Revisiting Carina – Part I

Revisiting Carina

She was leaving for Singapore.  A brief, four sentence, seven line e-mail heralded the news, marking the first time that I’d heard from her in over a year.

Hi Jeff,

Long time not talked…. HOW ARE YOU??

Where are you living right now?

I would be so happy to hear from you!

I will move to Singapore in October to study for two years!

Un abrazo muy fuerte,

Carina

And then all of a sudden, she, the near object of my infidelity, was back in my life.

My immediate response provided an update on where I was and what I was doing (fundraising in Vermont for Middlebury at the time), ending with a sincere petition that she reply soon, a request which I had little faith of seeing fulfilled.

Of her or for her, I have written in gross disproportion to how much I have actually seen her, or, for that matter, know her:  at some point in the winter of my senior year of high school, I wrote about her after seeing someone who looked so frighteningly similar to her that my parents, the young woman at the restaurant table, and I all caught me staring.  That night, in my bedroom, I for some reason drew a poor rendition of her using a blue ballpoint pen that would later explode in my pocket.

Then that spring, upon receiving a letter from her couriered by my Spanish teacher who had been to Barcelona, I wrote of her a second time, in the same imperfect Spanish and the same conventional and overly expressive English.

Then came a poem in the August after graduation which was proofread by a friend Alejandro in the dining room of my parents’ house, who, after correcting a few things, said, “You loved her.”

—

Part I:  So a German and an American Meet up in Barcelona

Alejandro and I waited outside Café Zurich in August one year later.  Cell phones were slowly becoming common, particularly in Europe, making my sporadic trysts more feasible.  Alejandro received a call, informing us that she had arrived at Plaça Catalunya.

We kissed hello.  I introduced them.   Alejandro made his way back toward the metro.

“Call when you want us to come pick you up.”

“Thanks; I will.”

There was smiling and shrugging.

“You look good,” one of us said.

“You do, too,” the other replied.

She had friends from Belgium visiting, with whom we joined as we walked towards the corner, in the direction of La Oveja Negra, the bar to which she wanted to take us.

We entered what to my American mind was a rustic entrance, sat down at a low-sitting wooden table with a tiled wall to our backs, and ordered sangria.

The Belgians got up to go to the restroom, so that it could be just us two.

“Fun that you have visitors.”

“I’m glad they leave tomorrow.  Sorry that they have to join us tonight.”

“It’s fine.  You like them?”

“Well enough; just that I have to speak in English with them.”

“And?”

“My English is horrible!”

“Say something to me?”

“Stop!”

“You’re no fun.”

The night ended without incident; she received a tenuous phone call from her boyfriend in Germany, and twenty minutes later Alejandro and his father Gerónimo picked me up in their ’super-car.’

—

“Have you seen the fountains at night?”

“No.”

“We could go tonight.”

“Okay.”

“They light up, there’s music, it’s great.”

“Sounds good; let me just make sure it’s okay.”  I put my hand over the mouthpiece.  “Jandro:  Carina wants to take me to the fountains tonight; okay if I go?”

“No problem; we have the day together.”

“Thanks,” I said, then turning to speak back into the phone:  “Hey – sounds good.  What time do I meet you and where?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Do you want to have dinner before we go?”

“Sure.”

Then there she was in the urban dusk, with the streetlights shyly flickering on, still unsure of their exact purpose, dragging on her cigarette with faded gray corduroys, and a thin, long sleeved black shirt, leaning against her bag pressed against the wall to the metro’s entrance.

“Hi,” one of us said as we kissed hello.

“Hi,” said the other.

She offered me a cigarette, which I accepted and struggled to light as we made our way along La Rambla, headed towards the Port.

I do not recall the name of the restaurant; we were seated outside, me facing towards the sea, her towards the rolling corpus of Mare Magnum, its shops and cinemas.

In all the times I’ve thought about her since, as I write these words, this is the first time that I remember that we ordered claras, or, as she explained to me while the waiter stood there dutifully, the strange combination of beer and lemon Fanta.

