Billy: “There’s only one God, and it ain’t you.”
Paula has caught him writing at the computer to someone named Lisa. She doesn’t attack him immediately. Then she does, but Billy protests, “To cheat on a spouse is a sin. A bigger sin is to stamp out love wherever it has established a tenuous foothold in lives. An even bigger one is to play God and pretend to decide which love is good and which love you get to stamp out.”
They had been watching Sleepy Hollow one October night when he let slip that Lisa had said to pay close attention to the opening scenes that had to do with the Dutch and conspiracy.
“Who’s Lisa?”
“Girl I went to high school with, forty years ago. More, I guess. Sheesh!”
“Is she married?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you still talking to her?”
“She’s just incredibly cool. And, you know, the forty years.”
“Are you fucking her?”
“Hahaha! No, baby. Why? You think talking about movies or chatting via e-mail to someone 2,000 miles away is cheating?”
“Yes.”
“Seriously?”
Paula thinks. “No. It hurts, though.”
“I’m surprised. I thought you knew I’d never hurt you. Do you know that, after all this time?”
“But this is some secret shit. How would I have known you were hurting me without knowing it?”
He knows what she means. “It’s not secret. I write to a lot of people.”
“A lot of your old lovers?”
“Lisa was never my lover. Which is hard even for me to believe.”
As always, he has picked the worst time to try for humor. But just tonight, sixteen years since they exchanged vows, he realizes this is the trait she hates most in him, as he watches new disgust distort her face.
So he continues: “Though her molasses nipples tasted darker and better than chocolate.”
“Ooh, baby! Dark chocolate is my weakness,” she murmured seductively, punching him in the back hard enough to knock the wind out of him. “You lying sack of pigshit! Now I know you were never her lover!”
“Yes, but you will never know for sure.”
“This is true,” Paula admitted, at this late date still feeling it as pain rather than anticipatory joy in fights yet to come. “Why else would she still write you after forty years?”
“Précisément, mon ange. You will never know. Unless, after a mere sixteen years, you decide it’s safe to believe my word and trust in my excessive love.”
“For everybody.”
“No, no! For you, Paula, for you, Bitterbiscuit. And everybody. Even though I still can’t breathe from that backpunch.”
Saying backpunch set him to coughing for a full two minutes, which set her laughing and then to pressing her thumbs deeply under his shoulder blades in a massage of tender agony.
She declared, “I do apologize for the punch. While I did mean it, I didn’t mean it to come out as hard as it did.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Of course not. You know I would never hurt you. You can blame Lisa’s chocolate-covered nipples.”
“Hahahaha! Yes! And so I do, but you still have to make it up to me somehow, as those delectable nips are but figments of our collective imagination.”
“I can’t stop thinking about them.”
“Do you taste them now? Right now?”
“I do! I just can’t taste chocolate and molasses at the same time. I just taste that molasses and chocolate taste the same. And you try to justify it like you have no guilt, like you’ve done nothing wrong! How could you do this to me?”
“We’ve been married for sixteen years. How could you not have known?”
Crying now, just this side of hysterical: “Brain-damaged frogshit wanker! I have always known! I’m going to leave.”
“Bitch!”
“Idiot!”
“I feel I’m premature, but is this the signal for fucking? Cos this would easily top most of the angry makeup sex of many years. That is, if you want, darling.”
“No, I do not. Thanks for asking. Here’s your anniversary present: I’m gonna stay with you for sixteen more years. But that’s it. Then I’m gone.”
“But just now you promised to leave sooner. Much sooner. Tonight, I’d hoped. Nothing ever goes right for me.”
“Poor baby. Let Mama kiss it, make it better.”
But Bill said, “No, I’m gonna kiss you. Where? Here?”
“That’s good.”
“Here? What about here?”
“Ummnnh. There, yeah.”
“My sweet pretty Sugardimples. HA! The victory belongs to me. Against every odd, ’twas you who resorted to physical abuse first! You cannot imagine what I have held inside, lo, these sixteen years.”
“I cannot believe I did that. I don’t have a violent bone in my body.”
“Some cartilage, then, or a criminal solar plexus.”
Recalling herself, Paula resumed, “You can’t charm your way out of this one, dirty fucker. Describe for me, one at a time, each of your sordid e-mail whores and why I should let you continue to communicate with them, and if those reasons involve disgusting sexual perversions....”
