The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.
~Thomas Merton
This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what you’re doing, or it comes out flat. You can’t fake your way through this.~Real Live Preacher
I met Sal at a fraternity function at the beginning of the university school year. I was entering my third year of engineering and a large herd of us was heading out to a regular watering hole where a favourite local band was playing. I'd seen them live over a dozen times.
We shared a mutual friend who asked me to pick the two of them up at Sal's place that afternoon, after which the three of us drove to the gig together. Sal and I exchanged a few glances in the rear view mirror and she ascertained the fact with our friend, quite unabashedly, that I was single. It was a hot, late summer day, I was wearing shorts, and she liked my legs.
On the dance floor that evening I had turned my hat backwards and was jumping in rhythm to the celtic-folk-rock that spewed forth and drowned out attempts at any but shouted conversation. I was to tell Sal a couple weeks later that what clinched it for me that evening was the fact that her left breast made acquaintance rather firmly, though inadvertently, with my right forearm during the sweaty gyrations in which we were engaged. (I am very much a boob man.)
Later that evening, I managed to insinuate myself into her apartment more by accident than any intentional guile. We started by getting stuck in the mud just outside the bar when leaving: I pushed; she gunned the gas; I got wet and brown. I drove another friend home first while the mud dried on me, and ended up going the wrong way down a bus lane. Campus cops don't get very much stimulation before midnight on weekends; classes are out and the Saturday bar crowd isn't yet. We spent 15 minutes with him and I was handed both a fine and a stern admonition with more authority than we both knew he had. University security gets even more derisive commentary, behind their backs, than the more ubiquitous rent-a-cops.
Walking her up to her door, I may have pulled a muddy-puppy-dog with more fervor than was strictly warranted, but she encouraged me to come up... at least to wash off a bit. I was in. With my bare feet as the source of a miniature muddy Mississippi in her bathtub, I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered what the rest of the night might bring. I had to remain seated for a few more moments, lest my intentions make themselves obvious upon exiting the room.
I'm not a big fan of the major leagues, but I had rounded first and was nearing second base by the time the night ended for us. She's the one that had to grasp my hand and place it on her breast part way through our fumbling endeavours. She became my first long-term relationship.
She was my first in a lot of things.
After an autumnal initiation, Valentine's Day gave a warning that things weren't going well. I think I was about five minutes late picking her up and she wasn't terribly pleased with my choice of sweater and slacks. I noticed that she'd received the flowers I'd had delivered to her door earlier in the day, but she made no mention of them for several hours. Wanted to make sure I knew she was mad. So was I, by then. Leaving her apartment and getting into my car (well, my mother's car) we didn't speak until after arriving and being seated at the restaurant.
It was the first time I had ever become so incensed at the hands of someone other than my younger brother. A very strange and wholly unpleasant sensation. It was to occur on a fairly regular basis over the course of the next four years.
The overriding obstacle that lay at the root of most of our problems was a combination of two things: there was a huge gap in the level of relative experience each of us had in terms of relationships; as well, she was both a conscious and subconscious domineering controller which, combined with my accommodating people-pleasing nature, led to all sorts of seething repression on my part and explosive outbursts on hers.
Physically, I couldn't tell if our relationship was healthy, lacking much of anything to compare it to. I had drunkenly fondled my 11th grade date during my high school after-grad. Sal and I passed that milestone the night we met. Brave new world after that. I established early my motto, still maintained today, that sex should be like a return address label: the woman comes first.
There was a particularly memorable and ugly incident early on in the first apartment we shared together. (I am able to recall the ugly ones much more vividly than the others.)
Being a very non-confrontational man, our arguments were exercises in frustration for both of us. To this day I don't fight very well. If a dispute goes past the point of reasonable debate and gets heated in just about any way, I lose the ability to communicate coherently, so clam right up. I can do a Fulminating-Stomping-Door-Slam combined with a Peel'n'Run-Screeching-Tire like nobody's business. Thankfully, I've had no call to do so in a good number of years.
One of our arguments, whose cause eludes me now - inconsequential anyway - had reached this point. I sat in a red-faced, jaw-clenched, quivering tower of rage while she stomped back and forth in front of the coffee table, gesticulating wildly and trying to egg me on to some sort of response. Either before, or at some point during our encounter, I had made myself a large glass of chocolate milk, which sat between us on the coffee table.
When focused in anger, I rarely yield. It almost always seemed, after many of our arguments, like I was challenging myself to see how much negative energy I could possibly contain without actually bursting into flames; or just winding up and hitting her. This was her greatest source of frustration since, she freely admitted, she needed a man who could, at times, put her in her place. When I demonstrated my inability to do so, she would become further enraged, inciting me with whatever means were at her immediate disposal. Normally this only meant louder and angrier.
But, like I said, I'd made myself some chocolate milk.
Oddly, I wasn't incensed so much at being doused in my half-finished beverage as I was by the fact that the back of the couch was adorned by a hand-stitched quilt given to me some years prior by my grandmother. When quilting, she had her basement set up in such a way that she could progress on her work while simultaneously enjoying her Toronto Blue Jays on TV. There is a LOT of work that goes into a grandmother's hand-stitched quilt. And it was chocolate milk.
I left Sal to clean up the sofa while I towelled off and took my quilt to the apartment's communal laundry room before any permanent damage could be done. To the quilt, anyway. I returned only briefly to grab a book which provided an excuse to stay in the laundry room a while. She came and apologised to me there. I think that's pretty much how we left it. That's how we always left it.
