The Masturbator
I have a hole in the heart that I cannot possibly fill. This realization came to me at a dinner party on June 2, 1962. I have been to a hundred dinner parties over the years where I often sit alone and reevaluate my life as people talk about current events, nuclear war, and other meaningless sorts of things.
My life consists of little more than going to dinner parties, playing bridge, sipping wine, and making conversation with ordinary people like myself for the sake of conversation. To fill an uncomfortable void, or for lack of anything better—which is the reason I got married.
I am fairly certain that hell is probably an endless dinner party—one from which you don't get to go home—a bottomless glass of merlot—or a marriage to someone you don't love.
I also engage in routine masturbation for clarity. It is not sexual at all. It is important to never stop masturbating, I've learned. Once you do, it is all over and you will get old and stupid.
I can ejaculate in less than 30 seconds. My personal record is 6 seconds. The secret is that it starts before you ever touch yourself—a concept I borrowed from Ted Williams on the art of hitting.
I also engage in routine masturbation for clarity. It is not sexual at all. It is important to never stop masturbating, I've learned. Once you do, it is all over and you will get old and stupid.
I can ejaculate in less than 30 seconds. My personal record is 6 seconds. The secret is that it starts before you ever touch yourself—a concept I borrowed from Ted Williams on the art of hitting.
By coincedence, my name is Jack Offermann. I was teased mercilessly as a kid, though I never jacked off until I went to war.
At dinner parties, couples host other couples and make their best dishes and deserts. They also entertain the party of six or so other people with some sort of game like bridge, charades, or with a slide show from their latest vacation. Sometimes there is a robust conversation of some sort. Food for thought for the intellectually starved.
At dinner parties, couples host other couples and make their best dishes and deserts. They also entertain the party of six or so other people with some sort of game like bridge, charades, or with a slide show from their latest vacation. Sometimes there is a robust conversation of some sort. Food for thought for the intellectually starved.
I don't talk about beating my meat, though. Mostly everyone talks about their kids, or their jobs, or politics.
No one brings anything besides for cigars or bottles of wine as to not interfere with the dinner. It isn't a potluck. Only a few bottles of wine at best get opened depending upon the number of guests, the rest the hosts will keep and are left to age for another occasion. It would be an egregious faux paus to bring a bottle of wine to a dinner party that was brought to you at a previous one. Or to bring merlot. No one wants merlot.
Dinner parties aren't for pleasure or enjoyment. They are expressions of absurd social dominance or subservience, and gratiutous self-gratification, and I loathe them. I go to them because my wife loves them and it is rude to decline an invitation. It is important, she says, to be fine upstanding members of the community. It is important to be liked and revered and that sort of thing. You might want to run for council someday, she says. Where would you be then if you never went to a dinner party?
I am a history teacher at Lancaster High School and my wife, Julie, is a research biologist at Ohio State University. She often wears pants. She has a doctorate and doesn't believe in the patriarchy, which makes her a dysfunctional feminist. She is a relatively unhappy and mentally unstable person.
She once tried to kill herself by putting her head in a gas oven and baking herself like a meatloaf—only she snuffed the pilot light out so it was all gas and no heat. It didn't work. I found her and I felt obligated to drag her by her ankle to the safety of the front lawn. Then I called the fire department. When she opened her eyes, she was uspet I wasn't the angel Gabriel. Then she worried the neighbors might have seen her so she made up a story about there being a gas leak and every so often at one of the dinner parties someone will bring it up not knowing she was trying to kill herself like a pot roast.
By coincedence, she is jewish and only twenty years before members of her family who lived in France were killed in much the same way. Only they got theirs in the showers first, and then the poor bastards were dragged by their feet to the ovens where they escaped the death camp in a cloud of gray smoke.
We are both in our early forties. We met in high school and married after the war. Julie was a foreign-exchange student from France. The timing was fortuitous for her in that the Nazis barged in soon after she left, so she stayed in the US on a permanent vacation. Our marriage was hunky dory for a while. Then there was the affair, which changed everything. But I saved her reputation by concealing it and murdering the only person who knew—her lover.
No one would expect me capable of murder. I am a rather meek and modest individual. But I suppose we all got it in us, push come to shove, as they say. I didn't murder her lover because I was jealous or out of hatred. I murdered him because she asked me to do so. She said it was the only way she felt she could forgive herself for what she did. And so, as things go, it was done with the indignity of a cheap .38 revolver that I tossed out on the drive home.
Having been in the war, I was already adept at murder, so what did it matter, really? One more or less. He who was guilty of a moral crime I judged him guilty of in my head as though it were a courtroom at Nuremberg. I had no sympathy for him. He was a jew and what's one more, considering. Six million and one, two, three. It was as easy as picking an apple off a tree. I killed at least a dozen men in the war. I was told in bootcamp that war is simple—we got to kill more of them than they kill of us. And so I did.
I never masturbated before the war. Not once. But during the war I went nuts and would crank them out like nobody's business. Like I was Rosie the Riveter cranking out bullets and bombs. It was rather hard to find the privacy, but I managed. However, it became known that I jacked off. Some thought I did it for luck. Others thought I was insane. I masturbated like some men pissed. I did it to calm my nerves.
When I came home and Julie asked me how was France. I said it was awful and she seemed disappointed that I said so. I made an honest woman out of her until she found the love of another man while I was on a fishing trip with my father who had dementia. It's hard to fish with a man with dementia.
In high school, the other kids called her Jew-ly Majewski. Majewski was her maiden name. The one she was born into the world with, like it or not. There was no way for her family to hide from the Nazis with a name like that, which is probably how they ended up in the ovens. Perhaps, their surname was on the mailbox. When I asked her how she became a foreign-exchange student, she said, "Against my will."
She said she was in love with a boy named Robert. Only she didn't say Rah-burt, she said Ro-bear in a mournful sort of way. She said her father made her go to America just to keep her away from Ro-bear. Then she wept until she fell asleep presuming that her beloved Ro-bear became a cloud of smoke. God only knows.
Julie doesn't seem grateful that I went to war and risked life and limb to liberate her beloved France. But in France, the people are very grateful. To this day, August 1, 1962, they have celebrations to honor those who landed at Normandy to begin the liberation of their country and to defeat the Nazis. It had been eighteen years. When Julie asked me once why her people were cursed to suffer in the way that they do, I said I don't know, but killing Jesus, the Son of God, wasn't very smart. She frowned and said it was a rhetorical question.
I hung a portrait of Jesus in our dining room. I said prayers before every meal as catholics do. She bowed her head to say prayers, too, but I always wondered what she thought when I said prayers to Jesus. I wondered if she was mocking me. Sometimes I wondered if she believed anything at all. She said the jews believe Jesus was a false prophet, which is to say that they think He was full of shit.
I asked if they reconsidered after Auschwitz. I told her I would mention it at the dinner party and she forbade me to do so. We are the chosen people, she went on. It says so in the Bible. Based upon all available evidence, I am inclined to disagree. But what do I know. At least she is not a Muslim.
At dinner parties, she gets the chance to blab to everyone else about what she does for a living, which the other wives find interesting in that most of them are housewives and mothers who do not work at all. We don't have children. Julie's womb is a barren desert, or I have jacked off so much that I am out of baby bullets.
And so, at dinner parties, I don't have to listen to her for a while. She talks way too much and I do something else while she talks. I wander around the house and look for interesting things to look at or a place to hide and jack off. I've slowed down since the war, but I still do it on occasions.
No one brings anything besides for cigars or bottles of wine as to not interfere with the dinner. It isn't a potluck. Only a few bottles of wine at best get opened depending upon the number of guests, the rest the hosts will keep and are left to age for another occasion. It would be an egregious faux paus to bring a bottle of wine to a dinner party that was brought to you at a previous one. Or to bring merlot. No one wants merlot.
Dinner parties aren't for pleasure or enjoyment. They are expressions of absurd social dominance or subservience, and gratiutous self-gratification, and I loathe them. I go to them because my wife loves them and it is rude to decline an invitation. It is important, she says, to be fine upstanding members of the community. It is important to be liked and revered and that sort of thing. You might want to run for council someday, she says. Where would you be then if you never went to a dinner party?
I am a history teacher at Lancaster High School and my wife, Julie, is a research biologist at Ohio State University. She often wears pants. She has a doctorate and doesn't believe in the patriarchy, which makes her a dysfunctional feminist. She is a relatively unhappy and mentally unstable person.
