Old

by Stan Charnofsky

  “So, did he?”

  “No. He screwed me. Kept me hanging. I was stupid about it, but couldn’t let go. That was a year before you and I met. We had stayed friends, again my addiction to him keeping me pathetic. That’s when he loaned me his car (mine was in the shop) but with the condition I only drive it to the market or the local mall. When I crashed it, he did blow his top, because that car was his baby, a piece of machinery he was in love with; clearly loved it more than any person in his life. Now he won’t let me forget what I did to his little bug. I feel guilty enough, but he won’t let it go.”

  “Does he want you to pay for it?”

  “Not monetarily. He had insurance. But he does want me to pay—in shame and humiliation.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Imagine, a shrink not knowing how to respond to somebody feeling humiliated. The word in the psychology profession is, never use your skills on people in your own life, family or friends. Finally, I whispered, “Do you still love him?”

  I saw her eyes grow huge and knew that, all at once, she realized she was gabbing away about another man, and how that must have made me feel.

  “Oh Ted, I’m sorry. I’ve been insensitive.” She hugged me, pulled away and said, “It’s a wounded love, the kind that can never be, but keeps nagging because at one time it had potential.”

  I didn’t think she answered my question, but I kind of caught the gist. Once you love somebody, there is never a total collapse of those feelings, even if in the real world it no longer makes sense. The trouble was that whatever residual she had for Douglas kept torturing her so that she wasn’t completely free with me. Now, what in hell was I supposed to do with that?

  No duplicity involved. She was candid, but simply had a subterranean agenda that would not go away.

  TEN

  We both played tennis, Annie and I, so that was one way we were compatible. We tried to avoid ugly competition by playing doubles with friends, and switching partners after each set. One of my fondest memories is of Annie, after a spirited match of tennis, flushed and sweaty, her face radiating youthful beauty, sitting with me under an umbrella, taking long swigs on a bottle of Dr. Pepper. Even that was, in her small way, a protest, since she had read about and hated the Coca Cola people for how they treated workers in their South American plants.

  We also both loved theatre, had season tickets to the Taper in downtown LA, and the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood, though it wasn’t called that in those days. We saw several powerful plays, written by the great playwrights of the fifties, sixties and seventies, like Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. It was much later that the likes of August Wilson, David Mamet, Harold Pinter, and Tony Kushner came along. Now and then we’d run into a piece of junk—usually at the Taper where they were always trying to be innovative. We didn’t always agree about the junk, but because we cared about each other, our disagreements were civil, if sometimes heated.

  Where we got into trouble was when she would take on what I silently called “a Douglas mood.” No words would explain her sudden melancholy, but I could tell she was off on some purple cloud, an internal discontent eating away at her. Since there was nothing else I knew about in her life that could bring her grief, I went right to the unfinished business with good old Douglas as the source.

  Then one day, we ran into him. Annie and I were having lunch at an outdoor café on the Sunset Strip, and this couple walked by us, led by the maître d’, heading toward a table down the row. The man stopped and said, “Well,” and Annie said, “Oh.”

  He reached for his companion’s elbow—she was a tall, striking woman, maybe five feet ten inches—pulled her around to face us and said, “This is Tara. She’s a model.”

  Instantly, Annie put her arm around my neck and said, “This is Ted. He’s a psychologist.”

  Zing! She wasn’t going to be topped. I felt like a commodity, but did understand Annie’s kind of pathetic need to impress.

  Both nodded, and the two add-ons, the model and I, acknowledged each other. It took less than one minute and Douglas pointed to the host and said, “Gotta go.”

  Annie smiled a big smile, phony as hell, and said, “Don’t we all.”

  When they were seated, she turned to me and whispered softly, “Sorry. I’m a shithead. He brings out the worst in me.”

  “Seems to me,” I said, “that the two of you have unresolved stuff. All that verbal cleverness skirts the issues. I don’t mean to give you advice, but it might dispel your angst if you made an appointment, sat down for half an hour, and hammered out a grand finale to your ragged relationship with him.”

