Love Hurts

A short piece of fiction by yours truly:

We sat opposite each other in a booth at Annabelle’s. The faded maroon leather on the back of Rebecca’s seat was torn, and I kept looking at the L -shaped tear as   Rebecca wolfed down her French fries. “L.” L for love. L for liar, for loser.  I began to  stutter and stammer my way through my well rehearsed tale of woe, and it was then, at that moment, that I realized that I was in way over my head.  We are taught to believe that love is the thing, the only thing worthwhile, but no one tells us how much it can hurt.

     Annabelle’s had always been “our place.” There is something kind of quirky about Annabelle’s, it’s a 50‘s style diner with all classical music on the juke box. It’s what I love about Annabelle’s, and as I came to realize, what I love about Rebecca, that juxtaposition that never fails to surprise.   Her face, framed with a mop of Brillo-textured ash blonde hair, reveals misty-blue eyes,  conveying an almost unbearable sadness at the same time her smile radiates an explicable joie de vivre, the reason known only to her. She always looks as if she knows a wonderful secret.

We both put our omnipresent cell phones on the table, an unspoken concession to unplug while in each other’s company, but neither of us turned them off. I often wonder how things would have evolved if I had simply turned my  phone off.  The finale of Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italian was reeving up as I cleared my throat . Rebecca, wearing some kind of a  pale gray tee shirt with angels and devils co-mingling, skinny jeans and her beloved Converse high tops,  dipped more French fries into a large mound of catchup.  Oh, those ubiquitous  high tops! I can’t look at Converse high tops any more. When I see them the pain is excruciating, and I can’t bare to listen to Capriccio Italian. I simply don’t trust myself even though it is one of my favorite pieces of music. Rebecca has robbed me of so many things, perhaps my life.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t say another word, I need to listen to the music and I can’t listen if you are talking.” Once Rebecca put her mind to something she shut everything else out, and  since I qualified as part of the “everything else,” I often became superfluous, a tchotchka sitting on an obscure gift shop shelf.

Before Rebecca, my life had become a symphony of unresolved silences followed by the inevitable fortissimo, terrible fights, followed by more silences.  Some people would call it a bad soap opera, but I prefer to call it a symphony because I am a terrible snob and don’t watch programs that advertise soap. The quiet times in music, the sweet, almost unbearable quiet leading up to those thunderous horns and base drums, were all too familiar in my marriage.   Our quiet, however,  was not sweet, it was tense and awkward and unpleasant. 

My three kids picked up on it. At 8, 10 and 12, they went about their days with studied indifference to their home life at the same time noting everything.  Over scheduling kept them busy, but Kate, especially Kate, my 12 year old daughter, knew her mother was not a happy camper. How could a mother who was always attached to her cellphone, talking, whispering to one of her many girl friends as she screwed her face into hatred, remain unnoticed indefinitely? Those years when Alison balanced a toddler on one hip while stirring something with her free hand have been replaced by a balanced iphone nestled between her head and her neck. I prefer the former, all this multi-tasking is both frustrating and rude.

Something was awry and Kate picked up on it. From the day she was born, Kate had this scary “women’s intuition” going for her, she always knew what I was going to say before the words left my lips. Kate had always been Alison’s possession. The two boys she loved, Kate, she adored. Our sons, Timmie and Tommie, came along, a year apart. Timmie is my favorite. He looks like me, he thinks like me, and he worships the ground I walk on. It’s hard not to respond to adoration, and I have always believed that almost every family has a favorite child. A parent will tell you that they love all their children equally, but I don’t believe it for a minute.

My wife, Alison, knew what I was up to. She is not stupid, and she knew.  I was elsewhere so often, and there are just so many times one can lie about one’s whereabouts.  She lay down the law last night in her own inimitable style - cruel and blunt. Her iphone was nowhere in sight.

“I know you are fucking someone and it’s got to stop because if it doesn’t, I will take your children and I will take your house and I will take your precious Lexus and I will take your country club membership and I will leave you with nothing.”  To think that when I married her I thought she was refined and gentle?  She was. Alison graduated from Smith with honors, was Homecoming Queen in her local small town parade, and was considered to be a good catch: beauty and brains. Over the years the beauty has faded and hardened into an early matronly persona complete with botox and lot of hair color - blends, frosts, subtle waves of color weaving through every hair on her head, costing a bloody fortune.    She has become the perfect stereotype of the angry housewife in a Lifetime for Women movie, one of those women who speak through clenched teeth. It is my contention that in a woman, a jaw like a steel trap coupled with clenched teeth are a dead give away. Trouble on the home front.  It’s not entirely Alison’s fault, but what I have come to hate about her is her stubbornness. Alison has to be right. Always. Nothing is ever her fault.

