But nature has a way of taking its course.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Gertrud noticed me noticing her, likely in ways no other man had. I could sense she felt my eyes grazing her chest whenever she’d lower down to pick up something and that she knew I was watching her from behind, especially when she wore her tighter fitting pants.
I must have also talked to her and smiled at her in a way no other man had. I could see her blush, her face red as a tomato when I’d crack a joke and her pupils dilating when we’d lock eyes.
Finally, after a couple weeks of buildup, flirting, and eye tennis, on a sunny, crisp fall morning, while we were bringing in bags of seed to the shed, I lost control. I closed the shed door behind us, propped a bag against the door to seal it, and I sauntered up to her, lowered my face to hers and kissed her softly on the lips.
She stepped back in shock, staring at me in amazement and confusion. Her eyes bulging big as two blue moons.
This wasn’t how she imagined her first kiss to be, I bet. Her first kiss happening with a married man, an American, a Jew, in a storage shed. But her shock suddenly dissipated and gave way to carnal instinct and she stepped forward and kissed me back, not really knowing how, but doing so anyway.
It was all a blur from the moment we locked lips. Her body went limp, was like putty in my hands. She didn’t protest as I unsealed our lips and propped her up on a table, pulled down her pants and mine, and, impulsively, in a reckless fit of lust, breathing heavily, sucking wind through my teeth, I started having sex with her.
I didn’t put a condom on and kept thinking I should put one on or that she’d stop me, because it was so wrong on so many levels what we were doing, but she didn’t stop me and had her soft arms wrapped around me, hugging me like a teddy bear.
I guess it was that she didn’t want to stop me. Maybe she wanted to get pregnant, have my baby, because then I’d have to leave my wife and be with her.
We hugged and kissed for a few minutes after we finished. I’d have pictured it could be weird after what we’d done; perhaps there’d be guilt. But there was none. Sure, we were adulterers. Sure, we’d sinned. But it just wasn’t feeling that way.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent After we lifted our pants, buckled our belts, we chatted and she told me that she’d been imagining our wedding. That she’d wanted me to leave my wife. That she wanted to be with me. She was moving fast, wasting no time. Though I told her we should take things one step at a time, and she reluctantly agreed, and I could sense a dash of disappointment in how her jaw quivered and how hesitantly she nodded her head as I told her this...
We kept up the same routine nearly every day at work, for the next couple weeks, together in the shed, every time without a condom, but I’d always pull out…
We were in love. We started planning when and how we’d come out about our affair, me getting a divorce and then marrying her.
Everything was falling into place. Until that day. That overcast late fall afternoon when the whole village heard a gunshot, then another. Two loud claps.
I was at my wife’s family’s plant nursery and walked briskly into the sound’s direction. It’d come from Gertrud’s house. Approaching the house, the wooden brown house with the triangle roof, the house that looked made of gingerbread, I saw a few of the farm’s workers running in and out of the front door, frantically, some crying, all with twisted faces, expressions of horror.
One of the older Slovenian workers wiped tears from his leathery face and held me back from entering the front door. He tried to block me, but I could see into the living room, where, in a pool of blood, Gertrud’s mother lay in a heap, in a pose of shock and death, frozen stiff to the floor.
Gertrud’s grandfather, the jovial old man, the beer-sipping Santa Claus, sat on the couch, with a hunting rifle in his mouth and the back of his head missing.
The police arrived soon after, with their wailing sirens echoing off the trees, their sirens sounding like angry animals. It came out soon after, first through the gossip grapevine, then the local news, that Gertrud’s mother had been having an affair with a farm worker, a strapping young Slovenian lad several years her junior, and Gertrud’s grandfather, her mother’s father, had discovered the affair and killed her and then himself.
It sent barbs of fear down my spine, knowing that Gertrud and I had been in a similar arrangement. It could have been Gertrud who was shot, or me, I thought,
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent narcissistically, and selfishly, at first, perhaps out of a primal instinct for self-preservation and protection of my Gertrud.
