Chasing a Light Beam – Chapter 2: “Bonnie”
BONNIE
Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
-William Congreve, 1697
Bonnie Baker was short, like Ben Bob. They both stood four feet, eleven inches tall in the tenth grade, but subsequent years would confirm that Bonnie was already fully-grown. Her dark hair had begun to have strands of gray that were almost white when she was only twelve. On close inspection, the dark part was a blend of shades of black, brown, and bronze. It was soft and natural, and mixed with her diminutive size, it made her quite striking. Even her eyes were unique, as they were a combination of green and brown, with flakes of yellow. Her breasts apparently had not gotten the message that she was female. Ben Bob could not have Leslie Batson, but he had a shot at Bonnie Baker.
She was a Baptist, and she wanted to be a missionary. From the ninth grade on, she was never a cheerleader nor the president of anything; she was always the chaplain. Her singing voice was that of a lyrical soprano twice her size, the result of genetics and private lessons in Italian opera. It was never clear to Ben Bob how operatic skills would figure into the life of a Baptist missionary in darkest Africa, but he took every opportunity to hear her sing in church and at service clubs, and it never failed to cause what the Cajuns call frissons.
At seventeen, Bonnie had never been kissed, and she had no plans to change her status. She felt that marriage — or romance — would distract from her full-time service to God, so why get started? She had dates every weekend, and they all went home disappointed. Her parents never allowed her to see the same boy consecutively, so Ben Bob had to work himself into their rotation all through high school.
He was nearly six feet tall now. His three pubic hairs had expanded into a full crop. He began to think that missionary life was his calling, especially whenever he went swimming with Bonnie at her family’s lake house. He searched the scriptures using the Biblical concordance he had received for his sixteenth birthday, finding every Biblical reference that seemed to support love and marriage between a man and woman serving God. One evening when they were seniors in high school, he made an organized presentation of his findings, a sales pitch with himself as the purchase. She was stunned and amazed. As she stood and stared at him in wonderment, her head now twelve inches beneath his, he bent down and kissed her.
She cried.
Ben Bob thought of Bonnie’s senior portrait that had lived on his bedside table. He had kissed it every night for years.
I went to Duke after graduation, mostly because I could. I had a scholarship, and Mom said I didn’t have to go to a state school, so long as I found a way to make up the money difference. Officially, I was preparing to be a missionary, but the devil was workin’ on me. No matter the major, I felt the Duke name on a diploma would make folks take notice. Bonnie couldn’t get in at Duke. She was a hard worker: she graduated with honors, but she didn’t make the Duke cut on the SAT’s.
Four years of emotional torture began for Ben Bob. There were five mail deliveries each day to the campus post office. His life would have been much less complicated had there been only one daily delivery; he missed hardly any of them, looking for any word from his beloved. Later, Ben would take a course in motivational psychology, in which an experiment with rats was described. The rats were taught to press a bar in order to receive a reward. Once they had learned that behavior, the reward was delivered after either a fixed number of bar-presses, or randomly. The rats who received the rewards in a predictable manner would press the bar only until they were satisfied, but the rats on the random schedule, the ones that never knew when the reward would come, pressed the bar until they wilted from exhaustion, even if they rarely got anything. As Ben went back and forth to the post office, he never realized that he was the random rat.
I thought I was smart, but I was nothing special at Duke. The girls had a separate admissions system, and they were so bright you had to wear shades around them. God had evened things up a bit, though: they weren’t exactly eye candy. The older guys told me that if ever I entered a new class and more than a third of the students were girls, the only thing to do was drop the class, because all the A’s and B’s would go to them. I couldn’t rely on my Christian virtues for admiration; hell, my freshman roommate was a Jew! At least he believed in half of my Bible; there was a whole crew of folks who didn’t recognize the Bible as any kind of authority at all. Word of God? How about a not-very-accurate collection of myths and folk tales?
During the three days of freshman orientation, the alphabet repeatedly brought Ben into the presence of Rachel Breslau, a dark-eyed beauty from New York who temporarily obscured his thoughts of Bonnie Baker. He talked to her at every opportunity, telling of his Christian ideals, his love of children, and generally painting the picture of solid reliability — or of a wimp, depending on your point of view. It never occurred to him that she was Jewish. She was a beautiful, smart girl, and he was a nice, smart boy. Period. At the end of orientation, Ben Bob called Rachel at her dorm to ask for his first Duke date. He could hear her name being called over the dormitory speakers in the background, and finally she answered. When she did not seem to recognize his name, he recapped their orientation encounters to refresh her memory.
