Chapter 52: Ohio road trip
Avenoir. N. the desire that memory could flow backward. We take it for granted that life moves forward. But…you can see where you’ve been, not where you’re going…It’s hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way. — c/f The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
I overnighted in Frankfort, Ky., not ready to visit my father. My CPAP did not prevent poor sleep when nasal swelling from an allergy attack blocked air flow. Every night was a crap shoot. Frankfort was snake eyes. The leaden morning sky threatened snow when I filled my road Thermos at the Golden Arches, groggily remembering a virtual seduction in a password-protected computer file at home:
Dreamergirl: you left the light beside the bed on, having fallen asleep reading…The window was open and a light breeze stirred the air…I’d been watching your window all night, waiting to come in…My hand lightly touched your face, your eyes opened sleepily, you smiled slightly, then closed them again…sitting on the bed, leaning down, my tongue traced the firm line of your lips…you moaned softly…wake up and dream with me, spinner…
Traffic was heavy, moving fast. Christmas trees on roof racks, brightly wrapped gifts in rear windows. Christmas was days away. When I refueled in Cincinnati, a cute gal in the mini-mart admired my authentic bomber jacket lined with real Australian sheepskin — a vanity purchase with cash from my novel sale. She said I looked like Sean Connery in that Indiana Jones movie, and flirted suggestively.
Maybe I was trailing pheromones again, as a woman in Phoenix suggested years ago. Because the summer seduction kept playing in memory:
Standing beside the bed, I took the clip out of my hair, letting it fall to my waist…slowly pulling the shirt over my head, the light gleaming off my skin as first my belly, then my breasts are exposed…I unzip my skirt and let it fall to my feet…Suddenly I was beside you, half on and half off your chest, my silky legs pressing against the muscles of your thighs…my lips searching yours, meeting your tongue with my own. And my body starts to yearn for yours…
She liked my screen-profile conceit that I was a dream-spinner, because that’s what she called her cybersex-trysts. Her first invitation to dream with her, while I was at the writing seminar, led to almost daily contact for six months. A virtual love affair full of emotion and lust, stunning in its intensity. All while acknowledging we carried on with others. Poignant sensation.
My lips begin to move down your neck, to your chest, my soft hands gliding…rubbing circles along your hips to your groin where my fingers tangle in the curly hair. Wriggling my body lower, over your growing erection. I wrap my hand around it, gently, as my lips move beneath the sheet, silky hair along your belly as my lips wrap around your shaft, a wet hot tongue touches the tip and circles it, making it wet and slick, and my lips begin to move up and down, in the same rhythm as my hand…
The vast rural landscape around the Ohio interstate surprised me. Years ago I drove this route in a fast moonshiner’s car from my father’s Louisville shop, borrowed when my truck was smashed in Pennsylvania. The terrain didn’t register then, in my concussed state. That was the flying visit where my younger brother, who soon died childless, said our kids would fight over our father’s grandfather clock. The odd memories that surface on a road trip.
My directions led into small rural towns: men in barn coats, seed stores, muddy pickups, snowplows on gas-station Jeeps. Worn Christmas decorations thrashed in the wind above narrow Main Streets. Anywhere USA outside cities. My thoughts returned to virtual seduction:
VirtualIsh: Crawl up my love, and turn, put your thighs around my face.
Dreamergirl: ohhhhh yesssss
Virtualish:Press your hot dripping cunt down to my lips. I thirst for you, my tongue lancing across that engorged clit…
Dreamergirl: ooooohhh yessssss. Your tongue is making me so hot…
Virtualish: And then my lips. Sucking in a steady rhythm.
Dreamergirl: ohhh yessss ish yesssssss
Virtualish: Yes love. Let yourself go crazy. I still am sucking. Sucking…
Dreamergirl: !!!!ohhhhhhhhh! I am going to cum ish!
Virtualish: Yes love, take it, take it! Licking, licking…drinking you. My face sealed to you. So hot, so wet. So sweet. Long slow laps…Licking you all up into my mouth…tongue swirling and licking. Keep going. Take it all…
Dreamergirl: Ish…
Virtualish: Yes, love?
Dreamergirl: wowwwwwwwww
Virtualish: Good?
Dreamergirl: oh so very gooood. Twice, I came two times…
My writing-seminar classmates asserted cybersex texts were banal. Worse, poor writing. Certainly not titillating. You had to be there, in the moment. And like all moments, it was gone. Reading it cold could never recreate the emotional charge. Valid literary critique — but I kept some of mine anyway. Not for titillation. Souvenirs from an alternate reality.
