Slipping Through My Fingers Part 2

After Christmas Break that year, Matlin moved out of The Hotel and got a place with Barbara. Erica McFee moved in.

Shortly after she moved in, Erica and I got drunk in the kitchen one night. She was dating David at the time, and while we were drinking she told me things about David I had absolutely no business knowing. I knew right then never to trust her. If she’d stab her lover in the back like that, she’d stab anyone in arm’s reach.

You and Erica had history. Both from the same hometown. You had known each other in high-school. Erica liked to remind me how close the two of you were. Erica liked to… play with people, and I guess she had figured out how to play with me. Erica seemed to make it her life’s work to be certain that you and I were never alone in the same room. God, I hated her.

Sometimes at night, I’d wake up, leave Jeremy’s room, and go and sit in the dark on the stairway. I’d smoke cigarettes and drink whiskey and try to reach out to you in my mind.

That night, that one night, before Thanksgiving was consuming me. In spite of everything else that was going on then.

And there serious things going on.

I became pregnant a few months later. Jeremy had his tantrum, and I had an abortion. A few weeks after that, someone broke into my apartment and tried to rape me. I remember calling The Hotel that morning. You answered the phone, and I managed to stumble an apology for waking you so early. I asked to speak to Jeremy. By the time he got to the phone I was sobbing so hard I couldn’t even talk. Half of that was that I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t been raped. I had gotten away. I couldn’t find the words to describe what had happened.

Jeremy, to his credit, arrived even before the cops did. He also started doing odd things. Sneaking up quietly behind me. Unexpectedly coming into the passenger side of my car late at night. I’d scream hysterically. And still he kept on. Jeremy’s darker side was beginning to show.

I stayed at The Hotel with Jeremy while I looked for a new apartment. You were incredibly solicitous of me. Was I alright? Did I need anything? Did I want you to walk to campus with me? To the corner store? In about two weeks, I found a new place. I moved a whole block and a half away, but it was enough. A second story apartment. A gated complex.

You started dating Jenny. It didn’t take us all long to start calling her “that little sex machine.” Yeah. Jenny was something. And before it was all said and done, most of us got to taste a little of that something.

A long time later, after Jenny had been gone for a while, we were playing cards one night. As usual, I was the only woman in the game. You were there. Jonathan. And Tom. And maybe Mark? I remember Tom mentioned that Jenny was in town. “Man, I don’t want to see her,” Jonathan said. “If I see her, I’m gonna fuck her. And I do not want to fuck her.” We all laughed in general agreement. Jenny was… well, she was that way. Oozing sex and bad, bad, news.

But I’m digressing here. It’s all such a tangled story. There are a thousand other stories weaved into it. Just as tangled as our lives all were back then. Just as tangled as my heart was. Just as tangled as my heart still is.

Time went on. You started dating Melody. It was widely rumored that your fondness for Melody had a more than a little to do with Melody’s fast car and her endless supply of cocaine. I didn’t think much of her then. “All the depth of a muffin tin,” I believe I said.

I feel bad now, that I had so little respect for Mel at the time. Over all these years, Melody has been a friend to me. She still is. Even when everyone else has pretty much faded away. I never dreamed that we would all end up so far apart from each other. I loved all those people so much. I thought it would always be like that. But we all graduated, moved, got married, scattered to the wind. And Mel remains the touchstone for us all. Mel doesn’t let people disappear from her life.

You would drop by to see me now and again. You finally got used to the fact I didn’t smoke grass, and after making one too many bongs out of old coke cans, you started keeping rolling papers at my apartment. I still have what’s left of those rolling papers. In my “box of lovers.” The remnants of a pack of Zig Zag’s. My one and only tie to you.

We would talk about nothing mostly. I would listen, rapt, waiting for you to say something real. To tell me what was in your heart. Once I tried to ask you about that night, but you turned back flips to keep me from talking about it, and I gave up.

