Apart-meant

Marquette Apt
photo by brettanicus.

Okay dear readers, one last entry on divorce and then I promise to lighten up. This is actually an old journal entry from July 2004, but wanted to share it as it is a continuation of the previous entry, and I like the opening sentence:

My wife had left me some ten months previous, but the memory of her still hovered over the city, pulled rain down from the clouds, blotted out the stars at night. I’d given up just about everything in the divorce—the house, the car, even our dogs. I moved into a high rise downtown because the thought of being alone in a house frightened me. At least in an apartment I could feel like I lived in the midst of others. Little did I know apartment means “meant to be apart”. And from my perch 25 stories above the city I could look down on life teaming in the grid of city streets, the south metro, the steady crawl of cars along 94. I had hoped altitude would give me perspective, which it did, I suppose; Real life happens out there, in the distance, and in here I dwelled in my vacuum.

Divulge, Divide, Divorce

Card House
photo by saraweag.

She got up in the morning to let the dogs out, their excited whining and wagging tails echoing in the kitchen. Their house sounded hollow all summer, furniture moved out of the rooms so they could put a fresh coat of paint on the walls before the house went up for sale. Many rooms had never had furniture; what was the sense in buying things when they both knew it would mostly likely be divided in a divorce settlement. It is a strange and senseless way to live, knowing throughout several years of marriage that their life together was most likely a temporary thing. Yet they remained together, each day slipping into the next, spent in a superficial contentedness, laughing at the same movies, playing with the dogs, going out to dinner not to be romantic but out of a lack of energy to cook for themselves. The futility of the future weighs heavily on the shoulders of a couple constantly on the brink of failure. Small battles, little grudges, petty insults gather in strength until a dramatic trespass breaks the surface, and this house of cards starts to crumble. Either she slept with a client while on a project out of town, or he was caught in dating chat rooms on the internet. The ugly confessions and accusations come out. A rotten core in the center of a person they thought they knew, they thought was good, or maybe just good enough, until they took a deep bite and recoiled at the distaste.

62 Words Per Minute

photo by JanXVI.

He closed the door and crossed to the window. He enjoyed watching cars and trolleys passing on Lancaster Street. This view afforded him endless hours of distraction. Distraction from what lay within the rooms of his home. His wife moved from room to room as though to avoid him, as though he pursued her like a murderous stalker, and she fled like Little Red Riding Hood through the woods. Ah, but my sweetheart, you forget; The wolf doesn’t pursue you but plans ahead and lays in wait at grandmother’s house.

She was in the parlor talking with her mother. When his mother-in-law had arrived, he had greeted her and traded pleasantries for a few moments, but he felt his smile strained as he looked at her. The angle of her nose, her upturned mouth, her puffy cheeks formed a caricature of gluttony. He felt his stomach turn. He retired to the den, trying not to listen in on what they spoke about.

“Melissa has applied at Dorchester. Your sister is going places, Kelly. She’s taken that typing course and types 62 words per minute. I timed her, just the other night. Sure, she makes a few mistakes, but who doesn’t?”

Yes, who doesn’t make mistakes, he thought, pacing around the den. Maybe he could take down a book, start to read. He’d read most of them already, except for the garish looking books shelved mainly for appearance rather than content; medical journals, almanacs, a 1932 series of Minnesota state law and the cases of the time. Criminology had been one of his many interests, then profiling killers, then white collar crime, and finally war crimes, until “atrocity” had become one of his favorite words. It was something about the rip these stories would render through the fabric of life, something about the balance of other people’s horrible reality to his own pristine existence that appeased him. But how pristine was his life? A farce, a façade for the lust and violence that coursed through his veins. If they only knew, he thought. If they could only hear his thoughts.

Paradise This Way

Inviting Clarity
photo by bfranco.

I took my plane out to the island, my mind still reeling with the towering obelisks of New York, now soothed by the sight of the patch of land drifting on the blue sea; mists pooled at the base of Mount Waukashabi, and my hut lay there somewhere beneath the jungle fronds. Pedro would be getting my bath ready, placing slices of fruit on a banana leaf, and mixing my margarita. How long had it been since I had been out to the island? Seven months? Not since Frieda had left me, not since my daughter had disappeared somewhere in California to break into acting, most likely destined for porno.

But it was a different world now, especially since the merger and my buyout. This plane that once chauffeured me to meetings across the country now served only to transport me from one side of paradise to the other. I had always thought paradise would be across the sea somewhere, or on a mountain peak above the clouds; now that this dream had become reality I realized that paradise is scattered throughout our daily lives, in our own neighborhood; perhaps in the arms of a lover, in a bite of dark chocolate, sip of rare wine, the sun rising on a deserted city street. My island was not paradise; it merely provided safe harbor from the pain of loss, the failures of those things which had not been able to float on the sea.

But don’t think of those things. Drive those thoughts from your head or you will disturb the pale blue of the sky and water. The sea now glints innocently in the sun, but its anger lies just beneath the surface, sudden squalls ready to rise up at the least provocation. Sea birds snatched from the sky and plummet to watery depths, whale carcasses bloated and swaying on the sea floor. When rescue rafts are tossed by hail and lightning bolts, when black clouds mix with blacker seas, and trees bob up and down from islands battered in gales, then the human soul screams out to a deaf sky. Cold water lulls the mind to disorientation, to desert abysses, to mother tucking you in at night, to a pale light just beyond the horizon, growing closer, and the dull moan of wind and death fills your ears, drowning out the childhood songs, the nursery rhymes, Dr. Seuss creatures waving from an island. You turn and roll in waves, uncertain if you breathe in air and drown in water or breathe in water and drown in air; reefs cut your thighs, you taste blood mixed with saltwater, but of course your body should be inherently mixed with the sea, it is only right that your body mingles with this greater and crueler body of water. Then you taste sand, and the foreign weight of land, the unrelenting force of earth pressed against your face, and the sea reluctantly releases you, recedes, calls forlornly from across the flats, and you finally submerge into the deeper sea of unconsciousness.

