Old

by Stan Charnofsky

  “You wanted to cause him to crash his car, get revenge without getting blamed,” I said drearily.

  “Yes. We had talked about how it was my word against his, and since so much time had gone by, I knew no one would believe me. He would be free as a bird, although more of a vulture than a songbird.”

  “So, what happened?” Her sordid narrative beginning to irritate. This was a side of Julie I had never seen, and I was forming an image in my mind of just what kind of emotional disorder she had developed.

  She resumed her desultory tale: “Timing was important, since I had no gauge to tell me how long the brake fluid would take to empty. I had to find a way under his car’s hood, and I needed an ice pick, and I wanted the puncture to be at the bottom of the plastic bottle. All those things were huge tasks for my limited know-how about cars and how they worked.

  “Then, I got a break. One early evening, about six o’clock, I had parked my car around a big rock and had walked close to the ranch house to try to pick up some clues. There were maybe two hours of daylight left, and I heard—I actually heard––Tillie’s actor friend call to him, ‘I’m going into town. Meet you at Carl’s Pub in half an hour.’ There was Tillie, standing in the doorway, and he yelled back, ‘I’m going to grab a quick shower. Give me forty-five.’

  “I waited five minutes, then approached Tillie’s little foreign car—it was an Audi, I think—and prayed that, in the security of their compound, he would leave his car doors unlocked. My prayer was answered. I opened the door, popped the hood—that took some searching, since I wasn’t familiar with the location of things—pored over the engine till I saw a bottle with a black cap on top, containing the words in English, ‘brake fluid.’

  “I managed to get my arm in next to the canister, propped the pick against the engine head, and stuck its point into the plastic, shoving with all my might. A slow ooze of liquid began to slide out, and judging from its speed and the size of the plastic container, I estimated it would likely be between half an hour and an hour for it to empty. It was pure guesswork. I quietly closed the hood and made my way back to my car, my intent to wait until he actually drove off, then follow him to see what happened.”

  Listening to her, I had wildly mixed emotions. Of course, old asshole Tillie needed to get what he deserved, but the last thing I wanted was for my wife to become a murderer, go to prison, lose her child and lose me for good.

  “Okay, now Julie, what happened? Cut to the chase. Did it work? Did he crash?”

  “In twenty minutes, he came out of the house. I could almost smell his familiar cologne—Clubman, I think—though I was too far away to do more than peer around my rock and observe his movements. He started his car and drove out the open gate of the ranch grounds. Apparently, there was enough brake fluid still there, since he made no attempt to stop. Then, about five minutes later, with me about two hundred yards behind, an ugly thing happened which I didn’t count on, and I have no idea to this moment if my sabotage caused part or all of it.”

  She paused, and I couldn’t stand it. “What? What ugly thing?”

  “He didn’t spin out and go over the edge, because something occurred first which changed everything. It was dusk, and one of those big-rigs, a huge transporter, was climbing the grade. Later, in the police report, the driver said he must have dozed off. Anyway, he veered his truck into Tillie’s lane, and the little Audi got smashed to a pulp. The papers say the guy will be charged with manslaughter.”

  “So, you didn’t kill him!”

  “I’m not so sure. Following behind, I could see that he didn’t seem to slow down at all when the truck loomed up in front. His little car swerved sideways and the collision was on the driver’s side. He didn’t have a chance.”

  I pondered her story, then said, “You think if he had good brakes, he might have slowed enough to lessen the force? “

  “I…I think so,” she whispered. Then she added, “I’m a criminal.”

  “Not for certain. The law doesn’t apply if your attempt falls apart, as yours did. Fate stepped in, in the shape of a drowsy truck driver.” As I said those words, I flashed on fate stepping in with Julie’s sister, a ferocious storm and a disabled helicopter.

  “It was time for me to disappear, since it wouldn’t do for me to be on the scene when the highway patrol and ambulances arrived. As I slowly passed the accident on the opposite side of the centerline, I saw the trucker on his two-way radio, calling in what happened. It gave me permission to leave, which I did.”

  “So, no one saw you there or can implicate you.”

  “Well, I guess not, but I know what I did. I implicate myself.”

  I didn’t know what else to say. The silence must have felt incriminating to Julie. Finally, I blurted out, “Come home, Julie. We need you. You live here, with us.”

  “I must figure out,” she said slowly, “if I can live with myself.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  So, within a week, Julie came home. I was thrilled but wary. Aidan didn’t seem to know what to do. Yolanda had become his caretaker, his substitute mother, and now this mother from the past re-appears. He cried uncontrollably when she hugged him, then got shy and ran to Yolanda, who, to her credit, said, “It is your real mama, hijo. Go to her.”

  But he didn’t. For the next three days, he avoided Julie and clung to Yolanda, or, when I was around, to me. I knew that Julie was crushed by the seeming rejection, but I tried to explain that it would take time.

  As for our husband-wife relationship, it was as it had been, only with one more added burden. On top of her loss and her assault, she now carried a heavy feeling of guilt for what she perceived as a killing of a human being. Our intimacy was buried under a mound of pain, not easily disposed of.

