“That’s what he did!”
(‘What goes around comes around’)
That’s what he did! Just waiting, even waiting longer to do it this one night than usual—what exact night? I don’t know, one night in the heat of lust, like many nights before—although this night would be the last night—stiff surge came through him. Sweating through his soundless room, he got up and went into her bedroom, so Lee told me. She was now a high-school girl, seventeen, about ready to receive her diploma, go on to college, hoping forevermore to be done with her father’s whims, and beyond his range of harm. He had his divorce, his PH.D, his retirement pension, from High School, he had been doing this going on three years or more, since his divorce but in this last year he didn’t ask, he just did it. And she forgot to lock the door again, and before she thought of it, just in time to be standing at the corner of her bed, she saw him, he was there again. Without even attempting to touch her he sat on the edge of her bed, she was his daughter—let me correct that, his adopted Korean daughter, who didn’t want to live with her mother and her new husband, Lee. That’s what he did, not even waiting for her to graduate, sitting there, knowing she would be leaving in the near future—now in her all juvenile sight, he proposed to her like a child in agony, “I get lonesome without your mother, let me touch you, you know where?” She stared at him—he wasn’t defending her, rather using her, she burst into tears: he had been her adviser, power, and the infallible. Three years had passed, to whom she had this mentor sneaking in her room in a voice of pity, only to regain his composure again, once after his visit, against all the rules of fatherhood, respectability, decorum—this was the dirty inflexibility of facts. Then she told her mother, finally told her mother, and her mother told her stepfather, and her stepfather wanted to hang the Ph.D., and now she wanted to move back home, and her new stepfather, was now not so bad after all (matter-of-fact, her adopted father would state later on down the road, that her stepfather was a much better man than he).
This is she. Tonya. And within a month he married a girl from the Philippines, a mail-order bride. No, an internet order bride. Tall and thin and more on the plain side than pretty, and twenty-five years his junior. And how he had learned to be a good father to his daughter in her sight, in front of her was beyond us, but the new wife was impressed. And for her it was a hard way too. That was when she first realized she was now safe from his advances, actually becoming a member of the household, his household—no longer a lover, but the new wife didn’t get along with Tonya neither—maybe she sensed something, who’s to say—nor did Tonya’s little sister two years younger, another adopted child, Korean child, get along with the new stepparents. And obviously we knew all this, but Tonya wanted Lee and her mother to be quiet about the molestation, wouldn’t condemn her father, and wouldn’t put a legible signature on a statement that might put him away. Which prevented everyone concerned from doing anything? But there was never any question about which one she loved, she never loved her new stepfather—even with all his support—evidently she was loyal to end; or her new stepmother, again loyal to the end to her mother (an elementary school teacher among us), but they soon learned quickly how he refused to support them by going to Manila with his new bride—to avoid this and that, you know what I mean, taxes and courts and child support, and whatever else whatever more may pop up, could pop up, might, and to be frank and honest, both stepparents had had enough of the brats—ungrateful kids, demanding kids, and like a nymph, like a deer, he followed her—like a camel in heat. Darting across the ocean forevermore, and she returned back home, and showed her PhD, to her family, indefinitely. So we thought of course she’d be alright, but now there was no solvency between man and wife, only mother and two girls. Doesn’t that beat all, and he went his way, and she— Carolyn, was her name—she found a new lover, who jolted her the same way she jolted her last two husbands, in particular Lee. And I suppose the one who jolted her said: ‘Anyone can see daylight, on an incompatible face scorched with evaporated tears that emerged so quickly and left faster than they emerged.’ And she was clinging to him, like white on rice.
So we thought, all of us thought at school where Carolyn worked, of course that they were some thrifty guys, both the husband and the boyfriend. The husband not only learned something more about success too. And the boyfriend was somehow converted by knowing the husband was quite ill when she left him, like he was, when they first met. Oh yes, say it again: what goes around comes around.
No: 642 (6-25-2010)
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