Excerpt #5 - "The Crack In The Redwood Fence"

Introduction to Excerpt #5: This excerpt introduces 68 year old Jonathon who had gone through a middle life crisis searching for youth, thinking he could find youthfulness somewhere else other than in his wife, who he has actually loved...but then again, is this a description of love, especially when feelings of youthful inadequacy and aging get in the way, not to mention a wandering eye, and a powerful male sexual drive?
---I would remind you that I was a gynecologist at the time I wrote this novel and, admittedly, I had become somewhat sensitive to the sensibilities and feelings of women, especially when I would hear countless stories about husbands who had run off with other women. It seemed so selfish, and hurtful to them and their entire family. So I used Jonathon to represent such men.
---Unfortunately, little did I know at the time that men are not alone on this score because woman too can run off to the other side of the fence where the grass is greener for their own 'womanly' and other varieties of reasons, from mid-life crises to wants for their waning youthful appearances and misguided beliefs as to a faltering sexuality.

---Alas, Jonathon would never know it, but the answer was easy; he had always and would always be searching for that fountain of youth. Perhaps...just perhaps his acceptance of his own age would allow him to deal with himself more peacefully. Who knows. But the fact remains: Jonathon hadn’t ever been that way: truthful to and easy upon himself. Why, his motto, even, had always been, “Think young...and you’ll be young.”
---Good motto. Nothing wrong with it when taken in the right perspective. But with Jonathon the only problem was, there were times wherein he actually just about believed it...which, in turn, served only but to give him more and more problems...
---Why, he thought so ‘young’ that just twenty years ago--when he had not only been reciting--but even then, at the age of forty-eight when he had also been acting upon his motto--he’d come home from work one day, packed his bags, and, when his wife, Clara, had asked him what he was doing, he’d said rather bluntly, and without hesitation, and with a certain and definite firmness to the tone of this voice, as if he he’d thought about what he was going to say for a long time...
---...“I’m leaving...Clara!” Most short. Most succinct.
---...“You’re what?” she’d blurted out, stunned with dismay, yet, at the same time, thinking it really a big joke or some cruel game.
---...“I’m leaving you Clara,” he’d said again, snapping the clasp of his valise shut. “I’m moving out today!”
---And that was that.
---Of course, Clara hadn’t really believed him. After all, the entire incident...it had all seemed so ridiculous. An extremely unlikely happening. And when his little prank...when his game would be over, she had decided, “I’ll give him hell for it!...The nerve of him to joke around like that!”
---As it turned out, however, the ‘game’ was and had never come to be over...and mainly because not only had he moved out permanently, but also because the two of them, unknowingly, were in the throes of--and would always be victims to--Nature’s game!
---And that game never ends..
---It goes on and on...indefinitely.
---Unfortunately Clara had learned the hard way (and through no fault of her own) that it be Nature’s game they were playing. And it’s no wonder, considering those ‘drives’ and all--Jonathon had run off with a very attractive...a most enticing younger woman! Her twenty-six years made Clara feel old by comparison (her having been, at the time, in the middle forties), and to this very day she still feels the vestiges of shock and dismay from that horrowing day, although the hurt has since been numbed, over the years, and dissipated away.
---And the pity of it all, Clara has never really been able to understand exactly what had happened. What hd gone wrong. She had always considered her marriage to be a good one. Sure, there were some problems. But nothing that could not be rectified. At the time, things in genral seemed to be okay. But for him to run away! “No!...No!...This cannot be!” she’d thought in agonizing bewilderment shortly after that terrible day. To this very day, everything about it had gone completely against her grain, and still continues to do so.
---Poor Clara. Bad enough he should have left her so coldly, so suddenly...so hearthelssly. Bad enough she should be in a state of shock and desolation, brokenhearted, and cruelly left prey to the hardships of a lonely woman in middle age. But for her to bear...for her to suffer through the snide comments, the shameful and humiliating remarks uttered pitifully behind her back about how, “He left her for a younger woman,”...now that was too much! How horrible...how much shame she felt that she be the recipient of those cliched words. But then again, it was true. He hd left her for a much younger woman...
---Clara had always known that he’d always looked at other young ladies. She hadn’t really liked it. But she had accepted it, it being most natural (so she thought) for men to be that way. And what harm could ever come of it, she’d alwaqys thought, as long as he abided by her guiding [but jokingly stated] words: “Look...but don’t touch”!
---Evidently, he’d followed her advice half-way. He had always made it a habit of doing ‘the looking’ to the front of her, but when it came to ‘the touching,’ behind her back had been his only way. And that ‘behind the back’ part had been no one little accidental occurrence. Evidently, Jonathon had beenfollowing the directives of Nature, one might say--playing directly into Nature’s hands and, without knowing it, losing to Nature in Nature’s game--by succumbing to his innate, his inborn ‘drives’ in so many endless extramarital ways!
---As it turned out, Jonathon ran away with Deana, his tantalizing, twenty-six year old ticket to paradise!...his romance: everything he had ever hoped it to be...now out in the open, and ecstatically wild and carefree! They lived and they loved gloriously...they sought the enjoyment of quality, first-run stage shows and listened to concerts frequently...they went on romantic picnics alone and made love in the bushes, sensuously...they went off with friends to secluded lakes and, like silly little kids, they skinny-dipped, shamelessly...they walked through museums, arm in arm, like young lovers, and then, in front of crowds, they kissed, rapturously...they frequented night clubs and danced and drank with hilarity...and they lived in a one-bedroom apartment with a heated king-sized waterbed and made love to one another, endlessly. And then, after six months of living together, they got bored with one another and ended their fling with fighting, all kinds of hassles, and in absolute misery!
---Poor Jonathon. I took him another three months of wandering to crawl shamefully back to Clara...not to live with her, but hoping she might eventually take him back--at least, to be able to just speak with her. He tried to explain that he had been a victim of circumstances, that he was ‘mixed up’ and that he didn’t know what he wanted (but that he does now), and that Deana hd meant nothing to him right from the start. That she was just a fling. That he had not been able to help himself. That he had been driven to it by some ‘inner urge.’ Well, Clara ‘inner urged’ him right out the front door...savagely...while screaming all kinds of obscenities, to say the least, most impolitely!