A Change of Needs (15 page)

She had a curious look of anxiousness about her when he arrived, like a child’s first visit to the doctor, an understandable concern about the unknown. And like he had been with his father, he was there when she too passed. The child comforting the parent in one of life’s more ironic twists.

Both of his parents had now died in his arms, and he would not have traded anything for it. It was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing in a sense that he knew they were not alone, that he had gotten to say goodbye, but a curse in the sense that it was undeniably painful to see the people who loved you most in the world leave it, and you. He felt alone, and would need the comfort of someone who cared about him, and after the necessary couple of notifications to those concerned, Rae Anne was the
third
person he called.

He desperately wanted to see her when the weekend finally came, and he got the call all right. She said Glen would
not
be going out of town. So he headed to Leon’s, but it wasn’t long before he had to satisfy that innate curiosity, and if curiosity killed the cat, it straight murdered the dawg. He would drive by her house and notice Glen had apparently purchased an antique muscle car, how unlike him. Or …someone else had gotten the call that he had hoped to. He drove to the shopping center and parked, then walked that half-mile walk to her house, navigating the landscape and terrain he was now familiar with. He admired the car in the driveway as he passed it, and then continued to the backyard where in his mental imbalance he thought to see if he could catch a glimpse of what was going on. He got an eyeful he would not soon forget …
if possibly ever
.

The lights were on in the den, the sheers drawn across the glass doors to the deck. And there they were, sitting on the couch watching TV like High School sweethearts. The guy seemed extremely interested in what was on TV …and she
didn’t
. This was her discretionary time, and she had other ideas in mind. She slid behind him and began massaging his shoulders, signaling her readiness and intentions. This was a service call, “Service is requested, assistance required aisle 5.
I didn’t invite you here because you don’t have cable,”
or something along those lines Jake thought to himself.

She removed her shirt, those beautiful breasts he was all too familiar with unleashed and lain on the man’s shoulders, yet the fella hardly seemed to notice …
at first
. She whispered something to him, turned the TV off, and the sexual
wet work
began.

As he watched, “casual sex” suddenly seemed like a peculiar combination of words, like “ice warm beer,” the words made unnatural neighbors. It’s the most intimate thing two humans can do, hardly
casual
, and yet we do it with the ease of animals, much as we in fact are, and Jake was far from an opponent of the practice… having made an art form and part-time career of it, building his
a
typical life around it. But if men are turnkey operations with the sexual act, he was finding himself to be as confounding as a
Rubik’s Cube
when it came to the
emotions
associated with
this
variation. Beyond that age of innocence and first loves, no man has any illusion that they are the first to have been with a woman, but most have some natural aversion to the idea of some other fella falling up in there after them if they have some feelings for the gal, and as unaccustomed as he was to the sensation …he
felt
it.

A woman has to allow a man inside her, and when that
invitation
is extended to someone else, it
can
eat at a lover’s psyche, confidence, and his
stability
, like a crippling blow to his emotional weak spot. Make no mistake, with rare exception, women are the givers, and men the recipients of sex, and it’s one thing to know there has been another
recipient
…and quite another to
actually
be a witness to it, and as he watched another man get the “gift” that he felt should have been his, he was temporarily paralyzed by the unfamiliar commotion it produced of jealousy, anger …and
disbelief.
It was surreal.

Like one of those horror stories where the patient regains consciousness on the operating table but can’t move or tell anyone …Jake was having open-heart surgery, and she was
not
a surgeon… but a coroner instead, …a
love removal machine
in effect. He stood there in the darkness, not knowing whether to cry or touch himself at the sight of it all, like the singular audience to a live sex show, he couldn’t look away. Forget the unimportance of an historic timeline, but he imagined what it would have been like for Caesar to be stabbed to death while made to watch Marc Antony fuck Cleopatra…
Et tu Rae
? And then he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the glass backdoor …the image disturbingly unrecognizable, as if a stranger to himself.

