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Bae

Mike Schneider

    Four years ago when I was 48 years old, my wife of 28 years left me following a whirlwind romance with an ego-shattering paramour named Tom Tom. An accountant at her work, he was 60 years old, pale as a corpse, had M pattern baldness extending so far back that the top of his head looked like a mountain down to the sea with a fjord running along each side. The people next door in legal referred to him as “Norway.” He always wore long sleeve, starched white shirts with solid navy blue neckties, including dress down Fridays, and the occasional Saturday when everyone had to come in to finish something on tight deadline. Bevins, who retired a number of years ago and had been there three years longer than Tom, confirmed to everyone he had dressed like that since the first day he walked in the door. In a reversal of roles, at his retirement party he gave Tom two bright new ties, one lemon yellow, the other orange orange, as a going away gift. Neither tie was ever seen again.
    The only thing interesting about the man, to me anyway, was his name. He began life as Tom Jones, named by his mother. Her marriage didn’t last. A few years after the divorce his mom married a man named Lance Augustus Tom. The Jones guy took it on the lam, new husband adopted Tom, thus Tom Tom. Everyone at the company addressed him as tom-tom, not as two words but one, like the drum.
    “For God’s sake, Micki, why tom-tom?” I asked when she told me.
    “He loves me.”
    She had me there, I no longer did, hadn’t for a long time.
    Our marriage approached bliss the first 12 years. We worked, laughed, played, went out often, took cruises, skied at Jackson Hole, snorkeled in Virgin Islands National Park, and wore out two mattresses. We both had good paying jobs and liked them.
    The only hang up, we wanted a family, but it turned out I couldn’t contribute.
    “Your sperm count is only 5-million, Max,” Dr. Chung told us. “I’m afraid you’re sterile.”
    “Sterile! How can 5-million of something, of anything, not be enough when only one is needed?” I asked, incredulously.
    “They’re very small. The average ejaculation has between 100- and 500-million. According to the experts at the Mayo Clinic, anything under 39-million is considered sterile.”
    No matter what, we were determined to be parents. We had long discussions pitting a sperm donor for Micki, her egg in a surrogate mother fertilized by a sperm donor, and adoption, against each other. At one time she would not have minded using a sperm donor, or a surrogate, but that was before one of her friends, and also a coworker, had undergone tragic pregnancies. The friend actually died, the coworker’s baby died. After that, while still hesitant not to have an active, or at least passive, role in our baby’s creation, she was beginning to lean a bit toward adoption, seeing it as the safest, least troublesome, and furthest removed from the possibility of a haunting experience.
    I also favored adoption but for a different reason, looking back, perhaps an invalid one. I worried about a sperm donor, a surrogate, or both, showing up at the door someday wanting to be in my child’s life, then being on the outside looking in on the three, or possibly four of them, who would have a natural connection, as opposed to mine that, biologically speaking, would be non-existent. I felt Micki should share equally with me in that potential threat. Adoption covered it, and given her recent front row seat to the disastrous side of pregnancy, it didn’t take much to talk her into it.
    Next we checked into adoption agencies.
    “Why is it so damned expensive?” she said, shock in her voice. “I thought they were charities. They’re more like baby selling businesses.”
    “Seems to be a sign of the times,” I replied. “Dave, at the office, paid $4500 for a St. Bernard with outstanding breeding. A St. Bernard! Pick of the litter was $5500. Up that by a factor of 10 and you may, just may, be able to adopt a baby.”
    We lived in northern Ohio, Toledo, but that spring at the most unlikely place, a sales conference in Orlando, I had the good fortune of meeting a man from southern Ohio whose teenage daughter had gotten pregnant seven months earlier. Seventeen years old, National Honor Society, 4.25 GPA plus a legacy path to Radcliffe if her scholarship offers didn’t suit her, and she wanted to go that route. What he wanted was her to have no part of a baby that would block her way to a great education and, hopefully, a successful career, happy life. But he did wish to find a good home for it. The guy took a liking to me and for the unheard of price of less than $7000 in legal fees, we completed an in-state private adoption.