After our drinks were gone, our plates were cleared, and the check paid, she said to me, “No one’s ever invited me to dinner before.”

—

We sat on one of the benches that ran up and down the wooden sidewalk network, not far from where we had just eaten, with a few large and gray commercial ships docked on the other side of the jetty, carving their steely lines amid the fluorescent lights shining aimlessly out onto the sea.

She talked about the skinheads in Germany, for reasons that I don’t remember making much sense, commenting on their ignorance.  She mentioned that she was going to Seattle for a year, to work on her English.

“Would you spend Christmas with me in Connecticut?” I asked.

“I’d love to,” she replied.

She brought me something, wrapped.

“What’s this?”

“You can’t open it until you get back to the United States,” she demanded.

“That’s fine with me.”

I put it in the small backpack that I had brought with me.

We concluded that it was time to head to the fountains near Montjuïc, and so we began walking, stopping to have our pictures taken by passersby as we made our way slowly along the jetty.

As we waited for the water and light show to start, we talked about music.

“You know, I still listen to that tape you made me.  It’s in my car; I can’t even count the number of times I’ve listened to it.”

“Seriously?”

It was a mix that she made the night before she left Connecticut when we first met; the cassette itself had a vintage Coca-Cola print overlaid on the body of it.

“Here, listen to this,” I said, passing her my headphones, having her listen to a song I had discovered that spring.

I tried not to look at her while she listened.  But I did.  She liked the song I played.

Then we watched as the water began to dance to the strains of classical music; I remember thinking to myself how strange it was that people knew that this happened every week.  Years later, I would tell my parents as we walked past the dormant pools, that the fountains came alive at night, if it were summer and a Thursday, neither condition at that moment being met.

My concentration was divided unequally between being impressed by the show and wondering what she was thinking.  When the show ended, the inequality became even more exaggerated.

“That was great; thanks for taking me to this,” I said.

“You enjoyed?”

“Sure did.”

We meandered slowly towards the escalators and stairs, and, after a few more pictures taken of us by a few different unsuspecting parties, we lit our respective cigarettes, and retreated to our respective thoughts.

Finally, as the streetlights’ density diminished, she said, “I wish you weren’t leaving.”

She extinguished her cigarette, and we made our way down the stairs.

—

That night, sitting shirtless in Alejandro’s childhood bed, I wrote at length about the last two evenings in a journal with a seashell on the front of it, and then proceeded to write the lyrics to a song for or about her, which filled the last blank page in the book.  The tentative plan, in my head, was to write the song, and then play it for her if I made it to Seattle, or if not, at Christmas, when she came to visit me in Connecticut.  Before I went back to school that fall, I had written the accompanying notes, and polished it on the piano in my parents’ living room.

There was quite a farewell party that ushered me to the airport.  Most of the friends that I had seen over the three week period were there at the terminal, all of us hugging and kissing good-bye, taking photographs, and making promises to stay in touch, to see each other soon.

Carina and her mother made it to the scene about five minutes before I had to head through security and onto my flight.  Carina and I managed to exchange a quick kiss, e-mail addresses and phone numbers, with her promising to send me her new number in Seattle once she had it.  One of our friends waved at us, and took a few more photographs.

Then:  “I have to leave now.”

“Okay.”

And so she did.

I have never seen her since.

Three Preludes

Three Preludes

I.

The living room floor still had its deep green carpeting and the first set of furniture before the cats kneading their claws forced us through three more sofa loveseat combinations.

It was a sixth grade social studies project:  definitions and illustrated examples of various geographical features (archipelago, atoll, cape…), and father was helping me.

I had reached isthmus, and had begun pasting with Elmer’s glue (“Glue sticks don’t work as well”), when he got up to match my mother’s yelling, the origins of which I do not recall.

And then their hands were around each other’s necks, and when my hearing came back, it was in the form of my own voice and my sister’s, screaming for them to stop.