It turns out that there are some responses that indeed may be worse than simply laughing and walking away, as did Leslie Batson. The lovely Ms. Breslau found one such response without missing a beat. “I’d love to go,” she cooed, “but I have to wash my socks that night.”
Ben Bob retreated to the Baptist Student Center over the next several weeks, where he was able to arrange rides to the First Baptist Church in Durham on Sundays. The Duke Chapel was magnificent in its neo-gothic enormity, but the services seemed dry and impersonal, a sort of academic, non-sectarian approach to God that made Ben Bob uncomfortable. His enrollment in Religion 1X, a special “advanced” seminar modification of the ordinary freshman course, designed for those with intense religious interest, was proving disappointing as well. The professor, who was also on the staff of the Divinity School, challenged almost every religious notion that Ben Bob had always accepted without question, and even the divinity of Jesus was up for discussion. The God and religion of which he taught were intellectual experiences, rather than the emotion-based, down-home Baptist experience so integral to Ben. The Bible was seen as a literary and mythical storybook, somewhat historical, but not even intended to be factually accurate. Some of the revelations about “God’s word”, as Ben knew it, were particularly annoying and disappointing. How could Matthew not write the gospel of Matthew? It seems a harmless disparity, but to Ben it was akin to discovering as an adult that one of your parents had a previous spouse and child. Ben Bob was like country come to town every time the seminar convened. His feelings vacillated between defensiveness and disenfranchisement, and his unquestioning acceptance of Noah’s and Jonah’s experiences seemed beyond naïve to the point of stupid.
Ben Bob found a welcome ear for these matters in a 28-year-old man he met at the Baptist Student Center. He was the organist at the First Baptist Church in Durham, a graduate of Duke, with a master’s degree in theology from Harvard. He had a VW Beetle, and it was he who provided Ben Bob’s transportation to and from church and choir practice. He was short and thin, and he bounced when he walked. His hair had a mind of its own, tempered by some sort of all-too-apparent salve, and his face was pocked with evidence of severe acne earlier in life. His upper incisors protruded, resting on his lower lip. He was constantly animated and unable to keep his hands still as he talked. His name was Ambrose. To any twenty-first century observer, Ambrose was so clearly gay that he was almost on fire. But Ben wasn’t a twenty-first century observer.
One evening after a particularly rigorous choir practice of the Easter portions of Handel’s Messiah, Ambrose invited Ben to stop off at his apartment for a Coke and some TV. The dorms had neither beverage machines nor TV’s, so Ben jumped at the chance. It was a small place, two rooms, but artfully decorated, in a World War Two-era apartment building. After the first Coke, Ambrose offered a “tour” of the rest of the apartment, which had only one other room, the bedroom. Still buoyant from choir, TV, and the intellectual discussion, Ben Bob feigned enthusiasm as he inspected the room. Ambrose put his arm around Ben and suggested, “Would you like to lie down and rest with me for a while?”
Ben Bob knew the meaning of homosexuality, but it had never occurred to him that he would ever meet a live one face to face, or in any other position. At first he froze, as Ambrose looked up at him with a toothy, inviting smile. Then he ran out. He was about three miles from campus, and he ran all the way back. He wasn’t frightened; Ambrose presented no physical challenge at all. He was disgusted, disappointed, and disheartened. He was confused.
Ben Bob never attended another religious service while at Duke. He would not become a missionary, nor a preacher, nor anything else related to the church. And Bonnie? As luck would have it, before graduation she discovered that her father had been having sex with a woman before he married her mother. It was hardly a story worthy of the front page, but the father’s sanctimoniousness about sexual and religious matters, combined with Bonnie’s unwavering toeing of the line to please him, caused her to throw out the whole deal: she hated her father and thought religion was hypocritical. The perfect punishment for her father, in Bonnie’s eyes, was for Ben Bob to become both a doctor and her husband. She came to Durham at Spring break during their senior year and showed Ben Bob her breasts for the first time. He had seen very similar sights in the men’s dorm showers, but these were attached to the one he loved, and bada-bing! It was a done deal.
