Chapter excerpt from diary of a divorcee. Sex, Humor etc.

I was lying on the massage table getting angry. The
masseuse, "Sky," was too goddamn careful. Sky’s
tentative touch caused me to flash on asking Jack to
scratch my itch. Somehow he had always managed to
avoid the right spot.
"There, there! You just passed it!" I would cry, but
he would glide his fingers just over it and scratch
next to, under or around, but never on top of that
itch. "Up! UP to the right NO that’s down, NO my
right dummy!"
Finally it came to me: the intent behind his
miscalculated touch; his forgetting to pick up the
meds, the groceries; his headaches always being worse
than mine-he was doing what husbands do! Avoiding my
pain.
His needs had always eclipsed mine. Well, I would
later tell my single friend Bridgett, "I think that’s
the whole problem, including his being
kitchen-disabled, office-retarded, and "too tired" in
bed. If only we could take turns being needy or being
crazed.
After Jack and I and the kids left the commune, with
it’s flexible structure and tax exempt status, we were
thrown unawares into a daily grind that turned
marriage in to a war for survival and no one was
intact in this family. Survival was an unforgiving
relentless task. Jack was becoming a pathetic aging
hipster while I was trying to become a professional
grown-up. The more I worked on improving myself the
more he made fun of me, called me self-involved, and
dug in his heels to the rock music of the sixties. I
rolled my eyes, got sarcastic, and acted superior.
"How does it feel? Sky asked.
I tried to think of a word, settling upon, "umm..."
"Is it too hard?"
"No such thing. In fact, it’s too gentle."
"Why would you want it rough? I do not believe in
being intrusive."
"Well, its kind of a tease when it’s too light...."
"Well, it’s really much more effective when it’s
subtle like this...maybe you should try to meet my
touch halfway?"
"That feels like work to me, I just want to bliss
out," I protested
"Well, healing, true healing is a joint effort. I
believe that the patient needs to participate as much
as the healer for it to truly help."
I tensed my shoulders and began breathing faster
"How’s this?" she asked, "can you let your body feel
it?"
"It’s frustrating---Like a soft fuck!" I heard myself
cry. I sat up announcing, "I’m sorry, but this just
isn’t working". I quickly began to pull on my sweat
pants from the chair.
The same year, I kicked Jack out, gentle; passive
aggressive Jack never knew what happened. What
happened was I was discovering that the man I always
wanted kept his sensibilities locked in a vault and I
never could get the combination. He was a mirage, he
was a chocolate cake that I couldn’t eat, he was funny
and handsome and completely inaccessible. Behind
perpetual headphones, newspapers, intellectual
political guises, he had more rapport with our pet
parrots, much more, than with me. He would come home
from teaching history to the bad boys in lock up, say
hello to me from a safe distance across the room, kiss
the birds hello, and disappear into the news, or
anything but my hungry body.
Jack’s defense was that I was too uptight. He’d said
he needed a younger woman, someone in her twenties,
someone who made him feel good about himself, not
someone who demanded and criticized him all the time.
"I need a young chick," he said. I told him he needed
to grow up. He said, no, he needed to feel powerful
and important like the younger women made him feel. I
said, "sure, I’d feel powerful and important too, if I
went back to kindergarten!

And so the book of my marriage slammed shut and with
only the materials of my pre-marital adolescence, I
set out to find myself in another man, substituting
one dependency for another. I began my noble
feminist quest with a thorough and in your face quest
for the perfect lover. Of course, I would need to
sample many, especially to be sure I didn’t order the
same meals I’d been leaving on my plate since early
on. I promptly set out on a mission to discover the
hard f—k.