I was lying on the massage table
getting angry.
The
masseuse, "Sky," was too
goddamn careful.
Sky’s tentative
touching brought back
asking Jack
to
scratch my itch.
Somehow
he always managed to avoid
the right spot.

"There, there! You just passed it!"
as he glided his fingers just
over it and scratched 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 epiphany: the intent behind
his miscalculated touch;
his forgetting to pick up the meds,
the groceries;
his headaches always worse than mine-
he was doing what husbands do!
Avoiding wives' pain.

ii.
His needs had always eclipsed mine.
his being
kitchen-disabled,
office-retarded,
"too tired"

If only
we could take turns
being
needy or crazed.


marriage was a war for survival
and no one was intact
Marraige was an unforgiving relentless task.
He was becoming a pathetic aging hipster
I was trying to become
a professional child 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 actedsuperior.

iii.
"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.

iv.
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.

5 years later I discovered that to be in a heterosexual marital style relationship is to be frustrated, no matter how hard he loves you up. Like life itself, it's suffering, and besides that, my Mom was right: all men are fixer-uppers.

sex, humor, second adolescence