    Tara Marie Sandberg became our daughter on June 16, 2000, five days after she was born.
    “Isn’t she lovely,” Micki said when we picked her up in Cincinnati.
    She was. Twenty inches long, seven pounds even, an ever so slightly turned up nose, very fine brown hair, almost thin little arms and legs, long fingers. Maybe she’d grow up to be a concert pianist. A beautiful one.
    It was the most joyous day of my life.
    And the day our marriage began its downhill slide. Like many, it fell victim to the age-old problem of one parent feeling left out because the other spends too much time with the baby. Call it stolen affection syndrome, abandonment complex, or whatever you want, Micki had issues about me devoting too much time to Tara, not enough to her. It wasn’t overt, always swam just below the surface, was never acknowledged, or addressed, until it shot out of the water like a cruise missile from a submarine on our daughter’s first birthday.
    “Things were perfect until she arrived,” Micki said. Off to the side and out of earshot of the grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, and friends who, like me, were paying more attention to Tara than to her. I spent the next 16 years trying to keep her in check.
    When Micki left, Tara stayed. Beginning her senior in high school by then, she wanted to graduate with her class rather than move out of the district. She also realized which one of us provided a more favorable home environment, one that encouraged growth, praised progress, and boosted self-worth. I couldn’t bring myself to think about the life she would have had living with someone who blamed her for everything that had gone wrong over the past 17 years.
    While no longer having to choose between my daughter and my wife was a welcome relief, the truth is I missed Micki. Especially on those monthly, or sometimes bimonthly, occasions when our mutual desire overpowered our mutual disrespect, and we could finally mellow out like we always had in the beginning.
    After Tara went off to Ohio State University late the following August, I tried dating a few different ladies but failed to find one with whom I meshed. Younger women didn’t want me. Those in my age group carried too much baggage. Kids. Adult kids they were still raising because they either couldn’t let go or the kids refused to grow up, kid kids, late life babies, some not even in school yet, or worst of all, grandkids. I told my friends, don’t even think about it; Blake Shelton could not compete with a grandchild who has already won the heart of a youngish grandmother.
    After that I tried prostitutes for a while which I thought would be pretty cool because you could pick your poison: Blonde, brunette, redhead; black, white, oriental; big tits, little tits, tiny tits—whatever you wanted. Neat. Not so. When Micki and I pounded the sheets after holding each other at bay for a month or more, as strained as it had become, I always had a bounce in my step and smile on my face going into work the next morning. With prostitutes it seemed all my ambition, spirit, and self-esteem ended up in the business end of a condom, and the next day I’d plod even slower.
    I had heard about sex chat rooms, decided to check them out. Found a fairly nice one called lustyliasons.com. It was free, seemed to always have around 20 or 25 people in it, usually a little over half of them chatting in the main room, the remainder paired up in private messaging conversations, and always a few who had fallen asleep, or forgot to sign out. You could tell when you sent them a PM and they left the room immediately upon receiving it. Sorry I woke you, Big Boobs 29.
    I chose bushman69 m32, for a name, figuring 32 was a good age. If I told them the truth many might consider me too old. The name caused some confusion.
    “Are you Australian?” asked Tasmanian Devil.
    50 and Fit wanted to know if I was bisexual, while wifehomealone said, “You sound interesting.”
    I faltered some in the beginning but picked up the jargon, rules, etiquette, and procedures rather quickly.
    After a month or two of numerous cyber partners I settled in with a gal who called herself, Dorm Girl. She was 20 years old, didn’t mind me being 12 years older, said men her age were hopelessly immature—high schoolish—she called them, and found it refreshing to have hooked up with someone who, “... could look further into the future than who his next fuck was going to be.” She could have been 20. She also could have been 30. Or 40. I could never tell, at least in the beginning.
    The first couple times we were together we didn’t cyber. The third time I was able to seduce her. After that intimacy came naturally. We spent hours online together each evening, generally from 9 to midnight, chatting about anything and everything. Dorm Girl, whose real name was Emily (I told her mine was Ken), had a contagious enthusiasm for experimentation—try this, let’s do that—and claimed she kept everything on her end as real as possible.
