by Ward, Susan
“Of course. I’m fine.”
His answering smile is kind and sympathetic. Alan has become a good friend. The kid is a giver to the core. Once you get to know him you realize he is only an asshole on the surface. Part of the show. Part of his act. Part of the role he plays to protect his heart since he still has severe trust issues. Maybe someday he’ll find someone to love. It just wasn’t me and never could be. I love Jack, and Alan would have never settled for second slot in any woman’s heart. It’s better that I married Len.
He puts a fast kiss on my cheek and climbs back into the car. The door slams and I watch them drive off. Something holds me on the street, staring at the road, and then I get the sensation of being watched. I rapidly search the sidewalks, the road, and my heart drops.
Brilliant blue eyes are fixed on me. I knew Jack was staying the month in his New York apartment. But I never expected to see him. Not here. Not tonight, and my instantly roiling emotions warn that I’m not ready for this yet.
My breath catches as he crosses the street. My heart quickens wondering if he’ll take me in his arms, but he stops in front of me, not touching.
“Hello, lovely Linda.”
A lump rises in my throat. “Hello, Jack.”
Inside my head I roll my eyes at myself. Hello, Jack? Really? It would have been nice to have something eloquent to say, but I feel in complete disarray.
“You look well,” he says.
“So do you.”
I feel the strain between us, a caution that lends to awkwardness, and I hate it.
He looks at the building. “How long have you lived here?”
“Nearly a year.”
Jack laughs. “Four blocks apart. Your apartment and mine. And we haven’t run into each other before. My jaw dropped when I saw you climbing from the car.”
I hate the careful words and I’m not fooled by them. Bullshit, Jack. You were waiting for me. This is not a chance encounter. I don’t know how I know this, only that I am certain of it.
“Would you like to come up?” I ask.
I see indecision flitter in his eyes. He arranged this, but isn’t certain he should have. I don’t wait for him to answer. I step toward the entrance and the doorman pulls back the door.
Inside, we wait for the elevator. Both of us are silent on the long ride up to my floor. There is only us and the attendant but it makes the interior of the elevator feel smothering and small.
Jack rakes a hand through his golden waves and I see it again. His uncertainty if he should have followed me inside the building. I am uncertain as well because I can feel it, after two years, here in this tiny space, inside me and all around me.
The want. The love. The need. As it has always been since that October we first met; today, another October, after two years of being apart.
I unlock my door, drop my clutch on the entry table and flip on the lights.
I gesture Jack into the high-ceilinged, open space living room.
“Would you like some coffee?” I ask.
Jack smiles. “No. I’ll only stay a few minutes.”
I sink down on the arm of a chair as Jack settles on the couch.
He looks at me. “Are you doing well?”
I nod. “Very well.”
“And Len. Are you happy? Does he treat you well?”
I battle back the rising tears. “He’s a good guy. A friend. We get along well together.”
Some sort of internal struggle breaks through the wall of Jack’s reserve and onto his face. “Why did you leave, Linda? Don’t you think you owe me an explanation? Why leave and marry him?”
My heart stills. “The reasons don’t matter. Not now, Jack. Leave it alone. In the past. That’s what I need.”
Yearning and pain fills his eyes. “The reasons matter to me. I’ve tried to forget you. Not to love you. I’m still in love with you, Linda.”
I stare at a vacant space in the room. I can’t meet his eyes any longer. I change the subject. “How’s Chrissie?”
He leans forward on his seat. “Well. Nearly thirteen. I didn’t come here to discuss Chrissie.”
“Why did you come here?”
There’s a long pause, the kind he makes when he’s searching for words and working to rein-in his emotions.
I shift my gaze to meet his, and I can see it in his eyes. It is wonderful and terrifying and so much more than I deserve after what I did to him.
“I love you, Linda.”
He says it simply, but it’s not a simple statement. It is full of meanings and offerings and desires.
I can’t stop myself. I can’t hold myself back from him. I cross the room, settling in the space between his legs and let him pull me into his arms.
“I still love you. I never stopped, Jack. Where we are now has nothing to do with whether I love you or not. You are the love of my life and you always will be.”
He tilts my chin and gently kisses my lips, and I know we’ve begun again.
One Forever Kiss
Prologue
“Jackson Parker”
There is a quiet you hear only at the beach, a hush that rises up from the ocean, enveloping everything until the only sound is the quiet within yourself.
Most people get it wrong; the reason I’ve spent most of my life living on the edge of the Pacific. They think it’s a simple geography preference or a lifestyle choice. It’s neither. It’s a philosophy, though I’ve never bothered trying to explain that—or me—to anyone. And I probably won’t ever try because the two people on this earth who needed to understand this about me understood without my explaining it.
The ocean shrinks all things—your happiness and your regrets, your strengths and your weaknesses, your love and your loneliness, your misery and joy—to proper perspective. Everything about us is trivial compared to the sea. It is a greater force than any of us can hope to be or ever conquer.
