Meet Me in Manhattan (True Vows)

by Judith Arnold

  You don't eat. You don't talk. You don't move. You just lie there, wallowing in the memory of every moment you spent with her. Especially those last moments.

  "We'll stay in touch," she told you. "I'll always care about you. But let's just befriends."

  No. Let's not just be friends. "I will never date you again," you tell her. And you mean it. You mean it with all your heart.

  Your shriveling shell of a heart.

  "You're eighteen years old," your father says. "You've got your whole life ahead of you. The world is full of girls. You'll find someone else."

  No. You never will.

  "Maybe you should see a doctor," your mother says. "I think you're coming down with something."

  Yeah, you're coming down. Down in the world. Down into the darkness that is the end of love.

  After a few days, you somehow find the strength to go to work. You sit inside the gas station, staring past the candy racks and the stacks of newspapers to the pumps on the other side of the glass wall, waiting for a car to drive in so you'll have something to do. Thinking maybe an old Wagoneer festooned with horse show stickers will pull in, and Erika will climb out and race to the building, throw open the door and say, "I was wrong to leave you! I love you! I came back."

  Volvo wagons stop at the pump. Dodge Caravans filled with little kids in soccer uniforms. Mercedes coupes. Trucks bearing the logos of house painters, lawn services, plumbers. Lincoln Town Cars with tinted windows.

  Never a Jeep Wagoneer with wood siding and horse show stickers.

  Your mother is right. You are sick. You're dying.

  Erika's first letter arrived about two weeks after she'd left for college. When he saw it waiting for him on the kitchen table after he got home from the gas station-saw the return address, the Colorado Springs postmark, her familiar handwriting-he thought he just might not die, after all.

  He resisted the urge to tear the envelope open right there in the kitchen, with Spot sniffing at his heels and his mother peeling carrots at the sink. Instead, he carried the letter up the stairs to his bedroom, climbed onto his bunk, and held it in his hands. Stared at it. Let it lie on his chest in the hope that it might seep some magical power through his shirt and his ribcage and into his heart.

  He listened to the stillness around him, then heard a creak above him, in the attic. One of the ghosts, he thought with a smile. The ghosts Erika insisted didn't exist.

  Hell, he'd practically become a ghost himself these past two weeks. If she didn't believe in ghosts, she should have come back to New Jersey and checked out Ted Skala, the haunted guy, the walking dead.

  Finally, when he was calm enough to open the envelope without shredding it and damaging its contents, he slid his finger under the flap, shook out the letter, unfolded it, and read.

  She was doing well, she said. Colorado Springs was awesome. He wouldn't believe how beautiful the mountains were. Some of the kids in her dorm said they'd teach her how to ski. Apparently you couldn't live in Colorado Springs and not know how to ski. It defied the laws of nature or something. Besides, she said, if she wasn't going to do show jumping, she needed to find some other sport that would give her the sense of flying.

  Her classes were interesting. She was especially enjoying her psychology class, and she thought she might major in psych, although she didn't have to choose a major until the end of her sophomore year. She was also taking a fine arts class, and she had a newfound respect for Ted's drawing ability. She wished she had half his talent.

  Her roommate was great and she was making lots of friends. The sky was bigger in Colorado, she reported. She couldn't explain it; she knew logically that the sky above Colorado was the same sky as the one above New Jersey, but everything felt bigger out there, wilder, brighter. More open.

  She sounded so damned happy he wanted to weep.

  He didn't. He just felt his heart shrivel a little bit more, shrinking into a dark, wrinkled raisin in his chest.

  She had written to him, he reminded himself. She was obviously thinking of him. She wanted to share her experiences with him. The letter was a good thing.

  What could he write back to her? "Hey, Fred-I'm still pumping gas in New Jersey."

  He read the letter again, and then a third time. He analyzed it for hints that she missed him, clues that she still loved him, insinuations that she hadn't completely discarded the notion of marrying him.

