F.A.
Decorations
The streamers from the surprise party had not yet been taped to the underside of the deck when they were left out. The storm surprised us. I missed it all because I had to work late. I don't know how much I had to work. Maybe I just didn't feel like going to the party. When I came home, I saw so many of the decorations battered. The rain made them bleed their colors. It was the opposite of summer snowballs and the way the flavors blossomed inside the shaved ice, getting deeper and darker as the attendant poured. I knew nothing was reusable. The party must have moved indoors without the festive good cheer. I tried to imagine her disappointment. Standing here under the deck down by the basement door, I thought of something that I would like to say to her. Something…the letters for happy birthday now looking like swollen rice noodles…something that would have connected the end of one point to the beginning of another.
I remember the parties we had when we were younger and the neighbors would bring their chairs and we would all sit in the backyard when it was unfenced and huge, and the children would catch fireflies in glass Coke bottles. I am sad to see that this party was not what she wanted. We didn't have decorations for those summer parties. They just happened. But those were many years ago when the days were much longer and the rain didn't get us quite so wet.
I am alone. The last person to the party. The distance in my mind. She is probably upstairs, wrapped up in the white linen sheets. I'm sure there's food left in the refrigerator. That's how long it took me to get home. Long enough for her to erase it all and pack it into plastic. I guess it was still raining when she finally decided to go to bed, and so she left everything out here like this for me to clean. I'll get it in the morning. I'm hungry and I'm tired. And even though it stopped raining, I can't think of that thing that I wanted to say to her. I'm hoping it will pop into my head soon so that when I crawl into bed I might have something nice to say to her if she wakes up and asks me why I was late.
“Work. You missed the party getting spoiled. It would have been good if you were here to help suffer the rain. I tried my best to save it, but my heart gave out. It just didn’t seem important to me as it didn’t seem important to you.”
I undressed and stood at the end of the bed. She was curled in a ball with her back to me. She was on my side of the bed. This was her not so subtle way of telling me to stay out.
“I am sorry, Sadie. Work came unraveled, and I got lost trying to fix things. It was wrong of me to miss things. The decorations must have been lovely until the rain–”
“Work unraveled?” Bullshit. This was her way of cursing at me. “Unraveled. That’s some fancy dang word, Henry.” As a professor of creative writing, I knew how to choose words. I might have planted that word to hurt her a bit. I was quietly angry that she was angry with me. When there’s a freshman writer discovering my book and my mentors, siting in the big chair across from my desk, it’s hard to cut him off.
“Your father was from Germany, yes?” He was looking at the poem I had written for my honors thesis.
“That’s right. Rolf. Such a German name.” I had chuckled over this tired joke so many times that the laugh was genuine because I was actually just laughing at my own stupidity. I could see his wheels turning, though. Their wheels always turned with that poem.
“So he was in the GERMAN army.” He paused, closed the book and looked up at me as they always do. “He was a Nazi.”
I didn’t shift my relaxed posture. I just gestured. “He was a soldier. Drafted by Nazis. But he was no Nazi.”
“Did he kill jews.” How many times had I heard this question?
“I don’t know who he killed or if he killed anyone. He was killed by the Russian winter.”
The young man reopened my book carelessly. “I am sorry. I lost my dad to cancer. My mother is Russian, but her jewish ancestors came to America a hundred years ago. Like Fiddler on the Roof, you know?” Oh, I knew. My own guilt led me to explore Judaism from every awkward angle. Being the son of a Nazi wasn’t quite as bad as surviving the Holocaust especially since my father did not survive it himself.
“Your mothe shows up in your poems over and over. She moved to Florida. That’s the one poem about her slide towards the equator, or as you call it ‘the belly of the Earth.’”
He looked down and smiled sheepishly.
“It’s a powerful poem, Dale. Your mother must be a remarkable woman.”
“‘Must have been.’” He looked up at me with his dark eyes and crooked nose. “She’s dead.”
“I am sorry to hear that. As you know, I lost my father when I was only a baby. My mother died three years ago.”
“We are orphans, Professor.”
“I suppose we are.”
He held the book up. “It’s a beautiful collection. You’re quite a good poet, I am glad I took this class. May I keep the book?” The book was for sale at the University bookstore, but I nodded.
