My Dream Date

My Dream Date                                                                      16 January 2018

The sun was shining brightly through the skylights in the sun room off the kitchen. One stream blazed down upon the New York Times my Dutch husband sat reading. I briefly considered sitting beside him, but I’d had another dream and abandoned the notion. Cicadas filled the air with their mournful alarm.

As I continued to stand, my dog began circling, hoping this would result in a walk in the woods. It was Sunday morning after all, our standing hiking day. She looked at my feet, saw no Keens or Chacos, and decided to settle on to the couch, beneath a wall of windows, until that condition was remedied.

For six months I'd been trying to have a date with my husband.  Our fourteen year old daughter even offered to babysit her 11 year old brother for a "date night.” But no date was made. It was June 2012. He was acting as a dutiful husband, but not an engaged friend or stimulated lover. The post-menopausal lubrication device, I'd been prescribed the previous summer, had never been test-driven.

So here I stood, another Sunday morning, after a sexless Saturday night. I asked the same question of him that I'd been asking every month since my sister died in October.

"Are we ever going to be intimate again?" came out of my mouth as a sigh. 

He usually would answer, "Of course", or "Sure", or a slow and patient, "Yessss." 

But this time he answered distractedly as he folded the Sunday Times into his lap and exhaled, "I don't know."

"Finally, you're being honest," and I added, "I want a divorce."

He didn't miss a beat, although I swear the cicadas ceased for a second when he asked, "Can't we have an open marriage?"

The facial composure he usually lost when he was emotional, turning it into a rubbery mask, only relaxed at his mouth. His gray eyes drooped downward. It dawned on me that he'd already been living that reality for some time.

When my mind processed all that had just been uttered, I said as quietly and as steadily as possible, "If you can even ask me that question, then you don't know me at all." 

Being intimate to me was a package deal: sex, emotion, spirit, a shared history, humor and love. To him it meant sex and secrets. I'd suspected for years that he'd been having an affair.

In February while in Florida with the kids, and having left my dog at the farm, it was reported that my husband hadn't come home for many nights in a row. My friends wanted to hire a private eye.

For over a year, I'd had a recurring dream in which my husband approached a bar where I was waiting to be served. He saddled in beside me, without acknowledging me. Looking towards the direction he came, I'd see a woman with short fine dark hair and a pretty moon face. We'd lived together for eight years in San Francisco, and the Boston burbs for ten; he often protested, unsolicited, his distaste for Asian beauty.

Blindly, I put on my Chacos, which started the dog woofing and spinning towards the back door. By this point my husband was still sitting, but his dull expression had shifted to alarm, as he awoke to the idea that I wasn't acting angry or pleading, but rather remained composed and self-assured.

“I'm taking the dog for a short walk. After breakfast we can hike around Great Hill and discuss how to proceed, out of earshot of the kids.”

As I walked up the well-worn path and into the Arboretum, a thought repeated, when do you know your marriage is over?

What my soul had known for years, my brain no longer denied. As my dog and I rounded the half way mark on the trail, I felt a calm and girlish confidence that had been missing since my sister’s death. 

Deep in my bones I'd answered her last question to me, "When are you going to do something about Peter?" 

I remember exactly how the mottled light filtered onto the forest floor.  How the summer grass was overtaking the winter's compost. An answer kept echoing through the trees and above the reedy buzzing of the birds and bugs. The reply to my departed sister's question and my own were answered simultaneously: "Now." 

Mid-June 2013 the divorce was final and Peter would announce that he was buying a condo with the Hong Kong woman of my dreams.