They did not immediately or entirely heed, instead lowering their hands, glaring, my father breaking the silence:  Get out of the house, get out.  The response:  Make me, Alan, make me.

So instead he slammed the door, and soon drove off, and while I cried beside my sister in my room, I listened as his car returned, and we did not know what to do, or what might happen next.

We won’t do that again, said my mother later that night.  After all, we broke the answering machine, she half chuckled, but she refused to lie and to say that she still loved my father.

II.

I was driving with my mother to West Hartford, between my first and second year of college, her pressing on the imaginary brake on the passenger side:  The speed limit’s 35 here, Jeff.

The ensuing argument arose from, I believe, her technical support needs clashing with my volition not to be found at home, and so began the same exchanges rehashed from years ago.

But with a twist:  to emphasize how bad a son I was, how rotten a child I had become, she added, You’re just like your father, you know.  Just as horrible as he is.

Defused, I listened as she elaborated:  Don’t ever turn out like him, or you’ll never stay married.  You’ll never keep someone acting like you do, you know.  I put on my turn signal.

That’s why I’m divorcing you’re father.  Wait, what the hell?  I can’t do it, anymore, Jeff.  I’m divorcing him once your sister’s done with college; I’ll die alone, I really will.

I never did tell my father, although when I saw him watching baseball that night, with a cat sitting happily on his chest, I decided to join him instead of going out.

And as we sat there, me the audience to the ultimate in dramatic irony, I began calculating the number of years before I had to tell him that I knew all along.

III.

She proved a faulty soothsayer, as the summer after my sister’s graduation, they remained together, still with their frequent bitching, occasional outings, and frustrating friends.

Then I was in Maine, with them, my grandfather, somehow still alive, and relatives from the West Coast, drinking more than lightly, less than heavily, at a family cottage on a wharf.

The next morning, we drove to Camden, my mother and I in one car, the rest of them in the minivan, a little quieter, a little unsure of what would be remembered.

She recapped the evening’s events, after I had turned in or stopped paying attention, including discussions of religion, money, and how we didn’t want to talk about Sammy anymore (money).

There was no segue to be found on the revivification of the theme of their crumbling marriage, just a key forced into a broken, rusted lock, stuck again now on the passenger side.

I can’t tell, Jeff, she says.  When he’s in groups, he can be so fun and charming, but he can really make me feel pretty lonely at home with the things he says.

I mean, with the cancer thing, I could have been there on my deathbed, and if it was the day he was supposed to have lunch with his friends from work, you know he would have gone.

So finally:  Ma, we’ve had this talk before.  You’ve been saying you that you were going to do this for years.  Thinking to myself:  oh, and you tried to kill each other.

It’s not that easy.  There’s the house, the insurance, the cats, and all the other, just, stuff.  I mean, it’d be a very messy thing, and I just don’t know if I have the energy for it.

You know, there’s something he said to me when we first met that should have cued me more than it did.  He said that he had never really been happy in his life.

So just do it already, I said, biting my tongue with further advice, thinking of my father, alone in half of the house, drinking a beer after mowing the half of the lawn, trying to see if he’s smiling.

The Reasons They Do It

The Reasons They Do It

Two tables away in a small college
café where I take my lunch, two men, both
donning sweaters in a sixty degree
spring, discuss things I do not own (such as
multiple cars, multiple homes, children),
and professions I am not in (such as
law, medicine, practical vocations).

It was during their brief exchange on the
psychology of med school (neither of them
revealed themselves as doctors), that I tuned
in to steal this snippet:  No one wants to
be a general practitioner; they
all want to be specialists, because that’s
where all the money is.  Uh-huh, trust me.

I here recall a friend, currently in
classes, thinking not of the cash in which
he’ll be swimming, but rather of his up-
-coming pathology exam Tuesday.
If asked why he chose to specialize, why
he’s not going into primary care,
his answer would not be money.  No, his
reasons are far more direct, in his own
words why:  I just want to cut people up.