Okay, now for the realstory of my life.
I was born to a branch of the Rockefeller family and filthy rich from the get-go.
He stops, appalled by the flippant nature of the words against the truly serious intent. He backspaces to erase the sentence. This may be fun, but it’s deadly serious fun, if there is such a thing.
So, how do I want to have it start? How do I want to begin my ideal life?
Strange, he thinks. It should be so easy to figure out.
Chapter 32
Air Force wives learn early that family dinners are uncertain events. Especially when the husband is a four-star general. Such men are married to the Air Force first, leaving the wives to feel at times like little more than mistresses with commissary privileges.
Bitsy Risen checks her watch, aware she’s been glued to the television all day—though her slight rebellion against complete submersion has been the piano sonatas playing gently in the background as closed captions march across the top of the silenced flat screen TV. Kip Dawson’s amazing saga continues to scroll haltingly across the bottom.
“It’s like the ultimate reality show and soap opera rolled into one,” she’s telling friends—including the equally solitary wife of the NORAD vice commander who also expects to see nothing of her own husband until very, very late. They both know that a series of space launches are about to start “…popping off the planet like fleas off a dying dog,” as Chris Risen said at five in the morning when he rolled out to find the shower. Bitsy knows the routine. When things start happening in space, NORAD wives open wine, turn on stereos, call their girlfriends, and mostly chill.
But the experience of reading the Book of Kip,as one of her friends refers to it, has been disturbing, and she thinks any wife would feel about the same. She sees Kip’s words about wifely support and intimacy and sex, and she’s surprised that it’s prompting her to suddenly reassess her own, well, performance. It’s the only word she can use within the context of Kip Dawson’s laments—not that such worries really apply to her. She and Chris are still in love with each other, and when it comes to libido, they’ve always chased each other into the bedroom at the drop of a suggestive comment. Still do. So no problem there, right? At least none that she can sense.
Bitsy hopes there’s nothing she’s missing—no blind, unwarranted, dangerous assumptions she might be making.
Chris is satisfied, isn’t he? As satisfied as I am?
She’s kept herself trim and feminine and completely supportive of him in what they, as a team, both chose. But the whole subject is unsettling, as if she might suddenly discover that this marital bliss isn’t real life, but a play in which she’s become too immersed—an illusion that can evaporate as rapidly as a play reaches its finale.
Men like Chris canbe seduced by illusions, too, she thinks. Like any pilot who bruises himself hauling on the controls trying to “save” a flight simulator that’s actually bolted to a concrete floor.
But, she hopes what theyhave is anything but an illusion.
This has got to be deeply rattling a lot of women out there,she thinks, especially those who’ve become lazy and forgotten to be lovers.At the same time, she knows that the male mid-life explosion often has nothing to do with intimacy or frequency.
Sometimes it just happens.
Thank God, Chris and I escaped,she muses, already aware how rare it is to grow together instead of apart over the years. So many of their friends have long since split, leaving kids shuttling endlessly between cities and houses and sets of parents and stepparents. Not to mention the anger and divided retirement funds and the names of former spouses who can no longer be mentioned without pain.
The words begin scrolling across the bottom of the screen again after a pause. He’s been working on the rewrite of his life and the thoughts and ideas and dreams are fascinating. In some ways it’s been like getting a private, completely unauthorized look at the top-secret workings of the male mind.
And some of the things he’s related—some of the things he’s been through and felt—have brought her to tears.
The phone rings with Suzie, the vice commander’s wife, on the other end. They’ve been talking on and off all afternoon. Bitsy takes the portable back to the couch.
“Did you see that montage Fox News did?” Suzie is asking, still amazed at the depth of the reactions through dozens of interviews.
“No. Tell me.”
“I didn’t know they had that many correspondents. They’re flipping all around the country. For instance, there was this little beauty shop somewhere in Iowa, crammed with women who’re holding kind of a vigil with the TV and hanging on to every word he writes. I swear some of those gals were sounding like rock groupies. It was strange.”
“I’m not surprised,” Bitsy replies. “Some of what he’s said… you just want to hold the poor guy and tell him it’s okay, you know?”
“Mother him, in other words?”
“Right. Don’t you?”
“Okay, I’ll admit it. But some of the women they’ve been talking to are thinking less of giving comfort than of getting him under one. But I don’t know, I think it’s whathe’s saying that’s sexy. The guy is intelligent, and remember, there’s nothing as sexy as a well-hung mind.”
“Who said that?”
“I did. Seriously, I’ll have to Google it.”
“Well, sexy or not, the reactions of everyone out there are just amazing,” Bitsy adds, still reading the evolving words. “What he’s saying now is really thought provoking. I’m sitting here wondering about a lot of the subjects he’s raised, not just how I would feel up there in his place.”
“The most touching thing to me are all those people who’re crowding airports and bus stations right now to race across the country and see parents or kids they haven’t talked to in years, and every one they’ve interviewed says the same thing: I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for reading what that poor guy wrote, and realizing how little time there is in this life.”
“Do they say which part, exactly, touched them the most?”
“Just the whole thing, and the anguish when he wrote about his son, I think.”
“He’s broken some sort of mass psychological dam, that’s for sure,” Bitsy says.
“You know, he wrote earlier about a dangerous intersection near his home in Tucson. For six years, he said, he couldn’t get anyone in city government to pay attention to the need for a traffic light there, and three people died. Now, suddenly, because he wrote it up there and half the world read it, the Tucson City Council is debating the issue as we speak.”
“I hadn’t heard that. But yesterday he wrote about how much he loved Banff and Lake Louise in Canada, and almost instantly they sold out for the summer.”
“You reading him right now?”
“About how he’s become a well-known artist, with four kids and a beautiful, Brazilian wife?”
“Yes. His rewritten life. He wants four kids and he already hasfour kids.”
“And the house in Tucson? He’s put himself right back there, only this time it’s a vacation residence. And the father he was going to fire and recreate? Still works for mining interests in Arizona, only now he always tells Kip he loves him.”
“You know what impressed me? The guy thinks he’s not brave. You probably read that part where he said he was far too timid to do anything bold. But he isbrave. Look how much courage it took to delete everything he’d written for two days. He was really deleting his old life and moving on. How many of us could do that, even in writing?”