    “Whatever you say you’re doing to me, I’m doing to me,” she said.
    We often made love twice, occasionally three times. She had a healthy appetite, was multi-orgasmic, and the longer we went the stronger they became. In my mind I saw them as waves, each bigger and more powerful than the previous one, until finally the tsunami crashed ashore and the sea could once again smooth out and return to serene calmness.
    When she, or any of the others, wanted a picture of my junk, or just a face shot, I’d tell them I couldn’t because I was a low level politician, county commissioner in a rural area of a Midwestern state, with plans to seek higher office, couldn’t take a chance on a pic getting out and going viral. I always cited Congressman Anthony Wiener, whose political career, and recently his freedom, had ended, in part because of his inappropriate pictures going viral on the internet. I also did not accept pictures. Early on I did but at least half of them were obviously fake, plus I preferred drawing mental pictures based on our conversations. Would rather have my choice of whom I was with than locking myself into who they actually were. In my mind I could make them prettier, sexier, more exciting.
    I also learned my lesson about phone sex. A girl with whom I was cybering wanted me to call her in the worst way, “...so I can hear you say my name and moan....” Never again. She called me every day for two weeks before I realized I could block her.
    An online relationship required switching from my PC to a laptop so when Tara was home I could go in my bedroom, shut the door and still be online with Emily. Could always X out if Tara knocked.
    She came home on weekends quite often her freshman year, about every fourth or fifth one. Not as much her sophomore year although she did come back for Halloween. We had a long standing tradition of salting the foundation bushes with creepy, spooky creatures accompanied by creepier, spookier sounds that the neighborhood kids loved, and Tara didn’t want to miss two years in a row. I’ll never forget that afternoon while getting the candy ready in the kitchen, a heavy glass bowl she was carrying slipped from her grasp, shattered when it hit the floor.
    “Holy Toledo, pagan Michigan!” she blurted.
    “Holy Toledo, pagan Michigan? Where’d that come from?”
    “I just made it up,” she said. “What else is there to say about Michigan in the same breath with an Ohio city during football season, and the big game less than a month away?”
    We both laughed, the first of many that evening. I missed those times, always felt sad watching her drive down the street and make a right turn out of my life until the next time. We texted, of course, but having her here was so much better.
    In my cyber life it was becoming evident Emily had fallen for me in a big way. If I were five or ten minutes late she’d say something like, “Thank goodness. I was afraid you weren’t coming.” Often, she didn’t want me to leave. “Can’t you stay just a little longer?” seemed her favorite way to welcome each new day at midnight. I did stay on Friday and Saturday nights but the others, I had to get up for work in the morning. As she became more attached, and, frankly, as I did too, I began feeling guilty that I had never come clean with her about my age. She was a super nice girl who, for one reason or another, preferred sex online rather than in person, and did not deserve to be taken advantage of by...yes...a middle-aged liar. The longer it went the worse it would be when she found out. Although I would be lost without her, once the guilt I harbored for deceiving her finally overtook the anxiety I felt about losing her, I opted to let her fly.
    On a Saturday night as we were chillin’ after one of her typically strong finishes, I dropped it on her.
    “I have something to tell you that is going to hurt you and I want you to know I never meant for this to happen. I thought we were going to be a one-night stand. While I didn’t set out to deceive you, the wicked truth is I did. I’m not 32, Emily. I’m actually 49. I’m so sorry.”
    Dead silence.
    After five exceptionally long minutes I typed: “Still there?”
    “I’m processing.”
    Five or six more nail-biting minutes followed, then, “OK.”
    “Really?”
    “Yes, really. I enjoy you too much, we enjoy each other too much, to let a little thing like age kill it.”
    To prove she meant it we cybered again and this time her spasms were even more intense.
    “Wow! I guess the idea of being with a mature man turns me on,” she said.
