Second date 5, Anger depression and sex

Up till now, I haven't said a whole lot about how D and I interacted during this intense clean-up ... at any rate, not after the first morning. And partly this is because the work itself just drowned out everything else. Oh, we might sneak a kiss if nobody was looking. We might trade arched eyebrows when Wife started in on wanting to save her grandmother's antique dust bunnies. But most of the time we were just working, and if one of us said something to the other it was probably "Did you see where I set down the ammonia?" The overall level of romance was not terribly high. True, we did fuck again Monday night after I took her back to her motel. (Have I mentioned that D is inexhaustible in this area?) But Tuesday morning when I went to get her, we just kissed and talked. Tuesday night I left her at her motel with a big hug, a bigger kiss, and a case of exhaustion so severe that I had to go straight back home to bed. Wednesday morning we went out to Starbucks for coffee and had our conversation about narcissism ... useful and important as far as it went, but hardly romantic. If we hadn't been knocking off a bottle of wine each night with dinner -- good stuff, that Wife and I had been saving for "some day special" -- it would have been hard to tell that we loved each other.

I should say something about the wine: it is off-topic, but it was really odd. Quite a few years ago, Wife and I had joined a wine subscription club. After a while we dropped our membership, but we still had much of the wine left over. A lot of it is red, which Wife doesn't care for; I never bothered to open "the good stuff" if it was just for me; and we don't often have guests. So there it sat -- chilled but unopened -- apparently until Doomesday. When D suggested that we could use a glass of wine after our work the first day, I figured this was as good a time as any to open one of the remaining "subscription" bottles. Why not? I offered some to Wife, who declined. And so D and I each drank a glass while making dinner together, ... and another glass with dinner ... and finished the bottle by the end of the meal. And this became the pattern for the subsequent nights. Wife never took any, even when I uncovered a bottle of white which we had overlooked years before. D and I finished a bottle a night. And I will never forget the image one night when the kitchen was full of boxes and the dining table was full of junk so we ate on a cardboard box on the floor: Wife sat at one end of the box with a Diet Coke; the boys crowded around with milk or water; and I sat down holding two glasses of wine, one of which I handed to D as we began to eat. It was as if I were watching myself from the outside as I did it, and all I could think was, "That's such a marital gesture! Does anybody else see it?"

But I digress.

Wednesday, when she was overwhelmed by our Augean study and needed a break, D had organized the boys into cleaning their room. Usually in the past they have done this by shoving everything under the bunk bed or piling it on the dressers and then announcing, "The floor's clean!" But with her help they got it clean. On top of the dressers, under the bed, behind the door, in the back of the closet ... it was clean! And over dinner, D asked me if I had noticed. Well, I hadn't gone into the room but once for a minute or so, but I told her what I had seen, that the floor was remarkable. In my best clueless-dad voice, I asked what else had gotten done during the (comparatively short) time she had been working in there. She didn't say much, but I noticed that her attitude seemed to change subtly. I couldn't even put my finger on when the change was, exactly. All I could tell was that by the end of dinner, something was out of kilter. But D didn't say a word.

As I drove her back to her motel that night, I tried rather tentatively to probe, to find out what was wrong. At first, D didn't say anything. Then when I asked a second time, she burst forth with:

"You know, this family is really short on gratitude!"

Huh? Can you possibly think we are ungrateful for all the help you are giving us? Is this about Wife and her antique dust bunnies?

"You wouldn't think it would be so hard. When Jesus ate with his disciples it was the most natural thing in the world -- he broke the bread, gave thanks to his father in Heaven, and ate. But I sure don't feel any gratitude around here!"

By this point I had started to worry. I knew D had been working her fingers to the bone, and anybody who had worked as hard as she did the last three days would have been entitled to the occasional tantrum. Hell, Wife could have parlayed that much work into a full-fledged nervous breakdown. (Well, almost.) But I also worried, from my experience with Wife, that this could blossom completely out of control. On the whole I figured D to be more stable than Wife, but there was a nagging voice in the back of my head that just wasn't sure. And you, my readers, have already heard me wonder aloud why I seem to be attracted to psychologically demanding and emotionally high-maintenance women. So I thought that maybe, just maybe, I had bitten off more here than I could chew.

