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Mr. And Mrs. Robinson

It had reached that point. Maybe you’ve been there, maybe not. It really doesn’t make much of a difference. Call it a mid- life crisis, call it whatever you goddamn well please. All Cliff Robinson knew was that if things didn’t change, and change fast, disaster was soon to follow.

His forty-eighth birthday was soon approaching, and he was suffocating. Not just in an allegorical sense, but literally suffocating. He woke up each morning, and in his mind, felt the need to tell himself to breathe. Things might have gone just fine without this daily reminder, but Cliff, as he  thought upon awakening every day, was not about to roll the dice with his life on the line.

He rose early each day, around 5 A.M. , giving him about five hours of sleep. His morning hard-ons were a thing of distant memory. No, nowadays, sex did not occupy even his sub-conscious mind.

He had recently lost his job. Truthfully, however, it was an act of pure self sabotage. And in these uncertain economic times, he caught hell from his wife. There were bills to pay, children to support. Selfish, selfish bastard, Caroline repeatedly mouthed, even when Cliff was no longer in sight.

He was not in total disagreement with his wife’s assessment of the situation. Even his honest belief that he was acting out of a God given instinct for self preservation did not do much to alleviate his guilt.

“I’m going to make you an appointment with a shrink”, Caroline said as she entered the kitchen. He was just sitting at the breakfast table, his morning coffee hardly touched. He was staring blankly into the vacuum.

“No sane man behaves the way you have these past few months. And now this! What the hell is going through that warped mind of yours?”

Cliff offered no response.

“That’s what I thought. Well, if you’re not talking to me, I’m going to find someone for you to talk to”.

She began to leaf through the yellow pages, then stopped abruptly.

“I’ll call Judy. Hal had this same type of problem a couple of years back, and he saw somebody, and now he’s alright. Yeah, I’ll find out who he used”.

“Hal tried to kill himself just about a year ago”, Cliff  absentmindedly responded.

“Well, he’s all better now, he has a steady job, and their marriage is much stronger than it used to be”.

Something in Cliff began to stir. An emotion he hadn’t felt in quite some time began to rise to the surface. He looked at his wife angrily.

“Hal walks around like a fucking zombie. I think they have him on Thorazine or some other son of a bitch drug that saps all the life out of you. That’s how you want me to end up?”

“Well, it would be better than things are now. At least you would be bringing in some regular income”.

Cliff slowly got out of his chair and walked over to his wife.

You might call it spousal rape. He tore her well tailored clothes off so rapidly, Caroline hardly had time to react. He didn’t make love to her. He fucked her. He pinned her arms to the kitchen floor, and forced himself inside her.

To her surprise, after a minute or so, she was wet. Very wet. The entire episode continued for quite a while. Well over an hour.

She did not press charges. In point of fact, things were quite different in the Robinson household from that moment onwards.

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