Sputterpub's Blog

Owen only got worse. He acquired the idea that he was doomed to alcoholism and suicide, like his mother and her father before her, even though he didn’t like to drink. His eating and sleeping slid even further off kilter, and he grew preoccupied with what he called obvious conspiracies in government and industry. He saw four different psychotherapists in the space of six months, and tried seven courses of psychotropic drugs.

I tried to be there for him. His family was exhausting but I wanted to make the effort for Owen. Yet more and more, I found myself hanging out with my friend Bill instead. He was a comparatively simple soul. It seemed strange that I wanted to spend time with a man I didn’t love, while I shied away from being with Owen.

There still might have been a chance. There might have been a moment or two, when Owen and I could have reached into our relationship and saved it. But that’s when his father took me out for coffee and bared his soul.

He parked the car outside the Dennys restaurant and we got a booth near the door. He ordered coffee and apple pie and, like Owen, he stirred sugar into his coffee first, before adding the cream. I drank mine black, and I’d ordered no food, so I watched him. He settled back on the bench seat, cleared his throat, apparently thought he’d try another posture, and shifted his upper body forward, elbows on the table and fingers laced beneath his chin. He made a pretty speech. He begged me to take care of his son.

I was stunned. I was floored to silence with surprise. That was before I knew how ignorant most adults are. It was one of those rare moments in life, alone with another person, when we are thinking poles apart. So it took me a few moments to comprehend. Owen’s father as much as said to me: “I’m too busy with myself right now. You’ll have to parent my kid.”

As soon as I got it I pulled away with revulsion, my back slapping the leatherette booth, but it took years for me to realize how his father had emasculated Owen for me. A long time later I knew our last chance was killed in that coffee shop, by his abnegating dad.

At the time, I went about my business and fell in love with Bill. Owen was interviewing his fifth shrink when I rediscovered the joys of simple lusty sex.

Owen wrestled his demons with faith and a vegetarian diet. He leveled himself. He gave up being rambunctious and brilliant, in exchange for sleep and a railing at the precipice. After he got used to speaking more softly and driving with his lights on, he settled in and embraced the benefits of humble labor. He adjusted to abstinence.

His sisters both grew up to be gay and in stable monogamous unions. Their father maintains that toxic relationships with their mother drove them to it, but everyone knows orientation isn’t a matter of choice.

I married Bill, had three children with him, and eventually left him. But I never regretted the marriage, and I really like the kids.

Owen spent some time on SSI after his bipolar diagnosis. He got his credentials once he stabilized, and he worked a few years as a substitute elementary teacher before returning to school for himself. It took him five years to finish his master’s. He hopes to have his doctorate in another three. Then he’ll look for a job. At fifty-seven.

I see him once or twice a year. I always feel fond when I’m with him and a little sad afterward. I can’t forget the other Owen, the earlier guy. I remember what that brain could have done.

Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if I’d married him. I know now it wouldn’t have been the union of struggling great writers that played so well in my undergraduate imagination. But we might have had a child or two. I probably would have developed a financial district career somewhere, and he would have gone into teaching. We might have propped each other up at tough times, and maybe we would have written, individually or together. He would have driven me nuts with his little obsessions. I would have irritated him to mimicry with my self-conscious laugh. I might leave the house more readily. He might drive faster, and break some rules.

Then I remember a cup of coffee with his father, and feeling forced to agree to be Owen’s parent. One was dead and the other was preoccupied. I could never have married that.

Right. I couldn’t have. Not the person I was then. In the ensuing thirty years and in the parlance of my many therapists, I have given myself permission to be sweet. The person I am now might have been able to keep loving Owen. But young I never could have done it; I was too busy reacting to my own father and his unrelenting ideas. Given my dad’s expectations, young I could no more have been sweet than my brother could have been slim. But that’s another story about how things could have been better.

As far as Owen goes, his life never changes much after now. His story, for better or worse, is done.

The end was as simple as catastrophe. When Owen was twenty-two, his mother went from the kitchen to the garage, got comfortable in the front seat of the car with a lumbar pillow and her favorite family picture, started the station wagon engine, and opened the car window. The garage door sealed so well that it only took fourteen minutes for her to asphyxiate herself.