Interstate to state route to county road; a final turn onto a graded dirt road through dense winter woods. An arched, rustic resort gate showed right where the odometer predicted. I parked by the office. The only sound was wind in bare branches. The parking lot was nearly deserted; no Pennsylvania Mazda. There was no small lithe dark-haired woman waiting. I had a gallery of her photos memorized, winter togs to bikini. A few people were in the café. Others placing presents under a tree in the resort office.
My native paranoia crept in with the numbing wind. If this was a trap by friends of an ailing cuckold, no one would know where to find my body. Should have at least told my father, proud the philandering acorn had not fallen far from his Priapic tree.
He still had Kentucky-cop credentials, almost got elected sheriff once. His eastern law-enforcement contacts would move quietly for a fellow badge on a family matter.
I was still in my police agency’s computers, and friendly dispatchers vouched for me if some cop ran me for speeding. But an out-of-state domestic-violence query would percolate to headquarters, and to lawyers defending against my wrongful-termination lawsuit.
If this was a trap, the trick would be surviving. Never go unarmed to a tryst. I slipped my deniable .357 revolver under my bomber jacket. No shell-ejection. If slugs were recovered, no paper to tie me to a wiped and discarded barrel. How to break a chain of evidence, taught by detectives I worked with for years. If there was gun-play and I won and got free, I’d have a chance.
I put on my innocent face, went in and said I was meeting someone. The reservation was in her name. Hated giving up the link but saw no choice. The guy said, “Oh no, she didn’t reach you? They canceled.”
“She did?”
“Her husband did. We called to see if they’d be here early enough we could make it to a Christmas party in town. Actually…” He suddenly looked constipated. “Actually, he said it must be a mistake, we couldn’t have a reservation for them. Then she called later. I could tell she was upset. Guess we blew an anniversary surprise. Or birthday?” I said nothing. My silence made him more nervous. “She said she would try to reach you before you got on the road. Guess not, huh?”
“No. Too bad.” Any hospitality industry I knew about had strict rules to protect guest privacy. But these morons failed to speak to the person who made the reservation. Had they also blabbered about an expected male guest? I didn’t ask. Why confirm this retard’s sudden inkling they screwed up? I waved off his stammered apology, and left.
Early dark under the trees, shortest day of the year. My six-inch revolver would reach anywhere a lurker could hide close enough to see me. I wasted no time getting to my car, blew down the dirt road, and breathed easier in Christmas traffic on the way back to Louisville. With release of tension came the old familiar ache of a failed rendezvous. And all-too-familiar depression. My father would be surprised, and happy, to see me earlier than expected. But he had no computer or internet access. I would be unable to reach her until she was back at work Monday. If she was even at work after the resort idiocy.
Maybe I was getting too old for this shit.
Chapter 53: Aftermath
Home is where when you have to go there, they have to take you in. My father was pleased I was earlier than expected. My CPAP worked. I caught up on sleep. We went out to dinner every night, and he told harrowing Christmas-combat memories from the Battle of the Bulge that still disturbed his sleep.
His wife, now in a nursing home, mistook me for him through her Alzheimer’s fog, and him for her father. I held her hand. He hugged her. She chattered happily. The only gift we could give her. An emotional holiday with my aging, lonely father.
That was the surface of things. Internally I ached over my failed rendezvous while part of my brain mocked my hypocrisy. After one satisfying December tryst, I had tried for two. After the shock of incest revelations, I was in full flight from ugly real life.
And so was my dreamer girl of the failed rendezvous. Alone among my virtual lovers, she was trapped in a marital nightmare worse than mine. I called her Cynara, for an old well-loved poem, because I was faithful to her — in my fashion. As she was to me.
Much of her life had been a genuine horror show. Then she found her husband, and twenty years of love, fidelity and peace before Fate intervened. He went for a routine medical checkup — and received a death sentence. A long, miserable death was whittling him down month by month. An early casualty was their hitherto satisfying sex life. There was not a damned thing she could do but care for him, and die a little emotionally as the disease overpowered his stubborn will. She wasn’t about to run away — except virtually.
She had succumbed to the lure of Cyberia to unleash pent-up sexuality, “dreaming” with faceless strangers, while she haunted the internet for word of a miracle cure. One night, after she invited me to dream, I found her online in a bleak mood. When I gently inquired the cause, she revealed his death sentence and her research. The full horror of her predicament was numbing.
She said she supposed she’d seen the last of me, now I knew she cybered behind her dying husband’s back. My heart broke a little. To the contrary, I said. I will be your ghost in the machine. Your court jester to lighten your heart with moments of happiness and free you to fight the good fight.