  Shit. She was having too much fun to marry him. She was growing, learning ... Christ, she was going to major in psychology. Once she'd mastered that subject, she would look at him and think, What a head case.

  He had to write back to her. Not just write back-he had to convince her that his life was as wonderful as hers. But writing didn't come easily to him. He was so much more visual than verbal.

  He would draw her a picture.

  He heard another creak upstairs in the attic. Maybe the wind had kicked up, maybe the house was settling-that was something two-hundred-year-old houses liked to do-or maybe the ghost was simply letting Ted know he liked the idea. A picture for her, with color, with detail, with brilliance and emotion. A picture that expressed everything he couldn't write in words. He would send it to her, and she would know his feelings for her were a hell of a lot stronger than her feelings for the mountains and the big sky and her psychology class.

  He started planning out the drawing the next day at work. He spent large chunks of each day sitting behind the counter at the gas station, doing nothing, simply being present in case someone pulled up to the pump or wandered inside to buy a scratch ticket or a pack of smokes. If he was idle and the mechanics needed his assistance in the garage bay, he'd help them, but they didn't ask him for help too often because if they did they'd have to pay him a hell of a lot more. He wasn't earning mechanic wages, so they couldn't really expect him to be a mechanic.

  For a guy who was naturally restless, sitting behind the counter wasn't exactly fun. He whiled away the time reading the newspaper, listening to music, straightening the bags of potato chips on the chrome shelves. But he'd rather be drawing. Thinking. Creating.

  His picture had to be spectacular. It had to express everything he felt for Erika. It had to dazzle her.

  Them. Of course, it would depict them. In bed. Making love. Their bodies intertwined. Not pornographic, not tawdry but beautiful. Over the days, he stole spare minutes when he could, plied his colored pencils, poured himself into the drawing.

  Not just him and Erika. Animals, too. He always drew animals. She loved horses. He'd grown up with sheep and geese, ducks and rabbits. He added donkeys to the drawing. They were kind of like horses, but also like the farm animals he'd taken care of throughout his youth. Donkeys had spirit. They were strong, energetic, stubborn. Like him. Like his passion for her.

  Somehow, he managed to intertwine them with the lovers in the bed. He added color, shading. Lines, shapes, intricacies. No rushing, no shortcuts. This was his masterpiece, for the woman he loved.

  After a week, he was satisfied with what he'd created. More than satisfied-he was proud. His drawing was amazing. She would love it, and she would love him.

  He had an early shift and was able to leave the gas station midafternoon, before the post office closed. He had no idea how to ship the drawing; he couldn't fold it to fit inside an envelope. He hoped the post office would know how to package it.

  The postal clerk, a middle-aged woman with frosted blond hair and a double chin, gasped when she saw the drawing. "That is beautiful," she said.

  "I have to send it to Colorado," he told her. "I don't know how to pack it. I don't want to fold it."

  "Absolutely not. You can't fold it." She circled the counter to a corner of the room where packing supplies were on display and pulled a rugged cardboard tube from a rack. "This is what you need for a drawing that beautiful," she said, carrying it with her back to her side of the counter.

  Ted watched as she meticulously rolled the drawing, making sure not to crease or dent it or bend th
e corners. In her pale blue post office shirt with the fake tie at her neck, she looked like the antithesis of Erika. Surely her taste differed from Erika's. If she thought the drawing was beautiful, Erika might hate it.

  Even so, Ted absorbed the clerk's compliment like blotting paper soaking up a spill. "It's for the love of my life," he confessed, smiling when he realized how gooey that sounded. He didn't owe her any explanations; he didn't have to prove himself to her. But she thought his drawing was beautiful, and once she'd rolled it for him, she inserted it into the tube with the care of a mother laying her baby in its crib. She was his accomplice, his partner in this essential act. She understood its import, and she was honoring his drawing, and him, and his love.

  He hoped Erika would honor it as well. He hoped she would look at it and realize he wasn't just a loser working at a gas station. He was an artist. She had inspired him to create this masterpiece that depicted how much he loved her. He hoped she would pull the drawing from the tube, gasp, and murmur, "That is beautiful."