She once tried to kill herself by putting her head in a gas oven and baking herself like a meatloaf—only she snuffed the pilot light out so it was all gas and no heat. It didn't work. I found her and I felt obligated to drag her by her ankle to the safety of the front lawn. Then I called the fire department. When she opened her eyes, she was uspet I wasn't the angel Gabriel. Then she worried the neighbors might have seen her so she made up a story about there being a gas leak and every so often at one of the dinner parties someone will bring it up not knowing she was trying to kill herself like a pot roast.
By coincedence, she is jewish and only twenty years before members of her family who lived in France were killed in much the same way. Only they got theirs in the showers first, and then the poor bastards were dragged by their feet to the ovens where they escaped the death camp in a cloud of gray smoke.
We are both in our early forties. We met in high school and married after the war. Julie was a foreign-exchange student from France. The timing was fortuitous for her in that the Nazis barged in soon after she left, so she stayed in the US on a permanent vacation. Our marriage was hunky dory for a while. Then there was the affair, which changed everything. But I saved her reputation by concealing it and murdering the only person who knew—her lover.
No one would expect me capable of murder. I am a rather meek and modest individual. But I suppose we all got it in us, push come to shove, as they say. I didn't murder her lover because I was jealous or out of hatred. I murdered him because she asked me to do so. She said it was the only way she felt she could forgive herself for what she did. And so, as things go, it was done with the indignity of a cheap .38 revolver that I tossed out on the drive home.
Having been in the war, I was already adept at murder, so what did it matter, really? One more or less. He who was guilty of a moral crime I judged him guilty of in my head as though it were a courtroom at Nuremberg. I had no sympathy for him. He was a jew and what's one more, considering. Six million and one, two, three. It was as easy as picking an apple off a tree. I killed at least a dozen men in the war. I was told in bootcamp that war is simple—we got to kill more of them than they kill of us. And so I did.
I never masturbated before the war. Not once. But during the war I went nuts and would crank them out like nobody's business. Like I was Rosie the Riveter cranking out bullets and bombs. It was rather hard to find the privacy, but I managed. However, it became known that I jacked off. Some thought I did it for luck. Others thought I was insane. I masturbated like some men pissed. I did it to calm my nerves.
When I came home and Julie asked me how was France. I said it was awful and she seemed disappointed that I said so. I made an honest woman out of her until she found the love of another man while I was on a fishing trip with my father who had dementia. It's hard to fish with a man with dementia.
In high school, the other kids called her Jew-ly Majewski. Majewski was her maiden name. The one she was born into the world with, like it or not. There was no way for her family to hide from the Nazis with a name like that, which is probably how they ended up in the ovens. Perhaps, their surname was on the mailbox. When I asked her how she became a foreign-exchange student, she said, "Against my will."
She said she was in love with a boy named Robert. Only she didn't say Rah-burt, she said Ro-bear in a mournful sort of way. She said her father made her go to America just to keep her away from Ro-bear. Then she wept until she fell asleep presuming that her beloved Ro-bear became a cloud of smoke. God only knows.
Julie doesn't seem grateful that I went to war and risked life and limb to liberate her beloved France. But in France, the people are very grateful. To this day, August 1, 1962, they have celebrations to honor those who landed at Normandy to begin the liberation of their country and to defeat the Nazis. It had been eighteen years. When Julie asked me once why her people were cursed to suffer in the way that they do, I said I don't know, but killing Jesus, the Son of God, wasn't very smart. She frowned and said it was a rhetorical question.
I hung a portrait of Jesus in our dining room. I said prayers before every meal as catholics do. She bowed her head to say prayers, too, but I always wondered what she thought when I said prayers to Jesus. I wondered if she was mocking me. Sometimes I wondered if she believed anything at all. She said the jews believe Jesus was a false prophet, which is to say that they think He was full of shit.
I asked if they reconsidered after Auschwitz. I told her I would mention it at the dinner party and she forbade me to do so. We are the chosen people, she went on. It says so in the Bible. Based upon all available evidence, I am inclined to disagree. But what do I know. At least she is not a Muslim.
At dinner parties, she gets the chance to blab to everyone else about what she does for a living, which the other wives find interesting in that most of them are housewives and mothers who do not work at all. We don't have children. Julie's womb is a barren desert, or I have jacked off so much that I am out of baby bullets.
And so, at dinner parties, I don't have to listen to her for a while. She talks way too much and I do something else while she talks. I wander around the house and look for interesting things to look at or a place to hide and jack off. I've slowed down since the war, but I still do it on occasions.
I love solariums and closets. I love basements and cellars. Sometimes I sit at someone's desk in their den and imagine I am them. Writing checks. Scolding children. A captain of industry, perhaps.
When I close my eyes and jack off I can see a woman in my mind that seems to be painted on the backs of my eyelids like one of those "Girls! Girls! Girls!" on the cards they hand out to tourists in New York City and places like that, advertising for lewd hostels and unsavory strip clubs.
I've never been in a hostel or a strip club before, but I like to imagine what they are like. I imagine there are big boobs everywhere. Some with pasties on them for the modest girls or the ones who are ashamed of their deformed nipples.
When I close my eyes and jack off I can see a woman in my mind that seems to be painted on the backs of my eyelids like one of those "Girls! Girls! Girls!" on the cards they hand out to tourists in New York City and places like that, advertising for lewd hostels and unsavory strip clubs.
I've never been in a hostel or a strip club before, but I like to imagine what they are like. I imagine there are big boobs everywhere. Some with pasties on them for the modest girls or the ones who are ashamed of their deformed nipples.
I bet they are pretty women. I can't imagine anyone paying for an ugly woman to dance for them, but I suppose that could be a thing. I imagine they dance on a stage and shake their various body parts in seductive and lewd convulsing sorts of ways, especially the black girls who act like they are in the jungle dancing to the beat of a drum for bananas. I imagine you never see their pussies unless you pay money to see their pussies in a special pussy-seeing room where men ogle pussies like they might ogle rare coins or stamps.
When I was 12, I paid a girl to see her pussy. She was 16 and my next door neighbor. Her name was Betty Anne Francis. We went into a closet and I gave her a whole dollar to see it. She called it her peach. In a way, it looked like a peach, but it was covered with a ball of red hair and sort of looked like the unwound guts of a baseball that had been beat to death—a mess of string.
When I was 12, I paid a girl to see her pussy. She was 16 and my next door neighbor. Her name was Betty Anne Francis. We went into a closet and I gave her a whole dollar to see it. She called it her peach. In a way, it looked like a peach, but it was covered with a ball of red hair and sort of looked like the unwound guts of a baseball that had been beat to death—a mess of string.
She parted her red hair with her fingers like Moses parted the Red Sea so that I could see the part that looked like a peach. It looked healthy and clean. It was wonderfully educational. She said some of the boys call her Betty Anne Firecrotch.
She said I could stick my finger in it for another dollar, but I didn't have another dollar, so I just gawped until she pulled her panties up and left.
The woman who appears as I jack off seems to haunt my mind and she exists only there. She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen and I am madly in love with her. As crazy as it might sound, I know that she exists. My brain is not simply inventing her. She is tattooed to my deepest of memories. I think I knew her from another life. I have to jack off to see her. It is like I go to another world.
I'd rather be at home writing in my den away from everyone in this mad world. I do not like communicable diseases or small-talk. I have never been published. As one smug agent said to me after reading my story, The Masturbator, I am unpublishable. My content is unlikely to find a home in anything other than a smut magazine, he went on. But when I sent my story to a smut magazine, they claimed it was not smutty enough and too cerebral. They said I don't get to the point. They called it "artsy-fartsy crap."
She said I could stick my finger in it for another dollar, but I didn't have another dollar, so I just gawped until she pulled her panties up and left.
The woman who appears as I jack off seems to haunt my mind and she exists only there. She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen and I am madly in love with her. As crazy as it might sound, I know that she exists. My brain is not simply inventing her. She is tattooed to my deepest of memories. I think I knew her from another life. I have to jack off to see her. It is like I go to another world.
I'd rather be at home writing in my den away from everyone in this mad world. I do not like communicable diseases or small-talk. I have never been published. As one smug agent said to me after reading my story, The Masturbator, I am unpublishable. My content is unlikely to find a home in anything other than a smut magazine, he went on. But when I sent my story to a smut magazine, they claimed it was not smutty enough and too cerebral. They said I don't get to the point. They called it "artsy-fartsy crap."