She had called her husband first. But they’d been through almost eighteen years of sporadic counseling and three brief separations, and he was used to her threats by then, and the fact is he opted not to leave work for her. Owen and Sharon and Sheila no longer lived at home, and they didn’t get calls.

Owen’s world fell apart when his mother died. It wasn’t so much her absence as the sudden removal of the foundation of his existence. Because even with all the fights and threats and estrangements, Owen had thought he came from a happy family. His mother’s suicide was an abrupt and undebatable statement to the contrary.

He was just twenty-two. He was a new college graduate, recently single after three years with me, on the cusp of discovering himself as a writer or a graduate student or a stud or all three. Actually, he’d been rather happy in our relationship – he’d only broken up in an impulsive week of wondering what it would be like to fuck someone else – and after two months apart and three unsatisfactory liaisons he’d been trying to patch things up when his mother started her car to nowhere. In the initial, crazy, chest-searing aftermath Owen made a dozen desperate telephone calls to me, and two fevered proposals of marriage.

I was moved but not toward a wedding. I first fell in love with Owen’s way with words on paper and stayed to appreciate his unruly passions, and I’d had several rough weeks after he left me. But I also had time to notice how peaceful the evenings were without his frequent attempts to discuss dissertation ideas, and how restful the weekends were without his plans for our improvement. I was shocked and sympathetic, but I rushed neither to his side nor to acquiescence.

And in the ensuing silence Owen’s insanity was first heard.

He mostly stopped sleeping. The dining habits of the whole household were off, so no one noticed that he wasn’t eating. And by the time I got there, for I did get there after a few weeks, Owen was no longer functioning as a man.

The house was a mess. No one had cleaned since the funeral four weeks earlier. The family had two cats and the place reeked of them. There was hair all over the kitchen counter and stove.

The refrigerator was stocked with canned drinks and the freezer held stacks of casseroles from neighbors. I couldn’t find fresh fruit. The potatoes had sprouted in their drawer.

I had to take charge. Somebody had to do it. I put nineteen year-old Sharon and eighteen year-old Sheila to work on laundry. I set Owen to vacuuming. I dispatched their father to the grocery store, with a list. Then I went to the bathroom and locked the door. I turned on the water, pulled down my jeans, and sat on the toilet. Leaning forward, elbows on knees, I sobbed for a minute into my own hot palms.

Then I peed and flushed and used the running sink water to splash my wet eyes and cheeks. I patted my face with the cleanest towel I could find. I think I even squared my shoulders before I returned to the family.

Within a day the place showed improvement. Postures straightened and glances were met. It wasn’t a profound turnaround, but restoring a little order to the household had a beneficial effect. Except on Owen.

Those first nights we tried every technique we’d ever used but he wasn’t able to come. I even offered to attempt a few ideas we’d heard of and not yet dared, but Owen was frustrated and self-conscious. We said goodnight but he couldn’t relax on the mattress and I couldn’t ignore his tension. We talked, caressed, hassled and wrestled most of the night.

His life might have been different. If his mother hadn’t killed herself, Owen probably would have married, produced, and reproduced. Instead he labors alone.

It’s not a bad life. He shrugs his shoulders when asked if he’s happy, twists his lips before speaking, and says like any fifty-four year old that it’s good enough as long as he doesn’t expect too much.

His home is a plain one-bedroom apartment near the campus where he studies philosophy. Its only ornament is a bronze bust of Newman. He gets by on student loans and teaching assistant stipends, so he doesn’t spend much money. His old friends claim he lives like a monk.

Owen rises from his twin bed at six every morning. He brushes his teeth and washes his face and then he makes his coffee, sweetened with a teaspoon of sugar and tanned with a plop of half-and-half, which he sips while he reads his Bible. He makes such a ritual of the procedure that it’s like a morning prayer.

At 6:45 he showers and shaves. He breakfasts on cheese and bread and he’s usually out of his place by 7:30, to his small office on campus or his spot in the library. He contemplates categorical imperatives and tries to develop new Christian ethics. He reads the same material again and again.

He tries to exercise but his knees are too worn for the jogging he used to do; most days he doesn’t get more than the walks to campus and back.

