But that’s how I feel right now.
He smiles. He is beyond handsome, his features perfect with a symmetry that recalls Greek statues. Of course, artists can manipulate a face and make it look like the face of what we imagine a god’s face would be, but to see someone born to look this way is startling. I am speechless. He is manly but his face looks brushed for a photo shoot like some runway model. In fact, his complexion is so perfect that it seems to glow. I’m not thinking about anything else because my gaze is locked so tightly on his that my eyes can’t wander.
He’s not smiling continually like some mannequin. His strong, straight lips move but I’m not really listening to what he’s saying. My eyes move from his eyes to his lips as I fumble for words, maybe because he is so calm and apparently quite amused. I am there for quite a while, babbling and flirting. It’s like that moment you don’t want to lose when you step out of a warm bath. I didn’t want to let go of the moments I was spending with him. I was luxuriating in the afterglow.
Finally, someone says, ‘Excuse me,’ and I blink and look at an elderly man trying to get past me with his cart. He pulls back with a look of abject fear on his face, an expression I understand. So many elderly people wear that look habitually, the look that reveals they are more aware of the ticking of the clock now. Some are counting their own heartbeats all through the day like someone counting pennies, trying to determine how many are left to spend in this life. They push right against you at the checkout counter. They are always looking for quick escapes so they’ll have more time to wait for death at home. No one wants to die on a checkout line. It would be too ironic, not to mention embarrassing.
And what would happen to the groceries you’ve chosen? Would they put them back immediately or take them quickly out of sight? Who wants to buy the box of rice touched by someone who just died?
‘Oh, sorry,’ I say and step aside. He still hesitates. Something more about me is frightening him. I wonder if I had smeared my lipstick like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? I pull back even farther.
‘If you want to go by, go by,’ I say sharply.
He moves past me as quickly as he can. He looks as if he thinks I am going to pluck out one of his precious groceries and make him return to an aisle. Maybe he thinks he is in danger of becoming the mythical Sisyphus of grocery stores, doomed to choose his groceries only to have them disappear before he reaches the checkout counter and have to go back down the same aisles for eternity.
Shaking my head almost to get my brain working again, I move on to finish filling my list, occasionally watching for the handsome man whose cart I bumped. I don’t see him in any other aisle and assume he has left. I shudder with disappointment and continue shopping.
Everything that normally happens does happen. I pay the bill and, with the wheels squeaking and rumbling over the macadam parking lot, I push the cart of groceries out to my car, loading the bags on to the rear seat and floor as carefully as someone loading fine china. I never put my groceries in the trunk. I like having them ride along with me so I can mumble to the milk and juice, and warn the cereals to do what their labels claim they can do for my health.
After that, I put the cart in the place to leave carts and pause, looking back at the supermarket as if I have forgotten something, but really searching for one more sign of him. There is none and, besides, there is something terribly depressing about a well-lit large store with few people in it. There’s a sense of emptiness, of desertion. It looks like a scene in one of those after-the-bomb movies. I push the images out of my mind, get into my car and drive home robotically, looking, I’m sure, like someone who has just been stunned with the news that she will, after all, live.
When I arrive, Kelly is in the kitchen making herself a club sandwich with the same precision she had when she first started doing that for herself at the age of four. She has the sliced turkey pieces exactly matching the size of the sliced Munster cheese and applies the mustard in surgically neat, even strokes so that every drop of it comes off the butter knife. I’m amazed at her concentration, and when I watch her doing this now, I see her as a little girl again, dainty, holding her fingers up to keep from smudging the tips with mustard or mayonnaise.
Did I do that to her, carry on so about neatness and femininity?
Actually, she never eats properly at dinner and is always hungry later, but nothing I can say or do changes that. At least she eats and is not into one of those fad diets other girls her age fall into like stepping into bear traps. She has a firm, mature figure that is better than mine was at her age, but she is terrified of gaining too much weight and falling off her imaginary magazine cover. She’s cute enough to be on one, with those crystal-green eyes, button nose and sweet, soft, very sexy Scarlett Johansson mouth. She hates when I refer to her as ‘cute’. Babies are cute. Young women are either attractive or beautiful or shut up.
She pauses to help me with the groceries.
‘You should have told me you were going shopping. I would have gone along to help,’ she says. She says that all the time as if she was a wind-up doll with taped messages to play. In this way, she takes after her father. They’re often reading off the same script.
‘I thought you had so much homework that you were going to “drown in it,”’ I remind her. Like most teenagers her age, she’s prone to hyperbole. Everything has to be ‘the most’ or ‘the worst’. I don’t think I was like that, but more and more, lately, I have been having trouble remembering myself. It’s almost as if I was always the age I am.
‘Oh, I did. Got a test in math tomorrow, too! I’m going to become a hunchback,’ she says, leaning over the table to illustrate how she had to lean over her computer keys or textbooks so long.
Kelly’s grades aren’t bad, which always amazes me when I see how much time she wastes. They’re so good, in fact, that I can’t get myself to complain about the nonsense she finds to do. Ronnie goes right to the bottom line, as he does with everything else, if I mention her distractions.
