There is a stuttered shuffle-ball-chain and then a pause in
the linear free fall time warp that is eternity as I step off the stairwell of
the plane and walk onto the snippet of tarmac, into the terminal, seeing the
tint reflection of the woman of my dreams, the creature I have been writing
poems after poems over for the past months for, the creature who I envision
will spill meaning into my life, the person the commune of heavenly saints, the
orchestration of higher providence my youthful nineteen year old bones feels
oriented to be with for eternity.
The sight
of my Beatrice, the sight of my five-ft 4 Megan, the sight of my all.
She is looking shy, snug, her lips welded together in
half-smile, coy, almost. Behind the window of extreme tint she looks just like
the woman in the passport photograph she sent me, the extras, the woman who
abstained from smiling at the international photographer because her teeth were
still hurting.
With my
nylon bag still flung over my shoulder like a fresh hunt I strut up to the
sight of my muse in autumn. A smile slowly ripples into her face. Then a blush.
Then a larger smile.
I am the
first to barter a salutation.
“Hello,” I
say very simply.
We are in
doors and everything is a blur. Light seems to richochet and skirt behind the
“Hi,” her
lips respond, as if engaged in a metaphysical chorus of recognition. The
plucked notes constituting the epic overture of our shared song. A smile
unfolds between the separate bridges of our smile as our limbs gravitate
towards the bounty of each others respective lower waist and back, an embrace,
I can smell the mist of her body, the newness of her neck and shoulder, the
squeeze on both polar ends seems to grapple and tug and reel, the fleeting
golden radiance of autumn, the earth tangoing with the nearest cosmic bulb 93
million miles away, the splash of light having left the solar hearth in a
ripple of nuclear intensity seven minutes ago, while I was still hovering above
the gold course like topography of the fox river valley, now sprinkle across
the atmospheric halo of the planet in a streaking tithe of generating glory, and the girl now ardently
ensconced in the prison of my arms, realizing only in medias embrace that I am
somehow buoyed also in the cradle of her arms and that we are both squeezing
the fuck out of each other in one elongated embrace that seems to throw fits of
unalloyed envy into the anthem of eternity forever above.
“It’s good
to see you again.” I say, as, as if angelically choreographed, our limbs go
limp from scaling the proximity of the others body and our fingertips subside.
*
“Do you
have any luggage?” Megan asks, heading in the direction of the luggage
carousel.
“Everything
I have is right here.” I say, as I hold up the nylon red bag I have been
lugging with me since I left the cement steps of my house what seems like a
collective lifetime earlier. Somehow I refrain from stating espousing that
everything that I have ever spiritually yearned for in the corporeal blink of
this lifetime is stationed three feet to my imminent left.
As we exit
the airport the sliding doors seem to hush open. Megan turns to me.
“Cigarettes,”
Megan says, as we step out into the parking lot of the Appleton Airport, “Do
you smell them?”
I comment
in the affirmative, making a guttural sound of dissent with my lips, proud that
I have just quit, once again.
“We should
get some sometime this weekend.” Megan says, referring to smokes.
“Yes,” I
say, shocked that she wants to smoke, the images of the unvarnished bride of
health slowly deteriorating inside the ashtray of my psyche. Somehow the
thought of Megan indulging in my most sacred vice next to caffeine is extremely
alluring.
Megan has the type of vehicle where
the seatbelts automatically snaps you into place when the car door shushes to a
close. Rather than place my duffel bag in the back seat, next to her school
books, I keep it wedged between the caps of my knees. There is muffled whir and
the vehicle is quickly off, jetting through the airport parking lot, a scattering
of leaves crackling behind the vehicle in the fashion of dust. As Megan reaches
the entrance to the airport she unbuckles her seatbelt and reached above the
overhead visor searching for a parking voucher.
“Do you
need money?” I ask her. Megan declines as she grasps the receipt, and I try not
to make it obvious as she unlocks her door and hands the voucher to the toll
booth operator, that I am overtly ogling her cute denim clad ass, swearing up
and down that it is the sexiest thing I have ever seen.
