that went well

Things didn't quite work out as planned this weekend, and instead of spending my Saturday at the 14th Annual Home Cheesemaking and Beekeeper's convention in Pacoima, I ended up sharing quality time with a mechanic. It turns out that Fran's Caravan had a bad tensioner. Well, that's how it turns out, but to get to the point where it "turns out", the geniuses over at Delaney's had to bill me four hours of labor. Then they helped themselves to another 2 hours to fix the problem. The convention was still in full swing Sunday, or so I've heard, since I blew my admission and gas money on fixing up the Caravan. Still, by my accounts, I'm far ahead of the game since I got the thing so cheap.

Anyhow, I called up Victor around noon and surprised him with my suggestion that we go have lunch. He wasn't surprised by the suggestion so much as the venue: Chancellor's. Neither of us had ever been to Chancellor's any time other than a Wednesday late-night. Victor mused that this was an opportunity to find out whether our post-Aikido taco stop actually existed in spacetime outside of 10:30 on Wednesday nights. A chance to see whether a falling tree makes any noise in a deserted forest, as it were.

So I picked up Victor in my Caravan, the new tensioner purring happily, and set out for Chancellor's. Victor sat himself in the back row. It was about a thousand degrees outside so we had the air conditioner going full blast, which, in a Caravan, doesn't really do much since there's so great a volume of air inside to condition, all of it starting out at about a thousand degrees and desperately trying to stay there, aided and abetted by the thousand degree air pummelling the windows and sneaking in through leaky seals. With Victor sitting in the back, the air conditioner blasting noisily, crusing down the road at speeds which caused all sorts of interesting vibrations to course through the body panels of my marvel of American engineering, it was noisy. Victor, in his naturally soft voice, decided to strike up a conversation.

"Mmrrm hrrrmmrm mhrmr mrmm," said Victor.

"What?" I shouted.

""Mmrrm hrrrmmrm mhrmr mrmm."

"You need to speak up or move up or something, man, it's noisy in here," I said.

Victor got the idea, I guess, because he started shouting. Well, he started doing what for Victor counts as shouting and what for most other people counts as talking in a normal voice.

"When's Margie coming back?" he asked.

Margie has been gone since Thursday afternoon. Her office flew her all the way to Rochester for training. The guy giving the training seminar, Col. F. L. Farnsworth, ret., lives in Chattsworth and conducts seminars in Chattsworth in the winter, and Rochester in the summer. Since it is most clearly summertime at the moment, and since Margie's got to have this training long before winter, the company flew her out to Rochester, along with eighteen of her coworkers.

"Two weeks," I said. "Her seminar lasts two weeks. Then she'll be back."

"You don't think she'll screw around on you in Rochester, do you?" asked Victor.

The guy's mind goes places my mind would never even stumble upon by accident. That's why I like hanging out with Victor. My own viewpoint is limited by my world view and my tact. I don't think Victor has either. He just says what's on his mind. How things manage to get on his mind has always been a mystery.

"Why would you ask something like that?"

"Well," said Victor, "that's how they are, you know?"

"No," I said, "I don't know. That's how who is?"

"People. Everyone. It's biological. Human beings have a built-in biological imperative to mate with as many people as possible over their lifetime. Monogomy is a completely artificial construct, and a recent one, at that. It's only been around for a few thousand years but polyamory has been around for millions of years." Victor paused to take a breath and finished up his lecture with, "Very few species in the wild are monogamous."

I didn't know what to say. Margie and I will be celebrating our seventh wedding anniversary next month, and here was Victor, speculating that she's taking the two week trip to Rochester as an opportunity to obtain a little extra biodiversity.

"We're quite happily married," I told him.

"What's that have to do with anything?" he asked. "Do you know how to get to Chancellor's?"

"Of course I do, we've been going there for more than a year."

"Sure, but never from this direction. We always go from the dojo to Chancellor's and then home. Now we're reversing the last leg of the trip but the roads may be different. Are you sure you can find it from this direction?"

"Of course I'm sure," I said. I paused for a bit to give Victor a chance to continue with his previous line of discussion, but it seemed as if his diversion into navigation had distracted him from his biology lesson. I knew that wasn't the case. Victor had never in his life had a relationship that lasted more than a month. It would be simplistic and petty of me to say that he was jealous of me. I think it would be more accurate to say that he was mystefied by my experience, though perhaps not particularly envious. I don't think Victor was really interested in anything that had the potential to last longer than a month, which is probably for the best, since I can't imagine a woman who'd care to be around him for longer than that.

We drove the rest of the way to Chancellor's in silence.

