Old

by Stan Charnofsky

  I yelled in desperation, “Annie, run, run!”

  The wounded aircraft scudded into the side of the pier, exactly at the elevation of the gazebo. The sound broke against my ears like thunder, and at the same time, broke my heart forever. I screamed as loud as I could for Annie, a sickening, unearthly scream, but my words careened against the wind, devoured by the rain. She was in the center of the firestorm.

  Through fate or luck, I was not injured badly, though a fragment of something cut my shoulder, and I had to be treated for flash burn.

  Medics were on the scene in five minutes; the helicopter, it turned out, had radioed its distress, though the pilot, alas, did not survive.

  Annie, my love, my special person, the woman I would forever refer to as my “almost” life partner, in a most bizarre twist of fate, was gone.

  I met her by accident. I lost her by accident.

  THIRTEEN

  I became a hermit. My work suffered, of course, but I managed to do the bare minimum to keep my private practice going and my teaching acceptable.

  The futility of human life began to eat away at me. If anyone’s sweet and promising journey could be extinguished as if it never existed, where was the fairness? Annie did nothing terrible to merit such a terrible end.

  My personal culpability would not give me peace. It was I who had scheduled the rendezvous. It was I who had placed Annie in that vulnerable situation. How stupid of me. How irresponsible.

  Zandor and colleagues at my work consoled me, but they could not know the corruption I felt for my misguided, catastrophic choreography––that turned out to be a macabre dance of death.

  I know now, years later, that self-forgiveness is the hardest kind.

  After four months, I began to desire some kind of social life again, began playing tennis with Zandor (that was painful), went to the theatre with a colleague to see Inherit the Wind, about the Scopes monkey trial, and famous lawyers Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryant.

  Then one evening, there was a ring on my townhouse bell and when I opened the door, a woman was standing there. She said, “Hi. Remember me?”

  “Certainly,” I said, and stepped aside to permit Annie’s sister, Julie, to enter.

  I did not know Julie well, saw her perhaps half a dozen times in the years Annie and I were together, a few times at her daughter’s birthday parties, and once at a gathering when Annie turned thirty. I would not say that there was friction between Annie and Julie, but their connection was thin and somewhat fragile, largely, I gathered, because of Tom, Julie’s husband. I had met him a few times as well, a boorish man with a dour countenance that, along with his six feet four inches and two-hundred thirty pounds, made him seem formidable and even threatening.

  Annie had dropped fragments of incidents where Tom had been abusive to his wife, though I never knew if it was physical or emotional or both. Anyway, she did not care for him so we were never social buddies with that couple.

  When Annie died, I recalled seeing Julie and her parents at the funeral services, but I could not remember seeing Tom.

  Now, Julie was in my townhouse, moving toward my hearth, toward my dancing fire, to warm herself. My curiosity was curbed by my psychology training, and instead of asking her why she had come to visit—never had before, hardly ever spoke with me before—I waited to see what she would say.

  She sat in a soft armchair in front of the fire without speaking for a time, then said in a dull, flat voice, “I’ve kicked Tom out.”

  I felt like saying, “It’s about time,” but instead, again because of my professional style, said, “Must be a difficult time for you.”

  “Not because of breaking up. We’ve been doing that for nearly a year. But, yes, it is difficult with my nine-year-old daughter and a rather meager financial situation.”

  “He won’t help?”

  “My guess is he will disappear. He was never very good with Megan, and I don’t think he will want to get stuck with supporting her.” She stopped than said, “Or me.”

  “You have a job?” I asked.

  She seemed so flat, emotionless.

  “I do child care at my house. Eight children come three days a week. It’s like a nursery school. Not much of a living.”

  As was my pattern, I tended to listen and be neutral; but, also my pattern every now and then, was that I’d take a verbal risk and leap in with a forward comment. “You and I never talked much. I don’t know you very well.”

  “I know. Tom was jealous of me talking to any man, even my sister’s boyfriend.” She shivered, as if the fireplace heat was hardly enough.

  “I’m sorry,” I said softly.

  She began to sob, a pitiful, convulsive cry.

  Not sure how she’d take it, I leaned over anyway, and hugged her. I could feel her body vibrate and collapse into my embrace.

  After a moment (that was another thing my psychology taught me: don’t talk through someone’s tears), she pulled away and said with a fiery desperation, “Annie was so much smarter than me. Sorry to say it, but I think my rotten marriage is what kept her from taking the plunge with you.”

  That was news to me. Annie hardly ever talked about Julie’s marriage, and certainly never compared me to Tom. Maybe Julie was onto something, though, because Annie also never seemed to want to bring up the subject of marriage.

  “One bad marriage doesn’t contaminate the next,” I said, with a bit too much authority, as if I had some inside information on the subject––which I certainly did not, despite my shrink training.

  She hadn’t really looked at me till then, but suddenly she turned her head and stared at me—now with all the years of hindsight, I am wont to think it was at that moment that she became interested in me as a man.

