The One Who Got Away, Part Three

“Sophie,” I said. “It’s Steve Axelrod.”

“I knew you’d call back.”

“You also knew I’d be awake at one in the morning.”

“You always said – people don’t change.”

“I was a cocky little punk.”

“And now you’re wise old man.”

“Absolutely. A sage.”

“Okay. So, let’s hear it, Ancient One. Do people change?”

“Never. Not one little bit.”

She laughed. “How’d you get so wise, then?”

“Hey, a little deference to the sage! No follow-up questions.”

“No, tell me.”

“I don’t know – I guess … I mean, you learn things. Hopefully. I’ve been sued and I’ve been fired. I’ve been married and divorced. I know how to burp a baby and change a diaper. I can apologize for the English language to a seven year-old with the best of them. Ever see a little kid try to sound out the word 'laughter'? They're pissed off. They want to know what that 'gh' is doing there."

"What do you tell them?"

"That ‘gh’ is like a house guest that everyone tries to ignore, like their uncle Wally. That the English language makes no sense at all and breaks its own rules constantly, but it's lots of fun. I said that to my daughter. She lit up and said 'Just like you, Daddy!"

"She sounds great."

"She's scary. She could out-argue me at two. I told her no more candy one day — she'd had enough sugar. She turned on me and said ‘Mary Poppins says a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down.^’ What was I supposed to say to that?"

"Well, you could have made her take some medicine with her candy, or told her she was using a logical fallacy — I think it’s called ‘argument from author­ity’. But you probably just hugged her and gave her another piece of candy and said ‘But that's absolutely the last one.’”

It was my turn to laugh. That was exactly what had happened. "You're right. That's my weakness as a parent. I reward cleverness. But I adore clever children."

There was a moment or two of companionable silence. I

I was shocked at how easy this was; and how much fun. "Tell me about you," I said. "Have you changed? Do you look different? Have you gone gay? Converted to Buddhism or Scientology?"

"No new religions. These days I think of myself as a sort of lapsed agnostic. I really liked having no opinion on the subject, but the Church just seems more idiotic to me all the time. My parents are Catholics. Did I ever tell you that? Good Catholics. That's the best argument against religion I've ever heard."

"I don't know. I've often wished I could believe in it. Eternal life, absolute right and wrong, all my sins forgiven on a weekly basis."

"But that's the silliest part of it. I could never believe in a God who forgave everyone so easily.^”

"Why shouldn't he, though? None of our sins affect him per­sonally. He has no stake in it. I lie and steal, what does he care? He knows the truth. It isn't his money.^”

"But take the Lord's name in vain and you're in big trouble."

"Even that doesn't bother him, I bet. You can see how he'd be hard to shock. The guy's omniscient. He's seen it all. Besides, it's all his fault, anyway. He made us this way. If he doesn't like us he should recall us like defective cars."

"It sounds even more nonsensical than usual when you put it that way. "

"Yeah — I get an image of Celestial production line with some middle aged unionized demi-God screwing the arms in and waiting for his coffee break."

She laughed. It was a beautiful sound: surprised, breathless, full-throated, light-hearted. It seemed to forgive the world in a way that God was never quite able to do.

"We got off the subject," I said when her laughter had sighed to silence. "How you look these days?"

"Am I fat? Is my hair green? Have I pierced my belly button?"

"Yeah, give me the dirt."

"There really isn't any. Nothing pierced. No tattoos. My hair is still brown. I'm thinner than I was. I run five miles a day. But I don't do it for exercise. It's like -- meditation. When I pound my body hard enough my mind finally shuts up. Around the third mile I start to get a little peace and quiet.”

"Are you still painting?"

"I have a gallery in SoHo that shows my work, but I haven't been doing much lately. I teach at Smith — art history and some studio courses. Technical stuff. We're doing dry point etching this semester. "

I was listening to her voice more than her words: the music, not the lyrics.

"It's really you," I said.

"I was just thinking the same thing."

"Do you remember the last time we saw each other?"

"Of course I do. I just dug out that poem."

"I can’t believe you kept it."

"Of course I kept it. It^’s beautiful."

"But not beautiful enough. I thought you'd be on my doorstep in a week."

I could feel her indulgent smile. "You expect too much from your poems."

"They're meant to be spells, actually."

"But I was in love with someone else a the time – remember?."

"How could I forget — 'madly in love^’. I felt like I was dying when you said that. Like you were a doctor giving me the biopsy report."

"But you lived."

I shrugged. "That's true."

"It's worth remembering, Steve. You did fine. You got married.”

"And divorced."

There was a pause. Things were shifting between us; high clouds on the move.

"How about you?,^” I asked softly.

