Ch 16 Part 1 - The Pheromones of Coming Home

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Chapter Sixteen – The Pheromones of Coming Home

(Chapter Sixteen is spoken through the words of the original narrator, Ethan.)

465

May 4, 2010, Penelope played a hell stead in a reenactment of the story of Persephone and Hades at her kindergarten school play.  Penelope had a horse cut-out head on a stick and a black cloak with purple sash-reins to convey her status as a mare of the night.  I imagined a more bad-ass version of Penelope’s five-year-old self bustling Hades’ red radio flyer carriage. 

Penelope deserved the latitude of making fun of life’s darker moments.  Ashley stood on the other side of the schoolyard.  My seesaw ambivalence and infected bitter battled for supremacy.

466

On the outskirts of Penelope’s sphere of consciousness, in January I began the New Year by entering the arena of on-line dating.  I succumbed to a surrogate social system to escape the confines of the Nottoway five-car parking lot.  Nottoway was brimming with these “I could skin a deer in heels” type of country women.  Most were obsessed with Jesus and his powers to center their “My family knows everyone in town” lives.  The contract terms were laid on the table first like a bug squished under the family Bible. 

Online there was a plethora of single mothers.  I was in that mezzanine-age between the end of sororities and the beginning of ascending children’s birthday parties.  The single father and the single mother prototypes were fragmentally different.  Women appeared compelled to declare, “I am a mother.  My children come first,” like St. Julia of Merida billboards placating guilt.  These uniform testimonials asserted femininity in a blood sacrifice to partake in such mating rituals. 

A man with a child was inherently docked in points for his reduced perceived capability to perform such acquiescence.  Daytime television adages that single fatherhood is endearing or that a woman swoons at a man guiding his offspring through the aisles of a grocery store absent adult female accompaniment like he is some Seattle Tom Hanks are bullshit.  Such Disney fallacies are for Lifetime movies not single-parent reality shows.  Preschoolers are not chick-magnets.  They are quandary-filled for-quick-sale signs advertising the spoiling produce veteran shoppers desist from perusal.

The logistics of single-parent dating and juggling that weary road of being there for your children and attempting to still be a fully-actualized adult can be exhausting.  It seemed like, especially for women, there was a reluctant permission to be a single-parent and enjoy personal time.  It was as if every measure of elation one section of this personal world may grant creates an imbalance that must be reconciled in the ledger in some other space of a child’s life by a mother’s algebraic addendum. 

Mom is told to enjoy every moment of motherhood.  When a mother does not she is awash in guilt.  Every parent deserves equilibrium and a break to obtain symmetry of self.  Delegating is essential to maintain control over the tribe.  A parent needs to recognize the disservice to her own children when she does not seek guilt-free time alone in escapes of self-preservation.  A need to be “the be all” martyr mother is the dropping breathing mask lesson in every pre-flight information disclaimer. 

467

I tried to find balance in my own advice, but it was hard to find anyone, let alone a stabilized Gen-X single-parent or flat-out single.  My hypocrisy of living in Nottoway for Penelope prompted this opinionated priority system fueled by my own self-disdain. 

There was this eHarmony marketing myth that some magic database software could match people based on treasure-trove cavernous compatibility.  Maybe in a city like Denver or New York, but in Nottoway a pulse and a location radius was paramount.  The crux of online dating seemed that we were all searching for someone that does not exist.  The idea people are matched on compatibility is a fantasy.  The database matched people by profiles within a twenty-year age range, an approximate zip code, with pulse optional.

Unknown women were magical, like unicorns or porn-nymphs.  A man could imagine fairy-Godmother care for his family needs or a sexual dynamo actively encouraging his exploration of Holy Grail clitoris caverns.  Who knows what they might want to do in bed?  Blank slate women could be either or both like a Pegasus-Unicorn beautiful, powerful and free.  I certainly was not free.  Marriage, divorce, history, and Ashley haunted my head like plague-ghosts.  Knowledge just made everything worse.

468

Women ultimately fall in two categories to men: mothers or lovers.  Stereotypes have ranges, but ultimately a woman is perceived to be one or the other.  Depending on the internal stage of a man, he seeks a polarity, praying for an ultimate equilibrium.  Women are not all that different in their perceptions of men.  Men are lovers or husband-material when a woman contemplates attributes to attend to each spectrum in the bounty and perils of piloting a womb.  Evolution’s design propagates the bewildering siren tests to encourage two parent households.  Thus the negotiations of the bizarre scales of a ten-minute sperm donation are compared to a nine-month gestation and a lifetime of umbilical servitude.

