Christmas spirit, overpowering cinnamon, blows me like an errant dust
bunny through the four airless rooms of my apartment, and for a few hours I
erase the memory of last weekend, forty-eight hours spent choking stinging
vapors from oil based purple and yellow paint. My furniture disappears
beneath a half dozen of my only friends and all the baggers and clerks from
Terrelia's Market, invited on my last beer run downstairs because the market
was closing and I needed more people with nowhere to go. Finally, my voice
dominates last year's K-Tel Christmas music and I'm talking about her again,
Bing Crosby warbling behind my shouted, "eccentric! Marie was eccentric
worse than Lanie," while my head shakes furiously because that's not the case
at all.
Honesty proves that hours later when the room is empty, politeness
exiting behind my guests. "Nuts," I admit then, whisking half empty
Fiestaware bowls of Old El Paso and Doritos shards from my Ethan Allen white
pine table. "Nuttier than granola, fruitier than a Hostess berry pie, a
couple sandwiches short of a full picnic basket, knitting with one needle--"
The living room is reassembled by the time analogies run dry, JC Penny
coordinating pillows in navy blue and white striped corduroy plumped back
into rigid attention across the back of the white pine futon, the way Lanie
kept them. Braided scatter rugs are shaken out the bathroom window, then
strewn haphazardly across the pale hardwood floors, Doritos shards drifting
down a one story column of damp ocean air before splatting neatly in Mrs.
Terrelia's terra cotta flower boxes. Some scatter like ashes from smoldering
July Hibachis to rain soaked Tenth Avenue, empty now as the rest of the world
waits, smug beneath dual control electric blankets, for Christmas morning.
Two blasts of Lysol Country Breezes, a swipe at my computer's screen with
a frayed gray sock dripping Windex, and my home is restored to as much order
as will ever come to a man who lives solo by circumstance, not choice.
Another Christmas Eve alone at midnight, a half eaten container of Ben and
Jerry's chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream wedged between the knees of my
Levis as I stare blankly at the late movie on channel fifteen. Swiping a
useless sprig of mistletoe from beneath the table, I crush it hard in both
hands before hurling it behind the futon to die.
It's Christmas Eve, and I want her back.
What's left to say about love? Too many pointless pages have been penned
throughout history, too many love songs with bad lyrics and worse music clog
the FM waves. I've struggled too many years with something painfully basic:
Love comes, love goes. It's a matter of hanging on until you're functional
again, a healing process like skin closing over a wound, forming a stump
where your leg or your arm, whichever you were most dependent upon, used to
be before it was completely and unexpectedly severed.
My problem? I don't want to heal again. I did that when Lanie left, the
twins clinging to her, because San Francisco was no place to raise children,
and they deserved something better after we fell apart.
All that needs to be said about love was swooshed out of a paintbrush
last weekend when my bathroom turned purple, yellow trim racing across the
baseboards.
It took two days, and I stayed in the apartment the whole time, stocking
up on baloney, bread, and Budweiser at Terrelia's before I started, asking
Bett McArthur to slide my mail under the door when she finished work on
Saturday night. It shot through one envelope at a time, clear plastic
windows scuffling across the hardwood, a comforting six-thirty reminder that
I had a place in the world, and it remembered me. "Keep breathing," she'd
scrawled across the back of my PG&E bill, the 'I' dotted by a smiley face
that reminded me of the twins' kindergarten work.
The world should be purple and yellow, Marie confided once, so I'd
painted it for her, as if her favorite colors would draw her back.
"Tant pis," she'd said, in that annoying way she had of using French
phrases culled from a travel guide, then explaining their meaning as if her
audience was so mentally inferior they'd never figure them out on their own.
She was German, Swiss, and Danish, that much I'd learned. About as
French as Kentucky Fried Chicken, but the lie had only added to her allure.
Her ex-husband had been French, she'd confided and shrugged, as if shaking
him from her shoulders. "So much the worse," she explained, hanging her head
so that her hair dropped a curtain over her face. Such injustice, she said,
that the most glorious colors on earth were invited out to play only at
Easter.
Injustice was my world now, I thought, Paul Michael Glaser and Sally
Struthers playing out a repeat of a remake from the seventies, something
about Houdini. I breathed deeply, inhaling the familiar creaking of
contracting wood and the ping of ancient plumbing that was the market
settling into closure two floors below. An ancient recording of Jingle Bells
drifted quietly from Mrs. Terrelia's apartment above it, while the rhythmic
squawk of rusty springs in Bett McArthur's king sized bed drifted down from
her world above my ceiling.
I was a small piece of a depressed building that night, almost as morose
as the April evening I'd grudgingly moved in after depositing my wife and
children at the Amtrak station, knowing they'd never return.
A dead market on the ground floor, because a market only lived when it
bustled with people. Above that, the widow Terrelia waited for her sons'
arrival, Christmas only an idea until their thick Italian laughter and the
squeals of her grandchildren flooded her apartment. She'd take the
photograph of their grandfather gently down from the mantle, the photo she
pointed to each time I delivered my rent check, and decide again that he
should never have hoisted a last case of schnapps from the delivery truck.