  She was quiet for a moment, then in a little voice, so different from her woman’s contralto, softly said, “Teddy, you’re absolutely right. I need closure. The asshole keeps ringing my bell. I need to re-write my life in a different key.”

  “What key is that?”

  “How about the key of ‘me sharp?’”

  “And him flat?”

  “You got it.”

  “Well, I don’t want it. I want you to get it.”

  “That too,” she said, and cried.

  ELEVEN

  Four years swept by in the blink of an eye. (I recall a bit of verse that started out like that: “Years swept by in the blink of an eye, and though ye are young, be prepared to die!”) At least now, with so many years in-between, that’s how I remember it. That’s probably a truism, that when you get old, you look back on your whole life as if it simply and cruelly melted away. I was taken by the old folksong, Where Have All The Flowers Gone? and sometimes, when I’m alone, I ask myself, where has my life gone? I remember the song from Fiddler on the Roof, where Tevya sings, “I don’t remember growing older.” Well, neither do I.

  Annie and I had some glorious times together, never, despite her efforts, completely free of the Douglas connection fracturing her peace of mind. She got past him overtly, but, as with all failed relationships, in some corner of the symbolic heart dwelt a demon, ready to torture at the slightest reminiscence.

  We had a wonderful five-year anniversary experience, even though we weren’t married, feeling deeply a part of each other’s lives. I called her (often she’d stay with me, sometimes I’d stay with her, but we still maintained our separate residences) and said, “Annie, my lovely, I am getting tickets for you and me to go to Puerto Vallarta. What do you think?”

  She squealed. “I like that! When do we leave? I need to give notice at my work.”

  “How about April fifth? It’s the week before Easter, and my university is on spring break. We could leave on a Friday and come back the following Saturday.”

  She was ecstatic and I felt as if I had given her the ultimate gift. My last stay in Mexico, on the eastern side, had been marred by the plane flight with the woman feeling spurned and trying to punish me. I guess I was hoping this one would be an emotionally corrective experience and wipe out the old, tainted memories.

  We stayed in a weatherworn, architecturally interesting, pink-brick-colored hotel that looked like something out of a Bogart movie set in Algiers or somewhere. The lobby had churning ceiling fans and high-backed wooden chairs set in little cozy groupings. Mexican music played constantly, guitars and horns dominating. A breeze spun through the open atrium, cool and invigorating, off the ocean and sand, no more than forty yards from the hotel gate.

  Our room was not luxurious but comfortable, with all the basic amenities. I have to say that making love in a new and exotic setting changes the energy dramatically. We both felt free, unfettered, un-assailed by obligations and deadlines, and almost wicked in our sense of abandonment. What a glorious and wise decision—to get out of the routine and see things transmuted by a different culture, unusual food, and novel experiences!

  But, even in paradise things can go wrong. We had one near miss and one direct hit. The near miss occurred when we were scheduled to take a speedboat ride just off the coast, a high-speed affair advertised as geared for thrills without spills.
Our boat filled up with us still in line, and the next one would not leave for two hours, the afternoon siesta interfering. Annie and I decided to get a drink at a place with some dumb, half-American, half-Mexican name. I think it was Carlos and Charlie’s, or something like that.

  We were seated upstairs, with a glorious view of the shoreline, sipping on Margaritas, when the speedboat began to cross our vision from left to right, south to north. Looked like fun, people waving, the boat cruising at breakneck speed, foam crashing in all directions as if insulted by the intrusion. All of a sudden, half way across our visual screen, the boat seemed to dip below one of the plumes of foam, and when it rose up again, it was tilted on its side. In a moment it came crashing down, creating a wall of water in front and scattering the passengers in every direction, into the roiling water.

  Well, the final tally, which we heard gossiped about, was that three people were taken to the local hospital, but no one was killed. One older man suffered a mild heart attack, but it was believed he would recover, and one nine-year old child needed oxygen after swallowing too much water. That everyone was required to wear a flotation vest certainly saved a lot of lives. The next scheduled speedboat departure was cancelled.

