A Family Dinner

Around the table, it was:  a retired banker who was in his time in charge of disaster recovery and continuity management, a real estate agent in the midst of losing her mind, a kindergarten teacher, a third year law student, and a college fundraiser.  It was the first time that we were together since we buried my grandfather’s ashes in July from the body that died in March and was cremated soon after.  We had to wait for the thaw, and then for a weekend that worked for us all to have a memorial.

Here, though, it was fall, and my parents, my sister and her boyfriend were visiting, at the peak of the autumnal colors.  We were seated last among several parties that arrived between 7:25 and 7:35, owing, probably, to the fact that we were five, and not the standard two or four.  I was in acute state of undeniable sobriety, sustained only by the fact that I was racing the coming week, and was off the bottle, itching hourly to get back on.  My mother’s provocations (“You can have one drink”) did not aid in the slightest.  Intoxication made these family weekends more tolerable; things were off to a shaky start.

While we waited for our drinks (a mojito, something that was champagne based, another that was scotch based, and my unsweetened iced tea) and my sister fingered her water glass as though it contained some secret message, my mother commented positively on the ambiance and the arrangement on the table.  We touched it, to discern if it was real.  We discerned that it was not.  The mojito was sent back (the prognosis was cheap rum), and exchanged for a blueberry martini, which received passing marks.

The highlight of the evening, however, was the soup, ordered by my mother and sister.  It had happened that the original soup of the day was a pumpkin bisque, but due to its overwhelming popularity, it had been consumed in its entirety by earlier clients.  As such, it was a cream of mushroom which was served, without their being informed.  We all took turns trying to figure out why the soup was not orange, but rather a greenish brown.  Democratically, we decided that it was the herbs and spices.  The evaluation from my mother “good, but maybe a little too gourmet for me.”

It was not until later, when we had overheard another table bring up the fact that her soup was not orange that we learned of the error.  And the fight was on.  Through several pointed but not quite direct inquiries, my mother extracted from another waitress a confession that a mistake had been committed and an apology for doing so.  I did not expect my sister’s boyfriend, up until now a somewhat-quiet-because-he-was-bad at-normal-conversation-with-humans-and-more-than-slightly-overweight type, to get as animated as he did, but no sooner had there been an apology that he began asking the waitress what would have happened if someone had been allergic, and asserted that they should not be charged.

Things escalated; our original server came out, apologized, received more invective testimony from the law student, who informed her that while he was not certain about Vermont, in Massachusetts, it was a board of health mandate that consumers be informed of such changes; after all someone could have died here.  Our server left to go cry in the kitchen to fellow wait staff, and summoned the owner who offered her own, apologies, who informed us the soup was free, and who patiently listened while the law student kept going, and while my mother informed her that she did not want the server to feel upset, but rather wanted the owner and the server to know that above all, she felt dumb for not knowing what she was eating.

I cut everyone off, told my sister’s boyfriend and my mother that there was nothing left to discuss:  our soups were free, the evening had thus far passed without any occurrence of anaphylactic shock, and our entrees were consumed without incident.  The owner thanked me, and once the seated members at the table agreed, or were forced by my death stares into agreement, she retreated.

My sister began to cry, we looked at the dessert menu out of obligation, and then asked for the check.

Antacids

In the week after she left, I had my first case, albeit self-diagnosed, of heartburn.  I came home to an empty apartment on a Monday afternoon, the only noise to displace the sound of my own footsteps being that of my pet rabbit, scurrying about in her cage, and being the not-yet-spayed female that she was, compulsively making nests which would inevitably spread onto the carpet.  I dropped my bag on the floor and greeted with a not-quite-sad face the thud sound that I expected, along with a clinging noise that I did not expect – I had forgotten that I had a glass mixing bowl in my overnight bag, for reasons which eluded me at that moment.

The week passed without incident:  we talked daily, ending each conversation with the truth that we missed each other, that we loved each other.  I kept up my training in martial arts and in running to prevent myself from having any free time to think about my lot.  Overall, it was a wise strategy.  The bed, as I looked at it each evening after turning on the bedroom lights, too large for just me, sat there, also wondering where the second person was.  It had been over a year that it had supported the weight of two people, with the exception of my somewhat frequent business travel.

