Temptation - Jackie Davis Martin

The woman, the writer--amend that: the so-called writer--was sick of writing to one word. Confessing, shame, temptation, infidelity, resurrection. Just sick of it. She saw the point, or part of the point, of touching emotions deeply—or deeply touching emotions—or getting in touch with deep emotions—but it was a difficult task to prepare coffee and sit down at her computer to stare at a word: temptation.

Well.

She was old. Which temptation should she choose? The temptation when she was a kid to play with the car seat that tilted, the temptation to show it off to her friends Sharon and Francine next door? The Nash was blue, two-tones of blue, and featured a front seat that could tilt back to make, when it joined the wide plush expanse of backseat, a big double bed.

Her dad loved the concept, had demonstrated it proudly several times and she and her sister had bounced over the interior. This was long before those inflatable little houses one sees on city streets for a kid’s party, where kids can bounce inside. Anyway, she—our old lady, the writer---was too old to bounce, maybe ten, but old enough to be tempted to fiddle with the mechanism herself. She showed Sharon and Francine the car-turned-bed, and they oh-ed and ah-ed , but then she couldn’t get the seat back up. She never confessed this transgression to her dad, just listened to him curse the mechanism for the next few years.

Here the writer paused.

She had used the word confessed and that probably counted, too, as addressing one of the words meant to inspire writing. So: she had yielded to temptation and not confessed.

Was anyone even vaguely interested?

It was the way the story was told, of course. She knew that. Basically, though, people didn’t want to read stories of others who made strong personal choices, who made righteous choices, unless, of course, they were reading some moral guidebook. And virtue is fun for a while. Take food, for instance. The old lady’s stepson (whom she adored, but she’d take that up when “love” was thrown her way) was recently making almost a cult of good health, of vigor. Gyms, wholesome food, liquids, rest: for over a year. So: when the writer-old lady—oh, let’s give her a name! let’s call her Miriam! “Miriam” was an answer on Jeopardy last night—the name of Moses’ sister—and Miriam thought then, oh, good, another name, I will use Miriam. Where was she? Oh yes, when Miriam and her husband, the man’s father, were driving to visit, they welcomed the discipline the son might impose on their own unrestrained eating habits.

Here Miriam paused. Readers didn’t care about temptations of pie, which is where she intended to go with the story. It was an anecdote really, an anecdote being easier to write because it was just there, doing nothing: what happened, no theme.

So: what happened is this. The son cooked or assembled great meals and Miriam and her husband didn’t even ask about dessert. But, driving home from San Diego they went entirely out of their way to get a Razzleberry pie at Marie Callender’s somewhere near Pismo Beach and ate the pie when they got home in two sittings. What did they learn from this?

They learned that Razzleberry pie—which they hadn’t actually asked for, they’d asked for Blueberry, but Razzleberry was in the box—was fine eating except for all the seeds. They learned that they’d double-check next time.

So: temptations. Those of youth, those of age.

It’s what’s in between. It’s the standing in the copier room alone, eying all the reams of paper--or bottles of white-out or boxes of paper clips or anything else that seems to be in surplus—and thinking one of these won’t be missed. Or thinking, it is wrong. Which is more interesting? Actually neither, unless of course, a person—Miriam (Miriam almost forgot)—bumps into the boss or the principal or even a colleague exiting the room, hands full. Something at risk. Or unless there’s a hidden camera testing moral decisions made when no one is looking. That’d be a lousy premise, too, although in this case Miriam would get a cash prize for not taking the white-out and that would be an ironic turn. She could buy all the white-out she wanted, distribute it to friends.

It’s the temptations of sex that were compelling. Most compelling. Yielding—or not—to the high school boyfriend, a decision easy enough, really, in the fifties when the very atmosphere of the air was highly moral. People—young people-- just didn’t. How did society accomplish this, Miriam wondered, years later. Miriam and her young man panted and heaved and even partially undressed, tempted by each other relentlessly, in parked cars or—just once—in her bedroom when her parents weren’t at home—but still never went all the way. Was this a matter of personal choice? Hardly. They were fixated on the subject and contrived to meet years later, married to other people, and talk about what they should have done. But they didn’t do anything that time, either, beyond talk because by then they didn’t care about each other—or Miriam didn’t care at all about him, more the idea of him—and so they went their separate ways.

Not a story. Another anecdote. Although, if we really look at that last one, there was a risk. Either of those people could have been found out in the lie, and they had yielded to the temptation of meeting up with each other, as ridiculous as it turned out. Miriam was a writer—somewhat anyway—and she could adjust all this to be more than it was; she could call her characters Laurie and Alan and detach herself totally from what she saw now as rather stupid personal choices, and attempt to give Laurie or Alan an intensity, a sadness, a longing, a sense of something always unfulfilled.

Were people fulfilled? Miriam wondered. The woman, now old, wondered. What did it all mean? Maybe that would be the next word for her to stare at: fulfillment.

She was tempted to get more coffee. And so did.