The Final Chapter

The Final Chapter
By Alexander Guinevere Kern
© - 2006

-Chapter One-
"There are only three things to be done with a woman," said Clea once. "You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature."
-Lawrence Durrell-
Justine

The Pacific Ocean rushed towards her like a lover -- and just like a lover quickly retreated, leaving a offering of light-bright semen foam around her bare feet. Marlowe dug her toes into the sand, tilted her head back and closed her eyes. She loved the solar heat beating down on her skin. Taking a deep breath, she smiled, turned on her side and hummed out an exhalation of pleasure. The salt-tinged air, invigorating for her spirit, elemental to good health, carried an additional tincture of suntan oil which emanated from the flesh of the other baking tourists. Off in the distance she heard the ecstatic shouts of boisterous Filipino youth as they charged into the water, colorful surfboards in hand. She did not need to look at them; their images were firmly imprinted in her mind.
Marlowe Fraser had been sitting out on the beach in her orange lounge chair for the past three weeks watching the old tides and young muscles flex. Sometimes, at night, she slept on the sand with a blanket swathed around her like a wool cocoon. The rocking beat of the waves provided her with an aural backdrop, primally soothing, like the sound of a mother's heart.
Marlowe was glad she'd chosen to shed her sterile and monotonous marriage -- indeed, her sterile and monotonous life -- by packing up her absolute essentials; laptop, sketch books and several large suitcases, and then flying to the Philippines. She liked the way the country looked on her son's globe, a vast scattering of miniature land masses, like the diverse aspects of her fragmented soul.
It would not be difficult at all, she decided, for an expatriate American to fashion a new future here. The Filipino people were reputed to be the most convivial and hospitable in Asia. Marlowe had already found them extremely solicitous of her welfare when it was discreetly observed she was traveling without male company. Perhaps a few of the dark-skinned handsome men who approached her on the beach had been a little too solicitous, but Marlowe had no trouble deflecting such amorous overtures. In fact, she had been flattered. The Filipino men seemed possessed of a sense of honor and an inborn respect for women, a internal trait as exotic to Marlowe as their external features. When romantically rebuffed they simply offered her a mock wounded expression, followed by a slight smile and then left her in peace.
When calculating where, exactly, she would begin her sabbatical, one of the most favorable of the Philippines' many attributes had been the fact that English was still spoken by the majority of the populace. Since then she'd learned that approximately seventy languages and dialects could be heard, including Spanish, Chinese and Tagalog, the national language.
And the tropical weather calmed her shrieking nerves, except when the weather itself was in a rage. Marlowe had been warned about the coming Typhoon season and the mind-numbing days and nights of seemingly endless rain. This she considered a trivial inconvenience when compared to the many rewards offered her, as many compensations as islands in this Pacific-ringed archipelago. The additional benefit was, of course, her homeboy husband would never imagine to look for her here. Not a chance, thought Marlowe smiling, I could barely get the fat son-of-a-lard-ass to stay even a few days in Ocean City, Maryland. He'd no more board an airplane than he would French kiss a mummy.
Marlowe laughed out loud. Oh, the joy! To never have to see his aging, sullen Samuel Clemens face again! To never more be forced to listen to his pompous and critical evaluations of her person, her domestic abilities, her, as he termed them, "Foolish artistic pretensions". Farewell! Yes, farewell to the Vigilant Critic, thought Marlowe. She left him to curdle and crisp in the private hell of his incinerator personality.
How she had learned to expect and despise his glowering mole-peer as he squinted his gray eyes and scrutinized her outfit, her art work, her kitchen floor, after which scrutiny he felt compelled to shower upon her his acid appraisals, his scathing commentary.
"With your hair up like that, Marlowe, you look forty. Where'd you get that fuckin' atrocious dress? It looks like something my Mother would wear. Quit that shit, Marlowe! If you've got goddamn time to oil paint then you've got time to iron my shirts. Man, when are you going to go on a diet? Look at that ass, look at it!"
This last comment delivered whilst Marlowe was bent over, dusting their bedroom furniture. Nolen unhooked their bureau mirror from the wall and followed her around the room with it, aiming the mirror at her rear end and exhorting her to look over her shoulder and behold the girth of her offending ass. What a hypocrite!
And speaking of hippo, Nolen himself was grossly overweight. Horizontal half-moons swelled beneath his eyes and a dull fat bag warbled beneath his retrograde chin every time he opened his mouth to upbraid her. The pale freckles marching across his snub nose and the backs of his hands had been recently wedded with premature age spots and the scarlet constellations of broken capillaries. He had jaguar cheekbones and a squarish face wreathed by a radiating nimbus of faded gray-blonde hair. In the last few years even his weedy eyebrows and bristly walrus mustache had become liberally striated with white. In Marlowe's opinion Nolen's physical body well reflected the dissolute inner man; for a man of thirty-five Nolen Fraser looked very bad indeed.
And yet he'd had the effrontery to indulge his bloated body and his even more bloated ego by initiating and sustaining an affair with his young secretary, like every other mid-life crisis- afflicted American male. Marlowe deemed Nolen's little dalliance pathetic and hyper-typical. Gad no, she had thought, Mr. Superior couldn't even dip his wayward wick into someone who was at least interesting. A super sonic jet pilot would have done, or perhaps a bi-sexual fashion designer with multiple tattoos, a woman who might be so inarguably exceptional Marlowe could find it within herself to muster up a little understanding for her husband's moral slippage. Ah, but no. Marlowe's personal experience taught her that it's always the secretary, usually because that's who the jerk-off philander-man sees every day. Proximity and duration do make infatuation.
As she lay on the beach Marlowe was suddenly tormented with an unexpected vision of Nolen's company factotum cum paramour: A gum-chewing milkmaid with tenderized skin, massive mammaries and Dresden eyes. At the Christmas Party last year Marlowe had watched those Dresden eyes follow Nolen around the room like intoxicated moons. After that Marlowe figured it out quickly. The late nights at the office: explained! The easing up of his ever insistent demands for sex: explained! The new haircut and increased time in the shower. (What in the hell was he doing in there, she used to wonder, washing each one of his nose hairs by hand?) His sudden arrogance and the invigorated spells of ridicule: explained! It was clear Nolen Fraser had been cheating on his vows. Clearer than Nolen's ejaculate stained underwear, which he took great pains to conceal from Marlowe by jamming them into the bottom of the laundry hamper.
His treachery had utterly sickened her. It had not, after all, been the first time for Marlowe. She was no virgin at this wronged little wifey business, Nolen Fraser was her third husband. Marlowe lately begun to suspect perhaps she was afflicted with an incurable allergy to the altar, a matrimonial deficiency which rendered her unlovable.