"Tom and I lasted five years. We're still pretty good friends. He lives in Amherst now. There've been a lot of other people. But I never got married. No kids."

I let the silence gather between us; the fact of her on the other end of the line, waiting for me to speak.

"This is amazing,” I said, finally. “It^’s like no time has passed."

"But it has. Twenty years is a long time."

"I used to think so. Now I wonder."

There was a long pause, this new silence ominous somehow, like a dropped call. Was she using a cell? For some reason I thought of her as more old-fashioned than that.

Finally she spoke "I^’m living with someone, Steven."

“What?”

"I'd been alone for more than three years. I just met him a few months ago. It's all been very sudden."

I took a breath and pushed it out slowly, letting it rumble over my heartbeat, like driving over a cattle-crossing.

“I don’t get it. What’s going on? Why did you call me?”

“I’m – I don’t know. I’m confused. I’m sorry, I just -- ”

“Are you in love with him?”

“I don’t know. Yes. I guess I am.”

“But not madly in love.”

“He wants to get married.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know what I want. He wants to have children. Right away. I’m thirty nine years old. I better start soon if I’m ever going to.”

I said nothing. I was thinking back to the time before she had met this man. I had been alone, also — I could have called her then, in the early autumn, if I had known, if I had thought of it, if I hadn’t so completely abandoned thought of her. The timing grated on me. But I thought of something my mother said so often: "You do what you have to do, when you can." She had said it most recently when I was berating myself for staying so long in a dead marriage. "You weren't ready to leave," she had told me, simply. And four months ago I hadn't been ready for a conversation like this — maybe I still wasn't ready.

Maybe I never would be.

If she was getting married it made no difference anyway.

“Bear with me,” I said. “I’m trying to figure this out. You’re feeling old. Forty is around the corner and it suddenly occurred to you that you’re actually going to die some day. You’ve been thinking about the past, Your shrink told you to get ‘closure’ – or whatever term they’re using now. So this is just a check-the-box moment, taking the old mid-life inventory.”

“No! That’s not it.”

“So, what then? Revenge? I dumped you all those years ago, it still stings and -- ”

“No, no -- ”

“Then what?”

Silence. I could feel her pulling herself together.

“I still love you.”

“What about -- ?”

“Eric. His name is Eric.”

“What about him?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t seem real tonight.”

He couldn’t quite stop; not yet.

“Is he living with you?”

“He’s moving out.”

“Does he know about that?”

A pause. “Not yet. But he will.”

“You’re kicking him out?”

“I – yeah. I guess so. Yes.”

“Because of this call?:

“Because of a lot of things, Steve. I probably shouldn’t have let him stay here in the first place. Everything happened too fast. I didn’t really know him. He has a cold constantly and he leaves trails of tissues all over the house. He doesn’t read. We had a January thaw a few weeks ago, and I said something about the little balloon man whistling far and wee and he just stared at me. He’s never even heard of e.e. cummings How am I supposed to live with someone who’s never heard of e.e. cummings? And there’s more. He bought me a vacuum cleaner for my birthday. He hates Brazilian music. And he’s a hunter. He hunts deer with a bow and arrow, ‘nails them right through the thorax’, that’s what he told me. And he has a temper.”

“He must be great looking.”

“Tall, too.”

“Sophie -- ”

“I know what you’re thinking. You don’t have to say it.”

“What?”

“I haven’t changed either. I have, though. I know when I’m making mistakes now. And I fix them. That’s why I’m ending this. That’s why I called. And you know it. That’s why we’re still talking.”

“All right. You’re right. It’s true.”

The silence breathed between us again, some frantic grip seemed to release us, as if the wind had dropped off, no longer flailing curtains and scattering papers through the open windows, thrashing the trees outside; leaving the world to the soft tug of gravity. Everything dangled in the vertical calm, unruffled, pressed toward the center.

A motorcycle roared past on Helen’s Drive, heading for Bartlett Road. The dog next door started barking wildly at the noise. Two more dogs joined in the chorus, protecting their houses, doing their jobs

I spoke into the faint rush of static.

“Let me tell you what I decided when I turned forty. I made a plan.”

“What was it?"

"The basic idea is … to figure out which things and people in my life are worth the trouble -- and then take it."

"I like that."

"Good. Because somehow you just sneaked onto the top of the list.”

Had I said too much? Fuck it. Keeping my feelings to myself had killed my marriage. I didn't mind making mistakes but I wanted to make only new mistakes from now on.

I was tired of the old ones.

“I’m not as much trouble as I used to be,” she said.

"I want to see you."

