“Mr. Flyte! Happy Thanksgiving, by the way! How are you?”

“Ah, well, ah, thank you. Ah, we’re as well as, ah, can be expected, you know, ah, under the circumstances.” Ralph’s father’s voice was catching uncharacteristically.

“What is it Mr. Flyte? Is something wrong?”

“Well, you know, Ralph died yesterday.”

“Hunh!”

Shenar’s sharp intake of breath triggered an immediate response from Mr. Flyte. “Yah, he committed suicide, you know.”

“Oh!” Shenar didn’t know what else to say.

Both callers escaped into silence, one light, dry, needing to absorb information, the other heavy, saturated, needing to bleed it out.

Shenar heard a broken sigh through the receiver. “I, I don’t understand,” she intoned, “Where? How?”

“Well, he was in Portland at the beginning of this month, you know.” Mr. Flyte’s voice sounded tenuous.

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t know he was in Portland. We, well, we stopped contact, again, a few months ago, yuh...” She restrained herself from echoing Mr. Flyte’s incessant “you know”.

“Well, he had a lot of stuff up there, I guess, that he wanted to bring back to Phoenix, so he quit his job...”

“We heard from him the first week in November. Then he didn’t call, you know. That was like Ralph. He’d planned to be back before Thanksgiving. Then, this morning, while we were on our way to have Thanksgiving with the grandkids, you know, Jack got a call from a Seventh Day Adventist mental hospital in Portland. Ralph hung himself, you know. They have those old fashioned floor radiators mounted against the windows. He was left alone for ninety seconds between shifts. He had on his bathrobe. I don’t know why they gave him a bathrobe. He was on suicide watch, you know. He tied one end of the bathrobe cord to the radiator and the other end around his neck and jumped. Out the window.”

Shenar started to tear. “He’d tried to hang himself once, before I knew him. He told me about it,” she offered.

“Yah, I know. I remember.” Mr. Flyte responded flatly. “I thought you might know something about, well, what Ralph was going through before he, ah, died, you know.”

“No. I didn’t even know he was in Portland. I’m surprised he didn’t try to get ahold of me.” She thought about all the phone rings she’d ignored over the last few days.

“Well, I guess he tried to get help. I just don’t see how they could have given someone on suicide watch, you know, a bathrobe...” Mr. Flyte’s voice drifted.

“Oh, Mr. Flyte. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” She cried audibly.

Mr. Flyte cried, too. “I know. We all are, you know. Well, we’ll be in touch about, ah, arrangements, you know. We’re still not sure when they’ll be releasing...”

“I’ll be here.”

Shenar sat on her living room floor absently tracing the sculpturing in the carpet with her fingers for a long time after the call. Just before dawn, she dropped her head and sobbed. There was nothing she would have done differently. That was the tragedy. There is nothing she would have changed.

She sank to a prone position on the floor and rolled on her side toward the window. She relaxed. Her heaving ebbed. She made herself breathe regularly, deeply, and stared up, out the window into the sky. The first shaft of light radiated through an eastern cloud bank, reflecting off the wet limbs of the denuded maple in her front yard. Ralph’s statement is over, she thought.

Somehow, she hadn’t thought that she’d be informed of Ralph’s death. She was surprised, and humbled, that Mr. Flyte had called her at all. Ralph and his father had jousted their masculinity. Shenar thought Mr. Flyte a weaselly man, small, thin, nervous and sensually unappreciative, or unappreciated. He always seemed to be sneering at Ralph’s sexuality. Shenar had taken this personally, and noticed that Ralph had problems with his father’s attitude toward the two of them together, as well. Early in their relationship, Shenar conceived a fantasy that she related to Ralph and to which they often made love, especially in the aftermath of a confrontation between Ralph and his father.

We had a code name for it; the potency fantasy:

He and I are at his parent’s house. His father is aiming asinine, insidious comments at Ralph about his sexuality, trying to malign his masculinity and impugn his personhood. I’ve always known.

I am rigid with anger—my mouth gapes in mute rage.

I feel Ralph encircling me from behind. My body twitches, guessing at how his father’s words are stinging on impact. I strain at his arms to get at the old man—but I am caught.

Ralph’s body has enclosed me. His mouth is in my neck and I can feel him whispering something soothing, and his hands—his hands have slid between my thighs and are massaging my pubic area determinedly, in front of his father.

The energy behind my anger is being kneaded into desire.

Ralph’s erection is pushing between my buttocks. I can feel myself becoming fluid.