There is an
apprehensiveness about Megan as she drives. Twice she has already asked me if
I’m alright. Twice I have responded in the affirmative.
“I was
thinking if you wanted to we could go down to Door County
I tell her
I don’t care what we do this weekend.
“All I
wanna do is just hang out with you angel.” I respond. Megan’s echoes out again
a very, “he’s so sweet,” awww.
“There’s a
football game tonight. My highschool. If you want to go to that.”
We have already told each other
numerous times that the other looks good. I have already conveyed to her that
it feels real good to see her again.
There are smiles. In the back of her Volvo there are several
school books heaped together, strewn across the back seat.
It seems a lifetime ago when I first espied the sight of the
spritely creature seated humped over cocoon like fashion in the carpeted
hallway of a posh suburban hotel with airliners streaking by overhead in
thunderous meted yawns.
“I have to stop in the mall to talk
to someone about a potential job a friend is trying to set me up with so I’ll
have money for Christmas.” Megan says. In the back seat of her vehicle is a
bushel of stacked school books. She drives fast, clipping corners in a rash
fashion,.We pass emerald neon brick-kiln plateau of Barnes and Nobles. I think
about the bookmark Megan sent me a month ago. I think about last June, wading
in the air conditioner of barnes and Nobles, floating throughout the store with
a stack of books sunk into the palms of my hands,Ppat Mullowneys monotone
expressing amazement and the text he has just fished up from the rugged
corridors of the boxes, as if catching a fish in a trap and watching as it
wriggles fresh with life while cupped in its hand.
“You don’t
mind do you?” She asks again, as if she is overtly concerned about her propriety.
No, I tell her., swiping my chin as if following a ledger
line on sheet music. I tell her I don’t mind at all.
***
We walk into aquatic blue glower of a mall in autumn, soon
to be festooned with garish Holiday bric-a-brac surely come two weeks before thanksgiving.
The first store we pass is a bookstore. A rival of Barnes
ampersand Nobles.
“Come
here,” I say, leading Megan inside the excessively lighted bookstore, waltzing
past the saluting almost neon brows of glossy magazine, past the cheap mass
marketed romantic best sellers, MEN ARE FROM MARS, the Dual alters and pathetic
cardboard pyres dedicated to CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD and the latest serving of
CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SOUL, past tomes of true crime each with pictures of OJ
Simpson on the cover, near the end, the slant that reads simply LITERATURE the two columns dedicated to the grind and crux
of my vocation.
“Kerouac,”
I say, holding up ON THE ROAD, even though I have a copy in my back pack, along
with Walt Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS. As if indenting the beginning of the
beat-generation bulletin with my forefinger and thumb I flip a few pages into
the beginning and begin to read.
“I love this
section:”
I hold the book up as if I am on some sort of soapbox in Hyde park via London and begin to tell Megan about the individuals I have already told her about numerous times in the howling h and writing of my missives. I tell her about Pat Mullowney and how I met him last summer when we were opening the Barnes and Nobles up and had to alphabetized and shelf the books in the fiction department and how Pat would look (a smile on his lips that look some what like a lugubrious harlequin that has just discerned enlightenment) saying the name Cup-oat-tea or Carol-whack or Bou-kow-skee. I tell her about endless afternoons loafing around the oak mahogany at Lums, ashing out cigarette après clove cigarette, scrawling poems on whatever napkin or placemat we could pawn off as parchment. I tell her about the long meandering drives in the van o’ Hale chasing the azure-hinted tendrils of the sunset down the solitary trigonometric cornfield slate of dusty Midwestern roads. I tell her about the Drac mobile and about heartache and smoking a box of swischer sweets on Judy’s porch last summer in the opulent vector of town and watching as the sun seems to bowl and lob its intergalactic flare into the eastern pond of the horizon. I tell her about white Trash Pat and overtly air-conditioned afternoons in the mall and the scent of sun-lotion on co-workers and snapping crickets in the haze of dusk and bonfires at Jackie's house and being in the hospital and hurting and somehow being ensconced by a bubble of my closest friends at the same time.
