“Now that’s a smile.”
“Okay, your turn.”
“For what?”
“A smile. You’re pretty serious, too.”
He thought about it for a moment. Then he held a hand in front of his mouth. He lifted the hand to show a sudden, crazy smile, then dropped the hand as if to immediately conceal it.
She laughed and said, “You’re weird,” quickly adding, “I’m still joking.”
The goofy conversation seemed to relax them both. Subsequent drinks also helped. As he became more fleshed out in three dimensions, a real human being behind the words in the journal, her physical attraction to him grew. She watched him from across the table, taking in his dark, soulful eyes and broad, square shoulders. During her first drink, she imagined kissing his lips. She imagined him kissing her throat. She surprised herself with the passionate imagery in her mind, embarrassed that it was taking place as they engaged in a casual conversation.
They talked for a while about their jobs. He was a high-level manager at a hot new technology company, which impressed her. She talked about the bookstore. Then, during the main course, she tried to steer him toward the deeper territory covered in his journal.
“Where did you grow up? Have you always lived in Chicago?”
“No. I’ve been all over. It might be easier to list the places where I haven’t lived.”
“Your parents moved a lot?”
“Pretty much.”
“What kind of work did your dad do?”
“Different things.”
“Like what?”
“Insurance.”
She could tell they were entering an area of difficulty from his short answers and elusive eye contact. She tried to probe deeper into his past, but his answers grew more vague until he changed the subject altogether. He randomly made a comment about a woman’s hat at a nearby table, then said something about the music playing.
That’s all right, thought Ellen. We’ll get you to open up over time. There’s no rush. We’ll get to our respective histories. We’ll find that lonely place in each other’s hearts that draws us close.
After dinner, he suggested drinks at a bar around the corner, Poppy’s. She quickly agreed—it was too early to call it a night and she didn’t feel comfortable going to his place on a first date—or to her place, either, for that matter, although she had cleaned it just in case.
At Poppy’s, the noise from the crowd and a blaring Bulls game caused them to search out a booth in the back. They ordered beers and Ellen realized that she was going to consume more alcohol tonight than she had in a long time. Her thin frame offered low tolerance, so she tried to pace herself without getting too far behind Charles’s drink input.
He asked her more questions about the bookstore, and that neatly segued into a conversation about favorite books. He confessed to collecting a lot of thrillers, murder mysteries and true crime. She told him about her favorites: historical romance, fantasy and some “chick lit”.
“When I met you at the coffeehouse, you were writing,” she said. “Do you like to write?”
“I do,” he replied, then turned it back on her. “What about you? Working in a bookstore, surrounded by all those books. Are you an aspiring author?”
“I’m not much of a writer. I wish I was better at it. I used to write a lot of stories when I was younger, but I stopped. I’d like to do more writing. Even if it was just poems or short stories.”
“So write,” he encouraged. “If you have a pen and paper, you’re all set. It’s the easiest pursuit in the world. You don’t even have to share it with anyone.”
She seized the opening. “What do you write about?”
“All sorts of things.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Whatever I feel like. It doesn’t matter.”
He was being cagey. She wanted to know more about the voice in the journal. Feeling relaxed and uninhibited from the drinks, she attempted to bring the conversation back to his personal history. “So tell me more about your past. Why don’t you like to talk about it?”
He appeared startled. His jaw hung and he seemed to search for words. He finally shrugged and said, “I have some baggage,” with a weak smile.
“Don’t we all?” she asked, hoping her tone offered reassurance.
“I know, but…let’s not go there. I’m having a good time.”
“I am, too, Charles.”
He appeared surprised. “Really? I know I’ve been babbling a lot tonight. I’m kind of boring. I haven’t…been out much. I’m a little rusty at this dating thing.”
“Hey, so am I,” she said.
He looked at her for a long, silent moment and then said, “You’re very beautiful.” It sent a shiver through her. Her first impulse, strangely, was to cry. But she swallowed it back even as tears threatened to well in her eyes. Don’t mess up your mascara!
“Thank you,” she said, and the words came out flat, not at all as she intended.
A young waitress in a blue Poppy’s shirt appeared and asked if they wanted another drink.
“I’m good,” said Ellen quickly, head still spinning from Charles’s comment. The evening’s intensity had caught up with her—or perhaps the extra drinks. She felt both wired and exhausted. In a short period of time, she had met the man behind the journal, her first date in a long time, fallen deeper for his good looks and kind eyes, probed into his secret past, and been told she was…beautiful?
She needed to go home. She felt anxiety rising inside. If she stayed with him much longer, she risked getting nauseous or stupid or both. So much had been achieved in one night. She wanted to remove herself, reflect, regroup. Do it now, before you blow it.
“Charles, I’ve really enjoyed tonight,” she said. “But it’s getting late and I’d like to go home.”
She could sense a slight sag in his reaction. “Oh. Sure.”
“I’m just tired, that’s all,” she quickly offered. “I’d—I’d like to do this again sometime.”
He straightened up. “Yes. Me, too. Good.”
