Chapter One

The Girl

We got rained out in the Virgin Islands, so my parents decided we’d move our vacation onto good old U.S. soil. An island hopper twin turbo prop took us to West Palm Beach, Florida.

It was the kind of spur of the moment vacation that my Dad would surprise Mom and me with in the middle of New Jersey winters, “Hey, what do you say we all get out of here and go where the sun is?”

Moments later, a quick hop from WPB airport, we were already crossing Okeechobee Blvd bridge, and onto what was arguably the most posh strip of land in America, Palm Beach. The taxi crossed the Intra-coastal, as we cruised east on Royal Poinciana Way, its center strip lined with Royal Palm trees.  The center Bermuda grass median was a carpet runner past Testa’s restaurant, then down A1A until we turned into The Breakers. From the long gravel drive, she was an impressive sight; Henry Flagler’s masterpiece turn of the century Grand Hotel. Two towers capped the roofline of the Beaux Arts style castle reminiscent of New York’s Sherry Netherland and the Waldorf Astoria sitting on sand.

My parents would mingle with the Palm Beachers, and show their son how the other half lived. We pulled up to the big doors where porters took our luggage and my folks checked in as I checked out the Lobby.

Even to a decently well-traveled 15 year old, this place was unlike any resort I’d been to before. I recognized the tapestries on the lobby walls were old and important. An afternoon tea was being set up to perfection by a pair of elderly ladies wearing white gloves at a cluster of white wicker tables and chairs just off the lobby.  Tall arched windows ran from floor to ceiling down two long east-to west wings to the sea on either end of the wide rectangle that was the main facade. The people here were different than the vacationers I was used to as well. In place of loud Long Island honeymooners and camera snapping tourists were dignified looking gentlemen in blue blazers and women who carried themselves like royals. Everything was different and manicured for perfection.

I had a feeling of being out of place here, that the furnishings were for looking at and the carpets more suited to the slippered foot than my boot.  One could visit here, but would never belong like the locals who strode through on their occasional promenades or weekend brunch ritual.

After settling into our rooms, my parents encouraged me to explore further. A quick jaunt through the hallways, back down to the main lobby, my nose filled with the musty aromas of aged wood furniture and textiles, peppered with just a hint of the modern. The undeniable salt air complemented it all sincerely, cutting through the scent of hotel institutional clean. Out one door was a croquet court lawn and the pool patio and beach club.  A well-heeled young couple and their toddler were playing gently, and I saw that the proper mallet stroke was forward, from a sort of straddle, rather than the golf-like way my friends had approached the game at home on Jew Jersey fescue lawns. The crew cut manicured Bermuda grass I had first encountered in The Bahamas, and on golf course putting greens made sense of the strange game.

Near the south end was a small court that featured an old fashioned ice cream parlor. At last some unaffected juvenile comfort.

The pool area and beaches were well attended by cabana boys and all sorts of service people in white, and a nice outdoor grill, its chairs and tables in white wood. No functional plastic would do here.

Occasionally my eyes would be met approvingly by one of the preppie workers, who were everywhere.  How did they recognize me as one of the guests, despite my blue jeans, cheap plaid short sleeved shirt and work boots? Such was the style of the sullen New Jersey nineteen seventies teen. How did they know I was staying here?

And so I spent my first two days, filled with a melancholy wonder. This place was obviously staged for stodgy older people who dined in jacket and necktie, not thrill-seeking teens.

And then on the second evening, I found my own kind. A guest door was open on my floor, rock music wafting out into the hall. I glanced inside, and a friendly kid about my age pulled me inside. “Kevin,” he announced himself, sticking out his hand. “Brian. I’m Brian Heir.” And just as I whispered my name, more in teen social phobia than in any affectation, she heard me as I saw her. The prettiest girl I had ever laid eyes on in my life had been speaking in a phony British accent. No competition, no reference point, in fact just then nobody else was in the room. Only her, Sheri. And then suddenly the searing angry gaze of the South American kid sitting beside her on the bed. He was talking intently to her calling her ‘Birdie,’ but she had stopped listening to him the instant she heard me introduce myself. “I’m Brian Heir,” (pronounced “air.”)  I sat beside her on the opposite side of the fuming Venezuelan, and caught her flawless smile. With confidence that surprised myself, I asked Sheri to leave, and we walked out together.  The swarthy older kid shot me one last hostile glance, hollered, “bye Birdie!“ and we were gone.  Sheri Belgard and I walked through the hallways of various guest floors for no apparent reason, other than to keep moving that our conversation might otherwise stall. I politely asked her to cut the shit with the phony Brit accent, and she acquiesced with a wry smile and surprised glance.  When Sheri looked at me her big green eyes would move up, down, dramatically to one side or the other.  A natural pout of her bottom lip balanced her straight nose, strong chin and high cheekbones.  Sheri had an impossibly perfect smile, big and straight.  Her reddish brown hair was feathered in front, and highlighted a bit like the Farrah Fawcett poster on every boy’s wall. This fantasy girl was real, though and walking next to me.  She smelled fresh and sweet and clean when the air passed her to reach me. Teen perfume and shampoo like ripe fruit. I had never even spoken to anyone so pretty in my young life.

Sheri said she was 17. And she had a body that was the stuff of fantasy. Nubile breasts stretched a red and white candy cane stripe tube top nearly to the fabric’s limit. The rest of her was small but long.  She had slim willowy legs for her petite stature that made her seem taller.  Devoid of hips, she had the lower body of a gymnast or a dancer, or both. Those legs just went straight up to her waist, and in contrast to her torso was her lack of flared hips. I could wait for those, as my adolescent focus was on the baby feeders. She wore overalls, Osh Kosh, B’gosh. Not much more under those but the tube top, and flip flop sandals. She was my perfect dream girl at about 5’5” and maybe 90 pounds.  She overwhelmed this 15 year old.  I felt out of my league, overwhelmed.   Would I always be out of my league with Sheri Belgard?

Like other tough acting silver spoon brats of the day, we complained to each other disloyally and obliviously about the successful parents who set this fine stage for us.  What a luxury  to meet each other at this place, with more than a week’s vacation ahead of us, our only burden being to find a way to cut through teen angst and to be together. Really together, as the attraction was mutual and overwhelming, intoxicating. Actually, while Sheri was strong in her attitude, I was a bit afraid of her. This tough unlikely Jewish Boston kid seemed like she could go off in a heartbeat, had I said the wrong thing. And I did. But she didn’t. What I mean is, on the second day together just as I bid Sheri goodnight in the late eve (she had a midnight curfew) I said, “I can’t believe you left the party with me.” She stood and looked at me for a moment and her face changed to red anger.  I thought she was going to slap me. I had no idea what was in those words could be taken for offense, but I knew I had committed some terrible faux pas. Worse yet, it was exactly the moment I should be kissing her goodnight.  Instead, she just turned and walked away from me into her parents’ suite. Bewildered and shell shocked, my greatest hope in the world was that Sheri Belgard would see me the next day. What had I done?

I had not fully realized how sweet Sheri’s voice was until my room phone rang early the next morning. It was Sheri, and the hushed earthiness of her tone put me fully awake in an instant. We met for breakfast.

I was having difficulty assembling sentences, as she was stunningly pretty, beautiful, perfect. Her shoulder length feathered brown hair smelled fresh from across the breakfast table. Her green eyes sparkled, with tiny specs of yellow and brown and even blue in them. Then she moved forward and said “you almost lost me. Don’t ever say anything like that stupid shit again.”  I was dumbfounded. “What you said about leaving the party with you. That kind of thing freaks me out.”

Though I didn’t understand I nodded and smiled through a mouthful of cereal.

After breakfast, I met Sheri’s parents.  Her mother Trudi was clear evidence that Sheri’s genes were verifiable. A tall, stunning Swedish looking blonde, she too had a killer body, the grown up version of her daughter’s.  Her father looked like a cross between Fred Astaire and Harrison Ford. Daddy didn’t seem too concerned about lending me the keys to his rented Cadillac when I lied, saying I was 17. It was white with bone/ivory interior. Sheri and I drove that car all over Palm Beach, nearly starving to death trying to locate something edible. At last, Hamburger Heaven appeared, a timeless diner that required me to spontaneously master parallel parking, though I was two years’ shy of a driver’s license. No matter, the big Caddy lent us credence to cruise the island and even purchase some beer.

Back at The Breakers, Sheri and I sipped milkshakes at that old fashioned fountain shop, and for the first time she really opened up about a disturbing relationship with her father. She described his paranoid antics at home including tracking her down when she was with friends, dragging her home by the arm, and calling her the “town pump.” Beautiful and sensual as she was, Sheri assured me that she was a virgin.  Well an overzealous father was to be expected with such a voluptuous, innocent child, right? Even if he seemed a bit more possessive than protective…

This otherwise noble but boring genteel grand hotel was transformed into a wonderland with Sheri. She continued to fill in blanks to her upbringing, about the private schools she attended compulsorily after cutting dozens of days at public Jr. High. At least she was happy here with me, as we wandered around a stodgy but impressive bastion of the wealthy.  Sheri became open about her past, good and bad. I was her eager listener, equally fascinated by the delivery and content of everything she said.

At some point on our third day Sheri and I wandered into a yet undiscovered playroom. There was ping pong and billiards and notably, a jukebox, the real thing, full of 45 RPM records. Sheri let fly a dime for Black Water, by The Doobie Bros.

           

            Oh Black, water, keep on rollin’

            Mississippi  moon wontcha keep on shinin’ on me…

Sheri would play that song whenever we passed that room, more frequently as our vacations ran down, our well-worn runs between points of interest consisting of that playroom, the ice cream shop and the north wing, where we rearranged a carefully laid out afternoon tea, the worst of our teen mischief.  In all my life, I would never be bored by Sheri Belgard. Her observations on mundane things were as clever and funny as any stand-up comic.  She never laughed at her own jokes, and rarely out loud at mine.  A more serious side would come out in quiet hours, belaying what seemed like melancholy born of true sorrow, not just teen posturing or rebellion…

She was getting quieter, and more pensive now, into our second week at The Breakers. It never warmed enough during that December to swim or go to the beach in bathing suits. But as we walked our stomping grounds and sat outside in cool breezes, Sheri seemed thoughtful, and a bit bothered about something. She would hold my hand then suddenly drop it. When we ran into other kids we had met, it was a quick escape, in agreement that we only wanted each other’s companionship. The South American kid, I learned later, had had his own Porsche race car shipped from Venezuela just for the season. He was a couple of years older, but Sheri made me feel secure that she only wanted to be with me. This was too sweet a dream.  Nothing in my life had ever felt this spectacular, as did her company, her voice and subtle way of letting me know she thought that I was special.

To be sure, this was my dream girl in every aspect; chemistry that made my knees weak, yet still the nice Jewish girl from a well to do family that my own parents would approve of.

She was tough and she was streetwise and she could be sensitive and she got me and I got her. How would I ever again do without her? When Sheri took my hand, or touched me in any fashion, especially with her voice, there was a euphoria that put me in a trance. Every word out of her mouth in that soft refined Boston accent was hypnotic to me. Cheri Belgard could have levitated all 139 pounds of me off the ground with her voice alone.

I was hopelessly in love for the first time, and as I would find, the only time that every cell of my body was so fully convicted and convinced in my life.

We spent our nights running around the castle, and even gained access to the towers atop the old masterpiece. Occasionally hunted treasures here, chased off like beggars there, we always ended up in the white Cadillac by night’s end. I’m not sure why we never visited each other’s rooms much. Maybe we felt less likely to be found there in the dark pine needle and gravel driveway near the golf course.  Sheri would talk to me about anything and everything, and run her fingers along my shoulder, through my hair…And I lost myself every night in her deep green eyes.

We were of course making out like crazy, but on one particular night, I knew Sheri was ready to give herself to me. I remember her sitting in my lap facing me, and my unbuttoning her shirt. Her bust was so beautiful and perfect, the prettiest breasts I’ve seen to this day.  And they were in my face.  My lips were moist, and my breathing hard. Sheri owned me then, biologically and romantically for life. We hastily tore off the rest of our clothes, and Sheri’s eyes got big, just as she saw the part of me that did, too.  She pointed and said there was “no way THAT was going to go in THERE” pointing at me and then herself. Unsure whether she was coddling the fragile male ego or genuinely impressed, I felt reassured, the dominant male at last.  Not knowing much about foreplay yet, I instinctively dove down to her femininity, driven by pure first love and lust, and the desire to make her ready for me. But try as we did, Sheri had pain. I wanted her so badly, but the grimace on her face made it clear that it wasn‘t to be, at least not yet. I felt absolutely no disappointment. Because I loved her. I knew it then as I know it now. My runaway, young male drive and selfish lust took a literal and figurative back seat to something even greater, and more important; a deeper caring, and it made me feel at once powerful and respectful and gentlemanly to wait.

