Hannah Scribe's Scorched Earth Policy Of Love - A Militant Romantic, The Last Man Standing Would Be Hers

'Men', said Hannah.  'Can't live with them and can definitely live without them', but stuck she was in suburbia hating every minute of it, having moved out from the city in a failed desire for more room to grow.  Yes, they had a nice house, a lawn, a garden, and good schools, but what had it done for her?  Nothing, nada, zilch, zippo.  

She was as blindered, harnessed, and tethered as a Fifties housewife, and her husband was no better than the churchgoing Rotarians of a generation ago, giving a desultory swipe at the dinner dishes, cutting the grass like it was hunting prey on the veldt, going off every Thursday night to play poker with the boys. 'I didn't sign up for this', Hannah said. 

  

But of course she did.  She knew precisely what she was getting into, thought that Aidan Scribe was the man, the one whose boxes were all checked - kind, considerate, liberal, attentive, respectful.  She was less concerned with virility - that could be had on any streetcorner, and she had no intention of rolling over every night for her husband alone.  A modern marriage, she insisted, one with an exit strategy, a side door, a convenient way out but with a home to come back to. 

The city had been their mutual choice. Both had grown up around metropolitan areas and had gravitated to them for art, culture, and enjoyment.  New Brighton, where her husband was from was your usual small New England town, predictable for its bank, dry cleaners, Main Street dentists, and novelty stores.  'Not an unpleasant place to grow up', he said using that academic negative positive she hated, a manner of speaking which left no room for enthusiasm.  

If it hadn't been New Brighton it would have been some other routine, dismal place.  That's what the Scribe family was made of, simple expectations, and they could have been satisfied anywhere. 

She was from the Midwest - at least there people were proud of their simple Americanism, had no urban envy, and were just as happy with cows and chickens as other people.  Hannah left the farm for college, first Mason County Community College  then Ohio State, then one year of graduate school after which she left to follow the circus. 

Not really, but that was the way she liked to describe her 'fugue', a departure from the status quo to ride the rails with Billy Baxter, a bad boy but an irresistible one ('Why do we always fall for them?) and together they covered the territory - communes, birchbark canoes, Indian reservations, and the Muir woods. 

Billy turned out to be bust, a temporary anodyne, a good on-and-off switch but nothing more interesting or permanent.  It was a fling, a retro-hippy bus trip, but something to return from, not stay. 

Then there was Arthur from Beacon Hill, a patrician New Englander whose ancestors had founded the Massachusetts Bay colony, become Newport shipbuilders and Atlantic traders, and founded Parker, Perkins & Adams one of Wall Street's first investment banks. 

Arthur was the downer after upper Billy and his antics, and Hannah even thought he was the one - or was it the money, the Fifth Avenue penthouse, and a private plane? And if so, what did it matter? 

It did matter, actually, at least finding the right place to anchor; and Arthur was not it.  He was the kind of man who is always distracted, his mind here and there but never on anything vaguely interesting.  Perhaps it was the money, too many choices, not enough setbacks to focus one's attention. In any case, money and all, she left him. 

She married Aidan who had a little bit of everything, but not a lot of any one thing.  She thought that a potpourri, a smorgasbord, was better than a pot which could boil over, and her biological clock was ticking, so they tied the knot and moved to an accommodating apartment in Cambridge.  He trundled off to work at biotech firm in Boston, and she to a local advertising company which touted its Pahk the Cah Boston roots and wooed clients with its Southie and Charlestown working class background. 

So far, so good. A normal, expected, predictable trajectory, but when he came along ('He' was how she referred to her son, refusing to accept motherhood, and not giving him a name other than an indifferent pronoun somehow validated her independence) the apartment felt cramped and diapery and they decided to move. Cambridge, which she had valued for its cultural diversity, was in reality just a few streets of Pho, take out, Portuguese delis, Asian Harvard, and not much else; so it was time to move out. 

Hannah had been a dutiful, faithful wife during the Cambridge sojourn. No lovers, no cinq-a-septs, no liaisons or trysts.  Except for Jorge, Dominican transplant but no Romeo Santos but a MIT mathematician working on number theory - like Alan Turing, he suggested, whose first computer broke the German secret code, he was going to do the same with Russian and Chinese puzzles. 

Why she fell for him, she didn't know, but had no regrets.  Short, sweet, unpredictable, but satisfying; and when he took a professorship at Berkeley, she went back to hearth and home. 

In any case after a few years in the suburbs Hannah had become restive.  It was time to leave the nest even though her pick of men, with the possible exception of Jorge, had been a sorry venture. Men were not what they were cracked up to be, and while she had never consciously looked for Mr. Right, she recognized that as a woman, of course she was. 

Stepping out and away from Aidan on occasion was not picking up the scent once again, she said to herself, but adventure.  Had she been more honest she would have realized that she was once again searching for the Holy Grail of men. 

Aidan was, like many men, clueless and sure of himself, so he didn't even notice Hannah's absences. 'Working late at the office', the standard for feckless husbands, did not apply to women, at least not in Arthur's case, nor did long Saturday afternoons at the gym.  Infidelity was almost too easy, and as all unfaithful husbands and wives know, getting away with it is half the fun. 

Nevertheless, Hannah enjoyed her unquestioned dalliances and was open to as many as could be fit in to her busy schedule. There was Lawrence, buff trainer at the gym, Harper the top-tier lawyer who was defending her agency from libel, and Brainard, 'The Man Who Can Fix Anything' who worked on her pipes. 

Yet as pleasurable and diverting as all this was, it was still without focus. In the back of her mind, in her heart of hearts, in whatever way you wanted to say it, she was off the beaten path.  These men, as much as they satisfied her curiosity, libido, and need for risk and adventure, could have been poupées gonflables, off-the-shelf sex toys, dildoes.  She wanted a soulmate, for she had always expected to find one. Along with procreation, which she had already satisfied, that was a woman's prerogative. 

Not surprisingly feminists said it was a load of hokey.  There is ipso facto no Mr. Right.  He doesn't exist, never has and never will.  Sex is one bloody compromise after the other, so get used to it. 

But Hannah dug her heels in and thought she would give it one last try.  She gave up Alfonso the roofer, and Harkins, the accountant, and set her sails into the wind. Yes, she was married, but that was a desultory, stop-gap affair that could be easily dissolved.  Of course there was 'He' but he had his father, loving grandparents and a strong support group (another suburban ploy); so off she went, compass due north. 

Of course she ended up foundered on a deserted beach.  Compass or no compass, running before the wind can send you nowhere.  No Mr. Right, not even an approximation, so she reefed her sails and returned to port.  

That long episode did much to calm the waters, and she adjusted quite nicely to the suburbs after that.  Patient mother, dutiful wife, responsible professional, and satisfied that she at last confirmed what she had always thought, men were simply not worth it.