Sputterpub's Blog

At first she was irritated. Then irked. She tried to modulate her negativity, but Monica grew waspish. Simon responded with anxiety and tripled his efforts to please her. He began guessing at what she desired and conforming his own choices to what he imagined were hers.

“What do you want to do for dinner?” she’d ask him after they both returned home from their jobs. They were free adults; they could dine out, cook at home, shop and picnic, whatever.

“I don’t know,” Simon would voice while looking into her face. “Ummm,” as his brows drew together. “Italian?” He inflected the end of his answer into a question. His demeanor declared that he was ready to change his response to whatever matched hers.

Monica knew it would be as crazy to complain about her handsome husband’s devotion as about her other privileges. Which made her even more irritable. Then her irritability triggered more guessing from Simon. “For you to be happy” was his invariable answer to her any question about what he wanted from life. And as Simon kept insisting, what they had seemed to be as good or better than other couples. “Look around,” he said to her. “What more do you want?”

After it was over, she concluded it shouldn’t have gone on as long as it had. Then she could see how they diverted their energies into real estate purchases, and building, instead of working on (or dismantling) their union. With hindsight it was clear to Monica that her on-and-off affair with their realtor Max was never going to go anywhere (he was great fun but they shared no values) and distracted her from evaluating what was happening at home. And Monica realized when she had to arrange her abortion, that she clearly didn’t want to have a baby with Simon, but it wasn’t till after they split up that she understood her aversion to having a baby with anyone. Monica loved her parents but had no desire to be one herself.

At her last lunch with Simon, after the divorce but soon enough that it was in the nature of a debriefing, he voiced his only complaint about her. His girlfriend Debra had him attending a Unitarian church. Debra was Jewish and characterized herself as “open;” she was comfortable in that environment. Monica had been raised in a mixed-culture home; her parents observed Chanukah for her dad and Christmas in keeping with her mother’s traditions. Monica always preferred Christmas even though she sided with her father about most things. She liked the drama, the abundance and the tree, but mostly she liked Christmas because it wasn’t the only rhyme for her name.

“I can’t believe you never told me,” Simon said to her over that restaurant table.

“Told you what?”

“It blows me away. We were together all that time, and you never told me the true story of Chanukah.”

Monica is older now. She has acquired perspective with experience. She has a fair understanding of the Simon years. But she still sputters when she recalls that complaint.

She didn’t complain about her loneliness, then or later. Monica knew it would be like bitching about the obligations of wealth; she wasn’t going to get sympathy and she wouldn’t feel admirable. But she noticed. For a few years she even longed to have a weight problem, so she could gain admittance to the unacknowledged sorority of dieters. She kept reading and writing and thinking, and in college she met Charlie.

He was tall enough, good looking enough, smart enough, and very complicated. Monica admired his way with words, written and spoken, so much that she concluded she was in love with him. She also concluded that they would be life partners, even if it meant starving together in a garret somewhere, except Charlie flipped out at 21 and flipped into mental illness, and Monica wasn’t romantic enough to get past that. In fact, she turned away from Charlie so completely that she allowed herself to be recruited into a sales job she would have laughed at just months before, where she succeeded so well she didn’t leave.

It was just a season after that personal veer that she met Simon, whose clattering white horse (okay, it was a black Camry) and dazzling white teeth (the truth) must have deafened her sound sense and blinded her right vision. At least, that’s how she liked to sum up their story afterward.

They met, they dated, and they soon married. Monica’s parents expressed skepticism when she raved about how perfect Simon was for her. Even though their own engagement was only three weeks long they urged their daughter to give it some time. But Monica was set to marry. For the first time in her life she felt normal, and she couldn’t get enough of it, right then.

Monica has wondered since about the affect marriage has on a couple. She’s known of several relationships that were working just fine for as long as ten years, only to fall apart within months of tying the knot. She always thought there had to be more to those stories, until it happened to her.

Simon changed. He’d been fun, impulsive, sexy, even heroic at times, at first. And at first is when Monica said yes. Back then, when Simon said he loved her it seemed to mean something. No sooner were they married than his declarations became more like daily affirmations; every time Monica turned around her husband was enunciating those three little words or miming a kiss.

She felt stifled. It wasn’t that Simon rained on any parade or sought to change her. But his love and devotion became so prominent and public that she felt she had to regard it, too often. She started to notice that when they were in company Simon invariably looked at her when he talked, even though he was saying things that had already been spoken between them. She had to pay him attention when courtesy and interest invited her to attend to others, and she incurred a mixture of resentment and boredom about him that was hard for her to ignore. And got harder.

She realized three months after she married him that she probably shouldn’t have. It started to be obvious to Monica then, how damaged she was after the breakup with Charlie, what a relief it had been to be light-hearted with Simon. Seductive relief.