"Steven —"

"Come here — just for the day. I'll pay your travel expenses. Drive down to Hyannis and get on the boat. You could take a weekend -- take next weekend. Get an early start on Saturday. You could be here by noon and leave on Sunday night. We could have two days together. What's the worst that can happen?"

“Don’t ask!. There are so many ways it could go wrong. I’m smitten and you feel nothing. You’re smitten and I feel nothing. Or we both feel nothing or I wind up loving you but not enough or vice versa. What if we’re both just … making this up? What if we have nothing to say to each other?”

I had to smile. “I don’t think that will be a problem.’

Another silence slipped by. She was deciding.

“I’ll come,” she said. “I have to check my class schedule. It might have to be two weeks. But I’ll be there. I’ll call and tell you as soon as I figure everything out. I’ll come for the weekend.”

I felt suddenly winded, as if I’d just run upstairs. “Great,” I managed.

“We’re really doing this. I get a chill just saying it. I hope that’s a good thing.”

“It’s a good thing. It may be the best thing.”

“I have to go. It was good to hear your voice, Steven. And it’s nice to say your name. I’ll do it again. Steven.”

“Sophie.”

“I like the sound of that. Bye, Steven. I’ll call you.”

And she hung up.

I hung up myself and stared down at the phone for a moment. My coffee was cold, but that was the last thing I needed right now. There was a jitter in my hands as I washed the mug. What I needed was a sedative.

I drove to my job site the long way, cruising out to ‘Sconset and back on the Milestone road. I knew I was going to be late and I didn’t care. My crew knew what they were doing. I had spring fever, senior syndrome, all the anarchistic maladies of late adolescence. I was happy in a way I hadn’t been for years. Part of me remained suspicious. I knew very little about Sophie now, after all. Perhaps I had never really known her.

But she was coming to Nantucket. I knew that much. She was coming to see me for no other reason than the thrill in her blood from a long-distance phone call. That one fact about her revealed so much. Her spirit was still intact; she still had the old buccaneering indifference to ordinary rules and expectations.. It answered something wild in me, it was a jolt from a long-lost part of my own past, when I had flung myself forward by just this sort of impulse, running on feeling and instinct, knowing my choices were right just because they felt that way.

Just hearing her voice after all this time … I suddenly had an idea for a poem. And I scribbled it down on the back of an envelope:

The phone rings four times,

Then I hear you

I gulp your voice

Across the telephone line --

You are mine for a moment

Cool and liquid

Against the hollow dry,

Speaking an ordinary sentence

From a distant town.

On a parched summer day

On an empty stomach

You can feel that first swallow of water

All the way

Down.

Not a great poem, but a poem, the first one since that initial burst of inspiration when the kids were born.

I wrote in my journal that night:

Sometimes falling in love is a sort of awe-struck passive thing, like watching a giant summer rainstorm boiling up, barometric pressure dropping, sky turning to tin, sunlight pale and glassy, thunderheads piling, ozone sizzling in the air, foretaste of the downpour riding the exhaling breeze, running along your bare arms, better than the real thing. It all swirls around you and there’s nothing you can do but pay attention. If you don’t get inside you’re going to be drenched, but you want to be drenched, you crave it. And if you allow yourself to get soaked, you can own the sidewalks of a big city for a while, as all the rich yuppies cower in the doorways and under the awnings, glancing at their watches, waiting for normal, running late. With your clothes dripping and your shoes squishing, you laugh at them and it’s fair, you should be laughing at them, because for that moment at least, you’re alive and they’re not. That’s how I feel tonight – sopping wet, blissful, superior. Like I was nineteen again. But smarter.”

I went to bed but I couldn’t sleep.

Something big was coming, and it was bringing the poetry with it.

The One Who Got Away, Part Two

I had been thinking about Sophie Zambarabo all day, as I painted sash in the empty skeleton of a new house, the intermittent roar of the kerosene heater drowning out NPR, like a flare of static or an inspiration.

There was one afternoon in particular, that early autumn walk across the abandoned field, those foreshortened moments in the barn.The incident didn’t mark the beginning or the end of my affair with Sophie, but lifted from the rush of events it seemed to summarize everything that had happened between us. It was the one memory I had never fully shaken, the one I remembered when I woke up suddenly enough to remember my dreams. The field had become a standard landscape there, ten times its actual size, the barn a cathedral. In fact the field was small and stubbly and the barn was derelict, with broken windows and tilted graying plank walls, rusted latches and unused stalls. But the dreams insisted on a grander scale.