‘She’s doing well. Why complain?’ he replies, and I stop.
Loneliness has all sorts of ways of showing itself. It’s perhaps the most inventive feeling of all.
‘Anything exciting happen at the supermarket?’ she asks, and for a moment I’m too stunned to reply. Had the mother of one of her girlfriends seen me talking to that handsome man? Had she told her daughter who immediately had texted Kelly? Maybe the girl was there as well. It’s the age of instant Breaking News, news that can reach us even in the grave. Thoreau would have committed suicide by now. Walden Pond is not free from text messages.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Ground beef is on sale.’
I don’t smile. She stares at me and then she shakes her head and returns to her cave where her iPod and head phones, smartphone and computer wait for her. I almost believe they will share her sandwich.
Ronnie is in the living room now. He has satisfied his computer addiction and is shifting through channels. We have something like four hundred or so choices, but he rarely finds anything he thinks he’ll enjoy. It’s difficult to watch television with him because, like someone with attention deficit disorder, he’ll abruptly flip the channel to something else, calling what he started to watch ‘crap’ or ‘boring’. Between him and Kelly, the word ‘boring’ seems to characterize ninety percent of life. I think they expect to wake up and go to sleep to fireworks. They’re both always looking for distractions, action, excitement and noise. I know what they believe: stillness is dangerous. Silence encourages people to start getting philosophical which always leads to being maudlin and depressing. Ugh.
Usually by this time, I would go up to our bedroom and escape in a novel anyway. Books and movies are portals through which we escape from sour reality. They enable us to change our names, our history, our faces and our tomorrows, at least for a few hours. Most people don’t realize they are traveling on magic carpets.
Tonight is a little different, however. My eyes drift from the page
s and I have flashes of visual memories of the man I bumped into at the supermarket. He won’t sink into the sea filled with other seemingly insignificant memories. Instead, he is right in front of me again. I see his lips moving. I recall his eyes and travel over his face, lingering on one or another of his perfect features like someone fingering a precious jewel. It stirs me in ways I have almost forgotten. I even hear myself moan softly.
Later, when Ronnie is in bed beside me, slipping in like an afterthought, and the lights are out, I fold into a fetal position and drift softly into repose unlike any I had for years. The following morning, for the first time in a while, I wake after Ronnie, instead of before him as usual. I’m not working again yet, so I have no time clocks to punch, no non-domestic responsibilities to fulfill. Ronnie is ready to go down to have his breakfast.
‘You must have been tired,’ he says from the doorway. He waits to have his diagnosis confirmed.
I am grateful that he has at least noticed a deviation from my normal behavior, but I have no fear that it will rouse some suspicion in him. I can always be tired, but never depressed, distracted and unhappy. I can be in a daze, but never in deep regret. Both he and Kelly have absorbed my share of boredom and depression. If I even dare express a feeling close to it, either one will explode with ‘What about me?’ ‘I’m always working to make ends meet. This job is sucking the life out of me.’ Or ‘I have to go to a boring class with boring teachers. Even my friends are boring.’
There will be no sharing of their precious ennui and their self-pity. I excuse it by telling myself they are more needy than I am, but that delusion is crumbling more and more every day.
‘Yes, a little tired,’ I say. I know my lines. I recite them just the way an actress recites her lines daily on the stage, never making it sound as if she’s said them so many times that she’s bored with them.
He smiles, satisfied he is right.
‘Relax. I have it under control,’ he tells me, as if we are an ocean liner or a jet plane that is having some mechanical trouble.
I knew Kelly would have gobbled down her breakfast nevertheless and been out of the house before I went downstairs. I remembered her saying something about her going to a high school basketball game with Patricia Del Marco and staying over at her house. She blurts out plans like headline news and moves to something else quickly. If she had to announce World War Three, most wouldn’t know or understand it had begun.
When I finally do go down, Ronnie has gone, too. There is a new silence, a more complete emptiness, knowing there is no one else physically in the house. I start to make a fresh pot of coffee and ponder about what I will have for breakfast as if it is a life-or-death decision. Too many of my ordinarily simple decisions in the kitchen have become like this. I could ruminate for ten minutes over whether to have a herbal tea or a tea with caffeine.
Suddenly, my cell phone rings. It is so early in the morning that I worry it is a call reporting something serious has happened to either one of my parents or one of Ronnie’s. The four are still alive and well, submerged in their warm-bath retirements out in Palm Springs, even playing foursome golf and going to dinner and shows together. Ronnie has a younger sister, Tami, who fell in love and got married in the middle of her sophomore year at Berkeley. Her husband went into international law and they moved to Paris almost immediately afterward, so for all practical purposes, Ronnie is just as much an only child as I am.
Our parents’ friendship is probably the best thing to have come out of my engagement and marriage to Ronnie. It is easy for my parents to sympathize with his parents if they complain about him or vice versa. They joined a new AARP club with the motto, ‘Little children, little problems; bigger children …’ In essence, there is no retirement from parenthood.
‘Hello?’ I say cautiously.
There is a moment of silence and then I hear the words softly.
