by John Hansen
I was in love with my little redheaded girlfriend. She had a wonderfully eccentric personality – she was an art student who was also studying to be an art teacher. She lived at that time in Savannah, about three hours away, so we had been doing long-distance dating for a while, but she was about to graduate and move.
One thing that was cool about her was that she had grown up in a weird family out on a farm and this gave her a weirdness that was enduring, charming, wholly unique, simple and different, and fun. Her mother was this oddball who worked at Walmart and who had given birth to all nine of Holly’s siblings, yes, nine, at home without a doctor or any drugs. It made Holly one of a kind.
She was young but well-read, well-traveled, funny, and loved to do the stuff I loved to do. She was also sexy – had a long, flowing, thick mass of scarlet hair, that kind of white marble-like skin redheads have, and grey-green eyes that always glinted with freshness and happiness. She was not a model type by any means, but was very pretty in her own unique way, as redhead girls who are pretty always are. There are no two redheads on this planet that look alike, I have found, and after dating her I realized I had become somewhat of an expert on redheads. I didn’t know at the time sitting with my salad at the deli, however, that I was never to see those eyes again – and my days of being an expert all things redheaded were about to be over.
Her text came as I took a bite of pasta, and I stopped chewing when I read: “We have to talk.”
Two
A kind of cold feeling struck my chest when I read that. I stared at the little electronic letters, so tiny but pregnant with meaning, a sense of dread coming over me. I knew that this phrase had never preceded anything good, and I immediately guessed what the cause was. We were planning on moving in together in a month and I had signed a lease on a nice place near downtown just last week. But I had been harboring a feeling that she was going to say she couldn’t move in with me because of her parents or something, and that she was going to be living elsewhere next year, which worried me. There was an age difference of a few years, and I was starting to worry that she may have been unhappy with me, that I wasn’t young and crazy enough for her.
I had detected lately a kind of cooling-off in her, a slight change in her voice. All of the stubbornly shoved-away suspicious I had avoided, though, suddenly roared back into my conscious mind as I stared at her text.
I immediately called her number and she picked up after a few rings. I could tell just from her “hello” that something was different; her voice was now contained, held back, some of the light had dimmed in her voice.
“What’s up baby?” I asked, a little constrained now myself, wary, automatically readying my defenses. I pictured her cute little face against her phone, her hair pushed back behind her ears.
“Hey Will. I need to talk to you… about Tennessee.”
My mind suddenly jumped to issue of our road trip that we had planned in the Smokey’s, and the cabin rental I had secured. This trip I had set up with another couple who were supposed to meet us there was a big deal for me. I loved going up into those mountains and I knew Holly would love it too. We were supposed to leave a couple of days later, to drive out to the cabin.
“What about it?” I asked.
“I don’t think I should go.” She paused...
Boom… Like a bomb had gone off over the phone line. Any other time I would have assumed that some school-related thing had come up or something trivial would prevent the trip, something like that… But those recent, subtle, damnable, nagging suspicions had been telling me something wasn’t right – that cold sense of fear crept further up in my chest, gripping my ribcage tight.
What was worse, and what she didn’t know was that the trip was more than just a weekend getaway for me. I had secretly bought an engagement ring and was planning on proposing to her at this cabin I had found. I had never proposed to a girlfriend before in my life, never really had come close to it before. So I had been thrilled and scared all at once the last couple of weeks at the prospect of asking her to marry me.
And this was much more than just being a huge milestone for a young man after college, getting married to Holly was really the only thing I had to look forward to currently in my life at that point. It was the only good thing, the only happy situation, I had. The only thing that made sense, that felt “right.”
I returned to the conversation on the phone, doubt and fear growing with each passing minute. “Why can’t you go?” I asked.
There was a pause that seemed to last forever. I looked around at the crowd eating near me, at little tables here and there, but my thoughts existed only within that little plastic phone.
“I just don’t think I should go. I… think we need to back off, Will, and I don’t think we should get too far… get farther in our relationship,” she said. Her voice was very quiet, so constrained that I pressed the phone hard against my ear as I felt my heart sink further. There it was, now out in the open, no more guessing, no more wondering. Open and ugly in front of me.
A long silent pause, then, still quietly, “I don’t think I can continue doing what we’re doing…” she said. “It’s complicated. And I need to tell you…” A long pause. “I’ve been kind of hanging out with Jonathan more…”
She faltered… I could hear tears forming in her tone. Jonathan. That South American guy, the swarthy, lithe young man who was studying in the same program as her – the skinny, tan dude with the scrabbly beard. I had distrusted him from the start! She studied with him, and she had been coaching soccer with him. She had only known him a semester, and had first described him as “like a brother to me,” and she was always aware that I didn’t like him being around her.
But after a little while she had stopped talking about him, and that worried me more. The two of them had started out as study partners in a group, then study partners not in a group, then friends, then good friends, and now… All the while I didn’t like him, but I had never asked or told Holly to stop seeing him. I should have.
