Casual Choices

by Tom Corbett

  The days we shared are past now and will never return. But we are in no way to blame for it had to be that way. The times and the people who fill in those times do change, inexorably, and without apparent direction and there is little, so damn pitifully little, that we can do about it. We, as a couple, would have evolved irrespective of my leaving. I suspect that what we were to each other or what we might have been to each other is a simple function of time and place that cannot be duplicated.

  In my Irish pessimism, there is no room for happiness or hope.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t start this tonight. For one thing, I have been drinking. Right now, I feel pretty washed out. I kind of feel like a hunk of fruit that has been squeezed dry. The juice is gone. All that’s left is the bitter emotional rind that is stale and repugnant. Nothing much is left of the idealism, the kinds of commitment that occasionally made me a bearable (or maybe the opposite) person.

  At times, I can still sense the processes that seem to make the whole thing go, but like many others, I reject the acceptable labels (probably political) and systems that define our little world. Unfortunately, my rejection is complete to the extent that the possibility of replacing the rotting thing with new generative institutions or of achieving any kind of adequate escape from the impact of reality is amusingly absurd.

  You and I and every single other person, we are all alone and, by the curse of God, we must face the total intensity of existence in that state. Not even the booze I pour into my body can dull it into anything approaching acceptability. There is a kind of ultimate frustration that hovers about me, that makes me reject so much yet does not provide me with the illusion of escape or the delusion of utopian possibility. There is just this incessant and inescapable Pascalian sadness, redolent of vast empty spaces in the universe, which reflects on the immensity of the world and in the infinity of our absurd realities.

  It would be nice to capture and describe this insanity that has captured this futility and make it understandable to others. Sometimes I am motivated by a kind of revenge, as a way of exposing the preposterous joke that has been played upon us. Yet in a kind of ultimate irony, I am not foolish enough to take even my own confrontation (more likely my interpretation of the existential) with the world around me seriously. It is a product of my inherited pessimism (the Irish curse) and cynicism (my pseudo-intellectual pretensions). But if out of this maelstrom of contradictions an understanding might emerge which could touch others with an emotional impact, an interpretation of existence which makes no pretense of coincidence with the actual world but could possibly make a few people stop and think, then maybe I might be satisfied. That is the classic pipe dream, no? I am dominated by that kind of gnawing hunger, that loneliness, which leaves you directionless. All I have is a very intense suspicion that futility is programmed into our experience of what is little more than a cosmic tragedy we call life. In the end, no one, no one at all, ever gets to the pot of gold.

  She put the letter down. It was clear, Eleni was not joining him. Had he asked her? Had she said no? If so, it must have felt like a total rejection to him. For a moment, she considered a mean thought: Well, just deserts, he had abandoned her, rejected her. But she pushed that thought aside as mean- spirited. His agony touched her. He sounded so desperate, so lost. He did have feelings, real feelings. Now, she had a response to his query, he was capable of being complete. She felt a shiver of pity course through her. Wow, he had proposed, and she had turned him down or not responded at all. Of course, that’s why he had given her these letters. These were the parts of him he could not talk about openly. This was the only permissible avenue toward revelation.

  But where were her letters to him? Why had he saved these and not hers to him? How did he even get these since they looked like the originals, not copies? She examined them carefully, they had to be the originals? She shuffled through the contents of the folder. All she could find were letters to her. They looked original, old and worn and obviously read and reread many times. Why would he have these and not whatever she had sent him? They obviously existed, the Dear Josh letter and one where she had written to him after that and probably after that. She was sure there were more. One does not pour their heart out into a vacuum, or does one?

  April 11,…

  Dear Leni,

  Aspirations such as graduate school, careers, things like that don’t seem very important. My cynicism, my amorality, my lack of practical ambition have left me with a huge void that only suggests more drift. Find something else to take up next year and something else the year after that. And after you’ve successfully completed the prerequisite number of solar revolutions, you are permitted to withdraw in some complete sense. There doesn’t seem to be any real place to go, and on top of that, it probably isn’t worth getting there.

  The overwhelming irrelevance of it all forces upon me an inescapable sense of ennui. Things seemed just a bit easier back in the days when the big sweat was a paper for class or some other some nonsense. Perhaps if it were not so conventional these days, I would retreat to some religious ashram in the Himalayas where I couldn’t possibly be bothered by revolutions, war, sick societies, traffic jams, starvation, middle-class neuroticism, or four years back to Republican normalcy. Then again, I probably wouldn’t like that very much either. The future is a void. Here, futility prevails, overwhelms me. The loneliness has taken something out of me.

  I am tired, very tired.

  She shifted through a few more letters that reflected similar themes and sentiments. Rachel could not quite envision the writer of these words. Her brother had always been lighthearted and upbeat, a crooked smile across his face. He was the handsome athlete that the neighborhood girls fantasized about and whom the guys wanted to emulate. He was the guy who made others laugh, brought cheer to any room he entered. In the years she knew him best, it appeared he saw life as an adventure to be seized, full of opportunities laid out before him for the taking. But that was on the outside.