And then, on Thursday evening towards eleven o’ clock, friends began arriving.  A college buddy, one of the best, a housemate my senior year, was to be married.  Weddings in the years since graduation, proved to be one of the large unifiers for a geographically dispersed group of friends, and this one proved to be no exception.  I had fallen asleep in the living room / dining room space in my apartment while reading a book when I received a phone call that the foursome, two married couples, three of which had graduated from Middlebury with me and all four of which I had known for years, had arrived safely, had parked, and were shuttling their air mattresses, and bags towards the apartment.  I welcomed them in; we gave each other the 5 minute catch up, discussed logistics for the weekend, and turned in.

On Friday, two other friends, also housemates during that fourth year of our undergraduate tennure, arrived, and on Saturday, three more ended up taking up space in the apartment, bringing the total number to ten, including myself, who, for the wedding weekend, called this small space home.  At the evening dance after the wedding, the bride came up to me and thanked me for hosting what amounted to more than ten percent of all the wedding attendees.

It was at that dance, once the bride and groom had hours prior successfully completed the several month regimen of preparing for and executing their wedding, that I, on a phone call with my lover, now reduced to a voice on the phone, a picture on my wall, and a daydream at my job, first noticed the burning in my chest.  I noted this out loud.  She sounded concerned.

“I think it’s because I haven’t drunk since you left,” I offered, thumping my chest with a closed fist as an acidy wave rose up.  We said good night, the burning continued, and I decided to dance it off to a funk band that during their breaks were replaced by a computer.

The next day, my friends had left and in the middle of a long run, I again began to experience the burning.  When I returned home to the once again empty apartment, I tried pushing back the pain with water and Gatorade as I stretched.  On the phone with her soon after, she began reading the possible causes of acid reflux, which included increased consumption of alcohol, and increased consumption of food, both of which had occurred over the weekend.  I thought about it, about the fact that I had a condition whose miracle cures were heavily advertised in magazines and on televisions, a frowning father at the dinner table, a woman touching her chest, clearly distraught, and a large, a improbably large purple pill splashing onto the screen, or a total eclipse of the sun followed by the trade name of another tablet which promised relief.

After a quick shower, having spoken to her, and as a team having diagnosed what I suspected to be heartburn, I set off to the supermarket in search of antacids.  It was Sunday evening and the supermarket was mostly empty aisles fully stocked.  A few shoppers frantically searched for an item without which dinner could not occur and a few college-aged students scanned the prices on butter and eggs, working out which was the best deal.  I stood in the aisle which housed the pharmaceuticals, hemming and hawing about how many tablets I needed, especially given that it was my hope that this new condition would be temporal.  Economies of scale triumphed, however, and I got a thin cardboard box of thirty generic pills.

I paid and walked home.  In the kitchen, as evening began hinting that it was on its way, I popped the beige colored tablet out of its foil, swallowed it down, and marveled at the fact that I was aging, that I was alone, and that that was probably a good thing, because honestly, who wants to love a twenty something with heartburn.

Prologue to my memoir:

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

—

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.

Allahna on the Map – Part III

Allahna on the Map, Part III

Somehow, almost two years went by without seeing her and without any significant exchange, except for one morning when I was traveling in San Francisco in October of 2008, and right before a meeting, she called; I had to go; I returned her call; she wasn’t there.

2009 arrived, and so did the month of May.  It was a Thursday.  I missed a phone call from her; on Saturday, she was driving somewhere south, in order to fly to Iraq.  She would serve there for a year.  She was calling everyone she cared about to let them know the news, and to apologize for not being in better touch this past year, life’s been crazy, but things are good, she’s fine, it’s been an emotional month, and she’d love a phone call or a text if I could manage it between now and Saturday; she’d be driving all day.

So I sent her a message on Friday morning, asking when I should call her.  She called me back immediately.

I was at my office; I closed my door, and looked out the window at the small parking lot straddling the building.  I’m not certain I was the best listener this time around, as I was trying to monitor the volume of my voice, as it was a personal call at work, and so I cannot reproduce verbatim the conversation.  Which is unfortunate.

I can, nonetheless, attempt to reconstruct the content of the conversation successfully:

—

It has been a month or so of up and down.  One moment she is fine, another she is crying for no reason.  In yet another, she is cursing.

She clarifies the moment at which a picture was taken during an amorous tryst with her ex-fiancé.  My timing, it appears, was slightly off when I wrote about it at first.  She laughs about, indicates that it’s fine, and that she’s surprised that I remembered that detail, and is happy to be reminded of it.

She remembers one of the chapters I’d written about her, but wants me to send her both of them again.  I promise to comply as our conversation continues.

She’s going to serve as military police, as she understands it, which she thinks she does, in the town where Saddam was hung, or near there.  She will be working in a prison.  That makes me think about the photos revealed to the world in the spring of 2004.  She’s better than that, I tell myself.