“I know you’re at lunch Will,” Holly continued, “and this is all out of nowhere, but baby I didn’t want you to pack everything up for the trip until we could talk. I didn’t want to come out and say it like this… you must think I’m crazy…”
I could hear her crying, sniffling, wiping tears away for a moment, a sleeve ruffling over the phone’s mouthpiece, then returning to the phone, “I don’t know, I’m losing my mind, Will. I just know it’s not right, us being together. It’s not meant to be… I… Let’s just talk tonight, I’m sorry….” Then she hung up.
She had faltered in her explanation, but I could feel what she meant. I knew her hanging up like that was out of embarrassment and panic, not just the tears. She was young like I said and still sometimes showed a bit of the tentative, awkward youth in her mannerisms from time to time, in her way of speaking. But that had charmed me all the more early on.
I set the phone down on the deli table and stared at the blank screen. Thoughts raced through my mind: Jonathan, him over at her apartment, that smile, Holly crying on the other end, my ring I bought, the cabin, my friends who would be meeting us, all the history with Holly, my love for her, marriage, a new life together, her face... her sweet voice. Is it over?
I looked at my watch and saw that I was already late back at the office. It was greatly frowned upon not to be at your desk at all expected times at the magazine, especially by Linda, who was a natural-born clock-watcher. I looked grimly down at my unfinished salad; just thinking about walking back into that office made me want to turn the table over and throw my beloved pasta salad against the wall.
I just sat dumbfounded. How could she just end it like that? Where the hell was the discussion, the debate, the talking about it? We typically told each other ‘I love you’ about three times a day; and we go from that to… me sitting alone at a deli looking at my phone.
Damn that South American, and damn Holly and her youthfully awkward, bad, abortive breakup attemp
t. We didn’t even discuss it. I wanted to drive up to see her and tell her how I felt, and then bust that guy’s teeth out. That big, tan, toothy smile of his...
I looked up in bewilderment at the other patrons at the deli milled around or sat eating like it was any other day, like nothing unusual or different had just happened.
Can I call her back and fix this? Should I call her back, try to reason with her – should I do it now, or tonight? I picked up the phone and called her number again, but no answer. I then decided to wait to call her again that evening. I slowly backed my chair from the table, stood up, threw away the half-eaten food, and made my way out the door of the deli and down the street. I need to convince her to slow down, to go on the trip with me, and we can work it out. I thought about what I would say that night as I walked out. I was jerked between sudden anger and sudden sadness, loss and rage. Definitely the worst lunch I’ve had ever had.
When I was almost to the office building I looked up at the grey steel pillars and glass towering above me, and suddenly turned and walked quickly across the street and into the parking deck where my car was. I was barely thinking about what I was doing, moving more by instinct and desire than thought, but I just had to not be in that office.
I got in the car, without thinking of any destination, and I started it up and drove out of the parking lot, not glancing at my building again. I pictured my fabric and plastic chair conspicuously empty, Linda walking by and sticking her head in my office in curiosity and suspicion. The image left me with an unsettled feeling, but I drove faster down avenue.
Three
I figured after a few minutes that I could just go home and call Holly back again, from a place with privacy, on my own turf, really talk this out. I’d also have to call in sick, blaming the Greek pasta salad or something... But as I drove, my friend Scott Dreymond called out of the blue, calling from a tiki bar down the street from where I lived called Coco Joe’s.
I decided without any hesitation to go immediately there and meet him, even though it was at a bar, at noon, on a Monday. Maybe he could advise me on what to do about Holly. He was calling to talk about the cabin trip, I expected – he and his girlfriend were the other couple.
My friend Scott was a very old friend of mine, and was a drug addict and a drunk, but he was a good friend, loyal and trustworthy to me and to hardly anyone else… maybe just his girlfriend and me, if not to anyone else in the entire world. His family didn’t trust him, his coworkers didn’t trust him, but I did 100% and had always stuck by him through the good times and bad – and there were some very bad times with him.
He was perpetually unemployed, lurching from one drunken episode to the next, sometimes with lots of money and sometimes without, and only surviving by the inexhaustible patience and mercy of his grandmother who lived someplace in Florida at a rich retirement community, and who supported him by depositing money in his account on a semi-regular basis. He was her only grandchild and she poured all her hopes and adoration on him, like a lonely dog-lover pampering a vicious, dirty mongrel.
Scott, when he did work, was actually a fantastic salesman, and he was currently, at least for that week, an advertising salesman, selling yellow page book ads to local companies. When he worked for more than a few months he made a lot of money, but he was perpetually in between jobs.
He had always been unsteady since I had met him in high school, and then roomed with him at college, but lately his life had been spiraling out of control. Only in his late 20s, he had already had a home foreclosed upon, and had already filed a personal bankruptcy, losing two Porches and a ski boat in the process. He had also already been married and divorced, and the divorce had been publicly vicious and ugly, and massively expensive, which had started his latest spiral. In the past he focused on pills, weed and booze, but Scott was mainly only drinking very heavily these days, and he had gotten into some legal trouble few months ago with a felony DUI.
