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Blanco y Negro
by
W. L. Telford
1
No one can judge a marriage from the outside.
We all do. Societies. Courts. The intrusive ‘Media.’
We judge the marriages of our friends. Our neighbors. Co-workers. Casual acquaintances. Celebrities we don’t even know.
And we are always wrong.
Even when we’re right, we’re wrong, because our opinions are based on inadequate information. Marriages are too complicated and too subtle. They turn over the years on words said and unsaid, tones, pauses, touches gentle or rough, welcomed or shunned, sex or lack of it, money or lack of it, gestures, expressions, a face turned toward or away. Thousands and thousands of bonding or eroding moments.
Everyone who knew Mary and Jeffery Healy thought they were happily married. And everyone was wrong. One morning Jeff decided to do something about it.
In itself the cause was nothing. At the breakfast table, where Mary was surfing the web on her iPad, Jeff asked her to pass him the jam. Without even raising her eyes, she did so and scowled, fleetingly, at the interruption. That, said Jeff to himself, is it.
They had been married nine years.
He was thirty-five. She thirty and still as physically beautiful, he thought, as the day they met. Dark brown hair, green eyes, A voluptuous mouth that for years had only seemed to sneer. A great body, long legs, firm breasts, not huge, but big enough. A body that she never gave willingly any more. For a while he wondered if she was having an affair, but concluded that she wasn’t. She just didn’t like sex. She had in the beginning, or pretended to. It didn’t take the famed scene from WHEN HARRY MET SALLY to convince Jeff that a woman could successfully fake it.
Jeff studied his wife as he sipped his coffee. I loved you, he thought. At least I think I did. So why did you have to become such a bitch?
He did not consider himself a cruel man. But perhaps he was. Perhaps he had become one during the long years in which the woman he loved, tried to love, became ever more distant, did less and less to please him, until at last she did nothing. He wanted her to be punished. He wanted her to suffer. What she would no longer willingly do for him, he wanted her to be forced, endlessly, to do for others.
The day, or more likely night, would come when she would beg him to use her, beg to serve only his cock. But it would be too late.
That he was an attorney and knew what a divorce would cost him only re-enforced his decision.
Jeff Healy sipped the last of his coffee and looked across the breakfast table at the top of his wife’s head, still bend over her iPad, and smiled.
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