. . . Paradise

I'd been with my wife for nine years, seven of them married, and it had been a happy time.  I had not wanted to get married, but she was graduating from college and had been living with me for two years, and one day she began tapping her ring finger saying, "It's been two years.  It's not going to be three."  Adrenaline pumped through me hard for the next few days.  I was about to turn forty and had never been a rounder as they used to say, but I'd always loved the idea of options.

When I'd met my wife, she had been the aggressor.  I was much older than she, and while it was flattering, it gave me pause.  But when it became evident that our relationship might be going further, I told her, "You know what everyone will say.  They will say that you are looking for a daddy substitute and I'm still trying to date the homecoming queen."  She looked at me for a second and laughed.  "Fuck 'em.  I don't care what 'they' say.  Do you?"  I didn't have to think much.   I was happy and willing.

And as if to test my resolve and hers, a few weeks later I took her to my twentieth year high school reunion.  She was twenty.  And that night convinced me.  God, I thought, I am truly happy.

She was cute and elegant, a country club girl in gentle, sophisticated rebellion, and our days and nights were delightful.  She was generous to a fault, bringing me gifts in the middle of week for no reason other than she couldn't wait.

"Here.  I was going to give you this for your birthday, but. . . ."

I opened a shopping bag and pulled out classic waxed cotton Barbour raincoat.  It was Tuesday, I remember, thinking that things like this never happened on Tuesday unless it was Christmas or your birthday.  She once brought me a Lafite Rothschild after having some at the home of some friends.

On days when I'd come home feeling tired or beat, she'd give me pleasures I'd done nothing to earn.  

"Sailor," she said, mimicking Laura Dern's Lulu in David Lynch's "Wild at Heart" which we had recently watched, "I've had my cowboy boots on all day, and I was thinking. . . why don't we just run away?"

And there she stood in her new cowboy boots and a short skirt smiling like it was a movie holiday.  And so we poured a couple drinks and jumped into the open Jeep and "ran away" for a short while, driving the miles to a far away cowboy store where she could get some silver tips for the toes of those boots.

It was always like that.

Until it wasn't.  We'd had our first fight not long before.  And she had begun hanging out with her high school friend who she had not seen much of since we had been together.  Her friend was married and had a daughter, but she was leaving her husband and needed a pal.  Then they began to run with the old crowd.  And once they started a book club, and I knew I was doomed without admitting it to myself.  I'd pronounced long before loudly and often that book clubs were death to relationships, for if one woman was discontent with her relationship, everyone else would be too soon enough.  I had the sinking feeling, without saying so.

It was too just too sad to believe there might be trouble in Paradise.