Most men marry mothers.  Mothers are carbon.  Mothers control, do for a man, package socks like origami tubes, pilot crock pots, manage little-league logistics, ensure the application of Clorox.  With accommodations mothers graduate to wearing stretchy elastic jeans and slowly fold their sexual identities into light-bulb-shaped mannish haircuts in the white flag of sexual surrender.  Two generations ago stay-at-home mothers exalted a man with these hen-rituals by appreciating his avenue to financial security.  Bread was praised in the bank account like manna from a proper mortal-man. 

My father’s generation watched the mothers go to work.  The balance died.  Women mutated schizophrenically-male into employed ubiquitous functioning automatons of lunch-packing, business-suit, laundry-sorting, payroll-deduction, and casserole-dishing commute queens.  Ashley was a Gen-X mother, daughter to a working mom, secretly proud and resentful of the station of her juggling gender. 

Men have been slower to evolve.  Madagascar’s of evolution exist in divorced single dads like me.  These gender isolation chambers allow men the space to wield the Batman utility belts of forty-plus hours a week, to-an-from carpool, Gogurts, homework-rodeos, band aids on bo-bo’s, board meetings, lawn mowing, pig-tail symmetry, sewing kits, tooth-fairy plantings ruses, and stirring the gumbo roux.  The habitat to breed this species of man requires a space mother-lioness women rarely grant a man the freedom to evolve into.  Mothers patronize the male’s version of domestic chores like Tourette’s tics.

The alternative is lovers.  Lovers are hydrogen.  Lovers are independent agents slathered in sexual independence often denoted by lower back tattoos.  Modern women, mothers or lovers both must work.  There are few escapes from this economy.  Lovers prune and occupy a lack of need.  Sex is far more egalitarian.  The tastes and scents of oral sex are aromatically decadent, rather than prudishly vouchsafed once a solstice and equinox.  Pleasure fucking is encouraged under the Athena goddess gift of the pill.

These women spit out the bit of submissive gender shackles.  The moderates seek symmetry with mates: dish washing, chauffeuring, orgasms, and bank account deposits.  A lover and a man can exist if the woman is given her space, and the man is given his praise in her unearthed vulnerabilities expressed in their convergence.  Otherwise a man has no purpose in her world.

Since Gen-Xers marry after thirty.  Men may date a lover.  No more married at twenty-two means a boy may bolt on non-marriage material lovers and wed a bounce-back relationship mother in six months.  Women get befuddled as to why.  Honest men question the inverse paradox.  Why when a man falls in line as a prototype provider, nurturing man does he go dateless?  It is just two sides of the same question.

Men are oxygen.  Our gender-genetic instructions to a balanced partnership have never been more mangled.  Shall we form water or carbon dioxide?  Fear or love: we choose.  Will she go through nuclear transmutation changing from one element to another?  Are MILF’s the new Arabian virgins?  Can your graduate-degreed cranium still speak to me with the vulnerability you shared bouncing on your daddy’s knee?  Am I useful?

Men are petrified.  Her eye shadow will pale staring at pinterest.com like geek-boys on EverQuest.  Thighs will balloon into saddle bags of subcutaneous fat.  Dryer lint and a FICA deduction will breed a martyr.  I will be a vagabond electron to her self-sustaining element.  Her periodic table may be thrown asunder in transient priorities that his sperm donor, DeBeers African blood-diamond contract once signed will morph the polarity of his wife into either a gold digger or sex-less mini-van cyborg.  We seek a synthesis between sex, friendship, and function.  Promethium is scarce.

I was seeking my purpose again in this arena of dating and transient-evolution courtship.  I had really never dated.  There was nothing.  Then there was Ashley.  I wanted a woman to balance with, a woman to need me, yet let me be me.  I wanted a lover in order to breathe, but how to get there was a mystery.

469

I was better, but nowhere near good.  My story was bottled.  I wanted to find the first footstep back to finding a partner.  I needed someone I could show weakness, someone to confide.  The world was an endless task to be a man overflowing froth with answers, solutions, conclusions to algorithms and presentation topics.  I had nothing to offer.  I was answerless.  I was all out of aphorisms.  My nut-sack had no magic rabbits or Carnac magnificent wit.

The world was yelling at me to profess with resolute maturity, what it meant to be a father, to be a career man in this Nottoway plantation.  I wanted more than a random set of arms to hold me or set of tits to motorboat to hibernate in her traveling concubine cave embrace.  I wanted to be replenished and stand, a man with answers, not a flippant STD. 