They returned to her apartment in a cab, barely speaking in the backseat. She felt blasted by one of her old waves of insecurity. Where did it come from? Why now? She was afraid to speak because she didn’t feel confident that the right words and sentiments would come out.
When they pulled up in front of her building, Charles said, “Let me walk you to your door.”
“You want me to wait?” grumbled the driver.
Charles looked at Ellen.
“No,” said Charles.
At that moment, Ellen knew that Charles was going to kiss her.
My mouth is dry, she panicked. I’m trembling. I am so lame.
Charles paid the driver and they got out of the vehicle. The cab left right away, red rear lights vanishing around a corner.
Charles walked with Ellen to her building entrance. They stopped at the glass door to the vestibule and faced each other.
“I would have asked him to wait,” he said. “But I don’t like an audience.”
She smiled—big, genuine and spontaneous—no effort behind it.
Charles leaned in and kissed her. She responded quickly. Be receptive. Prove to him that this is not the end.
A rush of warmth traveled her body, tingling up into her scalp. She felt his gentle lips. His hand touched the back of her shoulder. She brought her hands toward him and touched his waist.
He broke it off after a minute, but remained close. “Have a good night,” he said.
“I already did.”
He smiled and turned. He started down the walk.
She entered her building, then watched him from inside the vestibule. He waved at her before advancing out of view.
Her hands trembled with so much excitement that it took her a minute to get a firm grip on her keys and unlock the door.
Once inside her garden apartment, she paced. She replayed the highlights of the evening in her head, bits of dialogue,
moments of contact. She felt a rush of energy.
For the first time in a long while she felt all of her senses brought to life.
While Charles had departed in the flesh, he very much remained a presence in her apartment. She ran to the desk drawer and pulled out the red journal.
She kissed the cover, then laughed at herself for doing it.
She jumped on the couch and opened the journal to her bookmark.
Tonight she had experienced the handsome, quiet, outward Charles.
Now she was returning to the deep, intense, inner Charles. A man with secrets, scars and darkness. A wise heart that knew true hurt. He may have kept his emotions in check during the date, but now they revealed themselves in plain, black-and-white penmanship.
Charles wrote: Sometimes I feel on the verge of tears, a sadness triggered by the most innocent moment, something mundane that drags out everything I have tried to suppress. A school bus of small faces. The smell of a long-ago cologne. A father and son playing catch in a driveway. An old song bringing memories of an AM radio smuggled under the bed covers to block out shouts from down the hall.
Yesterday, I had another run-in with Darren. I fear I am losing some of my influence over his behavior. Above all, he needs to protect himself from himself. Where I feel sorrow, he feels rage. Where I can channel the pain inward, he lashes out in all directions. He is losing the basic grounding to function in society. While I have held on to rational thought, his fingers are losing their grasp. We are so very different yet inevitably the same. We are two sides of a coin, fused by a common experience.
Perhaps now is the time to revisit the day that changed our lives forever. The climax and starting point to this narrative. The destruction that gave birth to a thousand nightmares.
When I embarked on this journal, it was an experiment with an ambitious goal of self-discovery but no sure formula to get there. In the course of these two hundred pages, I have been able to extract and unwind elements of my construction in hopes of identifying the stranger that lives inside of me. I have established a process and voice with the simplest of tools. I have reached a degree of some clarity, but solutions remain elusive. I have not improved my mental state of affairs. Deterioration and fragmentation persist. In truth, my explorations to date have been a warm-up. Now is the time to leap into the mouth of the monster.
I have introduced the players. I have established a storyline. I have described the conflicts and escalated the tension. Perhaps now we can ride out the pivotal scene?
I am seven years old. I am playing with Darren in our bedroom. The shouts and screams from our parents have never been this loud, raw and passionate. Their bodies thump against walls. Our home is breaking apart in explosions of violence: fists, kicking, broken glass and toppled furniture, a war zone.
We can hear everything in our room. I desire to hide in the attic, wrap my head in pillows, climb out the window, or hang myself in the basement. Darren presses his hands against his ears until tears squeeze from his eyes.
The noise crescendos, leading to the most piercing wail either one of us has ever heard. I know at that moment that the terror in our home has reached another pinnacle. When the sounds of my parents’ enraged battle shrivels to a single, muffled sob, I know that there is an end, a finality, and I can only hope that it is a joint realization that all of this horror needs to go away, consume itself, evaporate.
Darren and I leave the bedroom and head down the stairs, drawn to the sound of the strange crying coming from our father. When we find him, he is doubled up in a ball, like an infant, eyes wild, face scratched, white T-shirt torn. We see a butcher knife tossed across the floor, inches from where our mother rests limply, one shoe off, not moving. We see huge cuts like bloody lips grimacing through her dress. She soaks in a pool of red.
My father faces us, his features pink and puffy, a madman spitting out two words with a guttural ejection: “Get…OUT.”
For the next few days, I will try to wash that image out of my eyes with soap and water until I can no longer stand the burning.
I will never speak to my father again. I will feel nothing when many years later I discover he has been killed in prison, larynx crushed by a broom handle in a violent fight with another inmate.
