The Upside of Down

When Dennis Saunders woke that morning, he experienced a fleeting moment of calm before the events of the previous evening began to flood in; percolating in a rising tide of dread. As much as he tried to delay the inevitable, opening his eyes exposed him to an unwelcome reality.

He glanced across to the side of the bed where his wife usually slept. It was empty; a pristine expanse of unspoiled duvet lapping over a plump virginal pillow. After letting this sink in for a moment, despair began to descend, dark and suffocating. He flipped back the duvet and eased himself up onto his elbows.

He gazed down at the long lean frame that stretched out symmetrically in front of him. Despite being six months shy of his forty-eighth birthday, Dennis retained the physique of a much younger man. He took a quiet pride in the fact that, while his contemporaries had started to fill out across the belly and had chests whose sinew had decayed and folded to resemble pre-pubescent breasts, he had retained a taut muscularity. It wasn’t a body builder’s muscularity, more that of a basketball player, sleek, supple and defined.

Dennis attributed this to a combination of genetics and his job. While most of his friends and acquaintances sat behind a desk staring at computer screens, Dennis had worked for over twenty years as a bricklayer.

“I don’t need to work out, honey; I do that for a living,” he’d told his wife once, when she had tried to persuade him to go power walking with her, back when that was a thing. “It’s like going to the gym every day.”

In retrospect, he realized that this was just another occasion when he had heard the words Dawn had spoken but hadn’t really listened.

He tried to stifle a yawn, leaving him shivering slightly, and stared impassively at the heavy dark oak dresser, the one that they had saved for, that matched the dark wooden frame of the bed. At one end of the mirror, that ran along the top of the dresser, stood an elegant glass vase, replete with a rainbow array of flowers that Dennis couldn’t name, religiously refreshed by Dawn every week; their scent blending in seamlessly with the floral furniture polish that she would apply as part of the same routine. At the other end of the dresser sat a picture of the couple on their wedding day in an embossed brass frame; a stark reminder of how far they had fallen.

Dennis had the strange feeling of being hung over, but he knew he hadn’t had anything to drink the night before. Instead, his jittery, clouded state had come from exhaustion, a fitful night of what felt like ten-minute bouts of sleep before waking again in a heart-pounding panic. There had been a brief period in the middle of the night when he had awoken, his shirt damp with sweat, and thought that he had slept for hours, but a quick glance at the clock showed that it had been minutes. He had tried to will himself to sleep, but his mind had refused to comply, continually agitating him with replays of the night before and chilling glimpses of a desperate future. As he became more desperate, knowing that he didn’t want to face the next day feeling groggy and shattered, his thoughts slipped further from his control. The fact that he had woken up told him that he must have dropped off at some point, but the heaviness of his eyes and the dull throb behind them informed him that it hadn’t been for long enough.

Dennis first met Dawn in the summer of 1990, when he was twenty-eight. She was a senior at the College of Charleston, whilst he was on leave from the navy, flush with the money that he’d saved from his last tour of duty as a Petty Officer First Class on a submarine..

They met in a bar down on East Bay Street in downtown Charleston on a hot, humid night in July. The physical attraction had been both mutual and instantaneous. Dawn was instantly taken by Dennis’ tall, slim but muscular physique, thick, dark hair and deep, soulful brown eyes. The sharp uniform didn’t exactly hurt her first impression either.

Dawn had the kind of blonde-haired, blue-eyed, suntanned good looks that Dennis associated with the glamorous world of movie stars. Her commodious figure only served to seal the deal in Dennis’ mind. The fact that she was also funny and engaging was a bonus for a man on leave in search of sexual misadventure. After the endless months of imposed celibacy aboard the submarine, finding true love wasn’t at the top of Dennis’ agenda.

For Dawn, whose priorities had been decidedly less carnal, there had been something about Dennis that had immediately set him apart from the students that she usually dated. Most of those boyish young men tried to be a cross between Woody Allen and Robert Redford—smart, witty, sensitive and beautiful—which invariably manifested as insecure, angst-ridden and slightly effeminate. It was fairly clear from the outset that Dennis’ conception of the ideal male was of a more unsubtle and confrontational hew. An amalgam of Clint Eastwood, and, well, a bit more Clint Eastwood was how Dennis wanted to be perceived. He had a kind of blithe self-confidence that made him seem infinitely worldlier than the men she was used to, an assured, almost cocky manliness that made the young men she went to college with seem even more callow than they were.