‘Hi. I think I might take you up on your offer,’ he says. When I am silent, he adds, ‘To show me around? You remember me, the supermarket last night?’
‘Oh, yes, yes, sorry.’
‘Is the offer still good?’
‘Yes, certainly. Where and when?’
‘How about in an hour at the corner of Western and Parker?’ he says.
‘That’s fine.’
‘Thanks. Looking forward to it,’ he adds.
For a few moments. I stand there in a daze. Obviously, I had told him more about myself in those few minutes at the supermarket than I recall. I am sure I was babbling like some lovesick teenager. I shouldn’t keep saying ‘teenager’. Many of my so-called contemporary friends babble about their infatuations with this actor or that singer, too. Adolescence doesn’t really disappear. It hides behind adult responsibility, poking its head out every time it has the opportunity.
I can’t remember what I did immediately afterward, not exactly. I mean, I don’t remember showering, fixing my hair, choosing what to wear, putting on lipstick and perfume, and then leaving the house. I don’t even remember if I ate anything. If I had done any of that, I had done it quicker than ever.
It was as if I had closed my eyes, as if my car and I were on some sort of remote control. I suppose I resembled someone sleepwalking.
And when I opened my eyes again, I was just pulling into a parking space on Western and Parker where he was waiting for me patiently, as patiently as someone who was confident he had installed himself securely in my psyche and was well assured that I would come.
It was how it began.
And when I think about it now, I realize I would have had it begin no other way and certainly not with a long, titillating courting process, during which we slowly revealed what we already knew was inside us. All that pretending that it was something else is like swimming through currents of lies, self-delusion and hypocrisy.
Besides, there is no real excitement without spontaneity. Planning dulls the senses and the wonder of discovery. The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are wrong there.
Being prepared isn’t always best.
And while surprise isn’t always best, it’s so often better.
Otherwise, why have gift wrapping paper?
ONE
It never occurred to me to wonder or guess how he had gotten my cell phone number. I couldn’t recall revealing it when I spoke to him in the supermarket. On the other hand, what would have been the point of my offering to show him around if I hadn’t given him my number? Of course, there was always the Internet anyway.
During the past five years, I had worked as a paralegal for Sebastian Pullman who practiced commercial law for more than forty years before he sold his practice and retired nearly two years ago at the age of seventy-two. His fifty-eight-year-old wife drove him to it. When we parted, I could see the palpable fear in his eyes. Without his work, his life was going to be golf dates and cruises and charity events, where he would meet the Usual Suspects and have conversations on the same topics, until one day he would stop talking and pop like a soap bubble.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue that legal work, so I didn’t attempt to stay on with the new attorney who had bought his practice and building. I felt like a tightrope walker during those working years because Kelly was left so much on her own. Ronnie didn’t fill the gaps as much or as well as I had hoped he would.
However, I knew from the work Sebastian did, the investigations he ran, that anyone could find out anything about anyone else if he was determined to do so. The Internet enabled those capable of navigating through it to have the powers of the best private investigator. We were all amateur Philip Marlowes and Sam Spades. It gave new meaning to the word ‘snoop’. Peeping Toms were sunburned from the glow of computer monitors.
Sebastian contracted out his sophisticated business detective work, but I always prepared the reports for him, so I was aware of how successful the professional detectives were with their high-tech assistants infiltrating anyone’s personal life. Sebastian loved to discover hidden assets, whether it was a suppose
dly bankrupt company or a party in a divorce who was trying to avoid sharing the wealth that he or she had accumulated. His weathered face would brighten into the delighted face of a young boy who was given the gift he had hoped he’d receive. To Sebastian, discovering these hidden assets was as good as solving a murder.
The thing is, I didn’t wonder at all about anything concerning the man I had met. I didn’t question why he was free right now to meet a woman on a weekday in the late morning. I didn’t wonder about his family, whether he was married too, where he was born and had lived, and if he lived here now. I didn’t think about whether he had a college education, worked nearby or knew Ronnie. None of it seemed to matter. Some bell inside me had been rung, some door unlocked, and as if I had been anticipating that it would happen for some time, I moved without hesitation. Not a second thought, not a cry of conscience put any pause in me.
After I parked and shut off the engine, I waited, naturally quite nervous. I didn’t even turn to look at him when he opened the passenger-side door and slipped like a shadow into the car. I was trying to be cool, casual, and look very experienced at this sort of thing. I didn’t want to do anything that might cause him to change his mind or his image of who I was. I was trembling a little, just as I trembled when I walked out too far on a diving board and knew there was only one way off.
‘This is very nice of you,’ he said.
‘I don’t exactly have a full schedule these days.’
‘I hope I’m not simply someone to help fill your time,’ he said, and I looked at him directly. I could feel myself slipping into that warm excitement I had felt when I spoke with him the night before. His eyes were just as mesmerizing.
‘No, you’re definitely more than that,’ I said. I might as well have started to undress.
He saw that. The confidence in him was overwhelming.
‘Why don’t we skip the preliminaries?’ he said.
‘Preliminaries?’
Lost in His Eyes Page 2