Friday, November 10, 1989

.....To Ask

“Ask that man you’re sleeping next to about Tori Olson,” The woman’s voice on the other end of the line accuses.

I sit up straight in the bed. My heart skips several beats in fear. “What? What did you say?”
The phone goes click and the line is dead. I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and grab the other part of the phone closer to me.

“Hello? Hello?” I yell at the dial tone. Finally, I give up. I rest the receiver back and set the phone on the bedside table.

I can’t move. I sit on the edge of the mattress and stare out the window. My mind is so jumbled; I can’t make a coherent thought. A wave of dizziness overtakes me, reminding me to breathe.

On the other side of the bed, he sighs in his half-awakened state. I force myself to be perfectly still and begin praying he’ll fall back asleep.

To my disappointment, he rolls over and rests his fingertips against the small of my back.

“Hmmm, who was that?” He asks, in a groggy voice.

I stand up and walk closer to the window, needing to get away from his touch. I know I should ask. Find out what that woman was talking about. Who’s Tori Olson?

Instead, the fear of knowing the truth forces me to shrug and nonchalantly answer, “No one. Wrong number.”

I keep my back to him. If he sees my face, he’ll know that I’m lying. So, I stare out at the darkness damning myself for not trusting him and damning him for not trusting me.

From the bed I hear deep, even breathing. I turn around and watch the curled up, sleeping lump buried beneath the sheets. Only his closed eyes and a tuft of dark hair can be seen.

What kind of man are you?! I scream inside my head. After only five months, you need someone else. And just who the Hell is Tori Olson? What does she have that I can’t seem to give you?

I cross my arms over my chest, staring at his slumbering body, but really I’m looking through it. I think about this other woman and what she must be like. I picture blonde hair that flows down a thin back with protruding shoulder blades. A pert nose placed upon a heart-shaped face, with innocent eyes of blue. Innocence like that pond we visited that first weekend after our first date. How the blue color of the water was pure, but screamed to know the curiosity of what it was like to be disturbed.

And that’s just what we had done. Without telling me what he was going to do, he had stripped out of his jeans and jumped in the pond wearing those plaid boxers. I had laughed in embarrassment when he begged me to join him. Suddenly, throwing caution to the wind, I had taken off my clothes, leaving only my undergarments on. We had spent the afternoon in our underwear playing in that freezing water, disrupting its peace with ripples of inquisitive waves.

Now there was "Tori Olson" to break our tranquility by bringing out my insecurity and fear. I hate this woman. She’s a symbol of proof that the people I care about could leave in an instant for something better. She has the power to break not only my relationship with him, but also my will to love.

Suddenly, he raises his head jerking me out of my thoughts. In the moonlight, his skin looks pale. His eyes are shadowed making him look as if he were wearing sunglasses. He smiles and holds his arm out to me. The shock of the cold night air hits my skin. I realize I’m standing totally naked before him. I know he wants me to come to him, but I can’t. I feel disgust flow through my veins causing my stomach to lurch. The thought of him touching me, tasting me, knowing me makes me feel violated and used. As if I’m a second choice. A woman who’s conveniently here, but not the one he wants.

I search the room for my robe. I find it in the corner where I threw it earlier when passion was something I couldn’t live without. I pick it up and shrug into it, keeping my eyes on the floor like a child who’s being punished.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I say in a guilty voice. I saunter out of the bedroom, feeling his eyes burning through the material of my robe. I see his confused expression following me into the bathroom. I know my over dramatic behavior is ridiculous and something he’s never seen before, but I’m too angry to explain. I just want to be alone and wallow in my self-pity that Tori Olson is able to bring out.

In the bathroom, I splash cold water on my face. My cheeks are burning with emotions I swore I’d never show him. I raise my head up and look into the mirror of the medicine cabinet above the sink. My reflection doesn’t look like me. I look small and child-like.

The phone rings again. I fly out of the bathroom, hoping to answer it before he does. But I’m too late. He picks up the receiver before it has a chance to ring again. I come to a dead stop in the middle of the bedroom.

“Hey,” He says, in a voice full of sleep.

I can hear the edges of a female voice, the barbs.

He hangs up while the voice is still going on. Then he gets out of bed and undoes the jack.

I squint at him, waiting. He walks over to me, grabs my hand and pulls me toward the bed. With a sense of masculinity, but not force, he pushes me to lie down. He crawls into bed and curls up next to me, facing me. He brings his head down so our foreheads touch.