The Masturbator was about a man who invented a machine that turned bad people into good people. The only problem was getting them to go into the machine which shook them up and made them orgasm like they had never orgasmed before.
So I am in no danger of ever being published unless there someday is a demand for artsy-fartsy smut. I write of a life I don't have. Of a life that feels like I am sleepwalking through it. I write of a woman who I can never seem to find, nor quite capture into words, but who is clear in my mind when I summon her with the introspection and clarity of my self-pleasure. I probably would have an affair on my wife—I am not above it—but I have never met anyone interesting enough to sleep with who is more attractive than my wife.
The girl on my eyelids is the love interest of all my protagonists. And I am somewhere in the story watching, peeping through a window, a fly on the wall, or sometimes, but not often, I am the protagonist himself and she is my lover. I take my time when I write of her, rereading them over and over, never wanting them to end for when they end it's over, and it feels like death.
Her name is Daisy Bell. I realized that after masturbating ten times in one day.
The stories I write often come when I am sitting on someone's sofa in my suit coat and tie. Dinner parties aren't always formal affairs, but a nice sport's coat and tie is expected. It is 1962, after all. It is not some future time when people might wear blue jeans and t-shirts everywhere they go. Or sneakers and sweat pants. Who knows. Maybe they'll all go barefoot, not cut their hair, and drag their knuckles everywhere they go like apes. Maybe they will not even bathe.
"I imagine someday that formality will die. Decency, civility, manners, decorum, faith, modesty, hopsitality, will all be things of the past and we will live in some soul-sucking, Godless, commercialized communist void full of decadence, crime, corruption, exploitation, fake people, division, homesexuality, hate, and absurdity."
It was a question posed by our host. What does the future look like to you? He was a shrink so it was probably posed to give him insight into each of us. He had drawn it on a large piece of paper as we finished playing charades. The party of six was sipping wine and smoking, and one by one we went around the room. That was my answer.
The others said they see a brighter future of rainbows and sunshine. Of flying cars, scientific advancement, world peace, civility, equality, happy robots, and coexistence. The colonization of the moon, perhaps. Or of Mars. Apartments on spacestations. Underwater worlds. ESP. On and on.
I laughed, adding, "I suppose one who has not been to war might be able to see the world through such rose-colored glasses, but to not see the current downward trend is inexcusably ignorant or intentionally näive. Architecture of today is far less beautiful than that of the early twentieth century and even that of the art deco period of the 20's when we were all young. Music is declining in sophistication. Art, culture, literature. Nothing built today is beautiful or lasting. It's cheap and economical. There are far fewer skilled laborers and less craftmanship. In forty years people will not have dinner parties. They will not even know their neighbors. But I hope you are all right. Maybe we will go to Mars and talk to dolphins."
Julie gave me that look and I shut up. What did it matter, anyhow? The world is absurd and full of shit and I'd rather live in fiction. I'd rather jack off than watch a meaningless ballgame or another dumb movie. Actors aren't real to me. They are fakers. Grown-ups playing make believe. Movies aren't real, either. They are the stolen and exploited words from some writer who will never get his due.
The whole way home Julie gave me the silent treatment. And then we had sex, but it was hateful as it often was. Like stray cats. No words. No kissing. No I love you afterwards. Just pure hate and pleasure. All I could think of afterwards was how miserable I am and how I wish I would have died in France and been spared of my misery. I wished that one of those krauts I killed would have killed me and how they got the easy way out while I had to go on living. The joke, it turns out, was on me.
Julie was beautiful—people often say she looks like a young Ava Gardner. But physical beauty only goes so far and all I could think of was the woman I'd see in the thralls of my self-induced orgasms. That fleeting lovely apparition who floats on my eyeballs like stars. That woman I once picked the purple coneflowers for and watched dance in the rain in the park. I can hear her laughing in my dreams. I can see her face an inch from my own, but when I wake to kiss her, there is only darkness.
In the morning, my blood pressure is high. It feels as though I might have a stroke. Julie says that I sleepwalk. She says I usually go to my den and sit at my desk, but sometimes I go outside. Sometimes I get in the car or act as though I am watering the flowerbeds without the hose being turned on. She said she wishes I would do the dishes, fold laundry, or fuck her, but I never do.
She says she doesn't wake me when I sleepwalk because she has heard that if you wake someone up who is sleepwalking they will die—or go retarded. She says she ignores me because inevitably I will return to bed and snore. She says that I am restless and in my sleep it is as though I am another person.
At a dinner party, I will find a couch and stare off into space. Sometimes I go back to the war. Other times, I am nowhere at all. My tie is loose around my neck. Julie will tighten it if she sees it and scowl at me for loosening it. She thinks her affair is more of a big deal than what it was, and also his murder, though I have told her it is no big deal over and over, people die and are killed all the time. She said she is worried there will be a knock at the door some day. It has has been two years. She is convinced we will both get the electric chair.
He was a jew doctor named Jan Jakko, but, apparently, his name was pronounced Yawn Yok-o. He was tall and had gray hair and a beard. He looked like a wolf on two legs. I shot him dead in a motel room. He was expecting my wife who called him from a pay phone and said she had a room for them at The Blue Bell Motel where I lied in wait. I left the door cracked open for him. He walked in, licking his chops, and said something to the effect, "Oh, honey pie. You didn't get enough Jakko the first time?"
He closed the door behind him, still unaware of what was happening—still thinking I was Julie and I was in the shower or playing hide-and-seek. I could smell his musky aftershave. When he opened the bathroom door, steam from the shower rolled out into the dark of the room and enveloped him.
"No, honey pie. I just didn't get enough Jakko," I said as I shot him in the face with the muzzle of the .38 smothered in an unsuspecting pillow.
So I am in no danger of ever being published unless there someday is a demand for artsy-fartsy smut. I write of a life I don't have. Of a life that feels like I am sleepwalking through it. I write of a woman who I can never seem to find, nor quite capture into words, but who is clear in my mind when I summon her with the introspection and clarity of my self-pleasure. I probably would have an affair on my wife—I am not above it—but I have never met anyone interesting enough to sleep with who is more attractive than my wife.
The girl on my eyelids is the love interest of all my protagonists. And I am somewhere in the story watching, peeping through a window, a fly on the wall, or sometimes, but not often, I am the protagonist himself and she is my lover. I take my time when I write of her, rereading them over and over, never wanting them to end for when they end it's over, and it feels like death.
Her name is Daisy Bell. I realized that after masturbating ten times in one day.
The stories I write often come when I am sitting on someone's sofa in my suit coat and tie. Dinner parties aren't always formal affairs, but a nice sport's coat and tie is expected. It is 1962, after all. It is not some future time when people might wear blue jeans and t-shirts everywhere they go. Or sneakers and sweat pants. Who knows. Maybe they'll all go barefoot, not cut their hair, and drag their knuckles everywhere they go like apes. Maybe they will not even bathe.
"I imagine someday that formality will die. Decency, civility, manners, decorum, faith, modesty, hopsitality, will all be things of the past and we will live in some soul-sucking, Godless, commercialized communist void full of decadence, crime, corruption, exploitation, fake people, division, homesexuality, hate, and absurdity."
It was a question posed by our host. What does the future look like to you? He was a shrink so it was probably posed to give him insight into each of us. He had drawn it on a large piece of paper as we finished playing charades. The party of six was sipping wine and smoking, and one by one we went around the room. That was my answer.
The others said they see a brighter future of rainbows and sunshine. Of flying cars, scientific advancement, world peace, civility, equality, happy robots, and coexistence. The colonization of the moon, perhaps. Or of Mars. Apartments on spacestations. Underwater worlds. ESP. On and on.
I laughed, adding, "I suppose one who has not been to war might be able to see the world through such rose-colored glasses, but to not see the current downward trend is inexcusably ignorant or intentionally näive. Architecture of today is far less beautiful than that of the early twentieth century and even that of the art deco period of the 20's when we were all young. Music is declining in sophistication. Art, culture, literature. Nothing built today is beautiful or lasting. It's cheap and economical. There are far fewer skilled laborers and less craftmanship. In forty years people will not have dinner parties. They will not even know their neighbors. But I hope you are all right. Maybe we will go to Mars and talk to dolphins."
