A Life More Complete

---Chapter 3---

The darkness has taken over as I pull into Ben’s driveway, parking on the apron. I’ve missed dinner...again. My job is my life. I don’t work nine to five like most of the population. My job is unpredictable and demanding, it leaves little room for planning or scheduling. I called Ben on my way back from Calabasas to let him know I’d be late. I could hear the disappointment in his voice, but he never says it out loud.

I microwave a brick-sized piece of lasagna and eat it standing at the counter in Ben’s kitchen. I haven’t eaten all day. I inhale the lasagna and stare at the lone plate in the sink. I feel guilty. I want to be with Ben. I want to wake up in the morning with him, eat breakfast together, make his lunch and cook him dinner. I want to belong to him and him to me, my day to begin and end with Ben, but it won’t happen. I will be at work late for the rest of my life. I will fly across the country at inopportune times and return on red-eyes only to leave the next day again. I will attend an obscene amount of late night parties, award shows, press releases, where I will wander with a fake pathetic smile, shaking hands and kissing ass all the while wishing I was somewhere else. This is my life. I will always belong to someone else, someone more important...my job.

I grab a Heineken out of the fridge, remove the top and take a long deep swallow. It’s cold, too cold. It burns my teeth and I feel it in my sinuses. I close my eyes and wait for the moments of unshed tears to pass. I compose myself before I head out back to find Ben.

Ben’s backyard is out of a Better Homes and Garden magazine. The picture of perfection, like a resort in the middle of suburbia. Lush tropical plants grace the perimeter while flowers bloom effortlessly throughout. The pool is unreal and fills most of the backyard; large and illuminated, flowing organically as if it’s an extension of the house. A beautifully crafted wooden arbor stands nearby covered in Dutchman’s pipe. All the plants native to California, because that is what Ben does.

“Hi,” I whisper almost inaudibly as I find him lying on a lounge chair staring up at the blackened sky, beer in hand. Roxy is curled into a ball on the chair next to him.

“Hi,” he responds, sitting up to meet my gaze as he adjusts the chair back. His voice is soft, but there’s a lonely, sad quality to it.

I crawl onto the chair and into his lap placing my head against his chest. He smells of soap, a manly smell, mixed with beer. I’ve missed him terribly and I choke back the feeling of tears that sting my eyes. It has been years since I’ve cried. I want to cry for the guilt I feel, for the hatred of my job, for the loneliness I feel radiating from Ben. But I can’t. I won’t.

He runs his hand up and down my back absentmindedly as if he knows to soothe me. I take another long drink of my beer and place it on the ground next to the chair.

“I’m sorry. I wanted to be here with you more than anything, but...” I can’t complete the thought because it always comes back to the same thing. My job, my permanent excuse for everything. “Can you do this?” I ask.

“Can I do what?”

“Can you be with me when I’m late and gone and when I do get here I’m just done?” I inquire exasperated. It’s a question I ask that I subconsciously hope pushes him away. It’s my excuse to keep him from getting too close.

“If it means that when I do finally see you, it ends like this, then yes. Absolutely. Yes. This is the best part of my day.” He presses his lips into my hair and kisses me softly on the top of my head. His words are my undoing. Why is he so unconditionally kind to me when I offer him nothing but emptiness?

Tears begin to fall silently from my eyes. Pouring down like waterfalls, years of unshed tears soaking Ben’s shirt. My mother’s words slam into me. “Save your tears. There will be a day when you need them.” This was said to me when she found me crying in the bathroom after a particularly terrible high school style break up with my then boyfriend, Tyler McCarthy. The words were repeated several months later when I cried over the loss of my beloved cat Mitty and again when I failed my drivers test. But the worst time was when my grandfather died unexpectedly and suddenly. Ripping him from my life without warning, he was gone without so much as a good-bye. I cried harder in those few weeks than I had in my entire life, yet her face was absent and void of any feeling. She never hugged me or attempted to calm me. This was her father, the man who raised her, loved her, and took her in when she and her three small children had nowhere else to go. Crying should have been a sign of respect and love, but she couldn’t. And when I couldn’t gain my composure three weeks after his death she smacked me so hard across the face that she left a handprint, a red, lumpy, finger-shaped welt on my cheek, but still said nothing. I was stunned into silence and knew when my grandmother died three weeks later I learned not to grieve in any way that showed outwardly. When I walked out on my mother at eighteen, I repeated these same words to her and left prefacing her statement with, “Is now a time to cry?” She, of course, said nothing. I was now crying for my job, my inability to let Ben in, my lack of unconditional love, for Mitty and my grandparents and most of all for all those moments I wanted to cry but couldn’t. My body racked with heaving sobs.