But those initial thoughts were deracinated by empathy for Gertrud, her father, her sister, her relatives, who were such kind people. It was truly a tragedy, and in an area that hadn’t seen a murder in over a decade, it was overwhelming for everyone in the village.
And being a small village, everyone knew what happened. Afterwards, most of the townspeople stopped talking to Gertrud and her family, stopped going by her house for dinners. Not necessarily out of callousness. But more because they simply didn’t know what to say. At the grocery store or passing by on the street, they’d nod awkwardly, and always with shifty eyes or patronizing looks of pity.
It was as if a fog, or black cloud of death hung over them. As if the death was a contagious virus no one wanted to catch. It reminded me of my father’s cancer and how everyone abandoned my mom and me and how hurtful it was, the double whammy, first the grief of the loss, then the loss of normalcy and friendships.
Gertrud never talked about it extensively with her father or other relatives; being Austrian, they weren’t very expressive people; they were not folks who’d talk much about their feelings. But her circle of friends was there for her, and so was I, though I saw less of her, due to her father scaling back the farm’s operations.
Following what happened, her father decided not to raise and slaughter pigs anymore, which’d been the farm’s main purpose. Instead he planned to turn the farm into more of a garden center, growing and selling plants, seeds, and crops, working in tandem with my wife’s family.
Gertrud was grief-stricken, out of sorts, obviously, and I was seeing less of her, since we weren’t working together as much, and, to this day, I’m haunted by what happened next, since I want to believe I could have stopped it. I want to believe that. I really do.
She’d been prescribed a set of medications to help her deal with anxiety and night terrors in the weeks following the murder/suicide. It was never clear if it was intentional, though it seemed so, and she overdosed on a mix of alcohol, valium and sleeping pills, and died in her sleep.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent It was such a gut punch, losing her, and was even worse to discover she’d been pregnant, with my child. She’d not told me she’d missed her period, and I’d been pulling out, but it’d still happened. And now she, along with my second child, were gone.
And her father, how much grief could the man take? It was miraculous how stoic he remained through the whole thing. Gertrud had told me of how rough her family had it in the years following WW2, how they’d literally not had money, not simply been broke, but had no money at all, not a cent, and ate only what they farmed, ate pig fat, pig noses and ears and tongues and grass, weeds, and tree bark.
It occurred to me that having grown up so destitute must have steeled his resolve. I never saw him crack. He looked eternally shell-shocked, upset, but he was still up at the crack of dawn every morning, working, keeping on. Though he had that contagious fog of death, even more so after Gertrud died, and I was one of the few people who still visited and talked with him.
Unlike before, however, when he’d greet me at his door with beer or schnapps, smiling and joking and talking of old John Wayne movies, old Western films that he loved and asking me a million questions about America (I was a de-facto US
ambassador to the village). Instead of being jovial, he was dour, quiet. When I’d go by there, he’d drink beer silently, and would blankly stare at the TV, usually sports, usually skiing, which he’d vacantly watch like a zombie.
I felt like a zombie too. It didn’t seem real, that Gertrud was dead. It was like she was gone, on a trip, and that she’d be back soon. That we’d be together again.
I’d sip mint tea, in front of the fireplace, in the evening, and occasionally I’d glance out at the orange sunset that cast a halo-like glow over the jagged, snow-capped mountains in the distance. I’d think of Gertrud and me, stealing off, in the small hours of morning, running away together. I thought of her coming back.
That it was all a mistake, her death. That she’d be released from the hospital and be back smiling and feeding the pigs and planting flowers, asking me endless questions and cracking jokes.
But she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t be back. Now, she and my unborn baby were being eaten by the flowers. They were with the flowers. They were the flowers.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent 50
The trauma didn’t end there. More peripety was to follow.
In addition to my grief, I was feeling like a piece of shit, for cheating on my wife. I can’t imagine she’d cheated on me. She never seemed like the type, but, in all honesty, I didn’t really know her. That’s right. I’d didn’t really know the person I’d married.
