IN THE LIGHT OF DAY

Excerpted from my novel "JESSICA'S UNCLE"

36

In The Light of Day

April, 2004

It was nearly ten in the morning when they got out of bed.  In the light of day, they felt a mutual awkwardness about last night's intimacy, and had little to say to each other as they dressed and groomed.  Earl suggested that instead of going out for breakfast, he could just bring up a tray of Danish and some coffee from the lobby.

"We'll be in Salem in a couple of hours anyhow, and we can have lunch there," he said.

That would be fine, Ann agreed.

A little later, as they sat at the window, drinking coffee and watching the business of the day on the street below, Earl wondered what Ann was feeling about last night.  He sensed that she was regretting their intimacy.  If so, he doubted that it was because of any moral compunction, or even because of any sense of disloyalty to Charlie.  She had been so cavalier earlier, removing her clothing, strutting around nude.  That had been very strange.  It was not a natural or normal way for Ann to have behaved.  She was not a tramp, and there was no emotional flaw in her make-up.  The striptease had come out of severe stress, and so, it now seemed apparent, had their sexual intimacy.

The sorting out of his own emotions was causing Earl some angst.  His relationship with Ann had taken a stunning turn.  He had lived much of his life yearning for her, adoring her, imagining her as his wife and the mother of his children.  And now the most intimate of relationships had become a reality, and he was distressed to realize that it no longer mattered.  It was too late for Ann to fill the void in his life.

His marriage to Bonnie had been a disaster, for which he had given Bonnie the fault because of the kind of woman she was.  But it had been he who had made the careless decision to marry her, more because of her beauty and his carnal lust than because of the pregnancy.

His love for Ann, however, had always been as much spiritual as physical.  He had fantasized her as a storybook wife and mother.  Now he was discovering that he had never had an actual sense of Ann as a person, but had seen her mostly as an incredibly beautiful object, an object that he had wanted to possess.  He was, admittedly, the kind of man that the feminists most despise.

But Ann was a person, albeit a distractingly beautiful person.  She had dimension and depth.  She would have religious beliefs.  Political attitudes.  She would have certain tastes in music and movies.  She would like or hate sports. She would be vehemently against abortion, or she would think it was okay to destroy a human life in the womb.  Earl realized that he knew none of these things about the woman who had enthralled him all of his life.  He might as well have been in love with a celluloid image on a movie screen.

He did not feel guilty for having bedded Ann, even though he knew that she had been vulnerable.  He had not gotten into her bed because of an irresistible sexual urge.  If there had been an irresistible urge at all, it was to basely indulge a selfish wish to achieve closure on a lifelong unrequited obsession.  In hindsight, he would not have let it happen, because he now had to be concerned that Ann might expect their relationship to deepen.