He kissed her and said, “I’m leaving you.” Those
words shot out of his mouth like sharp bits of glass. They stirred
a tidal wave of red rage which swept over her body and sparked out
of her eyes. He held his breath.
“You bastard, you fucking bastard,” she said. “Twenty
years of you, twenty years of your sniveling infidelities, twenty
years of your thoughtlessness, twenty years of washing your shitty
underpants and you want to end it with a whimper, with an ‘I’m
leaving you.’ Over my dead body, baby. You’re not going
anywhere.”
He backed away from Sandy, who was fingering a crystal ashtray on
the table to her right. He suspected she wanted to use it on him.
“Who have you been sticking that short stubby dick into this
time?”
He looked over the chunky straw blond in the black evening dress.
He hated her. And he remembered when he had come to hate her.
Before the hate burst like a stick of dynamite inside his chest knocking
out his inner moorings, before the tsunami of revulsion rose between
them, there were times of tumbling together in a blur of thrilling
body sensations and emotions. Before the hate, there was the sexual
rapture that went into producing three children.
But then their married life became a series of little murders. And
he remembered the tipping point, the day when ecstasy turned into
angst, love into hate. After ten years and the birth of their third
child, he had gotten caught—a telephone number on a slip of
paper. She forced him to confess that he was having an affair. And
she said almost the same thing then as now, “Who is desperate
enough to want your short stubby dick?”
She mocked him. She mocked his manhood. She kicked him in the groin
emotionally and it sent shock waves into his psyche. The small size
of his penis had been a daily apprehension for him—in high school
locker rooms, on college dates, in front of the occasional whore.
Even through his several affairs, purchased by his position and status,
he never felt quite adequate. But only she brought it to a head. Time
and time again over the second ten years he would look at her face
and hear those words, “short stubby dick.”
And each time, the hate grew, a spore of pain in his chest, gathering
strength and girth in tandem with her gathering weight.
He had seen that the hate was there too, in her eyes. He had sensed
that it was growing. Tonight, he heard it in her voice. Maybe she
was not as aware of her hate as he was of his, but it was undeniably
there. It had exploded violently with her words and splashed its venom
across his face. He could taste it. He had to stop it. There would
have been no escape.
The bloody ashtray fell from his hand.
Ron Pasquariello has authored seven non-fiction books,
over one hundred articles, and has just completed a novel.
