When she pulled away she said, “Here’s what I regret. We made so many mistakes. We did so many things wrong. You were wrong in college, being true to Lisa. I was wrong at your house, being true to Eric. Doing our duty, ignoring what we really wanted, ignoring desire. No, no—I really want to say this. Desire is so fragile. It’s like my delphiniums. They need light and water. They die if you don’t take care of them. And anyway … nobody wants an obligatory kiss. No one wants a favor like that. It’s horrible. So you wind up with nothing except being able to say you did the right thing and feeling superior to the happy people. I don’t want that.”
I kissed her but she wasn’t quite finished.
“It could happen,” she said. “It almost happened before. I heard about your biking accident in France. I forget who told me, but they thought you were dead and I felt so … so bereft. So lost. Like it was all my fault or my punishment. If I had fought for you and we were together it would never have happened, or—I don’t know. This sounds crazy. Anyway I heard you were all right and felt this huge relief like I’d been carrying some weight the exact size of my body, some sort of custom-made sandbag, and it was suddenly gone and I thought, ‘I’ll see him again,’ and here you are. So it’s all OK.”
“That would have been a good moment to call me.”
“I know but … I couldn’t do that, out of the blue like that, like you did. Somehow I knew you’d call me, or we’d run into each other on the street in New York City, or at the next table at some restaurant, like—fate. Something would happen. You were alive and it wasn’t over. That’s all.”
I hefted the champagne bottle, but it was empty. “We missed so much time.”
“I know. I was thinking about that today. About—not wanting to live my whole life without—to never … ”
“What?”
She was looking down, as she was trying to draw some courage from the glass-topped wicker table, the brown weave below the smudged lens. She looked up; our faces were just a few inches apart. She said: “I want to be naked with you.”
I didn’t trust my voice, I didn’t want to bleat. I just nodded, already feeling the tension in my thighs, feeling it pulling at the corners of my eyes, contracting my throat like the start of a yawn, though it was anything but sleep my nerves were stretching for.
She stood and took my hand and led me inside the dark house and up the stairs, into her bedroom.
♦◊♦
It was really happening. Somehow I had never quite believed it would. Maybe it was just the caustic threat of disappointment. But I’d played it safe, I realized as she started to unbutton my shirt.
I hadn’t even brought a condom.
It was a fleeting thought, swept away by the accelerating moment, a cup of take-out coffee on the car roof. She pulled my shirt off and ran her hands down my chest, kissed up my neck and then took a small step backward. She lifted her dress over her head. She wasn’t wearing a bra. I stroked up her ribs, caressed the sides of those small perfect breasts, felt her shudder; we were both shaking. I slipped off her panties, went down on my knees to guide them down her legs. She stepped out of the little puddle of cotton and kicked them away delicately, the sexiest dance-step imaginable. I kissed up her thighs, buried my head in the delicious shadow between her legs.
“Wait,” she said, tugging at my hair. I stood. “I’m not done.”
She unbuckled my belt, unbuttoned my pants, unzipped them slowly, pulled them down. I kicked my legs free and she tugged the waistband of my boxers over my hips, lifted it free of my erection. It was a raw adolescent hard-on, expanding past the limits of the skin, tearing the seams. She stroked it once and then we were falling on the bed together.
It was perfect, we were hot for each other and our hands were all over each other—then it started to go wrong.
Some microscopic virus of thought found its way under my skin, infecting me: so much awareness multiplying in the soft tissue: that she was going to be in bed with another man tomorrow, probably comparing us; that this was my one chance to prove everything to her, sexually but not just sexually because the sex was a metaphor and a symbol and a totem, and if I failed, if I fell short now, I would lose her as surely as if I’d never come at all, and then the connected epiphany, sharp as the loose razor blade in the junk drawer, slicing the finger tip, perhaps I shouldn’t have come; perhaps I should have held off until she had actually broken up with Eric, when this moment could be clear and uncompromised between us. Or I should have left an hour ago, I should be long gone now. I should have turned her down, just said no, as Nancy Reagan suggested.
Abstaining would have been such a perfect move— cravenly saving myself from this impending hydraulic failure, I would have seemed so noble, so wise, so mature.
The perfect coward’s two-for-one.