Ben pulls me in tighter to him, his arms wrap around me so tightly I can barely pull in a ragged breath. I hear him shush into my hair and it only makes it worse. I can’t believe I’m letting him see me this way, so vulnerable and open. This is far too intimate and I want to shut down. Yet, I can’t control myself.

“I’m sorry,” I stutter through rough uncontrolled sobs. “I just had a bad day at work.” As I speak I regain my composure. I try to stand, but Ben won’t release me. His arms around me like a straight jacket forcing me to stay. “Ben? Can I get up?” I ask quietly.

“No. This is the most real you have been since I met you. I never want to let go of you.” He kisses my head softly and I want to tell him everything.

“I haven’t cried in at least ten years.” I quickly say before I can stop myself. “The last time I remember crying was after my grandfather passed. After that—nothing.” I suddenly breathe out, a long slow release and I realize I have been holding my breath awaiting his response. He says nothing for several seconds.

“Why?”

I take a deep breath and prepare myself for exposure. I haven’t spoken about my mother since I left home. “I don’t know. I grew up in a house that was completely void of any emotion. My mother was unable to deal with weakness or vulnerability, basically anything that caused her to feel. She passed this on to my sisters and me. I don’t know if she so much as passed it on or if it was forced upon us. We all became self-soothers, finding ways to deal. My sister Rachel and I named our mother “Benign” one night. It was the summer of ‘95. It was one of the hottest summers on record. Our house had no central air because it was so old. Only two window units. It really sucked. We sat on the roof outside my bedroom window because the house was hotter than the air outside. We smoked a joint, laughing, we came up with the nickname. Benign, like as in cancer. The kind that doesn’t kill you, but still sucks really bad. That was our mother.” I shake my head against Ben’s chest. “I guess we all deal with our demons in different ways, maybe some less self-destructive than others. My repressed feelings manifest themself in my OCD.” I sound like my therapist from my childhood and I pause wondering if he’ll acknowledge what I just shared with him. He says nothing and I summon the courage to continue. “I’m sure you’ve noticed my OCD. It’s hard to hide, kind of embarrassing for the person who witnesses it.”

“It’s lessened over the last few years. Hardly noticeable. If at all now.” I can’t gauge his emotions from his voice or body, but he quickly changes the subject. “So, tell me about your sisters,” he says smiling.

“My sisters and I are all very close in age, Irish triplets, I guess. Rachel was born almost exactly one year after I was and Courtney, who we call Maizey, eleven months after Rachel. My relationship with Rachel is the best it’s ever been now that we’re adults, but it’s nothing compared to some. When you grow up in a house void of love, you don’t really develop close sibling relationships. We had the fact that we hated our mother in common, but once that was gone there wasn’t much left. Rachel lives in Santa Barbara, works as a massage therapist at the Four Seasons. She’s three hours away and I see her maybe once a year. It’s sad.” I shrug my shoulders as if I’m not sure what to say. “Courtney is the baby. My poor sister Courtney was tagged with too many nicknames to count. She became Corny, which turned to Corn, and after a watching an old movie on cable about Indians she became Maizey, like maize, like corn. She’s been Maizey as long as I can remember. She’s the one who I guess has fallen the hardest. She lives with her drug dealer boyfriend and although she won’t admit it, she’s a drug addict. Cocaine, just like our father. It’s ruined her life. I haven’t spoken to her in three years. I don’t have any idea where she is or where she could possibly be.”

