“Can you tell me what’s wrong with me?” I really wanted to hear her answer.
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Mike!” Lila said. “It isn’t you. I haven’t dated anybody!” she protested.
“Then I have to ask, are you a lesbian? Is that why you won’t go out with me?”
Lila blushed from my question and answered, “No, Mike, I’m not a lesbian! There are just some things that are going on in my life right now that keep me from dating. I would love to go on a date with you, but now isn’t a good time!”
“Then, I have to know Lila, why not?” I demanded.
“Mike, I… I…” She turned away from me, “I work at Fitzgerald’s.”
I shook my head at her response. Okay, so she worked for a competitor of my dad. I had never spotted her there, or at my dad’s place for that matter, but I didn’t see that as being insurmountable.
“Lila, I don’t care. All I want to do is just go out on a simple date and enjoy spending time with you.” I looked deeply into her eyes. I saw relief on her face.
“Are you sure, Mike? Are you sure it isn’t going to cause you any problems?” she asked.
“No, Lila, I don’t care. Just let me take you on a date. If for whatever reason you decide after that, that you don’t want me around you, then okay. But at least I’ll know I gave my best shot to the prettiest girl in school.”
That Saturday, I showed up at her place in casual wear. I didn’t want to build up any undue pressure or unrealistic expectations by going to some expensive French restaurant. I took her to the zoo; we strolled around watching the animals. I bought her a brat at a hot dog vendor, and we continued our tour while eating and talking.
As the afternoon faded into the evening, we went to the park adjacent to the zoo and sat on the ground while a troupe performed a play in the city’s Shakespeare in the Park program. We laughed at the mad antics of “A Midsummer Night Dream.”
As I drove her home, I was fascinated by the animation she exhibited, raving about the show. We were walking up to her door, hand in hand. Out of the blue, she said, “You know, if I ever get a dog, it’s going to be a French Mastiff and I’m going to name him Oberon.”
“Where did that come from?” I laughed.
She wistfully looked into space, “Growing up, the only friend I had was the neighbor’s dog. He was a French Mastiff and I wished he was mine. I never had to worry whether he loved me. As for the name, to commemorate tonight as being the only other time I have been truly happy,” she proclaimed. She turned to hug me and said, “Thank you, Mike. I had a wonderful time tonight!” She gazed at me in expectation.
I lowered for a kiss and she closed her eyes. When our lips met, it was as if for the first time in my life things fell into place in the universe. I had no idea how long we stood there. When we broke the kiss, I think both of us were stunned and breathless.
“Wow” she softly whispered.
Not being a fool, I struck. “Lila, how about going out with me next weekend, they’re playing Romeo and Juliet.”
“Mike, let me have a couple of days to decide. There are some things I need to do,” she replied. With that, she leaned in for another goodnight kiss before I could object. As I stumbled back to the car totally enthralled by this wonderful woman, I began planning for our third date. Fate would not be so cruel to stop me from seeing her.
Monday afternoon, she called, “Hi Mike, if you still want to take me out this weekend, I’d love to go. I need to let you know that I’ve quit my job at Fitzgerald’s. I’ve taken a paying internship at a tech company I’m hoping to get a job offer from after graduation. I’m going to have to tighten my purse strings even tighter to survive, but I’ll manage.”
From the second date, we moved to our third and then our fourth and so on until we were basically shacking up together at my place. I finally convinced her to drop her lease and move in with me as a money saving proposition. We instantly adapted into our newly found status as roommates, best friends, and lovers.
I took her home to meet my parents during Christmas and they fell in love with her from the start. She instinctively began bonding with both of them and with no hesitation called them Mom and Dad. My Uncle Jack and Aunt Kate were no different as they adopted her, as well. When we left to go back to school my dad walked us out to the car; out of listening range he said, “Boy, don’t fuck this up.” Probably the best advice he’d ever given me.
At graduation, we both walked across the stage for our diplomas. We both had accepted good job offers in our respective fields. I proposed to her in front of my parents and she enthusiastically accepted. We started saving up our nest egg and planned a wedding for a year off, to get vacation time accrued and start looking for a place with a fenced in yard that we could get in our price range that would allow us to get Lila her puppy.
