never talked about their sex life but I got the impression it was active and gratifying. Nowadays he complains about her. Says she’s getting fat, which he doesn’t mind except she blames him for it. Says they never do it. He still speaks with admiration about her mothering and other nurturing but he sounds insincere and suburban when he does so, like he should be wearing shorts and have more chins.

I think Jeff wants me because I’m safe, forbidden, and slim. He spends so much time caressing my ass and kissing my midriff that I know he appreciates the shape. And then there’s the abandon thing. Yes there’s that. Jeff and I know how to lose ourselves in sex together. Literally. Our mouths have to be involved, they’re so close to our brains. We can do it with kissing alone. Sail/slide together, into each other, till we’re not Susan and Jeff anymore; we’re just a living dancing kiss we plumb together. That’s what we go for. That’s what we love.

Love? Love. The L-word that scares so many folks, that people take so seriously. Sure we love each other; what of it? Doesn’t mean we’re supposed to be together. Jeff and I play set roles for each other, but only for a period of time. (He admits he liked the old dormitory lockout hours; it put a cap on the time he had to be perfect for some girl.)

Vickie is beautiful. She looks like Sophia Loren.

I saw all four of them a month ago. I couldn’t get out of the big Scouts fundraiser, so I went to the picnic-with-silent-auction-and-hayride. Actually kind of enjoyed the hayride, which I’d always wanted to try.

There were John and Pat and their kids, with their Nissan Pathfinder. And parked two cars away was Jeff’s Ford Explorer that I knew so well, unloading Jeff and Vickie and their two. Jeff was in shorts; I was a little appalled at his knees in the light of day.

I had to sit with Pat and John of course. I watched them relate to each other like a salt-and-pepper shaker set; they matched and they were sort of cute, but you knew unmatched salt and pepper grinders would add more to the meal. They did have mayonnaise on white bread, or at least that’s what the sandwiches appeared to be – I don’t know because I don’t eat meat.

John is even more boring than he used to be, but he tried to flirt. I don’t think he’s an entirely well-behaved husband. Pat did not notice. After John was called away about Scout announcements he returned with his Girl Scout counterpart, none other than Vickie, with Jeff and kids and their picnic in tow. Oh boy.

Vickie is beautiful. Vickie is fat. Her face doesn’t show as many lines as mine because it is plump even if six years older. But she has too much boob and belly, and her shorts ride up her inner thighs as she walks. I felt relatively gorgeous.

She paid no attention to Jeff. She talked to John, and also to Pat and even me, but she was most focused on her children. She didn’t interfere with them but her eyes sought them. Jeff relaxed back on his elbows and occasionally looked at me. He tried to appear nonchalant but I could tell from his burping how nervous he was.

They say every marriage is a mystery and that no one but the participants understand it. I think not. I’ve been married twice and I’ve watched a lot of other marriages. I’ve seen those looks of quiet exasperation and fleeting hatred. All relationships are mysteries because people are complicated. Of course. But this cultural elevation of marriage? Hah! As much a lie as the one about “quality time.” As incorrect a cultural turn as frontal hugs for kids.

If marriages are so great, how come all the passionate art is about relationships other than marriage?

Ultimately, maybe it comes down to an issue of laundry. Whose are you willing to do, and why? Jeff and Vickie have a firm arrangement; she does the shopping and he cleans the clothes. Mostly he doesn’t mind. But he does complain that women leak. He says he doesn’t care about the occasional skid mark on his son’s underwear but he’s tired of the leakage from his wife and daughter. This from a man who gets after me if I bathe too often.

John and Pat aren’t as organized. Most of the time Pat does the laundry, and that isn’t even because she’s there. In fact, with John’s self employment he’s home more than she. Most of the time Pat does the laundry and resents it. Sometimes John does it but he never does it right. Often they quietly, bitterly argue about who should do it. Their sporadic attempts to teach their children to do it have failed.

