We were going up north to my parent’s cottage—Fred’s place now—and it was dark, the middle of the night, probably around 3 a.m. We were going down the tiny access road and it was damp, puddles in the ruts. There were frogs all over the road. Carol insisted on getting out. She wanted to jump in front of the car to herd the frogs off the road. The poor thing couldn’t save everything, least of all me, but I imagine there are generations of frogs who live now deep in the northern Michigan woods, who are unknowingly grateful for Carol saving their nameless ancestors. Is this why I came? To deliver salvation to frogs on a long-ago night in Michigan. Now she lives in New Mexico. She’s s a crazy cat lady who has dozens of cats and works tirelessly to rescue felines from near and far.
We did a sex act that involved a hardboiled egg, got the idea from a movie. She liked pornography, thought Larry Flynt was some kind of artiste. I would lose her to a guy called Snake. She had gone west to become an actor, but now she’s some kind of new-age style teacher, in California, married to another new-age teacher. She has a musician son, and was once married to an 80’s version of Euell Gibbons, fitting because I was a drunk and she was into macrobiotics way before it was cool. The wet soul smolders long after the heart dies: There are remnants of her in the way I do eggs—not the hard boiled kind—in the way I eat popcorn, in certain diction that got stuck in my head, frozen like those ancients that were preserved in ice. She is some kind of a life coach now.
She was smart. Off-the-chart smart, top .01 percentile. It was kind of debilitating, the smart thing. She made out with me—attacked me—in a public restaurant, and later we would stay in bed for five days and we weren’t protesting anything. Her backstory was fantastic, brutal, sordid, triumphant—you find out a lot of things when you spend five days in bed. I put a design on her back with a razor. I wonder if it is still there. She’s a professor at an aeronautics university.
She wore a long white dress, a white top, white stockings, and she sat on the swing, swinging on the banks of the Mississippi River. She looked happy. I pretended I was in an envelope, that I was safe. My heart had become numb, beating a soft cadence that was never attended to, never paid attention to. I couldn’t love her but I would care for her. She could hang on to me, and maybe that’d be a version of solace. Further north, facing the lake at sunset, we made an accord that the future could still be reshaped and molded. Accords—diplomatic agreements—were never meant to work with affairs of the heart. I miss her at times, the caring for her thing.
They took her away like that girl in the James Taylor song. (Update edit: It turns out that wasn’t what really happened to the James Taylor girl—she od’d.) A few years later, I’m drinking all the time and she came back on a summer’s day. We ran around, got high—travelled—until she went to visit an old friend of ours, a gay man who had little use or taste for women by then. When she slept with the guy, I knew she had never really come back. It was only a ghost. Years later, she came back around and wanted to resume some kind of relationship. Her body and face were ravaged by years of heroin and cigarettes, but she had quit all that—the heroin anyway. She liked to pretend she wasn’t an heiress, that she was self-reliant, capable, all that, but it was a thin veil she wore like she once wore her addictions. And I realized something had happened to the rhythm of my heart, that it still beats faintly for some but it has long since failed for others. And since the anomalous results are similar, all paths leading to the same place, it is that the defect was always there. I treated her badly this time around.
We stayed in the guest house attached to the southernmost house in the United States, in Key West. We had a private beach, and we could see both the sun rise and the sun set from our deck. Men and women, beautiful and filled up to overflowing with vibrant youth—their hearts beating strong—would come and bask nude in the long rays of the sun, on the beach that abutted ours. It was the interlude after a death. I put a design on her breast. It’s still there. She lived with CP and overcame a stroke (a footnote to intersecting lives is that my father coincidentally trained two of the doctors who operated on her, allowed her to walk when she was told that she never would). She’s a fighter. Some die. Some don’t. She would eventually remarry her husband and she would have a second act.
We rode into New York on a train. It was December. I thought it might be nice to see the city blanketed in snow. We arrived in a blizzard. And aren’t we always told to temper our wishes? We wondered the streets—the windows at Macy’s, pizza in the Village, Ground Zero, some Irish pub just because it was warm and we were cold. We wandered the slushy sidewalks—it was romantic, peaceful. She would hang on thru my worst, would eventually leave me at my best. And then she came back and on and on.
