by Paloma Meir
“She broke up with me, dude,” I plopped down on the floor beside where Danny sat on the sofa.
“Yeah, I didn’t think that was going to work out,” he patted me on the head as if I were a dog. “They change. It’s always about them, selfish. Sorry buddy.”
“I don’t know about that,” I wasn’t going to argue it. “Going to go mope in my room.”
“Be done by 6:00. Dinner and a movie with Sarah. You’re coming.”
“Okay.” I said with a heavy sigh as I got up to go to my room, “You sure you two don’t want to be alone?”
“Not with you like this. You and me. We take care of each other. Go do your mope.”
“Okay.” I sat on my bed and stared out at the ocean, sulking for a good fifteen minutes.
Feeling a little better I went straight to the drawer by my bed and took out all of Zelda’s letters, reread them, and put them back into the drawer. Satisfied I was in the right frame of mind, I took out the vellum cotton fiber paper I had bought at the Country Mart up the road and began to draw. I did not draw a stick figure sketch, but a real illustration.
The drawing was for Zelda’s Christmas present. I decided buying her a gift was pointless, impersonal. I wanted her to have something she could not buy with all of her money, something with meaning. Maybe even an apology for my heartlessness towards her when I had been in Peru.
Carolina had brought home a case of chicken pox when she was ten. The symptoms showed up in her best friend and myself a little over a week later. Quarantined to our rooms in our respective houses, Zelda had grown bored with no one at home other than the housekeeper. She would sneak out of her house in only her nightgown and bathrobe, hiding in the bushes all the way up the street and come into my house through the doggie door in the kitchen, we had never sealed up.
In my room, she would itch and twitch so uncomfortably with the sting of the welts. Hers were much worse than mine or maybe they just showed more through the alabaster of her skin. I put socks on her hands and tied them to her wrists with the laces from my running shoes to get her to stop itching the sores.
To take her mind off of the need to scratch, we played a game of an endless story. She would speak a paragraph and then it would be my turn. Back and forth we went with her turning it into a tale of unrequited love while my side stayed firmly in science fiction. It’s a shame we didn’t write it down. It was pretty good, a love triangle set in the International Space Station.
The moment I wanted to capture in the illustration was one of my favorite boyhood memories of my mother. This happened well before she quit drinking. We heard her footsteps walking down the hallway towards my room. Both of us panicked, not wanting to get “in trouble” whatever that meant to us.
Zelda impulsively slid under my bed. I sat up straight in the center of my bed as if I had been meditating as my mother opened the door. She put the lunch tray by my side, ran her hand across my forehead, checking to see if I had a fever, and reminded me to take my medicine after eating my lunch of chicken curry soup and freshly baked pumpernickel bread. She kissed me on the cheek, and quickly left, laughing as she shut the door.
I looked down to the floor and waited until my mother’s footsteps were on the stairs to signal Zelda out from under the bed, only to find her fuzzy pink sock covered feet sticking out. “Zelda your feet were sticking out,” I whispered with a trace of distress.
“Do you think she saw?” she crawled out from underneath and asked with a similar dismay. The red spots on her face were prominent from nervousness and probably rubbing her sock covered hand across her face while under the bed. That wasn’t something I let her do under my watch. “Should I climb out your window and go home?”
“I’m on the second story. It's concrete below... You’ll get hurt.”
“We could tie the sheets together...”
“Life isn’t a cartoon...” I glanced down at the tray, “Zelda look.” On the tray were two soup bowls, two plates of bread, two glasses of orange juice, and two sets of medicine, “She knows.”
“Oh good, I love her curry soup.” She attempted to pick up the spoon with her imprisoned hands, making me laugh. She was not the goddess she would become, but she had always been cute. Her innocence shined like a light inside of her.
“Let me get that for you,” I put a spoonful in her mouth, “I don’t get it.”
“She’s nice sometimes,” I broke off a crust of bread and put it in her mouth, “You know what we should do?” she asked before I could feed her another spoonful of soup, “We could empty her bottles out and put water in them. Then she would be nice all the time.”
“It won’t work...”
“That’s what Carolina always says, but it might work.”
“Here take this. It’s an antihistamine, stops the itching but makes you sleepy.” I popped it in to her mouth and held the orange juice up to her lips.
“I know what an antihistamine is, Serge,” I put another piece of bread in her mouth. “Let’s try it.” She looked excited about having solved all the problems in Carolina’s life and mine.
“What about Captain Braddock and Ursula? They’re about to crash into the moon. We can’t leave them like that.”
“Serge,” I put more soup in her mouth wanting her to be quiet, “You’re my friend, my best friend...”
“Carolina wouldn’t like to hear that,” I regretted saying as soon as I said it and still do.
