Racing Season

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Valentine's Day have come and gone, but now, as we hone in on racing season --  the one interest LB and the Ex share -- I find myself back in those heady, guilty, elating, plummeting days of early romance.  The first kiss.  Followed two weeks later by the first time I made someone throw up from an overwhelming sense of failure.  But let's try to keep moving forward to when there were no longer three of us, at least in body.

The first gift of flowers from LB.  The first present of jewelry: earrings shaped like little pixies.

And then, the first fight about the toilet seat.

I had been living in my little San Francisco apartment for a few weeks when I noticed that LB had, yet again, left the seat up.  When I mentioned it to him he said, "I'm sorry." 

I said, "No, you're not."

"I'm not?"

"No.

He seemed confused.  "Why aren't I sorry"?

I said, "Because you've done it before and I've mentioned it to you before.  If you were sorry, you wouldn't have done it again."  My tone was somewhere between withering and eviscerating, and the funny thing was, I was only a little bit angry.

Tears immediately sprung to LB's eyes.

Have you ever made a Sacramento boy cry?  The guilt I felt at that moment defies clean description, and was actually worse than the time I made the ex vomit.  At least he, in part, had it coming.  LB did not. 

I exaggerate when I say that LB's early years were spent skipping through the forest gathering bits of wool to make gnomes out of felt, but not by much. He was -- and is -- a gentle person. He doesn't yell.  If he comes to the end of his very, very, very long fuse he will walk away, but his rare explosions are silent.  It wasn't as if I'd brought a gun to a knife fight. I'd brought a gun to a baby shower.

My first reaction was to grab the enormous football that is his head and kiss him, rather aggressively, all over his entire face while apologizing.  I may have accidentally poked him in the eye and elbowed him in the ear while doing so, but at that moment I felt my true nature had been revealed as a puppy kicker, a seal-clubber, a cow-tipper, and I deserved to spend the rest of my life in a deep cave where I could do no more further damage to society.  I was once again a pair of ragged claws scuttling across silent seas, and I was so eager to be done with that feeling.

My second thought was of Rebecca de Mornay. 

As you know, my first marriage was basically one big argument where we paused occasionally for food and sleep, and our longest-running disagreement had been about Rebecca de Mornay.  At that time Wally George was in his heyday, raving on his cable show with the American flag as his backdrop.  Some of you are too young to remember who Wally George was, but we'll wait for you to read the link.

We enjoyed watching Wally George in the same way we enjoyed watching Jimmy Swaggart: he was dramatic, he ranted, and he was fun for cerebral and pretentious folks like us to ridicule.

My friend Rich from college told me an interesting secret: Wally George was really Rebecca de Mornay's father.  This was in the days before the Internet, remember, and there was no easy way to verify this sort of gossip.  I told the Ex what I'd heard, and he immediately denied it as idle rumor.  When he heard that Rich was the person who told me about it, he just rolled his eyes. 

Rich was recovering from the first of what would be several suicide attempts and had, in the process, lost the use of his left arm, his left leg, and caused permanent damage to his trachea.  He was, in the ex's eyes, "One of your crazy writer friends, if not the craziest," and only to be believed when he was saying something the ex wanted to hear.

When I told Rich the ex didn't believe me, he had his dad, a newspaper reporter, find the article about Rebecca de Mornay's parentage on microfiche and send me a blurry Xerox.  The ex's reaction was, "Anybody can fake that sort of thing.  We're talking about the guy who had you convinced that Terence Trent D'Arby meant 'Terence Trent of Roast Beef Sandwich.'" 

Now it was no longer about Rich being wrong: it was me being gullible.

Months went by, and one night we heard David Letterman make a passing reference to Wally George being Rebecca de Mornay's father during his monologue.  Oh, boy!  The ex loved Letterman, since they were both, "...reared in Indiana, and you know how painful that can be."

"It's a joke," the ex said.  "Letterman's making fun of the rumor."