Such was the problem with our fights: they would progress only to the point where we were too worn out to continue. Very rarely were any resolutions arrived at. We would silently agree, within a day or two, that the incident was best forgotten and then, just as silently, and futilely, hope that it didn't happen again.
One of the results of not ever coming to a resolution was the unfortunate side effect of never getting to have any make-up sex. I was a very restrained man in more ways than one for the duration of most of our relationship. I wonder now how much of the real me she truly saw. The converse, of course, is also a valid query.
All that, and so much more besides, is proof enough for me that the only reason I proposed marriage to her was that I thought it was what she wanted and would make her happy. I would be happy by association.
My relatives out east caught wind of my intentions and my paternal grandmother surprised me with the offer of her original engagement ring and band from her marriage to my now-deceased grandfather. I was very honoured at the unexpected gesture. Sal was too when she found out about it. After a suitable amount of time to demonstrate her patience, she started to pester me incessantly over its impending arrival, and would I please get my procrastinating ass around to proposing to her.
Working in retail as she did, most of her Saturdays were spent employed. I surprised her on one of these evenings, after work, with a darkened apartment; the only light being the twin rows of tea lights that guided her down the set of stairs into our basement suite. I was there at the bottom to greet her, dressed in my only suit, on bended knee and with my grandmother's ring in hand. Rolled tightly and bound by the ring was a copy of the wedding ceremony I had modified and proposed to use. She gleefully accepted my proposal. I got laid.
In retrospect, I don't think any deliberate action I've taken in all the rest of my life has felt so forced or wrong as that one did.
We set a date. Pushed it back once. Needed to plan and save more. We pushed it back a second time. I'm sure there was a good reason then, too. By that time she was working as a junior sales rep for a major cola company, having recently earned a business diploma. She travelled quite a bit in and around Edmonton, her trips sometimes taking her north to her home town of Grande Prairie. One of the reasons she took the job.
(After my own graduation, incidentally, I started work at the same company where I still find myself, almost seven years later. The reason I started working here was that Sal's cousin's husband was a project manager who needed some engineering help, short term. To this day I still sometimes feel a twinge of irony when I walk into the office.)
It was on one of her infrequent trips back up to Grande Prairie that she met Karl. He had been a high school hockey player and they knew each other from years past.
Sal broke it off with me some time after that. She sat me down and had me listen to Nelly Furtado's I'm Like A Bird; claimed she could relate to the lyrical message of flighty ambivalence. She moved north and in with Karl in very short order. He had a son from a previous marriage and she tried to settle into some sort of maternal role. I cried myself to sleep for a couple weeks.
It was the best thing that could have happened to me. It was necessary and long overdue, but I lacked the strength of character and will to do what she had done. That may have been the source of most of my grief at the time; there was no stronger proof that she had been in relative control the entire time than her having made the final cut. I hated myself for being so weak.
She still wanted to keep in touch, of course. People really do say, "I still want to be friends." It was early enough that I would cling to any tether that could possibly bring her back to me. We spoke at least once a week. She initiated all the calls; even then I was aware of the irony in that, maintaining the same level of control as during our physical relationship.
If all she got was my voice mail, I was sure to call her back.
The frustrating thing about this development was that she then spent most of our conversations complaining about Karl. I grew increasingly enraged and frustrated for allowing myself to be taken advantage of... again. So, when she called and complained, I got angry, and just sat there and seethed and listened to her. Our relationship hadn't really changed at all. At least this way I was under no illusion that I just might get to have sex afterwards. Hope - thankfully in this instance - had sputtered and died; it had been replaced by a bitter pragmatism.
The phone calls started to come less frequently. I recall one of the last when she admitted to me that Karl had hit her. She wasn't sure what she was going to do about the whole thing - she was a big girl, she could take care of herself - and expressed regret at abandoning what she'd had with me.
I was an avid squash player and she had left to shack up with a hockey jock. "It turns out that I prefer squash players, Si," she said. There was a very pregnant pause in conversation. I could hear her silent expectation on the other end of the line, waiting for me to fill the gap with some sort of conciliatory offer of reunion. Or something.
For one of the first times in the nearly five-year span of whatever had passed for our relationship, my silence was completely, and very apparently, intentional. I successfully fought the urge to say something.
I ran into her once at a shopping mall not too long after that. We didn't talk about anything of consequence. Broken relationships are almost invariably relegated to the shallower waters of inanity. She did mention that she'd gotten one nipple pierced. I convinced her, in the parking lot, to show me. Nothing I hadn't seen before, after all.
I think I'll always be a boob man.
Would that I could muster the courage to post such a naked entry (and I mean that in more than one way). I'm just too chicken to put things of such an intimate nature out here for the whole world to read. If I never write anything risky, though, I probably will never be a writer of anything but children's stories. Maybe you've inspired me.
Posted by: Mark | Tuesday, 24 January 2006 at 07:19 AM
What a moving look into your being. It's amazing how the human species can put up with such shit for so long...Thanks for sharing this and I'm sure your (current) wife has benefited greatly from this unpleasant part of your life. I'm sure you have too.
Posted by: JuJuBee | Tuesday, 24 January 2006 at 03:59 PM
We already discussed this, but seeing it like this, I don't know, makes it seem more real. And all the more disturbing. If it's any consolation, a lot of people have a Barb in their past. Operative word being "past". Live and learn, huh. She lost out.
Posted by: Linda | Tuesday, 24 January 2006 at 08:31 PM
Reminds me of something my father once said, coming in the door at the end of a day - "Well, I met my best friend today. He's the guy who married my ex-girlfriend".
Posted by: e | Wednesday, 25 January 2006 at 09:16 AM