I touched his knee, that’s all. It happened accidentally, quite innocently. I leaned forward toward the driver, Trevor, to make a suggestion, he spun the steering wheel, the tiny Fiat swerved and I reached out to get my balance.
My hand landed on the knee of the tall, blonde, handsome executive crammed in the back seat next to me. That’s how it started.
By Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
What did I write for Alan that wasn’t meant for anyone else’s eyes? What am I willing to share with you, now that he and I are divorced?
The other side of me, the side you don’t know. The erotic side.
Before the birth of The Diary (and of the Vixen Divorcee), I wrote stories intended for Alan’s eyes only. Stories of sexually explicit fantasies based on places he and I visited during our days of marital bliss. Stories the likes of which will never appear in the pages of The Diary. Stories I’m willing to share with you privately, now that he and I are divorced.
Yours could be the first eyes other than his to read one of these elegant fantasies.
One sunny morning in Paris, as my ex-husband Alan waited on the landing outside our apartment for the elevator, our neighbor, Mariele, joined him. He was dressed in a t-shirt, running shorts and running shoes, so she said the obvious. “You’re going running, aren’t you?”
He said, “Yes.” That was that.
A week later, they shared the elevator as he headed upstairs after his run, all
sweaty and stinky.
“You run a lot, don’t you?” she said.
“Almost every day,” he answered.
This was in the late 1980’s and we were spending 4 years living in the French
capitol, thanks to Alan’s employer.
The next week, out on the landing, she said, “My husband Gérard runs, too. Almost daily.”
The following week she said, “You and Gérard should run together. He doesn’t get as sweaty as you do. Maybe you could get him to work harder.”
Alan running the streets of our quartier of Paris.
The Last Day of Our Acquaintance
By
Sinead O’Connor from her album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got
Alan kept this CD in his car. When we drove long distances, he’d slip it in the player. We’d sing along, loudly and off key, glorying in the passionate imagery of the lyrics and the pain and purity of Sinead O’Connor’s voice. We’d sing happily, united in our love of the song. Her pain wasn’t ours and would never touch us. Or so we thought.
Until the day arrived when we sat together in the office of a marriage counselor. The
day when I knew our marriage was beyond repair. The day when he was still in denial.
We were living apart, hadn’t seen each other for a week. I turned to him and said,
“This is the last day of our acquaintance. I’ll meet you later in somebody’s office.”
That was it. We met later in somebody’s office to finalize the details, but those two
sentences marked the death of our marriage.
I never imagined until that afternoon how perfectly Sinead O’Connor expressed the end of my love, or what solace I would get from blasting out those lyrics in the home where I now live alone.
He struggled into the house as far as the living room, where he collapsed on the couch. There he stayed, unmoving, complaining of pain, for the next three hours, refusing to let me do anything, until I took matters in my own hands and made that call.
Within minutes, fifteen at most, our living room burst with big, muscular, handsome men. All sporting the uniform of our local fire department. All take-charge men who knew just how to shift my suffering husband off the couch, onto a stretcher, down
the steps of our house and into their emergency vehicle.
All the while flashing me magnetic smiles, reassuring me that everything was going to be just fine, charming me with their masculine confidence. Of course I was worried about Alan, but a corner of my psyche reeled with enchantment for these men.
Here they are, the firemen converging on our front door. Well, in my dreams this is how they looked as they converged on our front door.