We’d rushed in. We’d eloped. In Miami, she was this laidback, fun person, with a wonderful sense of humor, and the cutest smile and prettiest brown eyes I’d ever seen. She was tall and model slim. Looked like a model.
There were beautiful women everywhere in Austria and Europe. In fact, modeling agencies would come out there and just set up a booth on the street, recruiting prospective models, literally just pointing at passersby or having pretty young things walk up to them. My wife herself had done some modeling. With her slim features, high cheekbones and thin long narrow nose, she was exactly what you’d expect to see in a makeup ad.
But like many models, she had struggled with an eating disorder. In her case it was anorexia. I had no idea about it, thought she was naturally thin, and she’d never had any problems eating back in South Beach.
However, in Austria, as I mentioned before, her closet jampacked with skeletons kicked open its doors, and the skeletons, her ghosts took possession of her, and tore her away from me.
It might sound like hyperbole. But it’s true. She was as if overtaken, possessed by malevolent forces, became a different being, a new person.
She started to refuse to eat. Shed numerous pounds off her already thin frame, started to look frail, bony. Her face sunk in. She’d wear these striped pajamas at night and would, seriously, look like something in a concentration camp. Given Austria’s history, and my being Jewish, it disturbed me in several ways, seeing her in those pajamas.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Not only were her looks starting to go, but she began to smell. This awful, sour smell, like milk that’d turned. This sour stench emitted from her, especially in the bed. It was because she’d been starving herself, and so her body was eating itself, in an attempt at nourishment, causing this wretched stink.
She’d fly off the handle, too, accuse me of trying to kill her if I didn’t want to eat something, storming off. She’d been working in a hotel, part-time, and had gotten fired because guests were complaining about how she looked, that she was so skinny. It was scaring people.
At first, I couldn’t understand what was with her, why she was being like this. I didn’t know anything about anorexia. Though I did know of bulimia, as a teacher I’d had in high school, as well as a girl I’d gone to high school with had had bulimia and that was why their teeth were slightly rotted and crooked. But anorexia, I’d only heard topical things about, and I knew of its existence, but it was hard for me to know it was happening to her.
I think also, too, I was in denial. I didn’t want to believe there was a problem. Or subconsciously I wanted the demons to leave her body so much that I thought they would. I somehow thought that it was a temporary condition, like a cold, and that it would resolve itself. I remember, later, looking at pictures of her from this period and thinking of how frail and skeletal she appeared.
But I never saw her like that, with my eyes. I’ve heard it said that the camera adds pounds, and in this case, it was my mind’s camera, my skewed perception, my own eyes that were adding pounds. My eyes were lying to me.
Finally, I confronted her, and grimly, like a witness in the courtroom, she spilled her skeletons. Confessed she’d had this problem for years. That in South Beach, she was in remission, but when we got to Austria it boomeranged back.
Worse though, was that she confessed she was in a secret eating contest with everyone else. That she challenged herself to eat less than everyone. Including me. Since we’d gotten to Austria, she’d taken over the majority of the cooking, as this is usually the custom there, that the woman does the cooking (my FIL and BIL
had thought it strange that I’d cooked some of our dinners).
I’d noticed her making larger and larger portions. Very fattening food, too. Lots of cheeses and sausages. Cakes. Not that I can complain too much. Her cooking was
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent excellent, if not extravagant, but I was seeing her serving me increasingly gluttonous sizes of food, taking less and less for herself, and her becoming enraged if I didn’t clean my plate.
Needless to say, I ballooned in weight, going from 160 to 200 in only a few months. My six-pack replaced with a Buddha belly and bitch tits…
Not that I can totally blame her, because I certainly had a part in it, but once she confessed that she was in an eating contest with me, I knew what was going on.
Like in the Hansel and Gretel story, I was being fattened up.
Not to be eaten, though, by a witch, although with how erratic she was becoming, her eventually cannibalizing me seemed like a possibility, but it was that she was mentally cannibalizing me, was deliberately trying to make me fat, make me eat heaps of food, so she could feel better about herself. And she wasn’t doing this only to me. She was constantly cooking, preparing these massive plates of sausages, cheese dishes, and heavy cream-laden desserts, huge and piling high cakes, and bringing them around to everyone in the neighborhood, feeding everyone, while she starved, wasted away, shrunk to bone.