“Ursula takes the steering wheel from Captain...” She continued with tears in her eyes. I didn’t correct her misunderstanding of how the Space Station was controlled.
We crawled under my bed after lunch, pretending to hide even though we knew my mother was okay with her being over at our house, and fell asleep as the antihistamines did their job, her sock covered hand in mine.
I finished the drawing a few days before Christmas, just in time to send it via international express mail. I thought of giving it to her in person because she would finally be moving back to Los Angeles in January as she had said, not that I had believed it at the time. But no, I wanted her to open it on Christmas morning with her mini-family of Louisa and Astrid.
Carolina had come home for the holidays the day I had mailed the gift. She was excited, telling me that her and Zelda had made up. I knew they hadn’t been talking, but thought the problem, whatever it was, had been resolved months before. I asked her about it, but she didn’t offer an explanation that made sense. Some things never change.
Christmas Eve I found a package addressed to me by the front door. Knowing it was from my Parisian pen pal, I tucked it under my arm and headed straight to my room purposely avoiding Danny.
I closed my door and leaned against it as if Danny was going to come in and take the gift away from me. I opened the slim box and pulled away the bubble wrap to find a simple black-framed drawing. The drawing was much the same as the one I sent her, both of us sitting on my bed in our pajamas. In her drawing I am putting the socks on her hands. In mine I was spoon-feeding her the soup my mother had brought us.
I sunk to my knees against the door and held the drawing away from me, trying to understand the meaning. I put the picture down on the floor and sorted through the wrapping paper for the card.
Joyeux Noel Serge,
It seemed only fair to make you a drawing after all the ones you have done for me. Do you remember this day? So many memories of you, but this is one of my favorites.
We’ll be home next week. I’m hoping I get to see you.
ZM
I shoved the framed drawing under my bed, not knowing how to hang it without Danny losing his mind. I stood up and felt peculiar, anxious, pumped up. I paced around my room the letter gripped in my hand, finally opening the drawer on my nightstand to add the card to her pile of letters. The magazine fell to the floor.
I leaned down to pick it up and was knocked out by her image. I looked at it and imagined my hands running up her long legs, reaching under the dress, running my fingers into her folds, her wetness on
my hands, going down on my knees, spreading her pearly white legs, burying my face in her for hours, until she couldn’t move. I imagined what her face looked like when she came. I could almost hear her breathlessly saying my name, maybe pulling at my hair as her body shook from the pleasure I was giving her.
I put the magazine down because I had a massive erection, about to break through my jeans. Unbuttoning my pants, I barely made it into the bathroom before my hand was in there rubbing up and down, not caring about a lubricant, rough I was with myself lost in the fantasy. My hand was her, going in and out, having my way with her, the moaning she couldn’t hold back. Her coming over and over again as I pounded into her, and the look on her face.
I came harder than I could ever remember, cleaned up the mess that had spurted onto the walls, and sat on the floor out of breath, not a guilty thought in my head. I wanted to see that expression on her face.
Chapter Nineteen
My sexual obsession settled down over the next few days thanks to an impromptu snowboarding trip with Danny and Sarah to Mammoth. Shredding down the triple diamond slopes at the Main Lodge and heading back to the condo at night wiped out from the physical exertion and high altitude eased my mind.
The lithe dark-haired physical therapist, Kimmy, I met on the second day of our trip didn’t hurt either. I moved into her condo across the hall for the last two days of the trip. It worked out well. Sarah and her hit it off, leaving Danny and me to the steep rocky mountain range during the days.
Then Zelda was home. I had instructed my sister to call me as soon as she arrived at her rental house in Beverly Hills and make a plan for dinner. She said she would try to remember, difficult to the very end. That was my sister.
We pulled into the driveway after dropping Sarah off at her condo that would turn out to be only a few blocks from Zelda’s new house and my phone beeped. I looked down and saw it was Carolina. I didn’t know how to answer it with Danny sitting right next me pumped up, rapping loudly to a song that played on the radio.
“Carolina,” I whispered and turned my head away from my friend who wasn’t paying attention to me anyway.
“I’m with Zelda. We’re going out to dinner. La Scala in an hour? She has to settle in a bit. Is that a good time for you?” I heard Zelda in the background scream out, "Hi Serge!"
“Yes, see you in an hour... Hi...” I rudely hung up on my sister.
“Danny...” I hesitated, “Family time, dude. Zelda’s home. Dinner at La Scala in an hour. We need to shower. We stink bro.”
He aggressively threw his prized car into park, turned toward me, and tapped his finger on the steering wheel.
“Dude, it’s time to get over it. She’s an old friend to both of us, sister to me. Look at you. You’ve moved on. Let’s do this Danny.”