I was exhausted from juggling solo, chocking from exhaling with nothing to breathe.  I wanted redolent French truffles, not this spliced insipid Chinese immature fungus.  Then again sometimes mixing flour in the cocaine ends up better.  Empty poetic beer bottles were a fallow inebriation. 

I imagined that with anyone I might meet, I knew that it is truly an aesthetic form of insecurity to intentionally draw out the process of sharing the intimate details of one’s history or life with a new lover.  Emulating an enigma is the most profitable currency in un-tethered carnal commerce.  Disclosure contradicts all pheromones of the animal kingdom, in that selection is based on the outer, the external.  The sensual is sexualized through a codification of height, weight, muscular density and the hue of an iris or the plane of a jaw line in a genetic ladder. 

However, in the subterfuge of one’s human history, one is testifying to his own banal insipid candidacy.  The stock of entertaining conversation-worthy topics or events in one’s past is by default low.  In recurring attempts at finding a suitable long-term mate or diving into one’s spiritual exploration towards self-actualization, one must be a novice, a poor spelunker, or in fact conducting in the immediate espionage of prioritizing the splendor of sex over a humane discourse that risks running tangent, rather than parallel to one’s inner humanity.  There is of course the avenue of deceit or rearranged truths about one’s past, but my insipid principles would never allow such hedonism.

Therefore in either of these instances what one shares is rationed, as one might do with a medicine dropper towards an inoculation hoping that the disease of one’s true identity will be tolerable by the other party given enough shared experience in the interim. 

Being enlightened to these ramifications, as the nautical paragon of virtue Popeye might utter, I felt “I am’s what I am’s.”  I have perpetually felt a compulsion for full disclosure, to truncate such folly as a purely aesthetic entanglement resulting in merely carnal sensations or the agony of hope in a nonsexist deity as unrequited love.  I am Ethan Baker, a father, a man teetering in fallout, desiring pleasantries of flesh, but not the atomic sunrise reflecting on such realities.

470

I was battling with conjecture emails.  The last day of January 2010, I talked with an African American woman named Thandie.  Thandie was tall, five-ten, owned a made-to-order spa service for downtown hotels and a restaurant on the side.  Her parents handed her three-hundred grand when Thandie graduated and said, “Do what you want.”  Thandie was a Gen-X anomaly comet.

Thandie drove a Range Rover and lived in a half a million dollar condominium in the warehouse district of New Orleans.  Thandie was the kind of woman that ached for the opportunity to feel vulnerable.  Thandie was miss power-Prada suit and Jimmy Choo shoes and probably spent more on her hair each month than I did on my mortgage.  Some where a bald girl exiting a tonsure temple near the Bay of Bengal had a clear conscience.  Thandie’s last relationship was with one of the Saints’ wide receivers.

We talked on the phone for a few weeks.  There was this diction of New Orleans that I longed for, but I did not see Thandie as anyone that could fit in my Nottoway single-father life.  We had a date, planned for a Friday.  I almost cancelled, but I went.  I took her to Valencia, which was a Spanish tapas white tablecloth place in the curve of the Mississippi River in the French Quarter a few blocks from her condo.  I did not realize the restaurant was what Bella Luna turned into after Katrina.  Ashley and I had eaten there some use-to-be-memorable pre-hurricane night.

The waitress set out a single gulf shrimp with mango on a cucumber slice in front of us.  I felt like the amuse-bouche in my blue suit.  We had empanadas, salmon, and scallop tapas.  I had not been around a woman so turned on in so long.  I almost forgot what it felt like to be wanted.  Between the wine and her hand the height difference shrunk like a Louisiana shoreline soon enough in a flirtatious dalliance. 

Thandie was warming like an oven.  Men are propane flames of sex, single switches on or off.  Women desire a perpetual environment.  The surge rises like a flood, building in the titillation of nerve endings joining an ocean chorus, rather than a solo aria.  A man draws in the scent of her nape, the hint of touching her hand, the depth specter of a bass tone in the octave of his voice, the taste of intrigue of what could this be on her tongue.  Sight is often first and dominant for a man.  The combined environment of the other four senses kindle the blaze flinted by sight for the game every girl is taught the first time a boy teases her on a school yard.  The misdirection of love’s gifts; how do I figure out what he will give me in return for this beauty the boys appear adamant to pursue.  This is the subconscious panoply of every beautiful woman and the bane of every plain girl and straight-faced boy. 

