2:22 p.m. - 2005-05-27
Darby Rant
Explain to me again how it is that I would spend some six years of a sterile marriage under that pink tree basting a patch that said "Jose" onto the worn fabric of my heart and yet find myself in the back of a Volkswagon van in some dark corner of the college parking lot with (let's call him) Darby. No pretentions of love to complicate the picture. No profound conversations. No fertive glances. No poetry. No yearning or longing or pining or gazing deep into one another's eyes or even particularly caring. But that is how it happened. What I most remember is that he kissed my knees. Reverently. I cried. And when I got home, I looked in the mirror to see if I had changed in some perceptible way. And I had. Something essential had broken free and it showed. I'm ashamed now to say that he also was married and had a baby son. His wife, he said, was a 'bottomless dancer'. It sounds absurd in the telling, but there was an innocence about us. The other students and even the professor seemed to acknowledge us as a couple and find the whole thing amusing and even endearing. We passed notes in class and sometimes ran away to the van during the break, my sandals clopping noisily as we laughed at our perfunctory attempts at discretion. We were literally known to drink from the same vanilla milkshake, two straws. Having married so young, it was like going back in time and losing my virginity to my high school crush instead of a stern new groom demanding 'consummation'. Once, over a game of ping pong, he said "Let's be lovers for life, like Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy". This was heady stuff for one so invisible at home. During the day, I carried a diaper bag and tiny bottles of strained lamb. Come sundown, I emerged from my house in paisley tops and bell bottom jeans. We danced in the summer grass outside of class. I bought Tarot cards for his birthday. He sketched me outside the Humanities building. We brought cookies as a couple for the party on the last night of class. And, although no love grew between us, what was left of my marriage simply extinguished. Like an exhausted ember finally giving in on any given day for no particular reason. All those years of carrying Jose like a warm secret in my heart as I doggedly performed my marital paces had not unloosed the hold of my original values. My fear of hurting someone. The guilt I felt for not being what another might expect me to be. The effortless bred-in self betrayal that served to protect the feelings of just about anyone. Now gone. Lost along with my emotional virginity in the back of a skyblue van to the boy with skyblue eyes. I filed for divorce. He filed for divorce. The incidents were strikingly unrelated. We were not, after all, Hepburn and Tracy. We were me and (let's call him) Darby.
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