The ocean can provide peace or misery. Sustenance or deprivation. It can sooth your soul or it can mesmerize you into its depths. It can seduce you and then drown you, or in its whim carry you gently back to shore. But in all moments, it is greater than you, do not doubt it, and it will either love or hurt or ignore you at its choosing. And no matter what you do to try to master it, it is only illusion to think you command a single moment you are with it, because the ocean is, in fact, a woman.
That lesson I learned from my wife, Lena.
When I look back on my life it is the same as any man’s. Glorious moments and moments of regret. Sort of a memory scale, a simple equation that determines whether we believe we’ve lived a good life or one of remorse. The challenge is no different for any of us, regardless of our birth or success, our fame or our obscurity, our poverty or our wealth. The game we all play is the same. It’s a simple war we fight every day: what we allow ourselves to see and remember.
How we balance our scale.
More good or more bad.
The things we give importance to and the things we let be.
In truth, all our scales, regardless of what we’ve done with our lives, are equal. They are equal at our birth and equal at our death, and not a single act between the two changes any of it. We live, we die, we love, and we lose. And everything else doesn’t matter. In the giant scheme of things no person is greater than any other, and our only purpose is to love and if we miss that we are nothing.
That lesson I learned from Linda Cray.
The old Jack—or perhaps I should say young Jack—was a stubborn, headstrong, myopic man. I held on to things too tightly, the wrong things in the wrong way. It cost me much. It cost me years of happiness I could have had with Lena. It cost me my son, Samuel. And it nearly cost me my daughter, Chrissie.
There was a time there was nothing but loneliness and regrets walking this beach with me. An empty heart. Pictures in my memory. Voices in my head. My wife. My son. How remarkable they were and how much I’d failed them and wished I could go back
in time and undo my every mistake. I could not balance my scale with anything but my mistakes.
I’d forgotten how to love.
How to need.
How to give.
The pain sent me headfirst back into a bottle and I lost myself in a year of being drunk after years of being sober. I was a terrible father to Chrissie. I could not see her or any of the joy of this earth surrounding me.
I walked the shoreline every day, unable to lose myself in the quiet enough to find peace. Grief robbed me of clear perspective, and somehow I’d forgotten that I was trivial.
When standing at the ocean’s edge we all face a single choice: to go into the darkness of the water or turn back to shore. But it was on a night in 1980 when that choice wasn’t turning in my head in a philosophical way but in a consciously made decision way.
I was there at the edge of the sand, ready to die, unable to endure the unrelenting hours of my pain, the suffering of endless expectations, of trying to be who I needed to be and unable to be anything. I wanted to be with my wife again.
I had come to the beach to free Lena’s ashes into the ocean as she’d asked me to before the cancer took her from me. Her ashes had sat for four years on the mantel in my bedroom in a pretty urn I’d had made to resemble a Fabergé egg. Letting her go was not something I was willing to do even though it had been her last wish of me.
Then after a year of grieving our son, I was ready to scatter her remains across the sea because I had every intention of joining her right after.
I wanted to disappear into the darkness of the water with Lena and our son, to find peace again in the only manner there seemed left to me. I needed to be with her, she’d taken more than my heart on the day she died, and whatever held me to earth was less powerful than the want to follow her. But then, I’d pretty much spent our entire marriage following Lena without knowing it.
It was a decided thing, clear in my head, the choice of dying rather than living, then the ocean reminded me, as it often does, that I am trivial. I was lying in the sand, Lena’s ashes scattered around me because I was drunk and had dropped the urn before I reached the water, when I looked up and saw her.
No woman could ever look as much like Lena as Linda did that night in the moonlight, and since I was drunk and she was wearing a sheet wrapped around her body like a toga, my mind played tricks on me. I knew it wasn’t Lena’s ghost and that it was another woman helping me from the sand back up the cliffs to my empty house, but my heart refused to let go of the delusion.
Something inside me awakened for the first time in years. Still, I could only hold on to the delusion that she was Lena long enough to carry me through our first night together. And what a night it was. We passed the darkness making love as I had not made love in years—with all my heart, my hurts, my longing, my passion, my joy, my tenderness, the entirety of my body and soul—openly shared with a girl who knew nothing of love or tenderness.
A perfect encounter that should never have been anything more than my goodbye to the pleasures on earth. That’s what I thought I was doing when I started making love to Linda. Having one last drop of being a man before I became nothing.
A single random moment.
A girl from nowhere.
One last night of passion.
An unexpected road on a map going elsewhere.
Nothing more.
But the next morning, clear-eyed and sober, my life changed forever the second I saw Linda standing in the doorway. That second I stopped living in the would have, could have, and should have, and gave myself over to living in the now.
I had what alcoholics call a moment of clarity, all things aligned in proper proportion and suddenly clear. I remembered the things I knew to be true. Nothing in life is ever random. Every moment of life is a gift. Everyone we meet we meet for a reason. And because I was at times a stubborn son of a bitch, this chance moment had to hit me between the eyes like a ton of bricks just to get me to see it for what it was: a second chance to love and a chance to do it well.