Jeremy and I were splitting up and getting back together like the swings of a pendulum, all wedding plans shelved, if not abandoned. He dated Wanda for a while, and some other girls I guess. I never paid that much attention. I dated Tom some, started dating Jessica and then Lena. Lovely Lena, with her crown of red hair and her fondness of Janis Joplin.

Jeremy took it hard, my dating Lena. And one night, shortly after he’d graduated and moved away, he came back to town for a party I was helping to throw at the “Frat House” (which, dear reader, wasn’t a frat house at all). But before the party, he downed most of a bottle of Crown. Got so drunk that he passed out in my car. When I finally found him, I took him to my apartment and put him to bed. He didn’t sleep long. Instead, sometime on that dark, awful night, he woke up alone and half crazed. In a paranoid, drunken frenzy he decided I was at that party with Lena, instead of him. Of course, I wasn’t. I was at that party because I was obligated to be, being one of the “designated hostesses”. I was at that party fulfilling a social obligation until I could go home to him.

But that truth didn’t matter. Someone else’s truth never does. What mattered was the madness in Jeremy’s mind that night. It was always a precarious balance, his mind. And that night, it fell hard and fast off the deep end. He drove to the party, took his keys to the paint job of my car before he even walked in. I was standing on the back porch talking to a group of people and he came storming out, yelling obscenities. I led him into the back yard to try to talk some sense into him. He yelled some more, and finally, I just ask him for the key to my apartment and suggested he crash somewhere else that night. He refused. I followed him up to the porch saying emphatically, “Jeremy, give me my keys.” As he reached the door, he turned around and caught me with a left hook. I was airborne. I flew fifteen feet back to the sidewalk and landed so hard it completely knocked the wind out of me. People scattered, and then suddenly you were there.

You grabbed me, and held onto me like a wild animal until I got it into my head that going after Jeremy myself wasn’t such a good idea. Then you got Jeremy, got him out of the house, got my keys back. I’m not sure, but I think you managed this without hitting him. If anyone could have, it would have been you. He was, as I’ve said, so much in love with you.

All through the party, you kept your eyes on me and the door. Each time Jeremy came back, you got him to leave again. Then you and Melody took me home to find the shambles of my ransacked apartment. Papers were scattered all over the living room. A sketch I’d done of Lena was in shreds on the table. You and Mel stayed with me that long night after the party, turned Jeremy away from my door twice. Close to sunrise you and Melody went home, and I went to sleep.

Of course, Jeremy showed up a short time later. Finally sober. Sobbing. Contrite. And when I sent him away, we both knew it was for the last time. It was over.

And his paranoid delusions became a reality. What had been a passing crush on Lena, became something much more. And Lena, of course, had more than a passing crush on you too.

Oh the tangled, knotted threads of it all! I get lost in it! I stay lost in it! How can it be that this was 20 years ago? So much of my heart is still there, caught in all those criss-crossed threads.

So much of my heart lost somewhere in time.

Slipping Through My Fingers Part 1

I remember the day we met. I remember leaning back against a car as you came around the corner on a yellow bicycle. I remember that you had just purchased a new album. (They were albums then. Not tapes. Not CD’s. Albums.) I remember it registering with me that Jeremy’s breathing pattern changed when you rode up. It was the first time I suspected he was secretly in love with you.

Funny. I never asked him about it. I guess because I knew the question itself could pull his house of cards down like a stray gust of wind. And all these years later, even though we never talked about it, I am sure he was in love with you. There’s not even a hint of doubt.

Right after we were introduced, you asked Jeremy when the two of you were going to swap wives. I said nothing. I might have blushed. But I was… intrigued. Flattered. Okay – let’s be honest – I was game right then. I also knew Jeremy had a thing for your girlfriend, Linda. Though I always suspected that was part of his tangled passion for you.

Did you ever know he was in love with you? Did you ever even suspect? Did you know he had a thing for Linda? Is that why you brought the whole “swap” thing up? Or were you just being charming? Because, you were always that. Charming. Almost to a fault.

God, you were beautiful. Your head shaved smooth, wearing the requisite white T-shirt with the Anarchy “A” scribbled in black magic marker. Jeans and a leather jacket. Young and rebellious. Radical and wild, and you had me from hello.

