Tsunami Across My Heart (3 page)

My flight was mostly uneventful, but it was the first time in my life I’d been west of the
Mississippi River
. I watched the landscape become less lush, less green and more arid the further west we went. I ached to be in his arms again and I couldn’t wait to see his gorgeous face.

He greeted me at the airport just as I was entering the baggage claim area, just as breathtakingly handsome as ever, he slid his hand into mine and took my bag. Our stride was easy and in sync from the first step. I felt as though I were home with him. We drove to his house right away, and I was cold from the wind, hot from the sun immediately. I’ve never liked
California
for that reason. The weather and the temperature, the climate, all were too changeable and unpredictable…not unlike my newfound lover.

Eric took my bag into a spare room and showed me where I could keep my things. I dropped my flimsy skirt to the floor to change into something warmer right before him. Barely before I unzipped my bags to change clothes for those strange hot cold winds, we were standing in that room with my legs wrapped around his naked waist hastily making love, unable to even restrain ourselves long enough to walk from one room to another and lie down on the bed.

Back then and it seems so very long ago, my body was not very sophisticated in its sexual response. I didn’t know how things worked and so much of what was sexual was highly romanticized by me. It was the setting that was overwhelming or the colors, or just being with him. But sex definitely translated to love on my part, while I think Eric was used to having his way with women quite frequently.

At lunch, immediately after our passionate and creative embrace, he revealed to me that he had not exactly told me about how his relationship with Elaine, his local romantic interest, was much more active than I realized.

“Marissa… I need to tell you something. I realize I should have mentioned it before you came here, and it is probably selfish of me not to have said something before…”

“What is it Eric?” I had a feeling of trepidation, of course.

“I think I mentioned to you that I’d been seeing someone at home at the time we met. Do you remember my mentioning Elaine to you?”

“Yes. I remember.” I hadn’t really given her much thought, and honestly, he wasn’t telling me what he was doing on the days he wasn’t calling in a way that would make me feel that Elaine had more significance to him than I did.

“You know I’m crazy about you Marissa, but we’re living very far apart. And while we’re seeing each other soon after I was in
Atlanta
, this time we don’t’ know when we’ll see each other again…”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. I probably would have walked to
California
to be with him.

“I’ve been seeing Elaine a little more frequently lately, but I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to cancel coming to see me.”

He’s seen her more lately, and he isn’t prepared not to see her when I leave. So, we weren’t going to go to some of the places I’d thought we might. While I had thought I’d see his life, not just spend time with him and that it would be our private time, alone, but he was hiding that I was there.

I realized of course this meant he wanted to leave this other relationship intact upon my departure. My flight was not for a few more days, I would have to borrow funds in order to leave immediately, demand it from him, or perhaps blindly, foolishly hope my presence and devotion would make him forget any other woman.

Young, too young, too naïve…I chose the latter and I didn’t blow my cool. I mean how unreasonable of me was it to want exclusivity across thousands of miles?

“I can’t say I am not hurt or disappointed, Eric. I thought I would meet your friends and see your life here.” Honestly for me at that time I wanted no one else. So I set my disappointment aside, didn’t let him know the depth of it, and determined that I’d live for the moment, seize the day, real love might come for us later, on another day.

“You will meet my friends. We’re going to the tournament tomorrow. We just aren’t going to go where I think we’d run into Elaine. It wouldn’t be fair to either of you.”

While it might seem unreasonable to have been so passive at the time, I realize that I come to this point in almost every relationship I contemplate embarking upon. There is something tenuous, almost intangible and fragile about the opportunity for my vision of true love. It seemingly only lasts in the tension and creation of that very first wave.

My vulnerability never lasts very long, and can’t often be summoned again, and for that I know its fleeting quality. I hear the ranting and raving of so many
women making demands and ultimatums and shaking their heads from side to side about how things have got to be, what a man must do to win our favor and what it means to love us, to respect us. I acknowledge the truth that respect and admiration are demonstrated in a certain unmistakable way.

For myself, I want the force of the wave to build, I want it to have its own momentum and substance and I do not want to have to ask for, much less demand its strength or its weight or its significance. In the same way that a wave can be weak and inconsequential, so can the way a man loves you, yet by contrast it can have the full force of the breath of God Himself behind it and it can wash over you and through you with the force of a crescendo and it can cleanse you of any tainted love you’ve encountered before. Love is probably the only thing that truly heals. The same way that the force of a wave slides up upon the shore and when it pulls back it leaves a perfectly solid but pliable surface ready to be imprinted upon once again.

This is the kind of love I want; vulnerable, open, wildly unrestrained and free. The kind of love where he sees inside of me and knows the thing that made me suffer is the thing that also forged me into someone special, shown in the way he recognizes intuitively that my path is about reconciliation, healing, empowerment and strength. I want him to love that about me, and instantly know its value. I want him to marvel about it when he is nestled against my breasts and the power of our passion radiates betweens his heart and my sacred womb.

I want him to know that he strengthens me, gives me shelter, and gives me peace when the world needs to be held at bay. I’ve seen it before, I know its devoted name.

It’s the kind of love I hoped for from my husband David, and once from Eric, and even now from the nameless, faceless stranger I hope might swirl in fast eddies around my heart. But this kind of love is not something you can demand, this is something that has to come of friendship, admiration, desire and contentment, it has its own special passion. It’s nothing less than a gift…and I want it more than anything. But I won’t bully it out of a man.

