The Seven Divorces of Thomas Piaget

1. First Loves, First Divorces The first divorce of Thomas Piaget’s life was not his, but his parents. He was seventeen and in love with the impossible Alison Normand. He had up to this point displayed plain qualities, moving evenly through his life, doing well in school for the most part and playing a variety of sports and doing well in them as well. But then Allison happened, and he started to ask himself about the verities of love, fixating on the nature of it and its subsequent meanings. You loved, you got married, and then you got divorced. Or some got divorced while others stayed married, but he was not sure if they remained in love. His head filled up with questions and doubts. He loved Alison. He was sure of this, but his mother and father had told him that they at one time had loved one another as well. Then something happened. What? Something happened, and whatever it was, it was happening all the time, not just towards the destruction of marriage, but the creation of it, the need to announce and define one’s love via marriage. He said to Alison, “If we love one another and we want it to last, we should not get married.” Alison had looked at him with a fair amount of incoherence. Here was this boy she was at present dating because of an appearance she thought altogether becoming. His shock of hair, full lips, sly smile, the way he dressed in polo shirts and khaki pants as if he was always casual and relaxed, and then to be surprised by his intensity towards her. She had dated other boys beginning at fourteen, and as she counted them in her head, Thomas stood as the seventh for her. They had been an odd mix, but one thing they all had in common was how other girls thought them good “catches”, so she had moved ahead with them up to a certain point, secure in her approved choice. But one by one they had faded or failed her. She liked to think she had dismissed them, but there remained some doubt if this was really the case. It could be said they had become bored with one another. In each case, they had much to show one another, explaining likes and dislikes, some of these were shared while others were not. And then something happened. They moved on and away from one another. None of them was as curious or fixated on their relationship together as Thomas was. They did not dote on their lives together and miss one another as incessantly as Thomas said he missed her. She could gather a reason for this owing to the fact that Thomas was her seventh boyfriend, and she was his first girlfriend. What was it like, that first time? For her it was Reggie Stark asking her out and her ignoring his request until talking it over with her friends, Katie Witchett and Maddy Rice at that time. Both thought him suitable for her. They explained how they liked the look of the two of them together, talked about what she should wear, coming to her house to help with her wardrobe. And then after these first steps, talked about boys in general and what should or should not be allowed. They still wanted nothing to do with penises they told one another, but then again there had been some discussion about the “things” and the problems they posed. All agreed that they were to have nothing to do with them or the boys if they produced one on the first date. This was a deal breaker. Reggie never showed his, not did Scott Bend or Randy Parker. It was her fourth boy, the one she thought she was in love with, Kevin Long, who revealed his to her. She wondered now how it happened. The boys before Kevin she had lost track of in terms of how long they were together. She believed she saw none of them longer than five dates. Five seemed a fair number. She told herself now that Kevin must have been on the sixth or seventh date with her. They had started to profess their love for one another. Alison had no idea that this was a prerequisite to it, the thing. Kevin had said rather sleepy eyed and close to her as they had spread a quilt out at the park to do homework with no one around, “I love you so much”. Alison had heard him tell her this before. He was rather quick on the draw of telling her he loved her. Only one other boy had told her this, Reggie on their third date, but she had never told him she loved him. Maybe that was why it ended. Love had to be returned if the relationship was to continue. And she liked Kevin, she liked him a lot, but she did not know if she was in love, though she thought she was. Still, she reasoned, if I am not going to lose him, I had better tell him I love him too. And she had. And Kevin had took this to mean it was now time to “go for it”. He took her hand and placed it atop his pants where the thing was housed. Alison could feel it there, wondered over it. She had, to be truthful, never seen one, though a girlfriend, Charlotte Lewis, who had spotted one as a boy urinated next to a tree, drew several pictures of the thing so as to educate her friends about what it looked like. “C’mon,” Kevin said as he smiled at her and felt for her breasts. She took her hand from his pants where he had placed them and pushed his hands back from her breasts. They belonged to her, her mother had told her, and were not to be treated without respect.