It came back to me now, standing in my empty apartment, resonant with the absence of children: an isolated afternoon, like a single roman candle blooming in the night air above Jetties beach, during the pokey one-at-a-time section of the fireworks display the DPW mounted every Fourth of July. It was as if they wanted you to study each trailing fall of sparks, back-lighting its own smoke against the stars. Of course, no one on the beach cared. They were just getting drunk, trying to amuse their cranky children and waiting for the finale.

I preferred not to think about the finale of my time with Sophie. But this one flare had stayed with me.

It was late September, late in the last century. Summer was still lingering in the Pioneer Valley. I was walking the periphery of the Hampshire College campus, past the apple orchards into the fields beyond. The air was damp and breathless under the enamel blue sky. The day was hot and getting hotter.

I heard running footsteps, the slap of sandals against asphalt behind me. Before I could turn I was grabbed from behind.

Her voice in my ear: "Got you."

This was what I had been dreading; but I gave myself up to it. I tried to be analytical. She wasn't actually beautiful. With her heavy eye brows and thick lips she actually had a sort of simian appearance. But it was a sensual face, with deep blue eyes, those lips (they were made for kiss­ing) and a wild mane of brown hair. She was five eight or nine and her movements had an angular grace that made me stupid with desire. Looking at her I felt my IQ evaporating . It was like de-evolution. In ten seconds I’d gone past the Neanderthal stage to the Cro-Magnon: I’d already lost language, and now I was rapidly forgetting ev­erything I’d ever known about tools. Soon I’d be unable to make a fire. In fact, pretty soon I wouldn’t be able to do anything but huddle in my cave and pick lice out of my chest hair.

But it was an illusion. I had left the paralyzed part of me behind and talked to her all night long, just two nights before. And out-of-body-experience? Just the opposite. I had never in my life felt so rooted in my own flesh, a stalk of bone and muscle, irrigated by the blood..

I turned in her arms and she kissed my cheek

"Hello," I said.

She rested her head against mine. "What happened to you? You disappeared,"

The sunlight was dense and warm, but I was shivering. Sophie was tall, so much taller than Lisa; almost as tall as I was. I had slouched to hide my height for years. But I was standing up straight now. Actually I felt even taller than I really was, with Sophie beside me. We would tower over everyone. "The last of a race of giants." Where had I heard that phrase? It didn't matter, it was an absurd conceit. My thoughts were jumbled. I focused on the physical facts as we started walking together: my arm around her waist, her dress — it was flimsy cotton, flower-patterned, buttoned down the front — the red highlights in her hair, the way out foot­steps matched. The humid sunshine felt as solid as amber; it held everything in suspension — the season, the school year, the present, the future, the two of us. Lisa was gone – a family crisis had pulled her back to Canada.. I was single again, a free independent citizen, twenty-one years old, in full control of my faculties. I could do whatever I wanted. That’s what I told myself.

I didn't have a watch and I was glad. I didn't want to know what time it was. I could scarcely remember what day it was.

"Tell me," Sophie persisted. "I was worried."

I didn't want to talk about Lisa; but Sophie knew that. "Tell me about the girl you wrote those poems for. She's the reason you ran away, isn't she? What's her name?"

Most of all, I didn't want to say her name. So I did: "Lisa."

"Did you write a lot of poems about Lisa?"

I nodded.

"Tell me another one."

"Most of them aren't very good. . Besides ... "

"It makes you uncomfortable. But you were going to tell me about her, weren't you?"

"Sure. The next time I saw you."

We walked on in silence, We were crossing a wide, brambly field, toward the barn at the far side.

"Ow!"

Sophie stopped. She stood on one leg to pull a little spike out of her foot. "There are thorns everywhere," she said, wincing. "Damn it. I really wanted to see that barn. I love old barns. I love the way they smell." We stood indecisively for a moment with the sun heavy on our heads and our shoulders. A car droned by somewhere; it might have been an airplane. Sophie didn't want to go back but she didn't know how to go forward. Everything was a metaphor.

Then I was inspired. I took two steps and scooped Sophie off her feet. She let out a small shriek of surprise that turned into a laugh as I settled her in the traditional over-the-threshold position. She felt impossibly light, as if her bones were hollow, as if gravity had been cancelled. Her skirt had ridden up, her thighs were bare, her legs were beautiful.

I’ll admit it: this was the most erotic moment of my life, more sexually charged than sex itself had ever been. The noon heat seemed to reverberate up from the ground through the soles of my shoes in the huge stillness of the day. There was no one in sight anywhere. Sophie's wrists were resting on my shoulders, her fingers playing with my hair. My nerves were screaming, bright and loud as a schoolyard at recess, dark and violent as a blacked-out city. Contradictions were everywhere. The moment was mundane and mythological: Sophie was herself but she was also Circe calling me, Medusa, turning me to stone. That last image was particularly appropriate -- I was tangled agonizingly in my underwear. Sophie guessed: she must have seen me grimacing, felt me walking stiffly. She reached behind her ribs, twisting a little in my arms, and slipped her hand under my belt, under the elastic band of my briefs. I almost fainted when she touched me. I staggered a few steps.

