Trouble Won't Wait (9 page)

See ya later,

A

Funny thing, when I go looking for a picture of myself. Every picture with me has one of the kids or Mike in it. I don’t think Adam would appreciate one with Mike. So, I rig up the digital camera on the timer and snap a silly shot of myself with my tongue sticking out and send it as a joke, along with one of me smiling, which comes out decent, if far from lovely. Last, I attach a link for a clip from the
Victoria’s Secret
site, of a model strutting down the runway with only the newest bra and panties on. She’s blond and female, but that’s about all we have in common. I label the attachment
Me getting dressed this morning
.

Now I absolutely have to do invoices for the company, and then run down to the post office to mail some payments and the Christmas cards. Downtown, I bump into another PTA mom, and we go to lunch. I’m not getting much work done today. We share in-law horror stories, gossip about things at the school, and part, laughing.

It’s time for my walk when I get home. Exuberant from my good day, I find Adam waiting in his back yard when I run into the cemetery. His smile only lifts me higher. Life is good. We chat for exactly twenty minutes over a bottle of water near the horse pasture, before I have to leave so I can be showered and waiting when Rachel gets home. Adam thanks me for my emailed photos and winks at me as I walk away. Memories of him keep me smiling all the way to my house.

* * * *

After dinner, Mike makes it a point to hug me in front of the kids, and my happy mood is spoiled. He knows I won’t rebuff him with them watching. As his hug grows longer, I grow more distressed by this confinement, his abuse of power. When he forces a kiss on me, I bite his lower lip hard enough to show him I mean business. There’s no blood, but his watering eyes tell me it stung. He releases me without a word.

* * * *

Morning. After another night spent crying myself to sleep. Mike isn’t going to work until after our little appointment. He carries on a sweet, one-sided conversation on the way there while I gaze out the truck window, wondering how we ended up in marriage counseling.

I believe we’re the only couple we know from our generation still together. That’s very sad. Lasting marriages seem to have gone the way of console TVs and AM radio. They’re still out there, but you don’t hear much about them anymore. And, like many marriages, a lot of those TVs aren’t working, but folks can’t bring themselves to abandon them.

This counselor just joined a local practice of several mental health specialists, located in a new Roman-looking office building full of other everyday professionals. Nice. The accountants can look out their windows past the faux-stone pillars and watch the crazies and folks with their marriages on the rocks come and go.

What Will People Think Phobia makes me deeply fearful someone we know will see us, but there’s no way around it. Sooner or later, all the fools I graduated with who looked at me with envy at our ten-year reunion for my sexy, successful, doting husband will know I couldn’t keep him. I could keep him if I want to, I guess, but they’ll think I couldn’t.

With a courage-faking breath, I follow the other half of my failed marriage into the office, where he tells the receptionist we’re here to see “Baldwin.”

“Baldwin?” I repeat in a whisper, when we are seated in a corner. “Not
Dr. Baldwin
?”

Mike shakes his head. “He’s from Aspen, and he only has one name, not a last one, or first one, whichever. Just one name, and he doesn’t use
Doctor
. He wants to be on a level with his clients. They told me when I made the appointment.”

I’m laughing inside. Our therapist is a nut job! Mike has commissioned a totally off-the-wall counselor to try to mend a marriage I refuse to see fixed. My life has become a twisted comedy. Funny to an onlooker, but soul-rending to me.

“Mike and Mandy?” Baldwin ushers us into an office with several tiny fountains tinkling, incense burning and zen music playing. I roll my eyes at Mike, and he tries to conceal his amusement. This is the kind of joke we would get off on. In the past, that is.

We’re both smiling entirely too much when Baldwin faces us on the loveseat, sitting in an armchair across from us. He’s in his late twenties, with long straw-like hair, and bangs in dire need of trimming–bangs! Although he’s dressed in a suit, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he wore Birkenstocks with it.