“Do you have any good memories of your sisters?” Ben asks and seems intrigued by my openness.

“Of course I do. Not everything in my life was a mess. I shared a room with them until I was twelve. Something funny happened almost every night. One summer we broke my mom’s desk chair spinning each other around in it. We didn’t tell her, we just left it like nothing happened. And that night when she sat down to finish up some work, she leaned back and the chair collapsed. It took everything in us not to burst out laughing. That night when we were in bed we laughed so hard we cried, all three of us. Rachel continued laughing long after Maizey and I stopped. She was quiet about it, but I knew she was because the bunk bed was shaking and every once in a while she’d giggle.” I laugh again as I recall the memory.

I fill the silence of the night with all kinds of stories from my childhood as Ben sits with his legs crossed, facing me and taking it all in. He smiles and laughs with me.

“How’d you end up here?” he asks, eager for more information. I’ve always been a private person. It’s hard to share your life when you don’t even know where to begin. Ben is one of the only people in my life that I’m this honest with. Melinda and Bob know my story, but they allow me to leave it behind. They understand the pain and take it for what it’s worth. It doesn’t define me and I hope someday it will stop burdening my future so entirely. “I’ve known you for six years and I have no idea how you ended up in California.”

I smile at him. “Obviously, my mother. I couldn’t get far enough away from her. But it really all came back to a boy. My high school boyfriend, Tyler McCarthy. I applied to colleges with absolutely no frame of reference, but knowing it was my only out. I picked mostly based on their remote proximity to my mother. The University of Washington, because of the movie Singles, Arizona State because I love the heat, The University of Hawaii Maui because my mother was exceptionally awful that day and California State University Long Beach because of a boy.”

I remember at the time thinking my decision wasn’t all that odd, but looking back it changed my life. It’s the only choice I ever made that was off kilter and strange even for me. I’m not that girl who does things just because of a boy and yet I applied to college just because of a boy. My relationship with Tyler McCarthy was tumultuous and obsessive the way young love is, but I didn’t think for a second that we would last forever. He was my first love and when things ended, they ended badly. I still have a hard time talking about Tyler.

“In the end I ran from my mother. But, I also picked CSULB and so did Tyler. The kicker is that we broke up before our senior year of high school ended. Unfortunately for me, he was hard to avoid and we ended up back together near the end of our freshman year in college. So, really, I guess you could say a boy led me here.”

“Well, I don’t really care who led you here or who came before me. I’m just glad it happened,” Ben says smiling as I lean into him.

It’s well after midnight and I’m exhausted. I finish my second beer, my body pressed against Ben’s. I still need to go home and as if he can hear my thoughts, he whispers, “Stay with me tonight?” He has asked many times, too many to count and each time the answer is the same. But tonight I will.

“Yes,” I mutter.

“Really?”

“Yes, really.” I take his hand in mine leading him into the house and giggle at his impressive smile and the excitement that exudes from him. Being with Ben is simple and comfortable, calming. There was a time in my life when I wanted nothing more than someone like Ben, yet I ran from him. It stops today and I will give way to what is right.

I pull him into the bedroom, his arms wrapping firmly around me, I press my lips to his and softly caress his mouth with my tongue. He returns the kiss and feel myself melt into him, like I always do. Tonight will be different, not drunken rough sex or a quickie due to our work schedules. Ben and I will make love, kind and gentle, quiet voices and total regard for each other.

The bedroom is chilly and dark, pitch black, as a breeze blows through the open windows, making me tremble at its coolness. Even with my fear of the dark threatening, I can’t help but feel safe in Ben’s arms. His body covers mine as his hands run over me, first my breasts, my stomach, my hips. My body shakes and I press my hips up to meet him. He senses my urgency and responds easing into me. I know Ben’s body as well as my own, but today in the darkness it’s all new. For the first time I feel Ben’s loneliness, his desperation, the need that drives him to pursue me and I want him more than ever.