Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale Read Free

more abandoned love, their fingers and mouths still sweet and
sticky with maple syrup.
    Both the men were bareback,
and they were sitting there in the metal lawn chairs sipping from
cans of beer and staring at Alice Ann, and Ralph wondered suddenly
if Alice Ann knew this. Although Alice Ann was but a few feet from
Ralph, he had the weird feeling that he was observing an image of
Alice Ann that had been in some way magnified from far away, as
though he were watching her from the wrong end of a telescope. As
though it was not the real Alice Ann standing there but some sort
of aura of her. The more intently Ralph stared, the more rarefied
with clarity and sharpness her features became, yet always with
that sense of magnified distance. Who is she? Ralph wondered. Who
is she? Ralph had stood there, frozen to the spot, as he wondered
if Alice Ann was posing for those perfect strangers, and the
intense, peculiar desire he felt for her gripped his groin and made
him both giddy and sick to his stomach. It was as though some
beautiful but terrifying image of great portent were being
projected before his eyes, the sort of image a story might turn
upon.
    The one thing Ralph knew for
certain was that, in the story he planned to write, this dramatic,
frozen moment would set the narrative off in a direction full of
utterly unexpected danger and possibly disaster. Yes, Ralph had
thought, the wife in that story would have made juicy abandoned
love the night before with her new husband. And they would have
held one another tenderly while they pledged to preserve forever
the excitement and mystery of their love and marriage. And then
that wife would turn right around and betray that husband in the
story. She might not want to do it, but she would have no choice.
Ralph would bend that wife in the story to his will. He might even
make the wife in the story sleep with both those bareback
strangers, if that would make things more interesting. And maybe
the husband in the story would betray the wife, too, in order to
stir even more trouble into the plot. Even if the husband, too,
didn’t want to do it. He might have to, for the sake of the
story.
     

 
     
    Sperm Count
     
    In college Jim Stark’s first
wife, Judy, a very pretty, perfectly nice, sensible young woman who
everybody declared was a dead ringer for that American television
sweetheart Mary Tyler Moore, had been a cheerleader, vice president
of her sorority, and, in her senior year, Homecoming Queen. Judy
had made good grades as a math major and planned on teaching high
school four years before starting her family of two boys and two
girls, about what her own mother had accomplished, in the baby
department anyway. When her old boyfriend, a handsome,
hell-raising halfback, lost his athletic scholarship due to
academic difficulties and dropped out of college his senior year to
drive a beer truck for his father’s beer-distributing company and
drink beer a lot, Judy studied the Dean’s List late into the night.
Jim Stark was no football star, and he was supposedly something of
a moody James Dean loner type, but she had seen him around campus,
and he was a pretty big guy and dark, her type, and pretty cute in
a hoody, sideburned kind of way; also, he wrote a column for the
college newspaper, and most important, he was on the Dean’s List in
pre-law. There were rumors about Jim Stark, true: that he worked
nights as a bartender-bouncer at that forbidden Big Al’s place
across the river and that as a teenager he had been in some serious
trouble with the law. Somebody even told Judy that this Jim Stark
guy wrote poems, but he sure didn’t look like any fairy to Judy.
And who believes every rumor, anyway?
     
    Judy’s new husband’s law
school idea was a joke, of course, and by default, for lack of
something better to do, besides enter adult life, Jim eventually
earned an M.A. in English literature at West Virginia University,
his thesis a Jungian analysis of the poetry of Matthew