Simply because I could not stand the thought of hurting her. Instinctively, Sheri relieved me with her hands, even as her eyes stayed big. My ego was appeased, and by body sated.  I loved her. I really loved her.

The next day presented a gray, cool and breezy December afternoon. Sheri and I found ourselves sitting outside near the sea wall. We watched the winter waves, wordlessly caressing each other. Her eyes were as big as a child’s from a Margaret Keane painting. Her melancholy was making both of us tremble, or was it the winter wind that stole our warmth? Sheri reminded me that her vacation had started before mine, and how glad she was that I was there to make the time bearable… And that she was going home tomorrow. Her words shot through me like a lightning bolt. Tomorrow? Leaving?

There were no tears from her, only some matter of fact chatter about things to catch up with at home, and that her father had to return to some important work. Her apparent lack of emotion made this moment suddenly unbearable.  I wanted to hide from her before I came apart.

We just sat there facing the ocean, with Sheri nested in front of me with my arms around her. Too cold for bathing suits, we had our shoes off, toes in the sand. Looking down, Sheri pointed out how long my toes were. I had never thought about feet. Then I looked at hers. They were the most beautiful feet anyone ever walked on. Sheri showed me some exercises that a dance teacher had taught her to keep extreme mobility in the toes, moving each one independently, then the big toe up and the others down, et cetera. It was a diversion in conversation and visually from what was really going on, which was goodbye.

I never missed observing feet again in my life. A weak attribute for most people, this girl had these little dainty feet and toes that would become a mandatory element of a woman’s beauty for my life to come. I had never been fascinated with that body part; it was just that Sheri was beautiful, even perfect in places that were flawed and mundane on ordinary people.

The south wind that gusted up the beach must have blown my tears onto Sheri’s neck, because she turned around and wiped them away. But her own face stayed dry. There didn’t seem to be any empathy in her eyes.  I’ve always thought that females were stronger, and in her resolute acceptance of having to go home, I accepted that I had merely been a comforting diversion for this beautiful rich girl, and nothing more.  But she got way too deep into my soul for me to endure the days to come. And come they did.

The big limousine was already packed with Sheri’s parents and little sister and luggage, awaiting only her to make their departure. I can’t remember if she kissed me goodbye in front of her parents, but I’ll never ever forget seeing her walk away from me to that car. It was the last glimpse of her I would have for 25 years.  It seemed that I was powerless, and she was realistic. After all, adults still ran our world.

The southeast wind gusted heavily now, helping the limousine on its way, and blowing me back into The Breakers as I opened the door next to the ice cream shop.  The soda jerk in his white hat asked me where my girlfriend was.  I bolted directly to the game room, dropped a dime in that jukebox and played the now well-worn Doobie Bros. record:

            Oh Black Water, keep on rolling,

            Mississippi moon wontcha keep on shinin’ on me…

The jazzy country fiddle part sounded so melancholy this time.  The song rang of sorrow and longing.  Suddenly there was no air in the room, within the great hotel, or on the planet.  Where did all the oxygen go?  Lightheaded, I nearly fell over, and held onto that jukebox for support. I didn’t know what a panic attack was.  I walked around The Breakers in circles, crying softly to myself, then burst out the east wing sea doors, no longer able to hold back a scream so primal that I thought my head would explode.  On that shallow strip of rocky, eroded beach I shrieked melancholy and horror and hopelessness. Boy meets girl; boy gets girl; boy loses girl…

Chapter Two

Respiration Suspended

When the last three days of my vacation mercifully ended, I was glad to return home with my parents.  My father had never seen me cry over a girl and he never would again. But I had a new found power, having gotten the prettiest girl at The Breakers to leave the party with me. I finally started taking some trophies in my hometown in New Jersey, although every girl fell short of Sheri. None even vaguely reminded me of her, and my resentment gave rise to Brian the womanizer. I had no consideration or feelings for the girls and women I dated, simply because they weren’t Sheri. I broke some hearts, but mine was never even at risk.

One day my friend Lance casually mentioned that he planned to hitchhike to Boston, to see an old friend. It was three months after The Breakers, and I decided to join Lance for an adventure, and the chance to see Sheri.  I’d make my way to Boston, then to the little suburb where her father had built a mansion on a hill, like the king of the town. Apparently he was instrumental in an important medical breakthrough, the culmination of years of research and hard work that had funded Sheri’s own family’s trip to The Breakers.  They called him “The Man Who Invented the Beep” in Time magazine.  Alan Belgard made The Pacemaker.

A day and a half’s thumbing and Lance and I found the doorstep of Squid, his childhood camp counselor, friend and mentor. “Squiddy” was older than us, and every bit as cool as Lance had told me. He let us crash on his floor and even shared his beer with us.  He had been a Navy Seal and had great stories.  But I had only one thing on my mind. I couldn’t wait to call Sheri.  Though I found it hard to get the nerve, for some reason.  Only teen fear of rejection had kept me from calling since December…

The next night after arriving at Squid’s place in the North End, I made my way out to Kenmore Square, and the Rathskeller. I was always a rocker, and it would be cool, even nonchalant to call Sheri from the noteworthy hole in the ground.  It was the bar’s house phone that I used to call Sheri. I still had her phone number in my wallet, unused save for unfolding a couple of million times to smell her fading perfume and trace the way she had jotted down her name on our last day together, the prerequisite heart dotting the “I.”  Sheri’s mother answered the phone, and just as a live band took the stage and the noise came up, the annoyed woman threw a barrage of reasons why I could not speak with Sheri.  She was pregnant. And engaged. And had lied about her age and was really only 16. And her fiancé was there RIGHT NOW.  Before I could inform the lady that I too had lied, and was only 15 myself, she hung up the phone. I dialed once more and Mrs. Belgard advised me again that Sheri’s fiancé was at their house this very moment. And that was that…

I doubt the Doobie Bros themselves could’ve kept me in the Rathskellar after that.

Returning from Boston was more of a chore than the adventure the northward trip had been.  The wind always blew the wrong way, it rained cold and Lance and I weren’t hitching many rides. At some point not very far down the road I put my thumb away and bought a Greyhound ticket back to New York’s Port Authority and a local to home in North Jersey. Lance was a good sport to stick with me that way, even though he had no reason to be a sad sack as I did. Lance likely suffered his first buddy whining over a woman and I just plain suffered. I reassured myself that this was the very reason that I hadn’t contacted the girl immediately after vacation.  She was out of my league, and people had plans for her. And nowhere in those plans was Brian Heir.

 If I had been a cold womanizer before Boston, I was now a full-fledged predator.

And life went on. And on and on, but the years never brought me face to face with Sheri, Yet I don’t think I ever had a close friend, nor a stranger who’d listen to me who I didn’t tell about her.

Humans are resilient creatures, and I adapted. I learned to live without the expectation of true love, or the desire, passion and caring that I had known so very briefly as a 15 year old boy at The Breakers.

Throughout the years before the Web, I made attempts to contact Sheri, none of them successful. I’d never dared to call her parents again as I was sure they regarded me as persona non grata.  As her father had become a big man in the medical bioscience field, they had likely laid out Sheri’s future.

Ultimately, I pictured her married young, her beautiful body entering entirely into womanhood as she bore some lucky man’s children. And I eventually accepted that I don’t get what I want in this life, which was Sheri, plain & simple. 

 I earned my college diploma and played in bands and raced bicycles and motorcycles competitively and worked as a ski instructor and on Madison Avenue, but I’d never attain the true key to my happiness, the girl who I loved too young, too soon, who created a mold into which no other would fit.  I was not adaptable in that regard.  My father once told me that “life was a series of compromises, choose yours carefully.” 

And so it was that I did not marry until my mid-thirties, to a wonderful, creative, talented woman. She was independent too, a trait I had not seen in a woman many times along the way.  Liz was honest and had integrity, too. She wasn’t looking for Mr. Right in any particular cut of suit, but she had to be won, just the same. That sense of independence also meant she didn’t need me, so I did all I could to make her want me, and become my wife. We were friends first and foremost, and our courting was slow and steady, over about two years from meeting.

Liz was creative in everything she did. An artist by trade, she always made beautiful presentations of even the simplest gifts and occasions.  And her thoughtfulness and generosity always amazed me. Liz knew that I collected weapons, and on one birthday she presented me with an authentic blow dart gun from South America, the kind used to this day by some tribes in the rain forest to shop for dinner. It was typical for her to give me unexpected, perfect gifts and accoutrements to my life’s interests.  We went skiing together every weekend and took trips out west and to the California coast.  On our honeymoon, Liz and I watched whales in the Pacific from our breakfast in bed on the Big Sur.  We shared everything, and everything would be fine.

As wonderful and honest and giving as Liz was, and as willing as I was to be fully committed and start a family, I had a single selfish, troubling thought on my wedding day. I muttered to myself under my breath, “I guess I really don’t get Sheri Belgard in this lifetime.  There would be no reprieve from the governor, no “The Graduate” ending to this movie. The troubling thought was more of a realization than a regret, more of an acceptance of life’s parameters than any reasonable sorrow.  Simple Fact: I wouldn’t be marrying Sheri Belgard in this life.

With that thought pushed firmly to the back of my mind, I joined my new wife in vows, and we put our lives together, adding a third, Victoria the next year. It was great to be a father, and a husband.

Even before the baby was born Liz learned pre-natal nutrition and picked out schools… Our baby would be privileged.

Then the all-too-common, insidious thing happened. Liz and I were all about our daughter, seldom about us.  We had become parents with such intensity and singleness of purpose that we stopped being lovers.  We each had a relationship with our daughter, but no longer with each other. 

Liz joked me out of making love, had excuses and rationalized to wait until baby weight had come off… The last time I had her, I just took her.  It wasn’t rape.  Liz conceded to let me release myself within her body.  It was the most humiliating thing I’d ever endured, and I vowed never to be with a woman who did not want me desperately and completely ever again.

Chapter Three

The Woman

One ordinary afternoon, the phone rang, showing an unfamiliar I.D. I wasn’t in the mood for telemarketers so I did what came to mind; I answered in drag.  After all, who wants to make a compelling pitch to Aunt Bea? After my matronly falsetto “Hello?” there was a long pause.  Then finally a reply in a familiar voice in a New England accent asked, “Is Brian Hayah theyah?”  “Sheri?” I asked? “Is that you?”  It had been over 20 years since I’d heard her voice.  Sheri explained that for the past ten years, she had been living in the same small Florida town as me and my family, only a couple of miles away.  While searching the local phone book for a friend of her daughter, Sheri saw my name and number. It had taken her a couple of months to get the nerve to use it. She told me that she was married, with a son and a daughter, and I told her about my wife and Tori.

Then she explained how all those years ago, her mother hadn’t told her about my visit to Boston. Nevertheless Sheri had found out months later when it slipped out.  She was furious with her mother over it, and properly rang up Brian Heir.  The only problem was, she didn’t realize she had reached the answering machine of my cousin of the same name, whom I haven’t met to this day.  The other Brian Heir doesn’t date women, so he never returned her calls. Eventually she gave up. Still, she kept trying, and one day a roommate picked up the phone. After Sheri’s introduction, he replied that “honey, I think you’ve got the wrong Brian Heir.”  For decades, Sheri had looked for me. And all the while she lived right here in my heart and my town. 

The phone conversation was instantly, almost uncomfortably familiar.  Sheri said that immediately after The Breakers she had told all of her friends about the cute guy with the big…

I interrupted her and reminded her how we made love in the back of the Cadillac.  She corrected me. Truth being that over time, my imagination completed the act that we were unable to consummate as teens.  I guess for all the pain of missed or lost love it was unfathomable that we hadn’t gone all the way. Sheri was adamant that “it wouldn’t work” and what a gentleman I had been about it. I was taken aback at how forward or familiar she was, unable to discern which.  Had it really been 25 years?  Sheri was so familiar that I have to admit, I was skeptical.  Had my Sheri become a randy swinger?

