Once, years ago, I was engaged in a prolonged game of romantic chicken with an ex-girlfriend. She was married at the time. And she had a child. Not exactly the sport of kings, I’ll grant, but sport was what it seemed (at least for a time). Over a period of months we met at the over-wrought bar-of-the-moment and passed the time flirting shamelessly, noodling over past liaisons, each waiting for the other to crack under the building sexual tension and make an unambiguous advance.
Not being married, and not having a child, I wasn’t aware just how much unhappiness and disappointment must have been compacting within her as she kept washing up into what was clearly—even in the eighties—a pathetically shallow bar scene in order to rekindle long-cold passions.
One evening, though, I was given a peek into the state of her marriage. True to form, I missed the significance of the revelation in her life entirely. Its effects on mine were immediately clear, however. Breaking all the rules we had wordlessly agreed to, about discussing our life outside The Past or The Bar, she began to complain bitterly about her husband. Neither she nor I had ever spoken of her husband or my girlfriend while at The Bar, so naturally I found myself gripped by her tale. If I understood her correctly, her husband (whom I knew and, terrible as it sounds, admired), having found himself on the losing side of a power play at work, was being squeezed mercilessly. The pressure was getting to him, she reported to me; in fact, he had recently started exploding into tears every evening as soon as he returned home. “Before he can take his own tie off,” was the way she put it.
I gasped, in naïve horror, imagining what was for me the unimaginable: pressure so intense that it would bring such a proud man so low. She looked at me as if we understood each other completely. “I know,” she said, almost yelling now. “I feel like screaming, ‘Be a man, would you!’”
My memory of the moment—now a faded victim of the passing time, no question—is that The Bar suddenly fell silent, our conspiracy revealed to all present. The shame of knowing burning my callous heart, I pulled hard on my bottle of beer to hide the resulting rush of emotions and took a quick time-out with the Lord. I entreated, “Lord, I am truly sorry and I humbly repent, but if, in your infinite wisdom, you ever see fit to have me marry, and if my wife ever finds herself in a bar with a puke like me and she shares such intimacies and voices such cruel complaints, please, rather than let me live long enough to discover this betrayal, could you strike me dead where I stand? A stray bullet, maybe, or bad brakes on a mail truck, a lightening bolt, even, I don’t care how you do it, just take me Lord.”
excerpted from The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood, and Freedom
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