Melvin Hamlish and the Untimely Arrival of Puberty

At the start of the last school year, Melvin Hamlish spent most of his days glued to the cathode rays in the monitors in that last computer lab down in Denley Hall.

The days were short there; hours spent accessing the latest updates from his mother who was still employed by the Foreign Service and currently occupying a small shack at the edge of the North African Desert in Tunis, the capital city of Tunisia.

Melvin knew little of this North African country before he mother was stationed there, and despite the long hours, the sheer volume of distance the two of them were forced to share, the exorbitant hazard pay did much to make the whole effort worthwhile, while Melvin’s father was consistently on the edge of one mental breakdown or another.

In typical fashion, Melvin’s older sister Carrie spent the bulk of her time taking advantage of her mother’s absence and speeding her cherry red 2001 Volkswagon Bug through the extended parking lot at school, jetting off to the exotic locales of Taco Bell parking lots while Melvin sat in the rear of the computer lab and hoped for another update.

It was on an afternoon such as this that he discovered a hidden part of his mother that he struck him as rather odd.

The tones of her emails had lightened in the most recent transmittals, and he in his adolescent mind could not see how her mood could have lightened by anything else than some sort of extra-martial affair.

The scenes in his head while disturbing, did display a penchant for fantasy, and reflected the imagination of a boy who dreamed his life away at the back of the computer lab.

The instructor, Mr. Larson, was a wiry man, constantly animated, and possessed an ill-fitting mustache that highlighted his torpid stature by gently announcing itself; the way a goiter does on an unexpected first date.

He’d talk to Melvin, mainly about the amount of time he spent in the rooms on those particularly hot May afternoons.

At this same time, Carrie would be slugging Diet Coke out of a warm 20 oz bottle while waiting for a boyfriend to step out of a neighbors house with the right amount of required speed necessary to fulfill the requirements of a until a few hours ago forgotten assignment of a fifteen page research paper, the results of which would all but guarantee an early admission into Stanford, the ticket out of the emotionally frigid New England tundra, leapfrogging her into the more culturally aware (or so she thought) and altogether more happening digs of the West Coast, where vapid wayward youths had sowed their own breed of defiance for decades, hatching plans while undoing bra straps waiting, camping overnight even, for the early-morning release of Kiss Tickets from a Milwaukee mall parking lot.

And at this same time, Gary Hamlish, a steadily employed auditor ticked time away working for the local school district in a newly-refurbished office that closely resembled the sterile environs of the more fervent global corporations from which Gary had recently managed to exorcize himself from the pained memories of employment at said corporate job.

Only on this afternoon, instead of performing his usual task of waiting for an Email from Cecily, had instead arranged a rendezvous of sorts. For weeks now, to combat the increasing need for companionship in the wake of his wife all but symbolically leaving her whole family for the arid local of the North African Desert, had repeatedly put his toe into the lukewarm waters of infidelity, for which he was not suited.

Gary was at heart a loyal man, lover and friend. To betray Cecilia like that (unbeknownst to him at the time, Cecilia had herself managed to entwine herself into the arms of a particularly libidinous European gentlemen, who worked at the French Embassy in Tunis) was unthinkable as it was unimaginable, as immediately offensive to him as the cut of the wrong color tweed with his new khaki pants which at this moment he had spilled mustard from a reheated knish acquired at the deli on the way home from the office during the previous evening.

As repulsive as infidelity was, in Gary’s case it was almost certainly bound to happen at one time or another, as the recently hired secretary had an almost death wish like desire to sabotage and sublimate her own feelings at a rate faster than the numerous failings of Gary’s own sexual advances ( as they were always misread, too late, and lacked the necessary grace and discretion the paramours of men ten years his seniors most certainly had perfected at this point in the hum drum existence of experienced auditors.) could manage.

Still the magnetics of attraction meant that before long the two would accidentally (intentionally on the part of Claire, the would be participant in said illicit affair into which he had been placing his largest toe into the proverbial Epsom Salts of displaced aggression) be paired together to analyze and adequately allocate funds to the essential purchases of the myriad of departments and sub-departments found in the New Cannan School District, a highly-regarded district that represented the hundreds of thousands of dollars invested into the spit shined polish of the various Mercedes Benz’s, Aston Martins, and pinnacled Jaguars that decorated their subdivision like Roman Statues, the very symbol of wealth and power immortalized in solid pewter.

And as the long hours turned into evenings over coffee, slowly mutating into lavish dinners paid for, unbeknownst to the taxpayers that pumped their money into the local budget of the New Canaan school district, so did the romantic intensions of the persons involved in what was becoming the illicit affair that Gary wasn’t sure he could pull off, but the same one that he nevertheless found himself ensared in.

So Gary and Claire, an out-of-key rhyming scheme of a couple if ever there was one, were having an affair, one dished out over the plates, cloth napkins and balance sheets containing software upgrades for the same one Melvin Hamlish received the news, rather bluntly one troubled morning, in which he had dropped the entire contents of his trapper keeper on the bus, and in the subsequent melee, had inadvertently misplaced the necklace that his mother had given him, a fist and a star, representing not only the most powerful Arab interest party in Tunisia, but a symbol of creativity in the face of oppression that expressed their own similar world views, that his mother was not due back any time soon, that her stay had been extended indefinitely until further notice, but that, as Cecilia had quite elegantly said in her email, that he should “not be expecting your loving mother home anytime before the timely arrival of the late summer of 2009.