When his feet finally began to move they carried him around to the driveway. The guy had a beautiful automobile, a midnight blue Pontiac GTO, dressed out, but the doors were unlocked, so he glanced inside the glove box for the registration. His name was Anthony Marcus Donelli …not
quite
Marc Antony, but too damn close for coincidence it seemed, as though a senate comprised of Destiny, Fate, and some guy named Anthony Marcus/Tony, were inadvertently killing
him
by “
stabbing
” Rae. All he could think was first things first, he was gonna have to
Tonya Harding-
style kneecap this bullshit, the unfamiliar sensation of it all producing a troubling and uncharacteristic reaction in the man, foreign and unlike him …
prior
to meeting her that is.

He walked back to the shopping center that housed a neighborhood pool hall among the other shops, etc., where he and Rae sometimes met. He would spend the next few hours there contemplating his next move until returning, armed with a juvenile plan in mind. In that period of time he had bounced around occupations as a younger man, he had worked for a time as an independent contractor for a satellite TV installer, he knew that there was a test-jack in the phone box on the side of the house, it was the first thing he had checked every time he got a service call about a customer unable to download pay-per-view, to make certain there wasn’t a problem with the phone line which lead to the satellite box.

He went to the 24-hour Drug Store that anchored the shopping center and purchased a $10 touch-tone phone with a cord, went back to the pool hall and waited until it was closing time, then made the walk back to her house. He had remembered her story about the older couple calling the police the night of her tantrum, and he knew the police would keep record of the call. He was aware it was extremely unhealthy behavior for a forty-five year-old man …like
T
emporary
R
estraining
O
rder unhealthy, but so was her behavior he told himself. He found the plastic phone box on the outside wall of the neighbor’s house, and using a dime, loosened the screw that held it shut. He had assembled the phone in necessary fashion, no cradle, no electric cord, just the wire that would connect to the phone and the jack. He had brought a pen to put under his tongue to disguise his voice when he spoke as he knew the call would be recorded, and dialed 911.

He told the call-taker that he thought there might be a disturbance at his neighbors’ house, had heard moans and what sounded like muffled cries for help, and he knew the husband to be gone. Gave them the address, and hung up. He knew the old couple’s phone number would show up on the PD’s caller ID, and provide the necessary credibility. He then disconnected the phone, secured the box and left for the woods to wait for the police to arrive.

Jake would not soon forget the expression on their faces when two police cars descended upon the residence, Tony hoping to get away unseen, and Rae Anne standing there with the infamous just-had-sex/bed-head hair in her short white robe, stunned and frightened about what to do next, as he sat hidden from sight like some thirteen year-old vandal who has strewn toilet paper all over someone’s trees, impishly admiring his handiwork. It was now 2:45 a.m. on a Saturday night/Sunday morning and people had begun to stir, it would not go unnoticed. But before it all played out, Jake had headed back to his truck, and home, with an undeniable satisfaction about himself. It wasn’t pretty, he wasn’t proud of it, it wasn’t who he was, or at least not who he use to be, but she had damn sure affected who he was.

He had read her emails, knew of her intentions, had
seen
the competition, and began to think in terms of how he would need to adapt and create perceived deficiencies in their game and her efforts to play with them. The dose of imaginary Chlamydia had merely proven to be a speed-bump, and not the roadblock he had hoped. A course of antibiotics and a condom had bypassed the issue, and he’d shot his
passive aggressive
wad with the attempt. Like some perverse emotional warfare, or PSYOP, he was now a romantic terrorist attempting to produce an affliction only he had the antidote for …
anxiety
, and thereby reinforce remedies only he could provide such as familiarity, comfort …and
safety.

He would write her an email later that day, they were initially supposed to get together that evening after all, inquiring about how her weekend with the hubby had gone, now in full knowledge of the bullshit story she had fed him about Glen not leaving town. He never let on that he was any the wiser, his behavior sinister, creepy, and a threat to all she held dear, and in that same psychotic vein he told himself she had it coming. She’d think twice about it next time, or so he hoped…

Rae would call in a day or two, perhaps because she wanted to check the tone of his voice, who knows, but he took a perverse pleasure in listening to her squirm over the phone as she continued her lie about the weekend’s “mundane” activities, and he informed her of his comfortable but uneventful weekend, and that he missed having the opportunity to see her… She would never discuss the actual events of the evening with him, he would never know how it had entirely played out, but he had accomplished what he sought. I don’t doubt for a moment he didn’t cross her mind in the aftermath though. She wasn’t stupid.