We were at some kind of school assembly, in the auditorium. She was wearing a pink skirt and a white sash, and there was that smile. For some reason, I was carrying a red carnation. In the spur of the moment, with romance seizing my teen heart, I threw the carnation. It landed with a thud at least ten rows away from the girl. It was a prescient moment because I would always miss her or she’d miss me, although we’d try. I didn’t know it then, but we had already sailed past each other and into separate lives. Some years later, before her sister’s wedding, I stopped by her house one evening, and she put on the dress she was going to wear. It was dazzling white, with lace and I didn’t think I had ever seen anything so beautiful. It was a dark pinnacle. My heart should have stopped that evening. I did not need another beat. Many years later, I would mention that night to her. She had no recollection of it. It’s funny how the heart works or doesn’t work.
She asked me where I was—a question I’ve often been asked—and I texted “Someplace special.” She didn’t get the reference. it. It is the motto of her hometown, written in bold ten-foot-high letters on the town’s water tank. I had come to town wearing a Ralph Lauren polo shirt because she liked them, even if I had little taste for branded apparel. Funny how the pursuit of the heart will make you bend and warp your essence. I would make her stand against the wall and wait for me. It would be the last time I would see her, but she’d wait for a long time—wall or no wall, me or no me—I guess her heart had a hard time forgetting me. Sometimes, our hearts beat out of sync. It is funny how that works.
I was young. High school. It was my first girl friend since the nutbox. I broke up with her one evening. My reasoning was that she didn’t make me happy, like I thought that was her job. My anomalous heart was already making consequential decisions for me. A week later, we had sex in a car. Maybe the break-up wasn’t clean? Midway in the sex act thing, she started crying. What’s wrong I wanted to know. She said this line that has echoed throughout my life. “You are going to be a bitter old man.” I think with every stupid thing I did that left me alone, with every failure, I think of that moment, that line. How did she know? How could she not?
I planted her stilettos in the sand. The beach spread out in front of me. I leaned over and whispered words into her dark hair. I heard her sigh and then I looked into the inky darkness, the stars over the water. We would never find our way back to each other. I knew it then, knew enough by then to feel the pang of futility at the bottom of my heart.
We walked over a mountain in the Canadian Rockies and then walked back to our room, in the dark, in bear country. Years later, we would wonder around the streets of Chicago until we landed at a Greek restaurant at four o’clock in the morning. We ate flaming saganaki and I watched her join in the Greek dances. And then she was gone. When my heart is cold, alone, and the night is long, I sometimes see her spinning to the music in the dark. I try to quiet the steady beat and listen, finally listen.
She was Catholic and she spent a lot of time praying over me while I spent a lot of time drinking. On her birthday, I got her roses and put them in an empty bottle of Blue Nun wine, and slipped the bottle into her room so the roses would open overnight. Her roommate, Karen, thought it was hysterical. Weeks later, Maria and Lori and Tammi brought me to the airport. We had spent the night together, but our love was yet unconsummated. My heart was young, hopeful: there would be plenty of time for that. It was the last time I would see any of those woman, but I would see the roommate again. She’d be my friend for life, her triumphs, tragedies – well, most of the life. She finally faded away after her second marriage.
It had been a frenetic day. My car was in the shop and I had an early shift at work. She was into dogs. I found her a bit exotic and dangerous with her purple hair and big unruly dogs. Apparently, the police and animal control knew her well. The dogs would sometimes go over or under the fence, We stopped at her place once and there was crap everywhere. She put on gloves and cleaned it up. She dropped me off at work, and before leaving gave me a key chain, it said: If found, return to…and it had her address and phone number. At least I had the knowledge that she was fond of dogs. She had told me she didn’t want children which was a little disappointing to me—because I was hopeful back then—she would later marry a friend of mine, and amidst sordid tales and whispers, they had a child.
I was a child, just a teenager. I was over at a fellow teens house around the holidays. It was someone I knew from the nutbox and was rather fond of her. We had sporadically dated for a few months, going to a concert and a dance together. On that night, we had both been drinking, and it probably didn’t take much for a couple of teenager to get drunk. Toward the end of the night, she said this: “I may be drunk, but I know that I love you very much,” and then we kissed. For a moment in time, I thought life was going to work out after all. Love was easier than I thought. But by the dawn, she got sober I guess, and reconsidered maybe both her good line and that kiss. We never really spoke again. Many years later, I located her in the Midwest—married with a couple kids—and the husband just decided he was trans or something and her world was in turmoil. I doubt she ever longed for me, but I do wonder if she ever longed for the peace that was in that one far-away kiss.