The Hour Before Dark

by Douglas Clegg

  She looked as if she had lived her life once with some recklessness, and now relived it with wisdom and understanding and a certain amount of unpleasant resignation.

  And so, there was I; there was Pola; and between us, a metal counter, an apron, and my understanding that there would be no time to again make out beneath the school bleachers, or to dance beneath icy moonlight on the edge of a clear and frozen lake while my father’s car idled at the roadside, nor would there be another second of stealing a kiss and feeling like a thief. Whether it came at thirty, or at forty, or at fifty, it didn’t matter. I had already begun to long for what was past and what could not be grasped again.

  And then the little miracle began.

  She came over to me and drew a chair back across the table.

  “It’s terrible what happened,” she said. “Your father was a good man.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I wanted to say: I tried to call. But that sounded so lame. I wanted to say: I’ve thought about you for the past ten years. I just wasn’t sure what that really meant.

  Instead, we got to talking families and pasts and presents, but always with some kind of unanswered question about where love goes. How does it ever really change? You can tell me that when you were truly in love with someone, and it ended, that you no longer love that person, but I won’t be the one to believe you. Anyone I had ever loved—in my heart, not just in my flesh or in my mind, I still loved. They had remained with me in some way that was maddeningly difficult to pinpoint.

  Pola seemed to have set her expression in stone: neither smile nor flatline, her lips were slightly parted as if she were about to whistle. Then, “Well, it’s good to see you here, anyway. You should come around and meet my son.”

  “Ah.” That was all I said. Mention of her son reminded me of all the reasons I’d left Burnley Island behind. She and I were in love. I was in love with her. She was in love, but not with me. She had fooled me for a time into believing she adored me. But she had already moved on—she was pregnant at eighteen, and she told me, tears in her eyes, that it was another boy, a few years older. She was going to marry him. She wept on my sleeve, and I held her on a long summer’s night. She had kept saying to me how right it was that we should break up, that she wanted to stay on the island, that she loved it there, and that I was going to get out in the world and would’ve hated her more for trying to keep me there. The whole time she’d told me this, when we were both eighteen, I had hated her. Hated her in the only way that a lover could. It seemed careless of her—to me—that I should give her the purity of my love and be willing to dedicate my life to her, and she had just trampled on that by deciding on a more suitable guy. And I felt myself turn cold. Even at eighteen. Bitter and cold, and I never wanted to see her again.

  She had turned on me, and I had been too immature to handle it. I had run, and used any excuse I could to go.

  But now, seeing her, it brought back everything. The pop songs and the clichés were all correct: Love is a stranger. Love is a battlefield. Love is a four-letter word. Love is a miracle.

  But I added a new cliché to the mix when I was eighteen: Love is a prison, and the only way out is to open the door yourself, and walk away.

  I glanced at her hand. I just stared at that sucker, and I wanted to touch it. I wanted to hold her hand. To listen to her for a while. I could not get the idea out of my mind that we should be in each other’s arms, pressing together, melting against each other.

  We talked old times, and laughed, and hesitated a little. She shut the store down, and I told her I’d walk her home.

  Just as I had done as a teenager.

  Outside, the snow continued.

  3

  The snow swirled and shivered as it fell beneath the streetlamps.

  Pola would not look at me as we walked along Main Street with all its yellow and blue and red holiday lights strung along the stores. She still wore the large white apron, and it spread across her hips, tied tight around the back, accentuating her curves; her hair was pulled back severely, and an impish part of me wanted to pull at the bands holding it up and let it fell down around her shoulders.

  She stopped. As if she could read my mind. The snow moved around her face as she stood beneath the lamplight at the end of the street. Her eyes seemed radiant to me. “Sometimes the past is stupid,” she said. “Would you do things differently if you could go back?”

  I nodded. “Pretty much everything.”

  She gave me a knowing look. “Well, me, too.”

  Her brief words, me, too, confused me.