  As she regarded me with a full-frontal look, I, in turn, studied her face, which, I was aware, was not as striking as Annie’s. She was, nonetheless, an attractive woman, with high cheek bones, dark eyes whose ebony pupils seemed to flood the entire orb, black hair pulled back off her face and tied in back, a slim woman, but clearly with a larger bosom than Annie’s (which didn’t matter to me), and, though she was suffering, a willingness to look me straight in the eye, which I liked.

  She said, somewhat sharply, “We both lost Annie. I missed her the last few years. We were buddies as children.” There was a pause and I could see her struggling with something. When she continued, it was softer, words laden with empathy. “You lost more than I. She was close to you, that much I knew. She told me once that you were precious and that she loved you.”

  “We loved each other,” I said almost in a whisper.

  Julie stood and I watched her pace back and forth in front of the fireplace, reminding me of a caged lion I saw in the San Francisco zoo, pacing, pacing, first to the right then the left, her boundaries severely limited. I wondered, then, about Julie’s boundaries.

  At last she stopped, turned toward me, and said, “Can you be my friend? I really need a friend.”

  At the time, I had no clear view of the boundaries of that request, but my inclination was to leap toward it, and I said, almost too quickly, “I already am.”

  FOURTEEN

  As I reminisce about the women in my life and how I got to be old and alone, I am aware that my first two serious relationships ended with tragic suddenness. Kacey, was, in retrospect––and also as I saw it at the time––not appropriate for me, though she was challenging and a heady interlude in my young adult years. Annie was a wonder, and now, looking back, I can honestly say that we might have had a remarkable life partnership, had fate not dumped a defective helicopter in our path.

  Julie was another cup of tea. Well, she was a lovely woman, and when one got past her pain, she could be, I was to learn, sensuous and affectionate. Her trust had been shaken in her marriage to Tom Blades, and I knew how hard it was for trust to return. Most folks confuse the sex act for intimacy and a loving manner. That’s the craziest kind of misapprehension. Julie, and any wounded woman,
could be sexual and physically passionate, but that would not mean they were emotionally free. Julie, at least for a long time, was not emotionally free.

  And how about me? Was I emotionally free? No way. I was bonded by powerful cement to my lost love, and that was compounded by her history with my new friend, her wounded sister.

  That night, Julie stayed for about an hour and we talked about her daughter, a winsome child I remembered from about a year earlier when she turned eight. Then we discussed Tom’s loutish manner, though Julie claimed he had a soft side, which was what kept her there so long. Finally, we agreed to stay in touch with each other, she clearly needing some grounding, and I enjoying the company of an attractive woman.

  I guess you could say that Julie was the third significant female in my life, even if I wasn’t exploding with desire over her as I was with the first two. Those with more savvy than I surely know that there are other elements in the connection between two people than the erotic. Friendship is one, maybe even the most important one when it comes to a long-lasting relationship. Compatibility in pacing is another—that is, emotional melding, where one person isn’t off the wall one day while the other is repressed, then the opposite the next day; the two would never meet. And then there is the intellectual matching, and by that I don’t mean their IQs are the same; I mean that one isn’t on an elemental abstraction level all the time and the other in the attic. They have to be able to communicate clearly and enjoy each other’s insights.

  Well, there you have my treatise on what makes a partnership workable. Too bad that knowing the make-up of water doesn’t always mean one can navigate it.

  The first time I saw Julie after that evening, was a week later. She had called me the next evening, and asked if I might like to come over for dinner and get to know Megan a little better. I thought about it briefly and decided why not? I asked if I could bring something and it turned out, after negotiations, that she was okay with me picking up Chinese, and she would provide the drinks and dessert. When she spoke about money problems, she wasn’t kidding, though her small house was neat as a pin and charming as a dollhouse, and even Megan’s toys and childhood litter were kept primarily in her own room.

  I must say that I fell in love with Megan immediately. She was an imaginative child, artistic and self-assured, to the point of audacity. First off, she wanted to show me her room, the walls festooned with drawings, clay molds dotting a low table in one corner, a collection of splashy-colored hats (which she had made) lined up on hooks opposite the windows, and a butterfly quilt on her bed that looked hand crocheted.

  That evening, she wore her hair in two pigtails framing her face and anchored at the bottoms by yellow ribbons. Her eyes were not dark like her mother’s or her aunt Annie’s, but a luminescent gray-green, and she had a way of looking right at me (she probably got that from her mother) that promised to broadcast something remarkable. Often, what followed was remarkable: a personal insight, a revelation about how nature operated, even a penetrating observation about me that seemed too true to be a guess.

  She had me chuckling at dinner with her ability to see through to the heart of a topic. When Julie and I embarked on a dialogue about nursery rhymes and children’s stories, Megan showed avid interest, and when there was a break in the conversation, said, “Most of them are violent. People always get scared or hurt. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after. The spider frightened Miss Muffet away. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall and couldn’t be put back together again. The three blind mice had their tails cut off by the farmer’s wife. Whoever thought up all those stories sure seemed to want to scare kids.”

  “Sometimes,” her mother replied, “there are lessons to be learned. Like the teensy-weensie spider who gets washed out of the waterspout, and when the sun comes out, climbs up again. It keeps trying, and that’s a good thing.”