A woman must place the man as lover or husband material.  If he is termed a lover, sex is accelerated and then truncated if she is capable of honest cessation.  If husband, sex is postponed, dinners and flowers are purchased in a parade of courting, but so often the nice-guy never gets a shot.  Lovers can transform into later husbands, but once a woman labels a man as husband material.  The equation is solved.  The game is over.  The test is complete.  Fun is drained from the equation like an accountant completing a tax return, rather than a gambler entering an exacta at the track.  All these scents, sounds, touches and tastes can no longer be experienced with such suspense.  Thus nice guys finish alone beckoning voice mail boxes and email addresses that so rarely reply.

Beauties learn to test a man through requests.  Will he give me what I want, even when I am petty, selfish, or whining?  Will I be able to walk all over him and see his testicles turn into an ornament for my key ring?  She is not bitching; she is conducting research.  The paradox is that most women want a man to stand up to her.  She wants no, like a boarder line of assertive dominance, to know security in that this male is competent to care for me in the difference between confidence and hubris.  Women are drawn to this relief, of the victory of being un-masculine for the glorious allowance to be feminine, to quell direct concerns, to be able to operate like a rain forest of curves, meandering roots instead of a rectangular-jawed machine guided by a single connected or disconnected electrical current imprisoned by ninety-degree angles.

Thandie told me about her parents, divorced in her teenage years, buying her attention and this old New Orleans Creole culture and Zulu pedigree.  I think Thandie’s attraction for me had to do with her own father’s Creole swirl of Caucasian and Negroid beaming out in the hue of my half-disinterested irises.  Thandie seemed so busy.  I felt like man-candy, which for the moment was palatable, but not necessarily digestible.  I wanted to hope, but hope is so dubious, treacherous like a pirate.  Hope can turn a man in a prison cell to stare at a single spider like a whirlwind of entertainment and cement his title as lunatic.

After dinner, Thandie took me to a private bar room she belonged to above the House of Blues in the Quarter.  Thandie pulled out a private pass card to enter.  I paid for dinner and the ten dollar drinks.  I felt like a man again.  We kissed on the bar stools, half-drunk and horny in experimental eroticism.  There was a burlesque show going on in the House of Blues downstairs.  We peeked in on the dancers down from the balcony.  We returned back to the bar to talk in the secluded enclave and acted like kids on prom night.

We ventured to Thandie’s condominium and parked amongst the Porsches and Mercedes.  Thandie floated the elevator to her bedroom.  I paced those unsteady steps, until parallel and half-naked.  I experienced a white man’s introduction into the trappings of a high-end black woman’s weave and where pale gauche fingers can and can not traverse.  I stuttered inside my skull and broke in line between sensuality and consummated sexuality.  I did not want sex, not this way, not this breach of emotional foxholes for some random allocation of hours to innocuously stack a ledger.  I paused, decelerated. 

I think Thandie understood, but she was drunk and knew enough of me to know why the night almost did not happen.  Thandie knew an aroma of the origin of my reservations.  I held her for a while as her hearth went from bellowed coals to the cold paradoxes of gender.  I told Thandie I was going to go.  Thandie fell asleep in my arms.  In the darkness I could not find the light switch or the inclination to disrupt her slumber.  I left my non-tuxedo shirt and underwear, salvaged my undershirt, jacket and pants and drove back to Nottoway.  Thandie and I talked again, but I was not ready.

471

I knew myself well enough to know that I am a fish that can not survive in superficial waters.  I will suffocate and cease to be me.  Attempting bouts of mistaken identity was masochistic.  It is difficult to for me to segregate a carnal physical want from the affixed desire for a mental and spiritual affinity.

I wanted to know who a person was as their naked internal self regardless of my presence.  That prompted me either to decline or choose to not to pursue more potential partners than consummated relationships.  Those could be counted on a single hand. 

I am not ashamed.  I do not judge others for living their life in harmony with what makes sense to them.  God made us each beautiful in such splendid divergent ways.  Sex is pretty low on humanity’s problem list.  I was born this way.  I was never really into schoolyard games or frat-house Olympics.  What if I had stood up to Ashley when she bolted out my car so many years ago?

Sometimes I thought I would rather love vaguely.  I could love the idea, or a concept, the specter of a limb offering a kindness.  It was safer.  When love gets specified focused on a character rather than desire the dissipation of the multitude of possibility obliterates the aesthetic pleasantries.  In ordinary radical fruit there are seeds and pulp.  Narrow desire yields no sugar, just seeds like a spiky orange kiwano from Zimbabwe.  The endeavor is appealing until opened and then replete with bitter green goo.