“I still
have the Anne Sexton book of poems you sent me.” Megan adds, stating that she
hasn’t had much of a chance to read it with school and all but from what she
has read she has found it interesting indeed. At the mention of Anne Sexton I
immediately break out into an ad hoc rendition of “Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator,”
the last stanza, which makes Megan blush.
Part of me wants to grab Megan’s hand and squeeze it. Part
of me is afraid. I still have the copy of ON THE ROAD in paw. Megan looks at me
as if she wants me to read to her some more. My thumb scuttles across the paper linear of
the book, prying open the last chapter of Kerouac’s text like an unopened route
66 atlas stowed in Neal Cassady’s glove compartment of a recently purloined
Plymouth. I read to her about the banner
of America, feeling all alone, thinking about how it Iowa
“Come
here,” I say. Holding her hand for one second before quickly letting go,
leading Megan to the front of the store, the New releases.”
“Ethan
Hawke’s book.” I say, alighting it off the shelf, pointing at the sweet-n-sour
heart bleeding a tear on the cover. Without hesitation Megan asks me if I have
read it.
“It just
came out about a week ago.” I said. “I love the title.”
“We need to
rent that movie this weekend.” Megan says, referring to Before Sunrise. “It’ll
be cool to watch it with you.”
“Aren’t you gonna buy the book?”
She asks me.
“Not now.
Maybe soon.”
***
“So what happened at Barnes and
Nobles?” Megan inquires, there have been several lulls in our conversational
gaps. Every time I try to make it witticism or comment she blushes looks down
smiles and remains silent.
“I
basically had one of those cathartic moments where I felt that I wanted to quit
work and just pour out all my time and energy on my education.” I say, Megan
nods her head claiming that that sounds like a good idea.
“I had a
little money saved up from working all the god damn time last year and I got a
500 dollar scholarship which I got to keep for myself and which paid for my
ticket up here but other than that I’m strongly beginning to reconsider save
for the fact that I had employment and shortly I’ll be broke.”
Megan
responds by offering out a rather commiserating I know what that’s like.
“Shit, It
sucks. Whadyasay. Can a poet buy you a cup of coffee?”
We stop in Gloria Jeans and I order two large café mochas. I
tell Megan how much I love the book mark she sent me, stating the Turkish
mantra of “Coffee should be black as night, hot as hell and sweet like love
adage from memory. A silent smile creeps up into her face. Megan responds to my
plagiarized proverb by stating that she thought I might like that.
Megan
offers out a snug and almost nonchalant nod of concurrence. A wallowing silence
begins to envelope the for some reason blue-space between us. Inside the
interior concavity of my chest I feel
comfortable. This feels right. Being next to Megan seems right, although she
feels apprehensive. As we walk in the direction of her future employer I allow
my heart to shattered the spasms of silence.
Megan cuts
me short and tells me that she is sorry to hear about my girlfriend. I respond
back with a long drawled out what.
“You know.
Your girlfriend. What was her name, Kat?’
Megan looks at me as if I have just somehow offended her in some way and she is sorry she can’t remember every minute facet of my personal life.
“I think
that was her name. The girl in the prom picture.”
“Anyway,”
Megan amends, “I’m really sorry about that. From your letters you guys seemed
to be the perfect couple. And that prom picture—I mean, everybody wants their
prom picture to look like that.”
“It’s no
big deal.” I inform Megan, seeing where this is going, trying to tell her that
we didn’t really have all that much in common anyway. Trying to express to her
that she is young, naïve, immature—that we had no sort of an emotional rapport
whatsoever to speak of in the soil of our relationship. That’s the word I use,
rapport. I pronounce it sans the t, like it was a spelling B.
“She’s the same age and grade as I am, David.” Megan replies.
Touché.
***
The restaurant where Megan is
applying is a deli located in Dayton
“She must be back here,” I say,
grabbing Megan by the wrist, shepherding her in lamb-slaughtering fashion
behind the counter, into the back room, scoping my head to the left, saying
hell, being greeting only by an echoing lid of reverberating silence. Megan is
apprehensive about being the backroom. She tells me that maybe we should just
up and go. That she can come back later. That it is not really a big deal. That
she doesn’t want to like get in trouble for being some place she shouldn’t.
