Pillow Talk

Things eased up at work. It's amazing how things change when you guess right. Grudgingly, the night supervisor, in morning report, Liz, reads my patient's summary and then adds..."and she's surprising us all by getting better..." significant look in my direction. Then, Barbara, later in the day coming into my room, grunts, "color's better. Maybe there's hope after all."
I look into my patient's eyes, boy is she ever there. I want to say, "please keep healing."
So 5 days all in all. I was bananas the night after. I felt that my personality had been scourged, gouged out with a burnt stick. Hypersensitive. Went over to Jay's that night, parked the car in the barn and trudged over the soggy path in the rain to the door. Felt like Wee Willy Winky. Jay was lying and probably lie-ing haha on the couch, reading. I knocked.
"Come in."
No. After 5 14 hour days changing dressings on a patient every hour, I request all lovers to get off the couch, come to the door and take me into their arms upon arrival.
Then, in bed at midnight, Jay cuddles next to me naked and says, "is it all right if we just cuddle and listen to the rain tonight?"
So--5 days of no food and cafe con leche and being locked one on one with my poor patient, and facing 11 days without him--and he's bought new sheets and fixed up the boathouse. And now he doesn't want to make love.
I'm not too rational at this point. Who are the sheets for? I think. The other Halie? The one he sent the poetry book to? Is he saving his sperm for her? Will they eat plums and roll around on the new 300 count cotton sheets in the boathouse and read post-coital poetry to each other while I'm gone? While I'm in Ohio, schlepping along with my elderly parents and sullen teenagers to fudge shops--oh excuse me, shoppes and japanese steakhouses? Then I think--this is terrible. I can't say anything to him about this, because if he is planning to cheat on me, I'll lose the advantage of being virtuous and wronged when we do break up (always worth points and desperate pleas for reconcilation on the part of the betrayer--so satisfying). I'll come off being paranoid and strident and then he'll feel justified in cheating on me. If he isn't attracted to me for some reason--if I've said the wrong thing or maybe just somehow conveyed the fat clammy despair I'm feeling in general to him--discussing it will just make it worse. Attraction is never increased by discussion. Talk is the enemy to all sexual attraction. But if we don't make love, then that means we will go almost 2 weeks without making love and that will be awful--that means he's trying to erase me from his memory to give himself permission to cheat...and so on and so on...
and so what? so what if the lying fuckhead dumps me and rejects me sexually? Big fucking deal.
"Are you okay?" he asks, in the dark.
"yeah," I say, deciding to go with honesty, "only I guess I wish you hadn't made this big deal about getting naked, because now I feel sort of rejected."
"I'm just really tired. Aren't you tired?"
Yes, actually, I'm exhausted. On almost every level. It's midnight, and I've been up since 4 am. In fact, I was going to suggest cuddling, but hadn't because of leaving town, etc. I'm just mad that he did it first.
"I'm tired. But is everything okay? I mean--not getting up to let me in, new sheets we haven't used, the boathouse all fixed up--but us not sleeping in it--is anything up?"
As we say in nursing narratives: "reassurances given."
But who knows? Trust is hard to reestablish.
Well, three years. Not too many messy conversations in the dark, so one every once in awhile is probably survivable. We kept talking, then we made love.
That's my 1/2 hour