But it was too late for that. My mind was working too hard, spinning faster and faster, engaging my morbid imagination, visualizing all the other horrible outcomes, the physical reality of my desire suddenly as elusive as a crumb in a glass of water, slipping away from my finger on the sluice of thought.
And Sophie didn’t seem to notice. She was in her own world now, too, the opposite world, a fugue state of abandoned lust.
I held her tight, as I might stamp on the brakes, pressure against the surge of momentum.
“Slow down,” I said. “Let me catch up.”
I kissed her hard, she seemed to snap out of it and we both started laughing.
“Do over,” I said.
She stretched herself against me and I could feel the shell of thought crackling loose—a hard boiled egg, still warm, rolled against a formica counter top, ready to be peeled, ready to be eaten.
“We’re so long together,” she whispered, twining her leg with mine. Then she rolled on top of me, went up on her knees and guided me to the spot. I was inside her then, thrusting up, a little deeper each time, parting every layer of resistance, pressing her to me, hands on her bare ass and it was perfect and then she said,
“You can’t come inside me,”
And I felt the orgasm coming right then, that moment, too soon, too fast, another grating echo of high school sex. I was going to fuck this up every way possible, screw it up, every piece of slang for bungling was a sex word.
I pulled her down, rolled over on top of her, pulled out and came on her leg. She thrust herself against my hip bone and in a second she was coming, too. Afterward, we rolled away from each other a little, gasping.
“Holy crap, we totally suck at this,” I said.
“We just need more practice.”
“You think?”
She nodded. “And speaking of sucking … ”
She started easing herself down my body.
Then the phone rang.
She stopped, listening as the machine picked up.
“This is Sophie. Leave me a message. I like to see the little red light blinking when I come home.” Then we heard Byron Clark’s voice.
“Lift off in half an hour, Cinderella. Leave a shoe there. She’ll track you down.”
I stared at Sophie. “It’s eleven thirty already? How is that possible?”
“Don’ t go.”
“I have to.”
“You could leave in the morning.”
“I need to be back in the morning. I’m starting a new job, and I have the kids tomorrow.”
“I’ll drive you. We—we could leave before dawn.”
“But you’re going to Canada tomorrow. Remember? Are you flying out of Logan?”
“JFK.”
“Shit.”
“Wait a second. Let me think.”
“You could take the shuttle from Boston.”
“No, I checked on that when I was making the reservations. The first flight is at six and my plane leaves New York at seven. I’m supposed to be there an hour early and anyway—”
“That’s cutting it close.”
“I have a 5:10 flight out of Bradley. The whole package is locked in.”
I stroked her hair. “You could just cancel the whole thing.”
“No I couldn’t.”
“Or I could come with you.”
“Everyone would love that. Surprise! And what about your kids?”
“OK, OK, bad idea. But we could—it … if they—”
I had nothing. I gave up.
“Checkmate,” she said.
“Queen takes King.”
“That’s not fair. King and Queen get taken by Travelocity.”
“You’re right. Sorry.”
She turned the clock on the bedside table so we could see the face.
“We have 15 minutes to get to the airport.”
♦◊♦
We didn’t say much on the way to the airport. I don’t know what was going on inside of her, but the night had blown the words out of me. I was content to feel the engine vibrate under the torn leather seat and watch Western Massachusetts stream by in the moonlight beyond the window. I took her hand, but there were street lights on the empty roads and she needed to shift. Some comment about the merit of automatic transmissions drifted through my mind but tumbled away behind us with the dark landscapes outside. It wasn’t worth breaking the silence for.
She kissed me, standing by the car while Byron ran the ground checks on his little Cessna.
“You’re so much more real to me now,” she said, finally.
“As long as that’s a good thing.”
“You know it is.”
“There’s room on the plane. Last chance to blow it all off and come back to Nantucket with me.”
She pressed her head into my chest, shook it silently.
“I know, I know, you have to go. Just—come back. I did, 20 years ago.”
“For all the good it did you.”
The comment irked me—a little stab of gratuitous pessimism. I took a breath, kissed her forehead.
“You have a better shot. Hopefully we’ve both learned something since last time.”
She looked up, met my eyes. “You’re right. Travel safe.”
“You, too.”
“I will come back, Steve. Wait for me.”
I smiled, a little ruefully. “Don’t worry. I’m good at that.”