  “I know that,” Megan said saucily, “but there are a lot of them that scare little kids (excluding herself from that category), and don’t have any redeeming message.”

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  All three of us laughed at that, Megan saying at the end, “Old enough not to be fooled.”

  I thought of a sampler one of my friends had, on which was sewn: “It’s great to be young and brassy and bold; it’s not so good to grow old.” Megan knew nothing of that, yet, she was indeed old enough to be insightful, gloriously brassy and brazenly bold.

  Julie had made a tasty bread pudding for dessert, on which she had spread a layer of whipped cream. Megan wanted seconds, which her mother allowed, but put her foot down on thirds. I enjoyed their interplay—it was clear that Megan knew the boundaries and loved to test them, and that Julie knew she knew and loved to go through the routine with her.

  I wondered how such a healthy relationship could have developed, considering the friction in the home between the two adults, and decided it had to do with contrasts––Julie’s loving calmness set against Tom’s volatile outbursts. She had told me that she had hung onto the marriage too long, looking for glimmers of hope, and that evening I could see that she was a patient woman who gave the other person a lot of respect. I liked that. Imagine, giving your little nine-year old child all that respect. Doesn’t happen enough in our culture.

  Before I left the Blades’ home that night, I had a healthy respect for Julie and her daughter. I admit that my attraction to Megan, at least at first, was more intense than that for Julie. I don’t mean that I was in any way repelled by Julie; it was just that I viewed her as a good, solid person, but without a searing urgency to get intimate with her. What a grand lesson I was to learn about life and love!

  As she said goodbye to me at the door (Megan was already in bed) she said softly, “You can’t know that this was the most peaceful, benign and uplifting evening Megan and I have ever spent with a third person here. Dinner events with her father—my itinerant husband—were episodes in conflict, distressing and often terrifying for both Megan and me. He didn’t hit her, and only got belligerent enough to shove me a few times. But it was never calm, always fraught with contention, everything always having to be his way.”

  “I’m so sorry for your pain, Julie,” I said. Those are ugly memories to have to live with.”

  “I want you to feel welcome to come over again. We can repeat this if you like, or plan some other kind of event. Megan really likes you.”

  “And I like her. She is a treasure. You have done superb work with your daughter.”

  She turned shy and I could see her color change. Almost too softly to hear, she said, “I like you too.”

  I moved close to give her a hug, and when I did, I felt her fingers on my back, digging into my skin, as if trying to grab off chunks of me to keep for herself. When we separated, she leaned directly toward me and kissed me lightly on the mouth.

  You know, in retrospect, of all the kisses, passionate or friendly, I ever got from a woman, I remember that one as absolutely pristine, without ulterior motive. She liked me and showed it.

  Just that ingredient was what tugged me back over and over again into Julie’s life.

  FIFTEEN

  “Great game,” Julie said, as she hugged her daughter. Well, yes, Megan had done rather well, I think. I never know in soccer because they don’t score much, and doing well has to mean intercepting the ball, keeping the other team from scoring, and passing to teammates accurately. Though I certainly cheered for Megan’s team, and congratulated her at the end, it is hardly a secret that I am no soccer fan. Soccer and ice hockey both leave me cold (no pun intended), the former because after two hours the score is likely to be one to zero, and the latter because mostly they fight with each other. Some wag called it ice boxing and I tend to agree.

  You recall I used to be a baseball player, which admittedly is a methodical sport, but then, suddenly the action explodes and you have to be ready for a close play, a collision, a brilliant slide, a great catch, or a monstrous hit. Now, in my older years, I play t
ennis a couple of times a week, and it helps to keep me fit.

  I started wearing glasses when I was about fifty, mostly for reading, since my long-distance vision is still quite good. It makes me look scholarly, I guess, as many of my colleagues at the university also wear them and I fit right in. I take them off when I play tennis.

  “Can I have a Pepsi?” Megan asked her mother.

  “Here,” Julie said, “I brought juice. It’s better for you.”

  I saw the disappointment on Megan’s face. Her teammates were all drinking sodas, as far as I could tell, and she was feeling left out and overly controlled. I smiled at Julie, who seemed unperturbed. She had her values, and, by goodness, her child was going to grow up with them.

  The three of us sipped apple juice from paper cups, I quite content because I liked apple juice, Megan pouting and looking deprived, and Julie both proud of her resoluteness, and pleased that she was so much more health-conscious than most parents.

  In Puerto Vallarta, I noted that even in paradise there can be problems. During Megan’s growing up years, her connection with Julie was clearly symbiotic, with a delightful interplay between them, yet I could observe seeds of friction which would, some day, cause a rift; Megan was too powerful a person to acquiesce regularly to Julie’s stiff, albeit loving, regimen. Another kind of paradise defiled.

  One Saturday afternoon, about a month after Julie first visited my townhouse, an afternoon before an evening when we were to see Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, a play ostensibly about him and Marilyn Munroe (which he denied, since he wrote it when she was still alive), I got a call from Julie asking if I could come over right away. I didn’t ask a lot of questions, only, “Are you okay? Is it an emergency?”

  Her reply: “Not in a physical sense. I’m feeling pushed out, and I would welcome your consultation.”