Galvanic crisis notwithstanding, Jeni Roberts felt awkward and very nearly mortified with embarrassment as she and the ex-lover met and selected their meal options and sat down together in a windowside booth of molded plastic and made radically incongruous small talk while she prepared to try to ask the question that would accidentally precipitate her epiphany and a whole new less innocent and self-deluded stage of her married life. She had decaf in a disposable cup and put in six prepackaged creamers as her former sexual partner sat with his entree’s styrofoam box unopened and gazed both through the window and at her. He had a ring on his pinkiefinger and his sportcoat was unbuttoned, and the white shirt beneath the coat bore the distinctive furrows of an oxfordcloth dress shirt that had only recently been removed from its retail packaging. The sunlight through the big window was noon-colored and made the crowded franchise feel like a greenhouse; it was hard to breathe. The associate sales manager watched as she started the tops of the creamers with her teeth to safeguard her nails and removed them and placed them in the foil ashtray and dumped the thimblefuls of creamer into the disposable cup and stirred them in with a complimentary square-tipped stirrer one after another, the look in his developmentally appropriate eye the puddly look of nostalgia. She was still profligate with the creamer. She had both a wedding band and a diamond engagement ring, and the rock wasn’t cheap by a long shot. The former lover’s stomach hurt and eye-flesh ticced especially bad now because of how now they were in the dreaded last three bank days of the month and Mad Mike’s Hyundai put unbelievable pressure on reps to move units in the last three days so they could go on that month’s books and inflate the books for the clowns in the regional office. The young wife cleared her throat several times in her special way that the man solely responsible for the performance of all Mad Mike’s reps remembered all too well, doing the dry nervous thing with her throat to communicate the fact that she recognized how inappropriate a question like this was going to appear now at this juncture, with them with their unhappy history and now no longer in any way even like marginally connected, and her happily married, and that she felt embarrassed but was also in some kind of she was saying genuine inner-crisis-type situation about something, and desperate — the way usually only serious credit problems made people look desperate and trapped like this — with her eyes with that drowning look in them of she was begging him not to take advantage of her desperate position in any way including judgment or ridicule at her expense. Plus and how she always drank her coffee with two hands around the cup even in a hot environs like this one here. Hyundai-U.S.’s volume, margins, and financing terms were among the countless economic conditions affected by fluctuations in the value of the yen and related Pacific currencies. The young wife had spent an hour at the mirror in order to choose the shapeless blouse and slacks she wore, actually taking her soft contacts back out in order to wear her glasses as well, and nothing on her face in the windowlight but a quick dab-and-blot of gloss. The expressway’s heavy flow glittered through the window that lit up her right side with sun; and through the glass the Mad Mike’s lot, with its plastic pennants and a man in a wheelchair with his wife or like nurse getting worked by fat Kidder in the hospital gown and arrow-through-head-prosthesis the reps all had to wear on the days Messerly was there to keep tabs, lay also within the divided purview of the booth’s former lover — who still loved her, Jeni Ann Orzolek of Marketing 204, and not his current fiancée, he realized with the sickening wince of a mortal wound reopened — and just beyond it, shimmering in the heat, the Adult World lot, with its all makes and classes of vehicle day and night, moving them through like Mad Mike Messerly could only fantasize.
ADULT WORLD (II)
PART: 4
FORMAT: SCHEMA
TITLE: ONE FLESH
‘As blindingly sudden and dramatic as any question about any man’s sexual imagination is going to appear, it was not the question itself which caused Jeni Roberts’ epiphany and rapid maturation, but what she found herself gazing at as she asked it.’
— PT. 4 epigraph, in same stilted mode as ‘Adult World (I)’ [→ highlights format change from dramatic/stochastic to schematic/ordered]
1a. Question Jeni Roberts asks is whether Former Lover had indeed in their past relationship ever fantasized about other women during lovemaking w/ her.
1a(1) Inserted at beginning of question is participial phrase ‘After apologizing for how irrational and inappropriate it might sound after all this time…’
1b. At some point during J.’s question, J. follows F.L.’s gaze out fast-food window & sees husband’s special vanity license plate among vehicles in Adult World lot: → epiphany. Epiph unfolds more or less independently as facially asymmetric F.L. responds to J.’s question.
1c. Flat narr description of J.’s sudden pallor & inability to hold decaf steady as J. undergoes sddn blndng realization that hsbnd is a Secret Compulsive Masturbator & that insomnia/yen is cover for secret trips to Adult World to purchase/view/masturbate self raw to XXX films & images & that suspicions of hsbnd’s ambivalence about ‘sexlife together’ have in fact been prescient intuitions & that hsbnd has clearly been suffering from inner deficits/psychic pain of which J.’s own self-conscious anxieties have kept her from having any real idea [point of view (1c) all objective, exterior desc only].
2a. Meanwhile F.L. is answering J.’s orig question in vehement neg, tears appearing in eye: holy shit no, god, no, no, never, had loved her always, was never as fully ‘there’ as when he & J. were making love [if in J.’s p.o.v., insert ‘together’ after ‘love’].
2a(1) At emotional height of dialogue, tears streaming down 1⁄2 face, F.L. confesses/declares that he still loves J., has all this time, 5 yrs, in fact sometimes still thinks of J. while making love to his current fiancée, which causes him to feel guilty (i.e. ‘like I’m not really there’) drng sex w/ fiancée. [Direct transcription of F.L.’s whole answer/confession → emotional focus of scene is off J. while J. undergoes trauma of sddnly realizing hsbnd is Secret Compulsive Masturbator → avoids nasty problem of trying to convey epiphany in narr expo.]
2b. Coincidence [N.B.: too heavy?]: F.L. confesses that he also still sometimes secretly masturbates to memories of former lovemaking w/ J., sometimes to point of making himself raw/sore. [→ F.L.’s ‘confession’ here both reinforcing J.’s epiph w/r/t male fantasy & providing her w/ much-needed injection of sexual esteem (i.e. it ‘wasn’t her fault’). [N.B. re Theme: implicit sadness of F.L. making soul-rending confession of love while J. is 1⁄2-distracted by trauma of (1b)/(1c)’s epiph; i.e. = further networks of misconnection, emotional asymmetry.]]
2b(1) Tone of F.L.’s confession trmndsly moving & high-affect, & J. (even tho traumatized w/r/t (1b)/(1c)’s shattering epiphany) never for one nanosec doubts the truth of what F.L. says; feels she ‘really did know this man’ & c.
2b(1a) Narr [not J.] notes sudden appearance of red & demonic-looking gleam in hypertrophic iris of F.L.’s left [‘bad’?] eye, which could be either trick of light or genuine demonic gleam [= p.o.v. shift/ narr intrusion].