Our hippie therapist proceeds to take a rough history of our marriage, ages and frequency of lovemaking. The last seems odd to me, especially when he dwells on how much enjoyment we each derive from our love life, on a scale of one to ten.

Mike tackles the task at hand. “It’s always been a nine or ten for me, up until this last week when she started holding out on me.” Bastard. Does he
want
me to tell this guy what he did?

“Probably from a six or seven to a ten sometimes,” I admit. “Until I saw Mike boning our friend’s girlfriend the night before Thanksgiving.”

Mike’s selectively honest mouth drops wide open. Apparently, he didn’t expect his sin to be disclosed in the therapeutic process.

Baldwin carefully and non-judgmentally notes the facts in his tiny spiral pad, which bears our last name,
LAWSON
, across the back. Is this guy for real? Is that our case file? Again, I fight back laughter.

He wants to see us separately next. My appointment is Thursday, an hour after Mike’s. I have little doubt we are all Baldwin has on the books for the week, which explains how he got us in so quickly.

On the way home, Mike and I both crack up over the spiral notebook and the decor. We’re still laughing about Baldwin when Mike follows me in the house. He pins me against the wall in the foyer and starts kissing my neck. Clearly, therapy works for him.

“Mike!” I screech. “Get off me!”

He’s murmuring, nuzzling around my hairline, which he knows drives me crazy. “Baby, let’s go build a fire. I’ll stay home from work and spend the whole day making it up to you. I’ll make you want me so much. Mandy.” My name comes out a cross between a moan and a sigh.

His hands are everywhere good, rubbing seductively, and my traitor of a body likes it, wanting more. Wants me to relax into him and let him take me where only he can. “I love you,” he murmurs on the other side of my neck. His thumbs rub my nipples, while he presses against me, making me want him so. He moans, a sound which makes me think of a garage. Oh yeah, that garage!

“You asshole, you weren’t even going to admit to the
counselor
that you screwed around on me!
Get off me!
” I shove him hard, knee wedged pointedly in his groin, and he lurches back.

His eyes are glossy with that look I used to love. The look that meant he was going to do anything it took to get me
there
with him, writhing in ecstasy. “I’m sorry, baby. Let’s make it go away. Please, let’s forget this.”

“Easy for you to say ‘Let’s forget’! You weren’t the one who was wronged. What if
you’d
walked in and found
me
bending over for Brad?”

Mike’s eyes instantly narrow with the wrath we both know would rain down if the tables were turned.

“Don’t you need to go to work?” I storm off.

“I won’t give up on you, Mandy! You’ll see. I’ll fix this,” he calls after me as I rush downstairs.

I hear him humming
Mandy
again on his way out.

* * * *

It’s Thursday morning and I’m waiting for my appointment with Baldwin. Mike is still in there, I know, since his truck is out front. I can’t imagine what he’s been talking about for an hour with Baldwin, but I bet it’s not the truth. Since I’ve been carefully cool with him since Tuesday, he hasn’t tried to kiss me again in front of the kids.

I’ve made it a point to not be alone with him, ever. Two more bouquets of flowers have been delivered, one each day. He’s pulling out all the stops. My girlfriend even called the other day and told me he had the radio station play that song for me again. I wasn’t listening, on purpose.

Via email, I’ve learned Adam doesn’t care what kind of cat he gets. I’m considering getting him a kitten from a litter my friend has. Adam was catching a cold when I saw him yesterday, definitely under the weather and not in good spirits. For myself, I’m amazed I’m this chipper with the sands in the hourglass of my marriage sliding so quickly away.

* * * *

Mike finishes his appointment, blowing me a kiss I scowl at, and I enter Baldwin’s little Nook o’Nirvana. No incense today. Instead, he has at least a hundred candles burning. I think I can feel wax in my lungs.

Baldwin’s hair is in a ponytail and his bangs keep flopping in his face, but he incessantly tucks them behind his ears. Am I on
Candid Camera
? Nobody real can be this funny. My brother would love this shit. Maybe I’ll confide in him, just to share this.