I did manage to find the place, even though we were approaching it from the opposite of our usual direction. It wasn't nearly as easy to find parking at noon on a Sunday as it was to find parking at 10:30 on a Wednesday, but I managed. We had to walk a couple blocks, in the sweltering heat, and Victor, who is naturally endowed with a high metabolism and imagines that this gives him a free pass on exercise, was rather sweaty and tired by the time we reached our hangout. That's a shame, because, as it turned out, the whole city block was at that very moment experiencing a rolling blackout. There was no air conditioning inside Chancellor's, although they weren't closed because the gas grills were still working enough to cook up most of their menu items, and the beer still had enough residual chill to be served. We went in and took our usual booth.

The crowd was different on a Sunday afternoon, which is to say, the alcoholics at the bar were even sadder. Cheekie Charlie wasn't there, though that may simply be a new development as of last Wednesday. In his seat was an old woman with only one arm. She didn't have a prosthesis, just a safety pin to close up her sleeve. She sat with her back hunched over, and when she spoke to Javi, the bartender, her eyes never left her drink. Occasionally, she'd look from side to side, but she wouldn't lift her head -- she'd just swivel her neck so she could see while keeping her eyes downcast. She spoke softly, without enthusiasm in her voice. Her hair looked like it hadn't been brushed in a week. I looked at Victor and cast my eyes toward the one-armed woman at the bar.

"Broken Betty," I said.

Victor nodded his assent to the Christening. Everyone has a nickname; life and circumstance are not always kind in the revealing of them.

Broken Betty's cocktail must have been a little hard of hearing, and Broken Betty really wanted it to know all about her life, so Broken Betty raised her voice.

"Things were never the same after the accident," said Broken Betty. "That's when Aston left me, you know, right after the accident. He said that I had changed, but he was wrong. It wasn't me, it was him! He changed. Nothing had changed in me, I was the same person he married. I was off my feet for a couple of weeks but I wasn't any different."

A waitress brought us a pair of menus. As she approached, Victor motioned for her just to give us the menus and leave, quietly. Her name tag read, "Anne." I'd never seen Anne before. I wanted her to leave quietly also, but I didn't lack social skills in the same quantities as Victor.

Broken Betty had more to say, and, Anne having retreated to the kitchen, we were without distraction and able to focus on Betty's tale. Javi, the bartender, was also interested in Betty's loud story, it seemed, as he moved closer to listen.

Broken Betty continued. "Eleven years. About to adopt, too. I don't think he even cared about what happened, he just wanted to move on, so he did. I wasn't any different. My mind is still as good as it used to be! I could still do everything I used to do. "

"How did you lose it?" asked Javi.

"Lose what?" said Broken Betty.

"The arm."

"My arm? What's that got to do with anything?"

"That's why he left you, right?" asked Javi. "The arm?"

"The fuck!?" said Broken Betty. "I was born without an arm! He left me after I sprained my ankle playing soccer!"

Victor and I blinked at each other. Broken Betty had a few unkind words for Javi and then she brought her voice back down to where only her cocktail could enjoy the rest of her story. I looked over my menu and picked a lunch. Victor appeared to do the same, and, that having been taken care of, he turned his attention back to more pressing matters, namely, the presumed-finished conversation from the ride over.

"So you think she's never cheated on you?"

"Dude!" I said, continuing, eloquently, with, "What the hell?"

"I'm just saying," said Victor, "it's biological and perfectly normal. We're not meant to be with only one human."

"Yeah, you said that before, so let me set you straight. Fundamentally, there's only one way to deal with that question, and that's to not worry about it until you need to. Going about obsessing about the faithfulness of your partner is insanity, especially if they have provided you no reason for it."

"Sure, but --" began Victor. I cut him off.

"Look, man, there are only so many things I have time to worry about. That's real low on my list. I could get food poisoning from lunch or smashed by a falling meteor, but worrying about those things isn't going to make them any less likely to happen."

"Ah, so you admit she's likely to sleep with other guys?"

I sighed. "No, man. That's not what I said. Regardless of whether she's going to do it, worrying about it before it happens isn't going to make my life any better. I do what I do, and if that's not good enough, she's her own person and she'll do her own thing. But there's more to it than that, between Margie and me. If there wasn't trust and understanding, we wouldn't be married. People have been murdering each other in their sleep for longer than they've not been. Why don't I worry about waking up with a knife in my chest?"

"Maybe you should," said Victor. He wiped some sweat off his forehead and shook it off his forearm onto the floor.

"Or maybe I just trust that she won't cheat on me any sooner than she'd stab me in my sleep," I said.

Anne returned to take our orders. Victor and I both ordered the BBQ pork. I figured the conversation was over but I guess I figured wrong.

"How can you have all this trust? Look around you, man, people -- married people -- are stabbing each other in the back every minute!" He gestured toward Broken Betty. "You heard what she just said, didn't you?"

"Yeah? She's also got just one arm. What's that got to do with me?"

"I'm saying Margie can do to you what her husband did to her: find something better and move on."

