A Bird's Reluctance!

“This is strictly a business dinner and I mean it!’’ he blurted out.

 “Sure, sure.”

“I mean it so don’t get any lustful ideas in your sexually liberated brain.’’

“Looks like you are the one with ideas because I haven’t said anything.”

‘’No, it’s because I know what you are thinking’’

‘’And how do you know what am thinking, Mr. Psychic? Why do you assume you are so irresistible and that I am planning a big seduction on you?’’

“Just keep your hands to yourself. I am a wonderfully, happily married man with a gorgeous wife who’d kill if she thought I was fooling around.”

Jane was amused by that last statement and managed to chuckle.  She wondered how he was going to be like if he were not wonderfully and happily married.

“Oh, I see. Is that why you come to the office every morning with face frowned like a brownie? You don’t look it at all. Ok, let’s pretend to be friends, just two friends having dinner,” she finally said.

“You just don’t get it. I am a married man and can’t have female friends, let alone have dinner with one. It just doesn’t work where I come from.”

“Why not?” she asked, surprised.

“Because that is the way it is. If my wife met a male friend for lunch or dinner, I’d tear his head off and file for a divorce.”

“Absolute nonsense!”

“You can say anything you want to say, why would I want female friends anyway?” This he said and stormed out of the restaurant with no destination in mind. He knew he was confused.

Peter Mann knew his world was caught up. He could not understand what was happening to him anymore and knew he was on the verge of an abyss and ready to plunge deep into it. Until two years ago, he was a happily married man with his own share of problems. He worked hard to provide more than his family of three could ask for. He even said that his only goal in life was to provide for his family.

He could not understand why of all men parading around, he should be the one to suffer this fate. Life was too cruel, he thought. Pete, as he was affectionately called, got married soon after obtaining his first degree. He always believed that if something was worth doing, then it was worth doing in the morning. Life was young and bliss. He was having a feel of how it felt to get home to a lovely wife who was always there, and waiting. Aside work, they went everywhere together and had mutual friends. The only ones that differed who were not known to his wife were his clients, mostly.

As he got drowned in his own thoughts down memory lane, he got shoved by Jane who had followed him out. His line of thought was broken and he apologized for his outburst and instantly held Jane tenderly on the arm and led her back inside the restaurant, to her amazement. He pulled a chair as soon as they got to their reserved table for her to sit down before taking his. Food was quickly ordered as they both needed it and also were running late on their schedule.

“What kind of woman do you want?” she quizzed.

The question hit him so hard that he had to stare at her face. He thought the question was straight forward. He was just unprepared for such a question because he’s never really had an answer to that profound question. It was just too personal and he figured Jane was prying too deep into the innermost part of his being. He was taken aback and it dawned on him that he did not know what he wanted. What a shocking truth?

He was a lawyer by profession, had litigated all the high profile cases in their firm and was held in high esteem by the senior partners because of his astuteness, sense of purpose and sense of duty. He was caring, gentle, and intelligent but has no sense of humour.  He was anti-social and only really mingled if he felt the need to. He was not into women and so got married to the first woman who crossed his path and also because he didn’t like the way his friends changed women like diapers. He knew Dzina was different but he loved her all the same without reservations. He loved her because life with her was adventurous. He was being introduced into the world of fun. That was when he realized that beginning of life was relative, it never started at forty like everybody says; yes, because he is in his late twenties and life had already started.

Dzina stepped onto the scene and swept Pete off his feet with her charm. She was very beautiful and sleek, so fashionable you might want to think she was a model upon sight. She was fun loving and adventurous. She came from an average family of scanty economic means and vowed she was going to climb to the top by all means necessary. She knew she would be stepping on a few toes but she cared less. She first had sex at the age of 12 with a 20-year old man she claimed she loved and had her first commercial sex at the age of 14 and never looked back. Through university, she was subtle in her endeavours but surely got away with everything she wanted. She wanted all the finest things in life, she wanted all the rubies, the diamonds, the pearls and all the expensive toys one could ever think of, unknowing to Pete.

Peter was a workaholic and paid little attention to Dzina. They shared quality time if they had time and hardly quarrelled even though they were odd for each other. They both accepted each other with the warts and all and never bothered about the excesses.

