came about, I would be seen as a team player. I would then have bowed out owing to my feigned illness, which slowly would have been overtaking me during the course of the day. That was my plan until, in a moment of crass cliché I would have expected on a night-time serial drama, Erika and Kissling emerged from the copy room with the sheepish grins of high school pranksters who had just been caught by the headmaster with a rival school’s mascot.
On the contrary, though, they had not been caught, though I could certainly see them from my darkened seat in the nearby mail room, and their grins melted into secretive glances of self-congratulation at having pulled off their exploit while Kissling smoothed his shirt under his waistband. My eyes were wide with shock, amazement and disbelief. Kissling, a nobody from Nowhereville, stood there with the afterglow of fornication with the woman who had been, just days earlier, the ultimate reason for my happiness. I was frozen solid to the chair, uncertain how to sort the array of emotions that had suddenly sprung from the depths of their damnation in my soul. From my shaded seat I waited until they re-entered the main body of the party so that I could investigate the copy room.
It took some searching, but there, in the bottom of the waste basket and wrapped in discarded photocopy paper, was the soiled condom. I would have howled had I been able to utter any noise other than a disbelieving gasp. In a move quite out of character with anything I had ever done before, an action that, had I heard about somebody else doing it, I would have relegated to the realms of insane jealousy, I folded a sheet of photocopy paper around the condom and put the resultant package into my blazer pocket.
Quite opposite of what I had been planning, I re-entered the party, procured a drink from the black man in a bow tie working the liquor table, and plotted an accidental run-in with Erika and Kissling. Twenty minutes later, my second gin and tonic in hand, they emerged from a cluster in the far corner of the company cafeteria and wended their way through the crowd toward the make-shift bar. I slinked off to the side, hiding behind a group of coworkers who were discussing, in nauseating detail, anti-lock braking systems and air bags as fundamental essentials to any vehicle they would purchase. I ignored their proffered opportunity to join the conversation by excusing myself and appearing alongside Erika and Kissling.
“Nice party, isn’t it?” I asked, motioning with my recently emptied glass to the crowd behind their backs.
Erika’s face grew momentarily ashen while Kissling, the knowing victor in an undeclared secret competition, nodded his head and looked to where I motioned.
“Yeah, much better than the last few I’ve been at,” he said, glancing quickly at Erika before turning his attention to me. “I didn’t think you’d be here. I thought you were getting sick again.”
“I am sick, but I’m taking your advice about the fluids,” I said, turning to the bar and nodding for another drink. “It seems to be working.”
Kissling looked at me as if he were nonplused. Alongside him, Erika’s face fought against the contortions of revealing herself caught in a lie. She struggled, vainly, to give the appearance that she and Kissling were only recent acquaintances who did not know each other very well, though, I admit, this interpretation came much later. They were quickly handed refills of their drinks and they slinked back into the crowd and away from me, submerging into a group from the paralegal department hovering near the hors d’oeuvre table on the opposite side of the room.
Erika’s lie now exposed and the realization of her treachery now known to both of us, I placed my untouched new drink on the bar and left the party quietly via the fire stairwell, my head ablaze with the pain of betrayal. I had been, up until that moment, merely wallowing in self-pity, bemoaning my loss to no one save myself and content to, as my father would say, “Take the pain.” Now, though, things were different. No longer could I pretend that I had merely stubbed a toe, suffering a small amount of pain forgotten in time. On the other hand, it seemed going too far to assume that a dirk had been inserted into my back and twisted quickly clockwise while a hand clasped over my mouth to muffle tortured screams.
Outside, the early evening air was frigid, made more so by my absent-minded error of leaving my overcoat in the mail room and my stubborn refusal to now re-enter the party to retrieve it. I had not been, you see, lurking in there knowing that Erika and Kissling had deposited themselves unseen into the copy room. I had been placing my jacket on the pile of other jackets and had taken a seat, momentarily, to consider what I would do were I to run into Erika that evening.
