Chapter 37: Fall from grace
Fall from grace: to lose favor, be discredited; in theology, relapse into sin.
— Dictionary.Com
To give in to temptation; to suffer a moral lapse.
— The Free Dictionary
She sat in her large luxurious champagne-colored van in the hotel parking lot, eye-level with me standing outside. An unlikelier ride I could not have imagined. I had expected her fastback Mustang. Glossy copper hair in a short bob, her glistening blue-green eyes brimmed with emotion. Goodbyes always are difficult.
I was nearly three thousand miles from home, three years into unemployment and my fall from the grace of monogamy complete. She had delayed and delayed, though distant duties called. She laughed at herself for having no change of clothing with her, so anxious to meet me she left her packed bag behind. Given her stylishness, that said a lot. That I was with her at all culminated an unlikely train of events.
After being fired at age 50 there was no way I could have imagined winding up in that parking lot. At home my wife, worried the first year about my depression, started hunting with me for the first time in twenty years. She was amazed I didn’t yell at her to keep her face covered or other things I yelled about when young, hot-blooded — and monogamous. Which I still was then for a decade.
The first year my depression was briefly tempered by freelance work for my old Seattle outdoor publisher, who was preparing to retire and sell his company. My oldest friend Hollis had organized Manhattan venture capital to buy him out, and install me as publisher. A national expert on publications, he saw growth potential I could tap, and knew I’d been happy as an outdoor writer. But due-diligence negotiations snagged despite pleasant chat over my old boss’s guest-china coffee service. Before resolution he suffered a fatal heart attack driving to meet new advertisers. His heirs sold to somebody else. Depression flooded back.
Trying to stave it off, I surprised Chloe with two days in an Oregon beach motel before the last day of duck season. We enjoyed a stormy weekend with good books and seafood. At a restaurant, a sexy waitress flirted with both of us, hinting at a threesome. Chloe surprised me saying a fantasy of sharing me stirred her fires. Her heated, whispering confession in bed sparked erections reminiscent of youth. Almost our last experience of the old happy carnality.
The next day at the duck club was a near-disaster. The guide, a friend for years, lost his grip on the boat as she climbed into the blind. It scooted backward, trapping her booted feet. She pitched toward the water.
Years of weight-lifting paid off in a heartbeat. Already inside, I grabbed two handfuls of coat and lifted, like curling a barbell. Held her suspended until he pushed the boat back under her, his normally ruddy face drained of color. She had been a split second from face-planting upside down in waist-high water.
We took ducks home that day, but I have no memory of the shoot. My normally jovial friend left us in the parking lot like fleeing the scene of a crime. The near-disaster spooked him worse than Chloe.
The next shock came when a new Lab pup, almost fully trained, was run over in front of our house. Which cast a pall over a Kentucky trip with my son to take my father home from the hospital after hernia surgery. He had torn something trying to lift his wife after a bad fall — reminding me of the duck-blind incident. I was shocked how diminished he was, afraid he would die the same month as my poor pup. But at home he rallied. I daily changed his dressings and helped him around. Then my son damn near got electrocuted fixing the garbage disposal when my father forgot to cut the power. It was like Fate had it in for us. But a hospital EKG showed him okay. Kentucky belles in nurse-white were agog over the lean red-bearded mountaineer my son became when I wasn’t looking. Enthralled to his girlfriend at home he didn’t even notice.
My father was a blend of many things, some admirable, some not. Dozing on pain-killers after my son went to bed, he revealed the affair for which my mother divorced him. A wounded GI buddy in a hospital overseas asked him to take care of his wife till he got home. Dopey grin: “I took care of her so good, thought I’d have to do her mother too, she was so jealous.” When he left town ahead of my uncles, he told the wife he would send her a bus ticket when he was situated. Didn’t, of course. So many linked betrayals. In painkillers veritas, I suppose.
He left when I was three. I was a teen in Florida when the matriarch said he was now a successful businessman who could make material contributions to my well-being, despite his “conscience-less dick.” (Which only meant he was, after all, a man.) And he did. But we had never hunted together. My second year unemployed I flew down for dove season the year he turned 73. He showed me a farm he was interested in buying. It was a beauty: sturdy outbuildings, whitetail tracks everywhere. He could buy horses like “polio ponies” he exercised for his Seventh Cavalry officers before the war, but worried about bringing his wife so far from city medical care. He was too old to care for her alone. He said he’d buy the farm right now if I’d come live with them. Again, his offer felt like manipulation.