It was horrific. Seeing that happen to her.
But it got worse when I caught her cutting herself.
I’d come back from working with Gertrud’s dad and stumbled upon her in our bed, with a steak knife, slowly tracing it on her upper thigh.
Blood trickling, I ran towards her, pried away and seized the knife. She offered no resistance.
I’ll never forget the look on her face. It was so blank. So empty. So numb. Her eyes, once so warm, were cold, haggard, empty.
She was listening to “Scar Tissue” by RHCP, a record she listened to over and over, and a record that to this day haunts me of her.
I’d noticed before that there were a few scars on her upper thighs. They looked like tracts left on fresh ice by skates. But I never asked about it. I’d thought that since she’d done gardening work, maybe they’d come from accidents involving gardening. It seemed plausible. I’d always thought of people who cut themselves
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent to be raving lunatics or something. She’d seemed to be far too well-adjusted and sane to do such a malicious act of self-harm.
Again, I didn’t know the person I married. I was young. I had rushed in. And I guess these aren’t standard questions a person would ask a prospective spouse, if they were anorexic, if they cut themselves, et cetera.
More skeletons had danced from the closet. Introduced themselves. They never had left, I surmise, and had been orbiting her, away for a time, and had now returned and crashed into my life, like mental satellites, mental space debris falling from the sky.
Seeing her bleed like that, seeing her use her body as a voodoo doll, was an image I wish I could forget, repress into amnesia. But I can’t.
Staring at the wall like it was on fire, unable to lift her vacant eyes from it, she told me she cut because it felt good. It felt so good, she said, almost like an orgasm. She said it reminded her she was alive when she’d feel dead inside, which she often did.
The first time she’d cut herself, she went on, was after she was sexually assaulted as a child, by a door-to-door salesman, who attacked her when she was home alone. Afterwards, once he’d left, after he’d pressed a blade to her throat, threatened to kill her if she told anyone, she herself grabbed a blade, from the kitchen, and said she planned to slit her wrists, but was too much of a coward (her words) and instead cut her leg and had since continued the practice. But then, when I’d just caught her, was the first time she’d done it in ages.
So, obviously, this was hard to take, a tough pill to swallow. Not that it excuses cheating on her. Not that I’m the victim. Everyone has their demons.
I’d spoken to a couple old friends, relatives, and they’d told me to leave her. That she was too much of a train wreck to be with, that she couldn’t be in a relationship with anyone until she sorted out her deep depression, self-harm and eating disorder issues.
However, even though I was an asshole who’d slipped and had cheated and impregnated his neighbor, and even though I was beginning to have worsening desires- running, burning, carnal thoughts of my SIL- seeing her prance around in
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent her bikini, and how she was flirting with me more and more, her smiling, giggling and playing with her hair, her touching my arm and shoulder a little too much, dammit, still, I’d signed up for better or worse. This was worse. I’d already betrayed her, but I wasn’t going to leave her.
(All the while, though, as she was becoming more erratic, emaciated, I was having more vivid night terrors, visions of seeing my wife, naked, her bony skeleton body. My wife slashing herself bloody, slashing her wrists and drowning herself in a bathtub full of dark red blood.)
((There were nightmares I’d had of Gertrud too, holding and rocking our giggling baby, us happy before her grandfather, missing half of his face, burst into the room, with his hunting rifle, and shot us dead. Another nightmare I’d had was a recurring vision of a red-haired little girl in a concentration camp, smiling and waving at me, alongside her mother and grandparents, as they stood in line for the gas chamber’s showers... Every night was another awful dream. I can’t say what was worse at this point, my dreams or my reality… For the first time ever, I began to seriously hate sleep, and was thinking there were angry spirits of murdered Jews living in the forests nearby, sucking and drinking my sleep like vindictive vampires…))