"Well, dude, what can I say," I said. I could say a lot more but Victor doesn't like to "lose" an argument even when it's not really an argument. This wasn't an argument yet but it could develop into one and even with Victor, I had better things to discuss. I conceded, in an attempt to end it, "I guess that's just a risk I'm taking."

"As long as you know that," said Victor.

Victor liked to think of himself as everyone's older brother, full of hard-earned wisdom to thanklessly dispense on any topic imaginable. Even when he hadn't "been there," he wanted folks to feel that he had. He wasn't condescending or contemptuous, he was absolutely sincere. The way that he cared for the people around him was through his advice, which he thought was valuable beyond all else. In his own mind, he was a humanitarian. An honest-to-goodness bodhisattva. A modern-day Jesus V. Christ.

"Trust is a funny thing," said Victor. Inwardly, I sighed. Just when I had thought it was over...

"Yeah," I said.

"Yeah," he said. "It takes a lot longer to build than some people seem to realize. After seven years, you might know Margie enough to trust her, or not. But what about Buckyman Jim?"

"What about Buckyman Jim?"

"He married Cleo after knowing her only two months. How could he have had time to find out if she was trustworthy?"

"I don't know," I said, "why don't you ask him?"

"Good idea," said Victor.

"All right," I said, and conjured up Buckyman Jim. Bucky pulled up a chair and sat at the end of our booth. It's wise not to sit too close to Victor; nobody knew this better than Buckyman Jim. There was no more room at my side of the booth.

"'Sup," said Buckyman Jim. Victor nodded to him and I did the thing with the eyebrows and the neck, you know the thing, all the cool kids do it. It means "hi". That's the thing I did.

"Sure is hot today," said Bucky.

Anne returned from the kitchen with two glasses of water on a tray. The water had no ice in it. She stood behind Buckyman Jim, who turned his head around to get a look at her. "Icemaker's out," she told us. "Electric. I didn't realize you were having three."

"He just got here," I told Anne. She pulled three menus from her apron and handed them back out.

"You can't have the pork," she told us.

"You're out, again?" asked Victor.

"No, we're not out, we've got plenty of pork, you just can't have any, because the power's been out all morning and the pork is no good any longer. Health codes won't let us serve it."

"So what is good any longer?" asked Victor.

"The grilled cheese sandwiches." Victor looked at Bucky and me, and we each nodded our assent.

"Fine," he said. "Three grilled cheese sandwiches."

"Make mine a double," I said.

Anne went back to the kitchen. Victor looked at Buckyman Jim.

"I've been explaining how humans are just like any other animal, genetically programmed to mate with as many other humans as possible over their lifespan. How monogamy is an artificial construct that can't possibly ever work."

"Oh, that one again, huh?" said Buckyman. I grinned. Victor was not amused to have his pearls of wisdom taken lightly.

"How are things with Cleo?" he asked.

"Fantastic," said Buckyman Jim. "She's really enjoying the move to New York. Well, not the move to New York, more like New York itself. You know what I mean."

"Uh huh," said Victor. He wasn't interested in smalltalk, and got right to the point. "Don't you think you married her too quickly?"

"No," said Buckyman Jim.

"You don't think you could have gotten to know her a little better first?"

"Sure, I could have. So what?"

"So then you could know with more certainty whether you can trust her," said Victor.

"How much certainty do I need?"

"Well," said Victor, "that all depends -"

"Exactly," interrupted Buckyman Jim. "I got all the certainty I needed and then I married her."

"That's ridiculous. After only two months, how can you be sure that she deserves your trust?"

"What you mean to ask," said Buckyman Jim, "is after two months, how can Victor be sure that a woman deserves Victor's trust, and the answer to that is, he can't. Look man, this whole trust thing is your problem, this whole getting to know you business is your business, not mine. I needed to know some things before I married Cleo, and I found those things out in two months. Everything else -- and of course there was a lot more -- was gravy."

"But what if you're wrong?" asked Victor. "Spending a little more time with her before marrying her would have allowed you to have greater predictive powers. Greater probability of certainty."

"What if I'm wrong? What if a whale falls out of the sky and lands on my head? You're not listening to what I'm saying, and, even if you were, you're asking the wrong questions, man."

"It is human nature to betray and hurt those that we are attached to," said Victor, hoping to score one last point. Buckyman wasn't going to let him have it.

"No, Victor, that's your nature, and people are attracted to people that share their nature. The 'human' in 'human nature' comes from being able to overcome our nature, if we must. In my case, I didn't have to. In your case, you might want to try and get over your primal mistrust of humans. It's not always productive."

Buckyman Jim turned to me and asked, "When's Margie coming back?"

"Two weeks," I said.

"How do you stand it?" asked Buckman Jim.

"I get by."