We decided to meet nearby with spouses and talk of old times, new times, share notes regarding our kids…

But Liz seemed irked and bowed out of the lunch meeting. Sheri’s husband Jack had apparently done the same, or else she never told him, because the only two attendees to this reunion were to be Brian and Sheri.  Just before hanging up the phone after confirming, I asked her “I realize it’s not nice to ask, but are you still beautiful, Sheri?”  Without the slightest trace of conceit, she replied “Actually my friends tell me I got prettier with age.”

Midday that Saturday, I rode my big Harley touring bike to the Morikami Orchid Gardens. Sheri arrived in a very high end BMW SUV.  She hadn’t lied. My Sheri had grown from a foxy girl to a foxy girl/woman.  She was taller, having had a growth spurt in her late teens.  Her cheekbones were high, with a strong chin. Beautiful green eyes surveyed me, then my bike. She wore jeans torn at the knee, revealing long, slim legs.  The old feelings of being out of my league with her were back. This was a beautiful, stylish, elegant fox of a lady, yet some tomboy remained.  There was a rich air about her, not just in her manner of fashion but the way she carried herself.

Whether it was the height gain, which gave a real perspective of the young girl I knew, or because of just the right amount of maturity, I had a hard time connecting the Sheri I knew with this hot suburbanite.  It was like a dream, and I wasn’t completely ready to believe it.  Things like this didn’t happen to me, did they?  We sat down on a picnic table and took turns telling each other about the families we’d made.  Then Sheri’s face went sad, and she told me how unhappy she was with her husband of almost 20 years. She had married an ambitious young Israeli American who was a sales animal. When they first married, he had outsold all the old salts on the used car lot.  When he turned his hand to stock brokering he made a fortune through the late 70’s to present.  Sheri’s father had taken him under his wing and developed his talent to become a scratch golfer, and Jack conducted business on the links with Sheri’s father’s wealthy friends and contacts.  So through the years, Sheri went from a rich upbringing to an overachieving husband.  She was anything but a snob, yet I doubt she ever had to drive a car older than a year or two.  As impressed as I was with her upscale lifestyle, Sheri shook her head and said “money ruined my life. “When my father hit it rich, the money perverted my parents, and I watched them get drunk and promiscuous.”  I didn’t quite process her statement, because while I came from a comfortable background, I never lived the country club lifestyle, or built $1MM+ homes. 

In turn I expressed a dissatisfaction with my marriage that even I didn’t know was that bad until I heard my own words. “I hate her” I told Sheri. “My wife is a shrew who only respects the baby and has little use for me.” With that Sheri kicked a shoe off to remove a pebble. “Oh, I remember those toes!” I told her that she gave me a lifelong complex for my own finger-like toes.  We laughed and then noticed the sunset, over the forested park to our west.  It was beautiful, glowing orange, and it also meant we’d been there for hours, talking about everything and nothing, all at once.  “Well, it is magical to see you again, Sheri.”  I said we should meet again sometime soon.  She replied with “how about tomorrow?”  I was thrilled.  As I said, this was more enchantment than my life had offered in quite some time, and I leaned forward for a friendly goodbye kiss.  Sheri gave me a quick peck on the cheek. I set my hand under her chin and said, “Open your mouth, and give me a real kiss.”  I don’t know where the boldness came from, but it worked.  Sheri gave me a real kiss this time, the kind a man and a woman share when they feel something. Just as the intoxicant of her biological perfume and open mouth took me to another planet Sheri pulled back. I apologized.  She shook her head, .She asked, “Have I forgotten how to kiss?”

While loping the big Harley home I realized that everything had changed.  Sheri was in my space again, by some gift from the Gods, and she seemed receptive to me. I did not believe that either one of us had set out that day to start an affair, though our shunted marriages certainly justified it. While the big bike cut a swath through the wind, a bird swooped in low, crossing my path.  It seemed that I narrowly missed it, as it carried something in its feet, a branch.  I realized that the bird was a dove, and mused that it clutched something, a branch for nest making?  The incident was like an impression, over as soon as it had started.  No more than two seconds from seeing the bird, to recognizing it as a dove, to its looping back up out of sight.

The next day I called Sheri at home and asked her if she would be free for the day.  She surprised me when she said “sure, why don’t you come over?  I want you to see my house.”  She lived in a development just a mile from my house, though it may as well have been a million miles away in lifestyle and economics.  The guard gate had my name and cleared me to wind my way to her 6,500 square foot house in an exclusive enclave of only about a dozen homes.  Sheri met me at the front door, and swung it open to reveal a big courtyard, with a guesthouse as big as my home, and a beautiful freeform pool. It was like a curtain of rain forest was peeled away like a reveal to Eden. Sheri showed me a house with so many rooms that it took an hour to thoughtfully go through each one, explaining how and why she did what she did with the spaces.  This made perfect sense, considering the imposing sizes of the rooms.  Some people had such trophy homes that were cold inside, too big, full of echoes and bare surfaces.  Sheri had succeeded in making as cozy and intimate a family home could be. I don’t think a bungalow could have been any more intimate than this warm family house that spoke of children, relaxation and informality.  By this I do not mean sloppiness whatsoever.  In fact, there was no clutter, rather just the right quantity and type of accessories and furnishings.  A lifetime of privilege had made it second nature to know about things like Saturnia floors and top shelf Moen fixtures and high line kitchens.  She was completely devoid of affectation or ostentation.  She simply knew about good domesticity and put it in place artistically.  My first real girlfriend had become a grownup, a discerning decorator and head of house.  I did not say ‘head of household.’  That title was ultimately Jack’s.

As we settled into an oversized comfy couch, Sheri expanded on that.  Her husband was the guy who in his own words “busted his ass to pay for everything,” which better be damn right the first time and every time.  But she was the homemaker, 100 percent charged with raising two children, both in their teens now.  Dinner had to be made perfectly to Jack’s spec and hot or there’d be hell to pay. 

Before we realized, it was nearly time for Sheri to pick up her children from school, and me to leave. As I was saying goodbye I casually mentioned the anecdote of the previous day, when the dove nearly collided with my motorcycle after leaving our reunion meeting at Morikami Gardens.  Sheri said “very funny” and made a sarcastic face. “What?” I asked, “What did I say?”  With that she rolled up her jeans pants leg a few inches up her calf.  Just the sight of her beautifully turned ankle gave me a tingle in my pants.  There, just above the bone on the outside of her ankle was the faded tattoo that Sheri had shown me back at The Breakers.  It was the kind of old-school sailor’s ink, and kind of dark blue, green faded image that had lost its sharpness over time.  Sheri drew me in closer to spy what was in fact a dove with an olive branch in its grasp.

After a spectacular parting kiss, I slowly drove out of Sheri’s neighborhood, savoring the surroundings and sparing my car the speed bumps.  I tried to recall the last time I had seen a dove in Florida.

Which is to say, I didn’t work as much as I should, given my new miracle.  The next day Sheri called in the early evening. It was a weeknight and she had fed everyone and cleaned up. She wanted to get out for a while, and we decided to meet at a nearby park, even as darkness fell.  We ran from our cars into each other’s arms, making out wildly.  At this point, I was beginning to feel and act out sexually.  I actually tried to hook up with her, tugging at Sheri’s jeans and such while grinding like teens.  It became clear that our first time would not be a kinky outdoor session ducking security lights. This was no bimbo and I reassessed what was going on here.  The opportunist Brian pursued a chance at some long absent physicality.  But Sheri was not a dirty cheater housewife.  She looked to me, I thought, as a potential remedy for a bad marriage mate. I was probably still in a state of shock that there could be something real here that was much more than I dared to believe; The original loss of Sheri that had turned me into a trivial lover, and the prospect of more was hard to visualize. In fact, on some level I still couldn’t believe that it was her!

Following the nighty time boner chasing session, Sheri was ready to set the stage for real intimacy. We actually booked a hotel room and made plans to meet there after my workday.  Jack was taking the kids to a concert, so she could have the evening to be a grownup, and just maybe, my lover.

I registered and went to the room to wait for Sheri. She showed up looking casual and cute.  I kissed her hello, which I think she fearfully mistook as my attempt to jump into action.  That wasn’t what either one of us wanted, at least not right away.  Sheri admitted that she was put off by the whole thing a bit, two married people meeting at a hotel with premeditated plans.  Thankfully those plans included something innocuous and safe: FOOD.  Sheri had brought a virtual smorgasbord of treats, and I suggested that we just relax and watch cartoons, sitting on the floor like two little kids instead of the bed.

Sheri confided that my Chino slacks were freaking her out, like she felt like the Lolita who has a tryst with the businessman; too calculated and dirty.  So off came the Chinos, and there we sat, me in my bikini briefs, on the floor at the foot of the bed, eating the delicious ham sandwiches she had brought.

After a while, we relaxed and nature took its course.  We climbed up onto the bed and kissed and kissed and kissed. 

I was consumed by and terrified with performance anxiety. Nearly a quarter of a century of anticipation to be with the girl of my dreams, body don’t betray me!  Fortunately, there was no such self-sabotage.  From seduction through a marathon of foreplay, she was all mine now.  My dream girl had finally given herself to me. And I knew when she began to yield emotionally, spiritually.  It was beautiful.  At last, when we came face to face, Sheri told me that she had just climaxed more in foreplay than she had in 20 years of marriage.  We began  to make love slowly, then more intensely, and ultimately with vicious passion and urgency.  After literally hours, I made a comment about how wet she was, and found my way through the dark to the strange bathroom.  Flicking on the light switch, to my horror I noticed that I was coated with a crimson coat of blood from knees to navel.  Houston, we have a problem!  Sheri already had her light on, and I can only describe her demeanor as happy and terrified.  Our coupling had caused a major bleed!  There had been little friction, as Sheri’s body had been copious...  She decreed that I had been where no man had been before, and that she finally lost her virginity after giving birth to two babies, one of them 10 lbs.

Jack had taken the kids to a boy band concert, what would she tell him, “I’m at the E.R. with a vaginal tear, but all is well?”  Thinking quickly we called housekeeping.  It was now around midnight, and a maid appeared with fresh linens and lots of towels.  The heavy set Caribbean woman glared at me as I had the Chinos back on; never mind that Sheri was two full years older than me, she presented as the innocent virgin and me the lecher from the depths of Hades.  I tipped her generously and prayed for secrecy.  A few sutures later at the E.R., Sheri was good as new.  After apologizing profusely for  the bleed, Sheri assured me that I had done nothing wrong, She said that she had felt a combination of pleasure and pain, and that that was OK.  She had just never made love so vigorously, for so long.

This night was significant as the evening I symbolically took her virginity. Unfazed by the stitches, she would simply tell Jack, from whom she was already alienated, that she had her period while it healed, if she had to. 

From here on, we were as one.  There was nobody else for either of us.  We were an ecstatically monogamous couple.  And with this, I fell in love with Sheri Belgard for the second time.

Chapter Four

Flesh, Fame and The Devil’s Due

Sheri and I saw each other too much.  She responsibly acknowledged that I was neglecting my business, and that she would like to help.  Her children were in their teens and finding more of their time with friends. So she began to shadow me in the office, and working from her home together, where she had a full office.  Her personality was nothing short of magic with clients, underwriters, anybody.  She exuded the perfect balance of newness/ineptitude and good intentions, to amend bank lock commitments, an unheard of accomplishment.  She turned me on to her entire retinue of neighbors and friends, which multiplied my business in a very short time.  This was the woman I should have married!  What she had done for Jack was now the magic she worked for me. 

Each day’s high point was now the moment when I could behold the most perfect smile, Sheri’s broad, straight bright Cheshire Cat grin.  I was finally believing that she was real, that it hadn’t merely had a long fanciful dream.  When we weren’t together we were inseparable on the phone, texting and talking.  One evening when Jack was home and she couldn’t get out, Sheri was on the phone with me.  Jack was back and forth, in and out of the room, boisterously commenting and interrupting Sheri’s dialogue with me.  She was also texting me what she could not say.  Suddenly I heard his deep dark voice say, in matching Boston accent, “Hey I know about that there textin’ stuff … Yaw havin one of them affayahs!”  I almost shit my pants.  I thought it was my right to love this girl my whole life but here was the father of her two kids confronting her.  I sat there silently, holding my phone to my ear, waiting for something, anything.  Then, laughter from Sheri.  She told me that Jack was joking.  “I could have a fuck in front of him and he wouldn’t notice, he’s so narcissistic!” 