But something happened one afternoon that woke him from his slumber. He came home without the usual ritual of announcing his homecoming before he stepped out of the office. He took ill and decided to just go home after lunch. He got home to meet the wife in a compromising situation with a stranger. She was having sex with a man he has not seen before and realized he was not coming from any part of their town or community.

Before he could say ‘jack’, he passed out and couldn’t confront the man as he wanted to do and was rushed to the hospital. He finally came around on the third day in the hospital with some family members at his bedside. The ‘only’ witness was Dzina who also happened to be the ‘defendant’ so everybody believed what she said. “There was nobody besides her in the house’, she said and that cemented the alibi. Nobody knew Dzina in that realm and never believed Pete’s story. He was only admonished to see a psychologist and, most of all, to relax because he worked under stressful conditions.

This shocked him so much that it changed his world, his thoughts and aspirations. He could not believe he had no case and worse of all was supposed to act ‘normally’ to his kinsmen. He could not find even one person who believe his side of the story and he knew that he has to think through things once again. It dawned on him that there were so many innocent people languishing in jails all over the world as a result of having no one to believe their story. Their lifestyles made them guilty even before the jury was even selected.

Damn! Yes, because he was being accused of insanity as a result of the life he led, laughable but serious. He became a changed man from thence. He had so many questions running through his mind but his wife was not ready to talk about them, because to her, nothing happened. Her warm receptive nature changed into tight-lipped arrogance.

Everything changed. They talked only because it served functional purposes and there was nothing like the love they shared anymore because Dzina could not live the goody-goody life she was living and Pete was not ready to come to terms with what he saw that fateful afternoon. Dzina now went out with all sorts of men as long as it had monetary reward.

He also wanted divorce but for who? All of them were bound to be the same because in his world, she was the finest of all of them. She was an angel as far as women were concerned, he had thought. He was now afraid and confused.

This affected his attitude dramatically and his work output declined, because it conflicted with his goal of providing for his family. He later took to drinking till he drank like a sailor every night. His world was slipping away by the day and he was ready to be engulfed by whatever it was.

Nothing worked anymore but he always was reminded by the solemn vows they took in front of God and every member of the community to protect and sustain his marriage through thick and thin, for better and for worse.  He knew he wasn’t ready to pay any alimony to a promiscuous ex-wife who would not admit her infidelity, and he had no intentions of paying child support all his life.

He wanted to go home. Home, where he was raised, home, where Mama was, although he knew he would never live there again. There was too much poverty and ignorance. And it was intolerable the way everybody in the community was ignorant and poor, the dilapidated houses, the high infant mortality rate, the hopelessly unemployed, the unwed mothers and the unfed babies. This was what became so intolerable to the extent that he fled from the area like thousands of others and migrated in search of greener pastures, just to ease the pain of poverty.

 He knew he had endured this too far and there was Jane, her personal secretary at the office who won’t let him be. Jane who flirted with him at every instance because she considered him a fine gentleman who had a promising future and a potential lover.  She was ready to do anything to get his attention and was still at it.

 “I, I want a woman like me,” he managed to say.

 ”Like you?”

 ”Yes, like me.”

 “A woman who has same interests, a woman who sees the world through my lenses, someone who will be there for me.”

“And you haven’t found any yet?” she asked.

He thought Jane was the right person for him now, they both had same interests, advocated for people who had nobody to help them out, were always together and liked so many things except their orientation on sex, to which he was ready to indulge in now. He then realized he had loved her from afar all the while, where he always got to play safe but never really enjoyed the show. So many things made sense to him as he also resolved not to judge the motive of people for doing what they do because they might have a reason for doing them. He also realized that the love that one sought across the breadth and length of the world was usually just around, all the time.

 “You,” he answered, this time convincingly soon after the repeated question jostled him back to life, to the shock of all of them.

“You are the one I love, I’ll be filing a divorce tomorrow,” he said with a wry smile.

“Thanks for making up your mind about me,” she said with all the charm she has ever mustered in life and she became more beautiful than he had ever seen.

They ate quickly, settled their bills, held hands and sauntered out of the place into his car. Inside their car, they realized they were the only people left at the premise as the parking lot was deserted.

The neon lights that displayed “ORION’, the name of the restaurant, went off when he powered on the engine and took off slowly into the night.