“My phone’s been buzzing in my pocket for the last hundred miles.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out his mobile, “Fuck,” he muttered as he looked down at his text messages. “She’s psycho. I have moved on but your friend, because she’s not my friend, hasn’t.” He tossed his phone onto my lap, walked back to the trunk, and slammed his hand down on the car he loved.
I ignored his fit and looked down at what the “psycho” had written him in the text message.
My darling, I’m home. I’ve come home for you as I said I would. I miss you and think of you all the time, and I know you feel the same way. Don’t be mad Danny. I’m better for it. I’m better for you. Happily ever after, the two of us will be together, forever.
The rest of the message listed every conceivable way of getting in touch with her. The words “I’m better for it” she had written seared into me, filling me with sadness. I was shocked it hadn’t done the same for him. How blind had he become to her?
“Danny,” I got out of the car, “You need to call her right now. I get it. You’re done with her, but you can’t leave her in tangles like this.”
“She’s been gone six months. I haven’t heard from her since she sent that letter. I thought she had moved on, found some French dude. I don’t owe her anything, Serge. I’m not calling her.”
“Danny you’re going to call her right now.” I pushed the phone into his hand, “Say it’s over for good. That’s it. That’s all you have to say. Then hang-up, break the phone, change your number, whatever, but let her know. You do owe her that.”
“I get it. You’re loyal, and the best friend a person could have but stay out of this. Her needy bullshit... that’s all it is. She’ll be over it in a week.” He sighed, but his face raged with anger, “This is our house, our home buddy, but don’t bring her around. She’s poison.”
“Dude, fuck, you wouldn’t treat a stranger like this. You were better to the trail of women before Sarah.”
“Dude,” he yelled, “I texted her the day after she left and told her I was done with her.”
“She didn’t get the message. It couldn’t have been clear. What did you say?”
“That she was my arm, not my heart. We’re done talking about this, Serge.” He turned to walk in the house, but I grabbed his arm and held tight.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“She knows what it means. Enough Serge.” He shook my hand away. “She was bored on the plane. Seriously, not a word from her in five months and now this? It’s not real. She’s not real and never was, selfish. She’ll shop it off. Dude, don’t let her ruin us the way she ruins everything else.”
I took a hard look at him. I was as shocked as he was. She hadn’t mentioned him once in any of her letters. I had assumed, wrongly it seemed, that she had seen the folly of trying to recapture the past, felt foolish for not knowing that people change, or in Danny’s case, don’t change.
Danny was wrong about her being selfish, about her being the ruin of all those around her, but maybe he was right in thinking that this was just a fantasy that she was projecting on to him. Maybe it was jetlag. I decided to try it his way. The worst decision of my life.
“Okay Danny, we’ll do it your way.” I opened the trunk and pulled out our bags, “I’m going to head out to dinner with her and my sister. Fuck, I don’t have time to shower. Do I stink?”
“You stink of manliness.” He sniffed hard, smiled, and everything was okay again.
…
I drove like a maniac up Sunset or as much one can in a fuel-efficient car, cutting through the quiet neighborhoods of Beverly Hills risking a speeding ticket. Too amped up to look for a parking spot on the street, I left my car with the valet in front of the restaurant for the criminal price of $8.00.
I looked in through the front window of the restaurant and took a deep breath, centering my high energy. The two of them were at a table towards the back of the restaurant, chatting away. Zelda threw her head back in laughter as my sister spoke in her animated way, her hands waving around making a point I couldn’t read without more context, like hearing what she was saying.
I opened the door and stood as if I were looking around for the two of them, but my wandering eyes were centered on the two of them. I could only see Zelda from the waist up and a large wealthy looking man was blocking my view. I could see her hair was different, still long and white, silky like an angora kitten, but styled, with long wisps, framing her face, highlighting her cheekbones. Her eyebrows, which had always had an alluring arch were even more defined giving her large dark eyes a stronger come hither look if that were possible.
She was unmistakably Zelda, but from what I could see a more polished version. She spoke back to my sister in the same animated way. Her delicate long fingered hand moved across her face pushing a stray lock away from her eyes. She saw me, and I could not pretend for another moment I did not see her.
She stood up in an uncharacteristically clumsy way pushing the table into my sister and jumping out into the walkway almost knocking a busboy with his hands full of half-eaten plates of food down to the ground. She apologized as I floated, or that’s what it felt like, across the room to her.
“Zelda...Our pictures to each other...” I whispered back to her.
“They were the same...” She inhaled and continued her cooing, “You smell so good, just like after lacrosse when we were kids. Your hair, Serge...” She released me and took her seat in the red leather booth.
“Hi Serge,” my sister said, “Sit down, do you know what you want? We were waiting for you to order. I’m starving.”
“Zelda, is she as irritable with you as she is with me?” I laughed as I sat down next to her, “Hello Carolina.”