kittyanne68

ahh, my maiden voyage.
this would be the first portion of a larger piece, probably novella-ish. my main goal was to introduce the characters and their relationship since the entire piece centers around it. hopefully, it's going to be a bizarre and entirely unique take on a midlife crisis upon completion. don't be gentle--i have teflon skin. it's difficult to hurt my feeling.


Benjamin Hartman glanced at his watch and realized it was after dark. He sat behind the wheel of his Lexus sedan in the middle of the driveway that looped between the expansive front lawn and flagstone facade of the stately home in the affluent Pittsburgh neighborhood of Shadyside he shared with his wife, Maggie. He did not feel particularly blessed while idling in his forty thousand dollar luxury car in front of his three million dollar home situated on three acres of prime commercially zoned real estate. His mind whirled over thousands of random thoughts and musings. He could not gather the energy to exit the car and enter the house. He was thinking about his life while drumming long, delicate fingers fretfully on the steering wheel in tune to a jazz concoction NPR assaulted the airwaves with, watching thick tufts of snow dance in brilliant halogens, remembering when Maggie still launched herself at him, wrapping long, muscular legs around his waist and strong arms around his neck--prior to the pounds he had packed on since his forty-fifth birthday and a herniated disc in his back. He felt the urge to climb out of the car and jump up and down screaming but feared a broken hip he would never be able to properly explain to his wife.

Maggie was asleep—or pretending to sleep--in the four-poster bed when Ben stopped in the doorway of the bedroom to look at her. Her back was to him, the flannel sheet thrown haphazardly over the curves of her naked body. Maggie never sat or laid her body down as much as she sprawled into a given area, taking up as much space as her body could without the dislocation of muscles and it was a quality other people found inconsiderate but he found endearing. She resembled the cover of a noir paperback, the victimized woman stretched lifeless across a seedy motel bed. Moonlight streamed through the large arched windows across the room and bathed the skin of her exposed arm and lower leg in eerie light, dark tendrils tattooed across her flesh like deep wounds by the branches of a chestnut tree in the front of the house. He thought absurdly of the fairy tales his mother had read to him when he was a child.

He stood for moments in the doorway watching her sleep--or perhaps she was pretending to—lost in thoughts that made him feel as if he were sliding down a muddy hill toward a cliff grabbing at shallow-rooted blades of grass, incapable of helping himself or accepting aid from anyone witnessing his dilemma. It occurred to him that he was possibly losing his hair and he wondered if Maggie had noticed.

Ben sat softly on his side of the bed, loosened his tie and removed Italian leather shoes from tired feet. He unbuttoned his pale blue and white dress shirt and threw it casually onto the chair near the bed, pulled off his tailored pants and tossed them on top of the shirt. He looked down at his expanding gut visible in the space between the stretching elastic of his plaid boxer shorts and white t-shirt. It took a few moments to convince himself that Maggie washed all of their clothes in hot water.

Ben reached across the bed and his hand stopped in the empty air above the exposed skin of Maggie’s shoulder, hanging like a leaf caught in a crosswind, trembling, afraid to touch down. She said, “What are you doing?” and her voice was amused. “Are you trying to kill me in my sleep?” He wondered how long she had been awake.

Maggie sat up and rearranged fluffy pillows to lean against, pulled her legs up to her chest and wrapped her long arms around them, holding herself in a perched fetal position that Ben could never comprehend the comfort of. Her long dark hair was messed perfectly from sleep, tucked behind her ears and parted haphazardly down the middle. Though she had turned thirty-five the previous summer, she never looked a day over twenty-five and he wondered about the last time she had experienced any difficulties getting into her clothes.

Maggie’s dark eyes searched his in the dim light of the cavernous room and she regarded him like a fascinating creature recently discovered in the back garden and placed in a jar with a twig and some blades of grass for examination. He envisioned her for a horrifying moment with a scalpel in her hand and plastic laboratory goggles on her face. His only consolation was that she still seemed to find him completely and utterly enthralling at times—the ongoing test of a hypothesis she would never divulge to him.

She asked him a question he didn’t hear. She repeated it and he didn’t answer because he didn’t want to talk about his health. He was tired of saying, "I feel fine", while his heart pounded against his chest and a pain crept behind his eyes the moment she asked the question. The. Question. “Honey, how are you feeling?” There she went again and he wanted to scream.

Ben sat back against the pillows on his own side of the bed, Maggie’s shoulder lightly brushing against him. She rested her hand on his leg, her touch assuring him that everything was fine though she didn’t know what was wrong. Telling Maggie about his day relaxed Ben because she listened and laughed or uttered interjections at the appropriate moments, got his mind off of things he didn’t like to think about, read between the lines but rarely commented. She kneaded the muscles at the base of his neck with her hand.

Her firm but gentle manner kept her from being kicked or mauled by the large animals she treated—he knew this though her profession was incomprehensible to an urban animal such as himself--and he attempted to stop the thought before it led to considering himself among the large, burdensome creatures she cared for. Too late and he began to reexamine his stomach beneath the sheets with a tentative hand. She said something kind his ears didn’t register; he imagined her patting his back, stroking his neck and calling him ‘good fella’. Maggie rolled against him and pulled the down comforter she often kicked away in her sleep up around them both, obsessive about keeping him warm.