There were times we had to be together when it wasn’t practical to be at her house.  I still had a wife and child under my roof, and often Sheri’s son and daughter were at her place. Having been forgiven of his restraining order, Jack was at their house on weekends and late afternoons and evenings.  But Sheri and I were absolutely crazy for each other.  My decade plus of sexless marriage and her apparent naivety made for spectacular lovemaking in the oddest and most politically wrong and dangerous places.  She really was like a nervous virgin, claiming that she had more orgasms in a typical half hour together with me than in 20 years of her marriage.  We fucked in every vehicle we had, on the beach at night, standing up behind dumpsters and ATM‘s and landscaping..  There was a thrill that she couldn’t get away from me in the tight spaces of vehicles, and wedged against the dashboard was a certainty that I’d get all of her.  We really were like animals.  If we absolutely had to have each other, which was for the most part our default condition, we still took hotel rooms.  One day, we met at our favorite inn, and we did what only teenagers hungry for each other do.  Then the strangest thing happened, as we both came together in what Sheri would come to call that “melty” feeling.  I think she was describing the moment when time stopped, and it was no longer possible or significant to know where one of our bodies began and the other ended.  We were one.  Then we were wet, very wet.  At first, Sheri and I both thought she had spilled her bladder in a moment of abandon.  She apologized but I was unflustered.  Amazing passion could take us so far.  Upon closer examination we realized that she, too had ejaculated!  This was something I had read about, but if it ever happened before, with any woman I was ever with, I wasn’t aware or observant enough to realize it.

Once that milestone was broken through, I could tell that Sheri fought this reaction, but if her orgasm was sufficiently powerful, she had no chance of holding it back.  In fact, after three or four climaxes in sequence, she was powerless to stop coming!  The female ejaculations would repeat, and then just seem to flow continuously and one orgasm linked to the next, with little or no pause of buildup in between them.  One day in her bed at home, I had a couple of orgasms without withdrawing from her body, and she just kept charging like a locomotive.  Feeling exactly one breath from a heart attack, I finally fell backwards against my pillow.  When I looked over next to me, Sheri was nowhere to be found.  I lifted my head up to see her curled up in the fetal position up against the footboard of the bed. She was trembling and shuddering.  I reached out to her and she just withdrew back a few inches.  It was not a bad thing, she had just reached a point past the sublime, and couldn’t bear contact for some moments.  Sheri made me feel like a Superman.  I had never had such a profound impact on a lover.  And she was the most extraordinary woman, way beyond my wildest fantasies or limits of imagination.  Short, perfectly cute toes on small feet with high arches led to beautiful ankles and legs that didn’t need shaving. At the other end, long fingers were supple and articulate. Her skin was truly as soft as silk and was utterly hairless.  The natural perfume from her pores was the key to my lock.  Sheri became self-conscious if she caught me watching her but I never tired of the most mundane actions.  The way her mouth enunciated words was pure enchantment and sensuality, enough to send me into another cycle of desire for her.  She was without any comparison, the most beautiful woman I had ever known.  From the beautiful teen I once knew, womanhood and the act of bringing forth life had only made her a deeper, stronger more complex and passionate person.

The next day Sheri and I were sitting together, talking in her super King size bed after having made love all morning.  She suddenly sat up and asked, “Do you believe in demons?”  I raised my own pillows to sit up against the magnificent scrolled headboard.  There were two paintings above my head of Greek mythical gods in swordplay.  “What sort of demons?  You mean the ones with horns and red flesh?”  She just kept looking at me deadpan.  Sheri had not given me such an expression of seriousness before.  “I’m talking about real demons that come in humanoid form.  They come from whatever dimension, and just appear in my bedroom,” was the answer.  “What are you talking about, Sheri?  You expect me to believe that you’re visited by demons?  Why?”  She looked at me sternly.  “I was instructed by them very specifically.  One is a short guy, with a haircut from the forties, the other a tall skinny sort.  The short one does most of the talking.”  My eyebrows went up, as to whether I should believe her or not.  “What they want,” she continued, “Is for you to write a book about our magical reunion.  This is fate, that we have come together again, don’t you see that?  You came to save me.  You will have to hurt others, the demons tell me, in return for fame, adoration and riches to us, as the book will be a bestseller.  I think they must mean that the innocents will be your wife and daughter, whose happiness must be sacrificed for our love and wealth.”  I didn’t know what to say, but Sheri seemed dead serious, in earnest.  Just then, her face lightened up, she gave me her dazzling smile and laughed, “Aren’t we a bit old to be believing in demons?”  With that, I was at once relieved and impressed with this beautiful, dramatic woman’s flair for drama.

She turned to me once more in her formerly serious demeanor.  “There’s a caveat.  If you don’t do what they want, if you don’t write the book and leave your wife, they will exact a toll on my flesh.  My organs, inside, my muscle and sinew and bone will be consumed from within if you fail to do what they have directed me to tell you, Brian.  Do as they command, or there’ll be nothing left of me.”  With that a single tear rolled down from the corner of her eye down her cheek. Sheri never appealed anything to me again in such earnest.

 I just said, “I’ll show you demons, draw us a bath in that 3 acre bathroom of yours.” 

There were His and Hers master baths, and the Femme side had a bidet.  The tub was an oversized white porcelain antique with golden claw feet.  We did things in our inaugural bath that neither of us ever had done before, suffice to say it was no Mikvah.  For one terrifying moment I hallucinated Jack home from work early, looking through a stack of mail at the open bathroom door, just as I was taking his wife where she’d never been.  In a blink his apparition was gone, but not before my reaction had registered on Sheri, who asked, “what? What is it?”  “Nothing, nothing except my guilt.”  I was trembling with carnal excitement and a tinge of conscience.  We were doing the dirtiest thing in this clean place.

The next weekend I had plans to take my wife and daughter to Atlantis in the Bahamas.  Sheri was well acquainted with this expensive resort, and advised me what to do, and where to dine, as she and Jack and their kids had made many trips there.  Sheri was not happy about it, but she and Jack still lived under the same roof, and our love affair was still very much a secret.  She took a positive point of view, advising me to have sex with Liz.  “I mean it,” she said, “If you can successfully make love with your wife, you may want to rethink all of the trouble ahead.  Maybe you can rekindle your marriage.  I hereby give you permission to fuck Liz.”  As if acting on instructions, I tried to seduce Liz after what should have been an intimate dinner on a terrace at a five star island restaurant.  But we were plagued by flies from the first course.  Big harbingers from hell trying to warn me… Liz complained of predictable headaches, and couldn’t get into it.  I was more convinced than ever that the physical part of this marriage was not an element that Liz needed or wanted.  I was relieved that I could return to Sheri devoid of any misconceptions or hesitations.  The only passion I had was for my first and only true love, my Sheri.

Explaining that I tried to fuck my wife to Sheri, albeit under orders, was not a panacea.  Far from it, she nailed me to the wall.  “That was a test,” she said “and you failed miserably.  If I told you to jump off the bridge?”

In addition, while away that weekend with my family, Sheri had a three ring circus with Jack.  Jack had an episode of full color bipolarity, and it had escalated to police and Jack being removed from his own castle in ankle chains and handcuffs.  When I regrouped with Sheri, she was resentful that while I was romancing my wife in Atlantis, she was literally fighting for her life with Jack, who by now must have had some sub-conscious feelings of his wife’s infidelity, on some level.  He actually blamed the violent incident on his then 16 year old son who, on a provisional driver’s license, had been pulled over after allowed hours. The fact that he was awakened with that problem, along with a miscalculation of meds by his shrink, set him up for the psychotic meltdown.  It was unfortunate and sad and scary and guilt inspiring for me. Were they as a couple really on the way out, as Sheri told it, or was I a catalyst or accelerant in Sheri egging Jack on?

I was happy to help Sheri’s kids with homework, as some sort of long-lost uncle.  They were wary of me, but I was sincerely thrilled to be entrusted to Sheri’s dearest assets. 

There were also her two dogs, a Boston Terrier, the spunkiest black & white little bulldog, and a majestic Wheaton terrier.  I had initially misread the little bulldog’s playfulness and jocularity as aggression.  In fact, Archie stole my heart.  He was a trusting, in-your-face playmate who never ran out of energy or humor.  Rags was the Wheaton Terrier, who was comical in a different way, just as long as you didn’t try to leave hastily.  Together, they were the comedy team of Archie and Rags. Naturally when Sheri and I went grocery shopped we located each other when aisles apart by calling out Come on, Ock!  This was a play on a heavy Boston accent summoning Archie. In any case this made it a snap to find Sheri in produce or bakery.

To this point, Sheri and I had a couple of months of delight under our belts.  But I was still a married guy having an affair.  It was time to realize things had changed and were about to even more.

If this was really Sheri Belgard this was certainly a gift from God and I had better get with the program. It was then that I decided to ‘accidentally’ introduce Sheri and my Daughter Tori, then just five years old.  After all, if I was going to run away with the love of my life, the acceptance of my daughter was critical. If there was an ill fit here, all would need to be scrapped, or at least re-thought.

Looking back, I see how immoral this was, but Sheri and I were getting closer, and she already showed me hers, it was time to show her mine… Child, that is.  At the nearby optician, it was time for my eyeglass exam.  I brought Tori, and Sheri ‘just happened to show up.’  Any worries I may have had about compatibility between these two was instantly resolved when my Tori looked up at Sheri as if she were the most remarkable woman she’d ever seen.  Funny, that’s how I felt, too.  Sheri was everything her own mother was not, physically, and in terms of personality.  In fact, the two got on so well that I was euphoric, because their exchange was one of mutual wonder. My miraculous new miracle lover was so entertained and amazed by how smart Tori was. Tori told ‘Miss Sheri’ about butterflies, and marine biology and a thousand other things that 5 year olds rarely know.  It was a relief and a thrill that the two newest women in my life had chemistry.

Our first Halloween was a fiasco.  My little Tori was only 5.  She wanted to Trick or Treat with me.  Problem was, Sheri promised a really special naughty costume of her own.  I had to juggle a few hours with my daughter, and by the time I got to Sheri’s, she was pooped out, and had changed back to jeans.  Only a photo remained of the ‘Bad Schoolgirl’ that I had stood up.  I knew I missed something special, yet still felt the need to get back home and crawl into bed next to the wife I had no passion with.

Up to this point Sheri and I had yet to spend an entire night together.  I had always felt the pull of my own home around 2 to 3 in the morning, to Sheri’s and my chagrin. 

When business brought me to the other coast of Florida, an unexpected storm deluged that coast, and my entire trip back was fraught with cars in the ditch along Alligator Alley.  Hydroplaning had sent them skating off the high, well-engineered modern highway, into questionable and various states of uncertain oblivion.  The more fortunate among the victims were being attended to by emergency tow trucks and even fire trucks from ladder company fire trucks.  The uncertainty of control, and why some cars lost their critical traction and others kept going was a white knuckle mystery.  One that Sheri did not let me endure alone. She stayed on the phone with me for many hours including my play by play observations of the casualties along the way, at times very nearly my own.

By the time I made it safely back to our own town, I picked up Sheri for dinner.  It was 11 pm and my hands were shaking.  But I was hungry and we had a hankering for Japanese.  So we went to Ichiban nearby, and were the last and only people still dining.  Our plaintiff expressions made it clear to the manager that we weren’t leaving without Hibachi everything.  After the meal, we weren’t willing to leave each other.  I followed Sheri the mile to her house, and I got in bed next to her, and made it clear I wouldn’t move until after the next day.  We were so excited in knowing that we’d meet the sunrise together, and I was still so wound up from the ridiculous ride, that we didn’t get much sleep.  I’m sure we made love, but it was the symbolism of our first unapologetic night together that made us somehow uneasy.  When we turned the lights out, I held her all night.  She required her own bed space, but fuck that. I didn’t dare let distance divide this divine intimacy again.

By the time I made my way home later in that afternoon,  I walked into my own house to find Liz going through my emails. On the monitor was a particularly descriptive message to Sheri graphically recalling the night of our debauchery at the hotel.  Liz was angry but not fuming.  I was her husband in name only, we had not been a couple in years.  I admitted to everything, and let Sheri know that we were “out.”

Sheri also came clean, and with Jack and Liz totally on board, we thought we’d never look back. Jack had purportedly called us “adulterers” and Liz remained in a certain degree of denial, blaming everything on my “slut” and never recognizing my total culpability. 