"Don't fall now,^” she smiled. "It could be disastrous."

She pulled me free of the fabric, eased her hand out of my pants, just in time.

"Is that better?"

"Much," I gasped.

"Take me to the barn," she commanded airily, enjoying the game of making me her slave. I obeyed and she rested her head on my shoulders as we crossed the last fifty yards.

We walked through an empty world. A breeze rustled distant leaves through the heat haze. The only other sounds were our breathing and the delicate crackle of brambles underfoot.

The moment was perfect and I realized with a curious jolt that I was happy and that I'd never been happy before. This feeling put everything into perspective, changed everything, diminished every­thing. There was nothing mild or sentimental about it. Just the opposite: it was cruel and ruthless. It was as harsh as grief. It was a high note I couldn't sustain. I was going to falter or fall. The rest of my life was swaying far below me, tiny and mediocre. People griped that love became affection, that happiness turned into contentment, that the feelings didn't last. But how could they? No one could live at this pitch for very long. You^’d overdose on your own adrenaline.

I reached the barn and kicked the door open. Inside the heat was combustible. Shafts of sunlight through the boards cut the darkness. There was a fluttering of wings from the hay loft above us as I set Sophie down. It was just some birds, nesting under the eaves, but it startled us both. We jumped — city kids, spooked by any evidence of the natural world.

We laughed and she put her arms around my neck. "Kiss me," she said.

I felt the full weight of our solitude. It was a slick surface; I was skidding. "I can't," I whispered. "I will fall in love with you if I do that."

"Good."

"But I — "

It didn't matter, she was kissing me already, those thick lips finally opened wide, kissing my whole body through my mouth.

I was on my back in the hay. Sophie was straddling me in a shaft of dusty light, unbuttoning her dress, slipping one hard little plastic circle at a time through its cotton slit. I could see her collar bones and the growing line of shadow. She wasn't wearing a bra. She shrugged the shift off her shoulders and the strange secret light caught the muscles of her stomach and the shadow of her belly button, the fullness of her naked breasts, drooping just a little as she leaned down to take off my shirt. I reached up and took their weight, letting them fill my hands, nipples stiff against my palms. She lowered herself on to me and we were kissing again in the sweet electric thrill of flesh on flesh.After a while she pulled her mouth from mine and kissed down my neck and chest and stomach. She loosened my belt, unzipped my pants and I lifted myself a little as she yanked them down.

At that moment, we heard the voices outside.

"Are you sure this -- ”

"Hey, don't worry -- come on -- ”

"But I mean -- aren^’t we trespassing?"

"Yeah. We^’re also cutting class and fornicating. Why split hairs?"

"Billy -- ”

Sophie lunged up my body and held me tight. "What do we do?"

She was so aghast I started laughing. She clamped a hand over my mouth, and then she started laughing, too.

"Hide," I grunted through her fingers. I pushed her aside, pulled up my pants and wormed my way into one of the livestock stalls on my stomach. Sophie slithered after me just as the barn doors opened. We waited, breathing shallowly. It was like eavesdropping on ourselves: the murmur of hay and clothes, the panting and the moans.

When the intensity of the noise guaranteed the other couple's complete obliviousness, we scrambled to our feet and dodged outside. We were awkward with each other, in the bright sunlight; maybe a little embarrassed. We walked the long way back to school, keeping to the paved roads and avoiding the brambles. We didn’t say much. The mood was broken and I didn’t want to kick at the pieces. What had passed between us in the barn seemed remote and historical; at the same time it was still happening. I could still taste her kiss. With the slightest gesture I could be kissing her again and I wanted that and she knew it.

But I was in love with someone else. That had to mean something. If that didn't mean anything, then this didn't either. Nothing meant anything if passion was so flimsy and expendable, if you could just discard it, trade it in, walk away, find yourself kissing someone else so easily.

Twenty years later the day was even more potent in my memory. But if it was Heaven, it was Heaven as Satan might recall it, long-banished for the sin of pride. I had certainly felt noble to myself at the time, stronger than my own desire; stronger and better. I had used the accident of that other couple as a rescue, a brace to my resolve. Looking back on it, my judgment was unforgiving. I had abdicated, I had walked away from the most extraordinary moment of my life: I lacked the nerve and the courage to take what Sophie offered. Instead, I tried to do the right thing and duly felt all the proper anguishes. The poetry I wrote in those days was tinged with bombastic self-seriousness. I recalled a key line from one of the most ambitious ones: It was called Crimes of Passion, and it brought those days back vividly: “No one can explain/how while we watch this black destiny/our silly lives destroy/it should feel like April/and we should feel such joy.”