Me? I don’t mind doing the laundry. Neither do my kids. We hate chemicals, so we never buy clothing that has to be dry-cleaned, and that means we launder often. But the machines are right here in a house we love. It’s not inconvenient to do a load or two. No hostility is involved.

They conversed throughout that evening. She wasn’t fascinated but she wasn’t exactly bored. They sat side by side on the couch after dinner, sipping coffee and brandy, talking only to each other because Denise and Chuck were settling a geography dispute then, atlas open across both their laps. Siggy wasn’t the talker Alan had been – Susan was starting to think about getting herself home after fifteen minutes of Siggy on sea kayaking – but then he put his right arm around her waist and pulled her to him with a smile that completely charmed her. His movement was so authoritative, so masculine, so refreshingly unambiguous. She gave him her phone number and agreed to see him that weekend. She refused to let him walk her home; she didn’t want more interaction right then.

When Susan awoke the next morning the creek was running clear. She forgot about the cat until she saw her car in the driveway; then she renewed her vow to sell her sedan and give up driving. She remembered Siggy and considered him along with her memories of Alan as she went through her day.

Siggy called shortly after she got home that evening. He’d thought about it, and suggested that there was no reason to wait for the weekend to see each other. She was flattered but she would soon discover that his eagerness to see her was only evidence of his impulsiveness and impatience, and nothing personal. She was to learn his family had called him Sudden when he was a boy. His divorce hadn’t been his idea, and he was lonely.

She knew even then that bells weren’t ringing for her. But she’d gone a few years without sex or male companionship, and she liked his eyes. She also liked the way he liked food; she thought the sex would be good. She was dreadfully wrong there. He was vigorous like an 18-year old, and about as creative. He was so childishly enthusiastic about it that she decided not to discuss the subject with him. And he never asked.

She didn’t love him, but she liked him at times. She shouldn’t have taken up with him, she told herself at the end and afterward, but in the beginning she hadn’t meant anything by it.

Sometimes Susan asked Siggy about his wife: had she laughed a lot? what did she like to eat? when did they enjoy each other most? He always said he didn’t know. At first Susan thought that was his discreet way of refusing to answer her questions, but she came to understand that Siggy really didn’t know. He’d been married to Brenda for 18 years and he had no idea who she was. Susan realized this and also understood that she was just as much outside Siggy, trying to pound into him some notion of who she, Susan, was… and failing.

She had been seeing him for more than a year when she had that revelation. Time flies when you’re old, she told herself, as she watched her 50th birthday approach. She realized at the same time that she no longer enjoyed dining with Siggy, or walking with him, and their metaphysics were diverging the more he got into the aura-flossing Portals program he had discovered a season before. Suddenly she saw him as too murky to keep.

As long as they had been together Siggy did the driving for them. He owned a station wagon but Susan hadn’t gotten around to selling her car; she just gave him the keys when they wanted to use her more comfortable vehicle. He was an inattentive driver. He thought he was a safe one because he’d never had an accident, but Susan concluded that he was so bad the other drivers saw him coming, and maneuvered to avoid him. She was never comfortable in the car with him, but at least she didn’t have to drive.

The day she broke up with him Siggy pulled out of her steep driveway with even less attention than usual. He was angry and upset and he gunned it. He ran over a big yellow cat as he backed up to the street but he just put his car in gear and drove away.

Susan saw which way the hurt animal raced. She followed the flopping creature to the edge of the creek and had her hands on the cat before she thought about her own safety. She released one hand at a time to pull off her sweatshirt jacket, wrapped the injured animal in it, and got it into her house. The cat was conscious and quiet. Susan looked into its small face. “What the hell,” she murmured as she picked up her keys.

She managed to get herself and the cat to the animal hospital without mishap. The vet had no trouble setting the broken leg. He also examined the yellow cat, pronounced it male and healthy, and sent them away with ointment, antibiotics, and instructions.