Julie gave me that look and I shut up. What did it matter, anyhow? The world is absurd and full of shit and I'd rather live in fiction. I'd rather jack off than watch a meaningless ballgame or another dumb movie. Actors aren't real to me. They are fakers. Grown-ups playing make believe. Movies aren't real, either. They are the stolen and exploited words from some writer who will never get his due.
The whole way home Julie gave me the silent treatment. And then we had sex, but it was hateful as it often was. Like stray cats. No words. No kissing. No I love you afterwards. Just pure hate and pleasure. All I could think of afterwards was how miserable I am and how I wish I would have died in France and been spared of my misery. I wished that one of those krauts I killed would have killed me and how they got the easy way out while I had to go on living. The joke, it turns out, was on me.
Julie was beautiful—people often say she looks like a young Ava Gardner. But physical beauty only goes so far and all I could think of was the woman I'd see in the thralls of my self-induced orgasms. That fleeting lovely apparition who floats on my eyeballs like stars. That woman I once picked the purple coneflowers for and watched dance in the rain in the park. I can hear her laughing in my dreams. I can see her face an inch from my own, but when I wake to kiss her, there is only darkness.
In the morning, my blood pressure is high. It feels as though I might have a stroke. Julie says that I sleepwalk. She says I usually go to my den and sit at my desk, but sometimes I go outside. Sometimes I get in the car or act as though I am watering the flowerbeds without the hose being turned on. She said she wishes I would do the dishes, fold laundry, or fuck her, but I never do.
She says she doesn't wake me when I sleepwalk because she has heard that if you wake someone up who is sleepwalking they will die—or go retarded. She says she ignores me because inevitably I will return to bed and snore. She says that I am restless and in my sleep it is as though I am another person.
At a dinner party, I will find a couch and stare off into space. Sometimes I go back to the war. Other times, I am nowhere at all. My tie is loose around my neck. Julie will tighten it if she sees it and scowl at me for loosening it. She thinks her affair is more of a big deal than what it was, and also his murder, though I have told her it is no big deal over and over, people die and are killed all the time. She said she is worried there will be a knock at the door some day. It has has been two years. She is convinced we will both get the electric chair.
He was a jew doctor named Jan Jakko, but, apparently, his name was pronounced Yawn Yok-o. He was tall and had gray hair and a beard. He looked like a wolf on two legs. I shot him dead in a motel room. He was expecting my wife who called him from a pay phone and said she had a room for them at The Blue Bell Motel where I lied in wait. I left the door cracked open for him. He walked in, licking his chops, and said something to the effect, "Oh, honey pie. You didn't get enough Jakko the first time?"
He closed the door behind him, still unaware of what was happening—still thinking I was Julie and I was in the shower or playing hide-and-seek. I could smell his musky aftershave. When he opened the bathroom door, steam from the shower rolled out into the dark of the room and enveloped him.
"No, honey pie. I just didn't get enough Jakko," I said as I shot him in the face with the muzzle of the .38 smothered in an unsuspecting pillow.
His face looked like a busted watermelon on the terrible carpet of the motel. Goose feathers went everywhere. Then I cut off his dick and stuffed it in his throat. A personal touch. I felt sorry for the cleaning lady. I walked out and around the building, hopped a fence, walked calmly through a vacant lot, got in my car and left. I tossed the gun in the river and went home to honey pie, who said she was contemplating slitting her wrists.
She was drunk and assured me that it was a one time thing, though she admitted to fucking someone while I was storming the beaches of Normandy to liberate her country. He was 4F, unfit for duty, and she refused to tell me who he was, but I didn't really care. Every so often since then she asks me if I want to know who she fucked while I was overseas saving the world.
No, I say, to her dissatisfaction. We weren't married then. You were under no binding contract, just a reasonable moral obligation.
I suppose I shouldn't have passed on the few pretty French girls that were fucking the Nazis only a few weeks before they were fucking us. If ever there was a barometer as to how the war was going, it was told by French pussy.
Julie lost a leg in a ski accident the following year, which was all my fault. I failed to latch her left ski properly and she went down an 80 foot slope into a grove of Norwegian spruce pines. She cried that she was cursed and this was God paying her back for the affair. Then they gave her a second dose of morphine and she went ape. When she awoke, she said she could see all of her relatives who died in Auschwitz. They appeared to her in plumes of smoke as she lied in bed.
I didn't have the heart to tell her that the smoke came from my cigarettes as I sat by her bedside chainsmoking. I suppose it is possible for her relatives to have been reincarnated as Lucky Strikes—unlikely—but possible.
She was drunk and assured me that it was a one time thing, though she admitted to fucking someone while I was storming the beaches of Normandy to liberate her country. He was 4F, unfit for duty, and she refused to tell me who he was, but I didn't really care. Every so often since then she asks me if I want to know who she fucked while I was overseas saving the world.
No, I say, to her dissatisfaction. We weren't married then. You were under no binding contract, just a reasonable moral obligation.
I suppose I shouldn't have passed on the few pretty French girls that were fucking the Nazis only a few weeks before they were fucking us. If ever there was a barometer as to how the war was going, it was told by French pussy.
Julie lost a leg in a ski accident the following year, which was all my fault. I failed to latch her left ski properly and she went down an 80 foot slope into a grove of Norwegian spruce pines. She cried that she was cursed and this was God paying her back for the affair. Then they gave her a second dose of morphine and she went ape. When she awoke, she said she could see all of her relatives who died in Auschwitz. They appeared to her in plumes of smoke as she lied in bed.
I didn't have the heart to tell her that the smoke came from my cigarettes as I sat by her bedside chainsmoking. I suppose it is possible for her relatives to have been reincarnated as Lucky Strikes—unlikely—but possible.
Shalom.
I was going to get a divorce, but she warned me that she would turn me in for murder, even though she would incriminate herself in so doing. I suppose she could deny any knowledge of my actions, but she would have to admit to the affair to establish my motive.
"Affair" is such a minimizing sort of word for such a brutish and selfish act of sleazy betrayal. In truth, if she accused me of murder she would find herself also accused, and she wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
What's more, she developed some type of breast cancer and made it widely known that she had breast cancer, so if I was to leave her, my reputation would be sullied. Plus, she had incriminating letters written to me by a senior student of the class of 1958, four short years ago, a girl who loved me like I've never been loved, or so she said, but who was probably infatuated rather than in love. What's the difference?
The girl, Kelly Cristy, and I had a brief affair that existed only in the imagination, the ink of a dozen letters, and in the ether of stifling summer heat.
Kelly was a beautiful girl, a blossoming woman, but she was not the girl on the back of my eyelids, thus, I didn't trespass onto her presumptive virginity and break any laws, not for fear of the consequence—jail would have freed me from a dull marriage, after all—but because I didn't want to bear the moral responsibility of what such an affair would have on the innocent girl who was thus far, presumably only guilty in the fancy of her hormonal teenage thoughts.
I kept the letters she wrote only because they were beautifully and erotically written, and I used them to jack off, one bringing me to orgasm in six seconds—my aforementioned record time. I have always been a sucker for romantic sentiment. I dreamed one day of getting so good at masturbating that I could orgasm without touching myself at all.
I found out later that Kelly was fucking her science teacher, Don Poland, who was a good friend of mine and who bragged about it over beers one night a year or so after she graduated when it was safe to do so. He said they fucked like rabbits in his Buick at the drive-in, and about anywhere else they could, including a few times in the classroom. He went on and on like Ted Williams goes on and on about hitting.
He said she was a dream come true in such a way that I didn't doubt him. The lascivious slimy bastard who smelled of formaldehyde and dead frogs ruined those love letters for me. I once thought my affair with the girl to be exclusive and her to be a pristine sexual neophyte only to have my bubble burst to the reality of her obscene juvenile whoredom.
Julie found what became known as "The Letters" in the glove box of my 57 Chevy Bel-Air. Everything was known in such a way.
I was going to get a divorce, but she warned me that she would turn me in for murder, even though she would incriminate herself in so doing. I suppose she could deny any knowledge of my actions, but she would have to admit to the affair to establish my motive.
"Affair" is such a minimizing sort of word for such a brutish and selfish act of sleazy betrayal. In truth, if she accused me of murder she would find herself also accused, and she wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
What's more, she developed some type of breast cancer and made it widely known that she had breast cancer, so if I was to leave her, my reputation would be sullied. Plus, she had incriminating letters written to me by a senior student of the class of 1958, four short years ago, a girl who loved me like I've never been loved, or so she said, but who was probably infatuated rather than in love. What's the difference?