472

I spent a month as a trapped miner.  Timing seemed adrift.  Penelope was in preschool.  My property world was still a spinning top over in a restricted corner of a closet.  When I talked to Thandie, it had to be on nights I did not have Penelope so I could drive in my car down the street from the rental house to find adequate cell phone reception to conduct an adequate length conversation.  My life was perpetually tugging at the tips of my shoe strings on the verge of chaotic unravel.

I grew up as a hermit enough on my own.  Nottoway exacerbated my function as an isolationist Atlantic islander.  I tried to find humor.  I imagined myself capable of living out a Shawshank-Andy Dufresne-perseverance.  My normal was imprisoned in solitary soaking in the sensory deprivation of a man beating walls.  I was built to do solitary. 

473

One Saturday I dreamed I was praying in church.  I finished kneeling after the priest set the Eucharist in the tabernacle.  In my peripheral vision, I saw red hair.  This phantom-faced girl started a conversation in full vocal volume, not yelling or in a whisper, but in a normal tone.  The entire congregation could hear.  She spoke without pause peppering questions in response to my mental requests.  She would not stop. 

Every other celebrant turned aghast at this anomaly.  The collective voyeur stared in the reserved-for-silence moment.  I said, “Would you like to go out this Wednesday?”  Deliberations of her auburn highlight sanity did not register.  She had a perspicuity in response warranting credulity.  I was magnetized. 

Then I woke.  My senses were stymied.  I realized another empty night of staring at unpacked boxes cataloged in my rental abode had careened into a six-thirty a.m. Sunday morning.  I needed to rise for eight o’clock mass to make time to volunteer for my daughter’s school fundraiser in hopes that I might see her for the first time in three days. 

474

I had not been out in the world much lately.  I had the premature night with Thandie.  I went on one date with a divorced woman that tasted like pickles.  She had a son with a personalized license plate (B’S MOM) and lived two hours away.

Dating as an adult was foreign territory.  Dating was alien.  Dating was like sorting a drawer of utensils trying not to feel like a spork.  I was distrustful of whatever this pheromone-dance was of flirting.  I had meager skills in liars’ poker. 

First date conversational topics were chock full of taboos, bear traps, sanctuaries of non-offensive pleasantries and common courtesies at meals shared over sweet breads, that are not bread at all.  Parings use meandering sentences appearing out of crannies of pasts to volley conversations aloft to avoid the shattering dangers of silence or factual knowledge about one’s actual history.  Enough quiet could explode upon a table top into glances towards wallpaper or paint on a ceiling to avoid prolonged eye contact that lovers use.  

I was working on being a shell with a smile that was not a smile.  Inches pretended to be kilometers to keep actual emotion at bay.  None of it was real.  The monster ate me, what others saw was only her meal slumped in a pressed suit, wing tips and bright eyes.  I was a god damn lie, tired of recycled well-wish conversations, as if facts would ever matter again.

I was unsure how one determines if a woman was available?  All the pretense of diamonds and twenty-first century interpretations of Gen-X finger raptures were futile, confounding and debilitating.  I did not ask.  I did not try.  Logistics trumped pheromones.  I knew the how; confidence, action, assertion.  I just did not know the where, when, or who.

Sometimes I imagined my ex-wife being approached in a grocery store, clichéd carts bumping and the ring off in a purse, soap dish or bath cloth.  Ashley was vulnerable of hand.  Would she scoff?  All was irrelevant.

Guys use a million idiosyncratic variables to filter who we want.  This selection criterion drives women to morph their chemical compositions to formulate manufactured compatibility as long as the man meets her father-blueprint threshold.  Men are creatures seeking that balance of sex appeal and business acumen to manage real life.  Which foundational preconception a relationship is built on predestines inevitabilities. 

Will she support him in occasions of turmoil, pull in or run, fight or flight?  Is there magnetism of polar opposites or do commonalities and cross-parental equations mathematically proof?  What is the maintenance on the type of vehicle she drives?  Does she love me?  All these questions and games men play and appease themselves in things we say and do not verbalize. 

475

The worst masculine mistake of courtship is emotional honesty.  Such integrity-based polemics are entirely self-defeating.  Mystery paired with an acceptable shoulder width is better bait.  Intrigue, with rogue humor bridging cockiness with an empathetic undercurrent is orgasm nectar to a woman.  Insecurity and desperation are poisonous repellant.