Atonement for the Dead

straw hat
photo by andreakremer.

In the curve of a cobblestone path a fountain sparkles. I stroll through the resort, wearing white linen slacks, matching jacket, a straw hat, limping along with my birchwood cane, a book under my arm. What book? Emerson? Something vivid enough to draw my eyes from the beauty of the gardenias to gaze down into the pages. Mr. Granger, they call me here at the resort. I’m a widower with enough money to keep me comfortable in my old age, enough so that I can come to this resort each August. And what is that one shadow that hangs over the garden, you ask? The memory of my dead wife? No, it’s somebody else here at the resort. An old lover who comes at the same time each year, yet I ignore her, try to ignore her to make amends with my dead wife for that transgression so many years before. At this very same resort, in fact. You’d think on a man’s fifth anniversary he could remain true to his wife. Yes, I was terrible, heartless, selfish.

Her name was Audra. A young woman of nineteen, traveling with her elderly parents. I’d seen her first in the dinning room; we were placed at the same table. My wife must have sensed the attraction in the few words we shared during dinner. I showed too much interest in her daily activities, laughed too hard at her small whimsical jokes. Or was it the way she lit up when we sat at table? I believe women have a sixth sense for knowing when their loved one desires another, even in total absence of substantiated facts.

The next night my wife had requested we be placed at a private table. I felt ostracized, humiliated, enraged, sitting alone in a corner while most others at the resort sat at large community tables, laughed and drank and occasionally looked over to us, eating sullenly, not speaking.

I saw her by the fountain the next morning, before my wife had woken. Audra. Even when I say her name now it hovers in my chest a moment. Sitting side by side on the bench, our legs touching. Then a slow walk along garden paths, through the glen, away from the main house into the woods beyond. When I returned and served my wife breakfast in bed, she knew immediately. She threw a tea cup across the room, upended the breakfast tray, but didn’t say a word of accusation. She didn’t need to.

The next twenty-five years were spent in atonement. On her deathbed, the reconciliation between us was complete. I started going to the resort each year in memory of my wife and that great harm I had done to her there. And then I saw Audra, older now, but her eyes the same, her smile. Nothing was holding us back now, she pleaded. Am I to never love again? I am in love, I answered. To my wife. She persisted, and with each year my reserve slowly crumbled by the pangs of loneliness and the memory of our clandestine morning walks in the garden to the glen beyond. Do the dead watch from the garden gate, I wondered? Do the dead forgive?

Cellar Door

A famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language of all the endless combinations of words in all of history, that “cellar door” is the most beautiful. While reading Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood", I think I came across the most beautiful sentence:

At home, I sat on the veranda, watching the rain poor down on the garden at night and assembling phrases in my head (267).

Chemical Therapy

In the delirium of a hospital room, he slips away unnoticed by his all-consuming sickness out beyond these sterile walls. Drifts into the boulevard, boards a bus, goes to the beach. Or maybe he’ll ride the back of an albatross to Florence, that wonderful city of romance and history and art. But the illusion fades; he cannot deny that he is here, in a hospital room, fighting cancer. He wonders, Do we choose to be ill? Can we choose to be healthy? It has nothing to do with our cancer racked bodies, he decides. The idea of sickness is what overcomes us in the end, like a flame that quickly spreads beyond its cylinder of wax.

His flight from these thoughts are a futile act of defiance. He runs throughthe hallways , out the revolving hospital doors and down the sidewalk, hospital gown streaming behind him. He crosses against a Do Not Walk light. Cars brush through him like a whirl of ghosts. A chill creeps over him. He tries to smile and nod hello to the people that he passes. Everyone gawks at him in horror or pity. Lost in a ghost city, towering skyscrapers disappearing in mid air. In the windows the faces of ghouls laughing down on him. He begins to weep, and his body drains with the chemo down a sewer grating into the tunnels beneath. Rushing through the intestines of the city, deeper into the bowels, he is little more than a pool of screams.

And then it comes, like the burst of sunlight. Maybe it is the final mercy of a God that he didn't believe in anymore. He is skimming over ocean waves towards a shore that promises so many works of beauty. All the promises of Florence lie ahead, and despite everything he has gone through, he is smiling.

Broken Teapot

tea dispensary photo by aesop.

The tea pot was laughing at me this morning. So I smashed it on the floor. As it broke into a hundred pieces, it sounded like a fit of giggling, then fell quiet. I didn’t sweep it up right away. Let it sit there all morning. It deserves as much.

It was insensitive: the tea pot, not my breaking it on the floor. For several minutes I had been looking for it this morning, while it sat in plain sight on the counter. How many times must I have circled it without noticing? When I spotted it, the curving spout was a smirk on its face, the handle like a hand on its hip; how it must have crouched there quietly in glee like a child hiding from its parent. It should have been more sensitive to my concern with my failing memory and loss of observation. This fog is making me frightened, and a frightened animal lashes out. Maybe I should stop taking the pills?

I feel a trace of remorse as I sweep up the shards of my once favorite tea pot and dump it into the trash, but comfort myself in the excuse that a frightened animal, by nature, lashes out.

I turn to the other dishes piled silently on the counter; “Any other of you got something to say to me?”

They didn’t.