  I felt something I’d never quite experienced. It was like a small voice in my head that said: You can spend your whole life not telling the truth about who you are inside. Life is easier that way.

  Or you can just fess up right now. Risk it. Throw it out there.

  Live up to it.

  “I never stopped caring about you,” I said, and I felt my face go red, and for perhaps the first time in a long time I felt it down to my toes. I felt my being. I felt as if this was the first time I’d ever stood up for myself in anything.

  I expected her to laugh in my face, and I was willing to take it.

  The look of astonishment that crossed her face soon turned into a slowly building smile and a damp sparkle to her eyes—a light glaze of tears. She wiped at the tears. “Don’t say that.”

  “I know it may not matter now,” I said. “I don’t care. You may not care for me in the same way. I don’t care.” Joe Grogan’s phrase came to me again, seeming completely accurate: It’s the damnedest thing.

  “Do you know I had to fight myself just to let you go?” she asked.

  “What?”

  She offered up a sad half-smile. “You would’ve died if you’d stayed here. You were too in love with me. And I was too immature. And I’d cheated on you, with my body and heart, and I did it because I knew you needed to leave. I couldn’t fight my parents then. I couldn’t fight anyone. And I let you go. I just let the best thing in my life go. I let it go for some stupid sense of what my parents wanted. And what everyone wanted except for me. And I didn’t want you stuck here, with me.”

  A chill went through me when she said it. Something seemed to smash against my innards, and for a minute I thought I would be sick. Jumblies, indeed. But that feeling quickly passed as I stood there in the barest moment that seemed to be an hour. I stood and looked into her fare, and something within me fought against what I was feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was an awful feeling of fluttering and slight dizziness, as if she’d caught me off-guard and had tripped me up.

  Then she said, “If you knew that someone intentionally lied to you so that you would have a better life, even if that lie was the worst thing in the world, how would you feel?”

  I thought for a moment and said, “If I understood the reason, it wouldn’t bother me. A lot of people lie for no good reason. If the reason’s good, it’s understandable.”

  She closed her eyes, opened them again, and looked at me as if she had just said a prayer.

  “It’s the stupid past,” I said. “Just like you said. Don’t let it hurt you now. I’m here. I don’t care about any of it. I’m here right now.”

  I was about to say something more, but I decided not to talk at all. I wanted to kiss her tears away. I leaned forward and kissed her eyelids, and then her nose, and then without even realizing where this might lead, my lips were over hers, and she opened her mouth gently. Her breath was sweet and felt like home as I inhaled it. I wrapped my arms around her, and drew her to me. Part of me was afraid she might pull away, but she embraced me before I had locked my arms behind her back.

  “This is crazy,” she murmured. She pressed her face against mine, and then under my chin, and then against my cheek.

  “I know, I know,” I said. I resumed kissing her as much as a woman could be kissed beneath a streetlamp. I reached up and drew out the twist of cloth that held up her hair, and it cascaded around her shoulders, and she opened h
er coat so I could put my arms inside it for warmth as I held her.

  “We can’t do this here,” she whispered.

  “The store,” I said, glancing back at the darkness of Croder-Sharp-Callahan. “The lunch counter.”

  She laughed, looking up at me to see if I were teasing her. “You’re serious?”

  “Like when we first made love,” I said, and my throat caught on those words: made love. It was the first time in my adult life I had ever said them. I had said all the other words that seemed truer in the past; I had used the profanity and the blunt language and the clinical talk, but not those words that had seemed both precious and mysterious.

  "This is mad,” she whispered, but her body betrayed a passionate urgency, and we held each other’s hands like kids again and ran through the fresh snow, back to Croder-Sharp- Callahan.

  4

  Once inside, she locked the door behind us.

