Looking for love in all the wrong places July 23, 1985
Another hundred bucks into the car.
That seems like all I do these days and have been for quite
some time.
It’s my version of self-mutilation, my rusted bucket of
bolts that someone must punish me for sins I’ve committed. My self-castigation for
immorality and lust, and finally taking liberties with a married woman.
So, what if the husband is a bastard; maybe I was that kind
of bastard once myself and so have no right to judge, let alone cuckhold him.
I get chills just thinking about it all, the tale of woe
Safire tells, even though I’m not the first to share her bed behind her husband’s
back. Mary Jane (always reliable for such information) has informed me about
all the times she’s had to lie for Safire when Safire has stayed out all night.
I even heard the deep voice on the Fotomat telephone calling for Safire just
after the change of shift, she telling me later with a snicker and an odd look
that he was a very close old friend that her husband knew nothing about,
because her husband doesn’t allow her to have any male friends – his intense
jealousy driving her into the arms of strangers, figuring if she’s being accused
of it anyway, she might as well get some pleasure out of it.
And this attracts me, a masochistic kind of attraction that
makes me go back to the same poisoned well to drink and I’m not even certain I
am thirsty.
At least not for what I might suspect I want. Maybe I’m just
curious to see how close to the edge I can get before I fall off, proving once
more how unworthy I am, how I do not deserve love or happiness.
I hate myself for being the wife stealer, while at the same
time, thrilled at the idea. Is that no perverse?
I seem to be caught up in a pattern here, of seeking out
attached women like Safire, like Louise, even like Suzanne (she coming with me even
after just dumping her previous boyfriend – me and him sitting side by side at
the Great Falls Poetry Festival handing on literature, he knowing I had been
making love to his woman and not hating me for it.) Maybe I am more like my
uncle Ritchie than I want to admit, who came in the front door of married women’s
houses as a carpenter and fled out the back door as a backdoor man.
Louise was still seeing her rich boyfriend when I went to Colorado
to get her, cast out by his mother who refused to let her rich son marry a gold
digger like Louise, and Louise holding on just long enough for another
opportunity, another man like me, to come along and I did.
With Safire it’s different. She wants me as an interchangeable
engine part, a long-term repair to her ailing life, while I am interested in
something short term, a temporary patch on a flat tire to get me to the next
stage where I can replace it.
Or is she really also looking for something temporary,
turning me into the deep-voiced man on the telephone, someone who can occupy
her bed until her full-time bed gets made by her husband in Baltimore?
Ultimately, I expect to get what Dr. Thomas calls my “wish fulfillment:”
rejection.
I get to crawl back into my hole to lick my wounds once she’s
gone, perhaps to take up with some other temporary romance, or spend the rest
of my life contemplating my navel. Or maybe, if I’m lucky, I may learn from
this, burned fingers on a hot stove and all that.
If only I didn’t feel so guilty about all this and did not
feel guilty pleasure on top of that.
Ultimately, I still am looking for love that will last, the
problem is I’m looking in all the wrong places.
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