If the conditions for happiness according to Schopenhauer were renunciation, resignation and asceticism, they weren’t working for me.
The next night as I was leaving for work, my actions finally caught up with me. I was turning the key to lock my door when a short woman materialized out of the darkness from behind the garbage cans and grabbed my arm. In an instant, I realized my mistake. I should have checked the area around the door before I left the apartment. She’d obviously been hiding there waiting for me to emerge from my hovel.
Instinctively I tried to pull free of her grasp. But she was strong. She wasn’t more than five feet tall, but she was tenacious. I couldn’t shake her off. She was short and broad and muscular. I could feel the force of her hand tightening on me. As I shook my arm, she wrapped her other arm fiercely around my thigh and held on with an iron grip.
It was a danse macabre. We kept turning and twisting in the night, two partners moving to an unheard beat. I was at least a foot taller than she was, but I couldn’t break free. We were locked together like two rutting dogs. And she didn’t say anything. She just kept grunting and wheezing, grunting and wheezing.
“Let go of me, bitch,” I shouted.
She grunted.
“Let me go.”
She groaned.
“What are you doing?”
She made a low animal noise.
“Who are you? What do you want?” I shouted.
No answer.
I tried to push her off me. “Let go of me. I’m not going back. Let go.”
She held on even tighter. We both fell to the ground. I scraped my forehead on the concrete steps. It hurt like hell. I was sure I was bleeding badly.
“Let me go, you bitch. I’m not going back.”
“Listen to me,” she said finally. Her voice was low and rough.
“No,” I screamed. “I’m not listening. And I’m not going back.”
“Listen to me.”
I started to punch her in the back with my free hand.
She grunted. “Oh, you bastard. That hurts.”
“Then let go of me.” I kept punching her.
“I’ll never let go. You got to listen.”
“I’m not listening,” I shouted. “I don’t want to hear what you have to say.”
“Stop hitting me, you bastard. It hurts.”
“Then let go of me.”
“I’m not letting go until you listen to me,” she said.
I rolled on top of her on the cement floor. But she didn’t let go. So I kept on punching her and the harder I hit, the tighter her grip became. Then she somehow rolled out from under me and twisted my arm behind my back in a hammerlock. I reached up over my shoulder with my free hand and grabbed a fistful of her hair and yanked it so hard she howled.
“Ow, Jesus. You bastard.”
“Let go of my arm,” I said. “I’m not going back to my wife.”
“Ha, you jerk.” She let out a guffaw and relaxed her grip, but she didn’t let go. “You’re a goddam idiot.”
I stopped struggling and just lay there on the concrete. I was exhausted. My breathing was labored. “Why am I an idiot?” I said between gasps.
“You think your wife sent me?”
I coughed. “Sure. Who else would?”
She twisted my arm. “Who do you think?”
“I don’t know. The police?”
“Why would the police want you?”
“For running away from home?” I said to deflect her question.
“That’s not a crime.”
My breath was returning to normal. “Then who would hire you?”
“Your son,” she said.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
It was time to say goodbye to Malkie. I knew I couldn’t stay in New York. There would be no peace for me if I remained where I was. The last few months had been a slow descent into purgatory. I thought I had reached the final ring when I started working at Max’s garage. But now I saw there would be further rings to descend into.
There was not going to be any redemption, no final act of heroism as there was in Lord Jim. I had to leave because the furies were pursuing me. It was clear I had upset some delicate balance in the universe by deserting my family and, as a consequence, all the natural laws had been overturned. A butterfly had flapped its wings in the rainforest and therefore a mighty hurricane had devastated a vast alluvial plain and the property and casualty companies had to pay out billions of dollars in claims.
Malkie cried when I told her.
“You said we wouldn’t be apart. You promised me.”
“I know,” I said. “But I can’t stay here.”
She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. “I should never have trusted you.”
“Please don’t say that. It hurts.” There was a terrible heaviness in my chest.
“I should have known,” she said between sobs. “If you left your wife, I should have known you would leave me too.”
I shook my head. “It’s not like that. I wanted to leave my wife but I don’t want to leave you. You’re the only person who ever made me happy. And now I have to leave you. Don’t you see how painful it is?”
“Then please don’t go,” she whispered.
“I can’t stay. I’m broken. I’m beaten. I’m afraid to stay.” I’d never been so honest with another person in my life. I wanted her to see me as I really was, free of all pretense.
