Chapter 22
When his parents left, Eric counted down the days until he and Tami could start having sex again. It had been so long. He'd read both of the sex chapters in her pregnancy books: Sex During Pregnancy and Sex After Pregnancy. He knew all about the four week mark, but when he brought it up to Tami, she told him the doctor said six weeks. So he bit his tongue and waited. When Tami finally agreed to fool around, she didn't seem that into it. The first time back was vaguely disappointing.
Things were hard at home that summer. Eric kept busy by working as a counselor at a summer day camp for elementary school kids followed by summer training for the Yellow Snakes and teacher in-services. He counted the days between sex, which sometimes reached as many as seven. Even when they did have sex, it wasn't as good as it used to be. Sometimes it felt to Eric as if Tami was just fulfilling a chore, and then she'd go to sleep right after. Her breasts were practically off limits to him, now more tools than toys, and the baby always came first. He could be telling her about some important thing at summer training and she'd just walk away in mid-sentence to tend the infant.
[September]
Eric felt unwanted by the time the school year started. There was a fellow history teacher, a pretty, twenty-five-year-old woman, who started sitting next to him at department meetings and talking to him in the teacher's lounge and asking about all the things he wished Tami would ask him about when he came home.
One day he was laughing with her in the lounge and pouring himself a cup of coffee during his lunch break when the head coach came in. "Coach Taylor," he said. "I need you in my office. Now."
Eric nodded goodbye to her and made his way past the gym to his boss's office. Coach Compton closed the door and the blinds. Eric sat across the desk from him.
Coach Compton stretched out his hand. "Give me that cap," he said.
Confused, Eric reached up for his golden brown Yellow Snakes coaching cap and handed it across the desk to Coach Compton. Coach Compton turned it over in his hands a couple of times and then suddenly smacked Eric in the face with it. "Wake up, son. What's wrong with you? You are courting temptation! "
"Excuse me?" said Eric, rubbing his cheek and looking wide-eyed at his boss.
"You have a fine woman at home, Eric." Coach Compton had met Tami three or four times in the past year. "A beautiful, intelligent woman who put you through college."
"Well…I put her through college first, I – "
"- who put you through college, who moved with you for your first job, and who has encouraged you to follow your calling. And yet every single day I see you in that teacher's lounge flirting with Ms. Kim Anderson."
"I wasn't flirting with her," he insisted. "I was being friendly."
"Eric, you're not a friendly sort of guy. You're polite. You're respectful. But you're not friendly."
"I was just being polite."
"You were courting temptation is what you were doing."
"I would never cheat on Tami. I'm not that kind of man."
Coach Compton put his hand on the cap he'd used to assault Eric, pressed it against the desk, and leaned slightly forward. "I said never too, years ago. Then the baby was born. I felt…like I'd been set aside. And there was this woman…a woman like Ms. Anderson…who made me feel like I was important again. Never became possibly. Possibly became probably. And probably became yes."
"But…you're still married." Eric and Tami had shared dinner with his boss and his wife. They seemed to get along well. They had three children now, two in high school, and one just out of college.
"She forgave me eventually. But it was a rough three years after that, and I nearly lost everything. And I wounded her. The pain I inflicted on her, Eric…it's unimaginable. She forgave me, and I worked hard to be a better husband, and I have been a good husband for many years now, but there's a part of her that's never going to fully heal."
Eric was uncomfortable with Coach Compton's personal confession. He shifted in his chair.
"She loves me," Coach Compton continued, "but she's never felt quite the same way about me again. And all for…" He shook his head. "Listen, this is the hardest time your marriage is ever going to go through. Well…this and the toddler years. And the teenage years. But now…it's just so easy to drift apart – Tami's moving in her sphere with the baby, you're moving in yours, you don't either of you get enough sleep…there's not much sex."
Eric looked down at the desk.
"And you come to school, and there's a pretty lady who isn't home all day with a spitting-up baby, who's all put together and dressed for work and hasn't been up half the night...a woman who only shows you her best side…a woman you don't have a few years of marriage baggage with. And you start to make the mistake of making comparisons that aren't realistic, that don't take the big picture into account. That's how it starts. I'm only telling you this, Eric, because I don't want you to screw up the same way I did. You think you're too strong to ever fall. Well, son, you're not."
"I…." Eric scratched his head. He felt like a kid who'd been caught stealing from the cookie jar.
"Strengthen your defense, son. Stop flirting with that woman. Stop trying to find her in the teacher's lounge. Just stop. Completely." Coach Compton slid Eric's cap across the desk. "You've got your free period next, and then you've got what, one more history class?"
"Yes, sir."
"I'll cover it for you. I taught history fifteen years back. I'll clear it with Principal Thomas. You go on home early now. You go on home to your wife."
Eric picked up his cap and headed for the door.
[*]
On his way home, Eric pulled over to the shoulder because some guy was selling roses out of the back of his pick-up. They were only $10 a dozen. He didn't ask questions. He saw this a lot around San Antonio. Sometimes they were selling onions, sometimes roses, sometimes cigars.
When Eric got home, Tami had a wailing Julie in her arms. He'd thought this phase had ended over a month ago, but maybe Tami went through it more than he realized. He put the roses in a vase, told her he'd take over, and sent her to sleep.
Eric bounced Julie around, the way his father had taught him to do. It was quite the workout after a while, but she settled down. He put her in her swing, turned it on, and then straightened up the living room, which had some scattered clothes and baby toys and books and bottles that he washed and set out to dry.
When Tami yawned her way out two hours later, Julie was just stirring and ready to eat. Tami fed her unabashedly, and Eric tried not to be aroused by those full breasts on display.
"Wow, you really cleaned up," she said, glancing around the living room. She walked over to the entertainment center and sniffed the roses he'd set on top. "Thank you. They're really pretty." She went and sat down on the couch. "Why are you home so early?"
He sat beside her. "Coach Compton cut me loose."
"You lost your job?" she gasped. "Why? You were doing so well there!"
"No, no. Just for the day."
She smiled with relief. She really was beautiful, even when she was drained. He leaned in and kissed her. Then he kissed Julie's head. When Julie fell asleep, Tami lowered her into the pack n' play they always left in the living room. "I'd really love to take this chance for a shower," she said.
"Okay."
When she was half way down the hall, she turned back. "Aren't you going to join me?"
It was best sex they'd had in months, there against the shower wall. When they got out, Julie was still asleep. Tami cuddled up against Eric on the couch.
"I'm sorry," he said, "that I haven't been more help around here. I'm going to be more help."
"I'm sorry I've been so irritable. And I'm sorry…I haven't been much in the mood. We really need to reconnect. Don't we?"
"How 'bout I invite my parents down for a few days? They'll help with Julie. Maybe we can even get out on a date. You know how good my dad was with the baby. They both still have a few vacation days left."
[*]
The next day, Eric did not go to the teacher's lounge. He ate lunch in Coach Compton's office, while they reviewed game tape. Kim Anderson popped into his classroom before his last history class of the day and said, "I haven't seen you all day, Eric."
"Yeah," he said. "I'm trying to get all my papers graded during the day now so I have more time to spend with my wife. I'm lucky to have her."
"Oh," the pretty history teacher said. "Well, if you ever want to compare notes, you know where to find me."
He never did try to find her.