At least I got the silly part right.

Black destiny? Destroying our lives? Come on.. That was as false as placing the word 'destroy' at the end of the line, for the sake of scansion and a rhyme. Some foolish choices had spoiled a love affair --that was all. At this moment in Baghdad and Mogadishu, real lives were actually being destroyed. My own difficulties looked absurdly frivolous by comparison. And yet, there was something bogus in that comparison, too. Though my troubles were not political ones, though they weren't issues of life and death, they were still important. If they weren't, what was the point of politics, anyway? Generations of soldiers had considered the pursuit of happiness worth dying for, trivial as it might seem on Memorial Day.

There had been something left between us when I took Sophie out to dinner on that remote winter night, when we walked together through the empty streets in the snow. We had both felt an ember glowing. Only circumstances had kept us from building a fire together. And the ember was still alive, however improbably after all this time, however studiously I had ignored it. She obviously felt the same way.

Maybe she was right: not all mistakes were final, after all.

I picked up the phone and dialed her number.

It rang three times, then again; then I heard her voice, vibrant and unmistakable, a little of out breath.

“Hello?”

Scenes From a Divorce #14: The One Who Got Away

So I had a Sunday alone after a long week and it was raining hard, and found myself sorting through the first half of my life to see if there was anything worth keeping. In fact there wasn’t much; the only absolute was my parents and my children. Beyond them -- a few friends, a few poems, some good memories.

And Sophie Zambarano.

I hadn’t seen her in fifteen years and the last time was hopeless.

We had eaten dinner in some little Greenwich Village restaurant with a raging blizzard closing down the city outside. She’d told me about her work, she was about to have a first gallery show at some TriBeca hole in the wall. She’d told me about her family, her sister had disappeared again; and she told me about her passionate love affair with another man. I could tell when she talked about this other man that I had no chance -- that my chance had come and gone. Still, I had taken her hand and leaned across the table to kiss her. Desire had surged briefly, uselessly, between us, and she said “We’re not going to make love tonight,” and we hadn’t. We walked back to her apartment building with cones of snow swirling in the streetlights, the sidewalks soft and slippery underfoot, and I kissed her once more and she said ”I’m sorry” instead of “Goodnight.”

A few weeks later, on an impulse, I had written her a poem for Valentine’s Day and sent it with a bunch of irises. It went like this:

Here are flowers

To celebrate Valentine’s Day.

Neither of us is quite sure why

But I think it’s only to demonstrate

That the best things only hibernate --

They never die.

But I am here and you are there

I cannot reconvene us;

So instead I send flowers

And try to sing

Of the wild bear who sleeps between us

Waiting for the Spring.

I never got any response and I hadn’t really expected one. Sending a poem like that to a woman who had just told me she was “Madly in love” with someone else was in questionable taste anyway.

So I gave up on her.

I thought about Sophie now the way I thought about the dead. My affection had become historical over the years, caught in time like an old photograph. I actually had photographs of her, but I never looked at them. That Sophie was in all likelihood living an eventful and passionate life parallel to mine reading the same newspapers I did, drinking her morning coffee very possibly at the exact same moment I was drinking mine, sleeping when I slept, (Though she never slept much), occasionally dreaming of me as I dreamed of her, I had always refused to contemplate. That was some specific sub-category of self-abuse: wanton misuse of the imagination, like using a beautiful ceramic knife to open a cardboard box.

Better to grieve and recover, eulogize and move on. I had done that, long ago. Even at my weakest moments, in darkest days of my marriage, I had mastered the urge to find her. But now I couldn’t think of a single reason to maintain that resolve. It had been three days since I found the poem, and I hadn’t thought about much else. Maybe I was living in my head, but I liked it there. And all I had to do to make real was pick up the telephone.

I was pacing my living room. I couldn’t sit still. Finally I grabbed my phone and called Northampton information.

413-455-0880.

It was that easy. I pressed to make the connection and the phone started to ring. My mind was a blank. Then I heard her voice.

“Hi, this is Sophie. I’m not home right now. Please leave me a message. I like to see that little red light blinking when I come home.”