Perhaps she saw that. She stopped crying. With a long sigh, she came into my arms. We didn’t say anything for a while. Then I turned my face so she could see my lips.
“I will write to you,” I said. No AT&T Relay. No interlocutress to stand between us and interpret my words. Just Malkie and me.
She nodded.
CHAPTER XXXIX
My son was waiting for me on the steps in front of my apartment when I returned home from work the next night. I wasn’t surprised to see him. It was still dark so I had difficulty making out his features in the shadows. He was a little taller and a little heavier than the last time I had seen him. I must tell you that I was pleased he was there.
“Hello, Dad,” he said when he saw me.
I couldn’t say anything. I was overcome with an emotion that closely resembled guilt.
I turned the key to unlock the door and motioned for him to come inside.
He entered and stood there looking around the room for a long time. “You live like this?” he said finally. There was a note of sadness in his voice.
It wasn’t a question that required an answer.
“Is this better than what you left?” he asked.
“I suppose not,” I said.
He turned to face me. “I wouldn’t recognize you,” he said, his eyes taking me in. “You look different.”
“I am different.”
He continued to stare at me. His face had an expression I hadn’t seen in many years, an expression I thought was gone forever. It was the look of a child who could still be hurt by the actions of a parent.
“Why did you leave us?” he asked me.
I owed him an answer to that question. “It was because of your mother. There was no love left between us. I just couldn’t continue living that way. It was a fraudulent life.” The answer was only partly true. I had left because of him also.
He shook his head. “You didn’t have to leave that way. It was cowardly. And it was dishonest.”
“You’re right. I probably shouldn’t have done it.”
He turned his gaze away from me. “You should’ve told me what you were going to do.”
I nodded. “I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen. You were determined not to hear anything I had to say. You were sure you knew better.”
“I thought you didn’t care about me,” he said.
“I thought you didn’t care about me either,” I said. “But it was probably just that we didn’t like each other very much, that was all.”
He gave me a bitter smile. “Yeah, I guess
that’s what it was.” He stuck out his hand. “I missed you. You’re my Dad.”
I took his hand, then put my arms around him and hugged him. He started to cry and so did I. We stood there sobbing, two grown men. I felt an uncertain amalgam of sorrow and joy. His unshaven cheek was coarse against my own. His chest shook with sobs. I suppose mine did also.
We cried until we couldn’t cry any more.
There was a long silence. I couldn’t stop myself from asking him, “How did Mom take it?”
He attempted a smile. “She didn’t make a big deal out of it. I don’t think she minded very much. She just acted like you went out for a pack of cigarettes.”
I nodded. That made it a little easier.
“There’s something else I have to tell you,” I said.
This time he listened. “What is it?”
“I can’t stay in New York. I have to leave.”
“Why do you have to leave?”
I studied his face. I wanted to remember the way he looked. “I can’t tell you now. Maybe sometime I’ll be able to tell you. I’ll call you when I get settled where I’m going.”
“Where are you going?” he asked me.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
*
I packed my suitcase and took a couple of big books that would require a long time to read. War and Peace was one and The History of Tom Jones was the other. They would stand me in good stead until I was able to find a decent bookseller. I left everything else behind. Whoever rented my apartment next would find a treasure of literature and fine music. A significant percentage of the worthy output of dead white males over much more than two millennia. It was highly unlikely that my Serbo-Croatian landlady would appreciate the value of what had been bequeathed to her.
I caught the A train to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. There was no two weeks notice of resignation of employment given to Max. That would have been the procedure if I’d still been working for the pharmaceutical company. Two weeks notice in a neatly-typed letter of resignation. But that wasn’t the way it was done in the world of grrreens. There were no written documents and no long-term commitments. Just an exchange of words in a rough approximation of English, depending on the dialect, and perhaps a handshake. This agreement would last as long as it was convenient for either party. Then the agreement would be silently terminated with no hard feelings on either part, because neither party expected it to last long. A white Anglo-Saxon Protestant survives with structures and strictures. When he enters the third-world underworld, he is lost. I was lost.
The lower level of Port Authority was crowded. People who couldn’t afford to fly were taking buses to all parts of the United States. I would soon be joining them.
I bought a ticket to Akron or Toledo or some other interminably bleak city.
I don’t remember which one.
THE END
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