By the end of the first evening, while they exchanged telephone numbers, Dawn had come to the conclusion that this might be the man for her. She was besotted, but she was also smart enough to realize that the one way to ensure that she didn’t achieve her goal would be to let Dennis know how she felt.

Dennis had been intent on seduction, a fact that wasn’t lost on Dawn. She used it to manipulate an extended courtship over the next couple of months. Dennis felt like he was the hunter, gradually wearing Dawn down until she finally succumbed to his sexual desires. But it was Dawn who was really in control. Like a sexual matador, she played Dennis’ ever-growing ardor to perfection, maintaining his interest with hints at a future pleasure so exquisite that he could almost taste it while always keeping him one step away from the Promised Land.

By the time that Dawn finally surrendered to Dennis, on an unseasonably warm October evening on the beach at Sullivan’s Island, her dating alchemy had transformed Dennis’ lust into an adoration so strong that the idea of being with another woman seemed inconceivable to him.

When Dawn fell pregnant the following spring, such was the couple’s passionate devotion that the circumstance was greeted by both of them with joy, rather than trepidation or shame. Indeed, before they were married the following year, even Dawn’s father, who had been visibly mortified when they announced the upcoming arrival, had thawed considerably.

“Hell, it would be unusual for a member of this family to do it the other way around,” he’d admitted with his arm around Dennis’ shoulder at a particularly boozy celebration for the couple’s new daughter, Diane. “We keep it quiet,” he had slurred conspiratorially into Dennis’ ear, “but Mary was pregnant with Dawn when we got hitched, and we turned out just fine.”

After they were married, they lived in a modest house that they rented in West Ashley, a middle class suburb of Charleston. Dennis resigned from the navy and decided to pursue a career in construction. He was self-aware enough to realize that he wasn’t particularly suited, either intellectually or temperamentally, to white-collar work. He had always been pretty good with his hands, though; in high school, he had always excelled at woodwork, auto mechanics, and art. Other than history, something that still held some fascination for him, more academic subjects seemed either too ethereal or simply dull.

With the growth in residential property in the area, construction seemed to be the obvious outlet for his particular skill set. An old friend from high school had trained at the local college as a bricklayer and seemed to be making a decent living, so this was the career that Dennis chose.

At the same time Dawn decided that, at least for the first few years, she would follow through with the teaching career that she had been training for in college. After they were married, she completed her training and began teaching in a nearby elementary school.

Those first years together, working together as a team to create a new family, brought them even closer. Even though money was fairly tight, they never fought about it; in fact, they rarely argued about anything. They were both imbued with a sense of common purpose that they were creating a little institution that would be greater than the sum of its parts.

This impression was confirmed by their circle of friends, most of whom were still single. Dennis and Dawn would listen to the travails of the single life, the tales of heartbreak and letdowns, deceit and loneliness, with a growing and smug satisfaction that this was something that they had grown out of. For Dawn, it was a little like when she was in her first year of college when she would listen to her younger sister, Sue, regale her with the same old tales of post-pubescent angst that she had told herself when she had been in high school. It left her with a palpable sense of relief that she had outgrown something childish and immature; it left her with the delightful feeling that she was finally an adult.

Dawn decided that they would call their first daughter Diane. She thought that the idea of them all being “D’s” was cute. Dennis found it a bit embarrassing, but he’d already learned that if it wasn’t really that important to him, it was better to just go along.

As the first blush of excitement at being newlyweds raising a young child began to fade, they settled into a steady, respectable routine. The initial heady promise of becoming adults gradually evaporated as most of their friends attained the same marital status, undermining their unique standing.

Despite being relatively content, Dennis often felt a slightly frustrating sense that he was missing out on something. There was a predictable mundanity to their lives that he was beginning to find a little confining. They had sex twice a week, friends over for drinks on Fridays, church on Sundays, followed by lunch with Dawn’s parents. Variations of the same conversations were repeated ad nauseam, colored occasionally by the changing news, but drained of anything contentious, like politics or religion. It was all very polite and tepid and about as inspiring as re-arranging your sock drawer.