    On the first day of spring that year we had a bit of a go round about the L word.
    “Maybe we should tell one another how we feel about each other,” she said.
    “I tried that a couple times, it didn’t work out so well.”
    “I think it would with us.”
    “I’ve tried it twice, Emily. Both times it spoiled things. I think it’s because when you’re together in person you can do so much more after you say it. You can plan a future together, get married if you want, or move in together, save for a house, have a baby, go on vacation, and on, and on. But when you’re online, saying it is pretty much the high point. You can’t go any further, so it soon ends.”
    “I don’t think so, Ken. We’re different.”
    “I doubt it. We’re probably like all the rest.”
    “No, we’re not. I know how I feel about you and I sense you feel the same about me.”
    “Ok, I’ll say it because you want me to, and it’s truly how I feel, but I sure don’t relish the idea of losing you over it. I love you.”
    “I love you, and you’re not going to lose me.”
    Surprisingly, I didn’t.
    When the seasons changed again, she had something else to add. Maybe the moon and stars were affecting her. Or the alignment of the planets.
    “You know the only thing I can think of that we don’t have is exclusivity,” she said one evening as we were about to say goodnight.
    “I’ve never thought about it. I haven’t been with anyone else since shortly after we met. I have no interest,” I replied.
    “Same here but we might feel more secure if we formally agreed to it.”
    “You mean you might feel more secure?”
    “Ok, yes, I admit it. I would feel more secure. While I know neither of us is into extra curriculars, it seems we each kind of have a perpetual hall pass, should we choose to use it. I would just feel better.”
    “Then you shall, sweet thing. I love you, want no one but you, and will remain true and faithful to you until we mutually decide differently. How’s that?”
    “Wonderful! And I’ll do the same. I love you and am going to sleep extra soundly tonight.”
    One of the bonuses of being with Emily was she taught me so much that I actually became a different person. She made me a better man by showing me things like why black lives really do matter, that Islam is not the evil religion I had pegged it to be, and taking a knee at a football game was not meant to disrespect the flag, national anthem, or the military but to make a strong public statement about an issue in which you believe deeply.
    Plus a hundred other things I’d never before thought about in a half century of living inside the comfortable little box I had been built into, like my father before me, and his father before him. The men in my family had been Republicans since William McKinley was president because it was the thing to do. Now Emily had me seriously questioning if that still held true.
    No matter what it was, she always showed me a different way of looking at it. When I complained about the millions of illegal aliens who were swarming across our southern border, she gave me what for.
    “They’re not illegal aliens, they’re undocumented immigrants. Or asylum seekers. They risk everything to start at the bottom cleaning shit out of pig sties, climbing radio towers to change the light bulb at the top, and picking tomatoes, strawberries, and who knows what else, under the blazing sun, all without benefits and for half the pay anyone else would get. Why? Because they’re intent on making a better life for their families. Compare that to an equal number of disaffected 20- and 30-somethings who are still living at home, sponging off their parents, refusing to even look for a job, and tell me they’re not doing more for our country than many of our own. They’re exactly the kind of family-oriented, success-driven people who made America what it is, and we need more of them, not fewer.”
    Yes ma’am!
    Another time I hit her on Muslim women having to wear hijabs.
    “Their men don’t, and their religion doesn’t, allow them to show any more of their faces than they need to talk, see, breathe, and eat. Or their bodies. How would you like to live like that?”
    “Well, you’ve heard about the two women who applied for the same job. Right? One had a college degree but no experience, the other had 10 years’ experience but no college. Which one got hired? The one with the biggest tits. I don’t think I’d want to be Muslim and wear a hijab but there’s something to be said for competing not on your looks but solely on your abilities, as they apparently do. Which, by the way, if you look closely, is how the military does it.”
    Emily was also big on political correctness, or as she put it, common courtesy. When I made an offhand remark about a whore who had been gang raped somewhere out west, she said, “They’re not whores, hookers, or ‘ho’s, they’re prostitutes. And human beings who deserve to be treated, thought of, and spoken of as such.”