That she can call the manager when she gets back home.
I tell Megan that if the manager
informed her via phone that she would be in at said time then we should have
nothing to worry about and the manager would be pleased to see that Megan is
showing both initiative and eagerness in attempt to garner employment. Megan
shoots me a look as if to convey it’s only part-time, its not like it’s a
career or anything like that. There is a
metallic clang of tray from what appears to be a side room where the dishes are
washed and stowed. The doughy countenance of the manager appears before us in
almost heralding minor-prophet fashion. She is apron-clad sporting a bad
late-80’s perm and is overweight and looks like she hasn’t slept since sometime
during the Reagan administration. I am about ready to take the initiative and
introduce my muse to the yeasty yeti when Megan interjects stating that she was
the one who called about the job and had an appointment at given time.
The soporific-eyelided women
inquires if Megan has ever worked with food before. Megan swipes her head and
says nope.
“You’ll have to be trained then,”
The manager says. I excuse myself exiting the backroom and taking generous slurps
of my mocha. Megan comes out five minutes later with what appears to be a
schedule folded between her clasped hands. She
doesn’t appear to be smiling.
“Did you get the job then?”
“I need to come in next week for
training.”
“Are you excited. I mean, this is
like your first big time job and everything.”
Megan looks back at me. We are
headed in the direction of the parking lot which for some weird reason I appear
to be taking the lead. It is almost if I can hear Megan blink.
I tell Megan we should celebrate.
Megan tells me that it is no big deal. That she just needed money for
Christmas. That it is really no big deal at all.
She then says my name again. Light
greets us as we reach the parking lot. Megan turns to me and inquires if I
remember where she parked.
“I sometimes forget things like
that.”
***
I remember talking to you on the phone and role-playing going
to Paris and totally wanting to lose it to you.”
We are connected to a social network spread out in front of
us like a game of battleship only we find ourselves lodged on polar sides of the country.
If we wanted to we could communicate like this via our
phones without having to hear each
others voices via something called texting.
Megan will tell me, via a diminutive window frame sprouting
up on the bottom of a larger window frame almost exactly fifteen years later
since I said goodbye to Appleton that autumnal afternoon.
***
The way home from Dayton Megan
still seems cloaked in a silent cape of apprehensiveness. I ask her if she is nervous about me meeting her
progenitors. She bites down on her lip and says the word no. She then says that
her parents are really cool and all. Megan continues to plow through the
avenues nearing her abode, missing three consecutive stop signs and failing to
use her blinker leaving a crinkle of leaves behind her muffler as she marshals
the vehicle on to Beechwood Avenue.
Every front yard in Appleton Wisconsin is so manicured it
looks like someone should shout par when they walk on the lawn. Megan doesn’t
laugh in the slightest when I correlate Beechwood avenue with Budweiser’s
Beechwood Aged and inquire when the Clydesdales will come galloping down the
street any second now.
I stare at the real-life digits to
the address I have been writing in the center of every envelope I have sent
Megan over the past seven months.
As we reach the welcome mat Megan
shoots me a facial glance indicative of
even though this is the house I have grown up in and where I live maybe we should
ring the bell as some sort of courtesy
or something. I look back at her, my red duffel bag still dripping in knuckled-furled
off of my shoulder blade. There is a gravid pause. I look back at Megan and she
says nothing, standing next to me, a pensive expression sewn into the
diminutive hyphen of her bottom lip, the bride forgetting the question asked by
the minister steepeled in front of her.
There is a swiveled squeak as the
hedge to the screen door opens in the fashion of an advent calendar as both of
Megan’s parents stand before us, welcoming smiles on their respective faces her
father’s hand salutes out in the fashion of a handle on a slot machine. Megan is quiet and her parents’ appear to be
talking both at once. They tell me that it is nice to meet me. They use the
word pleasure. They seem to tilt their head in almost windmill fashion while
stating that they have seen all the mail I have sent via thoroughly stamped and
metered post for their daughter over the past six months.
