Prologue to my memoir:

This is a revised prologue to a memoir that I am currently rewriting/editing.  Enjoy!

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Prologue:  And then there was light

I knew it would take years before I could engage the subject of Isabel.  I did not, do not want, to demonize her.  I loved her, even as it ended.  Even as we sobbed into the phone on our last day as a couple, I loved her.

Was it dysfunctional?  Yes, but dysfunction fails to distinguish it from others.  Was it abnormal?  Probably, but only in its intensity, which flowed up into unsurpassed moments of elation, and down, into a universe of self-abuse to which I had never before, and would never again, subject myself.

*

We walked into the terminal, necks craned up, looking for international departures, then, having located those signs, looking for the Lufthansa queue.  It was mid-October of 2004, the last day that her 3 month visitor status was valid.   One more day, and she would be illegal.  I had driven back to Connecticut two days prior, nursing a cold.

She had already complete packing, and as we were about to leave to drive her to the airport, she decided to check her e-mail.  There was a message.  It was from ESPN.  She had not gotten the job, despite the strength of her interviews.  A question of paperwork, of work status, it being October.  She began crying, right there.  I said something about other opportunities.  She said I was nuts, that this was her only hope.  It was borderline true – getting a job at ESPN was where she had focused nearly all of her job search efforts.  And close she came, but bureaucracy had the final say, and there we were, staring at the message, that they were sorry not to be able to move forward with her application.

“I’m never coming back,” she said.  I tried to console her, but I wasn’t even sure I believed myself.  She’d have better luck finding work in Europe.  She had family there, she had friends there.  Here, she was living with my parents.  She felt isolated.  She hadn’t found work.

So, this is really it, I thought.  She wouldn’t be coming back.

We punctuated the two hour car ride to the airport with a back and forth as to how we’d make it work.  When we’d see each other, how often, saving money, and me assuring her not to give up hope, that there would be other chances at finding a job here in the US.  Her scorning my pointless optimism, and me falling silent when she asked where were there jobs for her and how was she supposed to get them and what was I doing to help?

I watched her in line, back and forth with the Lufthansa agent.  She got her ticket and walked towards me.  Just over a year ago, I had met her.  She was the same, petite, black haired and olive skinned woman here in the airport as she was at Les Halles in Central Paris.  Same deep set eyes, same small hands, same attributes that drew me to her on a night when the museums were open late.  She looked a little more tired.  She looked at me.  She put her arms around me.  We were standing on top of a map of the world.  We were crying.

“No me dejes,” she implored.

“No te voy a dejar,” I said.

“Prométeme.”

“Te prometo, te juro.”

She said good-bye one last time.  We kissed, we kissed again, she turned around, and she was gone.

I would never see her again.

In December of that year, a month after I, in the form of a transatlantic phone call, terminated our relationship, I received two letters from her in close succession.  The first noted how in the weeks since the breakup, she had come to the epiphany that it was all her fault, and that she wanted me to know she had realized it only now.  The second wished me a Happy Birthday.  I held on to both, at least through graduation from Middlebury in May.

Her older brother sent me a message in the spring of 2005, the semester of my graduation, informing me that it wasn’t right of me to have left Isabel and only to cut myself off from her so completely, from blocking her on MSN Messenger, to not replying to her letters.  I should be a bigger man, and face it down.  This was the singular communication that I would have with him.  I unblocked Isabel from MSN Messenger, informed her by way of an e-mail that her brother had contacted me, and within the week, she wanted to talk about things.  We did so online.

She dove right into it:  was I with someone else?

I asked her why she would think that.  She had heard from sources she refused to divulge.  I told her that I was, that I had been for some time.  That yes, I was in love.  How could I, so soon after the breakup, she wanted to know.

So I told her:  “I just wanted to be happy.”

We were together eleven months.  I avoided thinking of her for years; I distilled my bitterness, fell in love again, and got a job.  But she remained in my brain, a whisper and then a scream, the possessor of my year in Paris – mostly lost but not forgotten.

The Only Man He’d Known From Iowa

I sit in the combined living and dining room of my grandfather’s apartment, where he’s lived since my grandmother died. He keeps the apartment very warm, such that my mother, when we visit, shakes the hair that falls on her neck as she brings his laundry back up from the basement.

“You should go see him,” my mother says the Saturday after Thanksgiving. “It means a lot to him.”

So I am there, with Ashley, who is meeting him for the first time. I don’t preface the visit with much; my mother has told Ashley about him already, all the back story she’d need for a quick visit to West Hartford.

When he expects company, the door is always left ajar. Still, I knock. I always do.

He tells us to come in, sing-songy. Whenever we visit, when he first sees us, it’s always, “Hey!” as though the announced visit were a total surprise.

I kiss his cheek and he kisses mine; he grabs my forearm, as though for support, even as he is seated in his overstuffed chair from which he watches television. Ashley takes a seat by my side on the couch.

He asks Ashley where she’s from. She says Iowa.

One of his shipmates on the USS Baltimore, the Heavy Cruiser which took FDR to Alaska, was from Iowa. He was teased quite a bit, for reasons I can’t quite remember, but it might have been the way he pronounced his A’s, something physical which invited attack, or, simply, some joke about corn gone a few iterations too far.

“Well, he got so frustrated he took out a knife,” he says. Ashley says wow, or oh my God.

He goes on to tell how he was the one that diffused the situation. He had settled them down. He didn’t get into great detail as to how it happened, but the shipmate from Iowa did not stab anyone.

“He’s the only man I knew from Iowa.”

Soon thereafter, I rise to leave, anxious to get on the road, Ashley rising in turn.

“See you soon, Gramps,” I say.
“Hey! Good to see you!”

His head turns to Ashley: “Come back soon, and we can talk more about Iowa!” He makes some reference to corn.

She smiles, and indicates she’ll see him soon.
The chance would never come, and the next time that Ashley would see my grandfather, his lips were sewed shut, and he was dressed in a suit that he hadn’t worn in years; we covered him with an American flag.

In Coastal Maine

A number of relatives knew only to start crying when they saw my grandfather, who, in the two years since his last pilgrimage to Maine, could now only walk three steps before needing a rest, and lived only with the aid of oxygen, monitored with great diligence by my mother who had done most of the planning for the trip.

We were there, at the family cemetery in Thomaston, to bury the ashes of my mother’s mother, my grandfather’s high school sweetheart in the late 30s, and his wife by 1980.  The pastor read the twenty third psalm without the letter R, and my grandfather, after some brief remark from my mother, told the small gathering about my grandmother next to a fallen redwood, claiming the photograph to be proof that she was the happiest gal you ever would meet, before the exertion and tears forced him to stop.

At the family cottage, twenty minutes away, at dinner, my family, with the exception of my grandfather, proceeded to imbibe with great zeal, and lighting citronella candles to fend off the persistent mosquitoes, we spread ourselves out, my father all the while the merry bartender.  It was a gathering of people you really only see at marriages and funerals, or in Florida, in February, to escape New England winters.

I myself turned in once one of my cousins began running shirtless around the kitchen, showing us a tattoo on his left shoulder.  It was after that point that he composed an open letter to us all that suggested that, now that Marie was gone, there was little need to maintain the falsehood that we enjoyed each other’s company.