It was now mid-February, only ten weeks since that first weekend, but like one of those rides at the
State Fair
it had an extreme amount of twists and turns, highs and lows, for its short duration. Once she began to step outside of their relationship, he was removed from the starting line-up and became an involuntary mascot of sorts, no longer the star player. He now represented the magic mirror, you know, the “mirror, mirror, on the wall …who’s the fairest of them all?” variety. He had unwittingly become her cheerleader, helping her properly inflate her ego in his own attempts to get back in her good graces, the kids’ playhouse, or on her floor as it often seemed, and in the process helping her ramp up for her next “event” absent him. And “no,” he had not forgotten she was married, but he
thought
himself more than just the occasional guest, as if he’d earned a special distinction and place in her life, and should thus be afforded the accompanying perks and preferential treatment of a
preferred customer
…or “frequent fucker” as it were.

If she’d had the wherewithal in the moment she would have noticed the signs, and maybe she did, but the long-term forecast appeared favorable and she proceeded anyway. While it might have begun as a respite from the drought in her life, a welcomed brief or occasional shower of much needed attention, the emotional meteorologist in her should have noticed the elements and the hazards presented by the gathering of circumstantial clouds and coincidental fronts, and the fact that Jake was the
only
variable common to each. That component, however indistinct and far removed from the actual
storm
itself, which still had a degree of
relative
proximity and consistency with it …like thunder, …never far behind the lightning.

All aspects that would eventually get out of hand with the fury, confusion, and potential for harm of a category 5 emotional hurricane, the fact that she didn’t revealed her level of connectedness as well… Liken it to standing with your nose on a billboard, you can’t begin to see it clearly and make sense of it until you get some distance from it, the “
me to
” you first saw and couldn’t make sense of, becomes “Welco
me to
Hell.”

.

CHAPTER 9

POCKETFUL OF SALT

Earl had been the precursor to Chunk in Jake’s life. They had grown up together, literally grown up together, some of the first memories each of them had included each other, and those are typically from the age of two or three. He had known Jake before he went through that difficult period as a child, and remained his only friend through it. They were extremely similar, “brothers of different mothers” they would say. Jake would say he wasn’t afraid of any man, only God and the government, but if there was a man that concerned him it was Earl. They had once held each other in headlocks for nearly 30 minutes before Earl’s mom had called him home for supper, neither submitting.

While Jake was
failing
his first attempt at college, Earl had gone to work at a textile mill in Greensboro, but they were both young, dumb and full of cum, and neither could concentrate on one thing for very long. In that period between the time he had broken up with his girlfriend, and before he moved to Raleigh, Jake and Earl thought to give the military a try, the economy was bad, it was peacetime and the Air Force and Naval recruiters advertised a buddy-system, sign up with your buddy and stay together through basic training and your first duty assignment. They started at the Air Force recruiter’s office, took the ASVAB, Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, and each did well, but Jake’s criminal record for some youthful mischief would keep him from getting in, next stop the Navy Recruiting station, same story…

It seemed the military had a surplus of enlistees at the time and could afford to be selective, and while Earl was accepted into both branches they were determined to proceed together, but everyone was now pointing them in the direction of the Marines, and Jake was growing less interested at that thought, planes and boats were cool, and he was thinking in terms of how girls swarmed over the flyboys and sailors. But he had known a friend who had joined the Marines three years earlier. They had thrown him a party when he came home from boot camp, and the nineteen year-old spent the entire night in a tree, Jake would bring him the occasional beer, but the kid spent the entire night in a tree …at his own party, as if on recon or some shit, until when no one was looking he disappeared, perhaps thinking he didn’t fit in anymore. They didn’t see him again until he had completed his two-year tour of duty …he had come out of it very different than he went in. When they say you can take the man out of the Marines, but you can’t take the Marine out of the man they weren’t kidding, and Jake was looking for a change of scenery, but not a change in his psychological makeup. He wasn’t one to be told what to do anyway, and he drew the line at that point where if he couldn’t go where he wanted, he wouldn’t go at all, and before too long he headed to Raleigh to live and look for work.