To pass the first threshold filter of a lover, at least women discriminate on a straight-forward basis whether women acknowledge the cull or not.  It is understandable.  Status of career orientation and pectorals are in the fine print of a Cinderella cliché.  Five-foot ten seems like a magical portal-awning into masculinity.  It is the “you must be this tall to” demarcation hand on the amusement park ride of life.  Men line up in the billions and only those above the minimum get to take turns riding the roller coaster.  The majority of women sit like strap-in belt-tracked cars.  The same “this tall” mother fuckers get to circle around over and again like they have fast-track pocket-passes to cut in a line that never moves for midget men. 

Maybe it was my Napoleon complex in denial.  Maybe it was my rant of the moment to compensate for greater realities.  I would rather isolate and over-simplify lonely struggles into a mathematical proof that certain differential equations could never balance in perpetuity.  Sometimes I felt like the little bastard stuck in a Ford Escort behind an F350 pick up.  I retained ignorant hope for some five-foot one angel to pick discriminately.  I also knew that confidence trumped physical stature.

It is possible, but not likely.  Those below are not masculine, genetically deficient, unsuitable for mating, offspring will be challenged.  Your degree, thoughts, humor, mitigated factors are moot.  That conversation is rarely held because he never makes the ballot of qualified candidates for the primary. 

It is evolution.  A taller man is more capable of killing the prey that is going to feed a woman and her offspring.  Modern income streams are no longer so directly correlated to physical prowess or masculine confines, but counteracting millions of years of evolution for such a logic-circumventing practice as mating is a laughable objective.

It is instinct.  It is native.  It is the underbelly of a Lifetime movie.  It is you better make forty-grand more a year for each inch under if you want me to look at you.  It is chemical hypocrisy of the hypothalamus.  It is known already.  Get over it.  It is Tom-Cruise-Top-Gun exceptions.  It is “but his dick is implied.”  It is he has to be at least as tall as my father.  It is there are no surgeries for this alignment.  It is the qualified pool of candidates.  It is reality.  Get over it.  Rant out.

I plowed through electronic profiles went to bed with the torments of my “nothing to do with height” inadequacies stashed under my pillow like broken teeth.  Ranting just appeased my juvenile-humanity to provide a judicial why to the quandary.  We crave the answer to why like a crack rock, a desert man’s mana, not some bacteria film, but a plan from God.  God had nothing to do with this, this was me.  I carried my erector set of bones to work, to parenting, and to an empty house depending on the day.

476

In March I met someone new online.  The correspondence took a triad of offerings of email over a few weeks.  I was almost accepting of falling into another non-germinating avocado pit.  Silence in such confines of correspondence was typically the equivalent of a quintet of fingers brushing a shoulder.  That was fine.  I probably made the mistake of appearing too interested.  I wanted to be certain and move.  I eventually sent an email illuminating my confusion in the crosshairs of contradicting messages.  I wanted us to either pull the trigger on meeting or become passing ships.  End the enigmatic. 

The last email I sent recapped an excerpt from a message I had sent to Ashley after our divorce.  The electronic letter neither referred nor elucidated the actual context.  In my head I contorted and edited the rationale for the original letter, which was simply my telescopic-male view of femininity to orient my own astronomical constellation catalog. 

Men sort thoughts by going off alone: hunting, sports, video games, television, or construction etc.  Women discuss in friend-harems to be heard, not to obtain answers.  Just look at average iPhone call histories.  In the confluence, men don’t talk and when we do, we offer solutions.  Women have their own solutions, but need to expel the puzzle pieces to the table of conversation to make a whole.  Women relish the waters of sorting the intrigue, the plot of machinations of what bin to put this man like tossing pulled flower petals.  Men start to help and smear the image or yank the bloom from her fingers.  Interplanetary travel between Mars and Venus was proving difficult and such light-speed gender-surfing digital salvos were entirely worth attempting.

I made the last part of my email a story that I had supposedly sent to Sidney in her adult years as my pen-pal.  I pondered giving Sidney advice on men as if I knew whether Sidney ever got married or was still married or not.  As if I knew a thing about women and if I could contort the little I did I could some how fool the public.

Certainly the ghost of the truth that most of these words were written by a man trying to save his marriage at the time to appeal to an aloof female who refused to talk would be found foul.  I wrote other things about my real life as bread for the sandwich, but I wanted my internet correspondent to decide if I was the boiled-shrimp remoulade fried-green tomato po-boy type of man she was interested in dating.

This is part of a letter I wrote to a former pen-pal of mine who was having trouble in her marriage.  I think it illuminates part of what I am trying to write about men and woman and the roles we play.