I hung up. I didn’t want to leave a message, give myself away, lose the element of surprise. It didn’t work though. She had the number on her caller ID; she called the next day and she hung up also. We were circling each other now, preparing ourselves. She called the next night, late. This time she left a message:

“Steve, this is Sophie … I hope it’s not too late to call. It was so good to hear your voice on the machine yesterday. I can’t stop thinking about you now. I feel like all I’ve done all my life is make one stupid mistake after another and the way I treated you was one of the biggest ones. Sometimes I think tragedy is just … the finality of our mistakes. Was this one final? I hope not. I’m living just outside of Northampton. You’re in the 508 area -- not even that far away. We could see each other. But first call me back. I need to hear your voice.”

I picked up the message in the morning. I couldn’t do anything about it – I had to get the kids to school. But her voice had gone through me like a backhoe through a hedge. Whatever the thing was between us, it wasn’t starting again. It had never ended.

She had left the next move up to me.

And I knew I was going to take it.

Scenes from a Divorce #13: Hope and Ultimatums

This is what I began to realize after a year of post-marital dating: ultimatums are women’s favorite form of gambling.

And the great secret pleasure of my newly divorced state was that I could finally call their bluff. Of course, it’s easy to be tough when the stakes are low, but that was another part of the intoxication: I actually didn’t care. The threats and and demands that had paralyzed me for years when I heard them from my wife had become mere annoyances, spoken by a these new girlfriends. I had written in my diary, “Lisa threatened me with divorce today. That’s like threatening Oprah Winfrey with a chocolate cheesecake”, but it was empty bravado. Divorce had seemed like an unimaginable abyss. Well, the worst had happened, I'd fallen in and I was fine. Broke, lonely, a little disoriented, but alive in the world, breathing free air, actually inhabiting my own life, for the first time in years.

The women were part of it, but a small part, and that seemed to bother them. “There’s no room for me in your life,” of them said. I said. “Find room or get out.” It sounds harsh and it was but the burn she felt was the caustic truth. I was raising two kids, writing a novel, working sixty hour weeks. All of those things were more important than she was. She said: “I need to come first.” I said, “You’re lucky to come fourth.” She said, “Then I’m leaving,” and that was supposed to stop the conversation; that was my cue to give in. I was supposed to say “I’m sorry, I’ll re-order my life for you, please stay.” What I actually said was a more polite version of “Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.” And it felt great. I have to admit that. I had been so powerless for so long, this cheap ascendancy felt like the real thing. It was invigorating, like waking up from a long sleep, or stepping outside into the mild spring air after a long illness.

Another woman insisted I invite her to my house for Thanksgiving. I still did all holidays with Lisa and the kids. I had known this woman for less than a month. I said no. She said, “If that’s all I mean to you, maybe we shouldn’t be seeing each other.” I agreed and she was gone. This was so easy it was scary. Then there was the wealthy older woman who insisted I take fistfuls of cash to pay in the fancy restaurants where she wanted to eat. She couldn’t stand the thought of being seen paying for a man. She offered to subsidize my share of a fancy vacation; I had to explain that I couldn’t afford to miss the work. Old money people pretend they’re poor; new money people like this woman need to pretend you’re rich. But I wasn’t. So that ended. Another woman wanted total honesty. So I told her I was still in love with my ex-wife. Bye bye. Of course I was on the other side of that one often enough: I spent many whole evenings listening to various women cataloguing the sins of their former husbands, and flinching as I waited for the inevitable “You’re just like Larry” Or Ted, or Charles. One of them didn’t like my kids. She could tolerate them only in “small, highly structured doses.” I explained, they don’t come that way. They came in large chaotic overdoses, and that’s the way I liked it. “You have to decide. It’s me or them.” Seriously. Her or my kids.

It was almost funny.

So she was gone and I had my nights to myself again. But a funny thing had started to happen. Each time another woman vacated my life, I felt a little less powerful and less smug than the last time. The novelty of self-containment was wearing off. I had scratched the sexual itch, proved I was still a presentable middle-aged male person, able to go out in mixed company without embarrassing myself, proved I was still attractive to the somewhat diminished percentage of women (down to 28% or so from an all-time high in my surfing twenties of 43%). But I was sick of all the demanding, intolerant personalities, and I was sick of my lingering feelings for Lisa. The tarnished remnants of love I felt for her, mostly lust, I suppose, fanned by jealousy, tamped down by dread and regret, just weren’t nearly enough. They were an ersatz substitute – carob instead of chocolate, decaf coffee – that just sharpened my hunger for the real thing.

It was a kind of post marital purgatory. I realized what I really wanted was to fall in love again. I wanted passion. I wanted to have something to lose, even I wound up losing it all over again. But as the months wore on it seemed ever more unlikely that I would ever again be overwhelmed by real emotion. Maybe that was for young people only. Maybe it was a mirage anyway; many cultures don’t even acknowledge the concept of love – they don’t even have a word for it. My kids certainly preferred it when I was alone. Romance was time consuming and expensive; it was a dangerous distraction.