The lustful infatuation that had so driven Dennis’ feelings towards Dawn at the start of their marriage began to fade, worn down by familiarity, and was replaced by a growing respect for her as a mother and home-maker. He found himself looking forward to coming home to their beautifully maintained house, with its inviting floral scents mixed with the mouthwatering aroma of Dawn’s cooking. Dennis was smart enough to realize that this was just the natural way of things; that the colonizing zeal that had initially fueled their passion would inevitably succumb to the corrosion of time. He liked the growing sense of partnership and loyalty that he felt with Dawn; it made him feel secure and mature. What he hadn’t counted on was that his more lustful inclinations had not simply disappeared. They were still there, just as strong, just as nagging, but now devoid of a legitimate focus.

Almost imperceptibly, he became more flirtatious with the women he came into contact with. He returned the casual flirtations of the buxom young server who worked at the sandwich place near to a site where he was working. Although he had no real intention of taking this any further than harmless banter, he had begun to fantasize about her during the mandatory Saturday morning coupling with Dawn. He even felt a sharp stab of guilt when Dawn commented teasingly on one occasion, “Wow, I think you just set a new Olympic record for the fastest orgasm, honey. I guess you must have the hangover horns this morning.”

As he had thrust into Dawn, his eyes clenched shut, he had pictured the young waitress bent, submissive, over the counter of the café, her short skirt hiked up over the curve of her hips, her panties dangling loosely around one of her ankles. Before he could forestall it by shifting his focus to something less libidinous – sports usually did it – his rising orgasm had reached a point of no return. He had ejaculated with an apologetic whimper and mumbled “oops” to try and cover his embarrassment.

Dennis may well have eventually succumbed to the temptations of extramarital dalliances had it not been for the arrival of the couple’s second child, a boy. The arrival of his son seemed to shake him back to the reality of his responsibilities, strengthening his loyalty to his family; while the urges were still there, he could confine them to a distant outpost of his mind, walled in by a sense of love for his children and fealty to Dawn.

Dawn had wanted to continue with their little tradition of D’s, something that Dennis found irritatingly twee. Nevertheless, Dennis was sufficiently uninterested in the process that had she suggested it on another day, he might have been a bit more accommodating of her suggestion of Davis. By chance, though, she had chosen the day when Dennis’ truck had broken down in the morning and his favorite college football team, Clemson, had lost in the afternoon. It had all left Dennis in a foul mood by the evening. Unfortunately, this was when Dawn had casually suggested it as she absentmindedly stroked her pregnant belly while watching dinner cook on the stove. Driven by his sullen temper, Dennis had decided to take a more petulant and vindictive approach, and in the end, they settled for Ryan, after Dennis’ father.

Dennis lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes. He breathed in deliberately and slowly in an effort to calm his racing mind. Serenity infiltrated his thoughts, drawing him back to the halcyon years of their marriage, the time when the kids had both started school and Dawn and he were making steady progress in their careers. It had been a while since he had taken the time to reflect on this period of their lives together; perhaps because the years had flowed so effortlessly, so easily. It was a bit like when a long-distance runner hits the middle part of a race. He has shed the breathless stiffness of the opening miles and has not yet hit grinding fatigue that makes the muscles ache for relief towards the end. The middle section is where the endorphins kick in, making the run feel more like a meditation than an exertion, an unconscious and spontaneous progression from one stride to the next.

Dwelling on this period of their marriage filled him with a warmth that had become a distant memory. Inevitably, he found himself questioning what had happened, what had been the catalyst that had metastasized into their spiraling downfall as if it were a single event that he could pinpoint. Like older people often look back at the nineteen fifties through rose-colored spectacles, shutting out any inconvenient realities that might contradict their narrative, Dennis couldn’t see the possibility that the rot may have started slowly, that he may have been oblivious to it until it was too late.

Birdsong outside of the window shook Dennis from his thoughts, and he glanced reflexively at the alarm clock. His insides tightened as the sickening realization sunk in that he had fifteen minutes to dress and make it to a worksite that was thirty minutes away.