Laughter is every bit as hard to keep down today as it was when I smoked weed in college, guffawing uproariously at anything and everything. My sides used to hurt the next day from laughing so hard. I feel the same unbridled hilarity jetting out of me now in near-snorts. It sounds like the way Grandpa used to breathe when he slept in his recliner during televised boxing matches. Little puffs of mirth.

Baldwin opens the dialogue. “How do you feel about the state of your marriage?”

Uh, let’s see, Banged-one. You recall Hiroshima? It was in better shape after the bombs than my marriage is now.
It’s silly for me to pretend I want this to work out. I’m wasting everybody’s time here. Might as well put all my cards on the table. “It’s over.”

Showing absolutely no reaction, he scribbles my reply on that itty-bitty pad of his. Rachel has a similar pad with Hello Kitty on the front. She keeps her friends’ phone numbers in it, not in alphabetical order, but in order of importance to her.

I doubt Baldwin understands my resolve, so I explain. “I’m only here because I’m stalling Mike until after the holidays to separate.” Or was Mike stalling me? I’m not sure anymore. “I have no intention of ever sleeping with him again, and I want a divorce.” That should be clear enough.

His bushy brows shoot up. I’ve piqued the wannabe therapist’s interest. “Why do you feel that way?”

God, could it
be
more simple? “He had sex with a woman we know, while I was in the same house! Anybody, even one of the kids, could have walked in on it! It makes me sick to think of him touching me.”

“Do you still love him?”

Jesus, did Mike put him up to asking that?

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t forgive him for what he did. I’ll never forget what I saw, it comes to me at all hours of the day and night.”

“So you do still love him, but you’re angry, possibly jealous of his having another partner without your consent.”

Without my consent
. This guy probably advocates swapping and threesomes, all the fun and games, as long as both spouses
consent
. I snap my gawping mouth shut.

Good ole Baldwin looks me straight in the eye. “What if
you
were to have an encounter with an outside partner, to even the score?”

Is it the smoke from the candles or his suggestion making me choke?

“You mean like a revenge affair?” Stampeding thoughts of Adam shred my calm like buffalo through prairie turf. I feel flushed.

Baldwin answers, “I was thinking of something more controlled, clinical. I’m betting you’d feel a lot better afterward.” His tone has changed, thickened, and he leers at me from under the bangs. Baldwin must imagine I’d bring a partner in here and let him watch us. He sounded kinda
excited
about it, though. And now he’s edging closer, perched on the loveseat near me. “You’d be amazed what a difference a change of pace can make.” He’s very close, and… Oh God. He wants to do this thing
now
. With him as the outside partner.

I laugh, pretending I’m not sure what he means. “Are you suggesting that my husband pay you to have sex with me?”

“I’d do it for free, but if it’s a bigger turn-on for you to pay me, I’m good with that, too.” As his hand reaches my shoulder, I start laughing wildly, hysterically.

“Oh, God. Stop.” I slap his hand away, as belly-laugh-induced tears run down my face. Fleeing to the door while still howling, I turn with my hand on the knob. “Couldn’t you…lose your…license for that?”

“Karma wouldn’t let that happen,” he assures me, as if it will bring me back. His arms are extended in a
come to me
posture.

This cracks me up all the way to the street. Whatever Mike paid him, it was worth that laugh.

* * * *

Adam is more ill today. He looks like he may have a fever, but doesn’t know if he does, because he has no thermometer. He only walks to his back gate, and I can tell he’s feeling lousy. I run down to Wal-mart and buy him a care package of thermometer, Thera-flu, Nyquil and Vaporub. I could be overdoing it, but I’m not sure what he’ll use.

As an extra precaution, I throw in some ibuprofen and a six-pack of Gatorade. I have just enough time to drop the stuff off before I have to be home. He comes to the door, and I make him promise me he’ll email me updates. I give him my cell number, “in case.” In case what? Who knows? It’s the nurturer coming out, worrying about him all alone like he is.