But I wanted it, anyway. I had told someone once at a drunken party that all I really cared about in life was love, and the art that described it. At that moment I had neither. The book was stalled and I hadn’t written a poem in months. Maybe that was why I started rummaging through my old loose-leaf notebooks, on a rainy April evening, looking for a little inspiration. It was late, I was on my second scotch, bored and drowsy, when I found the poem.

I read it over, set the drink aside, read it again, and found myself pacing the narrow living room, wide awake at midnight.

Sophie Zambarano: I had managed to forget about her, or at least set the thought of her aside – I was married, she was long vanished into a separate life, I hadn’t heard from her in more than a decade. But something was stirring and nothing had changed. Was she still living in Northampton? It wouldn’t be hard to find out. She was generally the only Zambarano in the directory. I picked up the phone, determined to call information for the number, but I set it down again. I was drunk. I was exhausted. I’d sleep on it, see how the idea felt in the morning, with a hang-over. I’d go slow, control the impulse -- show some prudence for once. But I fell asleep thinking about her.

And I knew I was going to make the call.

Scenes From a Divorce #12: Joining The Club

Sitting in a warm silent apartment on a Friday evening, snow ticking against the windows, the re-set button pushed, the slate wiped clean, everything possible, nothing happening, no expectations, no plans, no appointments, no obligations, no kids for the night, no women to obsess over, nothing to do and no one to do it with, alone but not lonely, just finished and just about to start.

Then a memory slips in, like the faint draft of cold air through the antique window:

Folding laundry in another winter, with a sick child sniffling at my feet. I came upon a relic, an inscrutable icon of past intimacy, changed and diminished, absorbed into the lives of my children ... but still powerful: a pink, spaghetti-strap t-shirt. It was a light, sexy summer garment, too flimsy to wear with a bra. It reminded me of good times and bad – Lisa was wearing it that day when we all went to the beach with Desmond, and they thought I had traipsed back to the house with the kids. We paused to tie a shoe or something and when I looked back they were acting like lovers a hundred yards away, his hands slipped under the light cotton to refresh their memory of warm flesh and firm nipple. And there I was, years later, so many fires flickering or extinguished, even the cheap flare of violated intimacy ( we made love ,more often in the days after Desmond left than in the entire year before), holding out that same pink t-shirt, staring at it. Lisa and my daughter had made it into an art project, drawing cats on it with a magic marker, turned it into a child’s play suit.

So, how does a lapsed priest feel, when he sees his children pilfering some forgotten stash of communion wafers for a after school snack? Their very innocence defiles him, shows him the distance he’s fallen, the uncertainty of his path, the ambiguity of his destination.

And I wrote in my journal that night:

These pages are like a letter written to some imaginary future self, standing free and happy in the sunlight, with a gently pitying curiosity about the way this extinct version of himself lived and felt in the self-imposed darkness. But I cannot grasp the reality of that person. How I might get from here to there I have no idea. But I know that if I ever crossed over I would want most of all to be alone. I would eat solitude and drink solitude, and rub solitude into my scaling pores like some perfumed moisture cream – make the hard flesh silky with silence, smooth with the cessation of judgment, supple with self.

And here I was; somehow, and basically against my own will, I had become that imaginary person, reading those letters, posted from another world.

The new world certainly wasn’t what I had expected, though I had to admit Married Guy had nailed it perfectly about the alone time. Of course I was still despised – but being despised from a distance was a delicious luxury. And even as a hermit, I had joined a new social world. I was part of a club now, a club I had never even known existed: the Divorced Folks' Club. The welcome was overwhelming. People I scarcely knew stopped me at the coffee shop now,to trade war stories – their late night trips to A Safe Place, the alcoholic binges and serial infidelities they had to cope with. I heard about nightmarish first wives and second husbands, tortuous custody hearings and runaway children. I realized I had gotten off lightly. Lisa wasn’t an alcoholic or a drug addict, a pathological liar or a kleptomaniac … she just didn’t love me anymore. But I got boatload of advice on how to deal with her, anyway.

"You know my favorite part of being divorced so far?" an electrician on a job site said to me. “Hanging up on her. You should try it, man. Next time she calls and she's pissing you off -- just hang up. It's like a declaration of independence. It’s Liberation! It's great."

The embrace of this new community made me realize that I had been a forbidding figure in my “happily married” days – a drag and a spoil sport: kind of like the one guy at a party who wasn’t smoking pot. Well I was stoned now, partying with everyone else, wasted with the worst of them, one of the gang.

I just wished it could be more fun.