Elly's Diary July 15, 2016

Dear Diary,

It’s been 3 months since I last wrote you and a lot has happened.  I think people have figured out that I have been seeing my boyfriend P.  I don’t know if John has figured it out yet, but Elizabeth does.  She saw pictures on the computer web of me sitting in P’s lap.  Well, it was me sitting on the same chair as P with me between his legs.  It’s not the sort of thing a lady lets people take pictures of, but P and I were pretty drunk at the time.  I thought Elizabeth would be pretty mad at her old mom for cheating, but she said she understands that sometimes the man you marry is not the one you want to be with. 

P and I were in Memphis seeing some friends of his who are jazz musicians, Luna and Reb.  I think that’s where the picture was taken.  The man Reb looked like a homeless fellow I see sometimes when I go to the wrong parts of Milborough.  The girl Luna was a lot younger and prettier and right away I started to feel old and 10 pounds overweight when I was with her.  Fortunately, she has the singing voice of a drunken sailor who just finishing swallowing a box of razor blades after gargling with acid.  P went on and on about how great a musician she was, but I kept thinking that I would rather listen to a dog howl in pain for 2 hours than listen to this woman again.  But because P liked her, I had to say she was great.

Then we went to Graceland.  P loves Elvis, the most overrated singer of all time.  I was never an Elvis fan, but after this experience, I feel lucky to have been around when he was alive and well, and performing at his best or I would have not understood a thing about Graceland.  But even at his best, Elvis was not worthy of wiping the gum off Bobby Curtola’s boots.  As we went through Graceland, P was all “look at this” and “look at that” and I just thought Elvis’ place was large, gaudy, and overdone.  If I were super rich and snobby, I might think it was a lovely family home with enough space for company and some recreation.   But because P liked Graceland, I had to say it was great.

You see the Graceland is accessible but Elvis is not, and there’s a performance really that comes out in the old records.  You have an opportunity to go on to Graceland for example and people who come really they just want to say, “Hello,” to Elvis because they see every day a little bit of themselves in Elvis, because we are all the same, you know, We care about our friends, and our families, and our health, and our futures, and our homes, and we all have these small intimate things that we laugh about and we wonder, “Does anybody else share my feelings about first thing in the morning, or you know, I’d like to drop this baby off a cliff right down?” and they gathered and just to say, “Hello, we connect. We’re really a part of you.” Of course, when I say that to Elizabeth, she usually says, “Mom.  You are never going to take my kids out by yourself, especially not near cliffs.”  Good thing she wasn’t at Graceland with me because after several hours of Elvis, I was ready to drop babies.

The sex with P is still great, but I wondered if he was thinking about Luna was he was with me.  We ask each other all the time, “Where do you get your ideas for sex?” I mean and we love to watch each other naked because it’s like a signature. You know you draw your signature a thousand times but somebody else would have a real rough time copying your signature. So we like to watch each other while we are having sex because it’s always magic. You say, “Where do the ideas come from for sex?” You really don’t know. But you get into a zone. It’s sort of like, if you imagined your neighbor goes out of town or you go out of town or you really don’t like your neighbor very much and you’re always concerned about the relationship with your neighbor, when you come back from being out of town they’ve built a fence on your side of the property and they’ve got a mean dog and they’ve moved in some buddies. And now you’ve got to deal with a situation where you know, somebody could sue somebody and there could be some fighting and don’t you lie away at night thinking all night long about how am I going to approach him and what would I say and if I said this, he would say that, and then I know that guy that he’s hired and that guy might have to deal with my lawyer and don’t you work out conversations? P says that kind of talk turns him off. 

I’ll try again for him.  So, let’s say you’re in love with somebody and you would really like to spend locked in a car for a night with that person. Don’t you think and then they would say and then I would say and then they would say and then I would say. It’s that imagined conversation that goes back and forth and then you find sometimes you want to have sex in a locked car.  P and I are very strange people. We live in a fantasy world and a real one, but we can control the fantasy world. We get really upset when we can’t control the real one.  I wish John would just divorce me so I could be with P all the time.  I hate having to make up excuses for why I had to go to Memphis.

I still don’t feel guilty about John.  I know he was cheating with that hygienist he hired years ago, but he would never admit it.  He even says I was the one who hired the hygienist because I hired everyone who worked for him, but why would I hire a woman to cheat on with my husband?  That makes no sense.  When I think about John I have a dream that I am on my hands and knees and I am raising my hands in joy that I am freed from the chains that had bound my hands together, because John had chopped off my hands. The chains were down but my hands were just stumps. So the John had cut off my hands and freed me but I am still a victim and I am still a prisoner shackled to John.  Why did I marry him?  P is so much better.

Elly