“Sure, Dale. It’s yours. I am glad it resonates with you.”
“I didn’t say that. I just like it.” He was so full of fear and confidence. Such a deadly concoction. “Didn’t you say you had a party to attend?”
Good lord. Now the students are proxies for my wife. The truth is, I enjoyed these sessions when a young poet finds me, an old poet, relevant. My book, my only book, is in his hands and his heart. He has read and re-read it. They often do, especially the young men who respond to my masculinity. It’s the German accent that died in me when I was twelve and I moved here to the US. But it leaks out of my poems. I find that the Jewish students are always rather obsessed with the poem about my father (the Nazi).
“Yes. I should go. I wondered if it’s still raining. My wife was planning an outdoor pool party Caribbean Island themed party. I am not sure the rain cared much for this idea.” It did hit me that I would be in trouble at home, but I just couldn’t get enough of this idol worshipping.
“Professor Muller…do you think I have a book like this in me?” You see, here in this little office with a sliver of a window and degrees and Degas hung on the walls, Hans Muller was not a disappointment. I was a man with answers. But once I got home, I had no original voice. My wife had heard all of my poems spoken in excuses and disappointments. Tonight would be no different. It was hard for me not to soak up the sunshine of this young man’s worshipping uncertainty.
“You have something brilliant in those poems about your mom, Dale.”
The young man smiled sheepishly. Thank you was written all over his young glowing face. “Are you going to make the party?”
“I hope so, Dale. I hope so.”
“I know your job is important. Young writers come to you for guidance and clarity and inspiration. I love that about you, Hans, I do. But this party was important.”
I slipped out of my shoes and shirt and pants and socks. I snuck into the bed and found a way to wrap myself around her. “I know. I let you down. I will clean the mess I missed. I promise. I love you, Birdie.”
She resisted for a moment, but she melted. It wasn’t my poetry she loved. She loved my strong German arms. She didn’t care about my Nazi father. She just wanted me to find her diction and meter. She wanted her heartbeat to be the rhythm of my words.
“I love you.” I pulled her into me. I was strong. She melted. “I love you. I do.”
“I love you, too.”
The Tiger
I remember you took me camping once in October in the woods where your parents used to take you and all of your siblings when you were all kids. I had never camped. I wasn't afraid of the wildlife or the darkness or the endless noise. I was afraid of you. I remember after you built the fire and we unfolded the old chairs, your eyes glowed golden. I know it was the fire, but still it was like you were a black and white photo with eyes only in terrifying color. Who made you? What creature could have created you? At that time I had been on the earth for almost 40 years, and I had never seen anyone like you. Your face was so balanced. One cheekbone matched the other. Your nose cut through the dark perfectly and then died in a little arrow-point. Your teeth glowed like coconut meat, and when you were silent they were hidden perfectly behind your cherry black lips.
There was a rain so light it seemed polite. You didn't even put your hood up. And when I looked up at the sky, I saw the stars being thrown at us. Like the sky was surrendering to you. I couldn't blame it. I certainly wanted to put my hands on the earth before you, palms up. I knew that you would eventually spill out of the chair, and I wanted to catch every drop of you. Because I could not imagine any of you going to waste. I could not imagine the earth swallowing you before I had the chance.
The Beach
The tractors seem silent because we are up so high in this holiday resort. They clean the sand while the fluorescent white foam of the ocean leaks in and disappears. Come out here, my love, and look at it with me. It is our vacation, but the ocean is here forever. And it won't care when we leave. Just sit here and see it with me. Wrap the blanket from the back of the couch around your dogwood shoulders. I'm not asking you to speak. You can close your eyes and lean on your knees, but at least listen. You might even hear the moon slipping like a coin through the metal sheet of the night sky. It is a desperate sound not unlike the endless sad sound of the quarters falling into the games at the arcade.