Chapter Five

Sprung From the Big House

This was without a doubt the happiest time of my life.  I could finally believe that it really was Sheri.  It sounds a bit unreal, but she looked more and more familiar, easing my concerns that this beautiful creature was really mine.  She had a way of moving, that in itself was pure art.  Her fingernails were short, from being constantly chewed.  But that didn’t stop her from using her hands expressively, like Sophia Loren.  Everything she said in her delicious baby girl female tenor was emphasized with gestures.  My eyes always followed the pictures she painted with her hands in space. Now and then I’d grab her hands and her speech would cease, as though I had muted her.  The moment I release her incredibly soft hands her commentary continued without missing a beat.  She always got the joke, and we’d laugh together, I in admiration for her natural art, she incredulous that I appreciated her style so very much.  Sheri said that all her life, her father and Jack actually complained about her ‘over expressive’ ways.  I was transfixed, and never failed to be entertained when she spun a tale of any topic, purpose or length.  Sheri was easily the most entertaining person I knew.

One late morning Sheri brought in the mail and showed me several letters from banks.  It seemed that Jack had triple mortgaged the house.  I didn’t see how a house could be triple liened!  The problem was, all loans were in arrears, for an overall balance that seemed to exceed even the million dollar value of the property.  Although Sheri and Jack had built several huge homes (and taken forward great gains on resale) this was the house that she thought mostly as home.  She had put her head and heart into this beautiful courtyard home, and I suddenly felt impotent, unable to help.  I was not equipped to buy down the debt for her to keep this acre of splendor.  Though I had always felt it would be a temporary arrangement, and it was fanciful for a while to be the lord of this manor, my limitations were suddenly, starkly all too painfully evident. 

Enter Sheri’s father.  By now he and Sheri’s mother had heard about the reunion, and one day they came to that house.  After all those years, I shook Alan Belgard’s hand and kissed Trudi’s.  I told Alan that my father’s life had been prolonged by Alan’s invention, which still regulated my father’s heart.  He just shrugged and said “Good, I’m glad it worked out...“ The last time we had seen each other I was 15 representing myself as 17 for the car keys at The Breakers, nearly 25 years ago.  Alan didn’t seem amused by the anecdote. 

A few days later, Sheri declared that the only way out of her Real Estate fiasco was to sell the 6 bedroom, 8 bathroom home.  She feigned indifference, saying she had met her goals and built mansions, but I knew what this place meant to her, and for the first time since we had gotten together, felt helpless for her. I was supporting my own small house in absentia, and couldn’t afford this place, especially compounded by its strained equity.  Alas, it was Alan to the rescue, the great inventor provided the solution yet again.  He would buy Sheri a more modest house in the area to put a roof over her and her children’s heads.  As it turned out, there was even some equity left in the big house after all, which Alan pocketed. 

The new house was nearly just that; a single previous owner had lived there in the clean, white development house.  The new neighbors were mostly ‘schnores‘,  Of the 500 or so homes in this tract, where the average price of a house was about a half million, the people really thought they were the shit.  They had no idea where Sheri had come from in terms of every other house she’d occupied since her 20’s.  She indulgently received the curious coffee klatches, and good naturedly tried to fit in.  Sheri’s kids adjusted quickly and well from the millionaire lifestyle to this sort of upscale Edward Scissorhands development.  Alan assured Sheri that this place would always be the roof over her head, for her and her two children.  “Think of it as part of your inheritance early,” he said reassuringly.

 If losing Sheri’s dream house was a jarring blow, her next setback was a devastation.  Her mother had not been in good health.  You wouldn’t know otherwise, such was her demeanor.  Once, I brought Tori over to meet Trudi and Alan.  If Sheri’s homes had been castles, their place was a cathedral. But the statuesque, willowy beauty gave no clue that she had been a dialysis patient for nearly a decade.  This woman exuded presence without the slightest bit of affectation or stodginess.  Trudi’s reaction to seeing my pretty little blond child was to set about her house looking for something that might amuse my baby.

A closet revealed a classic red and white tricycle.  It was all steel, not the stuff of Playskool and Fischer Price.  Trudi assured me that the little heirloom had been Sheri’s tricycle, and it was kept around for the convenience of the grandkids.  Now it was my sweet little Tori who excitedly but carefully drove the trike all over the parlor floor.  The great room was the size of a middle school gym and I watched Trudi’s face as she experienced genuine enjoyment from my baby girl.  “Trudi, what about scratching the floor?” I turned to Tori “careful don’t run over that Hepplewhite, or anything else!”  With a wave of her hand, Trudi dismissed the concern, “Let her have a good time, that’s all that matters,” was the beautiful woman’s reply.

Alan came in the room and saw my daughter.  He regarded her curiously for a moment, then walked away. Sheri’s eyes followed Alan and wrapped her arms tightly around her own shoulders, as if cold.

Just as often as I was the man about Sheri’s place, I was careful not to overstep my boundaries.  For example, I didn’t like to answer the doorbell.  But I was very much in evidence, at some point doing nearly as much of daughter Taryn’s college homework as she did herself.  I never tried to play daddy to Sheri’s kids but I wanted them to know that the man who closed the bedroom door at night wasn’t a stranger to them.  I was there under the caveat of ‘love me, move my children.’  With that in mind I looked for any way to help them. Changing a flat tire here, repairing a fixture there, just being the man who could do things, fix things, protect them from whatever might try to find its way into the sanctum of this mother and her children. 

Some things just had to be shared though.  Sheri and I were beginning to share each other’s heartaches.  My parents were both ill and she was a constant comfort to them.  Where even my sister maintained a distance during her visits from New York, Sheri thought nothing of getting right up in my parents’ bed and sitting against the headboard next to Kal, joking and teasing my Dad in the years after my mother passed away. 

Another hardship and a heartbreak of inestimable proportion loomed over our heads.  Sheri’s mother Trudi had a relatively minor surgery scheduled. While not in itself a particularly dangerous procedure, Sheri’s mother’s kidney condition was always cause for concern.  What nobody could have expected was the slip of the surgeon’s scalpel.  Trudi’s intestine was cut and she quickly developed toxemia.  Before any decisions were made, before countermeasures could be taken, and most curiously, before Sheri was allowed a single private moment with her mother, Trudi was gone.  It should be clear that I respected Trudi and always felt a warmth from her, but my own reaction was a surprise to Sheri’s family and even to myself.  A room away from the woman who was moments earlier a family matriarch, I first heard she was gone from Ronnie, Sheri’s brother-in-law.  My immediate reaction was to explode in sincere, violent grief. I simply was not prepared to lose Trudi, who made my soul mate from her body, and was the closest creature to her physically and spiritually.  This was too ephemeral, like a cruel plot twist from a cheap novel for unjustified, random grief.  I realized Sheri was weeping quietly, and my own outburst may have seemed a bit over the top.  But I was caught off guard.  I wailed for Trudi and Sheri mostly, but it seemed that my world changed too, as Trudi would never be my mother-in-law, which I truly looked forward to for years to come.  Sheri seemed the calmest of everybody.  She had the presence of mind to want a lock of her mother’s hair.  Her insipid brother in law objected.  Ronnie was always the crowned prince of inappropriate comments and actions.  Whether it arose from his need to take a patriarchic role of if he was just a galloping horse’s ass, he would have done well to shut the fuck up, as Sheri collected the bit of hair that would be all she had left of a mother who really hadn’t emerged as such until Sheri’s thirties.

Chapter Six

Bad Things in Small Packages

Sheri and I were dog sitting for one of her friends.  The house was in a prestigious subdivision of a country club community where Sheri and her husband had built several mansions, sequentially.  More knowledgeable than any Realtor, Sheri guided me through the gates to a collection of neighborhoods where she had played in the tennis league and dined and partied at the country club.  I was genuinely impressed with her sophistication and familiarity of these things.  Nothing impressed or intimidated her in the least.  If Sheri had any regrets about having left this lifestyle, she didn’t show it.  She explained that there were dues for the main country club and security gates.  Dues for the secondary club within the main club.  Minimum restaurant tabs, required equity investments into the tennis or golf. Listening to her description of the privileged lifestyle, it wasn’t clear whether she was genuinely disdainful of the excesses that she had left behind or whether she had sour grapes of a paradise lost.

We were enjoying her girlfriend’s castle.  The woman had divorced a heart surgeon who hadn’t stopped at his prolific gift for cutting flesh.  He had leveraged his career as a cardiac surgeon, and built and sold a chain of outpatient diagnostic clinics where his physician friend steered their patients for expensive tests.  The talented man had built a financial empire.

Following years of hard work and constant devotion and focus to his work, Joyce divorced him, saying he was annoying, poorly endowed, likely gay… Anything that justified her failed marriage being David‘s fault.  I always tried to see the good in Sheri’s friends, but the best I could find in Joyce was humor, after plenty of vodka. I’m not sure it was Joyce’s intent to be funny, she just was. I think the funniness came from what I originally thought was mock stupidity. Over time I learned it wasn’t mock.  One of the dumbest women I have ever met, to this day made her fortune the old fashioned way… She divorced for it.

Sheri and I snuggled up to a fireplace during a rare Florida evening chill.  Everything was peaceful, and we felt close.  It was fun to play ‘big house’ again for a night, and I looked forward to picking out a bed later for us among ten or so bedrooms in the mansion to melt into each other.  Sheri’s phone rang, and she bolted upright.  “What? You’re having a guest? Daddy this is weird.  No of course I’m not telling you what to do.  No, no I understand. I wouldn’t come over without calling. Right. Yes. Emily who? Wait, I know that name!  She’s there now?  Sure, put her on.”  I watched Sheri as the conversation on the other end of the phone was passed to a woman.  “Your name is Emily? How long have you known my father?  Uh huh… Is your last name by any chance Madison?”  With this last question, Sheri’s face went white, and I could hear the other person ask “How did you know that?” There was disorder on the other end, and it disconnected.

Sheri hung up the phone and burst into tears.  “I can’t believe it, my father’s goddam mistress is back.  After all these years.”  Sheri explained that twenty years ago, when her father was doing research near New York City, he had a mistress that he kept in a pied de terre in Manhattan.  I had seen examples of Sheri’s nearly photographic memory before, and she was positive.  She explained that at one point in the early 1960’s Emily Madison sent a handwritten note to Sheri’s mother beseeching her to give up Alan, to let him go.  Sheri’s mother had been furious and tore up the fuscia colored stationary and confronted Alan.  He had given up his mistress in exchange for her quitting her own ‘diverson.’  It was the swinging 1960’s and Sheri’s eyes went opaque as she matter of factly said money ruined her life.  “When my father invented the Pacemaker, all that money made us rich overnight.  My parents were drinking, swinging, acting like they were trying to reclaim their teens.” I rarely saw Sheri cry, at least on the outside, but tears streamed down her face in conspiracy to our peaceful and romantic evening.  “Of all the floozies, it had to be her.  My mother’s body is barely cold and Emily Madison flies her broom into town.  Oh, I knew about her all right… Whenever my father returned from business trips he had gifts for me that I knew he hadn’t picked out himself.  Emily Madison…  This isn’t good…”

What happened next is an uncertainty to me these days.  All I recall for sure was that I said something to calm Sheri or reassure her.  What followed was an unexpected rage.  She was instantly screaming, telling me I didn’t know anything and that her life was ruined.  That her father had ruined her life, in a way that affected everything, who she picked for relationships, her self-esteem...  It got to the point where Sheri was violent, in my face, screaming and waving her hands around.  Instinctively seeking to de-escalate conflict and anger, I strode out of Joyce’s house and drove away.

I drove around in a daze, then my eyes fixed on Sheri’s favorite yogurt store.  I got her favorite dessert and headed back to Joyce’s mansion, anticipating a calmer lover. But her car was gone, and Joyce’s house was locked up.  That was the first weekend that Sheri cut me off from communication.

Next day, I drove to Sheri’s house.  It was a hot, humid Florida summer day, hell on earth. Through a window adjacent to the front door was a mirror mounted on the dining room wall.  In it, I could see a weary Sheri make her way out of her bedroom.  It was nearly 3:00 P.M.  “What do you want?” came from behind the front door.  “I want to see you, I don’t understand what happened to you last night?”