The girl, Kelly Cristy, and I had a brief affair that existed only in the imagination, the ink of a dozen letters, and in the ether of stifling summer heat.
Kelly was a beautiful girl, a blossoming woman, but she was not the girl on the back of my eyelids, thus, I didn't trespass onto her presumptive virginity and break any laws, not for fear of the consequence—jail would have freed me from a dull marriage, after all—but because I didn't want to bear the moral responsibility of what such an affair would have on the innocent girl who was thus far, presumably only guilty in the fancy of her hormonal teenage thoughts.
I kept the letters she wrote only because they were beautifully and erotically written, and I used them to jack off, one bringing me to orgasm in six seconds—my aforementioned record time. I have always been a sucker for romantic sentiment. I dreamed one day of getting so good at masturbating that I could orgasm without touching myself at all.
I found out later that Kelly was fucking her science teacher, Don Poland, who was a good friend of mine and who bragged about it over beers one night a year or so after she graduated when it was safe to do so. He said they fucked like rabbits in his Buick at the drive-in, and about anywhere else they could, including a few times in the classroom. He went on and on like Ted Williams goes on and on about hitting.
He said she was a dream come true in such a way that I didn't doubt him. The lascivious slimy bastard who smelled of formaldehyde and dead frogs ruined those love letters for me. I once thought my affair with the girl to be exclusive and her to be a pristine sexual neophyte only to have my bubble burst to the reality of her obscene juvenile whoredom.
Julie found what became known as "The Letters" in the glove box of my 57 Chevy Bel-Air. Everything was known in such a way.
The Letters. The Affair. The Murder. The War. The Leg. The Oven. The Sleepwalk.
Although Julie believed the letters to have been unrequited, and our affair platonic, she tried to use them as leverage against me. Thus, I learned that marriage is a war of attrition, little more than a union of leverage and blackmail, and a race to see who dies, snaps, breaks, or surrenders first.
And this is the part where a new chapter is written—the chapter called The Dinner Party.
I must admit that when I make love to my wife, I feel like I am cheating. I am cheating on the woman on the back of my eyelids who exists somewhere in a haze or a fog. Who lives a lifetime in the blink of an eye. Somewhere between breaths. Between blinks. Between consciousness and unconsciousness. Between words. Between thoughts. Between worlds. And so I masturbate, not because I am some sort of satyromaniac—I masturbate to see her, however briefly. It is like having a seizure. Or eating psychedelic mushrooms.
I drove to the dinner party presuming it was to be like any other. There would be dinner, maybe duck à l'orange and chocolate mousse for desert. I always tried to guess what soup would be served on the drive over—that's how terrible my life had become. We would eat, play some silly game, watch some slides, make conversation, smoke, and then go home like normal.
Maybe I'd fuck my wife afterwards. Maybe not. Somewhere and sometime in a marriage, passion fades to complacency and sex is usurped by a good book or TV. But I did not want her anymore. I never really wanted her at all.
I was ready to kill myself. I wouldn't stick my head in an oven. I'd probably blow my brains out. Maybe I'd poison myself like a rat. Or I'd hang myself. One way or another, I was sure of it. Tonight was the night that I would go home and kill myself.
In the words of Shakespeare, "Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Some believe in reincarnation, but I don't know. I can't imagine being trapped in life with no way out. To be caught life after life in this terrible world in which there seems to be no purpose at all other than to work and socialize until your body breaks down and you are all used up. Until some cancer eats you from the inside, or your heart explodes all the while suffering the cumulative indignations of age. Baldness. Hairy ears. Liver spots. Varicose veins. A pot belly. Dwindling sexual prowess. On and on.
I was ready to kill myself. I wouldn't stick my head in an oven. I'd probably blow my brains out. Maybe I'd poison myself like a rat. Or I'd hang myself. One way or another, I was sure of it. Tonight was the night that I would go home and kill myself.
In the words of Shakespeare, "Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Some believe in reincarnation, but I don't know. I can't imagine being trapped in life with no way out. To be caught life after life in this terrible world in which there seems to be no purpose at all other than to work and socialize until your body breaks down and you are all used up. Until some cancer eats you from the inside, or your heart explodes all the while suffering the cumulative indignations of age. Baldness. Hairy ears. Liver spots. Varicose veins. A pot belly. Dwindling sexual prowess. On and on.
But this dinner party was different. The house was a historic old yellow house and the driveway was lined with pink rosebushes. The wallpaper inside the foyer was ornamental, cream and gold. The banister felt familiar under my hand—the chandelier above me—the spiral staricase—it all felt inexplicably familiar. The hardwood floors croaked gently beneath my feet as though to welcome me back to a place I was sure I had before never been—at least not in this lifetime. But my brain spun and I asked my wife with a quick whisper if perhaps we had been here before at another dinner party that I had simply forgotten.
"No," she whispered back. "I just met this couple at the country club. They invited us for doubles tennis, but the wife, whose name is Esther, had a migraine and they canceled. Remember?"
My wife, despite her one leg, played tennis better than most people with two. It is a sight to behold. Her hobbling around the court like a human pogo stick.
But this house I rememember. The smell of it struck me. It was an old familiar scent, that of a grandfather's pipe or the redolence of some flowers—Easter lilies, perhaps—or lilac. Beside the porch there were giant lilac bushes, though their blooms were gone. I knew they were there before I saw them. I went back outside to confirm and there they were, green and full of life, the faint scent of their dead flowers clinging to the branches.
Julie looked at me as though I had lost my mind. I didn't say anything—nothing at all—but I must have looked insane. I knew the tree in the yard. It was a sycamore. I walked through the yard to it and ran my hand along the bark like it was an old friend. Then I found the engraving that I knew I would find—DP+DB—inside a heart.
Julie was embarrassed. I realized I was still holding the bottle of wine, so I handed it to our host—David something. David anything. David nothing. David Cady. What did it matter, though? What was life doing to me now? Had I lost my mind so close to the end? Is this what it is to be suicidal and resolved to die? Was I hallucinating false memories?
It couldn't be. Someone asked if I was okay. Not Julie, for she was too embarrassed to speak to me.
"No," she whispered back. "I just met this couple at the country club. They invited us for doubles tennis, but the wife, whose name is Esther, had a migraine and they canceled. Remember?"
My wife, despite her one leg, played tennis better than most people with two. It is a sight to behold. Her hobbling around the court like a human pogo stick.
But this house I rememember. The smell of it struck me. It was an old familiar scent, that of a grandfather's pipe or the redolence of some flowers—Easter lilies, perhaps—or lilac. Beside the porch there were giant lilac bushes, though their blooms were gone. I knew they were there before I saw them. I went back outside to confirm and there they were, green and full of life, the faint scent of their dead flowers clinging to the branches.
Julie looked at me as though I had lost my mind. I didn't say anything—nothing at all—but I must have looked insane. I knew the tree in the yard. It was a sycamore. I walked through the yard to it and ran my hand along the bark like it was an old friend. Then I found the engraving that I knew I would find—DP+DB—inside a heart.
Julie was embarrassed. I realized I was still holding the bottle of wine, so I handed it to our host—David something. David anything. David nothing. David Cady. What did it matter, though? What was life doing to me now? Had I lost my mind so close to the end? Is this what it is to be suicidal and resolved to die? Was I hallucinating false memories?
It couldn't be. Someone asked if I was okay. Not Julie, for she was too embarrassed to speak to me.
Yes, I am okay. But this house is eerily familiar to me. It is like I've been here before, I confessed. It was early summer that I remember it last. The sycamore was younger then. The rosebushes were in bloom. The driveway wasn't asphalt, though. It was brick, or cobblestone. What a shame they covered it. Yes, I went on, I have been here before.
"Well, welcome back then," David smiled. "You're right by the way. We did repave the brick driveway about ten years ago. This house has been in my wife's family for a hundred years. Since the Civil War, I think. Maybe a little sooner. When she returns, I'll ask her. Pardon her please, by the way. She has a migraine and is resting at present, but I am sure she will join us soon."
I joined Julie and the other seven guests and we all went inside and the sensation I caused soon dissipated. The yard was full of fireflies. The early evening dusk was settling. It was a fitting end for me. To be familiar with something as I had lived my life so unfamiliar with everything else. Unfamiliar with love and friends. Nothing seemed to fit or to match my interests. Nothing felt comfortable or normal. Not even my own mother.