Somehow, I’ve thought, it would just emerge, and that I’d give it as good as I got it, and suddenly this sense of rightness in the world, in my soul would just be apparent, true, and substantial. So while the disappointment of it not emerging as I hoped was palpable, tangible, I was never really sure if something like this would just present itself or if it had to evolve. What are the parameters of such a love? I didn’t know then, I don’t know now.

As the week began to unfold, we were often in one another’s arms. Making love in the art deco pink tile shower, his bed, his living room, th
e car…we couldn’t stay apart.

Eric had a housemate, an older man by the name of Gerald who was practically blind, extremely effeminate and terribly possessive of Eric. He tended to intimate things to me; tell me little secrets as I did things here and there and even as I made him lunch a time or two. He brought me pause and I found his style very manipul
ative and overly strategized.

At one point he brought up Elaine, and he seemed to be saying that there was more to his own relationship with Eric than she, I, or any other woman might imagine.

He couldn’t see my raised eyebrow, but I am certain he sensed my tension. He was so damned catty, I suppose he’s lucky I didn’t lace his sandwich with arsenic and serve it with a saucer of milk.

I helped the old man because it’s my nature to help someone disadvantaged, took him his lunch and made sure he had what he needed in Eric’s absence but what he said, what he did, fairly or unfairly stayed with me and the insidiousness of his implications affected the decisions I made about Eric in the coming years.

Later, alone with Eric in his room I laid in his bed with him, kissing his face, his chest, his stomach, moving lower, closer to home, when he placed his hand upon my shoulder and said, “Don’t touch me that way.” I sensed an alarm of sorts in his voice and his brow was furrowed and he seemed deeply troubled. I stopped.

“What’s wrong Baby?”

He pulled me up into his arms and as he held me he told me “It’s not you. I know you want to please me and it feels good, but, when you touch me that way it reminds me of something that bothers me.”

I was concerned for him, and I wanted to understand. “Go ahead.”

“When I was just twelve I used to spend a lot of time with my cousin. He used to…. He used to make me let him suck me off.” His cousin had forced him to accept fellatio on a regular basis. He was struggling with this.

“It’s upsetting to me because you know, physically it felt good, but I was just a kid, and I didn’t ask for it to start and I didn’t’ ask for it to continue. I felt ashamed about it and I didn’t’ have anyone to tell. It went on for a long time, and it’s confused me a lot about what I do and don’t like sexually.”

“I’m so sorry Eric. I know how hard that can be, and it happens a lot more than people realize. Most boys don’t even have a forum of any kind to talk about it.” I held him closely, and didn’t move away from him for a long while, thinking about what he’d told me.

Naturally he was orgasmic but he hadn’t solicited the attention, and the conflict of this eats away at the person who is the recipient of unwanted attentions. It creates its very own special kind of hell, a trauma that isn’t easily healed, and talking about it doesn’t really make it disappear, no matter how well intentioned or skilled the therapist.

He wasn’t sure if his sexual responsiveness to a man meant he was bi-sexual because naturally, obviously, he was attracted to me, to other women. He wasn’t sure if his response meant he was attracted to men on their own merits at all. He wasn’t sure if the capacity for pleasure meant that was his preference or desire and he seemed to be testing himself and his limits in this way.

“I’ve always been chasing tail.” He said, not in a way that was shameful, but as a matter of fact. “I’ve had something to prove half of my life now. But it’s always hung in the back of my mind that I responded to my cousin and what if it meant that I was really attracted to men? So, in college, I experimented here and there, but I always come back to women, and I always have several women at a time. I want to be with one woman, one person, but it just hasn’t been right so far.”

My heart went out to him, naturally. “I understand how this entire scenario works inside of you Eric. I know it all too well. I’ve been exorcising demons like these of my own.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. With me, it happened to me by my father. He came home very, very drunk one night and when I helped him by putting him into bed, he thought I was my mother and kissed me, and caressed my breast. I was devastated by it and while he insists it was an accident Eric? I’ve never really been able to put the whole thing to rest. It’s confusing to me and it changed our relationship. Really, in that moment? I lost my father forever.” He held me closer, and there was the greatest comfort in not having to be ashamed that we shared that experience.

We seemed linked inexplicably, in the way that we both understood the dynamic of this kind of experience. He shamefully admitted that he would occasionally allow his roommate the same pleasures his cousin took but how confused he felt about everything. This, while I understood it, was something that I wasn’t quite sure what to do with and for the early portions of our romance made me question any real future we had with one another. What would be the effect of his cousin’s advances on him as a father, a husband? I couldn’t know, and if I was wrong about how it could affect him then the consequences could be so huge.

For me, I knew the way in which my own sexually abusive experiences deeply affected me and at the time I think that I was still young enough, but self deceived enough, to think what had happened was really my fault. I wasn’t sure about what Eric was doing with his own residual affectation, but I knew I understood his deep and abiding pain from it. There has always been an understanding between us that only recipients of this experience can fully understand with one another.
 

W
e lay in one another’s arms for some time and when we stirred and made love again it was tender and I was vulnerable to him in a new way I hadn’t been before.
 

My connection with him deepened, and widened, my feelings growing for him, and my desire intensifying.

The next afternoon, we started our drive up Highway One all the way to
San Jose
. It is a beautiful drive along the
Pacific Ocean
. We had dinner on the harbor in
Santa Barbara
before we left town, the boats gently bobbing and swaying during our candlelit dinner. I loved the way he commanded all the attention in the room, his handsome face glowing as he held my hand atop the linen covered table. The conversation was easy, appreciative of one another, and totally in the moment.