Disappointment

Let me start this story by telling you precisely why Marsha was disappointed. If I simply stated the plain facts as they were born, you might come to the rather straightforward conclusion that she was jealous. Indeed, most people find themselves in such a position when confronted with infidelity; most people writhe in pain when the face of betrayal plants itself within their notice. Most people would advertise themselves as wronged lovers, faithful recipients of a tragic romance, brokenhearted angels with rapscallion husbands.

But not Marsha.

In the first place, she was too sophisticated to be married. She had politely declined Alan’s offer in their second year of courtship and had instead proposed that they initiate a contract of cohabitation, made official before the landlord when their nine-month lease was signed and dated at a point in time which was, in fact, a total of nine years ago. Marsha felt that marriage was not only an impractical, bourgeois ideal, but also a rather thin pretense for the ownership of sexual and domestic labor. Alan went along with her plan, not because he felt strongly about the principle, but because he found it easier than the amount of thought objecting to it would require.

In the second place, Marsha was too sophisticated to be jealous. Jealousy, she felt, was one of the baser human emotions that had its roots in cooperative farming. In the context of industrialized society, there was no place for jealousy. She felt with great certainty that jealousy had become a cultural phenomenon entirely propagated by fundamentalist groups interested in maintaining classical divisions of labor and a highly stratified social order. To feel the heat and anger of jealousy, she truly believed, would be to accept one’s designated place in the social order. Jealousy was a device for making people cry to have their chains put back on.

And so, when Marsha did encounter evidence of Alan’s infidelity, she had only a split second to decide upon and label that sensation which seemed to sink into her gut.

“Disappointment,” she called it.

By then, Marsha and Alan had had a child together. In the interests of keeping her son out of the public schools (which would ultimately try to brainwash him), Marsha had quit her job as an editor with the local communist paper and had been homeschooling the child for the past three years. The sinking in her gut, called “disappointment,” accompanied her sudden and thorough realization that she and her child were quite dependent on Alan for survival.

Had she been less tired or perhaps in more of a secure position, Marsha would have taken the time to think through her dilemma. However, as she began pouring through the instant messenger transcripts she had accidentally pulled up on her home computer, a generalized panic seemed to overtake the sinking feeling. “Thinking about you…” she read, “wish you were here.”

And so, that afternoon, she made two telephone calls.

The first call, emitted in one harsh and menacing breath, included the simple statement, “You keep away from him, bitch!”

The second call required less thought, read softly as it was from the transcript lying in front of her, “Just thinking about you…wish you were here. Let’s do something special tonight...I’ll put on something silky….”

And then Marsha hung up the phone, reflecting silently on the historical significance of silks in class bondage and female objectification. She spat once onto the floor and stared glumly ahead of her. Her son was still napping in the next room. The theme song for the Maury Povitch Show was playing on TV. Beneath that was the hum of construction off Lake Street.

Marsha was disappointed.