He and I had been best friends for years, but life was drifting us apart, slowly, inexorably, which saddened me. The drift was more to do with his having gotten married, bought a large house, making lots of money for a time, rather than because of his drugs or boozing. All of those adult milestones were all things that I did not have or had not obtained, and all things that tended to settle a person down and change a person permanently. He had always partied too hard, of course, but it was his success and large moves that actually changed him.
I, in the alternative, remained unsettled, unanchored by possessions and family; and he was going the other way, albeit drunkenly. Thus, it was his periods of financial success and excess more than the boozing, whoring and drugs that had started to separate us. Strange but true.
But now, now that he was in one of his downward spirals, now we were bonding together again, re-welding the parts of our deep friendship together anew, perhaps in mutual despair and drifting unstableness – but welding nonetheless. I have found that the best, truest, and strongest friendships are built from the ashes of common disasters, shared sins and mutual flaws, rather than simple interests.
Brooke, the girl he was going to bring on the camping trip, was a recent acquisition from a yoga class he sometimes went to. She was 20 – a really hot, little, dark-haired thing. Despite his extremes, his excess and instability, his irrational decisions, people really liked him, usually, and he had a talent for making people feel very comfortable around him. It was a gift, which some people have, and which a lot of good salesmen naturally have, and he had it. And when you saw him it was almost always with a little sense of joyful expectancy, even if in your last conversation nothing particularly joyful had occurred. He just had… energy, and he and I had always understood each other’s personalities and sense of humor. That’s what we had.
Lately I had grown more worried about him; I worried that he wouldn’t be able to pull himself back out of this spiral this time. He seemed worse than usual. And I worried, as I drove up to Coco Joe’s that soon it may finally be the end for him, that he’d finally end up in a psych ward or killing himself or something, and I didn’t know what to do about it.
I walked into the dimly lit wooden-walled tavern still shaken from my call with Holly, still enormously worried, but now also searching for Scott with a familiar apprehension. The bar was decorated kind of half-heartedly like a tropical beach hut, but failing to fully remove the Irish-pub feel of the last bar that was there. Faint markings of the Irish flag above the dart boards could be seen in the right light, a ghostly shadow of a crucifix faded on the wall was visible, a certain Guinness-stained look to the wooden bar surface all created a contradictory, schizophrenic mixture to the feel of the place.
I walked in and passed the live parrot that the owner always kept by the bar, apparently in one last desperate and questionable attempt to sway the atmosphere towards the cheerful and tropic. Down at the end of the bar I could see Scott, slumping forward on a stool and talking with the bartender. The bartender was Steve, an older, moody guy who kept to himself mostly. Scott kept pointing purposefully to his watch as he talked to Steve, I noticed, and I overheard as I walked over something about “decency” and “society.” I already knew what he was talking about.
“… So that’s why it shouldn’t be strange to see someone drinking at noon, Steve…” Scott nodded quickly at me and looked back to the bartender. “It’s actually the more appropriate time to be drinking…”
Scott was wearing a blue blazer sport coat and khaki pants, with leather loafers. This was then a business day for him. He was a good looking guy overall, on the short side but with a firm build and sandy-blonde hair. We contrasted, with my tall and lean frame.
“Uh huh.” Steve grunted as he carved up limes, only half listening.
“Will,” Scott addressed me like I had already been in on the conversation for a while, “don’t you agree that people can handle alcohol better during daytime hours? I was just explaining to our buddy Steve here that people can’t handle our booze at night, none of
us can, not when our bodies are tired and starting to shut down – it’s the worst time to drink actually.”
I had heard him make this point at least a dozen times before: bucking the taboos of society, particularly in respect to booze. Partly it was a joke to him, but he meant it also to a troubling degree.
He picked up his glass of wine and turned it this way and that in the dim light, something he always did with wine, as if casually inspecting its ambient quality, even though he didn’t really know anything about fine wines; it was just something he liked to do for the look of it.
“But have a little snort in the morning…” He shot a gulp of wine and then set the glass down. “Or at lunch, and you have the whole day to burn it off. At night you come down and sleep like a baby – better than a baby.”
He had set the glass down a little too hard and Steve glared at him for a moment, then glanced over at me with a warning look.
“And no hangover,” Scott murmured to the wine glass.
“Yea, well it’s 12:30 and you’re already drunk,” I said, “so I don’t think your theory has any hope. Let’s chat a minute.” I pulled him over to a nearby table. I ordered myself a beer, despite what I preached; but I felt kind of justified in drinking a little from what I had been through already that morning.
“Holly broke up with me,” I said as we sat down. “I think…”
Scott’s sluggish expression was first of surprise and then doubt. “What do you mean, ‘you think’?” he said grumpily.
I told him about the conversation with Holly, how it hit me as soon as I heard her voice, that something was vastly different. I told him about Jonathan.
His face slowly changed. He always grew worried when he saw me depressed. I think it was because I was supposed to be a kind of life raft for him, someone to hold onto to stay afloat; someone who he knew he could count on when worse came to worse. He had his grandmother in Florida, but she wouldn’t be around forever. Scott knew about my plans to propose, but he also knew Holly had been worrying me lately.