One more hurried train-platform kiss, and then I was walking to the plane, climbing in with Byron and watching her as she got into her old Volvo and drove away. She was gone before we took off.
I never saw her again.
♦◊♦
What happened? And how did it happen? And why?
How could a great love affair pop like a soap bubble, vanish in a flick of spray, just from grazing the rough edge of reality?
I’ve been asking myself those questions for more than a decade.
I tried to transplant a particularly beautiful Christmas tree one year; of course it died. Turned out, they seal the cut somehow, so the trunk can’t absorb nutrients from the ground. It was just a decorative object, designed to be temporary, with boughs for hanging ornaments, each ornament with its own weight of nostalgia and family history. Then it was New Year’s, and we packed them away again; we vacuumed the needles from the rug and took the browning skeleton to the dump. The faint smell of the pine woods lingered in the house for a few days, but the tree wasn’t real. It could never grow on its own.
I thought of my time with Sophie Zambarano that year, chucking the discarded husk onto the pile.
We talked on the phone a lot when she was in Canada—long, late-night phone calls full of hope and high prospect. But nothing changed. She was going to break up with Eric; then she wasn’t. Then she saw herself forced “to choose between two totally different lives”; the pressure began to exhaust her. It all seemed so impractical and difficult: neither one of us was willing to move, and a long distance relationship would just wear both of us down.
Then she was back in Northampton, and Eric was moving in. It made sense. He had every advantage. He was with her every day, fighting for their life together. I was a memory, and a compromised one at that: a fantasy.
At one point she said to me, “I was cheating on my boyfriend when we were together. It was tainted as romance from the beginning.”
Actually, it was worse than that. Our brief affair was symptomatic of all her pathologies, all the bad stuff she had thought she had left behind—I was the creature from the black lagoon of her past, dragging all the swamp slime of those bad old days with me: the selfishness, the sex-addiction, the manipulative power-games. She had seduced me because she could, because it made her feel strong and powerful. It was sick, it was like falling off the wagon, like a drinking binge. The last thing she wanted to do was recall that lost weekend.
I was part of her past and I should stay that way, for both of our sakes.
She had to move on.
I had become a symptom. Somehow I knew that wasn’t good. A few more weeks, and I might become the disease itself. The phone calls, intended to connect us, sharpened the separation. It was trying to set a nail in a knot: each hammer blow pulls the boards farther apart. That’s right, I was thinking about her all the time, and every frustrating moment turned into a metaphor. Trying to climb the sand bluff at Surfside, slipping back on the soft sand with every step forward; visiting Los Angeles during one of those autumn weeks when winter arrives for a few days—with cold and bare trees and wind and white-caps and icy rain—before leaf-blowers clean the streets and it’s summer again. Every temporary, futile, frustrating thing was a message.
Finally I accepted it.
The calls tapered off. I fought the urge to pick up the phone every day, every night. I began to understand what she meant about addiction.
But eventually I gave up. I started seeing other women. I always knew, though, that no matter what we were doing, no matter what I had told them, no matter how involved we seemed to be … one phone call from Sophie and I’d be gone like a dog jumping out of a parked car. Of course I knew that call was never going to come, but it didn’t matter. I used the idea, and the feeling it provoked, as a point of reference. I was waiting for the woman who could make that mythical phone call moot, conclude the past and let the future begin. But I wasn’t finding her. Part of me knew that looking for her was pointless. You don’t find that kind of relationship; it finds you.
I tried to write this story in many forms, as a screenplay, as a novel, always changing it, tweaking it so it came out better, conniving a happy ending. But the ecology of the truth was too delicate for such manipulations, each change ravaged the narrative in some way: I made Sophie into a bitch, I made myself into a wimp, I reduced the tragedy and pain of her life to a plot point. And I still had no usable ending, no satisfactory conclusion.
I only found that when I met Annie and left Sophie behind forever. It took a new life beginning for me to finish—and even understand—the old one. Finally I can leave the story as it was: inconclusive, sad, troubling, an isolated persistent heartache that lives on in me like the occasional jab of pin from an old injury, the sprained ankle that still reminds me of a bike accident almost forty years ago.
Some injuries never quite heal. Finally you just have to embrace them, you have to let them hobble you from time and to time, let them bind you to your past with the red webbing of pain, and walk on. The pain always goes away eventually.