I will fail to shed even a single tear.
Chapter Twelve
Ellen could not shake the image of seven-year-old Charles and his brother entering the kitchen and discovering the violent stabbing death of their mother at the hands of their father. Even after Ellen had returned the notebook to the drawer and finished her glass of red wine, which usually made her tired, she could not settle her trembling. The journal’s words remained in her head and she still pictured the scene as he had described it, down to the splashes of blood on the cabinet doors.
Charles had experienced unbearable horror. It put her own childhood trauma to shame. How could she continue to feel sorry for herself in light of this man’s grief?
Ellen knew that most women would drop the relationship after making such a discovery. It would be easier to leave than to stay. Your average twenty-something gal—cute, bubbly, looking for a good time—would jump to other options. How many young singles would pursue a romance with someone burdened by such terrible emotional baggage? Even though Charles could not be blamed for the evil in his family, he would be considered tainted. Damaged goods. His dark childhood, suicidal desires, and continued sorrow and angst would be a distraction that would overpower the passion.
For Ellen, the inverse was true. She felt closer to Charles than ever before. She could fully understand why he would not want to share his past with her at this early stage in the relationship. She sympathized with his reluctance to talk about the pain.
Retiring to bed, slipping beneath the cool sheets, she imagined reaching for him and finding his warm body. She held him tight, two weakened souls drawing newfound strength from each other’s intimate understanding. They could connect on a level few others could.
Swimming in and out of her dreams that night, Charles confronted her without words. In a jumble of time and place, he appeared in the apartment where she had once lived with her mother. Standing before her, he grasped the bottom of his sweater and brought it up, peeling it off over his head. He revealed his strong upper body, sculpted and sensual. He pointed to ugly slashes across the flesh, over his heart. She did not flinch. She touched the scars with her fingertips, kissed him, and began the healing.
Ellen arrived earlier than usual to Pacific Coast Coffee. She had dressed up, spent extra time on her hair and makeup, and abandoned her usual frumpy workday wardrobe. She sat near the front, facing the door, legs crossed, skirt pulled back to the knees, eyelashes thickened, hair brushed full.
She knew that she might run into him.
She sipped her latte, pretended to read the latest edition of New City, and glanced up every time the door opened with a whoosh of cold winter air. She stayed later than usual, accepting Terri’s irritated glance when she entered the Book Shelf at five after nine.
Terri appeared ready to reprimand Ellen, but then switched gears, taking in her change of appearance. “Look at you. You must be going someplace special after work.”
“No,” said Ellen. “Just home.”
“Do you have a hot date?” asked Peg, appearing beside Terri, a wide grin pushing back her freckled cheeks.
Ellen felt herself blush. “No.”
“She’s been really chipper lately,” said Peg. “Something’s up. I’ll get it out of her.”
“Well, transfer all that good enthusiasm to the customers,” said Terri. “I don’t want to see anybody enter this store without a greeting and offer to help.”
Ellen nodded, ready to search out patrons.
“And one more thing,” said Terri, pointing to Ellen’s wrist. “You have a watch. Use it. Don’t turn me into a pest.”
“Sorry,” said Ellen.
“If you have a special reason for coming in late, we can talk.”
“It’s her first day wearing eye shadow, give her a break,” said Peg.
“Very funny,” responded Ellen. From anyone else, the comment would sting. But Peg was just being Peg.
“Enough,” said Terri. “Let’s split up.”
Ellen and Peg drifted apart to opposite sides of the store and then rejoined in the back, out of Terri’s view.
“Okay, she’s busy,” said Peg. “Now talk.”
“About what?”
“You know.”
“I don’t know.”
Peg moved closer. “I’m not gay, so don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re looking hot. It’s like another person walked in this morning. Look at you, you’ve been hiding a really nice bod. I’d have to stop eating and work out twice a day to get like that. Nice genes, girl. Both my parents have pot bellies, so you know where I’m headed. You really should spruce up like this more often.”
“I don’t like to draw attention to myself.”
“So what’s different about today?”
Ellen could feel herself blushing again, a warmth across her cheeks. She sensed Peg studying her and turned away.
“Aw, c’mon,” said Peg. “I tell you all about my stupid life. You get all sorts of juicy details. Like that time I laughed so hard I peed all over myself at my sister’s wedding. And all my bad date stories, like that guy who burped tacos in my mouth when we were kissing. You owe me, sister.”
“Okay,” said Ellen. She took in a deep breath. “It’s a guy. But it’s early. I don’t want to…you know.”
“Jinx it by talking about it?”
“Exactly.”
“Maybe that’s my problem,” said Peg. “So does this guy have a name?”
“Charles.”
“Charles.” Peg frowned. “That’s kind of formal. Why not Charlie or Chuck? Is he from the North Shore? Sounds like he has money. Does he have nice shoes?”
Ellen laughed. “All right. That’s all you’re getting today.”
“A name? That’s hardly anything. Where’s the good stuff? Is he a good kisser? What color are his eyes? Is his belly button an innie or an outie?”
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