He might be alive today, she'd say, while her sons clapped gnarled hands of
comfort on her back, unaware a callous reporter upstairs had rained broken
Doritos into this poor widow's flower boxes.
Above me, Bett McArthur lay naked and tangled with Rudy, the water color
artist from Fisherman's Wharf, or maybe Bradley Campbell, the basketball
coach from Ethan Park Recreation Center, and either could have been me. How
many times had I turned her down? I don't want to be that lonely, but I'd
never said it. I'd only shrugged, smiled, and closed the door fast.
Sandwiched between these two dramas was mine, the only players sticky
melting clumps of Ben and Jerry's, and Houdini escaping first a jacket, then
a trunk.
It was Christmas Eve and I missed her, my eyes stinging over soggy ice
cream. I stabbed disconsolately with my fork, mechanically stirring and
wondering what I'd done with my life in thirty-five years that meant
anything. Where to go now, without her?
My plants died when Lanie left, and I'd never forgotten crushing their
spindly, dry branches into a black plastic Hefty. Maybe I was in the same
slow withering process. Maybe with people, it just took longer.
Dumb theory, for a reporter who thrived on presenting solid facts to the
world, or at least to that small portion who read the Bay Express Herald and
wanted vivid details. Thrived until Marie, when I ran out of words because I
didn't have another ending in me. Lanie carted off the last one, its twin
blonde heads bobbing up in the rainspecked windows of a departing train.
I hadn't asked for Marie, hadn't chased her like I had Lanie, hadn't gone
out of my way to move her into my heart. It was she who disrupted my world,
appearing on the other end of an order pad at Cabbo's Grill, where I indulged
in pancakes dripping honey butter and canned frozen raspberries every Sunday,
a respite from my own dismal, tasteless creations. She was new, and when I
met those crazy green and gold eyes under tidal waves of red hair flaming to
her elbows, too beautiful to be contained by a frilly scrunchy or plain
rubber band, I felt new, too.
We were Kismet and Fate and that elusive Something Better Lanie promised
would eventually come, and after five years of waiting it had quietly and
suddenly and perfectly arrived.
"I'm going to marry you," I'd said, scratching my phone number onto an
outrageous ten dollar tip, and she'd cocked her head, tucking the bill into
the side pocket of her too large blouse. "Faute de mieux," she'd said then,
smiling the flat, hesitating smile of funerals. "For want of something
better." Her eye teeth were crooked, but only because without that
imperfection, she'd have been too lovely to breathe.
I dreamed about her because I do that when I love someone. But in my
dream, she doesn't bang on my door two months after our first meeting, just
after she'd carved a granite niche for herself in my routine. She doesn't
whirl into the apartment like a ballerina on Broadway, swooshing to a neat
and perfect stop at my kitchen table, the edge of her faded Levis shirt
resting neatly on the thighs of her shiny, worn black leggings.
"An ending for us," she'd pronounced, her head lowered. "Good-bye is de
rigueur. Absolutely necessary."
In dreams, she cries with joy when I call the next day and every day
after that for two weeks, demanding a second chance, an opportunity to right
whatever I'd done wrong. My dreams are better than reality, where she'd
simply said, as coldly as Lanie had urged me to 'just get over it': "Please,
you must not hang on. No nostalgie de la boue." It was the first time she
hadn't explained her French, so I looked it up.
Nostalgie de la boue.
A longing for the mud. For depravity, for your basic wallow, especially
in someone you thought was above such things.
"Nuts," I decided then, and said as much to Bett, when I asked her to
pick up my mail.
Rubber room material is what she was, to consider love your basic wallow,
to quit her job at Cabbo's and vanish who knew where. A new place to flee
intimacy behind a handful of French phrases, Bett suggested. People, she'd
continued, were not meant to be alone, but I'd only shrugged, continuing past
her down the hall, and on yet another Christmas Eve, alone is how I was.
A door slammed above me, furtive footsteps racing down the back stairs,
the groan of an old car sputtering to life in the night. The artist, or the
basketball coach. I wasn't the only tenant spending the night alone, and
oddly, that made sleep easier.
It seemed only right when the doorbell rang, as if it was supposed to do
that at four a.m. A perfectly unexpected occurrence that could only mean she
was back. She too, had missed the mud. Hope and adrenaline carried me to
the door.
I wrenched it open on a smirking Bett McArthur, her thin black hair
pulled straight back, stray tendrils a dark shroud around her angular face.
She thrust a margarine tub of peppermint wheels into my stomach.
"Merry Christmas," she said simply. "I missed your party."
I returned her smile mechanically, squeezing my eyes shut and indulging
the momentary fantasy that she was someone else, then reluctantly opened
them, feeling skin stretching, straining to grow closed, to form a stump.
It would take much more time, I decided, staring down at her. It would
take much more time, and I might never get there at all.
"Faute de mieux," I finally said, almost a whisper. "Come on in."
I pulled the door wide.
