Gwen
I am thinking about Gwen, pregnant, across the waters of several sounds in Amagansett, too allergic to the dust and molds in her 'new' old house in Greenwich to live in it, staying out there by herself all week. And here I am, largely by myself, not that many miles away as the crow flies, though I'd need a pair of heavy duty Jesus feet and a following breeze to get over there on water. I am thinking about how much I thought of her last year when we worked together all those months before she married, how much fun we had, the smart hardworkers in an army like crew of bores.
We worked closely together one spring and summer and into fall, sweating, eating, getting dirty together while planting shrubs and hauling tarps filled with dirt and clippings from the perennial borders we maintained. We represented the 'can do, get it done' end of the crew, maybe not it's finesse, but not so bad either, and we worked well and often as a team. At lunch, we would break off from the crew in order to buy unhealthy lunches together from the Greek Gyro truck, and just to get away for a few minutes. The Greeks assumed that we were wife and husband, an intriguing assumption, as far as I was concerned.
Gwen is practical and no-nonsense in the garden and elsewhere. She is decisive. In looks, she is cute, blue-eyed, blond, pettite, and very fit and strong. She is quick-witted and sharp-tongued, or quick tongued and sharp witted, but not well-educated. She has a chip on her shoulder about those who are. She's seen enough spoiled princes working at a restaurant bar in Easthampton. She knows what she knows and doesn't know, which means to me that she's smart. And I represent exactly a type she normally disparaged: Ivy League, private schooled "preppy," a WASP, a snot born with silver spoon. Yet here I was, working hard and helping everyone, never putting her down or treating her as the redneck from the North Fork of Long Island, which by her self-description, she is.
And I never "hit" on her, which had to be novel because she had always worked in places where nearly everybody did, she is that cute. Yet there was always a tension, at least for middle-aged, long married me, a yearning controlled by the ego or the super ego or whatever inhibits and separates us from our iddish, animal selves. I must have been among the very few. I think she appreciated it. She even told me how much she "loved sex" and how alarmed she was, about to get married, and that she was sort of having to give it up since her husband to be did not really seem to care much about it. Was she asking me for a final fling, being a tease? I thought about it. Gwen could not have known how much I ached to rediscover sex, something I gave up with marriage, and certainly after the birth of my daughter, trading the pleasures of as Alice crassly put it, "new ass" for the security of a best and trusted friend. Actually there was plenty of sex until we had a child, and then there was none. Zippo. God knows, I think about it all of the time, but the complications of trespass on a marital trust are so many and so complicated that the act of betrayal to my wife, however sexless our relationship has been, limits me to lusting in my heart or mind and makes its consummating it improbable.
Is it really any wonder though? What if we had wandered over to the gazebo opposite Riverside Yacht Club, or hidden behind or inside a sculpture in that garden in Back Greenwich, or on the rooftop garden next to the Round Hill Club, by the pool overlooking Long Island Sound, or even in the cab of the Ford Ranger, with the tools and fertilizers? I might argue that a latent, unrequited ache may be superior to touching flesh, but ask me whether I really believe this to be so. So much hesitation on my part. I am filming my own reality television show, "This Is My Life" and we only have one life to live. It seems that I have spent a life of wishing and not doing. Sex with Gwen would have been great, that's my own best guess, but its consequences--who knows--might have been devastating because making love might have been so powerful to this middle-aged man with damaged self esteem that he or we might have become more involved than I could predict, and involvement is something that one cannot control. I am reminded of the line in a Ted Hughes poem, "Love struck into his life like a hawk into a dovecote." Imagine all those feathers, the commotion, droplets of red blood on white plummage.
We worked closely together one spring and summer and into fall, sweating, eating, getting dirty together while planting shrubs and hauling tarps filled with dirt and clippings from the perennial borders we maintained. We represented the 'can do, get it done' end of the crew, maybe not it's finesse, but not so bad either, and we worked well and often as a team. At lunch, we would break off from the crew in order to buy unhealthy lunches together from the Greek Gyro truck, and just to get away for a few minutes. The Greeks assumed that we were wife and husband, an intriguing assumption, as far as I was concerned.
Gwen is practical and no-nonsense in the garden and elsewhere. She is decisive. In looks, she is cute, blue-eyed, blond, pettite, and very fit and strong. She is quick-witted and sharp-tongued, or quick tongued and sharp witted, but not well-educated. She has a chip on her shoulder about those who are. She's seen enough spoiled princes working at a restaurant bar in Easthampton. She knows what she knows and doesn't know, which means to me that she's smart. And I represent exactly a type she normally disparaged: Ivy League, private schooled "preppy," a WASP, a snot born with silver spoon. Yet here I was, working hard and helping everyone, never putting her down or treating her as the redneck from the North Fork of Long Island, which by her self-description, she is.
And I never "hit" on her, which had to be novel because she had always worked in places where nearly everybody did, she is that cute. Yet there was always a tension, at least for middle-aged, long married me, a yearning controlled by the ego or the super ego or whatever inhibits and separates us from our iddish, animal selves. I must have been among the very few. I think she appreciated it. She even told me how much she "loved sex" and how alarmed she was, about to get married, and that she was sort of having to give it up since her husband to be did not really seem to care much about it. Was she asking me for a final fling, being a tease? I thought about it. Gwen could not have known how much I ached to rediscover sex, something I gave up with marriage, and certainly after the birth of my daughter, trading the pleasures of as Alice crassly put it, "new ass" for the security of a best and trusted friend. Actually there was plenty of sex until we had a child, and then there was none. Zippo. God knows, I think about it all of the time, but the complications of trespass on a marital trust are so many and so complicated that the act of betrayal to my wife, however sexless our relationship has been, limits me to lusting in my heart or mind and makes its consummating it improbable.
Is it really any wonder though? What if we had wandered over to the gazebo opposite Riverside Yacht Club, or hidden behind or inside a sculpture in that garden in Back Greenwich, or on the rooftop garden next to the Round Hill Club, by the pool overlooking Long Island Sound, or even in the cab of the Ford Ranger, with the tools and fertilizers? I might argue that a latent, unrequited ache may be superior to touching flesh, but ask me whether I really believe this to be so. So much hesitation on my part. I am filming my own reality television show, "This Is My Life" and we only have one life to live. It seems that I have spent a life of wishing and not doing. Sex with Gwen would have been great, that's my own best guess, but its consequences--who knows--might have been devastating because making love might have been so powerful to this middle-aged man with damaged self esteem that he or we might have become more involved than I could predict, and involvement is something that one cannot control. I am reminded of the line in a Ted Hughes poem, "Love struck into his life like a hawk into a dovecote." Imagine all those feathers, the commotion, droplets of red blood on white plummage.
posted by Stonechuck at 12:03 PM
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