But it always comes back.
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—Photo N1NJ4/Flickr
Thanks … I hope to hear next week about the book.
Just for the record …
Amazon Singles rejected it . Oh well.
Well damn, Steven. How about submitting it as an ebook anyway? Check out the Kindle Select program. It would give your work more exposure without going through gatekeepers. The main rub I see is that you have to give Amazon 90 days of exclusive use.
And no, I don’t own any stock in Amazon.
I refer you to my most recent post at open salon …
http://open.salon.com/blog/steven_axelrod/2011/12/30/the_truth_about_indie_publishing
I think I’ll just stick to writing for while…
Good article over there, Steven. It seems that the good thing about going indie is the lack of gatekeepers, and the bad thing about doing indie is the lack of gatekeepers. It’s easier to get into the pool, but easier to get lost in the pool too. I get the impression that whether going the indie or traditional route, luck plays a big part. I hope you’ll keep submitting through both avenues. More folks should have the chance to read your writing.
Thanks …
Actually, this is one section of my divorce memoir, “The First Pancake Theory” for which I’ve definitely been mulling the e-book option. No big publisher wants a memoir by someone not famous who didn’t get molested or almost die from drugs or something. I’ll definitely check out the link …
Here ya go, Steven: http://amzn.to/w3l4xd One thing: Amazon says that material submitted must not be published anywhere else IN ITS ENTIRETY. So, you might want to pull the full story from your blog if you’re interested. Unlike “regular” ebook submissions to Amazon, Kindle Singles have to be approved by the editors. Then again, unlike “regular” ebook submissions, Amazon pays 70% royalties even if you choose to price your piece below $2.99 (Kindle titles other than Kindle Singles earn 35% if priced below $2.99.) I love The One That Got Away/Flying Weather, and it would be great to see you enter… Read more »
Hal — That is a totally cool idea. I love that idea. How do you do that?
I really enjoyed the “whole story” from your blog as well, Steven. Why not submit it as an Amazon Single?
WOW! I’m blown away. Made me feel like you were telling a story about my life. Got me thinking I was there. Incredible work. And true to the fact that not all stories have happy endings. Unfortunately thats something that Hollywood never seems to go with.
“Some injuries never quite heal. Finally you just have to embrace them, you have to let them hobble you from time and to time, let them bind you to your past with the red webbing of pain, and walk on. The pain always goes away eventually.
But it always comes back.”
Oh my. Yes. This is the absolute truth.
Thanks for the comments. For nyone who’s interested, or wants to read more about Sophie, I just posted the whole story (This is roughly the last quarter of it ) on my blog.
If you liked the ending, go back to the beginning and see how it all began; I think it’s worth the trip
http://whereaminowwhenineedme.blogspot.com/2011/11/one-who-got-away.html
“But the ecology of the truth was too delicate for such manipulations.” OMG, isn’t that the truth? Beautiful, beautiful story. Happy endings, in the cliched way, are overrated. Real life often won’t reduce itself to that.
Wow, just an awesome piece of writing.
Fuckin-A. That is PhD level writing. I can identify and agree with most of your sentiments. It does come back…
Steve, this is an amazing piece of writing, thank you. I am still laughing at your insight, how, afterwards, “every frustrating moment turned into a metaphor. Trying to climb the sand bluff at Surfside, slipping back on the soft sand with every step forward…” But that’s somehow testament to the way you wrote it so that your story became my story. No matter how many details are different, the points you’ve made are so universal, the connection between writer and reader so powerful. Even the way you wanted desperately to change the story at the end. Yes, how many times… Read more »
Dude I am still trying to sort out how you convinced that guy to FLY you to a date with a woman destined to break your heart? That is what I call a friend.
Truly remarkable story. Thank you.
Steven this is just an awesome piece of writing. I admit to starting to read in on my iPhone in traffic on Route 9 here in Boston (reader mode so the type was legible but barely) and getting so completely sucked in that I risked getting rear-ended, or killed, more than once. Women in cars were screaming at me for not paying attention. I wanted to scream back, “You gotta read this shit lady!” Seriously, I love your ability to transport with dialogue. The stuff in the plane is priceless. And I hate to admit it but I think you… Read more »