((1))
Paul's father liked older women. When he married Paul's mother he was nineteen, and she was twenty-eight. This was highly unusual for the 1960s. Even more unusual, Paul's mother was a divorcee, and she already had a child, a little girl. In their small town that was downright scandalous, and their families were dead set against it, but they did it anyway. Two years later they had a child of their own, a boy. They named him Paul.
It seems that as their marriage went on Paul's father's attraction to older women diminished considerably, and by the time he himself was twenty-eight he had discovered the joys of younger women, in their early twenties. Also the joys of drinking to excess. The marriage limped along, as marriages do, for another eleven years.
And then something happened.
This is the official story: after years of neglect and bickering, Paul's parents decided to try a "second honeymoon" in Las Vegas to see if they could salvage things. Because their family had never been on a real vacation, they decided to bring along Paul and his older sister June. Paul had just turned eighteen, so it was said to be partly a birthday trip for him. But the vacation was a disaster, and by the end of it Paul's mother and father had decided to split up for good.
That was the official story, and Paul could certainly testify that the Las Vegas trip was a disaster --- at least, the part involving his father was a disaster --- so the official story was good enough for him, even though there was far more to it than that. Within a month after the family got home, Paul's father and all his possessions were gone from the house, and June had returned to her university.
Paul had just graduated from high school and was thinking about which college he wanted to attend. Again, that was the official story. The true story was that he had no desire whatsoever to go off to college. He wanted to stay in his home town. He wanted to find a good job. He wanted to stay living at home with his mother.
And in the deepest corners of his secret heart, he wanted to marry his mother, because he was absolutely, completely, positively in love with her.
If anyone had known of this, of course, it would have made the scandal of his parents' disparate ages seem like nothing; but, of course, no one ever knew about it, least of all Paul's mother.
He stayed living at home for another year, during which he longed for her the way a dying flower longs for water, and absolutely, completely, positively nothing happened whatsoever, and nothing was whatsoever was said about it. He finally gave in and went off to college. He graduated and found a good job in another town. He met a woman and got married. They went home to visit Paul's mother at least once a year, usually for Christmas. They never visited his father. Fuck him.
And so now Paul himself was twenty-eight, the age his mother was when she married Paul's father. The world was approaching the end of the millennium, and there was a feeling in the air that the world might be coming to an end. Certainly at the very least, all the computers were going to go tits-up at midnight on December 31, 1999, because of some flaw in the way computer clocks and calendars were designed, and when they clicked over to January 1, 2000 they wouldn't be able to handle it and suddenly everybody would be living B.C. again --- Before Computers. Everything would be pencil and paper again. A lot of people were convinced that this was really going to happen, and they were scared.
Paul's father was one of these people, and so six months before the end of the world he killed himself. It's possible there were other things going on in his life that also made him want to blow his brains out; Paul didn't know, and he didn't care. Fuck him.
The news of his father's death came to him from his mother, a phone call in the middle of the night. She was sobbing, nearly hysterical. He sat up in bed and turned on the light and talked to her for three hours, not disturbing his wife in the least because they hadn't slept in the same bedroom for over two years.
At the end of the three-hour phone call it was clear to Paul that he needed to get on a plane and go see her immediately, that she was a broken woman and should not be alone. When the sun came up that morning and he and his wife met in the kitchen to get some coffee, he told her that his father had died and he was going to go to be with his mother.
"Whatever," she said, and took her coffee back to her bedroom to get dressed for work.
Paul's marriage was not working out any better than his parents' marriage had worked out, and it was heading for the same dénouement. It would have ended long ago, in fact, if not for the children, but even they couldn't save that marital disaster for too much longer.
So he got on an airplane and rented a car and drove to the house he'd grown up in and was holding his mother in his arms before it was even lunchtime.
She was shocked to see him; he hadn't told her he was coming. "Oh my GOD! I can't believe you're really here! How long can you stay?" she asked, grinning and laughing and wiping away tears at the same time.
"As long as you need me, Mom," he told her, and took her in his arms again. Holding her felt to him like holding Heaven itself.
Yes, he still loved her. He'd never stopped loving her. You don't love someone as deeply and desperately as he loved her and stop simply because it doesn't work out. You just pack it away in a box and try to love someone else. Sometimes it doesn't work too well, and your wife knows something is wrong even if she doesn't know exactly what it is. Maybe she accuses you of cheating, which you've never done. Maybe, once or twice on a night lost to alcohol, she even screams at you that you must be some kind of faggot or something, why don't you ever fuck her anymore. And you know the answer, but you've never spoken of it to anyone and you know you never will, and the next day comes, and somehow you keep on going.
But now here she was, holding on to him, clinging to him, and he felt the soft lines of her body against him, he smelled the perfume in her hair that was the same perfume she'd used his whole life, and they stood in a living room that was almost exactly as it had been for decades because his mother only cleaned things, she never got rid of them. She never moved out of the house, she never remarried, she never changed anything.
She even dressed the same. She wore her hair the same. There was a little more gray in it now, of course, and there were more lines in her face, and she was a little heavier, but she was still drop-dead gorgeous to him. Her more generous curves fit against him like like two long-lost puzzle pieces coming together after being lost for ten years.
It has to be said that despite all her neurotic consistency, Paul's mother was fundamentally a happy woman. She was nearing retirement age but she was in no hurry to quit her job, which she loved and which she often said kept her "out of the bars." But this was a joke, because she hardly ever drank. It was the same with Paul. He often thought to himself, how funny we both ended up with a couple of souses.
They drank that night, though. They went grocery shopping after dinner and they strolled down the wine aisle and when they got to the checkout stand somehow there were five bottles of pinot in their cart.
So they drank, and they talked. They talked about Paul's father, and he was frankly shocked at how many nice things she had to say about the bastard. It wasn't that she usually badmouthed him, she wasn't that kind of person, she just didn't talk about him at all.
But that night, as they finished one bottle of wine and then another, as they moved from the dinner table to the back patio looking out at the new development that used to be an empty field, as they sat in the cool darkness listening to the bug zapper zapping, she spun story after story about what a sweet man he'd been when they were first married. And what a sweet man he could still be, even after their marriage was heading for the shredder and he was so obviously cheating on her, with a variety of women younger than she was.