Actually, there was a little more to it than that, like going from pre-god to pre-med too late to qualify on time, losing his academic deferment after graduation, and being drafted into the Army during the Tet Offensive. And not being accepted to medical school until after first-year classes had started, when a space became available following the withdrawal of a nauseated boy after his first encounter with his anatomy cadaver. And accidentally becoming a father during medical school, and then purposely becoming a father again, so the spacing would be right. And working for 100 hours a week for five years after medical school to become a surgeon. But Ben Bob did it: he worked for what he wanted the way his Daddy had done. And Bonnie did it with him. She was a good, if crazy, woman.
Unfortunately, the crazy part won.
Ben Bob clicked the recorder’s dictate button as he carefully placed the martini glass on the lamp table beside him. Such glasses are inherently unstable, and he had spilled nearly as much gin and vodka as he had consumed over the previous two years, not to mention creating a graveyard of broken stemware.
Before Daddy died, when I was fresh out of the Army, with a head that looked like a lumpy billiard ball, Bonnie and I got married. It was a bunch of “B’s”, Ben Bob Boyle and Bonnie Baker Boyle. The wedding was supposed to be much later, because we didn’t have any money. But a virus intervened. During boot camp, there was an outbreak of viral meningitis. The post medical commander issued orders for no intermingling of troops, to cut down on the spread of the disease. That meant none of us could go to the PX, or the commissary, or the movies, or to drink beer, and there were no passes. We each made only about seventy dollars a month, but Uncle Sam supplied all our essentials, and there was no place to spend the money. Enter the game of poker. I wasn’t by any means the world’s greatest poker player, but these guys weren’t the world’s smartest opponents. By the end of basic, I had fifteen hundred dollars. The wedding was moved up.
I wanted Daddy to be the best man, but Mom felt he didn’t deserve the honor because Daddy hadn’t shown much interest in my sister and me after we moved away. I turned twenty-one in the Fall of my senior year at Duke, and that was the end of Daddy’s legal obligation for child support. He’d been sending sixteen dollars and thirty cents a week for me since I was nine. In his mind, it was blood money that went to Mom, and he’d be goddamned if he was going send it for a day more than the law required. I could sorta see his point, but the money paid for my food, and during Christmas break, I traveled to his home to beg. I told him I’d be graduating in five months, and after that I could repay him right away.
“Son, I never knew why you thought you needed to go to that fancy far-off school with all those Yankee teachers to start with,” he told me, shaking his head in bewilderment. “What you need to do is transfer to Central Florida Junior College, come live with me, and finish your schoolin’ here. There ain’t nothin’ at Duke you cain’t get at CFJC, and it won’t cost an arm and a leg.” His ignorance of even the basic aspects of the secondary education system was dumb-founding. I left, crying.
Mom and I didn’t always see eye-to-eye, even to the point of my being legally emancipated after my junior year of college. But Mom would have done anything for me, or at least anything that didn’t involve conflict with the Scriptures. I was not about to buck her over the wedding issue. My other choices for best man were my best friend Scooter, and the guy who thought he was my best friend, Blake. Blake was our preacher’s son. Scooter was from a Navy family, and his real name was Tom. He was the first person I ever knew who openly claimed to be an atheist. Scooter smoked, drank, tried to screw every girl he met, and used an e e cummings quote in our high school senior yearbook. None of the rest of us had ever even heard of e e cummings. Scooter was president of the Key Club; he had the idea for the Slave Sale to raise money for a party. The way it worked was this: the names of all the members were written on a chalkboard by the entrance to the cafeteria, where everyone had to pass by. Anyone could bid for the all-day Saturday services of a member; I think the minimum was $1.50, with 25-cent raises. Mrs. Lowe, my chemistry teacher, the one with the reddish-purple bouffant ‘do, bought me for $2.75. She worked me like a red-headed stepchild, cleaning her bathrooms, mowing her grass, and washing her cars. Scooter left his own name off the board because he worked at the Winn-Dixie from nine to nine every Saturday. Linda Croom wanted Scooter bad. She was a semi-attractive junior who was banned from the senior marching band trip because she had supposedly serviced every male band “member” on the junior trip. As I understood it, all the complaints came from the mothers, rather than the boys.
