CHAPTER SIX

“My first love was Lady Liberty. In paintings and on coins, she stood in

that flowing white dress, arms outstretched, offering new hope to

people in places like western Europe when their hopes were gone.

No woman alive can match that angel of opportunity and hope.

That I have remained single and dedicated my life to her service

are testaments to my awe of her.”

Samuel Parsons, A Rogue At Zero Hour

“Too often in this country, the public careers of great men have

been destroyed by their private sexual appetites.”

Hal Simpson, Editorial in The Carlsbad Current Argus

It always felt a little strange. Though Hal had known Susan Davis for only six years, he felt he had known her forever. Susan was, in so many ways, the way Hal felt himself to be—a fish out of water. In an overwhelmingly conservative environment, she was unabashedly liberal. In an area forming the buckle to the Bible Belt, where pro-life, pro-capital punishment ministers gave their sermons twice a week, Susan was pro-abortion and anti-capital punishment. In a town where parents still dressed their children up in Sunday finery as a sign of their respect for God and His apostles, Susan regularly made jokes about “JC and the Boys” and “god” being the name of her dyslexic dog. In a place where women were expected to be barefoot, pregnant, and if not down on the farm, at least quiet and respectful, she was the town’s go-to physician in addition to being a successful artist, black belt in karate, and regular contributor to a number of women’s magazines. Living in a town where families planned their vacations around Sea World and Six Flags Over Texas, Susan took month-long sabbaticals to provide free medical care in places like Haiti, India, and Nepal. At forty-two years old, some twenty-two years younger than Hal, she could not quite understand why the men she went out with never called for a second date or why she never seemed to have much in common with her associates and neighbors.

This was all quite obvious, of course, to Hal, who always found it cute when Susan referred to him as “Chief” of the Carlsbad Constant Anguish. It took him months to realize that “Chief” was Jerry Siegel’s nickname for Perry White, editor of The Daily Planet.

He first met Susan in 2010 when the Current Argus was doing an extended article on the free health clinic she had just opened. When his reporter reported she couldn’t make the interview, Hal went to Susan’s office himself. Her office seemed sparse; dozens of medical books and journals, of course, but only a single framed diploma hanging on the wall. In a corner of the room, he noticed a pile of certificates and awards gathering dust, belying her achievements. He found himself taken with Susan’s openness and easy going personality; her outspokenness, so off-putting to others, was immediately attractive to him.

They soon found they had much in common. Their short chats when they would see each other around town gave way to long discussions which gave way to happy hour cocktails, which soon freed them to admit their mutual affection. When Susan so nonchalantly asked him if he wanted to “try a tryst,” Hal thought she was asking him to sample a new cracker. But try he did, and soon the two of them found they could schedule a few hours alone together every week.

It helped that Susan lived on a ranch a few miles southeast of Carlsbad. There would be no prying eyes. Both understood the implication their affair had on their professions and standing in the community if they were caught. Hal knew how crushed Ruthie would be if she knew, but their bedroom activities had dwindled to a few tepid sessions a year, and those seemed more like biological obligations than true lovemaking. As for his daughter, Larissa, he always felt she’d likely take a comme ci comme ça attitude to their affair. And it was she, he thought, who was the only person that even suspected his indiscretion; she seemed to divine from the sideways glance or the carefully modulated tone of voice that Susan and Hal shared that something concealed was going on.

The long-dreaded conversation with Larissa came a few months into his affair. He knew something was up when she showed up unannounced at his office, plopped down into a slouch on the chair usually occupied by Frank Greene and offered to share a beer with him. She came out and asked about his relationship with Susan; actually, he realized, she was not asking, she was telling. She had no dates, no times, no places—but she had the knowledge of his affair. At thirty-six years old (that sinking feeling every time he realized how close she was to Susan’s age), she had long ago abandoned her childhood construct of mommy, daddy, and the perfect home. Looking a dozen years younger than her true age, she had gone through a number of lovers; Hal felt she was judging (more analyzing) his affair as an equal rather than a daughter.

She understood the distance that had grown between her parents. She knew her father often fell asleep in the recliner in his study rather than go to his bed. She heard the superficial conversations, watched the evolution as “love you” said as a good-bye became “see you.” Larissa jokingly told her father she defined relations sexually in three stages. The first stage, loving sex, was the nightly roll in the hay in which both partners vied to make the other feel better. The second stage was bored sex, where the roll in the hay occurred once in awhile and the attitude was get in, get out, and get away. The third stage was hall sex, when you and your partner passed in the hall and would say “fuck you” to each other.

Hal grimaced every time he heard his daughter use the F-bomb, but Larissa had ignored his face and went on to say she saw her parents as stalled between the second and third stages—unable to do anything about the second and too proper to fall into the third. She did not judge; she neither condemned nor approved his relationship with Susan, she simply understood it was the way things were. She wouldn’t tell Ruthie, but she didn’t want to be around when her mother found out.

Neither do I, thought Hal with a sigh. Neither do I.