She expresses her happiness with her new boyfriend who isn’t new anymore.  He just isn’t her ex-fiancé.  Which is good, that fuck up.  We don’t get into it.  But no, this new boy is pretty great, and pretty understanding.  She is excited for me to meet him.  I am, too, I suppose, but I don’t vocalize it.

The deployment will last about a year.  It is a long time, she affirms.  And when she gets back, she plans on jumping in a car and driving up to see me again.  Because it was a good time last time.  Almost two years ago?  No shit.  It has been that long.  She apologizes again for not keeping in better touch, especially the time I drove to Connecticut to see her after her fiancé converted himself into her ex-fiancé.  In general, too, though.  Life’s been crazy, fucken work was nuts, didn’t have any free time, and when she did, she was too tired, you know how it is.  There’s no need to worry, I say.  Life happens, I say.  I probably say some other things, too.

I’ve still got to write this book, she says.  I ask if she still wants me to continue writing about the stories she tells.  She says yes, that we have to work on that when she’s back and we see each other again.

So you’ll come up to Vermont, again, I ask.  She confirms.  You bet, Honey.  That’s good, I reply; it’s been too long, and I’d love to see you.  You going to be okay?  Yeah, I’m going to be okay.

The conversation winds down; she is bringing a webcam with her and a computer, so she hopes to keep in touch.  I can always e-mail her, too, she informs me.  She will try to respond when she has time.  Do I have to get back to my job, she asks.  I say that I should, but I’m glad that we connected.  I wish her well.  She wishes me well.  The line is cut, and the parking lot is still there, still half-empty.  I return to my desk, and set about checking my e-mail.

—

Later that day, she calls again.  She has reread the chapters, and is glad to have done so, and glad that until she writes her own book, that someone is getting all this shit down.  Thanks again, Sweetie, she says.  That’s it, really.  Just wanted to let you know I read them.

I am back at the window, looking outside again.  We say we love each other; she calls me Sweetie again as she says good-bye.  I turn around; there is work to be done.

Revisiting Carina – Part III

Revisiting Carina, Part III:

Failed France

At the outset of my year abroad in Paris, she was in Germany, somewhere in the north, where she had been since her year in Seattle had converted itself into a semester.

In anticipation of a potential visit, I wrote a poem for or about her, which, if only for its brevity, is included presently:

Wine Reflections

You’ve not yet arrived,

but I’ve set aside some space for you -

both here and here – please, take advantage,

as others claim you can.

And I’d hate to see this chance fall through

And I want to believe you when you say it.

My friends have asked to meet you,

which wouldn’t make it easier to go without;

spinning about on this heavenly body,

I’ve so many things to show you.

We could be so many things -

perhaps, above all, together.

—

It took a few weeks after first landing at Charles de Gaulle airport (the wheels touching down immediately giving me a sense of nausea, as I thought to myself, What the hell am I doing here?  I wanted to study in Spain), before I was first able to phone her.  Having procured a phone card, and having begun to catch my stride and make a few friends, it was time to begin the laborious process of keeping in touch.

At the supermarket down the street from my apartment, a chain called Champion, I bought a small, wire, graph-lined address book with a purple cover, and began diligently recording names and numbers (and sometimes arrondissements, or nationalities, as there was a French Felix and a German Felix) of acquaintances old and new.  Having my cell phone stolen twice, this was the thread by which my ability to connect with people outside the classrooms, lecture halls, and cafeterias of the Institute of Political Studies in downtown Paris, tenuously hung.

There was a certain pleasure and a certain sense of alignment when she was the first name that appeared in the book, by virtue of her alphabetical good fortune.  I had carried her phone number and e-mail in my wallet with me from the US; the wallet would fall into disuse as the dictates of French fashion mandated an influx of tighter jeans, precluding the transportation of that clunky Americanism.  And so the address book traveled with me in my backpack or a jacket pocket at all times.  By the side of her name I drew a smiley face.

We connected in September, about a month into my Parisian sojourn.  The sensory overload, my recurrent flirtations (which was fast becoming a steady relationship) with nicotine, and the hormonal imbalances, all of which were onset by the strange institution of study abroad, were finally somewhat calibrated into my fiber, allowing me to reconnect with friends back home and elsewhere.

The Franco-German divide was the closest we had been in over two years in terms of physical distance, time zone differentials, and transportation costs.  The new setting of France, and the molting afforded by this transplant, was cause enough for hope that we would collide at some point, or several points, in the next 11 months.