I always felt out of place and strange. And if the autopsy of my life would draw an honest conclusion, it would indicate that I had been plagued by melancholy, though I had nothing at all to be sad about. Nothing to regret or to rue. Nothing to mourn other than my father who died as naturally as one could die of old age. I suffered no great tragedy or misfortune, other than that of the war.
The house seemed to have some supernatural power over me and try as I may to appear normal, I was in the palm of the hand of a greater being who seemed to be amused by me for this one moment in time. Maybe as He was amused when I was traipsing all over France and Europe just to get all the way to Berlin to find out that old Adolf, who had started the whole ruckus, had offed himself already.
Hooray! Hoorah! So I jacked off in the führerbunker.
My wife, in a futile attempt to bring me back to reality, whispered that David and Esther Cady are ardent supporters of President Kennedy—so don't mention how the election was stolen from Nixon. Such a faux paux could mean excommunication from the dinner party circuit. I wouldn't dare. Nor would I bring up anything about Jack banging Marilyn Monroe—who was somewhere in LA with a butthole full of benzos.
When things went back to relatively normal and they all stopped paying attention to me, I couldn't help but to wander. When Julie was telling someone for the hundredth time about her cancer and the ski accident which took her leg, I excused myself to the bathroom where I found immediate refuge in the black and white tile. In the ivory sink. In the bronze faucet. I knew it. I had washed my face in this sink before, I was sure. I had drank from the sink. I regarded myself in the mirror when I was a younger man. There I was with my brown hair parted. My eyes full of life and pride. Not as I look now, but as I was then. Different, but not different at all.
I went through a hallway as though I knew where I was going, but how could I know. The art and decor was different, but the walls were the same. I went straight to the den, which was now a library, where the sound of soft music played and, along with a soft amber light, creeped out of the sliver of a slightly-opened door. It was a song I hadn't heard in years. The most perfect and beautiful melody. A song from another life which passed like a dream, but that which plays in the lonely theater of my unsettled mind. A theater in which no one sits and the reel plays on a loop. But suddenly I could hear it again.
My wife, in a futile attempt to bring me back to reality, whispered that David and Esther Cady are ardent supporters of President Kennedy—so don't mention how the election was stolen from Nixon. Such a faux paux could mean excommunication from the dinner party circuit. I wouldn't dare. Nor would I bring up anything about Jack banging Marilyn Monroe—who was somewhere in LA with a butthole full of benzos.
When things went back to relatively normal and they all stopped paying attention to me, I couldn't help but to wander. When Julie was telling someone for the hundredth time about her cancer and the ski accident which took her leg, I excused myself to the bathroom where I found immediate refuge in the black and white tile. In the ivory sink. In the bronze faucet. I knew it. I had washed my face in this sink before, I was sure. I had drank from the sink. I regarded myself in the mirror when I was a younger man. There I was with my brown hair parted. My eyes full of life and pride. Not as I look now, but as I was then. Different, but not different at all.
I went through a hallway as though I knew where I was going, but how could I know. The art and decor was different, but the walls were the same. I went straight to the den, which was now a library, where the sound of soft music played and, along with a soft amber light, creeped out of the sliver of a slightly-opened door. It was a song I hadn't heard in years. The most perfect and beautiful melody. A song from another life which passed like a dream, but that which plays in the lonely theater of my unsettled mind. A theater in which no one sits and the reel plays on a loop. But suddenly I could hear it again.
Daisy. Daisy. Give me your answer do.
I'm half crazy. All for the love of you.
I knew the song—Daisy Bell from 1894. Recently in 1961, an IBM computer at Bell Labs artifcially sang the song in a startling first for computer technology. Someday, surely, it would be recognized as the earliest precursor of the artifical intelligence takeover—when humans should have realized that one day they would be obsolete. But I hadn't time for that for my interest was piqued by the house and the room.
I pushed the door open gently and the grammophone was playing as though it had set itself and selected Harry Dacre out of what seemed like a thousand records on the shelf, placed it on the turntable, and gently set the needle to the vinyl. Maybe ghosts are in fact real. I felt weak, lightheaded, and dizzy all at once and I had to sit, so I sat in a green leather chair to get a hold of myself. But I couldn't sit because I was too familiar with the song and excited that I was hearing it.
Then just as I started the song over, a woman stood up from a Victorian crimson velvet sofa, the back of which was turned to me which had successfully concealed her. She was subtle and slight and lithe, so beautifully shapen that she barely existed at all.
"Oh, pardon me," she apologized. Her plump limps ennunciating the words carefully so that every syllable was perfect. "I was just lying down. I have had a terrible headache. I get these awful sorts of migraines."
I couldn't reply for I was speechless looking at her. She stood there like the final piece of the puzzle of which I had began the night with only one piece. In that familiar house was the dream of all my dreams. The one who I had written of in my den, isolated from the noise and hullabaloo of a world of which I've grown weary. The one I had written about so that I could spend time with her, even in the absurdity of fiction. Even in the conflagration of my dreams. My fingers bringing her to life, word by word, letter by letter. And the more I wrote of her, the clearer she became until at last here she was, resurrected from pen and page just as she was on the back of my eyelids derived from my intense self-pleasure.
Surely, she must have known who she was to me. She must have known. She looked at me and smiled, despite the aforementioned headache. She was short and svelte with long brown wavy hair that was rich in health and hue. She wore an outdated lacey ivory dress with long sleeves and a collar that concelealed her pale and willowy kneck.
There was a cocktail glass in her hand and she started to say something, but her words were lost there between us as mine were lost. Words became pointless and impractical things suddenly. Impediments to action, in fact. They became impractical and fruitless. Words are for those who cannot speak with their eyes as we spoke with our eyes that were locked across the room. Language was derived for the stupid, a handicap for lack of intuition. I knew that she knew. It didn't need to be explained.
"Would you dance with me?"
She shook her head yes and reset the needle so that the song played from the beginning. She was Daisy, which is what endeared us to the song once upon a time. It was as though it was written for us. I took her in my arms and we danced. Without introducing each other. Without saying a word more. It wasn't in this life that we last danced last. It was in another from before, and between now and then we had been so rudely interrupted by death and displaced to another life through which we both have stumbled, unsure of our purpose. This life has been little more than a sleepwalk. It was as though at birth I was given a bad drug and the side-effect was lasting, until, at last, I met the cure.
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.
I'm half crazy. All for the love of you.
It won't be a stylish marriage.
I can't afford a carriage.
But you'll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two.
We danced a slow dance, despite the song's up-tempo melody. It was always slow to us. Every song was slow to us—thus, reason to press my cheek to hers despite the formality. To feel her hands clasped in mine—our bodies seperated only by stitches and a modest amount of cotton and lace, but by no trepidation. By no doubt or worry.
She was overcome with emotion, as I was, and she said that she felt her migraines were the product of a melancholy that has plagued her all her life. Then she whispered in my ear an appellation—Daniel. Daniel. Please, don't leave me! They were words that echoed from a lifetime ago.
I knew this to be my name for it was familiar to me, more familiar to me than the name I knew in this life—Jack Offermann. I wasn't Jack Offermann at all. I was Daniel Perry. This was a borrowed body. Merely a vessel.
I couldn't resist her. She was a dream realized. I unzipped her dress and kissed her passionately, recklessly. There was but a closed door between us and the dinner party. Those that wouldn't understand or believe what we knew. Her lips parted and her mouth grew complicit. Impetuous or foolish as it was, I unzipped her dress further and she impeded me not in the least. Not one word was spoken in support of fidelity or better judgment, or needed to argue against it, for we were not who we are, but we are who we were.
Her dress slid off her subtle shoulders and she wore nothing beneath. She was thin and her breasts were as slight as the rest of her, soft and modest, contrary to her lavish beauty and her large brown eyes that consented to anything to which I dared, and that which reflected the soft amber electric candlelight of a stained-glass chandelier which watched us from above like a voyeur without the slightest indication of disapproval. My fingers played her ribs like an instrument before their pilgrimage to where they naturally belonged in her most intimate cradle.
