Fear Itself

When Tony leaped upon my back from behind, his arm wrapped around my neck in a choke hold, the embarrassment of cowering in front of his cronies too much for him to stand, I learned a very valuable lesson: never turn your back on you enemies. I learned a second valuable lesson as well when from out of nowhere Tommy struck a blow to Tony’s chin toppling Tony to the ground and me with him:

it was good to have Tommy for a friend. Tommy proceeded to whale on Tony’s pretty face until he was bloody and unconscious. None of Tony’s friends dared to interfere.

Finally Tommy stood over Tony’s motionless body and he kicked him in the groin with a ferocious thrust. That ended the fight.

The next evening I walked hand-in- hand, the hero to Catherine, the slayer of the dragon to Albert (despite the fact that Tommy had landed the only blows struck), and still, to Teresa, I was the pathetic poor kid who had no business pursuing Catherine. The love of my life was back in my arms and all was forgiven when at the end of our walk Catherine kissed me for the second time, her tongue dancing with my soul, and she whispered in my ear, “I love you.” I knew that she would be my wife someday and I knew that she would love only me forever.

Which is why, as I passed a slow moving Plymouth Voyager while still heading south on Interstate sixty-five just outside

Columbus Indiana, the flame of Catherine’s betrayal branded my cheeks with searing tears no less painful than when Catherine had abandoned me for Tony Artino over twenty years earlier.

“Why are you crying daddy?” Sarah had awoken and reached out and grasped my hand, “Were you thinking about mommy again?”

“Yes honey I was.”

Sarah and I played games to pass the time. We played “I spy” where we named a color and the other person would have to guess what it was that we had spied of that color. We also played “Beetle” in which we had to count as many Volks Wagon Bugs as we passed on the road to see who could spot the most. I drove just a few miles above the speed limit to avoid any unwanted attention. Sarah fell asleep after we stopped for gas and she continued to sleep as I got back on the highway and plodded along. Driving the speed limit was not something I was used to doing. I normally tended to have a heavy foot and driving so slowly made it seem as though we were cruising through a school zone but I knew that the least mistake might permanently end my journey.

* * *

We pulled off of the highway just before the Kentucky border for gas and for lunch. As I chewed my french-fries I looked down at my Beautiful Sarah and wondered what sort of life I would have had without her. Certainly I would not have been ru

Teresa and Albert were choicelessly childless, a situation I, in hindsight, came to sympathize with as Catherine and I strived to impregnate her womb. During the first few years after we got married we fucked like field- mice at every opportunity just because we wanted to screw, but after failing to fertilize her eggs after so many trips to the well our concern grew. We desperately wanted a family. We started timing Catherine’s ovulations to coordinate our sexual encounters to optimize the chances of pregnancy. Sex became a labor, of love most times, but of tiresome weariness when it interfered with our work or sleep schedules. Eventually we tried fertility drugs and finally we were both tested and it was determined that my sperm count was too low to likely result in a child. In-vitro-fertilization was new and very expensive and really wasn’t an option.

The truth was that as much emotional pain as I was experiencing at that time over Catherine’s betrayal I managed to recognize that without Catherine’s affair I would never have had Sarah: my little Lizzy Borden. It didn’t matter to me that Sarah might have killed Catherine. It sickened me that it might be true; that Sarah might be a monster disguised as a sweet i

Of course the final joke was on me. I was wanted for a murder that I hadn’t committed.

If Sarah had killed Catherine she surely could not have predicted, with her seven year old brain, that I would be implicated for her murder. I knew that Sarah loved me and that the last thing in the world she would have wanted was to be separated from me. If she had killed Catherine she had killed her in an oedipal attempt to eliminate the competition. And as far as I could tell, if Sarah had done the deed, I was quite culpable. I had espoused Sarah in many ways and on many occasions. When Catherine and I were not getting along I smothered Sarah with my affection. When Catherine and I made up I withdrew the extremity with which I displayed my approbation. That is not to say that I abandoned Sarah altogether. But my time with the two women in my life was more equally divided when my relationship with Catherine was harmonious. However Catherine sometimes managed long mood swings in which she would not talk to me for days, weeks, and on a few occasions for as long as a month or more. And I called upon Sarah to fill my vast emotional void; and I fed the fire even more so by allowing Sarah to call me lover. And when Sarah and I ate out at restaurants I fed the fantasy even further by acquiescing to her reference to our dining alone as dates. Once after Sarah had asked me for what must have been the hundredth time if she and I could be married like I was to Mommy I told her “Sure honey” in an absent minded attempt to dismiss her question without further persistence.

“I mean like in a church.”

This got my attention. She was serious. “Well how about we just pretend we’re married.”

“No, I want to marry you in a church, like I saw on television.”

We were not church-goers. In fact Sarah had never seen the inside of a church before. And one day, just to appease her unrelenting childish want, I took her to a church. It was an old majestic Cathedral style Catholic Church that I had been forced to go to every Sunday as a child. The neighborhood had changed dramatically from the time when I had attended both school and mass there. Blight had crept from the i