And so it goes. You’ll give him some little presents and he’ll buy you a couple of expensive things that make you wonder, a thousand-dollar watch and a real nice Walkman, and you’ll teach him new sex tricks for a month or two until his wife finds out. It always takes the wife longer than I planned. Where is that girl? But oddly enough, it won’t matter to my guy, because, you see, he loves me. He’s not up for five bad scenes and ten months of therapy. This marriage is over. Kids and all. So much for Fido, the tennis club, every single thing that has kept him from being all he could be.
This is a tricky period for me. I’ll tell him that we’d better not see each other for a while; it’s only good sense. He’ll take a room somewhere and call me five times a day. I feel guilty, I’ll say. I’m confused. Meanwhile, I’ll cruise his neighborhood waiting for the moment which got me into this whole deal. I mean, I’m happy all the while, I’m happy right now, I’m naturally a happy person, but I’m not really happy happy until I see the FOR SALE sign stabbed into the front lawn.
The house goes up. They have to deal with the realty, some tired schoolteacher, dry as old bread and dumb as a stick, and they have to think: seven percent. This stranger who can’t speak grammatical English—a person who must have bored her classes to death for years without end in social studies—is going to get seven percent of our house.
And then they have to divide the possessions, think about all the stuff they’ve brought into the house for years and years—it goes miles beyond the stereo and houseplants; there are roomsful.
Later, six, ten weeks, after I’ve let him know that there is no way I can continue with him, that to be a “homewrecker” is more than I can bear and that I’m sure he’s better off without me—I am, after all, just a damaged soul floating through the universe. After he’s history, I’ll drive by his house again. Sometimes I’ll go by the garage sale; there she is, the wife, with four aisles of their lives spread in the sun. She won’t know me. Maybe I’ll buy something, a little wall mirror or a little hibachi for the terrace. If there’s a box of tapes, I’ll buy a cassette or two for my new Walkman.
I don’t gloat. I do what I do. But I get a rush in these weeks, the aftermath. I love to drive by and just read the FOR SALE sign again. On the dry days of fall, it swings sometimes in the wind and I slow to hear the creaking. A healthy tuft of grass grows around the post like a hairy halo. The house is now empty, and the whole yard takes on a dusty, wild look, vacant. It could use a little water, but, of course, the mower, a red Toro with a grass catcher, that’s long gone. That will never cut this grass again.
And between men sometimes I simply drive, float the neighborhoods at twilight before I go to the bar, and I admire the smooth blue lawns shimmering under the wheezing evening sprinklers and I watch the yellow squares of windows light against the night, maybe a porch lamp will illuminate a flagstone terrace. I love that. Flagstone. There is nothing that speaks of marriage more than well-laid flagstone and a short stone wall. I drive slowly past these formidable homes and I see the FOR SALE signs on every block. There is nothing, not even flagstone, that can prevent a house from going up.
WHAT WE WANTED TO DO
WHAT WE WANTED to do was spill boiling oil onto the heads of our enemies as they attempted to bang down the gates of our village, but, as everyone now knows, we had some problems, primarily technical problems, that prevented us from doing what we wanted to do the way we had hoped to do it. What we’re asking for today is another chance.
There has been so much media attention to this boiling oil issue that it is time to clear the air. There is a great deal of pressure to dismantle the system we have in place and bring the oil down off the roof. Even though there isn’t much left. This would be a mistake. Yes, there were problems last month during the Visigoth raid, but as I will note, these are easily remedied.
From its inception I have been intimately involved in the boiling oil project—research, development, physical deployment. I also happened to be team leader on the roof last month when we had occasion to try the system during the Visigoth attack, about which so much has been written.
(It was not an “entirely successful” sortie, as I will show. The Visigoths, about two dozen, did penetrate the city and rape and plunder for several hours, but there was no pillaging. And make no questions about it—they now know we have oil on the roof and several of them are going to think twice before battering down our door again. I’m not saying it may not happen, but when it does, they know we’ll be ready.)