I could not resist. I devoured her on that velvet sofa. I was starved of her. I was erect in such a way that I had been unfamiliar, and she grabbed me and pulled me up and over to her inner thigh, dragging me over her velvet skin which I painted with anticipation. I quivered there on the warmth of her lips which glazed over my head as I pressed slightly into them, entering her softly as though to only enjoy the moment. As though to stand in her foyer—a most welcome guest. I was an impatient visitor at her door.
But then, in my impatience, I greedily and brutally spread her open and held her down on the sofa and pushed deep inside of her, unable to resist further. She was tight and I had never felt anything as pleasurable or as seemingly pure as it was inside of her and that paradisical body. I pushed deeper and she moaned and cried in pleasure with her legs wrapped around my waste and her hands clawing my back to pull me closer.
I didn't care who came through the door in that instant. In fact, for a moment I wanted them to come. I wanted all of them to come and to watch. This was natural lovemaking. She was mine and I was hers long before we came into this foreign life and our loyalty was to that former life which was interrupted so unfairly by fate, which then recast us to this life, and suddenly now we made our first and most grand introduction. It was one hell of a reunion.
I have never fucked anyone so hard in my life and still she flowed all over the sofa and onto my cock that humiliated whoever came before me for no one could have loved her as much, or as passionately, or as deeply than I. She kept coming repeatedly, but I held out, enjoying every eruption and convulsion her body offered me. Every deep and forgiving kiss of all the years lost. I savored that which we had never the chance to do in that former life that had betrayed us so wrongly. It was all ruined somehow, but we now reaped our reparations.
She was the woman on the back of my eyelids. And as I came, which felt like the flood of years and a lifetime, I recalled the last time I had seen her. She lived in this house. Her parents allowed me to speak to her. Her father slapped me on the shoulder, proud as though he were my own father.
It was June, 1917, and we just graduated high school. I could feel the wool of the uniform itching my neck and I held her hand as she took me into this room where her parents granted us the privacy to say goodbye. She cried in my arms and I promised to return to marry her. Then it was goodbye and she gave me a handkerchief, a picture, and a letter that begged me to return, reminding me that I promised we would ride a bicycle made for two.
I could have made love to her a lifetime ago, there on that same sofa, but I didn't. I wanted to wait until we married so not to offend God, or so not to devalue herself should I not return.
No one came in. We dressed and then I left her. Reluctantly, I left her. We had gotten away with it and no one was the wiser. She asked to see me again before I left the room and I promised her soon, and that I would phone her. Of course, I would. How could I not? She was everything to me in this life or that. She was love reborn and she saved me from suicide.
Esther, as they knew her, Daisy to me, always to me, stayed in the library but came out later saying her migraine was gone and that she felt much better. Her husband, David, doted upon her and she squirmed away from him in her discomfort. She looked at me and I looked at her but not in a obvious manner. All I could do was to watch. I couldn't then take her from him. I was bound by some manner of decorum and civility. I had to be patient, but I feared I would lose her in my patience as I had a lifetime ago.
When David told her that I was interested in the house's history, she told everyone that she inherited the house from her father who passed in 1949 of heart failure. Her mother, she mentioned, Daisy Bell, like the song, died in 1920 of suicide. She was depressed over a lost love and unable to live with my father, who she didn't love, but married to supplant her grief.
"I am very much like my mother," she smiled. "I often wear her clothes, as I am now. And at times, it is as though, I carry her grief. All her tears showered over my crib."
When I got home, I decided that I must go to France. I must go and find Julie's former sweetheart, Ro-bear, as impractical as it was. I furiously masturbated with the sheen of Daisy all over me. She glistened in my hand. I did so for clarity and because I was overstimulated. Julie was suspicious for I was happy when I hadn't been happy in years. But I told her that I simply enjoyed the wine a little too well. My patience and desire to do things tastefully was making a terrible liar out of me.
What happened? She asked. She had a prosthetic leg. She sat on the bed and took it off and stood it by the bed. Then she slung her stub onto the bed as I stood beside her.
I want a divorce, I said. In fact, I don't want a divorce, I need a divorce.
This is absurd, she replied. I will not hear of it. You're drunk.
No. I am not. Your infidelity is too much for me to bear.
You cost me a leg, Jack.
I am not going to be to blame for your skiing accident anymore.
I'll put my head in the oven.
That is cheaper than a divorce. All I want is a divorce, Julie.
Why.
I've already said.
No, you haven't. And I don't believe you. You murdered him.
I'll murder you.
You wouldn't.
I would.
Well, murder me then.
Silence.
How would you murder me, she asked.
I don't know how, but I will.
I left the room.
Julie didn't call the police I thought she would, but she didn't. If she called the police my plan would be thwarted. Of course, I could laugh and say it was absurd, but I couldn't then murder her and get away with it. It would be a fool-proof plan, minus some modest embarrassment. I was sure she wrote it somewhere that I would murder her—that if she ever came up dead, I murdered her. Or maybe she told a friend.
Note to self—never tell someone you intend to murder them if you do, in fact, intend to murder them.
But I wasn't going to murder Julie. The next day the world found out that Marilyn Monroe died in bed with a butthole full of benzos and barbituates. She was likely murdered. It was very unlikely that her murderer told her he was going to murder her. It probably came as a surprise.
I called Esther on Monday. School was a month from starting back up so I had time before I returned to work. She asked what took me so long. She was expecting me to call on Sunday. I apologized and said I didn't want to call when her husband was home. He wouldn't have thought anything of it, she assured me. He was playing golf all day. We could have had the house to ourselves. She had been waiting by the phone. Her husband was at work. She asked me if I heard about Marilyn Monroe.
Awful, I said.
Yeah, awful, she agreed.
On Tuesday afternoon she met me at Hotel Lancaster. We made love so long and passionately that neither of us could get up afterwards. We were defenseless, lying there in the hotel bed like two fumigated bugs, naked and clinging to life in the glow of a TV that slowly warped our minds. They were talking about Marilyn Monroe, nuclear war, and the Soviets. On and on.
But the world could have been on fire and it wouldn't have mattered at all to us. I went home briefly on Wednesaday and left my wife a curt note that said I was going on a fishing trip and I wouldn't be back until Sunday.
I rented a cabin at the lake and Esther, my Daisy, came with me. She told her husband that she had a sick aunt in Toledo and had to stay the week. She'd phone when she could. Lying bought us some time, but I didn't sit well in me. Our timeless romance was reduced to that of a sordid affair worthy of a television soap-opera.
She phoned once when we went to the nearest town for food and apologized for not phoning earlier. She looked at me while she talked to him with apologies in the depths of her eyes. I knew then that I was done with lying. Her husband was an asshole who was an impediment to our happiness. I didn't phone Julie. The note was suffice. She didn't deserve anything more. I murdered her with ambiguity.
I taught Daisy how to fish and we rowed out onto Chippewa Lake and made love in a canoe without capsizing which is an art. She got undressed and was completely naked, the sun bright and warm upon her small breasts, smiling as other canoes and larger boats passed at a reasonable enough distance so that she would be like a vague blur of a brushstroke of a watercolor Monet never painted—Lovers in a Canoe.
She rode me in the canoe until we both were satisfied. We drank wine and picked flowers. I told her what I remembered of our former life, of France, the first time. Of my death. And she spoke only briefly of her suicide.
"It was the betrayal that ended me. That I had betrayed you, even in death. I couldn't live with myself anymore. Not even for a child. And it was my own child that I became. I suppose all that weeping at her bedside, the tears as I held her, the life in me left and found life in her, she who became me, or I that became her. And so I was raised by a widowed father that I myself had widowed.
"Strange, isn't it?" she went on. "He was a good man, but he was not you. And you were born again, presumably to someone close to who you were shortly after your death. Then we found each other again. It is the Masters that lead us on to the new life. It is they who led us back together. They were our Cupid."
When we went back on Sunday and I dropped Daisy off at her car and kissed her goodbye. I promised her that the next time we were together, we wouldn't be seperated again. I went home and packed my things. Jack Offerman was dead. He was an imposter. I was Daniel Perry again, and it is how I intended to live the rest of my life. I planned to change all my documents.
Fate had landed Julie in the US as a foreign exchange student just weeks before the Nazis stormed through France. And as beautiful as she was to look at, she was sinister and shallow and I knew she belonged to someone else. Whatever of a soul she possessed was devoured like a rose pedal by a beetle. The devil was that beetle. She who betrayed me at least twice by making love to other men. She who persuaded me to murder to exculpate herself of the sin of adultery. But if not for her dragging me to dinner parties, I would not have met Daisy.