“Oh you
have read them.” I say as they blush the tips of their fingers over their lips
and begin to laugh.
Inside the
door in the foyer there is a picture of Megan’s family perhaps when she was
four years older. Her mother with long hair. Her father looking gaunt and
serious with peninsula sideburns, a beige suit and mackerel colored tie with a
knot in the center of it that looks like it could be the size of a minor league
baseball diamond.
“Come here,” Megan says, giving me
the tour of the house. The house is the affluent sniff of an early eighties
homage to perennial promise of white middle class. The first floor alone could
pass comfortably as a ranch house based on the merit of diameter and sprawling
width. The second floor is reserved for a large bathroom and two commodious
sides bedrooms, one once belonging to Megan’s older sister Katie, the other
belonging to the northern Beatrice of my dreams. Another flight of carpeted
stairs leads to parent’s bedroom chamber above.
“This is my
room.” Megan says, brushing the door open. I see the Anne Sexton book I sent
her last spring. Her bed is neatly manicured, a walk in closet so large it looks
like it could pass for an 1100 dollar a month apartment in the lower east side
where rectangular tiles of jeans remain neatly stacked on each other. This is
the room Megan sent me pictures of last summer. The room with the portrait of Raphael’s
angels that Mark Andrew sent me for my 16th birthday, the pensive
eye browed toddler-flab of the twin cherubim’s that seemingly will follow me my
whole life.
It is the bed where the woman of my dreams lies on and
dreams. I look at the phone and try not to think about the last time I called
her when her friend picked up and then five minutes later when asked where she
was Megan told me that she was saying goodbye to someone.
Next to the mirror are pictures of her friends huddled in
triangles and a varsity letter puffed out with the digits 9 and 7.
As I look at the rectangular cheekbones of her drawers I
wildly try not to imagine what drawers her panties are kept in, folded in
little triangular configurations.
“And these are for
you.” She hands me a pair of towels which I accept in spelling bee trophy like
fashion. I look at Megan’s bed. I wonder if she has kept any of the letters I
sent her over the summer and if so which drawer they might be sealed in. I
wonder if she has scribbled out my name in her diary. Judging from how she has
acted when I am in the proximity of her shadow this afternoon I wonder if she
has thought about me at all.
My contacts have been
hatched in the lids of my eyes all day. I tell Megan that I need to use the closet
sized restroom in the basement. I can hear her mother carol down the stairs
with a voice that sounds just like Lily Tomlin that Megan has a phone call.
Megan picks up downstairs and with a chirp tells her mother that she’s got it
waiting three seconds as to verify that her mother claps down the phone before
answering hello, immediately her voice starting to giggle. I can hear her lips
stretch and smile as I reach into the lids of my eyes and remove the
translucent saucers. Whoever Megan is
talking to on the phone is making her laugh in a way I have yet to be able to.
I look around at my duffel bag on the bed. Megan is asking the recipient on the
far end of the phone if there is any possible way he could get for her just a
fifth of Jack Daniels. On the far end of the basement is my bed enclosed in a
tetrahedron of old upholstery and furniture. There is a watercolor of downtown
Appleton, Wisconsin above the wall where I am to sleep. Three flights of stairs
separate myself from Megan’s bedroom.
Megan continues
to laugh and smile into the phone. I feel that I am doing something wrong.
“I mean,
you sure you just can’t pick me up a fifth?” She inquires before her voice
spasms off in hiccups and laughter, the tan shade of her visage folds into what
looks like spring. I offer a reciprocating smile, backflipping over the inside
of my chest, mentally wishing that I could take her to that orchard of laughter
the lad chatting with her on the opposite side of the phone is seemingly taking
her.
I walk into the other room. The
laundry room on the north side of the basement is coated with leftover Peanuts
vignettes from the late 70’s. A picture of snoopy lounging nose up on top of
the steeple of his dog house. I brush into the guest bathroom downstairs, the
doors of which open and close like a pantry door. Megan laughs again before
telling the recipient of her affections goodbye, hanging up the phone with a
plastic clack.
