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I've a habit of dragging people around.
 Only matter is you couldn't tell. My chalk stripe navy blue worsted suit, white shirt, foulard tie, and the calf skin cap toe shoes disguise my baggage. An hour or two over a drink you still wouldn't know what I really do.
It varies from month to month just how many. There are some regulars. The jazz pianist, the preacher, the worrier, the teary-eyed sentimentalist, the callow youth, and the woman with alba skin and hair the shade of fire. They only show themselves when I'm alone. At such times they exhale collectively and appear.
My wife, Alma, they've taken to, however. Each has slept with her. I don't object whereas you might think I would. I'm not a voyeur. Instead I'm enlightened by the delight she enjoys in the diversity. Each causes her to reveal a different side of herself.
For instance, the keyboardist. He seduces her by whistling chord progressions of one of her favorite ballads. First, he'll announce the chords in each bar, say, "OK, C minor seventh, F seventh, D minor, C sharp diminished, then back to C minor and F seventh." Then he'll warble the changes.
All the time rubbing the small of her back, a prelude to coitus.
The woman with the alba skin and fiery orange hair, she I like to think is a Rabbi's daughter. She's very long legs and fingers that you might imagine are a cellist's. Her lips are a deep vermillion and bud like. When she laughs they open niggardly, suggesting a violet breathing behind them. Alma enjoys the reticence of the Rabbi's daughter. How she approaches her with stealth and a fragrant breath. The tongue caresses Alma's neck and aureoles with deliberateness. Alma giggles and shivers. The Rabbi's daughter moves down the body.
Soon legs are entwined. And Alma is singing the keyboardist's progressions. The Rabbi's daughter's only sound is a sustained A sharp, two octaves above middle C.
The preacher gets her attention only on week nights when Alma returns home from work literally exhausted. He's insistent in his own guarded way. "I don't see enough of you. Don't you love me anymore? Let me massage your feet. Tell me the problems you encountered at the office today." All his tired lines. One invariably works. Especially the massage or his share-your-troubles ploy.
Invariably Alma and he ride off to a perfunctory release. Neither is too excited about it. The preacher, for all his earnestness, is unable to touch these parts of Alma that the keyboardist and Rabbi's daughter provoke.
When I watch them an ennui sets in. Often I fall asleep before he moves to the missionary position.
The lachrymose sentimentalist places a photograph of Alma's deceased mother over the headboard. Looks very much like Alma actually, when I first met her. The mother is sitting in a wing chair smoking and laughing. Her legs are crossed and a pleated skirt falls just above her knee. The mother's eyes are illumined with a "you're winning me over" smile. There's a very seductive message in the way she has tossed back her head, the long braid flying out to the side of her lovely face with abandon.
A maudlin sadness generates the couple's embrace. Alma's deceased father was a stone, a providential husband and father, but a stone nonetheless. The libidinous nuance suggested in the photograph went unanswered by him. Alma mourns for her mother's loss both while she was alive and now. The sentimentalist sobs and commiserates with her. A prelude to an embrace. A release from this sadness and all the others they can think of.
The callow youth she addresses as the instructor. "Do this. Oh, please, not that. This. Yes, that's better." It's a very small step removed from masturbation. At times she prefers the latter, but he'll get better she reassures herself.
Only out of some wizened sense of charity does she prevail the worrier to come in off the balcony (He's always threatening to leap) and accompany her in the bed. She knows that this effort of mercy will be fruitless, however; at some point during the night she will hear the slider doors to the balcony open and see the shadow of the worrier shuddering alongside the wrought iron balustrade and staring ten floors below.
*
Alma thinks I'm shallow. She doesn't like the way I cock my hat to one side of my head. Forever she is scolding me that the part in my hair is crooked. "Did you look in the mirror, Edward?"
Little does she know about looking in a mirror. She glances in one and sees her gums receding, the strands of gray, the mole under her left eye which she calls a beauty mark. I see those characters smirking at me. I can't afford to look in a mirror for God's sake.
Alma treats them better than she does me. In fact they are deferential to her. Catering to all her needs. It's me they are indifferent to. "Get a life," they say. And when the worrier ratchets up his anxiety about wanting to leap off the balcony, the others begin to exhibit signs of anxiety. They whisper among themselves, seeking some way to ease him back to stability. "We'll miss him terribly," one will cry. "We're family," another will assert. It's as if one of their members is threatened, they all are. If one bolts on his own volition, underneath all the fuss is a sense he'll pull the others like catfish on a string along with him.
No, they are never solicitous with me. Yet it is I who carry them about on my back.
It's why I've come up with this scheme.
I'm going to force the worrier to leap. He keeps threatening, obviously gaining some satisfaction from the rest being solicitous of him. Coddling him. I say if he wants to do it, he should be brave and leap. That's the way I will frame the issue. "Worrier, if you keep threatening to leap I believe you are only doing it for the pity the others heap upon you. They don't want to be left alone. Further, I suspect that if you do in fact leap, one will come down with the desire to do the same. It's infectious, you know? This desire to take one's life. I would never consider it. Oh no. But you have. Yet, unlike the others, I have no sympathy for you. Further, I think you are pusillanimous. A coward, yes. I would have much more respect for you if indeed you were brave and took the plunge. It would all be over in a matter of seconds. But a word of advice, stay clear of the tree. It might break your fall. The last thing you need is to finally muster the courage to leap then have the grand event be compromised by your getting hung up in its branches.
"Ignominy. You've suffered enough of that, Worrier.
"So what do you say? I will accompany you early A.M. to the balcony, and in the morning's gray mist, you'll fly. How does that sound? Better than taking the leap. Huh? Is it a date?"
My scheme.
If the worrier does indeed climb upon the balcony's railing, and if the other characters in my charge are convinced of his determination to plunge . . . it's at that very point in time they will flee my head like starlings out a barn loft. For where the worrier goes they follow. His fate will be their fate. And that's when every character looks out for himself. I'm convinced of it.
Alma will have a new man come daybreak
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