Linda was the image of Lena.
She gave me shit—albeit in a sassy, more street-smart way—like Lena.
She wasn’t the least bit intimidated by me—like Lena.
She needed me like Lena—though I did not realize that about Lena until it was too late, the her needing me part of our story. I always thought it was only me needing her.
And Linda got my deadened body awake and on fire—like Lena.
I fell in love with Linda at first sight, only I didn’t know then that she’d become everything I’d live for, this miraculous girl who had stumbled into my life dressed in a toga, wandering the beach. Lena had been a miraculous girl as well, but somehow, even loving her as desperately as I did, I hadn’t learned how to live for her.
Miraculous girls are difficult to love well. And loving them how they need to be loved doesn’t always look the way a man would want it to. That’s a lesson men learn with age: the difference between being who you need to be for a woman and who you think you need to be for a woman.
I’d like to think I’ve loved Linda well, the way she needed me to. I regret not having loved Lena better. But I wouldn’t change any of my mistakes, my failings.
No, not anymore.
Time teaches you things you can’t see when you are young. It’s a widely held misconception that if you remove the bad moments from someone’s life, they will only end with good. But sometimes it’s the roads you don’t want to take that bring you to where you need and want to be.
You see, sometimes it takes being madly in love with a woman and doing it badly to learn how to be madly in love with a woman and do it well. And it took Linda for me to come to terms with my past, to find my way from the darkness back to the good things in my life, and to find peace.
It’s taken loving Linda to forgive myself.
One
2016
I grab my fishing pole, cast the line deep into the water, and then prop it in the sand to be ignored while I sit on my lounge chair staring at the ocean. A ritual I’ve come to appreciate now that I’m seventy-four. I watch the swells coming in from the south. Not enough to tempt me to grab a board and it probably wouldn’t be a smart move to be far from my phone. Besides, the sun feels good.
It’s unseasonably warm in Santa Barbara for winter, and the scorching rays—as I wait and ignore the unending text notifications from my family—are just the right companion for a day like today.
I’m an expert at waiting. I’ve spent most of my life patiently waiting for things. That’s the first misconception people have about me. They like to call me the voice of a generation and a man who helped change the world.
Bullshit. I’m not a man of action or revolution or change. I know why they say that about me—too many like to romanticize all things the ’60s—and they are just flat-out wrong when it comes to me. I’m the man who waited for things—sometimes too long—to be the way he wanted them to be.
Only, at least today, it’s a joyous event I’m waiting on the call about. Memories of other calls, darker moments in my life, penetrate my consciousness, but I quickly push them away.
Today is a happy day and I want only to pass it quietly here with good memories and the memories of Lena. My own ritual of inner peace: dawn, the beach, and my time with Lena. No matter my romantic status with Linda, there remains a part of me, unbending and unwilling, to let go completely of my emotional commitment to my wife.
As I rub the sweat from the back of my neck with a towel, I reach into my cooler for a chilled container of iced tea. There’s a bottle of champagne as well, though not for me. I haven’t drunk so much as a drop of alcohol since the night thirty-six years ago when Linda found me sprawled and drunk on the beach.
It’s there for her, though it was probably foolishness to have put it into the ice chest this morning before heading from the house, down the steps built into the cliffs and onto the beach.
Bu
t I’d woken with that feeling, the one I get when the road in front of me is about to abruptly change, and the only thing in my life I want to have change is where matters have been left with Linda. I haven’t been with Linda in nearly ten years, and to this day I regret the argument we had that turned us into friends instead of lovers—again.
I understand how we got onto the road we’re traveling. And I’m hanging back being the man she needs me to be, like always. But hell, I never expected this break to last so long.
For over three decades I’ve loved that woman and we have never before been in our off status—in each other’s lives, not in each other’s bed, emotionally connected and physically on hiatus—this long.
Together, but distant.
Loving, but silent.
Both of us dug in, believing we’re right, her unwilling to bend and me—this one time—unwilling to bend as well.
Though the unbending part is probably moot. All my stubbornness didn’t stop a thing. It’s happened. A done deal. Unchangeable—and dear God, I wouldn’t change parts of it for the world—and my only wish is that Linda would stop holding her ground.
I should not have expected it to be otherwise. There is no greater force on earth than a woman, and maybe she was right. I should have rolled with things the way she wanted me to. Her reasons and rationale for the conflict that put this latest chasm between us were understandable and right. I couldn’t find a single fault in either her logic or her wants. But that didn’t change a thing about how I felt and I couldn’t roll with her wishes, not this time, not even for Linda.
This unexpected crossroad in our lives knocked us onto the wrong road and we’ve stayed on it too long. I’m ready to turn around if she will just forgive and turn with me.
Lena did when I made mistakes with her, but then, Linda’s been through a hell of a lot more, with me and apart from me. More than any woman I’ve ever loved—more than Lena and more than even my daughter, Chrissie—not the least of which that moment that brought us here, to what I hope won’t be a permanent ending.
