WHEN WERE MARRIED - BOOK ONE - THE LONG FALL

FOUR LITTLE WORDS Part -14-15

There was a long silence.

"Doug is an assistant prof in the business department. He came in about a year ago. I have to meet with him because they assigned me as his mentor. They partner all new staff with experienced professors. We've had a few lunches together. A few times I've danced with him at events, but I don't think you were at any of them. You know how you hate most parties and events like that. Even if you'd been there, I'd still have been dancing with him. You hate dancing and he's pretty good.

"He's a nice boy, but that's all. I'm more than 10 years older than him, for God's sake. And I have never kissed him."

"Is he a good friend?"

"Bill! He's a friend. We talk sometimes and we've worked on projects together. But he's no more of a friend than a half dozen other male and female professors on the staff. Are you going to start obsessing about Doug now?"

"No, not if you say he's a casual friend. But why did you wear that blouse that shows off your tits and a skirt so short he had to see your pubic hairs – sorry he could if you still had any – to the meeting that night? Not really professor type nightwear, is it?"

Another long silence.

"You – okay, it was a little revealing. But, Bill, I'm not 75. Only 39. I'm still a young woman. It's not – not that I want men to ogle me, but...dammit, I've got a great set of boobs and great legs, according to most guys, and once in a while I like to show them off. I don't flash guys. I don't have affairs. But I'm not dead."

"You've never worn that outfit to any event I attended."

"Oh, God, Bill, do we have to talk about this?"

"Why not, Debbie? Don't all the self help books say couples have to be honest with each other? That they should talk out their problems. If I'm paranoid and obsessively jealous with no reason in reality, why can't you answer a simple question? Why do you wear revealing clothes that show off that great body of yours – when I'm not around?"

"Can't we talk about this when you come home?"

"I'm not sure I will be coming home."

A very long silence.

"Why the hell am I bending over backwards trying to hold you when you obviously don't care if we continue as a marriage and a couple. You want to know the truth about why I dress up for other men and not for my loving husband? Because unless you're naked and rubbing my tits, I might as well be part of the furniture.

"You don't notice what I wear, or when I change my hair style, or get a new bra. You don't kiss me on the back of the neck when you come in from work and try to feel my tits. You don't grab me in the middle of the day when the kids are gone and try to seduce me. You haven't taken me out and got me drunk to get into my pants in ten years. You haven't worked to get a piece of ass from me since we were first married.

" I wear those clothes for other men because I want to remember what it was like to be desired by men, or any man. Is that honest enough for you?"

This time, for the first time in days, I thought she was being honest. And what did that say about me? Suddenly, I had nothing to say.

"I'm sorry, Deb. I'm sorry for everything. "

I know she didn't understand what I was saying because she didn't know I'd had a secret look into her heart and soul and the secrets she was keeping from me. She didn't know I was apologizing for letting myself get old before my time, for not retaining the passion of our early years, for letting myself become more involved in my work than my wife's life. I was apologizing for letting her love slip away until she now belonged more to another man than she belonged to me.

"So, are you coming home?"

Why wouldn't I? Because she was still more in love with another man than she was in love with me? Because I still had no chance in a competition with Lance to win her love, or sexual devotion?

"No, Deb. I'm not. I'm not – it's not that I'm angry with you. But, I just feel like, maybe, we need some time apart."

After a long time, she said, "Alright, Bill. But someday, someday, you are going to regret this. You will hate yourself for what you're doing right now."

"Maybe. Kiss the kids for me."

"They're a little too old for that, but you probably haven't noticed that. And it should be you."

She hung up.

I turned off the TV and lay back looking at the ceiling bathed in moonlight from a picture window on a balcony looking out over the St. Johns. She might never know it, but I already regretted the hell out of everything that had happened in the last week. But, I corrected myself. It hadn't been going on for a week. This shit, this rot in my life and our marriage had been going on for six months according to the emails I'd read, and if I was honest, the decay went back a lot further than that.

Monday came as it always did. There were no big cases. Just cases; murder, manslaughter; and a Navy guy from the Jax Navy base separating from his wife who in a fit of rage at her had taken their little eight month old daughter who wouldn't stop crying and shaken her until her brain hemorrhaged in her skull. But his parents were loaded and they had spent money to buy a cracker jack legal whiz kid from New York to teach the hicks down in North Florida a few new legal tricks.

There was a separated first-of-three trials of scum bag drug dealing brothers who had been trying to teach a competitor to stay off their turf by spraying his Northside home with bullets and managed to kill an eight-year-old boy who had thrown himself down on his two younger siblings to save them and gotten a bullet in the brain for his bravery.

That was almost a waste. They were all going to the gas chamber, sometimes called the death chamber because Florida had never had a real gas chamber. We used lethal injection after the old faithful electric chair was retired.

All three scumbags knew they were going to die in the death chamber; we knew it, their attorneys knew it, the little boy's family knew it, their own scumbag family knew it, but we had to go through the motions three times to make sure the little boy got a small measure of justice.

Not really that unusual a week. But motions had to be made, jury selection had to begin, witnesses had to be coddled or have their spines stiffened. As usual, the days would be endless and the nights brief pit stops to get enough rest to keep going the next day. I didn't do a lot of courtroom theatrics. My job was to make sure everything ran smoothly.

Sometime during the day, between two crises of earth shattering importance which would be completely forgotten by the next day, Cheryl trapped me in my office.

"They tell me you're staying on the River? You moved out on Debbie? And your kids?"

"Shit happens."

She closed the door behind me.

"Bill, what is going on?"

"Too much to tell you about in the middle of a busy day, and there's a lot of stuff I couldn't tell you anyway. There's no separation. I just wanted – some time away. Give us both a chance to get a chance to breath."

"You know that a lot of times when you move out, you never move back?"

"I don't know if that will happen."

"You should have said, that will never happen to us."

When I didn't answer she just shook her head.

"God, I hate seeing another marriage go down the tubes. Don't do this, Bill. I don't know what you're thinking, but don't walk out on your marriage without fighting for it. Jesus, you're a pit bull in the courtroom. I've never seen you give up on anything. Don't let her go, don't let them go, without a fight."

"You can't have a marriage without two people who want to stay married. And that's all, Cheryl. Open the door and get out of here."