  The direct hit came on our third day. We were told that a charming coastal village was accessible by water only, surrounded by jungle, inhabited by native Indians, and a forty-five-minute boat ride from the beach in Puerto Vallarta. It was called Yelapa, and had a couple of authentic cafes where visitors could enjoy local color and indigenous food. One eatery, in fact, was beside a cascada, or waterfall, and the ambience was said to be unmatched.

  We decided to sign up for it.

  What no one told us was that Yelapa had no dock, and that the boat that would ferry us there would simply pull into the surf and come to a stop. We would be expected to wade ashore.

  I rolled up my pants and Annie carried her shoes and we dipped into the water up to our thighs, headed for the sand. It was warm, and we dried quickly, the guide offering different suggestions about keeping our shoes off until we left the beach itself, how to avoid donkey droppings along the foot paths, and protecting ourselves from the equator-hot sun by wearing hats and sun-block.

  Our entourage headed off on a fascinating hike along hillside trails, through tiny population centers, tiendas where food was sold, a telefono booth if anyone needed to make a call, exotic flora on all sides. There was no mistaking that this was jungle territory. The guide even talked about panthers that stalked the village people’s livestock.

  We stopped after nearly two hours, and were guided to sit at some tables set on a flat landing, below a thatched hut, beside a tumbling waterfall. It was lunchtime and we were eager to see what the fare would be. Surprisingly, it was freshly baked apple pies, along with dark coffee or tea. That was it. No sandwiches, meat, fish, chicken, or even soup. But, you know, those pies were the best I had ever tasted, or have tasted since: tart, moist fruit, and crisp, savory crusts.

  Some fifty feet below, where the ‘cascada’ came down on rocks, were half a dozen children, playing in the shallow pool, their laughter adding to the ambience.

  Our little tourist party of twelve gringos seemed to revel in this most remarkable, yet simple tableau. It was rare for me because I had never been in such an ecologically different environment, never imagined such pristine loveliness, probably would have been hard-pressed to find anything like it in the good old USA.

  Annie, I could tell, was soaring with joy, her face a Technicolor wonder, eyes aglow, more radiant than I had ever seen her. This seemed to be her milieu, seemed to fill her up with new life.

  She swung her arm around my neck in a wrestler’s grip, pulled the side of my head up against her face, and began to lick my ear. I don’t know what a woman feels while pulling that off; I presume there is a flood of erotic emotion in her; it elevated me into a sexual frenzy so urgent that, all at once, I wished for the disappearance of the waterfall, the children’s frolicking, the rest of our tour group, the heavenly apple pie, in fact the whole magical, matchless scene. I turned my head slightly and whispered, “Let’s get out of here.”

  She giggled, and nodded.

  We rose and smiled sheepishly at the others. “Be back in a few minutes,” I said.

  We followed a narrow, serpentine dirt path for the equivalent of half a city block, came to a clearing and spied a patch of grass on a slight slope. In an instant, I was peeling off her clothes and she mine. I fell on top of her, but not before quickly devouring her naked body with my eyes, her breasts paisleyed by the filtered sunlight, her arms extended as if inviting the world in.

  I remember that moment as the most exotic, uninhibited, elegant, transcendent lovemaking I have ever experienced. When we both became still, exhausted, spent, she smiled as if everything in the world were perfect and said, “Okay, now you can kill me. It can’t get any better.”

  We got back to our hotel room two hours later, to find it had been ransacked, all our gift purchases from the day before, gone. A ring that was my father’s, gone. Two of Annie’s necklaces, gone. Two hundred dollars in cash, which I had left in my other pair of shoes, gone.

  The hotel people were embarrassed. Yes, they told us, there is much thievery in the town, but the hotel is usually safe. They did not know how such a thing could have happened. Paradise, sullied by a direct hit.