Sheri slowly opened the door just enough for me to see her, the darkened living room behind her.  “Come on” I chided, “It’s a hundred degrees out here, please let me in.  I waited for her to open the door fully, and I took a step forward, wrapped my arms around her.  She seemed limp. Where was the girl who kissed me so hard our teeth gnashed?

After what seemed like an eternity Sheri took my hand and led me into her dark bedroom. The morning, and most of the afternoon was spent.  It felt good to duck out of the heat, with its inescapable summer radiation and glaring, bleaching sunlight.  Sheri’s lair was cool and dark and inviting, with its blackout shades.  We slept the rest of the day away, and awoke sometime in the wee hours.  Sheri wanted to go somewhere for dinner.  An ex-patriot New Yorker, I was familiar with the concept of Thai food at all hours, but this was Boca Raton.  The sidewalks rolled up by 10 P.M. and there was no venue for dinner, save for the all-night Walmart. Sheri slid her feet along the tile to the kitchen, and returned with a smorgasbord of diverse foods.  There was a plate of egg rolls, some fresh fruit and breakfast cereal. It struck me how gifted she was at making a feast at a moment’s notice. After filling her bed with all sorts of crumbs we made love and went back to sleep.

The next day was Saturday, and I made sure to get Sheri awake by late morning.  “What’s the urgency?” she groggily demanded to know.  I explained that I was taking her to see her cousins, which earned me a quizzical look. Her surprise was a trip to the zoo. Dreher Park is not the Bronx Zoo, but it brought out a bit of the inner child that I longed to liberate. In particular, she loved the otters. They played and performed for her. The woman turned little girl and these fun loving creatures communed for what seemed like hours. There were big cats, in particular two Bengal tigers that really seemed to delight and awe my sweet, injured love.  Suddenly a distant, angry look took over her face. “That woman tried to break up my family, when I was only about seven years old.”  I didn’t have to ask, Sheri was fixated on Emily. The reappearance of this character was a foreboding, dreaded thing to Sheri.  We played some more at the zoo and had lunch.  I wanted so very much to restore a young girl’s innocence to a woman who was still mourning the sudden, shocking loss of a mother and the intrusion of a dreaded ghost from her past.

With the cat out of the bag, Alan Belgard invited Sheri and me to dinner the following day.  With a baffled look on her face, Sheri explained that Alan would roll out his mystery guest.  Alan’s story was a curious thing. Here was a man with an actual God complex, apparently compelled to explain himself or at least inform his daughter of upcoming changes and the facilitation of some sort of coming out party for his mystery person.  My inclusion in the invitation wasn’t a complete surprise, as I had become Alan’s sometime drinking buddy since his wife died, and Sheri once told me I was the only person she remembered successfully grabbing the check on Alan a time or two. I’ve always believed that a person’s willingness to pick up a meal tab reflects the value of their company to you.  It was different with Alan.  He was used to being the rich guy who always paid. I wanted him to see that his time shared with us was valuable to me, and that I loved his daughter.  It felt right to make Alan feel good in this small, sincere tribute.

The facts as told to Sheri on the phone were sketchy.  It was clear that Sheri’s recognition of the name, significance and even the color and scent of the former concubine’s love letter (from 20 years ago beseeching Alan to desert his family) were spot on.  So her father wafted with atypical nervousness between a hooker from Vegas that friends had orchestrated to ease his pain during mourning (honestly now) to an admission that this was, in fact the long term mistress that Sheri clearly recalled as a young, precocious girl.

Next evening the four of us met at Tempura House, at a long Hibachi table.  Emily was a seriously short woman under 5 feet tall, dressed in all black, including a highly glossy black sheen wig that was cut with bangs to be consistent with Asian features.  The overall effect of the little troll was ridiculous, especially when she and Alan were standing.  Alan introduced the woman awkwardly as his “China Doll.” One must understand that even Sheri had seen her mother only alongside her tall, handsome father, Trudi Belgard by his side.  The effect had not been unlike Fred and Ginger.  Even at advanced age, the couple had struck an imposing silhouette, lean and tall, with a natural grace about them, not a trace of self-consciousness or conceit.

Now, with this near midget at his side, the entire dynamic was confusing, unbalanced, and lacking any sense of realism. It is possible that either Sheri or I, or both of us actually stood with jaws agape over this strange situation.  In any case, after the introductions, we took our seats, and before Sheri or I knew what was happening, Emily produced some papers.  The odd little woman explained that this was a contract with specific time intervals that held me to conduct milestones which would essentially take me off Alan’s (and Emily’s) financial responsibility.  Emily had blown into town like an errant tumbleweed from the deserts of Las Vegas, in perfect timing and synchronicity, to Trudi Belgard’s death.  The moment was an unreal combination of bad taste, poor manners, transparent motive and just plain low class to Sheri and me.  It would be difficult to look back to Alan’s reaction.  First, he was likely clued into Emily’s plan ahead of time, and a rather severe example of Asberger’s syndrome, would’ve been oblivious regardless.  Sheri was appalled.  White with mortification, silent and incredulous, I felt worse for her than anyone.  In any case my reaction was to laugh out loud at the self-appointed new matriarch.  I shook my head, smiled indulgently and asked Emily if she was familiar with the menu and the unique appetizers the kitchen offered.  This infuriated the diminutive conspirator, and she persisted. Even before there were drinks (water?) on the table Emily reverted to her proudly double spaced layman’s contract, and I indulgently smiled and once again ignored, opening my menu. This set Emily on the following diatribe:

“Look, Brian, you’re a reasonably nice looking guy, you run your own business, is that correct?”  I nodded while turning the pages of the menu, which if she had any sense, would have followed suit.  “You have been seeing Sheri for several months and we’d like to know what your intentions are.”

With this, I assured Emily that my intentions were to skip any alcohol, since I’d be driving my beloved Sheri home.  Next, I recommended the shrimp at this place, which Sheri and I enjoyed.  Now the crazed little Napoleon in heels became truly unwrapped and restated “I see you’ve been an item with Sheri for some time now, here is a contract that specifies dates when certain things happen; your divorce from your current wife, your putting Sheri on your Real Estate deed for primary residence and homestead, and some pre-nuptial details.”  With this persistence, I stood to my feet, and stuck my hand out to Alan.  I couldn’t feel the depth of his recent loss, but I had felt privileged in providing a shoulder to rest a drink on, even as I struggled not to break down myself, such was this tragedy.  Now I found myself faced with an obviously money-addled, self-serving interloper of immediately suspect character, upbringing and tact.  I took Alan’s hand and politely excused myself ‘goodnight,’ I extended my other hand to Sheri, and she left with me, hopefully to give Alan an opportunity to kick his tactless concubine in the ass.  She had certainly intended to take the bull by the horns, demonstrate her intelligence and strength to Alan regarding family matters, and seize the situation directly.  To my reckoning it seems she simply got the horns, while signifying the beginning of the end, for me, and certainly for Sheri and her sister Missy, who lived their lives since girlhood with the assurance of their mother that they would be heiresses.

Beginning with her name itself, Emily “Madison” was a pseudonym.  Like Holly Go Lightly in a fanciful moment, this woman, drifting in and out of reality, seized her very New York moniker from a street sign in Manhattan.  It was later further embellished to Amalia Sherman Belgard. Problem being, Emily was herself still married to Ken Sherman, an action which legally documented her legal name as ‘Emily Sherman.’  Ken, a genuinely nice guy, had lived his own days of wine and roses, when his exploits as a businessman, professor and other endeavors earned him some wealth.  But a woman such as Emily Malzer can and did run a good man like ken, the salt of the earth, into the pavement, which is exactly what she did financially, morally, and in terms as basic as his health.  At the time when her daily perusal of the obituaries revealed Trudi’s demise, there was little or no internal conflict for Emily Malzer to divorce her husband of 30 years while he was in chemotherapy, for a more lucrative opportunity.   I honestly believe that man must have been relieved.

She had fancifully, conveniently recalled that upon their betrothal, an understanding was mutually agreed upon that should Alan Belgard, her first true love (and conveniently perpetually wealthy one) should ever become available again, husband Ken would acquiesce to her leaving him to pursue her one true love, money, er ah, Alan.  More horseshit than you’d get tailgaiting a NY Hansom cab.

Well the little Napolean was not accustomed to being treated (ignored) this way, and my failure to take her seriously saw this angry dwarf launch a vendetta against me.  Who could take this little toad seriously? Had she ever met a payroll, or created employment opportunity for others, or very simply put, ever lifted a finger to help another human being besides herself?  I could not bring myself to take her as anything but the only other woman Alan had any experience with than his wife of many years.  However, the differences in physical, spiritual and moral antithesis of Sheri’s mother and this thing from hell, could not have been greater. 

Sadly Alan took the bait; rather than endure the natural course of grief and loss, distracted himself with the only other female he had likely known intimately.  Here was the last trump card of a once petit, now roly-poly woman, struggling to keep her voice in the female range. And the match was perfect.  Alan was her last long-shot and he bought into it, lock stock and barrel. As I have stated the real casualties were Alan’s blood daughters, and his grandchildren.  To reward a woman who deserts a sick husband in favor of a limitless shopping budget should never have been given priority over Alan and Trudi’s own progeny.  To subrogate his daughters critical needs should never have been been Alan’s oversight.  And all Sheri could do was watch it happen…

The day after our ill-fated dinner introduction, Sheri received a phone call from the “midget mushroom,” a nickname she was given for her appearance in a wide brimmed hat, which with her rotund bandy squat build, made for an uncanny tag.  I could hear Emily’s voice raised to a fever pitch, screaming at Sheri.  She didn’t take a breath to allow a response. Hearing the tone and specific verbiage suggested more abuse than communication. I beseeched Sheri to “hand the Midget Mushroom her ass.”

With Emily, Sheri’s conversation, and the escalating, unreasonable tone she was met with, was clearly not productive.  So at some point I instructed Sheri to brush Emily back, or otherwise draw boundaries for herself.  Being Emily’s punching bag would serve no one. 

But that phone call terminated without any resolution, with Alan calling Sheri back instead.  He was all business. The man had clearly misplaced his testicles, because what I overheard was “It’s me and Emily from now on, and you’re either with me or against me.  “Do you know what that means, Sheri? It means you’re out of the will if you don’t play nice to Emily.  You are to be friends with her or else!”  Sheri hung up the phone, equally betrayed by her father and my own well-meaning advice to her.  It never, ever occurred to me that a devoted daughter, Sheri has would be so easily sabotaged by a bag of shit like Emily.  It was impossible to regard Alan or his concubine as sane adults since that day.  He is the original Asberger syndrome engineer with no mechanism for humanity, not a speck of normal remorse over something Sheri confided in me from our earliest time together in 1975 and on a very regular basis through the years of 2001 and my 54^th birthday in 2013, when we still were in each other’s hearts.

The next indignity regarding Emily Malzer Sherman was the creation of Emily Malzer Sherman Belgard.  Sheri and I were out at dinner one night when she answered her phone.  It was her father, soliciting congratulations on his elopement with Emily.  Sheri was inconsolable, we could practically still hear the echo of her mother’s voice.

Alan was an abuser.  I was startled by Sheri’s accusations, which became more frequent over time, but no more profound than the first time she had steered conversation there at The Breakers, some several decades earlier.  Maybe I had missed it then, or she had merely passed innuendo.  Maybe it was truly incomprehensible to me at fifteen years of age.  It wasn’t much easier to hear the allegations now, even through adult ears that have heard the horrors of neglect and sickness.  After all, this was the Great Man, whose work prolonged my own father’s life, and so many more.  Sheri explained to me that her mother had been in love with Alan’s best friend, and it was likely that she had been the product of their affair.  That Sheri’s own blood type matched neither Trudi’s nor Alan’s… That on her deathbed, Sheri’s mother had something important to tell her, but that her father had callously ushered daughter away from mother at a moment that may have been as profound as the one when she was birthed…Or conceived…

This was heady stuff, and even though her intelligence was undeniable, I had never known a daughter who had actually been molested by her own father.  I didn’t want to believe her, even though she made a strong case.  I stayed quiet, and guilty for the faulty advice I had given.  Apparently, this family played by a different set of rules than any I had met.

Chapter 7

We Are What We Do

Sheri was introduced to the owner of a psychotherapy group.  More of an administrator and insurance biller than practitioner, George’s Doctorate was in World History, not Health Sciences or Mental Health. Yet he served as a landlord a la mode to a real psychiatrist (think prescribe) and four or five therapist/psychologists at any given time.