But it didn’t seem to be any big deal. It wasn’t like she and Simon were religious, or romantic, or even serious. They enjoyed their time together and wanted more; they agreed that their circumstances permitted them to have more; they went for it with no eternal promises. They were old enough to make their own decisions and had the resources to pay for them. They said that they didn’t want to offend any parents by premarital cohabitation. So they married, and Monica thought they both meant it when they agreed that their union did not mean unbreakable emotional or financial connections.

Monica meant it. She always meant her words. But Monica was so attractive that her interlocutors rarely believed her. Everyone assumed that anyone as beautiful as Monica probably wasn’t that smart. Even folks who knew from whence she came.

Monica’s parents had an enduring marriage that would have been admirable if it weren’t comic. But when a university professor marries a chorus girl, people talk. And even after the union goes on for years, whispers continue.

Monica’s father was short, dumpy, myopic, balding, and brilliant. Her mother was statuesque, buxom, blonde, friendly, apparently vacuous. The truth was, her parents were two of the nicest people on the planet and totally dedicated to one another, but they looked like caricatures and never overcame that look. Their marriage surprised their disparate peer groups when it took place, and its endurance astounded everyone who didn’t know them.

Maybe one of the ingredients to her parents’ successful marriage was the exclusiveness of their love. But that condition excluded their children almost as much as it did their circle of acquaintances. Monica and her twin Matthew were always loved and well cared for, but neither was able to fully enter the circumference of parental embrace because in some ways, their mother and father had eyes and laughter only for one another.

Under their familiar circumstances, it would have been no surprise if the twins grew up so close they invented their own language or communicated without words. But Monica and Matthew were tolerantly incompatible. Their births were only 12 minutes apart but their qualities diverged like tectonic plates. Monica the older got the best of both parents. Matthew the runt carried their father’s small frame and bad vision along with their mother’s amiable slow wit.

Monica grew up lonely. She had her books and paper dolls, but she didn’t have close friends. She started out with a gaggle of neighborhood buddies, but she lost them when her parents decided that public school wasn’t allowing her to reach her full potential. In third grade she was shifted to the private school five miles from home, and after a season or two the local girls seemed to forget her. The girls at her new school were put off by her beauty and the boys were at first uninterested and later intimidated. Like many a lovely teen she never dated much; guys always assumed someone else had already asked.

They blew out his sinuses with saline. They X-rayed his face and did a coronal CT of his head. They prescribed Vicodin and he enjoyed the sleepy powerful feeling it gave him, the way it made even Monica’s TV shows interesting and actually led to a gratifying romp with her on the hall runner one night when she came home glowing from an evening with some business colleagues. He remembers her looking almost as beautiful that night as the first day he met her. But the Vicodin didn’t dent the headache.

He returned home breathless with exertion and epiphany. He wanted to talk it over with Debra, but he had to get past Monica first. She was on the deck. With Max, the realtor she’d used for the two houses they’d bought so far. Monica had been talking about another trade-up for some time and at first Simon figured that was why Max was sipping gin & tonic at the railing. Then he relaxed his eye muscles and let himself see. He wondered how long Monica and Max had been an item. He said “Hey” to them both and turned back into the house for the phone, for Debra, for the night.

The second half of the revelation came when he took Debra in his arms. He put his mouth against the top of her head, on her curls still warm from sitting on her porch watching the sun set, and he concentrated on the sensation of her torso in his hands, the curve of her breasts against his thumbs. She pulled her head away from him to look in his face before kissing him deeply, and then she told him she wanted his baby.

Simon almost melted with happiness. He became excited about his life. He went to Monica the next morning and announced the obvious. She acted angry. Said she’d take him for all he was worth. That made Simon chuckle. He was thinking then that with a bit more time and a lot of grace, he might be worth something.

He’s giving it all to Monica. The house and the cabin and every little framed window. Simon got away with his future. He now works three days a week and spends the rest of his time looking around.

They were into computer analysis then anyway. They were accustomed to the proprietary systems of their big corporate employers, and they also had separate little systems in their home offices. Most evenings they shifted between watching TV and working in their separate offices. They tended to different rooms, because Simon liked watching the cop shows and Monica was drawn more to the ones about lawyers or doctors. Soon it seemed that they only talked when they had to make a decision about an investment, and they only had sex when they traveled.

Monica went for momentary gratification and excitement. She was quite content to be married to Simon. But she was addicted to the feeling of power she had when she met a new man and attracted him. She loved the bestowing of herself on an appreciative male. She was drawn to sexual adventure, to under-the-table fondling, to car sex. She liked to go panty-less to bars.

They didn’t have an open marriage, but each was on the road enough that it was easy to arrange time apart. The only time Monica had a real problem was when she turned up pregnant. She and Simon had done it one time in that cycle; she remembered coming home from an incredible erotic session with Max and she must have exuded something, because Simon kind of jumped her in the upstairs hall, on the oriental runner, and she really enjoyed his raw spontaneity. She had to hide the abortion from him; that took more planning than any liaison.