by Ed Ifkovic
Eliot turned his back to her, but his shoulders trembled.
Noel faced me. “Over.”
“Over,” I echoed.
***
Twilight fell on my terrace. Icy snow beneath my feet, crunchy, as I stepped out of the apartment. Cold, shivering, I stared down nineteen stories to the street below. A line of slow-moving cars snaked along the avenue, idled at a red light. Specks of gold drifting into pockets of blue and black. In the distance the new Chrysler building, Art Deco splendor. illuminated. Glittery and spangling on this festive New Year’s night. But oddly quiet now, hours before the midnight crowd teemed into the streets, horns blowing, screaming, laughter, hoopla, and embraces. Times Square madness. Dancing the night away at Roseland. At the Hotel Pennsylvania. But at midnight I would be in my bed. It was no night for celebration.
Cold. Time to go in. But not yet.
A short time before Noel had called to say goodbye and to wish me happy New Year. “I’m off the Cleveland, but I feel like the New Year is already old.”
My voice had shook. “There are no heroes in this story, are there, dear Noel?”
I’d heard him drag on a cigarette. “If I don’t return from Cleveland, send out a search party.”
I laughed. “You have to come back. I need you.”
A sweetness in his voice. “I love you, darling.”
“I love you, too.”
Then the line went dead.
Cold, my eyes moist from the arctic wind that swept over the terrace.
Leaning over the balustrade, though I gripped the railing carefully, I could discern a slight whisper of music from the apartment below. A radio on perhaps. Notes that drifted up and then away, faded to nothing. A hint of a song, staticky and then smooth. A mellow refrain. Jazz, I realized. Ellington’s mournful elegy on the death of things in the purple haze of late-night revelry and early-morning goodbyes. Darkswept, and inviting.
A bittersweet voice.
…in the evening when the lights are low
I’m so lonely I could cry…
My chest tightened, I cried out loud, I turned away from the distant music.
My eyes sought the dark park below me: a purple forest starred with gold. Like the sun turned upside down.
I stumbled back into my quiet rooms but my mind raced with a haunting refrain from another lifetime:
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
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