There are promises one makes to one’s self when everything is new again.  They are usually promises of change, of gross alterations to one’s constitution, habits one will adopt or change.  I had experienced this in small doses when I arrived at College, when I traveled to Barcelona.  Here was my third attempt at metamorphosis, and it was not as much an attempt at growth as an attempt at radical departure from life as it was.

The problem was that I didn’t really have much from which I wanted to run.  I had had a wonderful collegiate experience thus far, had forged some great friendships, and felt like I was on the brink of being intelligent.  So perhaps it was more I wanted to run into new things, rather than run from old ones. The old ones, it was my hope, would be there upon my return from this 11 month liminal state.

The urge to run and redefine was societal, literary, and, ultimately, ill-conceived.

While not on the order of Gatsby’s “Think of necessary inventions,” I did have an unspoken, unwritten, set of rules for myself when I thought about maximizing my time in Paris.  Some of them are alluded to above, but for the sake of being explicit, they were:

1)  Smoke more cigarettes (and not just Camel lights!)

2)  Drink wine.

3)  Remain single

4)  Which is not to say be celibate

5)  Quite the opposite, actually

6)  Be flirty to the point of borderline promiscuity.

7)  Stress less about grades.

By year’s end, 1, 2, 4, and 5 had come true.  3, 6 and 7 are a different story.

—

The idea was that Carina would take the train to Paris at some point in November, or that I would travel to Germany at some point in the spring.  The night after the conversation that sparked the fall plan, I wrote the above poem, translated it into Spanish, and smiled quietly to myself.

The poem sparked little commentary until October, when, during the course of another courtship that happened somewhat accidentally, but not unintentionally, a certain Isabel wanted to scan samples of my poetry.  Upon doing so, she stumbled upon the translated “Reflejos de vino,” and restated Alejandro conviction, but used the present tense:  “¡Tío, estás enamorado!”

I felt like shit for lying about it when quizzed:  “No, no, someone in the past.”

Isabel and I started dating, and the dynamics of the relationship were such that I began scheming of ways to pull of Carina’s visit.

As it turned out, my well-developed ability to lie did not, in this circumstance, need employment:  the closest I came to seeing Carina was on a Tuesday morning that fall, when her doppelganger, dressed as she might have been, locked eyes with me as I missed a line three train on my way to martial arts.

November arrived, but Carina did not; subsequent phone calls delayed her visit until December.  December turned into messages from Paris left on her phone, each time with the closing:  “My number is 00 33 06 20 23 58 57.  Hope to talk to you soon.  A kiss.”

And then a note in December of 2004, one full year after I was supposed to see her, wishing me a Merry Christmas, and returning my kiss.

Revisiting Carina, Part II

Revisiting Carina, Part II:

Seattle from My Bedroom

“Yes, I got it,” she said.
“Do you like it?”
“I love it, Jeff.  Thank you.”
“I’m glad.”
“It’s right by my bed; I look at it every night before I sleep.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”

With my very tenuous handwriting, I had a week before written on a padded envelope her host family’s address, stuffing inside a note along with one of the pictures taken of us by Montjuïc inside a twisted metal frame that I had purchased at the pharmacy where I worked during the summers.

I know I sent letters, but I don’t think I got any back; we did manage to talk on the phone, about once a month.  I would call, a member of her host family picked up (usually the father or daughter, seldom the mother, although I found that existed), there would be the sound of the receiver hitting the counter, and socked feet padding about, yelling to Carina, who was in her room.

“How is English going?”
“Eh, slowly.”
“You enjoying it?”
“It’s so-so.  It’s me and like 20 Asians.”
“Hmph.”

We talked of Christmas occasionally.

“It would be like a dream to be back in Avon!” (Volver a Avon – qué ilusión!)
“You’d stay with me?”
“Of course; your parents wouldn’t mind?”
“They love having company.”
“Yeah?”
“And we have a guest room and everything.”
“Wonderful.”
“Hey.”
“What?”
“I wrote a song for you.”
“Eh?”
“Yeah.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know.”
“When do I hear it?”
“When I see you in Connecticut.”

Regarding the prospective visit:  I sought permission from my parents, which was granted, complete with chiding from my father; I performed the song in front of an audience in my sophomore dorm, which gained tentative applause among most, and a few whoops from friends; I changed a few things.  It was October, I was a student, and I had hopes.

In November, though, there was an e-mail:  she was cutting her year short in Seattle, to complete just one semester before voyaging to Germany (“BASF – the chemical company!” she would chime years later), where she would take a job.

