Hay Fever

Sometimes when I am working, as I drive from one sales appointment to another between Salem and Canterbury, I find a place to pull over and jerk off. With the sun hiding behind a big fluffy cloud that reminds me of some obscenely pretty girl's hair from high school. An azure sky, which was the color of the dress she wore to prom, and though we didn't dance, I dreamt of it, and here I am enraptured with the thought of removing it, gently, though it doesn't go anywhere. 

Sometimes it is in the parking lot of an obscure building that was once something that it no longer is. There are no cars around and the doors are shut. There is only darkness in the windows, some of which are shattered or cracked. I think of the people who used to come here when it was a church, or a department store, or whatever it once was. I think of a young woman in a Sunday dress with garter belts that are too tight and that leave a rosy impression upon her pale thighs once removed. I think of a girl who smells of coconut oil and who wears short shorts with no panties. With large black sunglasses chomping bubblegum, fingering herself in the parking lot to some Buddy Holly song with her barefeet on the dashboard of her mother's Chevrolet. Unambiguous, as memory is.

Or maybe it is a field of wildflowers where I park to avoid going back to the office to do paperwork because they laid the girl off who used to do the books. And in my thoughts there is some beautiful woman who seems to form instantly from a potpourri of clouds, flowers, sunlight and the bees that linger there, undisturbed until I pull in and stare at them so long that she comes to be. It is always more than what it is. And there I am, alone, yet straddling this beautiful woman in a field of wildflowers, on the clock, hoping she doesn't go away before I finish. Hoping another car doesn't pull up and take her from me. 

Then, once relieved, I go back to the office and complain about my busy day like everyone else complains of theirs in various states of melancholic dissatisfaction, that fuck rag that I used to wipe away all those fulfilled and unfulfilled dreams buried deep in my pocket along with my secret affair with myself. I used to wonder why men carried handkerchiefs around in the older days. No one needs to blow their nose that damn much. Hay Fever, they once called it. But I know now what Hay Fever is. It is especially bad this time of year in the fertile spring. 

They say my job will be obsolete in a few decades. There will not be salesmen driving here to there and there to here and stopping along the way for sandwiches, or for a fling with a girl they know in some small town. Or for a beer in some lousy bar. Or to pleasure themselves along the thorny road so not to forget they aren't just whatever doohickey they are selling, neatly packaged and stuffed in the trunk of life. Some disposable part, no different from a million others. 

They say all of it will be handled by mail order catalogs and telephone operators who are currently babies and who don't know they will grow up to become telephone operators and order takers who will displace men like me. They say all of this on the radio. It doesn't bother me to be disused.

I started going to the same spot off my usual route more frequently, though well it has been said that variety is the spice of life and well I believe it to be true. It is full of wildflowers and gentle rolling grassy hills that remind me of a buxom lady who is bent over, perpetually taking laundry from a clothes line and placing it gently in a wicker basket like a lady who knows she is being watched. She was the lady across the street when I was a boy, but now she is this field.

Then there was a pretty woman who pulled up beside me suddenly in a dark blue Plymouth. She said she was an artist at the university who liked sketching landscpapes and she offered a sketch pad and a set of pencils on the front seat as proof, though I didn't ask. She acted as though this were my field and she trespassed upon me. Because my pants were down around my ankles and I was exposed and butterflies and bees seemingly embraced me by flying near to my genitals. I couldn't have possibly expected her to suddenly be there, but, nonetheless, there she was.

It was the start of an affair. An every Tuesday thing at noon before I went home to my meatloaf. If one of us couldn't make it, the other would wait for a while then leave, neither dissatisfied nor worried for it was nothing but sexual. I was sure it would make the papers somehow and result in some jealous murder when it was discovered. I never knew her name and she didn't know mine, but I called her Coquette, and she didn't protest. 

The affair lasted well into summer. Everytime afterwards, I gave her that fuckrag to wipe up before she returned to school or wherever it was she returned to and then I interred it, once more, in my pocket. Then, as we parted, she smiled and said "Til Tuesday." 

The entire summer it never rained on Tuesday, which I didn't think as being remarkable at the time because I didn't realize it. Then in August she said she was moving to Michigan. Her uncle died and had a rabbit farm which she was taking over. There wasn't a long farewell. No presents exchanged or a dinner invitation for either of us to akwardly decline. There was simply one final goodbye, which was, by coincedence, the way we said hello.  

I went home to my meatloaf and my wife who was on the couch watching television which glowed with a pompous perfidy, all bloated and fat like an unwelcome relative who thinks too highly of his personality. The green wallpapered walls reminded me of nothing. The glass fruit in the fruit dish mocked me. My wife had some sort of pulse, still, yet I wasn't sure. I barely garnered a hello and it had long since passed that she asked how was your day, sweetheart. Endearing terms, long since extinct. 

There she was smoking, rifling through the pages of an absurd magazine. It wasn't that she was callous at all, or intentional in her boring behavior. It is only that it became a part of her, and at some point she amalgamated all too well with the polyester drapes and the wallpaper and the shag carpet of domestication. She became the glass fruit bowl and the meatloaf and decorative candlestick holders. And maybe I was overreacting but I was desperate to not be so churlish about it for perhaps I was too that way to her. I had become my job. My pipe. My slippers, and my lawnmower. 

I lied in bed and read a book, far from her blaring TV. When she came to bed, a drink jingling in her hand, per usual, she said she had noticed my handkerchief was particularly saturated when she emptied my pockets to do the laundry. For a moment, I panicked, fearing I had been figured out, my affair exposed. I was usually much more careful with my fuckrag than to leave it in my pocket. There was typically a ceremony of me washing it out and hanging it to dry. 

"You want me to call the doctor and get you in about your Hay Fever, Jim?" she asked sympathetically. "Honey?" A rare term of endearment wasted, as I played opossum, pretending I was asleep.  

She finished her drink, had another cigarette, grumbled about something or other, put the empty glass on the night stand, and went to sleep. Then, as the ice collapsed and dissolved in her glass, I dreamt of a rabbit farm in Michigan.