  Rachel had always seen him during those years as a rock on which she would always be able to count. She remembered one time when she was in middle school and he in high school. Rachel realized she was developing physically, which would please most young girls but basically annoyed the hell out of her. Rather than wearing clothes designed to attract the opposite sex, she preferred loose-fitting ensembles dedicated to hiding her physical charms. It was to no avail; it was already apparent that she would be a beauty. Her soft yellow hair fell to her shoulders. She wanted to cut it short, but mother would not permit that. Her eyes were that inviting pale blue that tended to melt the insides of onlookers. Her features were delicate and almost perfect in symmetry and proportion. When she looked in the mirror, she saw her mother. She was Ora in form, though she was unsure about substance. Her mother was careful never to reveal her substance nor her body. Ora was steel and unavailable. No one was permitted inside her mother’s reality.

  Who was she, Rachel pondered? Josh seemed the classic Irishman, genial and witty and verbal and a good story teller. She did not feel Irish, but what? She was reserved and private but could summon a biting wit when necessary. Perhaps all that ancestral nonsense was silly, simply designed to foster intimacy among members of a clan where none existed. Yet, she could see attributes from each of their parents sprinkled in different proportions within each of them. Wait, she thought excitedly. Maybe that was the key here. Could it be that Josh had taken one attribute from his mother? He looked, and talked, and conducted himself much like his dad, but maybe there were things he had taken from his mom. Perhaps there was a need inside him to keep others out, to bury a truer identity deep inside and use the old misdirection ploy of humor and charm to deflect the curiosity of others. Perhaps, she thought to herself, no one would be permitted to see his true self, surely not his little sister.

  Her mind had wandered again. She returned to that awful period where her developing beauty drew the attention of young boys like bothersome pests. Perhaps the other girls found th
ese attentions desirable, but she was unmoved. In fact, she was annoyed no end. They started following her home from school, trying to provoke a response with those nuisance tactics that insecure males fall back on when unsuccessful in the pursuit of the opposite sex. The more she ignored them, the more they escalated their annoying ploys. Eventually, they slid into their final assault, forms of verbal aggression designed to trigger a reaction when milder teasing failed. “Rachel is a prick tease,” they yelled, or “a cock teaser.” They would yell such insults aloud as if they were common knowledge shared by all. Everyone knew that she was “doing it” with an ever-changing array of lucky guys, names picked at random in truth.

  Josh had found her crying in her room one day. It took him many strokes of her hair and a soothing voice to get her to tell him what was bothering her. Her story came out through deep sobs she could no longer contain. “I see,” he had said several times. Inside, he had raged. Nothing touched him like seeing his sister in pain.

  “There is nothing you can do,” she wailed.

  “We’ll see, kiddo.”

  The next day, as she made her way home from school along familiar streets, the boys appeared and a familiar routine started all over again. Rachel had had enough. Rather than run away, she took one of her books and hurled it at a tormentor, who merely laughed. Immediately, she knew that was exactly what they wanted, her attention that could be secured in no other way. In her act of defiance, she admitted their existence. However, she had passed over some social threshold. She could no longer back away, perhaps there was a bit of Irish fury within her. “Come closer. Yes, you with the tiny prick and I’ll take that smile off your face.” Her face was crimson, but she could not hold back the tears that flowed down her face. Suddenly, they stopped laughing. Had she gotten to them? Wow, that was easy. Then she realized that a larger presence had come up from behind her. The boys backed up, their faces frozen with concern and then fear. As they turned to run, Josh ran past her and grabbed the biggest boy by the back of his jacket. There was no way that any of them could outrun the school’s best athlete.

  Josh’s prey squirmed and pleaded to be let go. Fat chance of that happening. He dragged his victim to a wall and literally picked him off his feet. Rachel stood frozen with shock. For a moment, she panicked that her brother was going to kill this kid. His face was immobile in that visage she had seen only on game day.

  “Listen, you little pussy,” Josh said. “You get the word out to all your buddies. If anyone bothers my sister again, I will track them down. When I find them, and I will find them, I’ll separate their shriveled balls and tiny pricks from their bodies and shove them up a place where it will take a team of surgeons a week to retrieve them. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah,” came back a quiet whine.

  “I want to hear a ‘yes, sir.’ I want to hear that loud and clear.”

  “Yes, sir.” The whine was a bit louder.

  “Not good enough, my patience is running out.”

  Now came a full-throated “yes sir, understood.” That was loud enough to be heard by the boys who lingered well down the street waiting to see what might happen to their buddy.

  “And you tell them that all I need to hear is that any one of you little shits came within a block of her and I’ll get all of you, one after another. And I will enjoy every moment of it.” He stared at the boy for at least thirty seconds before dropping the young man to the sidewalk. As his victim scrambled to get away, he turned and took Rachel by the hand and walked her to his car.