I might have expected I'd come home and there she would be with her head in the oven. And then I'd have to pull her out like a forgotten ham, her head full of gas, and call the authorities to come in and do their investigation and so on. Then I'd have to plan her funeral. Deal with a rabbi. Pay the expense to bury her because she hadn't any family left to share that burden. Worse, I would have to eulogize her. And I'd be expected to be in mourning for a while, which I would have to fake because it wouldn't be mourning at all. It would be a quiet reprieve from the ennui of a loveless marriage and a soulless woman who deserved not the thoughts and affections I once paid her in my mind traipsing across her native France to liberate her countrymen.
"Come on and have yourself a whore, Offmann," my sergeant implored me in Lyon. He always messed up my last name. He had two smiling women in the crux of each arm, practically in headlocks.
I shook my head and passed. I suppose, though, I was not being loyal to Julie. I was subconsciously loyal to Daisy and morose because I couldn't have her. I didn't even known her. The second time in France, I survived. The first I did not. I wondered as I walked into the house how I got it. How I got it in France in the first World War. I had no memory of it. I had memory of being there, but no memory of how it ended. I suppose I could hire a hypnotist if ever I wanted to know, but what did it even matter now? The truth is I got it like too many others.
It was well past 9. The house was dark. I suppose I could pretend that I was only sleepwalking, but I was done pretending. It feels as though I have been on a sleepwalk all my life.
The cat was nowhere to be found when usually he is by the door waiting for me. I suppose I had been gone so long that he stopped waiting. I walked in and checked the oven. Julie wasn't in it. I walked up the stairs and I thought of my favorite book The Great Gatsby. If this were Gatsby, Julie would be waiting for me with a .38 and she would turn my head into a canoe as I had that of Dr. Jan Jakko. Then Daisy would either commit suicide or she would live on as Esther Cady—Mrs. David Cady—and the story would end.
But this is not Gatsby, and I am no dreamer. I am a practical and sensible man. And all my dissatisfaction with that novel's ending played a role in me grabbing my .45 and putting it in my waistband. Then I went in to tell Julie that we were done and I was moving on with Daisy. It was all over. And she could go back to France and look for her Ro-bear, if she wanted to. It was safe to return to France. They were currently between invasions.
I remembered then what happened in the First War. I remember being ordered to traverse the field between the trenches which was strewn with barbwire, landmines, and the corpses of too many unfortunate horses and men to count. Indiscriminate meat. 100 yards of rotten, putrid death.
A patrol of us were ordered to go into a trench that had been abandoned by the krauts, clear it, then set a flare to let the rest know that it was safe and it wasn't a trap. We were the allowable and necessary sacrifice. We had shelled them to hell and back and all that was left was a few scattered bodies throughout, and rats—thousands of feasting, opportune rats. The rest of the krauts had fallen back.
Their trench was much like ours. There were makeshift tables with cards and canteens. Ladders. There were cigarettes and limbs. Heads. There was a dog who was left behind. Some sort of wiry-haired schnauzer with a guilty and fearful conscience who ran away from me. His tags jingled as he disappeared around a corner.
The other soldiers were behind me and were busy taking things. Chocolate. Food. Cigarettes. Paper. Candles. Anything they could fit in their pockets. I kept moving, following the dog until I came across the gray mass of a boy slumped over in one corner of the bunker. He couldn't have been but sixteen. His eyes blue and empty stared ahead at me. His head slumped. His body appeared propped up and I realized he had been stabbed and was impaled against the sandbag wall—I presumed by one of his own as we were the first Americans in the jerry's trench.
He looked dead and blood cascaded down his chin and stained his uniform coat like a bib. The object, which appeared to be a spear, or flagpole, ran in a most unforgiving manner through the center of his torso. Sunlight, which somehow found its way through the smoke and the lingering debris of a fading cloud, haloed his head. His hair was a clumpy mess of greasy curls, still molded in the form of the iron helmet which lay between his feet that I realized were dangling from the ground.
Julie was in bed. Making love to a pale gray stranger. I opened the door and there they were. Going at it. The radio was on. Soft static and music through the speaker.
In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight.
I watched for a moment and it was pathetic. She was a bad actress and he was an ugly man, plump and humping her like some sort of rabid, lecherous, disabled animal. He had no rhythm and looked like he didn't know what the fuck he was doing. Her prosthetic leg was by the bed. Her stump was whacking him on the hip and her leg was curled around his back. The cat was by the bed watching, too. He was the only one who saw me in the doorway. I didn't disturb them. I quietly crept back to my den, retrieved my camera, and took several pictures. The lion was still sleeping when I left.
I thought she was going to kill herself or shoot me. If Fitzgerald wrote our ending, she would have. Instead, she simply reverted back to who she was all along. Maybe it was in her French nature. She must have known that I was somewhere with someone else. I wondered for a moment who he was, tried to catch a look, then decided I didn't really care. I quietly went back to my den, packed up my 10,000 dollars and anything else of value, and headed out. I felt bad for leaving the cat, but he was a casualty of war.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
I walked again through that bunker to the impaled jerry. He wasn't anything to me then but a boy. Not a combatant or an adversary. And I wanted to help him, though he was beyond help. I wanted to remove the spear and lay him down for his mother's sake. Before the vultures found him and ate his eyes. I wanted to bury him, check his pockets for letters or pictures. Maybe I could write home for him. Explain to whoever was waiting that this wasn't my idea.
Maybe he had a Daisy at home, too. I wanted to apologize on behalf of life itself as though I was an ambassador. On behalf of God. But I couldn't read or speak a lick of German. It was a bunch of garbled nonsense to me. Maybe I'd find someone who could translate.
Loud biplanes rolled over the trench to have a look—the good guys. They dipped their wings and we waved up. Our guardian angels, one soldier behind me said. I was thinking of Daisy. If there was one thing I wish she could have seen, it would have been those planes. She talked about planes—how she would like to be a pilot someday. I smiled as they flew away like a dream of her.
The young soldier was still alive, and with whatever life he had left in his dying body as I looked back down at him, smiling still, he mustered his last bit of strength and raised the pistol he had concealed in his sleeve and shot a hole in my heart. I fell to the ground and looked up to the gray sky. Daisy slowly slipped away from me.
The noise of the gun robbed me of the quietude I had allied myself with—that I found peace and comfort in after so much hellish noise that had plagued me for months. Hell itself knew no worse cacophony than that of war. And hell itself burned a hole in my heart with his bullet. A hole I carried into another life. That is what happened to me once upon a lifetime ago. And that is why I didn't come home.
I called Daisy and met her at her house 15 minutes later—9:37pm on Sunday night. Fate still had a chance to thwart our plans, but I wasn't going to give it time to decide how it would do so. I was through with being patient or discreet. I love her and she loves me. This was not an affair and it was not The Great Gatsby. There would be no tragic ending. No death of a dream shot dead in a pool, tragically bleeding out in the diffusion of crimson rivulets. Not if I could do anything about it. I couldn't wait anymore. I had lived long enough without her—45 years—an entire lifetime.
She smiled at me at the door, pleased that I had come. She said David was not home. He was somewhere playing poker. She said she told him she wanted a divorce and he agreed because he knew she wasn't happy. Who ever wants to be the cause of someone's misery? He would hire movers and move out to the country house on Monday. She invited me in and I stood in the foyer as she packed her bags and wondered.
"Does your husband have a large mole on his back and a birthmark that looks like a heart?"
"Yes, he does," she said handing me her bags. "How do you know that?"
"I think I saw him—playing poker. But it doesn't matter," I smiled. "When fate decides to favor you, you don't ask why. You say thank you."
She kissed me and we locked the door and headed to the car. Maybe her husband was writing a chapter in his book called The Amputee. How many people can honestly say they fucked a one legged woman?
The absurdity of life, like luck and misfortune, ebbs and flows.
We got in my car and drove south to vacation in Florida for a week or so, until around Labor Day when the lawyers needed us back to sign papers and school resumed. We made up for lost time and made love every chance we got, like young lovers, on the beach at night like crabs in the moonlight. The hole in my heart, at last, was filled.
Before we came home, I made her set on a bench on the boardwalk and close her eyes. She sat there with her hands over her eyes giggling. I rolled a rented bicycle up to her and honked the horn, which made her laugh. A promise kept from a lifetime ago, at last, when we roade a bicycle made for two.
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