Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Cheater, Part One

I love my wife.

She bought me oranges yesterday. Not the yellowing, chalky-skinned kind, but the bright, clean orbs of more-juice-than-pulp from the farm with the orchard in the country she knows I love but don't have the time to frequent due to the demands of my job.

She has a job, too, oh yes – and one in the city, too, a dozen streets and avenues from our small but decently equipped people-box downtown. Coming back from a meeting that took her to the suburbs, she drove two hours out of her way to get me the oranges in the wood-lattice box that smells like hay and tobacco, because she knows I've been orange-crazed since I was a kid.

And it's not as if we're new to this, with the sheen still on, butterflies in full attack, with five-times-a-week lovemaking sessions no matter what even if they must be stolen in a public place.

We're twelve two-twin-teenage-boys, taxes together, "I fucking hate you" hurled into the city streets through open windows, marriage-counseling regulars years into this. I have a loveseat in what the realtor called the "entertainment area" farthest from our bedroom with my name on it several times a month.

If work has gone badly for me, it's several times a week.

But every time I'm sent there (or flee there, as the case may be), I'm but a good REM hour into sleep before I feel the ends of her straight blonde hair brushing the sides of my sometimes drooling face with the creased-brow, just-woke-up-and-found-me-not-next-to-her expression – one that immediately makes me forget the harsh things I whisper-yelled about her to myself as I punched the couch pillows into submission at first exile. She then kisses my chin upside-down, grabs my forearm, pulls me back to our bed.

I love my wife.

Then there was this bar I was in one night, with its low light and reflective, brushed metal surfaces so unlike the table at my mother-in-law's house. It pulsated with the low grumble of club-worthy bass lines so unlike the piano my sons' saxophone teacher accompanies them with at their small-room recitals.

I didn't want to go, not being a particularly bar-loving guy myself. Not that I never had been – it's just that two kids and a mortgage will do that to a certain kind of man.

I met my wife at a bar. Back then she didn't want to be there, but I had, and she mocked me for it. It's one of those things that drew me in to her.

My coworkers took me there one night after we had barely escaped alive the sort of day at work that involves threats of furloughs and unpaid overtime. "Come on, James (Jamie was my father/husband name). This calls for happy hour. Just one beer. On me," they said. 

The bar was just around the corner from work, and just about a world away from home.

I was in no mood to not kiss my twins hello this evening ("That's just not COOL, Dad!"), and though I love my wife and she is not generally a complainer, I knew she had spoken with her mother today. It was Tuesday. She always speaks with her mother on Tuesdays. And with a mother like that, she was certainly allowed the weekly hour of necessary complaint that routinely followed just after I had hung my suit jacket up in the bedroom closet and she had, out of empathy for what she was about to unleash on me, asked me with those too-often bunched brows how my day went. She didn't expect an answer because she knew I'd never give one.

However, that night, with two simultaneous college tuitions having been dangled in front of my face as a bullying-one-into-selling-one's-soul-for-peanuts tactic, I would not be able to respond with the usual, anticipatorily brief, "Fine. How's your mother?"

I needed an hour to prepare. A happy hour, frustration emulsified slightly by beer.

So I went into this bar with my coworkers for a drink. They were greeted by name by a bartender half my age dressed in tapered-leg dark-blue jeans faded in the stylish places. They were accustomed to the "just one beer" bit as a way to combat similar work days they experienced more frequently than I had, perhaps because I was not THE superior, but I was theirs. Perhaps I'd even driven them here on occasion, though I fancied myself a reasonable boss.

The stress drained from their faces as the bartender drained different drafts into draft glasses that were far larger than the pint I was used to.

"It's the Sucks-to-Be-You Special," the bartender who donned the pants I thought only worn by women said to me in explanation with a knowing wink even though he really did not know anything at all. How could he? He was hardly twenty-two.

Coworkers' beers poured, they migrated to what they termed "their table" before I had the chance to order my own Tanqueray and tonic, which at the moment made me feel exceptionally elderly, even though my age never truly gave me pause – except, perhaps, when my wife would joke on occasion and with no mal-intent that when I was graduating college, she was a sophomore in high school. And even then, after the initial evolutionarily defensive impulse, I wound up feeling proud about it.

"So I suppose it doesn't quite suck to be you tonight," the bartender told me as he twirled the Tanqueray bottle once in his hand in a circle before unleashing it into my beveled rocks glass. I didn't understand at first that he was not only referring to my decision to pass on the giant frat boy beer. He then smiled from just one corner of his mouth with his lips pressed poignantly together and slightly jerked his head in the direction of the far end of the bar.

After I had concluded he was not in fact bopping to the beat of the music with this gesture (as he had been consistently while pouring my coworkers' beers), I turned my head toward the jerk.

I caught the tail-end of the dark-eyed stare of a woman perhaps ten years the bartender's senior, but no more than that. As she snapped her head back toward the book she was reading alone, her long reddish-brown and slightly unkempt hair whisked in a halo around her shoulders, betraying her less-than-sly attempt to avoid meeting my gaze.

The whole thing struck me as odd. And I was momentarily hurled back to the time when I met my wife. She had been reading, alone, at a bar, too. But there was jazz music playing, I remembered. That's why my wife tolerated that bar. I also remembered hating that it wasn't rock, and my embarrassment about my own musical preference in comparison to my not-yet-wife's more sophisticated one made me strangely uncomfortable.

"She's been checking you out since you walked in," the bartender said as he mixed some unknown martini-like concoction with the greatest of ease like a circus boy. I never understood how restaurant people did what they did, slinging drinks and food like monkeys, and then I remembered why I was at that bar in the first place.

"Well, that's fine," I answered, caught off guard and regretting the words even as I said them. Fine? I'd been tongue-tied and unable to properly express myself to my simian of a boss in so many instances that day, I suppose it'd become a habit. Distracted by the hellish remembrance, I over-tipped the bartender, took a too-big swig of my simple mixed beverage, and walked toward my coworkers' table.

On my way there, the book-reading woman dropped a pen she'd had swaddled behind her ear and hair, which caused my eyes to move automatically to her, and to the sort of sad way she sat on her bar stool cross-legged.

“This is why we stick with the sucks-to-be-you special!” one of my coworkers called out to me with the pre-tipsy joviality of a man who plans to be drunk. “It doesn't take the entire happy hour to serve!” I covered the remaining distance between myself and the crew, chose a place just beyond the end of the banquet style table, took a sizeable swig, and placed my drink on the table’s corner.