I was running the sale, and I told Linda that Scooter’s Winn-Dixie hours made him unavailable, but she was a woman on a mission. She plunked down five dollars. Now, this was at a time when minimum wage was a dollar-fifteen, so five bucks was a sizable investment. She said, “The bidding on Scooter is over. Tell him I’ll pick him up at the grocery store at 9PM Saturday.” And she did.
Eighteen-year-old boys — or men of any age, for that matter–are not known for their discretion regarding such events, and sure enough, Scooter described to me every detail of the on-time pick-up, the dash to the Air Base Drive-in Theatre, the immediate disrobing, and the maximum amount of sexual activity that a couple of that age can generate in the back seat of a 1963 Ford Customline, which is considerable. Then she dropped him off, thanked him, and they never went out again. Had she been a boy, she would have been considered a “stud”. But she was cursed with two “X” chromosomes, so she was a “slut”.
Scooter and I couldn’t have been more different, except that he was just as smart as I was, and we both knew it. I chose Blake for best man, because I knew Scooter could handle it. And he did.
My friends thought it would be clever to handcuff Bonnie and me together at the reception. Our first official trip as a married couple was to the county jail, to see if some gendarme might have the appropriate key. The deputies offered to perform not only that service, but also anything else Bonnie might require that night, in surprising detail, for public servants. It may have been the first nudge toward her conversion into a femi-nazi, but in any case, it didn’t get the evening off to a great start.
He took another small sip of the drink. “What a couple,” he thought. Neither of them knew anything about sex, except that it caused babies, and she had started “the pill” the month before the wedding to cover that. Towards the end of their courtship, when Bonnie was certain they would marry, she would put her thighs around one of his as they kissed, and grind until she had an orgasm. The first time it happened, she was frightened, because she was unaware of the existence of such responses. After that, she was hooked. One night, while they were ending the date by performing this routine at the kitchen door, her ninety-something live-in grandmother wandered in, looking for a glass of water. Bonnie was just short of her own destination; she had the glass filled and the old broad hustled back to bed before her thighs even cooled! There was nothing in it for him but emotional satisfaction and a feeling of accomplishment; it was all about her.
The honeymoon was completely different. In the novels Ben had read, a description of sex was along the lines of, “his throbbing member with its bulging veins penetrated her quivering wetness, and she immediately began to come in spasms that seemed to go on until she was breathless,” or some such. But that’s not what happened. His throbbing member penetrated her wetness, all right, but he ejaculated immediately and nothing happened for her at all. Not the first time, nor the second, nor the third — they were young, recall. Indeed, not at any time during the honeymoon. Neither of them had ever heard of a clitoris, nor had any clue how its stimulation might help. Eventually in their marriage, they worked out a satisfactory method, but straight intercourse was never to be the answer.
During Ben’s third year of medical school in Augusta, Georgia, Bonnie had problems with the pill, and couldn’t tolerate the IUD at all. Her gynecologist recommended a contraceptive foam, and she got pregnant the first month they used it. Later, when talking with that doctor at the time of delivery, Ben Bob would learn that the OB-GYN and his wife had eight children, five conceived while using the same contraceptive foam he had recommended. Thank you, doctor.
Having a child changes everything, if you’re a responsible, moral, ethical man. Immediately, the idea of, “well, if we don’t get along, we can just split up,” is eliminated. The child itself is a joy, but the situation is no longer under your control. Not only is this true for the man, but for the woman as well, as both Ben Bob and Bonnie demonstrated.
As Bonnie descended into what would now be called “bipolar disorder”, she began seeing a psychiatrist, but a specific diagnosis was never passed along to either of them. It probably made little difference, because frankly there were no good medications for such problems in those days. In spite of being a medical student with a rotation in psychiatry, Ben Bob figured Bonnie could control her feelings if she wanted to; in his eyes, she just wasn’t trying.
Bonnie’s father had diverted her from her musical aspirations into the field of elementary education, a career he deemed more reliable and suitable for a respectable woman. It did not help that the girl who sang second to Bonnie in her college opera productions went on to become a member of the Metropolitan Opera of New York. The lead in the Augusta opera production, for which Bonnie auditioned, was “given”, as she perceived it, to the woman whose family had made the largest financial contributions to the opera guild. Bonnie was pissed.