He’s usually home by 3:00. He resists the urge to nap then; he tries to correct papers or work on his dissertation till evening Mass. After that he makes his big meal: meat and starch and vegetables. He rarely goes out nights or weekends. He’s friendly but doesn’t have friends where he lives. He’s busy enough, though, and he sleeps okay.

His vacations are trips north to see his father and sisters, or backpacking alone in the mountains. He does the former out of obligation and the latter for his own punishing satisfaction. He doesn’t mind being alone but he still has a hard time around his dad.

You might say Owen’s doing all right. Things could be much worse. That’s what most people claim. Some even maintain that he’s doing exactly what he wants to do. They’re wrong. He didn’t choose all this. Things could be much better.

Owen grew up thinking his family was normal. He knew his parents fought a lot, especially when they drank, but his father was smart enough and his mother was pretty enough, and the Learys fit rather well into their integrated Bay Area neighborhood.

He was a rambunctious kid. Mischievous and very active. Owen was his parents’ first child and only boy, and his energy intimidated them. His two younger sisters were more agreeable and easy. Sharon and Sheila were a year apart, looked alike and shared a room; often they were treated like twins. They had their father’s wavy dark hair and stocky build. Owen stuck out in that family: lanky and impulsive, solo in his bedroom, flame-haired and potential as a match.

His gender permitted him to ignore much of the bickering. He tuned out and wandered away, usually to the fields beyond the houses and into investigations concerning caves and trees and rodent traps. It was left to Sharon and Sheila to watch their mother, gimlet in one hand and Chesterfield in the other, peel their father’s satisfaction away with her list of little bitters. Then they saw their father turn his attention inward, hunching, or else he straightened up, hissed “bitch” with nasty eyes, and stomped out of the room.

And drank. Often while their mother slammed kitchen cabinets and finished her gin their father continued sipping Jack Daniels, in his study. He worked for a newspaper, and he imagined he was like Hemingway, or Steinbeck. Or Salinger. Not J.D: Pierre. Owen’s father once worked for a man who assisted Pierre Salinger, and sometimes he tried to derive some status from it. He often emerged from his study petulant and sentimental. But Owen was usually away then, outside or in his room.

Owen grew up in that family, with his mother getting progressively sadder and his father responding with ever cooler concern and a self-protective hesitation, and he didn’t mark his parents’ degeneration any more than he noticed the aging of the family’s golden retriever or the fading in the color of the house’s exterior. He was devastated when the marriage ended.

I knew we were headed for sex days before we did it. We chatted while we worked and we flirted while we chatted. So even though some of our conversation was about his wife and three kids and about my husband and baby, most of it was full-body language about him being male and me being female. I was made to understand he found me beautiful. I became convinced that some of what I liked least about me actually appealed most to him. He loved that I was a mother; he said he didn’t want a girl.

His fucking was not exceptional but Cisco really knew how to hug. The first time we did it we were standing up in the new-painted bathroom, and he managed somehow to embrace me fully, chest to hip, while his thrusting pelvis made sweet pressure against mine, and his small erect penis poked.

The second time we had more time. Mark had taken Aggie to the zoo for the afternoon and I felt secure for at least an hour. Cisco and I talked more, intimately, and he almost flattered me enough to put me on top. But I had seen my hanging-forward face; there was no way I’d assume that position. We fucked missionary style after elaborate foreplay, and once again I was most impressed by the man’s ability to scoop me up fully between his big forearms. I felt hugged instead of humped.

The last time we did it I climbed up on Cisco and let me all hang down. He reached up for my dangling cheeks and pulled my face to his wet smiling mouth. He murmured to me how gorgeous I was while I came to nice agreement with his prick. Even afterwards he called me luscious.

He left when the window work was done. That was all we ever expected; in fact, I was surprised when he returned one Monday afternoon a few weeks later, to ask if we were satisfied with his work. I told him yes of course and sent him on his way, and only later realized that he smelled like beer, and that he knew Mark always worked on Monday afternoons, and that he’d probably dropped by, boylike opportunistically, just to see what might transpire.

I didn’t tell Mark about Cisco’s visit. I remember we had a peaceful dinner that night and then I took a bath with Aggie. We were in one of our seasons of drought and water rationing, and bathing with my toddler was a way for me to take a bath myself; otherwise we grownups were advised to shower in short efficient bursts. I’d created a little ritual with Aggie, where I got in the tub first and then she climbed in and lay face-up on my lap and legs with her head against my belly, so she became EIGGA, with a toothy forehead and bottom-lashed eyes. EIGGA was strange compared to Aggie, but by squinting a little I could adapt to her and see her beauty, while EIGGA in turn giggled non-stop, with the top of her upsidedown face bubbling in merriment.