Sheri’s friend Joyce had worked for George over the past couple of years while working on a counseling degree.  Sheri came in part time to answer phones, do light filing, and schedule appointments. 

In a very short time she was doing more, much more.  Where did Sheri get such an amazing grasp of pharmacology, especially in psychotropic compounds?  She knew about generalized anxiety, and psychosis, and… Borderline Personality Disorder.  Like the young George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” she even saved the shrink from his own errors, like dangerous drug interactions.  In a short time, Sheri was literally running the place.  She had a depth of empathy for the patients who came in, some whose existence itself was excruciatingly painful.  She calmed the anxious, and taught them tricks to conquer panic, and when George, ever the miser wasn’t looking, gave expensive doctor’s samples to schizophrenic patients who could not otherwise afford to stop the bad voices.  Sheri had found her calling and she put all of herself into it.  Although her hours were to have been 10 to 2, I’d visit her there at SouthCoast any time I was near between 9 and 6. 

When I expressed my awe to Sheri she explained that some of her knowledge had come from close to home, or actually from home itself.  She opened up to me all about her son Adam, and the range of issues that she had dealt with in order to keep him in schools, which were sometimes alternative and always private. The more severe side of Adam’s issues had perhaps been inherited from his father Jack.  The dreaded cyclothymia that began when he was a young teen might one day become full blown bipolar disorder like Jack’s.  They both had the odd habit of pulling hair out of the front of their scalps, for instance, Trichotillomania.  Who ever heard of such things?  Sheri was never far from her DSM-IV, the diagnostic book used at that time by psychiatrists.  Something was playing out here, more than I understood initially.  Everywhere I looked, Sheri pointed out psychological dysfunction, its names and characteristics.  Luckily, Adam never became violent with anyone but himself, but I began to sleep more lightly.

My visits to see Sheri at SouthCoast were to drop off flowers, and even leave my scent, as all of the patients fell in love with her, some of them quite literally.  But over time, my reason for seeing her there was because of the fights we’d had at home. 

The first ‘incident’ found me standing outside Sheri’s house front door, locked out in my underpants.  I had no idea what I said or done, it was that fast.  And there I was, yelling through a locked door for my car keys or pants, either would do nicely, thank you.  But Sheri’s episodic anger became more intense and unpredictable.  Going to SouthCoast Psychiatric was a sure way to win her back.  I’d go there to cajole her because she was too professional to make a scene there.  So I’d do my best Tom Cruise and exploit the smile my parents straightened for me, just to touch her hand and beg her forgiveness for whatever I had done, most of the time honestly not knowing what that was.  George begrudgingly put up with my frequent intrusions thanks to my computer repair skills. I became the unofficial technology officer for SouthCoast in exchange for liberal access to my love when she had locked me out of the house. 

When Sheri had a really serious episode, I went to my house.  It made sense.  While I belonged to Sheri, I had a house of my own, and a daughter who deserved more than a part time father.  It just made sense to me that the times her PMS was misaligned with the planets, I’d do double duty by showing up at my homestead.  Liz had accepted our different definitions of marriage by then.  I am only now learning how much pain I caused, but I still maintain that she’d never need me the way I needed Sheri, or that I thought Sheri needed me. 

This set up a cycle of Sheri being madder still at me for going to my house; never mind that it needed landscaping, and maintenance, and all the things houses need.  Sheri always turned it into a Liz issue, that I had gone to my house to spend time with my wife.  This wasn’t true, yet I never understood why Liz was so accommodating, when I would’ve expected everything I owned to be on the front lawn.  I was, after all, being a selfish asshole.  But by now I was chemically bonded to Sheri, her smell, touch, the sound of her voice, when it was ever less frequently sweet and seductive.  Liz knew something I didn’t, that something was unfolding, that, as she put it, “This will fall off by itself.”

“Cause and effect, cause and effect,” Sheri would say.  “I get this way because of what you do.  Actions speak louder than words.”  Alternately I was her knight in shining armor.  “You saved me.  You saved me from a miserable marriage and a life that I’d given up on.  I seriously think I would have committed suicide by now if not for the kids and if you had not rescued me.”  Wow, did I feel important.  I had never thought of myself in this way, and my power to make her happy was intoxicating, as was her love.  Sheri did not bore me.  On the other hand, if she was cross with me, I was the devil incarnate. She called me evil, and selfish (guilty on that one) and much worse things… Oh, and she called me one particular thing more and more often.  She started referring to me as a ‘borderline.’  She used the word as a descriptor when calling me other names, and as a noun all its own.

Once, during a parting of a couple of days, I called Sheri on the phone to begin the cycle of her forgiveness that would lead to ultimate make up thrill.  I do not mean make-up sex, although that may have been at the center of it.  The thrill of her taking me back, sometimes after locking me out of her life for weeks at a time, when I was sure I’d lost her forever.  The jealous scenarios my mind created, with liberal help from her taunts… On this particular evening our timing was still off, and she let me have a barrage of criticism and verbal abuse.  Of course, when I hung up the phone I saw myself exactly the way she had just described me.  And then it hit me.  The biggest light bulb went off in my head, just as I turned off my living room light to sleep on my couch.  I called her back. “Sheri how old were you when they diagnosed you with Borderline Personality Disorder?”  Silence on the other end replaced the tirade.  “You, you don’t know what you’re talking about!”  It was true, I really didn’t, in terms of what it meant clinically, I only knew that Sheri had been leaving me a gingerbread trail for a long time to lead to this sort of warning.  “This is great” I said, “Now that we know what the devil is that we’re fighting, we can beat him together.”  A long pause and a deep sigh later, she explained that I had no idea the depths of hell that the disorder put her in, and that she had tried to confront the cause of what was essentially PTSD years ago, in regressive therapy hypnosis.  She had stopped short, jumped out of the chair and run away each time, before seeing her attacker’s face.  I was confused.  “Can I just come over and hold you and we’ll talk about it?” I was on the floor crying like a child, “Our common adversary was right in our sights,” I told her.  “Besides, there’s no air without you.”

 
After rushing to her house at 3 am I fell into Sheri’s arms.  If she hadn’t held me I swear I would have fallen over.  As the desperate lover famished for his woman, or the child into his mother’s arms. I just knew I needed her.  We held each other that night (morning) and of course slept all the next day.

Our cycles of conflict/anger, followed by separation were ever increasing oscillations of time and intensity.  When we awoke from that most recent reunion, Sheri said “This won’t happen anymore, I won’t get that angry with you anymore.”  I squinted at this statement, relieved and a little confused.  “I just don’t love you that much anymore, so it won’t happen again.”  And so the new day started.

But of course it did happen again, over many, many cycles.  One attempt at reconciliation came after a couple of weeks of separation.  First I rushed to her house where we had arranged to meet.  When I got there her car was gone?  She phoned me to say we should meet at a restaurant, which we finally did.  It was so good to see her again, but she didn’t want her daughter to see that we were coming together again, so she suggested a hotel room.  She followed in her car for a mile or so, then veered off to disappear.  The next day she told me she had been cutting herself with a razor blade and did not want me to see the marks on her arms and legs.

Chapter Eight

The Cold Shoulder

What comes first, the chicken or the egg?  I was walking on eggshells, and I didn’t like it, so I drew my own emotional boundaries.  I found myself walking away as often as Sheri was throwing me out of her house.  I would be relieved to get to my own home, better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven?  Then my own ‘missing Sheri’ clock would start ticking down. While she could go for up to two weeks, I was almost invariably the one to begin breaking down after about 48 hours, and seriously needy of her at the 3 day mark.  72 hours found me on all fours on her front porch wallowing in a puddle of my own tears.

What was wrong with me? I’d no sooner get back in her good graces than I’d ask myself “Why did I come back?”  She was ever more controlling, critical and abusive, and I was convinced of a sort of duality.  I was hopelessly attracted to her in so many ways, truly addicted, yet the rational side of logic forced me to reckon with the fact that we were unable to put two good solid weeks of harmony together.

People who love each other should make each other’s lives better, not worse, right?

With that sound logic in mind, I made the fateful decision to spend time with my other loves, my daughter and The Mountains.  A former ski instructor of 15 seasons in my youth, I couldn’t say no when Liz craftily booked ski trips.  Liz would leave the brochure around for me to find during a Sheri breakup.  Sheri had actually thrown me out of her house, I wasn’t going to pout with three feet of fresh powder in Vail and a seriously talented daughter on a snowboard.  Problem was, Liz put it all together, and she got a charge out of the torment that caused Sheri.  After much vacillation, my decision to go get on that plane was in all fairness in tandem with a resolute breakup.  This was not something I expected Sheri to accept or understand, and I didn’t care… Until the moment the airplane began taxi for takeoff.  It was not until that moment, stupid as it sounds, and is, that I realized I had made the most terrible mistake, even if it was motivated by my desire to ski and spend time with my daughter, not Liz, who sat in the third seat nevertheless, and probably paid for the trip.

Realistically, Sheri doesn’t travel well.  Oh, how she flew to anger when I said that.  But she is loaded with phobias about travel.  We had tried a short trip or two, but she is bonkers crazy, definitely at her worst away from familiar surroundings.  So it was that I rationalized my right; my need to ski as a personal requirement.  That went fine once I clicked into my ski bindings at Vail or Steamboat or Crested Butte.  As the late day light grew grayer, and the lifts closed for the day, I spent my nights on the phone with Sheri apologizing, pleading, and listening to terrible threats of infidelity from her.  On paper it reads terribly for me; going on a ski trip with my wife, and expecting to keep my girlfriend.  But the truth is I didn’t have a platonic relationship with Liz, I had none.  I didn’t even particularly like to ski with her.  That’s the truth of the matter, but guilt about not creating memories with my daughter and sheer selfishness of wanting to ski, which Sheri will never do, found me taking the high road. 

Once, the shoe was on the other foot.  Sheri’s son Adam had been sent to Utah wilderness camp for some sort of rehab.  Both parents were required to attend his graduation, and to participate in workshops to ensure his success once back home.  Here I was back at Sheri’s house, living with her (after being forgiven for skiing with Liz there).  Fine, let Jack and Sheri go to Moab, Utah for the ceremonies or whatever.  The problem was, Sheri swore she couldn’t fly without me due to extreme phobias, nor travel with Jack under any circumstances unless I was there to provide comfort and maybe even safety.  Jack did have a history of physical violence towards her.  It certainly was an empowering compliment to me that I was so needed, so off I went, on the Polsky (her married name) vacation from hell.  I traveled with Sheri, Jack and their daughter Taryn, who was as nervous a traveler as Sheri (hmm, nature or nurture)?

That was the worst long weekend of my life, and definitely the weirdest.  Here I was sharing a bed at the motel with Sheri, and Jack sleeping next door in another room.  I had no transportation, as during the day the family (myself excluded) went to the wilderness camp for all day activities.  At one point, we all ended up together at a waterpark together.  It was kind of fun but I felt like the au pair in a dysfunctional outing.

I was willing to go outside the box to make up for ski trips, which to my credit I also made alone. 

Sheri was actually grateful after the Utah trip, and that meant Adam’s return to Boca to live with Sheri and me.  As hard as I tried to be a friend to her kids, never having had illusions of playing stepfather, I was at best tolerated.  The bottom line was that master bedroom door closed at night and it wasn’t their Dad on the other side of it. Well, they were both teens, and in hindsight (no pun) maybe I was in my underwear too much of the time.  But living with Sheri meant sleeping.  Lots of sleeping.  She was chronically anemic, as she still had full periods in her fifties!  However the dysfunctional amount of blood loss was due to a giant uterine benign tumor, a fibroid cyst.  She also had occasional seizures, occasionally in her sleep.  At this point you must be wondering what was so attractive about this ‘three legged dog.’

Suffice to say when I took Sheri to an Aerosmith show, she got catty looks from twenty-somethings!

She knew how to put it together and had a face that makes me wish this book was illustrated.  Or as I occasionally told her, “guys like me don’t get girls like Sheri Belgard.”

I have never seen a better pair of legs on any woman of any age, skin like a baby’s.  I always wanted her.

I still want her.