Maggie had the tendency of force-feeding Ben’s high blood pressure medication to him in the morning as if he would have walked ignorantly past the pharmacy on the kitchen counter and off to work without a second thought were she not there to distribute the numerous and various pills to him; couldn’t help but crack a smile when he thought about her holding his nose with one hand, the other placed firmly across his mouth and alternately rubbing his throat until he swallowed; he’d seen her do it to a one hundred and twenty pound Saint Bernard once and had been reminded of his wife’s wiry strength in a disquieting way.

Ben’s mind replayed the past month: the pills, the sleepless nights, the worried expression etched across her face his wife tried to hide from him. Dr. Peterson’s antiseptic office in Oakland. Stroke. Aneurism. Heart attack. He thought about Maggie’s hand in his, the way it disappeared when he closed his huge mitt around it. He wondered what it felt like to be dying.

Maggie said something about boats and Ben knew that she was talking in her sleep and leaned closer to her, listening for more. She had told him once that he argued in his sleep during important court cases but he had a hard time believing there was ever an instance when he was asleep and she was awake. It occurred to him that she had no reason to lie about it.

Maggie shifted against him, her arm creeping across his stomach, stopping just below his navel out of habit and he wanted to scream at his dormant penis to ‘Wake up and do something here!’ A muffled groan escaped his mouth rather than the primal cry he was imagining and it rang pathetic in his ears—the fury of a scolded puppy. Even puppies get hard ons, he thought bitterly. Maggie chided him from her own corner of his mind, telling him to go nail himself to a cross. Her practicality was unendurable sometimes. She rolled away to her side of the bed with her back to him. He wondered if she was pretending to sleep.

LiberalDem

Hello there.

Ok, he would've looked outside his window and realized it was 'after dark' and not his watch. I don't like the term 'after dark' anyway. It sounds very childish...like, if you came home 'after dark' you'd get into trouble. At least on my street you would. How about something like, "Benjamin Hartman glanced at his watch and realized it was later than he thought" or something like that?

I liked this line a lot...great way to illustrate his dissatisfaction.

I think this needs to be broken up. Start a new sentence with "It was a quality..."

I liked this a lot, too. Beautiful words.

I wasn't too wild about the description of his thoughts...too wordy, but I loved the sentence about losing his hair. I thought it was completely random, yet such a real musing.

I loved, loved, loved this part.

All in all, I thought it was great. I don't know that I could read an entire novel about this guy's mid-life crisis, but I thought you wrote this very well. You've a great descriptive flare.

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__________________
"I am a work in progress dressed in the fabric of a world unfolding offering me intricate patterns of questions rhythms that never come clean and strengths that you still haven't seen." Ani DiFranco (The Slant)

kittyanne68

thanks for taking the time to read it and comment. you're the first person to ever comment on anything i've written aside from teachers and profs for assignments so this is a pretty cool moment for me.


i agree with the first line. i'm trying for a feel that he's too distracted to actually read the time, just looking out of habit. lot of work to do on that one.

i was back and forth about breaking up the sentence describing her urge to sprawl and have now decided to break it up, so thanks for saving me any more back and forth.

i realize i was a bit too wordy with him, but i want to depict him as the kind of guy who tends to think too much and too randomly. i'm going to go over it again (and again and again and again) to keep cutting and slicing and dicing.

his crisis becomes more humorous and bizarre in the next few sections and you actually touched on something i was worried about--making this intro to them too long and boring that what comes next--the real meat of it--hard to get to.

again, thanks sooo much for your critique.

shabi

Well, LiberalDem did an awesome job already, so I don't have too much to say...
I did find this a little slow, and if this were a really short story I might have given up on it; but as it's longer, as you've said, it's understandable that you need to get out all the character introduction and everything, and I would want to see where you're taking me with this guy.
Again, as was already said, you're amazing with descriptions. They're great, and everything so far looks pretty good--balance of action with description-wise--but be careful not to let it get out of hand. It's easy to overdo things when you're trying to get across something just right.
Anyway, overall, you're fantastic with words. I especially liked the description of Maggie--"never sat or laid her body down as much as she sprawled into a given area, taking up as much space as her body could without the dislocation of muscles "--that made me smile.

kittyanne68

thanks, shabi, for your kind words. i'm glad you stuck with it. i've had these two in my mind for a very long time so i will heed your warning about going over the top with the descriptions. i feel so intimately involved with them at this point that i could let it get quite out of hand if i don't check myself and allow myself to be checked by others. it's so nice to get honest feedback! thanks again.

Stacy

I really enjoyed reading this. The characters are real and likable, and you have some lovely descriptions. I especially like the part where Ben comes home to find the moonlight tattooing his wife's body. That was beautifully described.

The tension in this piece is very compelling. You've portrayed Ben and Maggie's loss of intimacy very well.

Things I liked:
Great character sketch here.

Very original description. I like it.

My only recommendation would be remove certain adjectives like "stately" or "affluent." You've painted a successful word picture here, so the reader already understands that Ben has money, but it isn't making him happy.
It was pretty much just the intro paragraph that I found was troubled by that.

kittyanne68

thanks, stacy. you've pulled from it what i'd hoped to come through. i also agree with you re: the opening paragraph. later descriptions from w/in the house will also add to the knowledge so i did over do it.
thanks for reading and i appreciate your kind remarks!