“I tried to
get us some booze for the weekend.” She says. “ I don’t know if I succeeded or
not.”
“It doesn’t
matter.” I say, looking at Megan, a smile stretched across my face, realizing
that I have everything I have ever wanted in less than two decades surfacing on
this planet in front of me as we speak.
“We can go for a walk before we go
to dinner if you like and just talk for a while.”
I tell
Megan its beautiful here. I use the word Buccolic and hamlet even though she
looks at me funny when I say that.
“It’s not
bucolic, David. It’s only Appleton
***
“How do you get when you drink.” I inquire, a year later,
holding the cordless phone into the slant of my chin like a little kid trying
to discern the sound of the ocean.
“Horny.”
Megan says, as if she has just swallowed something and can’t get enough of it
stuffed between her lips
***
Pre-dusk autumnal silver seems to be splashing into the
streets. Towards the west the sun is being engulfed in a yolk of blinding
peach-dribbling light. I tell Megan that I can’t believe how barren the trees
are.
“Back in
P-town autumn, the branches don’t usually lose the bulk of all their leaves until
after Halloween. Hell, the sweet gum tree in front of my house never seems to
lose its leaves until we have Christmas lights up, sometimes even after the new
year.”
Megan looks at me a tad perplexed.
I am a freshman in college. I ask Megan the question I have been asking every
romantically linked female cohort since Dawn Michelle Kimble back in the day.
“So,” I
stutter, “How’s big time senior year?”
Megan
blushes and says that she doesn’t know. Then, using the same inquisitive
high-pitched monotone I previously employed Megan volleys the same question
back at me, asking me how big time Freshman year is going. Mentally I mark off
another tattered touché and smile, remembering why I like this chick.
The
northern wind brushes through our bodies in a raking fashion. Megan is wearing
a sweater and a jacket. Her shoulders slightly titter with the almost Pentecostal
passing of the wind.
I tell
Megan again that this is a nice town. I tell her that I like it here. Every
time there is a lull in our conversation I verbalize to Megan that it is really
good seeing her again. I call her Meg as sockets of lavender slowly splatter
against the western arena of the skyline. Towards the east a film of darkness
is beginning to scuttle, as if on all fours. The subdivision where Megan lives
consists of two level affluent ranch style houses reminding me of the north
part of P-town where all the rich kids with futures subside. Gradually as we
walk dining room windows become illuminated with lights. Every time a car slices
past a sprinkle of leaves orbit in its wake. For reasons I can’t understand
Megan brings up Kristina once again.
“I’m really
sorry about you and your girlfriend. How long did you two date?”
“About four
months. I really didn’t know her all that well. She was on the prom planning
committee at her high school and she needed a date and I was sort’ve best
friends with her best friend’s boyfriend if that makes any sense.”
Megan nods and says that it does. Another car shoots past
tithing a confetti crinkle of leaves.
Megan asks
so just what happened, before tacking on a “besides the fact that you were
unfaithful” bit at the end of the sentence.
“Good ol’
Infidelity.” I say. Megan does not look amused in the slightest.
“Sounds to
me like you really hurt her, David.” She says, claiming again that no one has a
prom picture like that.
Megan asks
how many times I felt compelled to cheat on her. I shrug my shoulders avoid the
questions. When she asks again I lie and tell her that it was only once.
“Her birthday
was a few days ago. On October first. I sent her a card and I called her up and
apologized to her for everything.”
“How did
she act?”
“She was
aloof. Like she always is.”
A blanket of wet chalkboard
darkness is beginning to slip across the horizon like some sort of a lid. The
sun has almost completely winked out on the opposite side of the aerial canvas.
I make small talk about day light savings. Falling back. How next week at this
time, it will have already been dark for a good hour.
“We need to
turn around and go back home now. We’ll get some food.”
I nod,
obeying her request by marshaling my limbs a full 180, pausing, telling Meg
that it is really good to see her once again. She remains silent, picking up
her gait into the direction of the house.
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