“I guess,” He says in a slow voice, as if he’s trying to think of the right words to say. “that I’d better tell you about Tori Olson. You deserve to know.” She was crazy, he says, underage, a runaway. There was, as he puts it, “just no getting by her.”

My body is stiff, tight with fear. “You mean you slept with her?”

I feel him nodding, yes.

“When?” I ask him. I’m amazed to find my voice.

“I don’t know,” He shrugs. “A year or two ago.”

“Oh,” I start laughing with relief, even looking straight at him. “I thought you meant now. These past few months.”

But he isn’t laughing with me. He’s shaking his head. “No, now there’s just you. But I still think you’d better hear what I have to say.”

“I don’t want to be in bed with you and hear about someone else,” I push away from him and roll off the bed. “I’m getting a beer.”

I head to the kitchen and hear him say, “Okay, then.”

He follows me, naked, into the kitchen. I open the refrigerator, grab two bottles of beer, and hand him one.

He walks over to the counter and leans his back against the tile. I walk to the table and sit down in the chair
facing him. The cap of his beer goes hiss when he turns it off the bottle. He sets the bottle on the counter and fiddles with the cap in his fingers.

I watch him turn the sharp edged cap around and around in his fingers. He isn’t looking at me; he’s staring at the floor deep in thought. I know he’s trying to think of the best way to tell me about her, so I wait patiently for him to begin. He takes a deep breath before he talks. A cleansing breath, I think.

“I couldn’t get away from her,” He says. “I couldn’t get free. And I had to, I knew that I did... and so I packed up everything I owned and I rented a trailer and I…..” He shrugs and stops to look at me.
I’m horrified. I supposed I look it.

“That seems so excessive,” I say.

“It was. It was excessive in every way. It was….” He looks pained, remembering.

And I feel like an ancient, a crone, thinking of him with this girl who was underage. She was fucking his brains out, probably.

“I don’t think I want to hear the rest,” I say.

“But you need to,” He says and takes another breath.

He was married then, and his wife had rented Tori Olson a room.

“And then she left me, went to Florida. Left me in the house with this girl.”

“Whose idea was it?” I ask.

He shrugs again. “I don’t know. Everybody’s probably. We were pretty nearly always high.”

I am never high. I don’t do anything, no drugs, hardly any alcohol. I think of how tame I must seem.

“It was a weird time. A very weird time.” He says. Then he goes silent.

I am freezing cold, partly because of the air and partly because of the past dread. I think I might cry and I wonder why. This Tori Olson was way before we met. But it isn’t Tori Olson, it isn’t. It is the life he led.

We are like that, still and apart for awhile, and then I feel him edging near.

I watch him approach me. Naked and vulnerable like a newborn baby. At my feet, he drops to his knees and lays his head on my lap. I stroke his hair, bending forward as far as I can. My robe has opened up, exposing my legs and I can feel the hair on his chest tickle my thighs. I smell the familiar scent of him and my love for him right then is excruciating.

He never says he loves me when I do. He says it when I’m wholly unaware. Like he’ll be driving off to the liquor store, say, and he’ll have the pickup running, even turned around.

I’ll be standing there, maybe weeding or something, maybe bringing in the laundry.

I’ll wonder why the truck is sitting there, idling, and I’ll look up to see him staring at me.

“I love you,” He’ll say, and he’ll floor the thing so that the wheels churn and gravel spits everywhere.

And me, I just sit there and churn too, churn with wanting my arms around him right then. Wanting to close him off inside.

He lifts his head off my lap and looks up at me. His eyes are tired. He kisses my knee.

“I love you,” I whisper. “I wish you would tell me the same.”

He stands up and holds out his hands to help me out of my chair, but he doesn’t let go of my hands right away. He looks at me deep in my eyes and says, “Maybe someday soon, I’ll be able to.”

He turns and walks out of the kitchen, back into the bedroom. I hear him get into bed, sighing before he lays his head on the pillow. I stand in the darkness of the kitchen, listening, feeling very small, very his, but willingly so.

“Whatever you want,” I whisper in the still, lonely air.

And then I wait.....

We moved!

  We have moved. Yep, you guessed it... to Las Vegas! So now I am back working at the flower shop I started my work journey with, but they h...