“As they will.”
“As they surely will, leave nothing out.”
“Ahh. Where to begin?”
He thinks. Smiles.
“There’s Miss Amanda. When first I saw her, in a rancid decrepit bar at the dawn of this millennium, she executed the only, and the only flawless, live jitterbug on a creaky stage in the most scandalous red dress I’d ever seen. And do you know anyone anymore who jitterbugs? And she was young.”
“Go on.”
“And it was so long ago now. I never cease to be amazed how long I’ve lived. I....”
“I know: just yesterday, you were seventeen. I think you were trying to find some point to approach in your nasty dancer story.”
“Yes, thank you, wife. Amanda. After their dance, she and her partner sat at the bar, at one corner of which I was established. I could not take my eyes from her. Not only had she just done the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen anybody do, she’d done it in a seedy bar in a twirling red dress, and now she sat where I could study her profile, and she was more sublimely lovely than anybody I’d ever seen.”
“Up to that point.”
“Oh, you know it, my darling. Please do not interrupt me as I enhance the Amanda story. Where was I?”
“Her magic profile. Get to the shade of her lipstick.”
“Her lipstick was just a shade or two more darkly red, more bloody than her dress. Louise Brooks bangs. God! Can you imagine?”
“Yes, I can. You can stop right there. You got her drunk, took her back to your greasy slimy bachelor pad, and she was a succubus.”
“Haha! Will you kiss me and rub your palm over my cock beginning now to chafe in his jeans, or are you still in pugilistic mode?”
“No, I love her, too. There’s more. She didn’t leave with her man after a drink or two.”
“She did not, my Nostradamic Nefertiti.”
“O fie! That is too much. Way too much.
“I withdraw it. I shudder to tell you what happened next, and yet I shall, for it is beautiful and not at all adulterous, though you were still years down the pike.”
“No doubt she saw you slobbering in your beer over her for those two hours.”
“There was scotch, single malt, with the beer, dim darling, and not two hours but a miraculous fifteen, maybe twenty minutes before the swain left, alone. Now the magic: she moved to the barstool next to mine.”
“This is another one of your stories based on dreams.”
“I’m sure I praised the beauty of her performance, but as the years have bathed the memory in a golden Mr. Bubblebath of nostalgia, I remember that we spoke not a word, and when my arm went around her shoulder and a hand came to rest softly on her spine under the dress, she demurred not, and our eyes met in a sunset glow of love. An entire decade of love passed and paradise got renewed in the merest instant.
“So, maybe another ten or twenty minutes?”
“Probably something like that, yeah.”
“And after that?”
“Nothing. I saw her one time when I was playing guitar, but we didn’t talk. Or embrace. Sigh.”
Paula sighed, too, an actual sigh rather than a spoken one: “Okay, I do love her. Ask her if I can borrow that red dress. What kind of shoes?”
“She’s not one of the ones I still write to.”
“The one that got away?”
“Ha! Hardly. I let ’em all go, to fly free, like birds.”
“They dumped you.”
“Every one of ’em. And yet how cruel of you to remind me so hurtfully, slattern! Your kisses gave me lockjaw, but theirs never did. You know that now you’re going to have to give me the stories of all your thousands of lovers.”
“I know! I can’t wait. Well, I’ll wait till tomorrow to begin. Hmm. Where shall I start?”
“At the start. You started so much, much earlier than I did.”
“My book will be much better than yours. That imaginary-love thing never did a thing for me. I….”
“You don’t have to. You know I don’t want to know.”
“I know! That’s why I have to!”
“I know! Do you want to take a long deep hot bath?”
“Hell no! I want to take a long deep cold drink. You want one?”
“Hell no! Hell yes!”
“The good ol’ days,” she mourned, clinking. “Who ever thought they’d end as soon as they did?”
“Happy Anniversary, Baby.”
They clinked again. They kissed with love they thought wouldn’t come again.
“You can’t ever let me have the last fucking word.”
| Copyright © 2022 by Pat Hamilton Pat Hamilton has written three novels, hundreds of songs, and a handful of book reviews for the papers. He taught College English for 30 years, which helps him blend popular and classic literature in his writing. As an Army brat, he traveled the USA and Europe before settling into the beauty of Tennessee, but the rock star he used to be still lives on inside him. |  |
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