In a very small voice, I tried to say that I, at least, was more than grateful for her coming out here and doing all this.

"But when you came into the boys' room, all you saw was the floor! You didn't notice the rest of it!"

No, I'm sorry, I didn't ... but I wasn't there for long and I thought I gave you a chance to brag about it over dinner. It's not that I was ungrateful, just maybe unobservant.

At this point, D was almost in tears. "But you didn't even look! You didn't even notice the dressers!"

Why? Were the dresser-tops clean?

"The dresser tops were clean. The clothes inside the dressers were folded neatly and organized. All the space under the bed was clear. The shoes were lined up neatly against the bed. The closets were clean. Every last shirt that had fallen down behind something was picked up and hanging neatly on a hanger. The shelves were dusted. The floor was vacuumed. And you never noticed any of it!"

Wow. That's really great. The room probably hasn't been that clean since we moved in. Thank you. Thank you very much.

"You're welcome. But you could have noticed without my having to tell you!" The tears were flowing freely by this time. I don't know about anybody else, but a woman in tears sets all my internal alarms on red alert. At this point I would have done anything -- including travel backwards in time to fix the problem, if only I knew how -- to make her stop. And about this time we got to her motel.

We went in. I was apologizing every way I knew how. D was still grumbling, but starting to simmer down. I sat down on the floor, and she sat near me. She tried to reach an arm out to me, but I was curled up with my arms around my knees, and I couldn't trust or accept the arm she was extending.

The next thing I knew, D was expressing all sorts of worry and concern for me. Why did I look so shell-shocked? Why had I withdrawn so far? Why wouldn't I cuddle with her?

Ummm ... shit, I dunno. Maybe because a moment ago you were yelling at me, and crying? Call me crazy, but that might have something to do with it ....

And D looked shocked. Oh my God, Hosea, don't withdraw on me. Yes, I was angry, but you don't have to withdraw. I'm so sorry, I had no idea you would react like this. I just thought you would engage with me, we'd wrangle for a bit, and it would be over. It never occurred to me that you would be this stung and frightened.

And then she said something that really struck me. "You know, Hosea, you talk about Wife suffering from depression, and maybe she does; although, as we discussed this morning, I think any depression is secondary to narcissism. But you really do suffer from depression. You really do! When you first told me about taking anti-depressant medication, you made it sound like you took it for energy ... you made it sound like coffee. But it's not just for energy. It's because you are really depressed. Sweetheart, I will never yell at you like that again. I just won't. It's not useful. Because the way you respond is to withdraw into a deep depression, and I don't want to cause you to go there. If there's ever something we have to work out in the future, I'll handle it some other way. I'm really sorry. Can you sit over here by me and hold hands? Please?"

Well what could I do, after an invitation as sweet as that? I put aside my fears, scooted across the floor to where she was, and held hands. And after a minute, we kissed.

You may have noticed by now that kissing is a big deal for us, because it is usually the key to a lot more. And so after a few minutes we climbed up onto the bed, wriggled out of our clothes ... and then kissed and held each other and kissed and fucked and kissed some more. And after a couple of hours we showered and I got dressed again and went home.

It must be the best possible way to end a fight. Wife and I never in twenty-five years mastered the art of make-up sex. But it didn't take long for D and me to figure it out.

Thursday was New Year's Day. Wife was especially tired and turned in especially early. Nobody wanted to open the champagne I had bought for the occasion. So D and I had even more time together back at her motel -- and I had yet another surprise there, in a week that was plainly full of them. I have always figured I was a pretty pedestrian lover. If you had listened to Wife over the years, you would have heard my overall ratings slide slowly from "just fine or at least not bad" to "barely adequate" -- but only once or twice has she said anything better than that. So I was totally unprepared Thursday night to hear D gasp out in ecstasy at one point, "How did you do that?" I was so unprepared, in fact, that all I could think to say was, "I don't know." For some reason this answer made D laugh uncontrollably for a while, after which (still laughing) she added, "Well if you don't remember, sweetheart, I do and you can be sure I'll remind you!"

The week was intense. The highs and lows -- and the surprises -- were all pretty extreme. And on Friday I finally heard from the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
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