  It became clear that authorities considered the death of Tillie an accident, the result of driver negligence by the trucker. Apparently, the actor friend identified Tillie, and the incident was reported in the Bakersfield newspapers, LA publications ignoring it as a rural event.

  What I began to realize was that Julie was in a pit, not only from her sense of guilt, but also from a cavernous depression that pounded on her like a capsizing load of gravel. I was familiar with depression from my psychology work, and Julie’s was as serious as any I had seen. She ate minimally, stayed in her room a lot, tried to hug Aidan now and then but finally gave up when he didn’t respond. Children do sense when something is out of kilter.

  I decided to keep Yolanda on, at least for a while. She was agreeable, but, sensing the delicacy of the situation, told me that in a few weeks she probably ought to look for another position. I could hear the sadness in her voice when she told me, her connection with Aidan a lovely thing to see and a tragedy to dissolve.

  If Julie could not catch hold and climb back into life, I could envision our marriage drifting away. The way things were, she was not competent to be a full partner in our home or family. In sickness and health was our pledge, and I surely would not abandon her, but I knew—I knew—that if she did not get therapeutic help, she would shrivel up and go inside. Depression leads to utter despair.

  Hindsight is a glorious thing. ‘If only’ is a phrase that traps us in wishful thinking. I’m no exception. I look back and think how things might have been. I did love Julie, could have lived the rest of my life with her and been satisfied. But, the events that piled up brought her to the brink of what the general public calls insanity, what psychologists call psychosis. She wasn’t really crazy, but she had lost her verve for life, was robotic in her movements, her functioning like a programmed automaton, ritualistic and sluggish. Action was needed to try to shake her free.

  “Julie,” I said with firmness, “it’s time for you and me to have a talk.”

  She was in our bedroom, sitting on a window bench, staring at the wind buffeting the big elm tree on our front lawn.

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course, Teddy, let’s talk.”

  The disarming part of her illness was that she was utte
rly cordial about things, with a minimum of hostility and a calmness that could have been confused for serenity. But I knew she was anything but serene, roiling internally, the battle exhausting her, pushing her more and more into herself, into a punishing introspection. It was as if an engine had quietly expired, no smoke, no hiccups, a minimum of noise, the way a car slows down when it runs out of gas.

  I realized again, as our discussion began, that accidents had played critical roles in my relationships with women: meeting Annie after her car crashed, losing her in the storm in Malibu when the helicopter came down, seeing Julie descend into an abyss after an accident killed off her attacker. Life is odd that way, since we can plan for all kinds of possibilities, but never for accidents.

  “Honey,” I said, as tenderly as I could, “things aren’t working well with us. This isn’t an indictment, but you have…how shall I put it? gone away. You know what I mean? You’re not here with us. Well, you are here, physically, but your heart, your energy is missing. What can we do about that?”

  She did not turn her head; it was as if the stirring of nature’s energies––the elm leaves’ frenzied spasms––was so fascinating that she could not tear herself away, her gaze an addiction, an act of vigilance. I saw a slight smile, the outward show of some inner amusement, mysterious and utterly private. At last she said softly, “Oh, Teddy, I am so unhappy.”

  “I know,” I answered, “and that is what I want to help you with, sadness, guilt feelings, your wounds, what pulls you into a shell.”

  She said nothing so I resumed. “Will you let me help you?”

  Her lethargy tore at my heart as I remembered the first time she knocked at my door, her pronouncement about evicting her abusive husband, her tears, pleading with me to be her friend.

  Her body shivered as if shrugging off a sudden chill. Her head turned slightly and she caught my eye. “You are a good man, Teddy. I’ve known that for some time, even when you were with Annie.” She hesitated and added on, in a doleful voice, “Too good for me.”

  No arguing, I told myself, yet I did not want to let her self-criticism go unchallenged. “Julie, lovely Julie, you are my wife, the mother of our son. We aren’t strangers. I love you. Would I love someone who is no good? We are equal partners. You are a talented woman, a wonderful human being. Bad things do happen to good people. That doesn’t make you bad.”

  That mysterious smile hung again for a moment, and it made me wonder if mentally disturbed people entertain themselves with their private humor. Then it fled like an unwelcome guest, and she said, “See, how generous you are. I am flawed. My bad things have made me bad. Can’t you see that I don’t deserve happiness? I forfeited my claim to the good life. Even if the system does not punish me, I must punish myself.”

  I knew she wasn’t into the good versus evil nonsense that plagues so many zealots, but here she was taking on the role of her own prosecutor. The only way to defeat such a self-promoted indictment, as far as I knew, was to challenge the thought process that brought it on and fixed it into place. I was aware that with clear-thinking persons, that strategy worked wonders, but with a mind clogged with recriminations, not so easy to do.

  “Remember,” I asked gently, “when we agreed that punishment for people who are anti-social rarely rehabilitated them? Remember we said they needed love and a human-to-human connection? People grow from restructuring their unworkable patterns.” (I felt, suddenly, like the therapist, admonishing the patient.) “Sorry,” I said, “if this sounds pompous, but I want you to know that my love, our love, for you, if you let it, will bring you around to a healthy place, an outlook that will carry you through a beautiful life for the next fifty years.”