Maybe the essence of femininity rests inside the ability to be comfortable with being vulnerable to a measured degree of latitude inside a woman’s daily life.  Allowing her self to be vulnerable is like an orgasm of the soul; it opens her up to feel alive.  She needs to be able to express her self; to open up with out directly correlated linear problem to solution sequential experiences that are more inherent to a man’s world rather than her own. 

In corporate America we have directives and objectives.  I think some women find it difficult to flip the switch in their personal lives to open up, to take their guard down and be feminine.  In being able to open up a woman expresses a release to silence the concerns of imperfection, of not meeting the standards of beauty, of a career, of motherhood, of domestic chores, or errands, of a whirlwind of a life that asks her to be all to everyone. 

In her soul she is trying so hard and is liberated in being vulnerable and comfortable with a man to express her self to, to listen and not correct, criticize, or instruct her in how to deal with those concerns, but simply to have him there like an external bowl of hands.  For him to be there for that moment, no matter how non-linear the words may come out, to be able to deposit them for that moment, for that time, gives her the release, it relieves the pressure of her system that reverberates and echoes in her soul a sense of harmony and joy. 

Men above all yearn to be appreciated for providing the happiness in our wives lives.  If you let a man know what he can do for you to make you happy and tell him you appreciate it, he will bend over backwards to keep doing it.  You are exalting his soul.  If you ask him to and help him be that bowl of hands and thank him for it, he will become the vessel for you and allow you to retrieve from the bowl at will without him altering or manipulating the contents.

This goes back thousands of years into the development of human interactions.  Men would go out and hunt in groups, provide food, bring meat home and the woman would assist in watching the children and preparing the meal.  A man who could not bring home an animal was a failure.  His family went hungry.  The man did not expect the woman to provide his dinner just to appreciate his work. 

The man decompressed in the solitude of hunting and then sitting by a fire and gazing after his work while the meal was roasting.  Obviously I am not trying to say such Neanderthal thoughts as a woman’s place is in the kitchen.  What I am saying is, as a man that my greatest joys in life have come from providing for my counterpart and feeling needed and appreciated for that. 

I think in this duality resides the balance of feminine and masculine.  We struggle to find space in the overlap without pushing the other out.  He is trying to solve your problems, and trying to do.  You just want him to listen, but do not want to have to tell him.  You expect him to know what you need, but you need to tell him that you appreciate him just being there to hear you. 

Tell him that you are not telling him these things because you do not have the answers, but because he is important to your basis of being.  The fact that you can share these problems with him makes you feel close.  When he tries to solve them for you it actually makes you feel further away, which contradicts everything a man is biologically engineered to understand.  That is why you are writing me, you are treating me like one of your girlfriends to satiate your feminine need to be heard because I am listening.

I wrote a few other things, straddling that insert, but somewhere in the email was an outcry to the woman I was trying to reach.  By the end of March, I invited her to a picnic along the Mississippi River behind the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, with a salutation, “Each day a flipping coin, choice and chance, a picnic in the spring, two bins, joy and regret, which will you deposit?, Life moves, grab hold, or who knows where you will end up.  Call me.”

Hi Ethan, Thanks for the invite. I am interested in meeting you.  I have to admit, I felt pressure initially.  Hence the reason I was quiet.  However, you seem like a genuine guy, and one that I would at least like to talk to in person. Let me check on the zoo.  If not then, maybe grabbing a coffee would be the next best thing. Elyse

477

Her name was Elyse Davenport, a girl stitched in bilingual memories of days raised in Philadelphia and New Orleans and stretched in between.  Her father was Jewish and her mother had a true fondness for a Catholic Jesus as a Guatemalan Catholic.  Dad was up north and mom south.  Elyse’s tongue bifurcated between Yiddish and Spanish with an English centerfold.

Elyse had tan skin swimming with Hispanic currents.  One of her myriad of career options was as a refugee of the sun and its scalding tongs, despite a genetic contradiction divulging the opposite.  Her day job was as a dental hygienist and with it a fascination for all things teeth.  Elyse loved sky diving and New York shopping strips, but spent most of high school within two miles of me inside uptown New Orleans.  The same NOLA neighborhoods were in our nomenclature.

Elyse and I spoke on the phone a few times leading up to our first date scheduled a week away.  I made a conscious effort to curb my enthusiasm for anything beyond natural.  Elyse knew my up-front mathematics.  Our evening was scheduled on April eighth in Nottoway at one of the three restaurants.  I wanted to take her out in uptown New Orleans, but the mountaineer in the woman wanted to see where I lived. 