And now, it was all falling to shit, I thought sourly.
I felt his presence behind me as he saddled the seat beside me. “Hey, Son, how are you feeling?” my dad softly enquired. His solicitous tone told me everything I needed to know. Lila had already reached out to my parents and had told them what had transpired. It was interesting that I wasn’t worried about Lila gilding the truth to put her in a better frame of light. No, she would have divulged the truth, warts and all.
I paused before answering my dad, “I don’t really know, Dad. I don’t know how to begin to explain how I’m feeling. I guess, I’m still in shock in a way. It’s like I just woke up in some Bizzaro world existence.”
My Dad nodded his head at my explanation. He looked straight ahead into the large mirror affixed behind the wall of the bar, staring at our reflections. “Your mom is worried about you; she and Lila have been going around town trying to find you. You didn’t help matters turning off your phone. Your Uncle Jack gave me a call when you showed up here at the bar. I gave them a call, they’ll be here in about half an hour.”
“What should I do, Dad?” The poignant weighed question was out there now. Here I was all grown up, self- reliant, ready to take on the world and I was reduced to running to my father hoping he could fix my problem.
“This is your call, Mike. You’ve got to decide how you’re going to handle this. You know that I don’t think you can find a better girl than Lila. The way you two are around each other, it’s so obvious that y’all were meant for each other.” Dad continued looking at our reflections, trying to gauge my reaction.
“So, you think I was meant to be with a stripper, Dad? How is that going to work out, Dad? You really think Mom is going to be comfortable being around Lila when we attend church, or when there’s a family reunion? How about when our kid gets up in school for Show and Tell and tells the class that Mom is a stripper!” I bitterly lashed out in reaction to the unjustness of it all.
“Son, people do things, right or wrong, for any number of reasons. From what, Lila has revealed about her life to me and your Mom, we know she had to make some hard choices. People adapt, Mike. You can’t judge a person’s entire existence from a single snapshot of their life. You’ve got to take that into account for the entire story. Lila deserves that, Mike. You deserve that.”
I burst out laughing. “I deserve a lot of things, Dad, but I don’t deserve a wife that thousands, hell, maybe hundreds of thousands of guys that have seen naked! That jammed a Washington, Lincoln, Hamilton, Jackson, Grant, or Franklin into the crotch of her G-string! That touched her, or…”
I had to pause as once again the unthinkable presented itself. Could Lila have resisted all that temptation? In my heart, I knew she had, but my mind was thinking other things. My stomach churned at the thought of total strangers manhandling my woman like a side of beef.
I continued, “How do I ever get past the fact that the woman I married isn’t who I thought she’d be?” I asked, not really expecting an answer to my rhetorical question.
“Mike, you weren’t a virgin when you first dating Lila and I doubt that she was either,” Dad commented. “Now, you say you’re upset that a lot of guys have seen Lila naked. That didn’t stop you from sneaking in issues of Playboy magazines underneath your bed when you were a kid growing up or watching porn on pay for view TV on our cable. What, you didn’t think we knew about that?” Dad laughed.
“The point is, all those women were somebody’s daughter, sister, cousin, girlfriend, or whatever. That didn’t stop you from objectifying those girls. Being married won’t stop you from turning around and looking at a pretty woman now. Truth be told, I doubt Lila will stop looking at handsome men when given the chance. That’s just human nature, and you’ll never change that. What you do change is how you chose to respond.”
“The two of you have made a commitment to each other. Before you discovered this, Mike, did you have any doubts about Lila loving you?”
“No, Dad,” I replied.
“Do you think that she loves you any less after you found out?” He asked.
I sighed, “No, Dad. It’s just I still don’t know how I can rationalize this. How I can accept someone that’s done something like that in my life?” I sadly replied.
We sat there for a few minutes without speaking, both of us just weighing our conversation and thinking about what we’d spoken. Dad sighed and motioned at my now lukewarm beer. “You going to drink that?”
“Get Jack to pour you one, this is warm,” I warned him.
He reached over, took a long sip and gave an appreciative gasp after he swallowed.
“It’s still better than that hot horsepiss ’33’ beer we used to get in ‘Nam,” he said.