    She changed, too. Kind of a put down specialist when we met, over time she went from, “I know about this because I just took a course,” to, “Sometimes you say the simplest things and they make the most sense.”
    After saying goodnight I always wiped out the history to prevent anyone who got on my computer from discovering my dirty little secret. That would include my brother Stan, neighbor Bill, friend Alice, and especially Tara when she was home, plus a few others. But as time went on, while I still didn’t want anyone to know, I began seeing what I was doing less like something immoral, disdainful, and pathetic, and more like a normal, healthy activity. I was happier, more upbeat, no longer saw myself as some kind of freak like I did in the beginning.
    But all that was beside the point. I loved Emily, she loved me, we weren’t going to have any kids to come between us. She would receive her bachelor’s degree in May, and I figured we were good until she completed her master’s, if not longer.
    Like anyone, she had several quirks. One I found particularly endearing was her passion for personal anniversaries. The day we met. Our first sex. The day we said we loved each other. The day we committed. The first time I called her darling, honey, and so on. She kept track of all of them. I never knew when they were going to pop up, there was no discernible pattern. Lengths of time varied. Sometimes it was a year, sometimes six months, other times three. Once it was five weeks. I came to believe anniversaries are to an online relationship what ice cream, or wine, is to an in-person one. Like, “I would love some ice cream but we’re out. Would you be kind enough to run to the store and get me some?” when a woman maybe wants to feel just a tad special, or perhaps reassure herself that you still love her enough to make a small sacrifice for her.
    It was one of these pop-up ice cream nights, the 14-month anniversary of us committing to each other, that we enjoyed one of our longest love-making sessions. We were at it more than two hours. I was spent but Emily was on fire, each time better than the last as her love and hormones appeared to have met somewhere deep in her belly, and stayed there, refusing to separate and move off in different directions, as they inevitably do. After the big one finally hit she said, “Oh my God, Ken. It’s never been like that before. I was like, ‘Holy Toledo, pagan Michigan!’”
    ‘HOLY SHIT!!!!’
    I stared at the screen, my mouth agape, brain numb, eyes open, seeing nothing. I don’t know how long I sat like that but when I came to the screen was full of questions.
    “Are you still there?”
    “Ken?”
    “Did your battery run down?”
    “Internet go out?”
    “Are you ok, my love? Sometimes I worry because of your age.”
    “I’m going to sleep. When you’re up and running again please IM me so I know you’re ok. I’ll turn my volume way up to make sure it wakes me. I love you. Sure hope you are alright.”
    I brewed a strong cup of coffee and tried to think. It wasn’t easy. If one of the guys had posed this situation to me that afternoon between plays, at halftime, or during a timeout, I’m sure I would have seen it as a vividly black-and-white issue. Now it looked gray, and I wasn’t sure what to think of myself that it did.
    I loved Tara as a daughter. I loved Emily as a lover. As a partner. As my significant other. They were like two different people. Tara, daughter. Emily, bae—a word she taught me that I never heard Tara use.
    First thing to do was let her know I was ok.
    “Hey sweetheart, I’m fine. We were on longer than usual, battery took a powder. It’s back now. Sleep well.”
    No immediate response but a couple minutes later, “So glad, I was worried.”
    “No need to be, everything’s cool.”
    “I had a wonderful anniversary. Will you kiss me goodnight?”
    “Wouldn’t miss it. Holding you in my arms, gently touching my lips to yours that are always so warm, soft and loving.”
    “Thank you, my love. See you tomorrow.”
    Our goodnight kisses were always special. This time, thinking about Tara, it seemed weird, perverted. But when I put her out of my mind, thought only of Emily, it again became nuanced and romantic.
    In the morning I called the office, told them I had food poisoning, was throwing up like crazy. It was the first day I had missed in four years and I spent nearly all of it sitting in a chair, thinking. The honorable thing to do would be stage an argument, pick a fight with Emily, tell her to go to hell, and never be heard from again. Tara would get over it, Emily could move on to someone else.