At home I found myself pondering the folded up photocopy paper, infuriated that she had been taken so easily and certain that such intercourse had overlapped my relationship and despoiled the afterglow of sentimentality I placed on my life with Erika. To have lost her fairly, through actions of my own devising, would have been one thing. To have lost her through muffled hallway conversations and after-work drinks which had led (and I am assuming such a course of action transpired, having no evidence to that effect) to whispered desires and late-night encounters was another matter entirely. This was too much to accept, and I admit I have taken a lot, but possessing the instrument of the crime (what I intended to do with it I had no clue) only made me more certain that I should, at all costs, wreck that which had formed because of my near-sightedness.
This, though, proved more difficult than I had anticipated. Merely showing up unexpectedly at her door, feigning to be desperate to restart our relationship -- while Kissling sat on her davenport in the sitting room (undoubtedly rolling his eyes at what must have seemed like my pathetic implorations) -- did nothing but anger her mildly that I could not act, as she said once, “like a grown man and not some heart-broken high school senior.” This was, I assure you, an entire fiction wrought by me that I had thought, at such an early stage, would cause enough friction that she would be rattled into, if not canceling, postponing the continuation of her relationship with Kissling. Instead -- of course this plan backfired -- it drove her to sleep at his place more and more frequently, a place she knew I would not intrude on.
Thus it went, past Valentine’s Day (and the bouquet of yellow -- for I could not choose red -- roses I sent her) through an uneventful March (she must have been sure, then, I had given up) into April, when I appeared on Easter Sunday at her door, having waited across the street from her apartment building in what must have been the only tavern open on such a day.
“Erika,” I said as she walked up the landing to the security door and fumbled through her purse for her keys.
Her shoulders tensed visibly through her dress (a new one) and she rolled her eyes exaggeratedly as she turned around to face me.
“Roger. What?” she asked, her voice flat with annoyance. “Are you drunk?”
“I just wanted to wish you a happy Easter. I hope dinner at your parent’s went well,” I said, wondering if Kissling had been party to the feast of ham and sauerkraut.
Her face lost all expression as she stared down the short flight of cement steps at me, her right hand resting on the wrought iron railing while her keys, there were fourteen of them dangling from a “Gumby” key fob, clinked together below her left hand. I could tell she had grown tired of this, my constant appearances from nowhere as if I were a poltergeist too lame to be anything other than an occasional nuisance, knocking greeting cards from the mantel or hiding the remote control to the television, and she sucked in a short breath before talking.
“How many times do I have to tell you to leave me alone?” she said once again, perhaps for the thousandth time, and looked up and down the street hoping for, I assumed, passers-by to come to her aid should I suddenly turn psychotic.
“I don’t know. I don’t see why we can’t still be friends, I mean, we knew each other for a long time,” I said, trying reason of a brand recalled a hundred times over by the love regulation safety board.
She shook her head in agitation -- several short jerks to the left and right -- and bit the inside of her lower lip, a look I had never seen from he
r before. I had, I guess, crossed a line at that moment, if a such a line existed, between those pining away for shorn-off love and those who are considered desperate and dangerous. The look in her eyes had also mutated from what had heretofore been little more than a disbelieving gaze of scorn for the hapless and into a hidden fright of uncertainty, the look of a cornered animal too weak to lash out viciously at its stalker but too proud to cower.
Yet, psychosis, such as it might be, was not a condition to which I had succumbed. Irrational behavior, certainly, who else but an irrational near-felon would, to use a word I disdain but is certainly an apt description of my mind set at the time, stalk his ex-girlfriend in an attempt to prove, finally, the error of her ways? I never intended harm. No, not to a hair on her head. Her pulchritude shined brighter than the morning sun casting diaphanous rainbows through misty air over a calm lake. Never, I swear, would I have premeditated any sort of harm toward her. I would, had I been given the opportunity, died saving her from dire misfortune. There, on her porch, however, I was placed in an entirely different scenario, cast against type as the berserk oppressor who must, at all costs, be defeated by the
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