  She kept the lights off, and we stumbled into stools and chairs and around the cash register. Somehow, our clothes fell away, although there was a good deal of tugging and unsnapping and unbuttoning and unzipping and boots that took a while to come off. I felt just as I had at seventeen, the fumbling numbskullery of a boy in love without a brain in his head, the explosion of the senses as we rolled together, and tasted and felt and burned against each other.

  Somehow, from there, we went up to the empty apartment above the store, through the back stairs, half-dressed, the snow still spinning gently downward, giggling and passionate and me in my boxers and socks, bounding up the steps after her as she wrapped herself in her coat, but with nothing else underneath.

  The apartment was one room, with a bathroom and a small kitchenette by the window. The window had a tattered and yellowed shade drawn down. An overhead light flickered. A mattress lay back against one wall. “It’s clean, don’t worry,” she said. “We use it for naps at work.”

  I didn’t care if it was dirty or newly washed. I leapt onto the mattress, and she came tumbling down on top of me.

  I felt an energy within me, a renewal of forces stronger than personality or sustainable life. Something more than what I had been before that night. I wanted to give her so much, everything I had, every ounce of love and care and physical pleasure; I wanted to mold myself against her and her against me until you couldn’t tell one from the other.

  Afterward, I didn’t even crave a cigarette.

  5

  “I’ve been wasting my life,” I said, my lips against her hair, holding the scent of her for just a moment longer.

  “You have not,” Pola said.

  “I have,” I insisted. “I’ve wasted these years. I let go of my family. Of you. We could’ve been building a life together.”

  “You’d have been bored here. With me. It wasn’t right, not then.”

  “I guess we had separate paths for a while,” I said. And I knew it. Sorrow had held its sway over me for too long. The sorrow was not just my father’s murder. It was a sorrow that had somehow crept its way into my soul and had burrowed there. It all seemed ridiculous now, in the arms of the woman I loved, on the island I had abandoned for no good or genuine reason.

  “Maybe this was the way it was meant to be,” she whispered, lazily and sweetly.

  I held her longer than I had ever before held a woman in my arms. I felt her heartbeat against my chest. That peculiar and unfamiliar feeling of being bound to another human being in a way that breaks down all barriers and intimate territories. We made love with the energy of first-timers, and the sloppiness, too. She laughed when I tried to hold her in a way that made her leg cramp; and I began laughing when she took me inside her, not from silliness, but from a joy I hadn’t even known could exist between two people, between a man and a woman in a secret of love that had been protected over several years. It was as if I had unlocked doors within me. She smiled afterward and told me that when we were in the throes of it, she enjoyed my laughter. “You sounded like the old Nemo. The one I fell in love with when we were children. The one who had joy.” She kissed my lips, then my cheek, and neck. “Are you back, Nemo?” She looked into my eyes as if someone might be hiding somewhere in them.

  Without realizing it, I had held my breath as she spoke. I had held on to a breath as if I were holding on to the years. I let out a sigh, the likes of which had not passed through my lungs or throat in all my life.

  “Yeah,” I said, like some idiot, a gust of my breath escaping and taking with it a great burden. “Yes. I am back”

  Outside the window, the wind howled, the beginnings of a storm, perhaps, but I didn’t care. I felt safe, for once in my life. I felt safe with Pola.

  I lay there with her, looking at the window, the snow, and for a brief second, I thought I saw a woman’s face at the window.

  I sat up, started.

  But it was gone.

  It’s in your mind.

  “What is it?” Pola asked, looking from my face, back to the window. “Nemo?”

  “Nothing,” I said, settling back into the mattress with her, arms around her again.

  6

  “I want you to forgive me,” I said a bit later.

  “For what?”

  “What I did to you back then.”

  “I didn’t blame you,” she said. “Like I don’t need forgiveness myself.”

  “How I ever deserved even knowing someone like you ...” She held a finger to my Ups. “Don’t make me out to be a saint.”

  “But I was the one—”

  “Don’t. Leave the past where it belongs. All the bad things are in the past. We were barely more than children then.”