  I don’t know if she believed me or not. She nodded slightly, touched my arm in a sweet gesture, turned and stared out the window, captured again by her private demons.

  In the next few weeks, Julie regained some semblance of vitality, but remained relatively subdued and unproductive as a mother and wife.

  Yolanda apologized profusely, and told me she was moving on.

  “Senor Ted, I have to go. I am sorry for you and for the senora. But mostly for Aidan. He will forget about me after a while. I hope he will have a healthy mother. Mi abuelita, my little grandmother, taught me this toast: ‘Salud, vigor y energia para ustedes por toda la vida!’”

  I was deeply concerned with Aidan’s reaction to Yolanda’s departure.

  He cried and clung to her, but she explained that his family was here in our home (fractured as it was), and hers was elsewhere. She said she would talk to him soon, which she did, calling him on the phone, at first every couple of days, then extending it to once a week, and finally every once in a while.

  He did ask if he could visit her, and she said to “…ask your papa.”

  Two years later, Yolanda was married and came to visit to introduce us to her husband, who taught elementary school in East Los Angeles, and had the same name as the great farm-workers’ leader, Cesar Chavez. I felt flattered that of the many places she might have worked, she remembered us with fondness. Aidan, when he saw her, grinned and allowed her a big, lingering hug.

  Yes, our marriage, Julie’s and mine, lasted for a couple more years. She took on some of the tasks of the home and of parenting Aidan. She was never quite the same as before the rape and highway accident.

  Then one day, when I arrived at our home—we hired a woman to come in four days a week, pick Aidan up at his preschool, clean and tidy up the house and prepare dinner—Julie was waiting in the living room, two bags by her side.

  “Teddy, I’m on my way. You don’t need me here. I haven’t been a wife for some time. Our son dotes on you and tolerates me. I must find a different life somewhere else.”

  “Where?” I asked. “What will you do?”

  “I’ll call you, I’ll stay in touch. I’m not disappearing like last time. I simply know I can’t flourish with the memories and hurts tied into my existence here. I suppose you will miss part of me, but only for a while.”

  I felt the tugs of disparate energies: yes, she was my wife and I had a solid love for her; but no, she had not been what a wife normally is to a husband for some time. It wasn’t only the sexual absence, but an array of inhibitions and disconsolate behaviors that kept an impenetrable fence—perhaps chain-link with an agonizing visual access—between us. The terrible thought surfaced, that perhaps Aidan and I would do better alone.

  “Julie, your son will miss you. He keeps losing the mother-figures in his life.”

  “Oh, he’s more resilient than I am. A tough little boy. He’ll do fine.”

  I held her close, hoping she would find comfort in our embrace and reconsider, but it was not to be.

  Julie made her exit from my life. There I was, past forty, no longer partnered, a shrink and a teacher, wedded to my work, to the successful rearing of my lovely little boy—and in an elemental sense, alone.

  I had no idea that love would abandon me from then until I grew old.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I’m not much for the Freudian protocols, unresolved early sexual milestones determining our lifelong behavior, feeding into our neurotic tendencies. Sure, we are influenced by everything that happens to us, but as adults we must take responsibility for however we have evolved. Too many folks want to blame their parents for their troubles.

  I will tell you that Aidan grew up rather healthy, despite the fluctuating and unstable mother images in his young years. He and I flourished in our companionship. When he graduated from high school, I took him on a European adventure, flying to London, taking a ferry over to France, touring through Holland and Sweden, back-tracking to Switzerland and Spain, and ending up floating along the canals of Venice.

  Since then, he has gone on to graduate from college, a sociology major, which he told me was interesting but pretty useless at the baccalaureate level. So, he worked for a couple of years for non-profits, like the Sierra Club and Save the Bay, then went back and got a masters’ de
gree in clinical social work.

  As I write these words, he is a thirty-something man, still single but with a girlfriend of three years, spirited and free in personality, dedicated to social change, a lovely, sensitive human being. Of all my life achievements, none gives me the pleasure that Aidan, in his maturity and bountiful life, offers. I am proud that we are true friends, that we love each other, and that he is, if as his father I may say so, a magnificent and emotionally sound person.

  Through the years, Julie did stay in touch, with me and with Aidan. She moved to Oregon, lived in a small town outside Ashland, worked as a practical nurse attached to a local hospital, and eventually, though it was difficult for her to tell me, confessed that she was living with a man, a former hippie, she said, who grew vegetables as his primary enterprise. For years we did not divorce, but when I was sixty, a set of legal papers arrived in the mail, noting she had filed for dissolution of our marriage. She enclosed a personal note, brief and cryptic, though not harsh, in which she said, “Better for both of us. Sets up options. Love, Julie.”

  Once I went to the Shakespeare festival in Ashland, with my buddy, Zandor, and his wife, Gwen, and Julie and I met for dinner, just the two of us, in a funky café, catching up on old times. She was hardly animated, but seemed in touch with herself, and, to my satisfaction, did not once mention her assault or the subsequent accident. Time may not always be a lovely healer, but it does temper fury, mitigates the passions of old hurts, and graciously permits us to forget.