His bedroom is a low slanting attic space but after four years I’m used to the yellowed popcorn plaster ceiling looming above as he lingers over my semi-soft-forty-year-old body while his unkept bearded face blocks out most of the water stains and black mold growing along the ominous cracks in this dilapidated rental house, something that worries me because he’s my boyfriend, I love him, and together we have seven children but he can’t hold down a job so how will he keep a roof over our heads, although none of this seems to matter while he’s whispering, “Babe, imagine our perfect life together” and “Babe, don’t stop – feels so good,” as his work-dirty fingers tug playfully at my freshly shampooed chestnut hair and he looks deeply into my light brown eyes as I soak in the closeness, the wild passion, neither of which I ever had with my ex-husband.
Glen would surely laugh at this absurd scene and wonder why his upper-class-educated-mostly-conservative-ex-wife was having lewd sexual trysts with the Verizon guy who installed FiOS at her office but truth be told Jeffrey was inexplicably attractive from the start – all five-foot-seven-and-a-half inches (“Don’t forget the half,” he likes to say) to my willowy five-foot-ten frame, his dirty blond ponytail and broad shoulders, and at first I enjoyed how different he was from Glen; preferring Bud Light to a bottle of Caymus, smoking Camels and weed (Glen would never!) and showing off his new tattoos to pals in the neighboring trailer park.
I met Jeffrey, a divorced father of four, a few months after my own volatile separation, during a time when loneliness was the emotion of the day and I worried it might take up residence forever so one afternoon I decided to approach the Verizon Guy on his lunch hour, as he sat in our office hallway, his back up against the wall, eating two slices of leftover sausage pizza, and I openly flirted, trying to look cute in my pleated navy slacks and perfectly pressed button down silk blouse and at first he was shy, but it didn’t take long before we were laughing and he offered me some pizza and then asked me out for the following Friday and weeks turned to months and then years as we spent our time together mostly staying in since money was tight, or hanging around the local bar drinking with the local guys, or watching his kids play deck hockey at the outdoor town rink or visiting his hairdresser mom in her stifling, cramped track house, listening to her rattle on and on while she sipped warm beer in a glass garnished with wrinkled green olives and I tried to fit in and I told myself I liked his big chatty family, that feeling of belonging. And for a while I did.
But tonight I’m wondering if this relationship has less to do with chemistry and connection and more to do with my perplexing need to feel desired, loved, worshipped by someone I think is below me – below in intellect, below in status, below in life, and I ask mysef if he’s only here to soothe my divorce-bruised ego – oh wow I sound like such a snob, a bitch really – and I’m embarrassed thinking these thoughts but how ironic that in the sticky smelly darkness at 2 a.m. it’s me whose lying naked on a half-blown up air mattress while my three children spend the weekend eating grilled steak and rice pilaf at their father’s lemony spotless condo with his perfect bodybuilder girlfriend so instead I lean into the strangeness, the physical pull that keeps me returning to this run-down, moldy love shack.
Staring up at Jeffrey’s rotting ceiling, it occurs to me that a colossal error in judgement has been made and all those years were wasted, never to get back (well maybe not for him as his devotion for me was obvious from the start) so I tell myself I’ve grown during this time, albeit selfishly, using him like a blank canvas on which to try new things like going to the NASCAR races, having sex in the shower, eating Taco Bell, as I tip-toed out of my plain-vanilla-suburban comfort zone, relishing that delicious unbridled freedom after leaving a shit marriage, and I know this chapter must end for me to move forward, so I can find my true soul mate but I stay because he loves me, protects me, although last night when he brought up marriage I froze and realized for the first time I did not want to spend the rest of my life with this man and it became crystal clear I was staying for the wrong reasons. It was unfair to him. It was unfair to his family. It was unfair to me.
So tomorrow, in the pale light of morning, I’ll kiss him goodbye on his rotting-wood porch, climb into my gold Honda Odyssey, and drive away for the last time, leaving that sexy little telephone man, those wild-brat kids, that falling-down house, and a life I thought I wanted slow-motion vanishing in my gleaming rearview mirror like it never happened at all.