Monday, November 29, 2010

In Which the Humble Protagonist Introduces the Tale

Let's just call me Carnita. "Little meat." This is my story.

Three nights ago, I found myself naked in a heart-shaped jacuzzi tub with my husband's best friend. This is where I will begin. It is no more the beginning than anything else that has ever happened to me, yet it is hardly an arbitrary place to start. Slowly and over time, the background will fill itself in, but one must start a story somewhere. Now that you know the beginning, let's go further back again to acquaint you with the setting and the characters. First things first, right?

I am the protagonist. A mid-twenties post-secondary English teacher. Inveterate abuser of fragments. Wife of almost exactly one year to a man who we will call Simon. I've always thought that Simon was a sexy name, and it is sufficiently evocative of my wonderful husband's geeky personality. We were engaged for less than three weeks before we got married in a civil ceremony, which was attended only by our immediate family, last November. We currently live in a small city in the Southeastern Appalachian Mountains, where I teach and Simon manages an office. I dabble in writing, photography, and visual art, and I am passionately obsessed with my practice of Tae Kwon Do; Simon is an exceedingly talented musician and graphic designer. He hopes to start a freelance business next year. We love each other ferociously, but we are still occasionally a bit surprised and challenged by our choice to get married. This conundrum of the contemporary institution of marriage is a lot of what Carnal Porridge is about: helping myself to figure out what marriage means to me, and equally importantly, disentangling my meaning from that which is inscribed by the social fabric.

Socioeconomic stats follow. Simon and I come from middle class backgrounds, and both of us have the good fortune of having two parents who are still (relatively) happily married. I am the only child of a bookish nurse whose father was a well-respected doctor, and a rough-and-tumble mechanic who grew up farming tobacco. They are an odd couple in many ways--namely, education and cultural background--but I can usually bring myself to understand why my mother chose my father. Simon's parents are more obviously matched; both teachers, they can often be observed sitting together in their thoroughly middle-American, picket-fenced suburban home listening to NPR, reading popular multicultural fiction, or good-naturedly mocking Republican politicians.

I am a college graduate, but Simon is an incorrigible autodidact who has dropped out of college three times out of sheer boredom with the glacial pace of learning in a classroom environment. We met during his first tour in academia eight years ago, and we dated very casually for a few months before he dropped out and moved back to his home town. We tried to stay in touch for a year or so, but soon lost contact for over five years. I am sure that I will get around to explaining some of the growing and learning that I did in that interim.

For brevity's sake, though, I will jump to two years ago, to the part where he found me on Facebook and contacted me. My heart did some sickening backflips when I saw his face in his profile photo since I had never stopped thinking of him, wondering what might have happened between us if he had stayed on at the university. Several months earlier, I had dragged myself out of a mildly abusive relationship with a man we will call Damon, a relentless stalker and skilled psychological terrorist. This state of affairs resulted, among other things, in my particular interest in men who seemed "safe," without even a touch of the type of psychosis I had finally learned not to allow to hypnotize me. I remembered Simon quite accurately as a man of deep integrity and conscience, a high level of social- and self-consciousness, and a rigorous and considered respect for women. What had happened with Damon would never, ever happen with Simon.

Simon came to visit me the very next weekend, and we knew almost immediately that what was growing between us was a special thing. For some months, one of us drove to the other's city to visit every weekend until we grew sick of this arrangement. Soon I decided to leave my job as a high school teacher, and I moved to be with him. We married halfway through the year that I spent in this strange city where I knew no one. Although I was overjoyed to have found and sufficiently captivated the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, being as extremely place-sensitive as I am, I was not happy with our living situation. Simon needed a more receptive musical community to pursue his interest in the avant-garde. So we packed up our new dog and all of our things and moved back to my little "teacup in the mountains," as a friend once called this place.

That was back in July. After some trial and error with living arrangements, we rented a darling little house in a perfect neighborhood. We found good jobs and picked up a roommate, who will hereafter be called Harvey. We settled into a pleasantly repetitive life here.

This brings us up to the bare minimum amount of context I must provide to begin at my chosen point:

A steamy bathroom. A cold night. Three attractive people in their twenties: one young man and two young ladies. Naked limbs tangled under warm water. Now we can get started.