You Have Rules
love and redemption in the south
After my divorce, I met a woman over the internet. Isn’t that always the way? She had just been divorced as well. We shared an interest in video games and talking into the smallest hours of the morning.
She married a man from France who had upset the French people in his chosen profession as a chef, so he needed a path to citizenship in the United States to start over. I asked her what one had to do to upset a bunch of chefs. Not much apparantly. I would learn he probably deserved it anyway. I married a woman who wanted me to solve all of her life’s challenges, including financial. My first thought was that I could handle it if I made a list of them all. That didn’t work.
From her marriage, she got a beautiful little girl who looked just like her and spoke two languages before she was four. From my marriage, I inherited a father-in-law who never quite gave up on that position, even though he had a right to, and he had with the first two sons-in-law. It worked out.
An ingrained and ordained daughter of Atlanta, she, I would learn, was the great, grand-niece of Ivan Allen. Excited by this, I explained that Allen was a friend of my father, grandfather, and uncle. He was a genius in the Office Supply business and an unsung hero of the civil rights movement. Allen sat next to Martin Luther King at the dinner where he received his Nobel Peace Prize.
She assured me that she knew all this. There are no heroes like family heroes, and hers were considerably more famous than mine, even though they were friends. She explained that there were members of her family who were so proud of Allen’s success in business that they were almost willing to forgive him for being a “nigger lover” and a traitor. That made me laugh. I never doubted for a moment that she was telling the absolute truth.
Where women were concerned, I allowed myself twelve years difference, older or younger, although I preferred older. I figured that was generous. She was five years younger than that. Still, she was good company.
After her beach vacation, she shared her photos with me over Skype. I complimented her on the results of her workout routines.
“Feel free to add these to your spank-bank,” she said.
“I absolutely will not,” I said. “We are friends. There are rules!”
“You have rules, she said.”
A woman of her own mind is generally worth the investment, but know what you’re getting into. Once scorned, she would never accept what a man told her to think again.
Time went on, and our friendship grew. “How long since you’ve been to Atlanta?” She said.
At that point in my life, I was in deep social isolation. Far deeper than ever before. Even my family couldn’t get me out. My right leg was suffering from a stubborn lack of cooperation. Still, there was something to her idea.
I would stay at a hotel, I insisted. A date was set. I had family in Atlanta that had long since passed. I always loved Atlanta.
“Do you have any interest in Stone Mountain?”
“Fuck no.”
“The Zoo?” She suggested. I loved the Atlanta Zoo as a child. Our schedule was filling up.
The third night in, she invited herself up to my room. A bottle was ordered. We could see the glittering lights of Atlanta.
“You should kiss me.”
”I will not.”
“Why’s that, mister?”
“You’re too young for me. There are rules.”
“You have rules.” She said.
“Besides, I always wanted to know what it was like.”
“What, what was like?” I asked.
“What it was like to kiss somebody who wouldn’t shut the hell up.”
She was the first woman I’d touched since my wife. It never happened again, although I would visit her again. It seems we really were just friends, but both of us were looking for that punctuation point between our divorce and the rest of our lives.
