Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
told her it wasn't what it was cracked up to be, because I had chapped lips. I had Suzy Q on
my lap—you know how parents think their children can't hear. Well, Suzy Q says, 'Mommy,
am I gonna get chapped lips from I eat too much?' Ha! Don't you love it?”
I laughed on cue, ignoring her free flowing imagery as we harked back to the good old
days. We dallied on the prelims and Betty led me by the hand to the basement where we
swooped to old home week in our world of discovery newly spiced with experience. Betty
seemed happy, loved and appreciated. She said it was best, messing up the guest bed like that,
so the soon-to-be-ex boyfriend could see that I was sleeping downstairs. Then we had tea.
Anticlimax can be comfortable in the suburbs. The charade to hide our middle-age liaison
would make no difference to anyone. Her affliction had been sex with no affection. The shrink
drew it out. Randy Mutton worshipped her, fucked her a few thousand times and then left
her—the love went away, or maybe it never was. She moped, saddened by the shortfall. I con-
soled her with a reminder that love's irony was not hers alone to bear.
Embraced again by beauty and fantasy fulfillment, we renewed the bond. She broke up
with the boyfriend a few days after I left, though he must have known. Betty and I could not
be an item, and she must have known that too, yet her post-coital happiness got wildly emo-
tional, recalling Betty of no spaghetti and certainly no acid. Then again, she'd achieved a rare
interlude on our brief time together, which amounted to a cock-a-doodle-do over love ever-
lasting. Never mind that it would last forever because of the chronic distance between us. It
made us both more secure with ourselves.
We stayed in touch till I had a layover in Dallas two years later. It was still a decade before
cell phones, and a few hundred miles proximity warranted a call. “Hey. What are you doing?”
“Who is this?” She'd recognized my voice in the past, and likely recognized it again.
A man behind her reiterated, “Who is it?”
“It's me. Your one true love. I'm in Dallas.”
“Uh . . . It's not a good time. You can't come to visit. Okay?”
“I said Dallas. I can't come to visit. I called to say hello and ask how you're doing.”
“It's not a good time. I'm very busy.”
“Who is it?” asked the mellifluous voice nearby, its benign curiosity telling the tale.
Among Betty's many effusions had been a confession that came at the tail end of our visit.
She'd asked if I remembered a certain fellow. We'd been friends years ago, and this fellow had
also been pals with Randy Mutton?
Sure, I remembered the guy.
“I fucked him.”
Maybe it was good for her, but it sounded like something else. She got curiouser and curi-
ouser; it happened on a Christmas visit to her parents who lived in the same town. He couldn't
get it up until he could, because she helped him as only she could—“Do you have any idea
how many guys have told me that I'm the very best?”
