Chapter One: "She stopped being available. He never knew why"

You could think of him as having walked in out of the desert. It requires painfully won survival skills to withstand the barrenness, the thirst, the stark loneliness of the desert. He had learned to survive. When he walked into her world, the barren landscape began to fill with color, the loneliness was muted by a network of friends, the thirst for companionship was slaked.

He hadn't fought this absorption into her world. Why should he? It took several years for the marrow in his bones to be replaced by hers and he only detected this displacement when the process was nearly complete. At first life just got sweeter. Once you've grown accustomed to having a nice home, it is hard to remember how miraculous it initially feels when you find one. It brings a great sense of stability to the universe, a feeling of belonging that hasn't occurred since childhood. A prayer has been answered that you don't recall having made.

His name was Guy. After his first marriage unraveled, Guy had drifted through a series of apartments. At first he rented furnished rooms, the worst, then he gradually accumulated chairs and lamps and tables and chests of drawers and arranged them in his own apartments. By the time he met her he had a lair. His lair was very important. He sometimes imagined a colony of birds inhabiting a cliff by the sea. He was one of thousands of inhabitants who perched in the indentations in the cliff, but he did have his own indentation. He could hang on.

The lair was important to her, too. She would never have considered him without it. Even if she disapproved of the furnishings, it showed he could be trusted to contribute, perhaps even to provide. Without this niche in the city's cliffside, she would see him as a drifter. Drifters don't provide.

As their relationship progressed they found a place together. This was better than moving into her place where he would have felt like a boarder. This should have been their place. It was, but it wasn't. Her imprint was everywhere. He didn't protest her aesthetic occupation of the space. His own furnishings lacked grace. Slowly she discarded them, or relegated them to inconspicuous corners. He missed the framed molas he had brought from South America and a worn leather chair with its faded Hopi blanket he had acquired in the South West, but at the time losing them seemed like a small enough trade off. The furnishings she brought to their home set an elegant tone. She complemented them with gradual acquisitions that she carefully chose. It was pleasant coming home. He felt a certain pride when they entertained.

Whom did they entertain? Mainly her friends, who gradually became his friends, too. Occasionally an old buddy of his would pass through town and have dinner with them. She was good natured about this, but they were photographs from old albums come alive for an evening, not part of their new life together.

He searched for new friends. To maintain some connection with his receding sense of adventure, he signed on as a volunteer firefighter. For a few years he enjoyed the camaraderie of the emergency response team and the adrenaline rush when their vehicle blasted into the street, sirens wailing. When Jill grew tired of his nights away, he packed it in.

Jill had no children. This had given her a certain freedom and a certain void. She had used the freedom and filled the void with a variety of education and career experimentations, earning a pair of masters degrees in English and Human Resources.

Guy had a daughter, Cynthia, from his first marriage. Early on there were the obligatory getting-to-know-you meetings of future stepmother and stepdaughter, inevitably awkward. Cynthia's mother had custody and, prior to setting up house with Jill, Guy had been in no position to share custody and provide a proper home for Cynthia. Now his fatherly longings seeped out of the box in which he had shut them. He let himself hope that he and Jill might provide her a home. They discussed it and he found Jill nervous about the proposition. They agreed to a trial and arranged for Cynthia to stay with them for a week. Her mother was bone-tired-ready for a break and willingly obliged Guy's request.

Life was immediately different. Cynthia was fourteen and came mainly because she was told to come. Fourteen, as parents know, is an adjective. It describes a very complex state, usually inaccessible to adults. Jill was able to be tolerant of this state for two days, unfavorably opinionated about it for four days, and virulently rejectful of the state and the child by the seventh day.

There was no bloodline, no deep family taproot to sustain the relationship through the storms of adolescence. But neither was there a certain generosity of spirit known in some other families and in some other times and cultures. A generosity which embraced the offspring of husbands whose wives were lost in childbirth or illness, or to human or animal predators. The same generosity as that required of men who took women with children not their own, whose fathers had died in the hunt, in war and in the grisly accidents which befall men. Perhaps the ascendancy of divorce over death as the agent of grafted families had soured the instinct for caring for others' broods, for respecting what the fruits of a partner's prior life meant to him or her. Perhaps the fault was not cultural at all, but lay in Jill's individual makeup.

Guy could understand -- Jill wasn't imagining his daughter's taxing behavior. He had to understand. Further visits to the house weren't overtly forbidden, but the message was clear that they would be heavily frowned upon and were inadvisable. Guy hadn't healed sufficiently from the breakdown of his last marriage to risk the dissolution of this one. He wasn't strong enough yet to go to the mat with Jill on fundamental issues. He scaled back his visits with Cynthia to an occasional afternoon at the mall or to an evening basketball game where talking wasn't required and Jill wasn't present.

In the family model in which Guy grew up, kids weren't kicked out in their anti-social years. You coped. One of the ways you coped was with dogs. They loved you when the kids didn't and you loved them back when you couldn't love the kids. They were as important as bees to the ecosystem. He relished off-leash romps with a lab or a golden before the neighborhood woke up.

Jill wasn't partial to dogs, their breath, their shedding, the fleas they brought into the house. She was a cat person. Declawed. Short hairs. She brought her two Siamese along and, when one died, they quickly replaced it. Dogs and Siamese mix poorly, at best occupying the same space but indifferent to each others' presence. At worst...they would never find out.

In the months after Guy and Jill met, sex was good. Jill wasn't prudish about the things his first wife treated as unspeakable. There was a flush of enjoyment between them. His apartment, her apartment, kitchen, car. Body parts didn't go neglected. If God gave them, they were used. This was a great rush of freedom for him. He had a sense they were grown up, at last past adolescent embarrassments. Cashing in for having survived this long, having learned something about life.

Then it all seemed to get unlearned. He was never clear about when it started, or what had happened. It would have been easier if he had seen it happen, if he had done something displeasing that he could put his finger on. Instead it just happened. She stopped being available. First for days, then weeks, then months. He never knew why, so he could form only global reasons. In some way he was inadequate and, as she would never tell him in what way, he felt vaguely inadequate in every way. Communication between them developed frosty angles that pierced and hurt. One might conjecture this had led to the chill in the bedroom but, if pressed, Guy would report a parallel or reverse sequence.

Without being able to clearly trace the route taken to this point, Guy found himself in that purgatory where life is neither wonderful nor terrible, neither lives up to our dreams nor descends to our nightmares, where it has become a sticky web of social, professional and familial relationships of varying complexity, spun around pleasantly decorated rooms and moderately entertaining vacations, and is filled with unnegotiable frustrations which, like the arc of this web, largely revolve around the once loving and beloved spouse with whom we have created our lives.

 

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