Then it was Christmas break, and after dropping a friend off at home, I drove home, towards midnight, the suburban roads deserted, with nothing to interrupt my wandering thoughts:  the non-event of seeing my friend had Carina been here, if she had been there, would we have kissed, if we did, where we’d have done so, and if, in this case, a kiss was just a kiss.

—

I had taken a creative writing workshop the semester in which I phoned Seattle in my small, thin-walled singled.  It was a humbling experience, which was well-timed, given the merit I attached to some of my high school works which, looking back, were, simply put, awful.  It was in this workshop that I discovered that narrative poetry was more rewarding to write than lyric, and that creative non-fiction was fertile ground that I had theretofore ignored.

Late that spring, upon a somewhat successful completion of that workshop, I sat down to write a piece that straddled fiction and non-fiction.  I was probably duly influenced by the conversations in I had on those Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, discussing the differences between “frolic” and “romp,” and debating the exact size of a “dollop” and whether such a thing would appear on a pancake, and from Soldados de Salamina, a book that I was reading for a Spanish class.  In it, the author, Javier Cercas, penned himself into the novel in such a way that sounded biographical (taking the time to include details on his feigned marital strife, etc.); in his interviews surrounding the book, however, he would later insist that the details were, in fact, fiction.

The geography of the book, which takes place largely in Catalonia (if memory serves), of course, served as a simpler means by which I might return to thinking about her; the general theme of the book, of an author (real or augmented) in search of something (in the case of Soldados, a soldier who spares the life of an enemy), the making the connection becomes simpler still.  Add to this the fact that the professor, a certain Llorenç, was Catalan, and had just that semester seen the photos that I had taken while abroad, and the reasons why the need to narrate yet again should be at this point sufficiently revealed.

It was an interesting and much needed departure from previous attempts at penning the entire experience of Carina.  The influences of my professors, mostly non-creative writing types, made themselves apparent in the narrative.  I shared it with a few friends for feedback, heard back from fewer, let it travel from hard drive to hard drive (there’s a paper copy somewhere), opened just recently to remind me of a few details I might have forgotten, and in so doing, challenging myself to distinguish what parts were real from the beginning, and what parts have since become true.

It was, in short, my sole means of communicating with her for the better part of the spring, and even this was quite one way; the phone calls, once she returned to Germany, were replaced by the process of writing that story, reading it, revising it, and, since at the time, I found them to be particularly clever, finding the perfect epigraph from Mr. Borges:  “…el terreno de mañana es demasiado inseguro para planes…y los futuros tienen una forma de caerse en la mitad. / …tomorrow’s terrain is too uncertain for plans, and the future has a way of falling apart in the middle.”

When a friend showed me that poem two minutes before an evening lecture began, I nodded, looked at him, muttered, “Wow,” and then opened my notebook, readying myself to write down interesting things about trouvères and troubadours, Lancelot, and the relatively tenuous biographies of Chrétien de Troyes.

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.

Allahna on the Map – Part II

Allahna on the Map – Part II

It wasn’t supposed to look like she came to visit because of a breakup, but the timing wasn’t up to us.  My girlfriend of two and a half years, the day prior, had ended the relationship by way of the telephone (things seemed tense when you came to visit, London’s so far, two years is so long; Jeff, I was just a sophomore when we started dating).  I didn’t cry, but I thought about it.  Instead, I called a friend within minutes, and we did laundry at my apartment while we drinking heavily.

Allahna showed up the next night; we met outside the McDonald’s in town the one landmark that in the late evening hours, when most guests tend to arrive at my apartment, isn’t easily missed, thereby sparing me disparaging phone calls (“What’s this shit about a rotary, Jeff?”).

We got out of our respective cars, hugged.

“That bitch,” she said.

“Now, now.”

“Good to see you, honey.”

“Good to see you, too.”

Having parked back at my apartment, a converted funeral home, we gathered up her things to bring in.

“I’ve been living out of my car.”

“I can see that.”

We tossed her bags into the bedroom, and, after showing her around the place, we got down to business.

“I brought my friend Jack,” she laughed, as she poured herself some bourbon and located the ice tray.

“Hope it’s okay that Rich and Mike are coming,” I said.  It was originally going to be just the two of us for the weekend, but the breakup’s gravitational pull apparently stretched to Boston, bringing two close college friends up to make sure that, along with the smoldering ruins of my relationship, that we also concurrently buried out sobrieties with near constancy throughout the weekend.