Chapter Nine

The Quiet Year

Sheri and I were in fight/separation number 384 or 385, I’m not sure, when I was stung by dozens of fire ants.  I went into anaphylactic shock and was hospitalized.  I needed Cheri badly and convinced her to come to the hospital.  She arrived and got in the tiny bed with me, until I was ready to be released the next day.  Then she drove me to her house and put me to bed.  Sheri could be the world’s best nurse and caregiver.  She had all the right skills and instincts and my favorite foods and treats just seemed to materialize out of nowhere.  And then she said it.  Something about Liz having been at the hospital earlier, or whatever it was, I don’t remember clearly, only that it was accusatory in tone.  By this time I had learned to establish boundaries.  In reaction to what I perceived she was probing for or trying to manipulate out of me, I got up without a word and began to dress.  “Don’t, no Brian you can’t just leave, it’s100 degrees out there and…”  Too late, I was up and out. Cheri hadn’t made any full-fledged attempt to stop me.  I called Liz after walking about a half mile, and she picked me up and drove the other ten miles to our house in silence.  

The next day I went to Sheri’s house to gather up my things, as I had so many times, only to find the front door locked.  I had already pulled the entire double hung casing out in a rage once, so elected instead to try the back slider.  It was open, and Sheri was… where else, but in bed, in the dark.  I went in the bathroom to get my razor, a pair of contact lenses and other symbolic but otherwise worthless items. I had left my phone charger under my side of the bed, and was on my hands and knees searching for it under the bed and nightstand.  Sheri said “get out, you’re trespassing!” and swiped at my eyeglasses, which she destroyed.  Damn, I had gotten such fast reaction times over the years, after about a dozen frames had met a similar end.  Must’ve still had some ant venom in me.  Well she followed that eyeglass oblivion with swiping and punching blows to my head and face, as she had a hundred times before.  I’ve never ever hit Sheri or hurt her physically despite more blows from her than I can count.  While still kneeling I was trying to right myself, and stand up.  It was clearly time to leave.  But she kept me off balance, pushing and punching.  From my hands and knees I pushed her back with one hand to create space between us and she stumbled back into the wall.  I’ll never forget the look she gave me.  It was surprise, mostly, with betrayal and defeated rage.  I left the house and went home.  

The next day I came back, why? Why would a sane man go back? I think I meant to apologize or make up or… Well, no cars were in the driveway and suddenly daughter Taryn drove up to my car really fast and aggressively like she meant to ram me.  From the passenger seat Sheri said, “I just got staples in my head from you.  Today’s the day you’re getting arrested.”  I was in shock.  I had no idea that she had been hurt.  When I pushed her back (while on my knees trying to escape) she must’ve hit the corner of the sheetrock where the closet is built out, just next to the bed.  I just looked at her in disbelief and went home.  I had done fine ducking and running from her rages all these years, and now I was responsible for her being injured? I felt sick.  I got sick.  For two days straight.

And then the process server came.  Sheri was already responsible for online mug shots and permanent criminal records for both her son and her husband.   She had never divorced Jack, all the while demanding that I divorce, sell my house and displace my daughter.  This was insanity.

Like all white trash eventually does, I found myself in front of a judge. I plead no contest rather than indulge the free legal aid advocate she brought with her to court.  Whew, at least no mug shot!

I was now the respondent in a dating violence case, with a one year injunction for no contact.  At that point it seemed like a good idea.  A bridge was crossed that we couldn’t come back from.

I honestly don’t remember much about that year.  It’s like a blackout to me. But it was a short year, only about nine months, before she contacted me. She had quit working.  Her health issues were overwhelming.

Chapter Ten

Forever

Cheri’s fibroid tumor had caused her recent periods to keep her at dangerously anemic low iron levels.  Friends, family and the doctors all campaigned for her to get this fixed, by way of a now mandatory hysterectomy.

First things first, Sheri needed a uterine biopsy, and refused to have the procedure done unless I held her hand in the doctor’s office.  Sound familiar? Do you think I’d fall for that again?  Of course I did.  One more chance to be her knight in armor and to vindicate myself from the tragic, unintended violence that I carry like Atlas every day.

So I did it, I took her to the doctor, and held her hand while he unceremoniously tore out a small piece of her uterus for the lab.  Sheri thanked me and assured that she never could’ve gone through with that without me, even though her best friend had the same procedure a year earlier.

We started dating again.  I had some life-threatening problems of my own, from botched spinal surgery, and Sheri took me to specialists in Miami. Travel phobic as she was, she drove me to Miami to find out if I’d be well.  Sheri had a new pressure, the house was put up for sale.  Emily Belgard thought it was too much house for Sheri and put it on the market, promising to get Sheri something “more manageable.”

We got to make love a few more times before the hysterectomy.  And then it was done.  A robotic radical full hysterectomy took sheri’s uterus, so there’d be no more bleeding, ever.  They also took her ovaries and her cervix and God knows what else.  Her cervix.  I used to call it her little octopus beak because she could actually articulate her cervix aided by a tipped uterus.  The surgical scars were crude and unshapely, and Sheri was upset with them. I pretended I couldn’t find them. I had accompanied her twice more to the surgeon, and after six weeks of waiting, we were given a go ahead to have sex. It was scary and a bit awkward, and all I could think of was never wanting to hurt her again, I was overcautious. Did she think me less than passionate? Half of her was numb. I couldn’t make her feel the way I made her feel before.  I realized then that my greatest joy was gone, my ability to make her feel.  The whole time I felt something strange.  It was sutures that had not dissolved.  She was needlessly embarrassed… Our intimacy had become a wretched science project.  

Sheri called herself as a eunich or a tranny, and said she wasn’t a woman anymore.  I reminded that she would always be all the woman I’d ever need, and then some.  Part of me thought that just a little bit less woman would be a good thing. ..

I was never one to set a timer on our lovemaking and I made foreplay to her endlessly.  I’d like to think of it as love giving rather than foreplay actually, because I was driven to do that by love. I could feel her frustration at not feeling anything, and I think that’s when I realized I was no longer useful to her.   

This September marked twelve years since we found each other, or more accurately since Sheri called me.  The 24th was my night and Sheri assured me that she was taking me out for my birthday, which she did.  She picked me up looking foxy as ever, and took me to our favorite big bucks lobster place.  For some reason, Sheri was fishing me for compliments on her hair, which I had noticed, and for the man’s fedora she wore.  During the course of dinner she asked me repeatedly if I thought the thirty something waiter was hitting on her.  He had been complimentary to my pretty date, but also proudly showed us pictures of his kids and his wife. She ran her fingers through my hair, which I had spiked for the evening.  She remarked that I should always wear my hair that way.  It sounded more like advice than a compliment.  After dinner we drove back towards my house, where she had picked me up at a supermarket parking lot.  We made love in the car, actually she made love to me in a one-sided way.  In the very same parking lot Sheri once made me walk back to her car a couple of dozen times after saying goodnight.  I was like powerless when she did me like that.  We had played like teens in love at this very place.  Tonight there were no long goodbyes though.  Her son Adam had just returned home from a year in Thailand, and Sheri explained to me that it would be a lot of news for him, since last he had heard we were not seeing each other.  I kissed her sweetly and left her car, waving to bid goodnight.  Then it hit me that Sheri had been hiding me for the past five months.  I was still a pariah with her friends and family, and even though I was in her bed the day before, we used the back door to enter and leave her house.  It had never occurred to me that what I thought was her caution for my working my way back to her gently was something else. 

The next morning I texted Sheri thank you for my birthday, and asked if I could return the favor tonight.  She told me she had some plans with the girls, her friend Leanne’s birthday.  The rest of that day she was unreachable.  When I finally got her on the phone that night, I could tell with 100 percent certainty for the first time ever in 12 years that she was lying to me.  A call to Leanne confirmed that her birthday wasn’t for another several months.  The next two days, nothing; Sheri would not answer a text, nor pick up my calls.

I went over there and a strange car was in the driveway. I heard a male voice in her bedroom with her as I was about to use the back slider.  I turned and walked away, and went home.  The same car was in the drive way all night the next several nights.  I’m no stalker but I didn’t understand what had happened.  The next day I crashed my motorcycle.  30 years of street riding in one piece, and now 

I’m on the mend, with broken ribs and a lot of road rash.  You could say I haven’t been myself lately.  The greater problem seems to be that I don’t seem to be anyone at all.

One of the few friends of Sheri’s who stayed in contact with me confirmed that she had met someone through an online dating site.  She likes him very much and the way he treats her, and “very much likes being with him.”  If she heard about my bike accident, there was no acknowledgment.  This was in stark contrast to the urgency of hospital visits we made to each other over years of occasional illnesses and accidents.  Whether we were together or in a row, when Taryn had always alerted me when The Devils had taken some of her mother’s flesh, presumably because I never gave them their book? The more plausible reason was the Lupus that nipped at Sheri’s heels all her life.  But nothing ever slowed me to her bedside.  

I think back on the iron infusion sessions, when Sheri received her treatments alongside Chemotherapy patients through a big catheter in her arm.  She never complained, impervious to physical pain. The thought of her ever being in such peril had made for an embarrassingly maudlin moment on one such day, when the very thought put me in silent tears as I sat beside her watching the fluid run down into her vein.  She saw humor in my drama.  You just never knew what would draw Sheri Belgard’s amusement. 

So many hospital visits… For her parents and mine….  Then the Funerals and friends’ new babies and Goodbyes to three dogs that had outlived their bodies over these 12 years. 

I didn’t want to be confrontational, given our past, so I stayed away from the house where I had lived on and off for a dozen years. It wasn’t mine, hell it wasn’t even hers, despite her father’s promise.  

But still, Sheri would not take a call. As I had desperately responded to her silent treatment a hundred times before, I sent hundreds of texts and emails, alternately begging, then cursing her, and pleading for mere communication.  Between my physical injuries and the sudden cut-off without closure, I lost track of how many of those one-sided text messages and emails I sent over that week.  But they were read aloud in court, entered into evidence in a request for continuance of the injunction that she had obtained against me and herself broken in April. This time the judge made it permanent.  

My great regret is that maneuvered or not, the terrible things I said to deaf, unanswered voicemail and wrote in emails.  While Sheri might say, “cause and effect, cause and effect…”  I remain accountable for what I did, and the heavy burden for the hurtful payload to both of us and others.  If I could take back those angry words and absorb my hurt like a man, I would gladly do it that way.  Because I loved her.

That was three months ago.  Despite my best interests in self-preservation, I rode by the house the other day, and was excited not to see my replacement’s car there.  Maybe it was just something she had to go through, to see if she could feel with someone else? Who could blame the girl after years of my testing ways?  I could have gotten sober earlier than I did, and divorced my wife and sold my house, and understood her better…  I could have rescued her.

I walked up to the back slider doors with high hopes, as the Realtor sign was gone.  Maybe her father and Emily had backed off?  My optimism was crushed when I looked through the glass doors to see that the house was empty.  The grand piano, the bed that I had so many loving nights & days and sleeps and even meals in…To my surprise, the door was unlocked.  I walked from room to room and back again, incredulous to the fact that a home where I once lived with Sheri and Taryn and Adam and dogs was just empty floors and walls, open cabinets and drawers, all starkly revealed by midday Florida sunlight invading from every angle.  Sheri’s beloved blackout shades were gone, as were all the window treatments.  The little fourth bedroom that had been Sheri’s requirement when house shopping had been for my own daughter’s visits.  It was stripped as bare as my soul… This felt like visiting the body of a friend at the morgue.

Not so much as a mirror on a wall or a towel rack remained.  Ah, but there was the shower seat, the kind that old people use, still in the shower stall. One leg was hopelessly bent one day in 2001 when Sheri and I made love and squashed it under our crazy passions.  The place was otherwise surgically empty, save for something shiny in the corner bathroom cabinet under the sink.  It was my old razor.

A funny thing happens when northerners move to Florida as a permanent home.  What once seemed like a subtropical dream yields to a reality of traffic jams.  The warmth and sunshine that welcome winter vacationers makes a wool business suit implacably hot.  There’s taxes and bills and crime like anywhere else. ..

I have visited The Breakers many times, mostly for business functions and seminars.  A place built on tradition and consistency, the North and South wings and the old tapestries and wicker furniture seem unchanged over decades.  

The weekend brunch is still a spectacular event.  To stay within her great gates, and to love under her spires is to know privilege. Returning half a lifetime later still brings familiar sights, echoes and smells, but the old jukebox is gone.

Oh Black, water, keep on rollin’

  Mississippi  moon wontcha keep on shinin’ on me.

Keep on shinin’ your light.

Gonna make everything, pretty mama gonna make everything allright…