She had always wanted to live in Nashville, the Music City, and as the finish of medical school loomed, Ben Bob’s applications for surgical residency were coming up. Much to everyone’s surprise, he was offered a spot at Vanderbilt, the very institution where Bonnie’s father had trained, the one thought by Ben’s in-laws to be beyond his reach. Ben Bob knew Bonnie would see his Vanderbilt appointment as a dagger to her father’s heart, and he felt she would be pleased beyond description. But she wasn’t. On the final day before the deal was to be sealed, Bonnie unexpectedly said she would not live in Nashville under any circumstances. She had been born there, and she was all gushy about the place when Ben Bob had interviewed, silently agreeing with her parents that he had no chance for acceptance. Now that he was in, she wanted nothing to do with it. She wanted to go to Lexington. Although Ben Bob scrambled and was able to land a good position at the University of Kentucky, he began to realize that Bonnie was more concerned with control than happiness.
Over the next five years, another child was born, Bonnie was a stay-at-home mother, and her militant feminism grew steadily. Ben Bob was offered a job with the most prestigious surgical group in Lexington at the completion of his residency. It was then that Bonnie, one evening after the kids were in bed, announced she would no longer live in Lexington “under any circumstances”, though they had come there only at her insistence. They took his one-month Chief Resident vacation and visited sites all around the country, none of which suited her.
Eventually, through a friend-of-a-friend, Ben had an offer from a group in Lafayette, Louisiana, an oil boomtown with a major university, arts, Cajun restaurants, les bon temps, and abundant opportunities for women. Bonnie could find no specific reason to object, and they closed on a house.
Before they could move in, she recanted. She had come up with a good objection. She said they had lived life for Ben Bob’s career for the past nine years, and that it was only fair that they should live life for her career for the next nine. She wanted to go to Music City, to Nashville. The same Nashville she rejected five years earlier.
With a signed job contract in hand, along with a home mortgage, Ben Bob refused. It was the first time he had failed to give in to her demands since the tenth grade. Bonnie went into full bitch mode.
They went for counseling. Ben Bob chose a woman PhD who was president of the Lafayette chapter of the National Organization of Women, anxious to make certain that Bonnie saw the encounter as one fair to her interests. After two sessions, the doctor suggested that Bonnie had some issues that required individual attention. “Mrs. Boyle,” she started, carefully choosing her words, phrasing them so that the possibly offensive message was the filling sandwiched between two complimentary thoughts, like an Oreo. “Now that I have had a chance over the past two sessions to view the dynamics between you and Dr. Boyle, I am impressed with your strength, your frankness and your resolve. There are a few personal issues about the way you interact with your husband that we could work to improve, so I’d like to see you alone for the remainder of the sessions. With your obvious intelligence and the deep love you have for Dr. Boyle, I’m confident we’ll achieve a wonderful outcome.”
At first, Ben was not certain that Bonnie understood the implication of the doctor’s suggestion. His doubt dissolved when he saw the expression he had witnessed so many times come over Bonnie’s face. “You…are…a…worthless…mother-fucker!” she screamed in staccato rhythm at the counselor. “Can’t you see that this ass-hole has been putting on an act so you’d blame everything on me? What kind of a stupid cunt would fall for that? Did you get your fucking degree at Sears?” It was an amazing spectacle, coming from a sister in the fight to throw off the chains of male dominance, magnified by the unlikely source of such a diminutive figure. It didn’t surprise Ben, because he had seen it countless times, but the counselor was speechless. As Bonnie hustled out the door, a vision came to Ben: they were in darkest Africa and the counselor was a gone-astray native, invoking the wrath of God’s own chosen missionary, Bonnie Boyle.
Bonnie took the two daughters and all the furniture, and moved to Nashville. The furniture was a gift from Bonnie’s grandmother, with the proviso that it would always remain on the Baker side of the family. Ben Bob came home one day to find the house empty and his family gone.
Retributive legal shenanigans followed, but the fact was that Ben Bob had no possessions over which to fight, save his ability to generate income, and he was more than willing to share that with his children. He cried for months at the loss of his childhood sweetheart, the only woman he had ever loved, but when he began to recover, he knew she had been gone for years.
