A Leak In The Safe

There was a slight smudge on the window where she’d laid her forehead, distorting the precise lines of the house across the street. She knew exactly what Charlie would have said about where she lived, remembering only too well how he’d spit out the word suburb like an obscenity. To him all the big houses and manicured lawns she and her neighbors worked so hard to maintain were no better than prisons, perversions of nature, stolen property, pretentious and artificial. Maybe so, she thought smiling grimly, but it was a lot better than wherever he was now, wasn’t it? To most people this place was a lot closer to heaven than to hell – Linda, her girlfriend from school, for instance, whose father had developed the area, making millions by transforming what had been just another of the grimy bohunk bedroom towns that surrounded the mills into an enclave for the rich refugees who kept spilling out of the city. What Charlie had seen as a predatory razing of history, Linda had found heroic, a visionary stroke of genius by the father she idolized.

Linda had been an enthusiastic and unquestioning devotee of school, church, country, family – everything her parents believed in, she believed in more. Popular despite a decided homeliness, her enthusiasm had always seemed well founded, as she became the first class president in the history of the school, and later married her first and only boyfriend, surrendering her virginity on her wedding night. Her first child came ten months later, and three more almost as regularly after, even as she worked her way up the corporate ladder at her father’s realty company, groomed as the great man’s eventual successor.

If Charlie had been aware of it, he would have no doubt found it deeply ironic that this firm follower of a disciplined, healthy lifestyle and regular check-ups had developed a malignant tumor resistant to all the weapons of medical science. Even her cherished faith had let her down – she’d caused a minor sensation at her conservative church when she’d stood up at her prayer and healing mass, her once luxuriant blond hair reduced to irregular tufts, and vowed loudly to "kick cancer’s ass" with the help of God and positive thinking. She’d died soon after, leaving career, church, children, parents and quickly remarried husband behind, her obituary considerably longer than Charlie’s, but with the same conclusion.

Now a battered pickup turned down the street and rattled past, several lawn mowers in the equally battered trailer fishtailing behind, no doubt a landscaper getting in one last grass cutting before the raking and shoveling season began. She’d always thought that if she knew one thing about herself it was that she was a survivor, but lately she’d come to realize that her survival was simply an accident like any other, that it really didn’t have anything to do with her. The way people thought about things didn’t matter, their beliefs were just another way to shield themselves from the world, like a white picket fence or the glass in a window.

Her forehead fell back to the pane and for a moment all she was aware of was the sway of shadows.

                            — the end —

Kind of busy today with the art fair (mostly busy suppressing my homicidal urges toward the human herd, I’m afraid) so I’ll burden you with another piece of my juvenilia circa 1975 —

The moonlight stretched like a road onto the water. I was compressed, at the eye of a hurricane, the sand tingling around me. I felt rather than heard her tenuous footsteps as she led herself to my side. Her hand grazed my shoulder and fell to my hand, joining there as if it were another part of my body, our shared blood flowing in and out with the waves. The dance of the figures of light upon the water was complicated by the arrival of a warm rain, its drops flowing directly to our veins. There was thunder beyond the dome of the sky, adding a gentle bass line to the sonata.

The waves slowly began to shift colors; now red, now blue, now a muted yellow. Huge undefined shapes played underneath the water’s surface, threatening to break out onto the shore. There was a fluttering as great flocks of phoenixes and nightingales wheeled endlessly above.

"What is happening?" She said, her face calm, devoid of fear or wonder.

"Can’t you see?" I said gently. "It’s the end of the world." Leaning back slowly, I closed my eyes.

SWAY (PART THREE)

She’d been in a lot of classes with Charlie that first year and had been intrigued by him from the start, even though he was so firmly outside her quickly drawn social circle. In a school where those who weren’t jocks or popular were tacitly and not so tacitly encouraged to remain as inconspicuous as possible, Charlie had stood out in his stubborn refusal to try as hard as everybody else to be like everybody else.

She’d finally gotten to know him at the literary magazine, a circle of overly sensitive adolescents who composed moony stories and poems to and about each other and then published them in a little magazine once a year. She’d written and drawn little scraps of things for as long as she could remember, an interest her popular friends found acceptable in a girl, if, like all girlish things, slightly ridiculous. With his acerbic wit and more obscure idealism Charlie held sway over the lit crowd the same way her boyfriend lorded over his.

As, much to the consternation of the black clad poetesses, she began to attend their meetings, she felt his attention almost unwillingly drawn to her, and his hand in her slow acceptance and advancement in the group. He goaded and chafed her as he did the others, but, already an aficionada of male desire, she could sense the attraction underneath. They began to meet at lunch and the library, at first seemingly by accident, but later with clear intent, initiating long discussions; arguments and dialogues on all sorts of topics, he elucidating his precociously developed nihilistic philosophies, but also listening, solemnly considering her awkwardly serious thoughts and nascent creative efforts, the very things she hid from her boyfriend for fear of ridicule.

Strangely, though, she felt most attracted to him when he excoriated her, mixing stinging sarcasm with an attack on everything conventional in her life, dismissing all her friendships and beliefs, and challenging all the “normal” things she liked and took part in. Although she often felt overwhelmed in the face of his ferocious arguments, she’d never completely given in, never conceded that he was all right and she was all wrong, a refusal she could tell impressed him far more than the nodding acquiescence of his acolytes. They’d grown surprisingly close, but some final layer of irony and caution had prevented them from getting romantically involved, their relationship continuing in and around both their amours, his with a succession of long haired bohemian girls, one of whom tried to kill herself (with aspirin!) for love, hers as the long-standing, almost ceremonial consort of the athlete king, who exercised his largely passionless suzerainty over her even after he’d gone away to college.

It was for the best that they’d never taken the next step – the two of them together would have been impossible, like a tiger and an ape – not in that zoo, anyway, and she though they both tacitly understood, but somehow after they’d graduated Charlie had lost his balance.

They’d gone to different colleges, the distance seeming to affect him more than her, his letters coming twice as fast as her replies, which grew shorter and colder as his grew longer and more wildly intense. In the end this paragon of non-conformity had been distressingly like the rest, appearing unannounced at her sorority house, disheveled and out of control, saying she was the only woman he’d ever loved, finally falling to his knees, sobbing, begging him to come away with him. She’d run away, leaving her sorority sisters and their frat boy friends to throw him out.

He’d written contritely to her later, apologizing, trying to make light of the whole thing as a drunken escapade, but she couldn’t bring herself to answer. Even after they’d both graduated and were living in their home town, they hadn’t been able to get much past an embarrassed hello the few times they’d run into each other.

And where had that dark, contrarian philosophy she’d internalized gotten its creator? The last time she’d seen Charlie, he’d been in a seedy bar one of her more demanding boyfriends had dragged her to, declaiming verses about his great lost love, too fucked up to even recognize her. She hadn’t been surprised to hear he’d died shortly after, alcohol and drugs, a suicide one way or another, all those ardent poems he’d written long discarded and forgotten. She kept his brief obituary in a book he’d given her – she wasn’t really sure where it was at the moment.