The intent, despite what might be suggested, was not sexual; it was to tackle the writing we had been wanting to do for months, in which I wrote the stories of her experiences.  The outlook, however, given the events in the twenty four hours prior to her arrival, was now quite different, much less serious, and a good deal more wobbly.

“It’s fine, hon,” bringing her glass over and toasting my martini.

By the time Rich and Mike made it to Vermont, we were already a few drinks in.

“How many have you had?” Mike asked.

“Eh,” I replied.

“Jeesh, good to see you,” he said, hugging me, complete with manly slap on the back, Rich following as soon as he slammed the door to his minivan shut.

As the two of them came in behind me, I introduced them to one another, and then began shuffling bags and furniture around, and went in search of a sleeping bag, which, statistically speaking, would probably be necessary.

I was pawing through my closet while Rich and Mike made drinks, and Allahna announced that she was going to change, and headed toward the bedroom.  Rich commented that that wasn’t where the bathroom was.

“It’s okay; Jeff’s seen it already,” she said, entering the room, as I pushed fallen items back into place after recovering the sleeping bag that had brought me there in the first place.

Then, briefly, I saw what I had already seen.

“Told you,” she said, to me, referencing her weight loss not affecting certain parts of her body.

“Hm.”

*

The next afternoon, while still in the process of rehydrating, Allahna sifted through some pictures, garnering opinions on which one or ones she should send to her de facto fiancé, Ryan.  We rifled through them, narrowing the selection down; I remember being a bit stunned with the sheer quantity of printed pictures that she had of herself.  One of the rejected photos she pinned to the refrigerator corkboard, where it still remains, her hips cocked out to the side and her tongue sticking out, escaping the smiling lips behind it.

I was struck most by the fact that the photos getting jostled all out of order and more than a few potentially getting fingerprint smudges on them did not cause her distress.

She took a moment to pause when we came across a picture of her with her face painted and glittered to resemble a butterfly.

“Remember the story I was telling you when we were having sex, and right in the fucking middle of it, Ryan jumped up and said ‘Baby, I need to take your picture like that?’  That’s the picture, right there,” she divulged, putting her finger on her naked shoulders in the picture for emphasis.

“Ah,” I said, remembering, and, looking at the picture, wanting briefly to fuck someone with face paint on.

*

Over dinner, to the three males at the table, Allahna recounted portions of her time deployed in Germany as a staff sergeant for the Army’s military police.  She taught us the proper way to hold an imaginary handgun (the ‘teacup’), the way that she, given her small hands, had to grip it, how to breathe when firing a handgun, and that you only draw your weapon if your intent is to kill.

“All that talk about ’shoot to maim’ is bullshit.  If you draw, it’s because your life is in danger, and you need to neutralize whatever’s threatening you immediately.”

I tried to think of an instance where I found myself in this situation; after a brief moment, I’d found one.

Inevitably:  “So, did you ever have to?”

“Once, at a bar; this drunk guy started threatening us, and pulled a knife.  I pulled a gun, but my buddies tackled him before I had to use it.”

We all nodded our heads.

Incidentally, the one time my life was legitimately threatened involved a knife as well; instead of having buddies save the day, however, I voluntarily lost my cell phone and cash, and watched as the mugger ran off and the cloud of my inebriation quickly dissipated into the gray of the Parisian night sky.

Our reactions to this story was similar to the one we had in the afternoon when discussing the various forms of martial arts that she, all five feet of her, knew:  we were in awe.

On the drive home, we were all quiet, weary from last night, resting before we had to rally again, to make me forget the fact that I was less that one week single, and less than twenty four hours sober.

As it was, however, once night two of our two night bender began to take off, Allahna turned in early (headache, maybe migraine), leaving the rest of use to raze our senses on our own, a task to which we too easily rose.

*

And then it was late morning, and after a breakfast which featured Mike flailing his arms in an impromptu game of charades (“What’s that animal, you know, that one that, um, does this”), and me identifying the amorphous creature as a platypus (“How the fuck did you get that?”), they were all quickly packed and ready to go.

So I stood at her car, imagining her life inside that four-wheeled home.  Her, then, to me:  “I do want to sit down at some point and do this writing thing.  I read what you sent me.”

“Okay.”

“Good; we’ll talk soon,” she said.

“Yup,” I agreed, knowing with some sadness that if past performance were any indicator, it wouldn’t be the commonly held notion of soon.

And then she was gone, driving back to Connecticut, speeding into another breakup, and, for the next few months, waning unintentionally out of my life, forgetting her flip flops as she headed south.