You were still living in that house with Jay and Barbara. We sat in the living room, listened to that new album, had a few beers, smoked some grass.

By the time I moved to the city, you were sharing a different house with Jeremy, with Jay, with Perry, and with Matlin. I loved that house, the house we all came to call “The Hotel.” You and Linda had split up. Jeremy and I were engaged.

One Tuesday afternoon, just before Thanksgiving, you, Jeremy, and I were playing cribbage at The Hotel and I asked Jeremy to get drunk with me that night. Jeremy said he had a mid-term the next day. You said you’d get drunk with me. It was settled. We would tie one on.

Later I asked Jeremy, “Can I?”

He hesitated.

“Yeah.” He said at last.

We settled into the kitchen, where you had set out gin and tonic. I hated gin and tonic. But that night, I didn’t care. I was nervous as a cat.

“(She) was trying to keep (her) courage up by applying booze…”

Of course, we had a lot of company. No one ever drank alone at The Hotel. I remember Tom and David being there. Erica McFee. Jacob Stein. Jonathan. I think Matlin and Barbara were in for a bit. And maybe Derik and Tresia.

Probably we played cards at some point. And the gin and tonic flowed like, well, gin and tonic.

But then, finally, we were alone. We were conveniently seated close together. But suddenly, we both turned a little shy. More gin and tonic. Or maybe we didn’t bother with the tonic. We flirted cautiously at first, and then with reckless abandon. Finally you kissed me.

That night, as we made love, you kept asking me over and over again, “Will this happen again?”

And each time I said, “I can’t be the one to answer that.”

Why didn’t I just say “Yes”?

*          *          *

Around 5 a.m. I heard Jeremy in the shower. “I think I’m supposed to go home now.”

“He knows?”

“Of course.”

And when the shower stopped, I got up, dressed, and went up to Jeremy’s room upstairs.

But my heart stayed in your room with you.  A part of my heart has never left.

Waiting

The first time we met, I was warned that you were terribly shy and probably wouldn’t speak at all. Instead, you sat down at my kitchen table with your clove cigarettes and talked my ear off for the next several hours. We knew each other instantly. That sudden shock of recognition, of karmic connection.

You let me read your poetry. You agonized with me over straight boys who had turned your head and at the gay boys who bored you. I taught you to use liquid eye liner and you taught me to use blush to enhance my cleavage.

You used to drop acid late at night and get lost walking in the city. I gave you a card with my phone number, with directions of how to tell where you were, and instructions on how to reach me, no matter where you might end up. I took your calls with no thought to clocks or obligations.

Once, you got smashed at a party as Lena and I steered you to the car, poured you into the backseat, you said to me, “What would I do without you?”

“Easy. You don’t do without me.”

We were almost unbearable in public. At restaurants, grocery stores, pizza joints, we would laugh and laugh at almost everything we saw. You could always make me laugh. Through lovers lost, schemes gone awry, medical humiliations, and far too many experiments in better living through chemistry. You made me laugh through some of the worst moments of my life.

You took me in when the world fell out from beneath my feet.

I took you in when the world fell out beneath yours.

It was at your house that I had my mad, summer affair with Martin. It was largely your doing that the whole mad affair started in the first place. With me, bent over your bathtub, in my ridiculously-short-shorts.

Friends tried to tell me they didn’t trust you. I understood. Your lack of respect for personal property was legendary. But I would answer, “I would trust him with my life. I wouldn’t necessarily trust him with five cents. But I would trust him with my life.”

Ironic, that in the end I stole from you.

During the worst days of the end of my affair with cocaine, I dropped by your apartment in a paranoid psychotic haze and finding you gone, fished out the foiled paper from my cigarettes and wrote a single word on the back of it. “Help.”

You came.

I sat you through the longs months you got stuck in the window seat of your apartment. Days and days without sleep or food, and I would find you there. “Baby. Baby.” I would hold you and rock you and call your soul back to your body from that dark, dark, place.