  And then she would get on a plane and fly to Newark, and drive up to Mendham, and charge into the gas station and say, "I love you, too."

  The wait was excruciating. Ted alternated between lying on his bunk listening to the mix tape Erika had given him and lying on the blue sofa in the living room and lapsing into dark, depressed moods. When in the grip of one of those dark moods, he had no appetite, and he lost weight he couldn't afford to lose. When he listened to the tape, though, he felt Erika's nearness. Surely she'd chosen the songs for the tape to communicate with him, just as he was using his artistic ability to communicate with her.

  He listened to Christine McVie's flute-like voice singing, "I love you, I love you, like never before," and he thought, This is Erika's message to me. I haven't lost her.

  A week after he mailed the drawing, she phoned. Hearing her voice was like injecting a powerful drug into his veins. It jolted him, heated his entire body, wrenched him into another place. "Hey, Ted," she said.

  "Hey, Fred." As gobsmacked as he was, he did his best to sound cool and nonchalant. "How's it going?"

  "I just got the drawing you sent me. That was so sweet."

  So sweet? So sweet? He'd poured his soul into that drawing. His heart. Every last ounce of emotion. Every bit of love and passion and yearning. He'd killed himself over that drawing, and she thought it was sweet?

  He wanted to cry. Or bang the phone against the wall until it broke, until it was smashed into as many pieces as he was.

  Sweet. Jesus freaking Christ.

  "Yeah, well ..." he said in a deceptively calm voice. "So, how are you?"

  She told him exactly how she was: Fantastic. Terrific. Never been better. She told him about her classes and her roommate and the kegger she'd been to last Saturday night. She told him about how she and all her wonderful new friends had gone hiking and they were going to teach her how to ski, and she was so happy to be trying new things. She told him that as much as she'd loved riding, she was welcoming the changes in her life, the different challenges of these activities.

  Ted knew what she was trying to communicate: not the sentiments of the Fleetwood Mac song, not that she loved him like never before, but that she was glad to be gone, glad to be embracing all that was new and different in Colorado. Glad not to have stayed home in New Jersey, living the life she'd lived for eighteen years. Glad not to have stayed with Ted.

  "That is really cool," Becky said. She and a few other girls had gathered in Erika's dorm room to admire Ted's drawing. No one had been around when Erika had retrieved the mysterious cylindrical shipment from the package room at the campus center. She'd seen the return address and freaked out a little; what could Ted have sent her in a tube-shaped mailer?

  She'd wanted to open it right away, but she'd carried it back to her dorm room before prying open one end and sliding out the drawing. And then she'd freaked out a little more, because it was the most astonishing drawing Ted had ever done. Vivid, visceral, an explosion of line and color-and passion. Two lovers in bed, surrounded by all that imagery.

  He'd drawn it for her. Gone to all that effort, for her.

  Would any other boy ever do so much for her? Would she ever meet another boy as devoted to her as Ted was?

  Someone as obsessed by her? Someone determined to cling to what had been rather than open himself to what lay ahead? Someone who refused to step outside his safety zone and see what else the world had to offer?

  She'd stared at the drawing and tears had spilled down her cheeks. Crying over Ted came easily to her. He had the key that unlocked all her emotions, and his power over her frightened her. She'd been smart to leave him. If she'd stayed with him, she would have given him control over her hopes and dreams. She would have become Ted's woman, rather than her own. She would have lost herself.

  She'd spread the drawing out on her bed, hurried down the hall to the bathroom, and washed her face. Once she'd regained her composure, she'd returned to her room and phoned him. ""I just got the drawing you sent me," she'd told him when he answered. "That was so sweet."

  He hadn't sounded exactly thrilled to hear her voice. She wondered why. She couldn't believe he hated her after he'd drawn such a magnificent picture and sent it to her. Maybe he'd wanted her to say something else.

  She'd said what was in her heart: it was so sweet that he'd done this.