My body has left the ground. Ralph is moaning at my back, his strength overtaking me. We are moving down the front hall. I turn in his cradling arms and bite his neck. His index finger pokes through my nylons and finds my well. I glance at the father over the son’s shoulder.

I am laid on the bed. My ass is to Ralph. My face is buried in the mattress.

Ralph positions me from behind. His warm hands push my skirt over my ass, slide beneath my panty hose and pull them just below my slit. The movement of the bed tells me he is closing in. I whimper and grind toward him. I hear my nylons being ripped apart. My vagina contracts. I feel myself gush and hear myself moan.

His hands and his thighs are spreading me.

Ralph is hard and thick, and hot...he moves quickly and deeply into me.

“Oh, God, Shenar...” he moans, and we are on our way. My body becomes an involuntary sucking machine.

I feel him pull back and move his swollen head slowly in and out of me, showing off our desire and our consummation.

Then, he lunges into me; we stroke, slowly, deeply, rhythmically.

He turns us both away and directs over his shoulder, “Now, go away, old man, I’m going to finish fucking my woman.”

Shenar felt this was an appropriate way to remember Ralph. After she came, she curled back across strewn pillows on the floor and slept, her body lighter and heavier than she could remember.

Maybe she should leave, Shenar thought.

She walked out on the deck and looked across the lake. She moved here for the mist-strewn light and the ambient humidity but unexpectedly appreciated the bright, colorful summers. Mercer Island shielded her from a view, through the Ballinger Locks, of the glinting, iron harbor. Mt. Rainier rose like a god to her left on clear mornings, sheltering and inspiring the denizens of its foothills. She worked better, she played better, she felt better, and she loved better in this city.

She had forbade Ralph to live here. He exhibited an inclination, early in their relationship, to blame his life on his physical surroundings. Shenar had exhausted herself fighting his land battles, even though he taught her to overcome her own with the desert. When she moved to Seattle she resolved not to allow him to smudge this experience of hers with his difficulties. She believed he would follow her to Seattle. He stopped at Portland, though, and made two-way, bi-monthly forays to the shores of Lake Washington to visit her. She loved him more for obeying her, and worked internally on coming closer to joining lives with him.

Yes, she prompted herself, at least every other day; yes, I can do this. Yes, I can adjust to him. Even while she was becoming involved with other men, “Yes, I can live with him.”

He would come to visit over long weekends. By Monday morning they were both seeking their own level, again. And Ralph was joking about it, about how he went from “lover” to “house guest”, of which Shenar would complain she was experiencing burnout. “Yeah, I just go in the kitchen and do the dishes and keep my mouth shut,” he had related to friends. Everyone laughed.

Now, no one was laughing.

Shenar was comfortable with her lack of horror over Ralph's suicide. The philosophical consideration of suicide sometimes eased her back into a measure of acceptance of her own life. She and Ralph had discussed the attempts he had made previous to their relationship. They had also discussed his life-long, insatiable misery, and it had not been beyond Shenar to finally stop reasoning him out of suicide, late in the night, and nuzzle him into sex and sleep, postponing the discussion for another time, extending his life another day. Although Shenar could not swear to it, she did not think Ralph had attempted suicide since they’d met, before this definitive act.

Neither had ever doubted the quality or the intensity of their attraction. Upon meeting they both at once identified this as love. She always assumed that she would know Ralph until he died; that he would die before her; and that he would die by his own hand. She believed, though, if he made it to his forties, he might relax a bit and live twenty good years before another aging crisis brought him down. She suspected that in order to stay alive he would need regular contact with her, basal contact, dick contact. They even joked, occasionally and delicately, as though it were a magic incantation, how he would still be pursuing her in his eighties and she’d still be declaring herself afraid of his life. The prayer didn’t work. His manic depression bounced him to and fro around the world, and, finally, out the window of a mental hospital at the age of thirty-six.

Her meta-somatic sensory organs set up a regular sweep of the dimension cloaked by apparent space as soon as she heard Ralph was dead. Throughout the next few days she remained assured that he was glad he was no longer human. Occasionally, she was jealous of his freedom and knowledge, but she let him float around her without reservation, enjoying the time and the perspective he was allowing her, with one reservation. She felt as though he was, in his way, turning the mothering caress of the northwestern coastal atmosphere into a suffocating stranglehold.

By the following Wednesday, her answering machine was filled with calls from Len, frantic about lubrication; Luthor telling her, “You listen to me, girl,”; strangers asking her to sub-contract on their projects...she had avoided answering the phone for a week. She knew she had to leave.

Text & Graphics © 1999 by Gail Rae Hudson

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