  “I don’t even wanna talk,” I said. “My dad used to tell me that the sun shines on a dog’s ass now and again. And I just want to bask in the sunshine a little.”

  We kissed again, and lay there until we both knew it was time for her to go pick up her son at her ex-husband’s. I didn’t want to leave her side at all, but we parted, regardless. I told her that we’d have lunch the next day.

  The separation of old lovers who discover a new love between them has got to be the most agonizing. You know what it’s like, you know how much you want the other person, but you also know that things can get in the way of love. How I wished that two people in love could always be together, every minute, every hour, and never grow bored or tired or distracted—or worse, out of love by the familiarity of love. These were the crazy abstractions I thought about on my walk back to Hawthorn, down the snowy road at sometime after ten P.M.

  And that’s when I saw Carson McKinley in his truck, parked alongside the darkened storefronts, but beneath the red and blue of Christmas lights, masturbating.

  7

  Truth was, I didn’t know if he was choking the chicken, but the truck vibrated, and I saw his sweaty face in the truck, so I assumed he was performing his favorite public pastime.

  I never begrudged Carson his compulsion. Many a man has dreamt of doing just what Carson did in broad daylight or beneath the streetlamps, but few have the balls to follow through. As long as he was in his truck, the island sheep and horses were safe.

  As I walked by the truck, I averted my gaze. The last thing I wanted to see after being with Pola, was a fifty-four-year-old with a beard and eyes like a crazed moron jacking off. But as I passed, he called out my name.

  Now, with anyone else, I would’ve ordinarily turned to see who wanted to get my attention. But this was Carson McKinley.

  “Hey, Nemo!” he called out again, his shout echoing slightly because of the cold and snow and emptiness of the street I turned. He looked out at me with his trollish face, half in darkness.

  “Storm’s comin’,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I saw her. Storm’s comin’.”

  The truck continued to vibrate.

  Perhaps Carson McKinley might’ve somehow spied on Pola and me as we had our marathon of sex. I felt a disgust for all mankind. The memory of seeing my dad’s porn collection didn’t help
. Women were right, most of the time we were dogs and pigs, and perhaps not even as good as anything that walked on four legs. Sure, there were men who did great things in the world, but in the ordinary things, we were completely the lowest of lows. Even my father, I thought—even Gordie Raglan, war hero, survivor of prison camps, who led the other prisoners to safety at great odds: Even his life came down to a stash of porn stuffed in the walls.

  I didn’t want life to be just this. Finding Pola again, not knowing if I could even feel that innocent love you get to feel as a kid, seemed like a miracle in need of protection. I stood there for a moment, judge and jury of Carson McKinley, who seemed the prototype of all that was dysfunctional of my gender. It was my puritan blood rising, I guess. Who was I to judge anyone else? I felt bad for Carson. I asked him if he was okay.

  “She’s a bad storm comin’ down on us,” he said. The truck began to bounce up and down. I turned away. He shouted after me, “SHE’S COMIN’! OH LORDY, SHE’S A-COMIN!" This was followed by what I can only assume were orgasmic moans of McKinley pleasure.

  “Merry Christmas to you, too,” I said.

  8

  As I approached Hawthorn, feeling weary and frozen and in need of sleep like a drunk in need of the last drop from a bottle, I saw a light on in Brooke’s room toward the back of the house. You’re up. You’re always up. You need more life. You need more than Hawthorn, Brooke. You need to open some doors.

  Bruno’s light was off, but this didn’t mean much. I wasn’t even sure if Bruno was in his bedroom asleep or across town with his boyfriend. Well, good for him. At least he’s got love. Hang on to it, Bruno, for as long as you can. It’s a small miracle that needs protection. I didn’t protect my miracle when I was a teenager, and I lost some years. Luckily, Pola protected it. Luckily, Pola loved me, too. So, Bruno, just make sure it’s love and then hang on for dear life.