The Germans have a custom called luften. No matter how cold the winter, they open up every window in the house each day and ventilate .  Our home could use a good luften, stale air permeates. My home, my castle, feels as if it is rotting from musty air. I often find myself choking, especially when my iwife is on one of her perpetual venting sessions on that damn little phone. It never ends, and her shopping addiction isn’t helping. Although she isn’t a hoarder in the true sense of the word, she is getting close. There are piles and bags full of God only knows what in every corner, the tags remaining on most items in the bags.

Rebecca, on the other hand, is the only person I have ever known who has no filter. Incapable of guile, she always says exactly what is on her mind. As I told her about Alison’s rant, she said, “Well, it was only a matter of time.” 

“Matter of time?”

“We both knew this could not continue indefinitely.”

“I had hoped we could continue,” I said lamely. My phone began vibrating, humming incessantly. I glanced at it. Alison’s name appeared on the screen.  She will have to wait I thought as I moved the phone away. I knew Rebecca was right, but I had not realized how miserably unhappy I had been until the prospect of a life without Rebecca took over all the blank spaces in my mind turning everything gray. My thoughts frightened me, and for a period of time, I don’t know how long, I was incapable of speaking. It was as if I was semi-conscious, heavily medicated. What disturbed me, what I found the most hurtful, was the fact that Rebecca seemed so nonchalant. I had expected another reaction. I had expected more from her.

“Affairs never end well,” Rebecca said after what seemed like an eternity. My phone started humming again, the vibration causing it to almost dance on the table. For some reason I greatly feared picking it up because I had a foreboding that no matter what the horror was that I was going through, things were about to get worse and I didn’t feel able to deal with more. 

“I somehow thought you and I were a cut above your average every day affair. We are made of finer stuff,” I said without looking at her. The salt and pepper became my solitary focus, I stared at them as if my life depended on it.

“We are who we are, no better nor worse than millions of others out there.”

“I don’t believe that for a second, and neither do you,” I said, picking up the salt and then laying it down on the other side of the pepper shaker.  The salt shaker was a woman in a long dress and the pepper a farmer, and when you put them together, they hugged each other. I placed them back to back, there was to be no hugging in this conversation. Once more my phone began it’s solitary shimmy across the table. I glanced at it again, this time it was my next door neighbor’s number on the screen.

“Shit, why can’t people leave me alone,” I said half to myself, half to Rebecca as I put the phone to my ear.

“Yes, hello.”

“Randy, this is Paul from next door. You need to come home, there has been an accident.”

“An accident?  What kind of an accident? Who?”

“It’s Timmie. He was hit by a car.  He’s gone, Randy, he died  half  an hour ago.”

* * * 

Two years have passed since we lost Timmie, two years since my former life ended and my new life began. Two joyless years. Most days have been spent putting one foot in front of the other while attempting to drown the waves of pain that continue to come to the surface when I least expect them. Some days I cry, most days I am dry eyed. Alison and I are still together, we can’t live with each other and we can’t live without each other, although neither of us know how to comfort the horrible pain we feel, both in ourselves and in each other. She is still attached to her iphone, I have taken up running. All the things that were so important to me in my former life are no longer important, what I never noticed is now paramount. Life goes on.

I have not seen Rebecca since that day at Annabelle’s, but much to my surprise I recently received a letter from her, hand-written and sent to my office:

Dear Randy:

Although we have not spoken to each other since that terrible day at Annabelle’s, not a day has gone by when I have not thought of you.  Timmie's death affected me deeply in spite of the fact that I had never met him. The fact that I could not comfort you in what must have been unbearable grief  was torturous for me, but we had to play with the cards with which we were dealt. 

Those cards were cruel. Our plan to carry on as lovers was chimerical at best, but the stars collided all at once, taking the two things you held most dear in one awful day, and for that to happen to someone like you is unfair. I am sure platitudes don't help, people are at a loss for words. "I feel your pain?" No, you don't. "Time heals all wounds?" Hardly. Not all wounds, some wounds are just too deep. The only thing I can suggest (although I realize I am in no position to give advice) is to seek out other parents who have lost a child because they are the only ones who know how you suffer, and in their company, you may be able to comfort each other.

I love you very much. I will always love you. 

Rebecca

It's All Temporary