478

I arrived first.  I sat in the waiting area and received a phone call that Elyse was running late.  I saw Elyse rolling in from the rear from my vantage point like a J.D. Salinger line as she passed in front towards the hostess.  Holden, “Who gives a damn if she’s late?”

Elyse pirouetted to our first face to face beyond digital photograph visual impression.  I was clutching lucky like a blood test pinprick for beneficial initial results.  The apex of Elyse’s stature emerged just above my shoulder in a confluence of geometry that allowed natural Pythagorean proof.

We were seated at a table in a three-quarter full room with Abita and Shiner on tap.  Elyse was not a beer drinker.  Elyse was more of a gin and tonic woman when the moment prompted such indulgences.  Elyse was neither a great fan nor opponent of intoxication. 

Elyse sat with her polarized sunglasses raised above her forehead into her just past the shoulder black length hair framing her face.  Elyse was in a black top and some form of gray pant that may or may not have had a designer moniker and calf-covering boots.  I remember her symmetrical button-checks, dimpled chin and sense-knocking blue eyes.  I snuck in stares with my radar-dish listening.  I averted the trajectory of my visual concentration from the centrifuge of her mascara-licked irises. 

I ordered a blueberry-glazed quail breast.  Elyse had the eggplant Napoleon in a Tasso sauce.  We spoke of our parallel high school paths growing up so close and never meeting.  Elyse was a cheerleader for St. Aloysius since she graduated from the Catholic girl’s sister school St. Ann’s.  I felt the motion of proximity of Elyse’s world orbit enclosing on intersection.  I sunk in Elyse’s McIntosh apple-blossom face radiant in smiling bloom in cosine line fit-them-in smiles in my sneak-them-in glances. 

The overhead Pandora pump-in of music slipped in The Airborne Toxic Event’s “Sometime around Midnight.”  Elyse had never heard the song and in a string list of the Avett Brothers and Wilco popped in as some sign I knew I was in the right place.  Elyse pulled out her iPhone and alluded to the dance beats of her world mentioning Mikie Snow and MGMT.  I had never heard of them, but developed a fondness for their times to pretend as the beats always made me think of Elyse.

Mid meal I reached my hand aside to the plates.  Elyse and I started to hold a single hand as we talked.  Elyse did not care so much for her sauce.  The herbs contorted an escape into my blueberry glaze.  

Elyse had business and personal trips pre-scheduled over the next month and a half.  The first was to visit her father in Philadelphia.  The second was to New York to intersect with one of her brothers that lived in Paterson, New Jersey while on a work conference.  The third was to go on a trip to Jamaica with one of her girlfriends.  The logistics seemed like a hindrance, but time is but ant hills easily stepped over in an aged gate. 

We finished our meal and encored conversation.  We traversed outside.  No one was around.  We had an eleven-thirty p.m. non-ticking no-slipper sit down.  The atmosphere was a country fair scene outside with a green-painted picnic table.  A windmill-type weather mane turned in the tower air. 

I made that intimate convex movement into Elyse’s concave seated position.  We shared our first kiss.  I pulled the scent of Elyse into my nostrils.  I reeled her in for that kiss out of a world Elyse did not expect.  This was a date to Elyse on a Thursday mixed amongst schedules of trips and timing.  Elyse and I were tattooed.  Neither of us was sure of progressions, but we were certain of that guttural detection of attraction. 

In a parcel clutched departure I walked Elyse to her Prius with a hug and a mutual pheromone inhalation.  I paid my closing address in a letter of words that had to hold for however long it might be before we could see each other again.  I returned to my Impala with the latch-system Penelope car seat intact.

479

I went home and counted ceiling tiles at my rental palace.  The following Saturday morning I picked up Penelope in my bimonthly penance.  Sunday morning I got a call from Molly, Penelope’s best friend Annabelle’s mother.  Molly asked, “What happened?”  I was clueless as to the context of her interrogative.  Apparently Annabelle had her sixth birthday party Saturday complete with a chocolate dirt cake.  Ashley had the invitation and neglected to inform me of the scheduling. 

Molly said Annabelle was crushed.  Perhaps her feelings were prepubescent manifestations of that personal clique-sort-of-way a fourteen-year-old later version of girl may plot passive-aggressive vindications against Penelope for the assumed intentional slight.  This version of Annabelle was simply confused as to the rationale of why her best friend would not attend her sixth birthday party.  I explained my ignorance to convey that I was neither a draft dodger nor a sadist.  Molly unfortunately realized that mailings in Penelope’s circumstance had to be concerted actions if Ashley was involved. 

Continue to Chapter 16 part 2