The other man May 15, 1983

 

More than a year later, after marriage, after the baby, she still thinks of that other man, about his being worried and hurt, and whether or not she made the right decision after all, trading this one for that.

The trauma of being forced to decide still clinging to her, an open wound that just won’t heal, the guilt about the other man haunting her, most likely for the rest of her life.

For more than a year, she fought tooth and nail to get the man, who is now her husband, out of jail, draining herself, becoming too weak to resist the seduction of the other man – a man hoping to sweep her off her feet, and did, but only temporarily.

Love and marriage, and of course the baby, came at a time when she began to hear the tick of the biological clock, having turned 30 with out romantic prospects and a rapidly shrinking time when she could still live up to her wish to become a mother.

Until her future husband came along, her life had been filled with empty men, hollow men, men working angles and lies to get her into bed.

Her future husband seemed different, vulnerable, even though he had lived a life as a hard core junkie, but jailed and apparently helpless, stirring up a part of her even she didn’t know was inside her.

A woman at 30 is different from a man at that same age. A man can be a father at any age, but a woman soon realizes that if she doesn’t do it soon, she may never be able to.

But she needed to find a man suitable for the role, telling me once if she couldn’t find the kind of man she wanted, she would build one from scratch. She did not mean the other man, who for all his flowers and candy, too much resembled all the other hollow men in her life. The man behind bars, the man she aimed to make her husband, differed, more romantic in a different kind of way, but insnared by the legal system that took her years to untangle.

The other man came along after more than a year of her struggle to get her jail bird free, and was just the opposite of the jail bird, tough, independent, with a bright career, and should have been the man she’s searched her life for, and yet… the other man just didn’t need her in the way the jail bird did.

Had the other man come first, things would have turned out differently, perhaps better, and as much time as she spent with this other man, in and out of the bed, he was only a temporary reprieve, a fill in for the man she had already committed herself to if and when released from jail.

She could not abandon the jail bird after she had put so much effort into saving him, regardless of how great the other man seemed, stuck with the dilemma of how to let the other man down when the other man clearly loved her and wanted marriage as well.

She had to choose and only realized how big a price she would pay, destroying her art (romantic stories and poems) she had created about other people in her life, but jealous jail bird could not tolerate.

Stubborn to a fault, she set out to make the marriage and motherhood work, while the other man, having met the love of his life, pinned away, realizing there would never be another woman like her in his life, and he didn’t want there to be.

She, I think, knows she made a mistake, how her jail bird could be salvaged temporarily, but never reformed, always going back to the needle and lying to her about it, and she pretending to believe his lives, just not to have to face she really wants to be with the other man.



email to Al Sullivan

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