  He had been her rock then. What had Josh asked that first morning, something about a tendril? Oh, she murmured to herself, that anchors a fragile flower to something solid. Of course.

  CHAPTER 10

  DAY 5 MORNING

  Josh woke up to find Morris missing once again. It was time for his morning walk, past time in fact. He swung out of bed and threw on some clothes. He walked into the living room looking for his not-so-faithful companion to find Morris curled up with Rachel on the couch. Papers from his private file were scattered about, but the two were fast asleep.

  “Hey, Benedict Arnold,” Josh whispered, “up and at ’em. I just want you to know, dog, that you can be replaced by a hamster at any time.”

  Morris lifted his head sleepily but managed a wag of the tail. He rose, shook his body, and lazily jumped down to waddle over to his master. There he sat waiting for his leash and the initiation of the morning ritual. The commotion woke Rachel, who looked around with momentary confusion.

  “What time is it?” she managed.

  “It is noon, you overslept.”

  “What?” She bolted up. “Why didn’t you wake me? Where’s Cate?”

  “Oh, she and Meena left hours ago. They said something about letting the old broad get her beauty sleep, that you really needed it.”

  Suspicion replaced confusion on Rachel’s face. “Okay, what time is it?”

  “Early,” he finished, putting the leash on his pug. “The sun is coming up though, and I assume the girls did not escape during the night. You know the younger set, they probably snuck out for a Stones concert if Mick and the others are still alive. Are they? Now they are probably sleeping in until the drugs wear off. No work ethic like we had.”

  “Like I had,” she corrected him.

  He threw that crooked smile at her, and she instinctively smiled back. Damn it, she said only to herself. He is so freaking charming. In a loud voice, she stopped him as he reached the door. “One question. I fell asleep before getting through this, but I only found letters from you to Eleni. She wrote back, she must have. Where are they?”

  “Long gone.”

  “Gone? Where?”

  Josh paused for several moments. “I burned them, long time ago.”

  “But you have all the one’s you sent her.” It was more of a question.

  “She kept everything. She sent me everything she had before…” He did not finish, turning and heading out the door with Morris.

  Rachel almost jumped up to run after him but caught herself. It was not the time. Rather, she turned to the papers in front of her. She rustled through them some more. There were notes as far back as college, short messages of no significance. She had kept everything to do with him, but he had thrown away all her communications. What was with that? Is the difference due to gender, to different levels of affection, to something else? All men are jerks, that had always been a satisfying explanation for everything. Well, those conjectures would have to wait. Then a note caught her eye. It struck her as different, less a letter than a short story. Curious, she picked it from the pile.

  Dear Leni,

  My mind’s eye turns to you all the time. This sunset this evening moved me. There is something special about those quiet moments when the brilliant orb shades to orange and red before touching the horizon. At such times, I’m drawn to what might have been, toward moments beyond reach but still within our apprehension. Of course, that is the same as saying that I’m drawn to the possibility of us.

  I think of the Cape often. I cannot push away that first morning together, just about our only morning together, when the breeze pushed the curtains and the sun fought its way into our room. I can yet feel the texture of your body against mine. There was something special about realizing that the closeness was a new experience for you, that you were saying by your actions that you found me special. You never said the words, but I knew at those moments you loved me. And for the first time in my life, that realization did not scare me to death. I welcomed it. I will forever hate myself for not saying the words that were in my heart that morning.

  Now, we can only capture those moments in our imaginations. I have a friend from India. He told me about a special place on the West Coast and had lots of pictures. It was a place he loved in his youth. It was a place called Goa, the old Portuguese colony until the Indian government kicked them out. The culture is more Western than the rest of the subcontinent, and when he was there, the beaches were unde
veloped. It was paradise. The sand was pure, the palm trees curved in response to the gentle breezes, the waters were azure blue reflecting the cloudless skies. Usually, only the local fishermen worked the beach. He said the evenings were magic, the sun would dip its magic into the Indian Ocean with splendor and majesty. In one picture was a small chapel, built into the sand not far from the water but nestled in a few palms.

  I’ve never forgotten his words about the place. You could get lobster dinners for next to nothing and eat dinner at a small restaurant located a few feet from the surf. So many times, I have envisioned us watching the sun expire in all that boisterous color before dining under the stars as the surf roared nearby. Then we would walk along the shore, hand in hand, talking about a future together or just the nonsense of the day. I never tired of exchanging nothings with you. Your long black hair would twirl around your face in the warm, wet sea breezes. On occasion, you would look up at me with those doe-like eyes, and my heart would melt just a bit more if that were humanly possible.

  Eventually, we would find a quiet place near the beach where the world was all ours. The only witnesses would be the canopy of stars above us. We would disrobe and lie next to each other, your body seeking mine as it did that night on the Cape. I would feel small tremors of anticipation as you surrendered any remaining resistance. As I rose over your prone figure, I realized the depth of my own needs, my brain struck dumb with desire and my flesh fired with compelling passion. With effort, I would suppress those most essential impulses, seeking a gentle path to where we both wanted to be.