This wasn't something we fought about every day.  Rebecca and Wally were in the background, like a half-eaten sandwich stuffed between the cushions of the couch in the living room.  Every day that went by the smell was a little stronger, its effect on the environment a little more hazardous.  It was a reminder that as far as Ex was concerned, I was not a reliable source.  People in any way connected to me were not to be believed.  By that point I was convinced that Rebecca herself could knock on our front door holding a printed copy of her own karyotype, and the ex would think I'd paid her off.

One day, we went to a party given by a business school friend of Ex's.  I was not fond of this friend because he enjoyed saying things like, "I'm all for illegal immigration.  I'm not about to pay full price for someone to mow my lawn!"

At the party, the host approached us and said, "Do you know what I just heard?  You know that nut-job Wally George?  It turns out he's Rebecca de Mornay's father!" 

Ex said, "Oh, man!  You're kidding!" as if he'd never heard this fact before but that he had no doubt his friend spoke the truth.

I lost it.  Right there, at the party. I became unhinged, ranting about how I'd been telling him this fact for months and he wouldn't believe me, and it just showed what a total ass he was who had no basic appreciation for me as a thinking human being with actual information. 

At that point in my life I had absolutely no ability to wait -- at least until we got to the car -- in order to retain the moral upper hand.  Instead I made everyone in that room uncomfy and came off looking like a crazed shrew with oddly strong feelings about both Rebecca de Mornay and Wally George. 

Ex's response was to pretend he hadn't remembered me ever telling him this bit of gossip, but that if I had assumed he didn't believe me, he was kidding, sheesh, and was I so petty and insecure that I couldn't see that?

It didn't end there.  Once we got home I made him look at the Xeroxed article Rich's father had mailed me.  I reminded him of the Letterman episode.  I even got Rich on the telephone.  Ex's capitulation that yes, we may have discussed the matter before but he didn't remember it felt vague and insincere, like he was humoring me.  By that point I was so turned around by the cool rigidity of Ex that I wasn't sure who I was trying to convince anymore.  We had talked about Rebecca de Mornay and Wally George before, right?  I wasn't imagining this?

I don't remember how that evening or the discussion ended.  What I know is that nothing was truly resolved, and it became obvious that the figurative odor I imagined was not just a sandwich.  It was a higher life form -- maybe a mouse or a rat or even a small bird.  It had once lived and breathed and thought and now it was dead.  It was large enough that its death gave off a smell of decomposition instead of plain old rot.  And it was important enough to be mourned. 

Now it is twenty-four years later.  That marriage is dead.  Wally George is dead.  My friend Rich is dead.  But if I close my eyes, I can still smell whatever was in that couch.

Let's go to a happier place, shall we?  The bathroom of my tiny apartment in the Tenderloin, the seat absent-mindedly left up, LB wiping his tears away while Jen cradles his enormous, martian-like head.

LB barely remembers this evening, but it was a big moment for me.  It was when I learned that whatever happened, LB and I would not fight to the death over things that meant nothing to either of us.  We would not fight to the death, period.  I would never need a weapon.  I would never need to gather evidence and witnesses to be believed.

It isn't like LB and I never had a silly argument: I remember trying to convince LB that Lo could play Scarlatti better than his ex-girlfriend could, a lifelong pianist. It didn't last long, and we quickly agreed that whoever might be more skilled at Scarlatti, Lo could play Deck the Halls with more emotion than his ex.  We made up because it turned out neither of us enjoyed fighting. 

And it's a good thing, because we would have had a hard time convincing Lo and LB's ex-girlfriend to get together with a neutral third party for a Scarlatti competition.

Comments

[Lo]

Just so your readership knows... I could wipe the floor with LB's ex Scarlatti-wise. And deck her halls to boot.

[The Coffee Lady]

I laughed so much at this for reasons few here will know. Do you know my surname?

[Tamara]

I don't doubt it, Lo, I don't doubt it.

[Barbara]

It sounds like you were suffering from Post Traumatic Stress disorder after your first marriage.

[Paula]

I'm imagining a Scarlatti competition and I am still laughing so hard I can't stop.