THE LIFE OF THE MILD

Some time in the not too distant past I began to feel the gradual erosion of my ability to yearn. I can't say with any great precision when it was that I realized my romantic impulses had irreparably drifted from the tender to the tawdry.

I assure you this is a painful confession for I have always taken great pride in my capacity for love. 

For me the word love, once uttered, ceases to be an accretion of soft, alternating vowels embraced by a pair lazy consonants but rather floats in an ether of sweet sound like a hymn or a prayer or a dirge.

I vividly remember the first time I was visited by this sublime and mysterious feeling. It was summoned by a high school infatuation that though chaste and unrequited, nevertheless lifted me into the odd air of mysticism. The name of my teenage Beatrice took flight long ago and I never saw the importance of trying to remember it. It's the feeling that I recall and it is a feeling that I have tried, with uneven success, to replicate ever since.

When my wife Betty and I first met I was flattered by the asymmetry of our relationship. Betty at the time was a beautiful shy woman who concealed her vulnerability with a curiously icy caution. Her early declarations of love were almost combative as if by their preemptive recklessness they could deflect my rebuttal. It was as if she planted the conqueror's standard square into my thigh severing the tendons of agency and dissent.

I was a willing vassal rendered powerless, not by Betty's charm but by her persistence. If it entered my mind to be suspicious of such a premature articulation of faith I don't really remember. What I do remember is that Betty was beautiful and knowing that love is but a premeditated act of will, I consigned myself toward what seemed like a worthy task.

I am happy to say that through our thirty-one years together I have had more than a few intimations of bliss. Having determined to assume the virtue of the besotted, I arrived through various mental and spiritual exercises to see my wife as the apotheosis of affection, fidelity and even, at times, passion.

Lamentably, like all fictions, hard reality looms like the angled blade of the executioner. With time my talent for intimacy has atrophied from neglect. The dance of benevolent deception has depleted my hopes and hardened my heart. The drunken boat of desire is now a rusted junk moored in the brine of disuse. I still love my Betty, of course, for habit is the strongest ballast but ultimately her early, irrational declarations could never realistically be reciprocated. And now as we sit across from one another nightly, sipping acceptable wine and nibbling on healthy and adequate dinners we accept our fate because that is the norm and to expect the extraordinary would be greedy. 

There's no need to worry though - Like most men, I've made some adjustments.

WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

I had no idea how miserable my wife was until I heard her talk in her sleep.

My first experience with her somniloquies was about twenty years ago while on vacation in Vieques. (Why one would go to Puerto Rico when one could just as easily go to Florida is a mystery I will leave for later). 

Passed out by the pool after her third Cuba Libre, I noticed Betty's exposed calves were turning the color of steak tartar. (Why the French see fit to waste perfectly good hamburger meat is another matter best deferred to the future).  

Dutiful to a fault I fetched a fresh towel to cover my bride's bare legs and it was then that I first heard the grumble that has since dogged my nights with suspicion.

Nobody likes to imagine their wife in flagrante with another man so when the grumble turned plaintive and partially coherent I ignored it in spite of my curiosity.

A few years later when my wife and I would still occasionally go out for a leisurely lunch at a sidewalk café and idly watch the suburban world unfold in all its indolent splendor I noticed Betty's attention drift even more than usual. Being married is an interesting process where one gradually grows accustomed to being rendered insignificant. A perfect stranger will at least afford you the courtesy of feigning interest while a wife won't think twice before dozing off while you're in mid-sentence.

And so it was one summer afternoon when the heat and the chardonnay and my annoying voice all conspired to lull my wife into a prone siesta at Sally's Continental Bistro in downtown Elmira.

 Now I know that women are capable of all types of deception but I had never heard of someone faking an orgasm in their sleep.

It was brief but unmistakable.

That Betty was still capable of arousal should not have come as a surprise but of course it did. Like many middle aged men I mistook my wife's ambivalence towards me as a disinterest in intimacy in general. I foolishly saw it as something that occurs specifically to older women, as if they were from another species whose sexually curdled like milk when it aged.

I decided not to bring the matter up, for after all, one should never be held accountable for the content one's dreams. All the same I've often wondered if Betty's garbled, midnight syllabics was an imaginative article of longing or an involuntary admission of guilt.

Or perhaps it was just a prolonged campaign of calculated revenge after that unfortunate incident with the babysitter.