When we lived apart, our letters flew back and forth like homing pigeons. Funny letters. Serious letters. Mad, stream of consciousness letters with sentences that went on for pages. Letters so voluminous we would inscribe the envelopes with, “Warning: Contents under pressure. Do not puncture or incinerate…”

I still have them all, you know. Tucked into a box. A large box. Some day, when my heart can bear it, I’ll put them in order. Re-read them all. When my heart can stand it.

And in the end?

Your lover became my lover. No one meant for that to happen. But intentions don’t count. It did happen. You refused to be angry at me about it, and like a fool, I prodded you to anger. Looking back, I know how stupid that was. Looking back, I’d give almost anything to take it back. But at the time, I thought it would help. I thought you would yell at me, and we could get it out, talk about it, try to salvage the damage.

Maybe too much damage had already been done.

I look for you, you know. I google you. I search the phone directories and the Social Security Death Index.

It’s been six years now. There are days when I can hardly bear the silence.

I cling to this. We’ve found each other in a thousand lifetimes. And we’ll find each other again. Probably not in this lifetime. But we will find each other again.

Because…

We must.

How else can I be whole except with you?

And so, my heart waits.

Just Spring

It was just spring (and the world was mudlicious), and on a warm April night I waited for you. For you to beat the city traffic, thread the highways, drive the back roads. For you to come from where you were to where I was. Where I was waiting for you. With good wine, and good cheese. With good jazz on the stereo. With arms wide open. With a heart beating madly and only for you.

You arrived close to midnight. I heard your truck park on the side street. My heart leapt at the sound of that old truck, of your boots on the stairway. I stood in the doorway for you.

Life could begin now. I could exhale.

You took me in your arms and we breathed each other like oxygen. Drank each other like water. Held each other like drowning souls clinging to the last thing above water. Got lost in each other’s eyes.

We sat on the floor in the living room and drank the wine and ate the cheese and talked of our days, our week, our thoughts, our dreams, our love. Words flowing like the wine. Time slipping by like silk in the wind. And suddenly! The sun! It was morning! The night disappeared behind us in a mad dash.

We did the only sensible thing. We left for breakfast. A funny old café where all the town’s old men gathered each morning. Eggs. Extra-thick bacon. Fresh biscuits and gravy. Orange juice just squeezed from the orange. Good, strong coffee.

And then we did the only other sensible thing. We went to the river.

There was river-front property for sale. We made mad schemes of buying two lots, and building in the middle to keep the neighbors at bay. A house high on stilts. Fishing from the back deck. We were young and were in love. The sky was ours for a song! Anything was possible. With love like that, everything was possible.

Spring was rioting around us. Wildflowers bloomed along the highways. As we crouched beside the water, a branch wavered in the wind. But it wasn’t a branch! It was a snake! Lovely and green and swaying so perfectly with the grass. I would never have seen it. I looked at you in wide eyed wonder at what all your eyes took in! You saw each tiny detail. You were part of it all in a way I could never be. I couldn’t believe I had been so lucky as to find you.

I sat down by a tree and watched you skip rocks. Splash! Splash! Splash! Six skips! Ten!

You held your fingers to your lips and motioned me over. I walked over, thinking you wanted to show me the water lilies were in bloom. But there on the water lilies, among all those yellow blossoms, were little blossoms walking from lily pad to lily pad. Ducks! Baby ducks! Hiding in the blossoms!

How had you seen them? Their camouflage was so perfect! Tiny little marching swimming blossoms! Oh, yellow fluff! Oh, my wonderful, magic lover! Oh, how I loved you!


And no matter where you are now,
no matter what you’re doing
or who you are with…


In my heart you will always be in that endless night, that magic day. In my heart you will always be those tiny ducks, that swaying snake. The all seeing eyes.

In my heart you will always be young and perfect and magical.

In my heart you will always be the best of my happiness.

In my heart I will always be waiting –
for the sound of your boots at my doorstep
for the sight of you by the water
for you to come back.

So that life can begin.