  And she'd realized, as they'd talked on the phone, that staying connected over two thousand miles was next to impossible. She'd spoken honestly yet sensed that she'd said the wrong thing. He'd sounded clipped and chilly. She couldn't see him, couldn't gauge what he was thinking. She couldn't read his feelings in his eyes, the way she could when they were together.

  The more she'd talked, the colder he'd sounded. He didn't want to hear about the hike she and a few schoolmates had taken up Pike's Peak. He clearly felt as removed from her as she did from him.

  "Who sent it to you?" Adrienne asked.

  Erika set aside her memory of her phone conversation with Ted and basked in the oohs and ahhs of her college friends as they admired the drawing. "My-a friend of mine," she said. Ted wasn't her boyfriend. He wasn't her love. She'd told him when she'd left for Colorado that she wanted them to be just friends.

  After talking to him, she doubted they were even that.

  MAINE IS LIKE NEW JERSEY, only colder, more rugged, more forested, less congested and the people have tart Yankee accents.

  All right, it's nothing like New Jersey, except for the one thing that matters to you: Erika isn't there.

  You help your parents move up to Maine, figuring the change of scenery will be good for you. You want to get away from all the places that remind you of her: the high school, your friends' houses, the stable where her precious Five Star boards. Ghosts may be able to travel up the road from the cemetery to the house you grew up in, but if you're lucky, the ghost of your love affair will not be able to travel all the way to East Machias.

  You still write to her, of course. Sometimes you send her a drawing. You and she are still `friends," whatever the hell that means. You know what it means to you: you are still so sick in love with her that you'll take whatever scrap she tosses your way. What it means to her is that she occasionally drops you a line and she doesn't hang up when you phone her.

  You sign up for some college courses. Maybe that will impress her. Maybe all she ever wanted from you was a little ambition, some proof that you didn't expect to spend the rest of your life pumping gas and wiping dead bugs off windshields. You always had ambition-if you weren't ambitious, you wouldn't have aimed your sights on a girl as classy as Erika Fredell. You just didn't know what you wanted to do with your life.

  Other than love her.

  There's a branch of Maine's state university system in Machias, so you sign up and hand over a check. You wander around the campus, sit in on a few classes and think, What am I doing? Why am I here? How the hell am I supposed to sit still for ninety minutes while this tweedy windbag takes twe
nty minutes to define macroeconomics-yeah, it's the study of broad economic systems, you get it already. How are you supposed to wait patiently while that militantly funky woman spends half the art class talking about shading? You get that, too.

  This isn't the place for you. Going to college to get Erika to love you isn't going to cut it.

  She used to love you just for who you were. She used to think the fact that you were reasonably intelligent and fun and utterly devoted to her was enough.

  When did it stop being enough?

  Winter came earlier to Colorado than it did to New Jersey. As much as Erika missed riding, she was glad she wasn't pursuing the rigorous training schedule she used to have back home. She would have had to start riding indoors by early November.

  Instead, weeks before Thanksgiving, she found herself on a bunny slope, strapped into rented ski boots, perched on rented skis and gripping rented poles. And feeling like a toddler learning to take her first faltering steps.

  "Just tell me what to do," she said to Becky, who owned her own equipment-not just skis, boots, poles, and a helmet, but fancy insulated gloves and a form-fitting jacket that made her look sleek and slim, unlike Erika's puffy down parka. "I've ridden horses. I made nationals. I'm sure I can do this."

  "It's not exactly the same thing," Becky pointed out.

  "This hill is hardly even sloping!"

  "That's the point. The first thing you need to learn is how to fall."

  "I don't want to fall."

  "Doesn't matter. You will fall, and you need to learn how to fall without hurting yourself."

  Two minutes later, Erika fell. The hill might have been about as steep as a typical highway ramp, but the snow was awfully slippery and the skis were unwieldy. At least her skis were. Becky's skis were obviously vastly superior. They never seemed to slide out from under her, even when she was zigzagging and making sharp turns and hunching into a tuck position.