2000-10-21 - 23:59:22

Together and Apart (Lilac, Part 4)

First off, I have to apologize to my readers. I have been meaning to update here more regularly, but this run of entries about my old girlfriend Lilac has been harder to write than I thought they would be. The fact that she may be here in less than two weeks is adding a sense of urgency to my musings, and a sense of unreality, too. How much of what I'm remembering is the truth? How much am I bending the story to make myself look good? How much of what I'm writing about is colored by things that happened later?

In my last entry, I talked about how Lilac was not a terribly faithful girlfriend. In thinking about it, it made me wonder: was I really such a great boyfriend myself?

I really do think I tried my best. I tried to be kind and understanding, but I might not have been as attentive as I could have been. I know that Lilac was annoyed about how much time I spent on chess.

The question arises: since we were together for so long, why didn't we get married? Lilac wanted to get married very badly. Because she was a ward of the state she had no real last name. The last name she used was her mother's name - she never knew the name of her father. In fact, they didn't even know her correct birthday: the day she celebrated as her birthday was just an educated guess. She very much wanted to get married and have a real last name.

On the other hand, I was hesitant to get married. My own parents horrible marriage was always before my eyes. And yet, it seemed that every time I was seriously considering proposing, Lilac would do or say something that made me think it was a bad idea.

Call me an idiot, but I don't want to marry someone if I don't think they are going to stick around.

Lilac seemed to be increasingly unhappy in Frown Town. She wanted to get out and see the world, she wanted to finish college. She'd picked up a lot of credits at junior and community colleges, but she wanted to finish her college career at a full-time university. She was planning on going to a state school about an hour away by car. She would be living in a dorm there and going to school full-time.

This left our relationship sort of in limbo. Was she going to start living with me again after college? What was the status of our relationship while she was in school?

While all these questions were hanging in the air, something unexpected came in from left field: Lilac turned up pregnant.

I have to admit that we had not been very careful with birth control, Lilac was on the pill, but she was very forgetful about taking them. She had been under the impression that she couldn’t have children: the abuse she'd suffered as a child had left her womb tilted at an odd angle. A gynecologist she went to once had told her that she could never have children. Oops! Guess he was wrong! Too bad free medical advice doesn't come with a money-back guarantee.

I was definitely the father. Lilac had been behaving herself since the problems with Mark and Robin.

There was no question about us keeping it. Our relationship was falling apart, Lilac was going away to school and neither one of us wanted to be parents anyway. Lilac was even more anti-children than I was: she had a deep seated horror that she would be an abusive parent like her crazy mother.

When we knew for sure she was pregnant, we had the following discussion:

Uber: Of course, we need to get an abortion.

Lilac: (Hurt) Aren't you going to ask me if I want to keep it?

Uber: (Astonished) Do you WANT to keep it????

Lilac: No!!! Of course not!! But you could have asked...

And so we got an abortion, a melancholy procedure. We had to go to a clinic far out of the area, and it was under siege from anti-abortion protesters. A rather paranoid experience.

As I sat in the waiting room, Lilac, I became uncomfortably aware that I was the only man there. Every time I looked up from my book, I noticed someone giving me a poisonous look. Hey, ladies, it's not MY fault that your guys aren’t here for you!

After it was over, we went to a nearby supermarket and bought some cookies. And then we had a good cry together. For any number of reasons.

About a month later I helped Lilac pack and I drove her to college. The state of our relationship seemed very uncertain. A lot of Lilac's stuff was still at the apartment, and there was the unspoken understanding that, barring something unforeseen, she was going to be living with me again after college was over. However, there was also the unspoken understanding that there was NO WAY that Lilac was going to be faithful to me while she was in college.

When I finished helping her unpack in her dorm, it was time to say goodbye, although we didn’t know what that meant. The dorm building was crowded with students and their parents and brothers and sisters. Lilac and I went outside and in a grove of trees a little ways from the dorm we had a farewell fuck. It was very fast, but it was very hot.

While Lilac was away, we kept in touch. We exchanged a couple of letters and we talked on the phone a lot.

Lilac picked up a boyfriend at college, his name was Seth. Basically their relationship seemed to be all about sex. He knew about me, but didn’t care. I didn’t like it, but there was nothing I could do.

However, I have to admit that I was not exactly idle while Lilac was away: I was carrying on an transcontinental love affair with a married woman. Let me tell you folks, in the days before the Internet it wasn't easy! It's a kind of a complicated subject, and it deserves its own entry, probably several. The whole affair ended, and ended quite badly, a good time before Lilac came back from school.

I visited Lilac several times while she was at college, and she came home to visit during term breaks. We slept with each other several times, and she always swore that I was the best lover ever. Maybe she told that to everybody, who knows.

In her last two semesters of college, Lilac was also sleeping with one of her professors, also a married man. Lilac described their liaisons to me and it sort of gave me a weird feeling. He was an older guy, and he had trouble getting it up. Lilac would get him excited by describing her sex sessions with me. The professor tried to get Lilac to set up a threesome with him, me and her. It sounded like he thought I was some sort of super-stud. Whatever, dude!

It sure was weird hearing about someone else getting turned on about my sex life. Usually I was the one on the outside looking in!

I wasn't that eager to meet the professor, because he sounded like a scumbag, and I was very dubious about Lilac carrying on with this guy in the first place. As Lilac later found out, he was making whoopie with two of this other students while he was doing her. He seemed like sort of a pathetic individual, running from some ugly truths about himself while boffing his students.

As the end of Lilac's college career approached, it looked like she was going to be moving back in with me, because she didn’t really have anywhere else to go. I'll tell the story of what happened when Lilac moved back in, next time.

Continued