My third year unemployed I deplaned in a familiar Pennsylvania airport to meet this woman, who chose it as far enough from her everyday life for safe rendezvous. Separated, divorced? She used the terms interchangeably, odd for someone with a law doctorate. I had no idea what she looked like. Then a short, curvy, cute thirty-something woman with a helmet of copper hair waved a bouquet of long-stemmed flowers. Not roses. She hated roses. A bouquet to greet me. I was touched.
She offered her hand. Our hands never came apart. She came readily into the circle of my left arm. I had not kissed a new woman in a long time. Our lips met, the bouquet pressed between us. When the kiss ended we were a couple.
She was one of two women who engaged me in private conversations my first day on the internet. I was doing freelance research for a video-production company. Not a real job, but some income. The video being produced was Piano for Quitters. I had no budget for focus groups or telephone polling, and discovered something called America Online “chat rooms” that gave me instant access to people all over the country. I skipped from room to room, typing out questions — who’d taken piano lessons, why they quit, would a video like this interest them in trying again? Men ignored me. Some women recounted childhood lessons they hated. But others assumed my questions were code to initiate flirting, and started in on me. I guess my bewilderment showed.
A “private message” box appeared on-screen in which she expressed sympathy for my frustration. She was not interested in piano lessons, but in how I would write about them. All writing interested her. Though we exchanged only a few sentences, she made an impression. She possessed three doctorates. One was in literature — she actually taught a college course. I said I used to be a writer and was trying to be one again. I must have made an impression too, because next time I signed onto AOL she hailed me, having entered my screen-name in her “buddy list.”
But I wasn’t up for light chat. That morning a speeding driver had run over my second Lab pup, acquired after losing the first one to another reckless driver. Chloe kept letting them out the front door to do their business instead of into our pasture. Our quiet residential street had become a speedway for assholes. I was at the video-production company in Olympia when she called in tears about how grievously he was injured. When I told the owner what happened, he said “it’s just a dog. We have a meeting.” He was a long-time professional friend. But I walked out. Somebody else could do Piano for Quitters.
The first pup had been so badly damaged the only thing to do was a mercy bullet in his brain. The new pup’s hips were crushed. Chloe said I had to do it again; we couldn’t afford vet bills. My daughter, grown and working, stepped in with newly acquired credit cards and said harsh things about her mom’s niggardliness. I loaded the pup carefully in my Bronco and drove him to Seattle, crying in pain every bump we hit.
The famous animal surgeon recommended by my vet pronounced the injuries survivable under his care, said anything they can do for humans I can do for dogs. A K-9 cop there with his wounded Shepherd said the doc works miracles. The patched-up pup and his pain meds came home with me, the doc saying home-care would speed healing. He was sleeping a deep, medicated sleep when I went online that evening, seeking diversion from my roiling emotions. Lost friendship, fear for my dog, anger at Chloe’s thoughtlessness, pride in my daughter. Last thing I wanted to talk about was literature.
The woman who hailed me understood instantly. Among her dazzling array of interests she showed purebred dogs at big national shows. She had her own sad stories about pet loss, but said she had seen successes as described by the Seattle surgeon and my pup might be okay. She offered to answer questions during recovery if I couldn’t reach the doc. And by the way, another of her doctorates was law — if I wanted advice on legal action against the causing driver.
Depressed, isolated in my remote home with almost no social contact, I began to look forward to our typed conversations. She always asked, and I always reported on my pup’s slow steady recovery. Then we would talk literature. She seemed to take me seriously as a writer. Something that hadn’t happened in years. I learned how to attach a story file to an email — this internet thing was a whole new universe to me — and sent her my one published short story, about the romance of my Paris sexual awakening. An old MP buddy, years before, said reading my story aloud to a woman got him laid. I had no clue showing it to another woman would work that way for me…
But it had. And now it was goodbye time. Suddenly she seized my arm from the windowsill and planted my hand on her breast, holding it there with both hers like a pledge.
“I will always be your lover,” she said tremulously. Her New Jersey accent momentarily subsumed by her bedroom voice.
But she wasn’t.