Susan refused to reconcile with Siggy. She told him she didn’t even want to talk about it. She settled in with Sanity, as she named her new pet, and she resumed driving her car now and then. She decided the best thing she could be for Siggy was a memory without bitterness, her image clean, level, and two-dimensional, like a cat’s face on a chrome drain.

Susan is a practical Western woman. She lives in Berkeley California but she doesn’t believe in astrology or the power of crystals or pyramids. She has never been drawn to meditation or Eastern philosophy. But everyone knows what goes around comes around. She was a little concerned that she’d pay for whatever she did to that cat. By the time she pulled her car into her steep driveway she’d decided to stop driving. She didn’t enjoy it anyway. She wasn’t good at it. With the money she could get for her three-year old sedan she’d have enough for years of cab rides to the grocery store, the doctors, and her parents.

She intended to walk to dinner anyway. Her friends’ house was only four blocks from hers and their neighborhood wasn’t threatening. She stepped out of her door at 6:20 that night, in clean jeans, a nice sweater and fresh makeup.

Her first impression of Siggy went both ways. He was in the kitchen when she arrived, slouched against a counter and turning away from a chat with Denise to look at Susan and Chuck as they entered the room. Susan was impressed with his height but not with his posture, with his abundant steel-and-black hair but not with its lack of style. She liked Siggy’s slimness but she couldn’t admire the way his corduroy pants sagged from his hips, showing the elastic of cheap boxers. At about 55, Susan thought he was too old for that look. She liked his blue eyes, his direct gaze. Some things about him reminded her of a man she’d known, briefly, 32 years ago. Siggy’s conversation was directed at her but not brilliant; Susan was able to reminisce while she participated in their formulaic dialogue.

She answered Siggy’s question about her work and sipped her wine while he started in about his. She thought about Alan.

When she started at Cal certain courses were famous among the students. There was the Folklore class; Professor Dundes collected little family traditions and superstitions and those were all he sought from his students. Harry Edwards ran his Education course then. He refused to use letter grades and passed all students, no matter what. And there was Oriental Languages 38A. It was the only one-credit course outside the PE department, met once a week (optional), and the grade depended on a book report, on any book. It had nothing to do with Oriental Languages. It was the perfect low-pressure way to round out a credit-short quarter. Susan enrolled in OL 38A. She went to the first two classes. She chose Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which she had with her at the second class.

“That’s a great book,” was Alan’s opening line. She stopped gathering her things together and shook her then-long hair out of her eyes to look up at him. He was tall, thin, Jewish-looking, warm-eyed, good-humored, attractive. “I’m hardly into it yet, but I like it so far,” she said to him.

That was all she had to say. He must have been very experienced, because she wasn’t, and without knowing how it happened she walked with him all around South Berkeley and then to the big house where he was staying, talking about Heinlein and sci-fi and life in general while glancing at each other’s faces with increasing wonder at how good those faces looked.

He introduced her to some of the people in the house and then he took her to his room, where he kissed her deliciously. He took her breath away. He was 25 and not a student. He had a BA from Columbia. He was just passing through. He politely asked if he could eat her. She knew she blushed; she must have stared. He laughed delightedly and took her by the shoulders and kissed her again. “I don’t want to do anything that makes you uncomfortable,” he murmured. She was a virgin then, and she thought his request was exciting, but there was no way she could consent without mortification. Not then. Then she had to get back to the dorm before lockout. Alan walked her home and kissed her once more, long and hungrily, in the stairwell near the entrance. They arranged to meet the next day. Susan went to her bed besotted.

There was a message the next morning. Alan had to go to LA sooner than he expected. But he’d be back, he said. He’d be in touch. Susan got a postcard three weeks later and never heard from the man again. She didn’t grieve – she was meeting so many and doing so much – but she never forgot him. And right then, Siggy reminded her of him.

Maybe it was his long lanky body. More likely his direct gaze, slow but intelligent. Or perhaps there was a resonance in the pattern of Susan’s need; it had been a long time since she received a satisfying hug or a deep enough caress. For some or all or more reasons, she found Siggy a bit attractive. She talked to him.