  TWELVE

  From my junior high school days on, I maintained a close friendship with a man who had an unusual name. His parents, whose last name was Kirsch, decided, for some obscure reason, to name their first-born son, Zandor. So, for four dozen plus years Zandor Kirsch and I went to movies and theatre together, played tennis, attended college football games at the Coliseum, and invited each other to any parties we hosted.

  He also became something of a confidant. At least, of all the people in my life, including any children, I would be more likely to tell Zandor about my issues than anyone. I will say right out, that he wasn’t necessarily the best listener—would interrupt a lot, express his views before he knew the whole story—but, I knew that he cared about me and that his motives were always for my welfare.

  “Teddy,” he told me during my Annie days, “this babe is the real thing. Damned if I know what you’re waiting for. You need to gobble her up before some other dude does.”

  “It takes two to tango,” I told him. “Annie is an equal entrant in this race, with full voting rights.”

  “Mixed metaphor,” he said. “You vote in an election, not a race.”

  “Whatever. I don’t simply decide and expect her to go along.”

  “Is she against marriage? Would she rather keep up the two households?”

  “I wouldn’t say she’s against it. She just isn’t ready. All the numbers don’t yet add up.”

  “That’s your psychology horseshit. I’ll bet you a dime to your dollar that she’d go for it if you took the risk to ask.”

  Zandor was not a gambler, and as this exchange shows, he was full of hyperbole. Still is. Despite all that, his rattling often got me off the dime, made me stretch for things I normally wouldn’t try. My whole life I kept telling myself that I wasn’t worthy enough to win a woman. That kind of self-talk kept me frozen, and alas, single.

  Oddly enough, he had a role to play at the end of my relationship with Annie. It wasn’t negative on his part, but it was contributory. The whole thing was a tragedy beyond words, an affront to any sort of human understanding, so filled with coincidence that one might call it fiction—hard-to-believe fiction at that. Such things happen all the time, but mostly we read about them or, these days, watch them on television.

  With Zandor’s prompting, I got around to organizing a romantic setting where I was going to pop the question. I asked Annie to meet me at an out-of-the-way point in Malibu, a promontory overlooking the ocean, where a charming gazebo had been built precisely for lovers, as a rendezvous spot. Whoever owned the land must have been a nostalgic dreamer, because there was no fee for
anyone to use it, and no restrictions about time of day or night. One needed only to park in the coastline parking lot, turn toward the sea, and walk the hundred yards to the wooden shelter.

  Unfortunately, it was a stormy afternoon, reminding me of the accident day when Annie and I met outside of Mr. G’s. I would shortly see strong wind agitating the surf below and buffeting the gazebo above. I would see powerful bursts of rain gushing from fulminating clouds.

  While I had intended to be there ahead of Annie, because of Zandor, I was late arriving. Since he was free, he was supposed to pick up the ring I ordered, from a jeweler’s shop in Westwood, and deliver it to me at a meeting point in Santa Monica at four in the afternoon. From there it would be no more than twenty minutes to the Malibu spot, perhaps half an hour in rainy weather. My meeting time with Annie was at five.

  Zandor got held up for some reason, was late getting the ring, and didn’t meet me until just after four-thirty. I was in a panic, convinced that Annie would be upset and might decide not to wait for me. The traffic was slow and cautious, and by the time I parked my car it was already five o’clock.

  I began to run toward the gazebo, at first unaware, then suddenly very aware, of the building noise of a helicopter close overhead. I recall thinking, “Why in hell is a helicopter cruising so low along the coast in this weather?” It reminded me of so many times in my townhouse where I would hear an aircraft’s engine overhead, growing louder and louder, then, thankfully, passing by, with the sound diminishing. Some day, I used to worry, one of those babies is going to be in trouble and will come spinning down crazily onto my home.

  I was half way out along the path, could see the gazebo clearly in the rain, could see Annie’s figure hunkered down against the wind gusts.

  The helicopter noise had become unbearable, building to a roar, when all at once I saw it, careening wildly out of the clouds, its rotary blades out of kilter, its direction straight down, straight toward the promontory point.