There I was, leaning over my obversed daughter and it finally hit me, or floated out above me like a lightbulb igniting, that Aggie was seeing me not only upsidedown but hanging down, and she was loving what she saw. I can’t convey my epiphany as profound – it wasn’t – but it along with the memory of Cisco served to get me over my life-wasting reluctance.

I’m not saying I’m healed. I still avoid looking downward at my reflection, whether in a pond or a purse mirror. But I see that bath as a turning point for me, when I began to like a different kind of diversity. And it was the first time I learned from my child.

Not long after that I found myself possessed with a powerful desire to charm Mark. I’d been thinking a lot about his body and pleasure and babies. One Sunday afternoon while Aggie napped I looked at him and felt like it, and I took him to our bed. I laid him down and stripped myself, and then I climbed on him and began a horizontal dance. My face was hanging above him when he exploded silly/proud.

The first time I looked down at myself in a mirror I was snorting cocaine, and the view wasn’t bad. Sure I was gazing up my own nostrils, with a coiled $20 bill distended from one, but my skin was still prevailing against gravity, so the perspective was odd but the face wasn’t. I was twenty years old.

The next eight years saw changes. I graduated from college, married Mark, and we bought our first (fixer-upper) house. Then we had Aggie and started the fixing up. Actually, we stripped the black-and-white vinyl tile out of the entryway when we first moved in, and we power-sanded and Varathaned the entryway floor and the one in our bedroom. Then I got pregnant. We didn’t plan that but it felt like we should go with it. And of course I never regretted her. But she sure brought changes. It hadn’t seemed so serious, getting married or buying real estate. Nothing felt permanent; there were always other options; if need be I could take some consequences and change my choice. As moved as I was when Aggie was born, as awed as I became when I watched her discover the world, it wasn’t till she was about a year and a half that I realized I’d been trapped. It no longer mattered how open I was about my past or how earnestly I argued my ideas; someone could actually get at me and hurt me, through her.

About then she was old enough for us to start on the bathroom. We spackled and sanded and painted and curtained and ornamented and personalized the space from yellowy beige to sparkling blue and white, and though we had to live with it disordered for nearly three months while we worked on it around our day jobs and Aggie, we were very pleased with it at last.

Before we were done we bought an unfinished wooden medicine chest to hang above the sink. It had a mirror on its door and four shelves inside, and we painted it white. We also set it, mirror-up, on the bed in the spare room while we prepared the bathroom walls. For the better part of a week I had to go to that room in the morning and lean over the mirror in order to see my face or hair.

Well that was my first aging shock. Two years before my thirtieth birthday (when according to my cousin a woman’s upper arm will begin to sag over her elbow, no matter who she is), I leaned over and saw my hanging face in that mirror, and at first I leapt back in horror at the sight.

My cheeks … bagging around my mouth and nose, foretelling the lines that twenty more years would etch. My eyelids … pouching intimations of incipient drag. The pluckable fuzz above my nose that would be exchanged, too soon, for gnarly long brow hairs cobwebbing above my eyes.

I felt so trapped and unattractive I had a mean affair.

His name was Francisco, and my husband brought us together. We’d reached the window replacement portion of our fixing up and we decided not to try to do that ourselves. Cisco was a glazier; he was the tradesman Mark found. Since I was in charge of wall decor it was appropriate for me to follow Cisco around the rooms with rotten windows, priming and painting behind him.

He wasn’t at all my type. He was short and powerfully built, barrel-like, and it turned out that his penis was neither pretty nor impressive. Mark was tall, not-fat, and comparatively well hung. We’d had an active creative sex life back when we weren’t tired all the time. Lately it seemed we were just partners in parenting and pals at pastimes. We never had the energy for flattery; we never had the time for exploratory kisses.

Cisco wasn’t circumcised. His organ looked like a cow’s teat when it was flaccid, and erect it didn’t amount to much either. At first I briefly wondered if I’d even be able to feel it