Last Thursday evening I was sitting in the lobby of my apartment building, staring off into space. I had recently had another disastrous encounter with my former wife Amy -- when she lost her job we agreed to be married again so she could move in with me and not worry about being homeless. But then the toxic emails from her started again -- accusing me of everything from bull-baiting to throwing live infants down wells. She obviously is still suffering from a major mental challenge that I just am not willing to deal with anymore. Today nobody knows where she is living -- she won’t tell me or our children her whereabouts. She has her mail forwarded to me . . .
So I was sitting in the lobby, feeling old and shabby and seedy -- past my prime and of no use to man nor beast. A parcel clearly ready to be stamped RETURN TO SENDER.
Then Marilyn walked in, sat down on a distant couch, and said conversationally she was waiting for a friend to come pick her up for a party. I said Oh that’s nice, and fell back to brooding. We aimed a few more bland and pointless comments at each other, and then her ride came.
The next day she knocked on my door. I was still feeling seedy and pathetic, lacking the spirit to be good and the ambition to be bad. I invited her in, we sat and talked, she told me she was back on all her legal prescriptions, seemed happy and sensible. So I invited her to stay for vichyssoise, which I had cooling on the stove.
This morning insomnia got me up at 3 and refused to let me find sanctuary back in bed again, so I made a batch of split pea soup and read a biography of Carry Nation. Marilyn knocked on my door again at nine. This time she wanted me to go grocery shopping with her. I am a dedicated supermarket tourist, so agreed. And then she sprung her Big Idea on me. Since we had both just lost our Food Stamps (I was getting nineteen dollars every month and she was getting in excess of one-hundred-and-fifty dollars each month) she thought if we combined one meal a day, splitting the cost of groceries, we could stretch our food money to stave off looming starvation.
This actually made a lot of sense to me, since cooking for one is so doggone hard without winding up with lots of leftovers that just get thrown away. Plus I like to cook for other people. So we spent a total of 40 bucks at Fresh Market for pork chops (2 packs for the price of one), boneless chicken breasts, potatoes, onions, rice, a variety of greenstuff, butter, and a loaf of bread to be split between the two of us. I made the chops and boiled the spuds for mashed potatoes this afternoon, feeling happy and useful again.
Marilyn, however, had suddenly sunk into an inexplicable funk, bemoaning her back pain and neck pain and ranting about how hard it is to take the bus to Nordstrom’s Rack for a hunting expedition seeking lingeries and other feminine accoutrements that are as mysterious and exotic to me as Machu Picchu.
After the meal, which I must admit, casting all modesty aside, was very good, Marilyn seemed to reach the nadir of her misery -- beginning to grizzle over how unfair it is that she has to suffer such painful agonies while the rest of the world skips merrily along like gamboling lambs.
Not knowing what else to do to halt her imminent blubbering, I offered, in complete desperation, to give her a back rub. She took off her winter coat (she claims my apartment is part of an arctic conspiracy to give her pneumonia) and glared at me as if challenging me to remove one iota of her personal and artisan pain. Limbering up my hands like a concert pianist by cracking my knuckles, I dug my fingers deep into her shoulder blades, beginning the attack. (It should be noted that I have no training, no experience, in massage therapy -- except my devoted and regular patronage of foot massage parlors in Thailand when I lived there.)
Marilyn immediately turned to butter, cooing that my hands were pure magic. Ten minutes later when I finished pummeling her neck as I’d seen done in old Charlie Chaplin movies, where the great comic would sneak into a spa for the weekend, she looked up at me in the purest bliss, and said “You’re wonderful.”
Then she fell asleep in her chair for an hour. When she woke up she was cheerful and sensible once again. I helped her bring her laundry bag from her apartment to the washing machines downstairs; then trudged back to Fresh Market to get quarters after she mislaid a roll she claimed to have squirreled away in her purse. While waiting for her laundry to finish, I made us lemon bars -- and Marilyn actually begged for a class of milk, instead of a bottle of merlot.
She is gone now, back up to own apartment, to fold her clothes, after giving me a moist buss on the cheek -- her profuse thanks for both the meal and the neck rub are still echoing in my ears -- and so I must query myself is this the fabled turning over of a new leaf that is often mentioned but rarely seen? Is it possible I can have a sane relationship with this woman now?
I’m making us baked chicken breasts with mushroom gravy over long grain rice, with a green side salad, for Sunday dinner tomorrow. Perhaps the combination of home cooked meals and neck massages is the golden key that unlooses her better angels.
Then again, I can’t escape the feeling she’s playing me for a sucker -- somehow. To help me figure that conundrum out, I will detail the daily outings of little Timmy in the Mad World of Marilyn . . .
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