Before long she said she loved me. And I said I loved my Cynara. Was I was even capable of love? An open question. But I was capable of talking the doctor who tended my mother into insurance-covered pain prescriptions for my arthritis I didn’t need, and mailing them to her to refill bottles after their coverage lapsed. Her husband was too ill and in pain to question the bottomless bottles.
She had said she’d be at that resort even if I chickened out. She thought I might. She was paranoid as me. Of course she was unaware of my Asheville detour. If I were honest with myself it felt like cheating on her. Absurd, given my crumbling marriage. My whole life had become an absurdity.
When I called her at work from Louisville, she said every minute until my call was eternal since the resort blew her cover. So it wasn’t just me. Later she emailed a log of her personal version of hell:
“Day one. I looked at the clock and thought he’s on his way. I was so happy, so excited, so thrilled you were coming. Not five minutes later, my husband paged me. He got a call from Ohio…asking what time was I checking in. He said: checking in? With who? I was so stunned I couldn’t think, couldn’t answer. I left work to meet him. There was so much hurt in his eyes, he was visibly trembling. Meeting who, how did I know you — why was I doing this? I am so ashamed for hurting him. And you, you don’t even know yet…
“Day four. The day you find out I stood you up. It feels like four weeks. I had his complete trust. I destroyed it. I’m not sure how much more I can take before I lose my sanity…Oh, Ish. Please don’t feel hurt and abandoned, don’t think the worst of me. It’s the winter solstice, shortest day of the year. Yet the longest for me. There’s a first moon and there’s sadness and heartache all around me. It’s killing me not being able to get a message to you. Nothing I can do but wait. And wait. And keep on waiting…
“Day six. The sun shone a little in my life today: you called. Deep inside I was hoping you were so angry you drove straight here and were in the parking lot. Just dreaming a little Ish, don’t mind me. I dreaded what you would say. But you weren’t angry, after all I put you through. I’m so sorry it came to this. All the hurting for you and me, but mostly my husband….”
Cynara’s online time became obsessively monitored as mine had been. He stubbornly tried to keep working as his body failed, but phoned home repeatedly to see if the line was busy. At home he lurked. Our contact was severely curtailed. But she swore one day we would touch for real. I didn’t see how.
As if there had been no break, I was right back in my own nightmare, complete with tension-riddled couples therapy. I hacked listlessly at my novel, and spent online time with the North Carolina teacher. For an assignment in her master’s program she had written a fanciful account of meeting a reclusive old writer who brooded over Rubbermaid tubs of notes and manuscripts, trying to recover from decades of writer’s block. Her instructor shrewdly said her prose intimated an unspoken romantic connection and deserved a sequel.
Since I actually was struggling with a book sequel, Di thought that funny. I didn’t tell my instructor our sequel already started in Asheville, she wrote. Want to try for Chapter Two this spring? Her deep affection, sense of humor and intellect brightened that dreary New Year’s. And induced guilt: if this were real life where you had to choose between two loves, I would choose my tragic Cynara.
But Cyberia had its own rules with multiple screen names for each account, a virtual template for the science-fiction trope of parallel worlds. You could change names — and persona — easily as hats. Mental-health literature says cases of multiple-personality disorder increased dramatically late in the twentieth century. Only half-facetiously I wonder how many such disorders began with access to multiple screen names.
In January I belatedly thought of an old South Carolina quail hunter’s wisdom: when women don’t do you right there’s always the birds. I was very young when he told me that, in love with Chloe, shocked how many men she fucked the summer I was with Glenda. We weren’t even married yet. Now I was probably old as the old quail hunter. Married thirty years to a woman I no longer knew. Maybe had never known, if my shrink was right about her marital manipulations to control me.
A duck hunter I knew had joked I needed a year off after my snowbound season from hell. But of course that wasn’t why I hadn’t hunted. The incest shock was why. I didn’t like myself much for the way I had reacted. I had learned something the old quail hunter hadn’t mentioned: you can do yourself wrong.
I booked a guided duck hunt to try to reclaim myself, feeling too fragile to hunt by myself. As if deteriorating mental heath could affect my body, right-hip arthritis from long-ago car crashes acted up. The guide loaned me a ski pole to limp through the flooded corn field to a treeline blind. I took a light-weight twelve-gauge, feeling too frail for my big Browning ten. Thinking of Hemingway’s lovelorn dying colonel shooting his last ducks on an Italian marsh, I was grateful my guide, unlike the fictional colonel’s hostile boatman, was solicitous. I had known him since he was a boy. He called ducks as well as his dad, an old friend.