    But I didn’t feel that honorable. As crazy as it sounds, now that I knew who she was, I wondered if there was a chance for us. Could we be a couple in real life? Change our relationship from filial love to sensuous, physical love. I already had that with Emily but would Tara be able to accept it? How would she take it if I told her? Would she be confused? Happy? Turned off? Would she see me as a father so low he fucked his own daughter, and everything that goes with it? Or had our online relationship changed her into a new and different person? Like a caterpillar that spins a cocoon around itself, then later emerges as a butterfly. Had she abandoned Tara to become Emily? Do butterflies know they used to be caterpillars? Probably not. Hindus have no idea what they were in the previous life or will become in the next. No reason to believe butterflies would be any different. Like Hindus they’re made mostly of water.
    At some point it occurred to me our headboards share a common wall; all those times I worried about Tara knocking on the door and me having to quickly X-out, we had been only inches apart.
    My god!
    By mid-afternoon I decided for the time being to maintain the status quo. I’d be the only one to know the secret and would guard it with my life. Or death, as that crossed my mind, too. Did I deserve go on living, not only after what I had done, but also wanted to continue doing? Even in cyberspace, and not biologically paired, our relationship had a nasty, dirty, incestuous ring to it, like from a bell as big as Jupiter with a clapper the size of Earth, that reverberated over and over and over in my head. I believe if anyone else, I would have considered it an outright taboo. But with us....
    Ninety percent of me wanted to do the right thing. The problem was, to that 90% the right thing was Emily.
    Our romance continued unabated, every night 9 to 12, sometimes longer, seldom shorter. Lots of talk, lots of intimacy. Me and my butterfly? Me and my daughter? No, more like a douchebag who loved an angel three hours a day and hated himself for it the other 21. I don’t recall ever feeling so mixed.
    I read everything I could find about Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn because we pretty much mirrored them. Amid continuing scandal they seemed to make it work. They had been married over 20 years. She earned a college degree, they adopted two children. She appeared well adjusted. Happy. He was still Woody Allen. You couldn’t tell what he was since Soon-Yi any more than you could tell what he was before Soon-Yi. Did I have my own Soon-Yi? Maybe. Or possibly a hateful daughter who’d as soon kill me as look at me.
    None of it made any sense.
    At times Emily and I had talked about having a life together. I said I could retire early, handle the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and other household chores, leaving her free to pursue a career, her doctorate, start a business, whatever she chose. We could move around if we had to, living in different places would add to the adventure. Now I discouraged that kind of talk.
    After mentally beating myself to a pulp every day for three months, loving her and hating me, she came home for her third spring break.
    It was time to tell her.
    How would she react? Would she scream, cry, and disown me? Pretend it never happened? Want to continue in person what we had been doing online? Would I be able to follow through if that’s what she wanted? That scared me almost as much as the possibility of losing her. There was this woman at work once, 30 years old, former runner-up for Miss Toledo, stunningly beautiful. Lots of chemistry flowed between us. I made it as far as the motel room door before having to say, “I’m sorry. I can’t do this, I wouldn’t be able to face my wife.”
    Would I have to tell Emily/Tara, “I can’t do this, I wouldn’t be able to face anyone.”
    I approached it the same as when I leveled with her about my age, right after making love, hoping that having her totally relaxed might ease the sting a bit.
    “I have something to tell you, Emily. A terrible secret. It was totally accidental and it’s earth-shattering. I’ve known it for three months, you deserved to know right away, and I should have told you but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I had to work up to being able to countenance permanently losing you. I guess the easiest way to say it is at this moment there is nothing but a five-inch wall separating us.”
    There was no response. I laid the computer aside, sat on the edge of the bed.
    In less than a minute the door opened and she stood there, motionless, in all her natural beauty. Her face looked askew, perplexed, unsure. Gravity pulled at her breasts just enough to confirm they were all hers. Her burnt umber triangle of love appeared exactly as I had envisioned it so many times over the past three years.
    “Ken, we have something really special. Please don’t let trivialities ruin it,” she said as she began walking slowly toward me.

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