The creek ran murky the day Susan met Siggy, and she hit a cat near the elementary school. Those were probably omens, and they shouldn’t have been ignored.

Like all omens, the circumstances were not in Susan’s control. Her house is situated in the biggest bend of a year-round Berkeley creek, about midway between the eastern hills and the tidal flatlands at the edge of the San Francisco Bay. It is masonry-lined where the stone still stands and it wends most of its western course underground, but it is available to pedestrian eyes and ears in Codornices Park, the Rose Garden, Live Oak Park, and along select yards in a few pocket neighborhoods, like Susan’s. It rises quickly under hard rain, swelling with the runoff from the streets. Its course from the hills to the shore is so steep that it subsides just as readily. But most of the time the creek runs shallow and burbling. Most of the time the water is clear. Now and then it appears cloudy, like someone upstream dumped a load of white paint in it or spilled a quantity of milk. It takes then the colors of mud and slime. It gives opaquely all the hues of army camouflage.

On the day she met Siggy the creek was grayish brown. Susan noticed its opacity when she got into her car to visit her parents. The sight of that burbling murk muddied her spirits. She wanted to stay home. She didn’t want to see her folks. She didn’t want to drive. She certainly didn’t want to go to her friends’ house that night for dinner, to meet some newly-divorced man they thought she’d like. But she felt like she didn’t have the strength to fight the agenda. She got in her car.

She was about a mile north of her house when she hit the cat. She couldn’t have avoided it. She was driving by a school and the creature darted in front of her rear wheel from between parked cars. She felt the impact like a flat tire. Her mirror showed her the gray-black cat scurrying lopsidedly across the street and out of sight. It made no sound.

Susan figured there was no point in stopping. There was no place to park and the street wasn’t wide enough for her to pull over. She wouldn’t be able to find the animal. She continued to drive. But she thought about cats. How beautiful and mysterious they are. How their faces are too small. She had a horrifying dream once, when she was about eleven years old. For some reason she was bathing a small kitten in the bathroom sink, and she accidentally pushed the lever that opened the drain. The kitten was so small it started to be sucked down, so Susan pulled the drain up. In that dream her action decapitated the kitten, so its body was swallowed by the plumbing and only its face remained, flattening and becoming the chrome disk of that retractable drain.

Murk and mangle. Susan was not in a good mood when she pulled into her parents’ driveway. She made her visit as short as she could. She has a good relationship with them, although she’s quick to despise her mother’s impatience and her father’s pomposity. She’s usually chatty around them, talking about her day, her thoughts and feelings, but she didn’t discuss the cat. She didn’t mention the blind-date dinner. She didn’t want to hear (and hear again) what they had to say.

Returning home two hours later, she kept thinking about the cat. Susan tries not to hurt animals. She hesitates even to kill insects, and she apologizes to snails as she steps on them. She spent a few months on a kibbutz when she was 22, and it’s true that she despised the chickens (she found them stupider than plants; she thinks folks who choose what they eat based on kindness-to-the-eaten ought to ingest lots of chicken and spare the lovely green things). She hated those bigoted birds so much that she relished eating fresh-slaughtered chicken after working with the crew to ship the beasts (alive, pecking and defecating) to market. But she was never deliberately cruel or harsh in the way she handled the birds while they were alive.

And she has never been injured by an animal. She has fallen off a horse or two, but she wasn’t damaged. She once had a thumbnail smashed by a new-born calf as she was training him to take milk from a bucket, but it was her own fault for letting her thumb move to his molar area instead of keeping it at the front of his velvety snout. Even the one time she was stung by a bee was her own doing; she was about six years old then and sitting in her back yard on a bench, and it was her idea to try to capture the bug so she could examine it. Unfortunately she trapped it with a wrinkled white paper napkin, against her own bare thigh. The poor bee died without even leaving its stinger in her flesh.