At Normandy, Salinger had not yet written the things that would ring in the ears and fill the hearts of generations. He held a rifle and felt the spray of the English Channel that likely was just as nervous as every soldier who was about to live or die by running through it. Sitting here with you I wish there was a way to call the dead Salinger and speak to him like a friend the way Caulfield put it. But your mouthless eyes will have to be enough for me to keep me from feeling so totally alone. You stare at me, and I stare at the beach over the railing like it is the mouth of a landing craft. But I am too far away to storm the Nazis. And there is nothing violent on the empty beach. The only danger for me is here. Days where you have disappeared from me, and I only wish I could throw you into the ocean and let the salt water baptize you into loving me again.
It is the same damn ocean who used to cradle me as a boy, and I would swim out into it on a rented raft and pretend that we were warrior enemies. We would fight the fight that kept me in the sun and in the undertow for hours and hours until my father had to shout from the shore for me to come back. But now the ocean has forgotten. Or he is just too busy to remember me because now my heart is not small and swollen with the imagination of childhood. It has been bent and dented and it will never be as valuable as it once was. To the ocean I am just a body to be tossed or lost forever along the sandy bottom of its black oblivion.
My love, I cannot say these words to you because it's clear your ears have been folded and packed like the umbrellas we didn't rent on the beach that we never visited together. But be true. Come to me. There is literally less than a foot between us. I made the chairs close enough so that if you wanted to reach out to me you could. There is still a fantasy for us waiting in the ocean. Even now we could walk down the stairs and across the boardwalk. We could charge through the sand and find ourselves in the water. It's not safe to swim without the lifeguard but it doesn't mean we can't do it. When there is enough pain you can float for hours and not drown. And if you let me hold you, my love, I will make us into a ship or a boat and we will rise and fall with the tide that doesn't stop just because the sun has gone down. We could live above the waves or even die together if the fighting gets to be too desperate for us.
The Love
Song
(A prose interpretation of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”)
Let me take you out when the night is stretched like black paper over abandoned windows. Let’s go to a bar where you can feel the crunch of peanut shells under your feet. It's possible that the people we see are not going home alone tonight. Don't ask me “what is it?” Let's just go and make our visits.
Even if we wind up stuck in the front room with the old women who look at us like we're deranged. I'll hold your hand and pull you through, and we'll pretend they are consoling us with their wisdom and grief.
The air outside is a cat that walks around on soft paws, (with fur that’s rotten from months of sleeping outside). You can smell it wherever you go, but still it thrills you when you see it leap!
Don't worry, my love. We've got time. We can waste the evening because there will be time for us to do the things that we have to do… tomorrow. Tomorrow, there will be time to make so many mistakes and then make them all over again. We’ll forgive each other and stop to eat fried dumplings (I might even eat two.)
Let the old women talk. Their voices are useless and low.
When I walk ahead of you down the stairs, you can see that I'm losing my hair. I don't mind. Because when I turn around, you fall into me. And your arms are long.
Let's take a chance? Let's dare to make tonight ours. I want to stomp my foot into the street and watch the city quiver.
I had a chance to do this once, but I didn't. I stood still. When I filled a teaspoon, I made sure I didn’t spill a drop. I was careful. Let's not be that way. Let's be naked. Let's allow the sugar to spill. Let’s undress not just because it makes sex easy. Let's be naked because that's the way we were born.
I was at the university. I let them size me up (and down). I know what it feels like to have the smokey setting sun stare at you. You are starting what I stopped long ago. Let me squeeze your hand. Let me tell you what no one told me. Or if they told me, I wasn't listening. Because they had me on a table. They pinned me to the desk.
I wrote beautiful long hand. A way of writing that is strange to you. Because you can delete. You can change your sentences in seconds.
So do it. Cut it up and cut it out. Do something new. Write something with modern letters. You don't have to be stuck with what you said in the past. You can be free. Kick them in the eyes. Don't let them look at you like critics. Don’t even get on the examination table. Run. Fly. Breathe. Death is only dangerous when you resign. Don’t quit. Never say “goodnight” and stumble into sleep. Stay awake!
These places where I want to take you, I've been to these places. I went there at the end of my work day. I smoked. I don't know if I deserve to be anything but the blind crab at the bottom of the ocean. I have a tough time with change. You know that. You've seen that from me. I am the sideways scampering crab. I walk sideways to go straight.
In the morning we can go home and stretch ourselves like shadows on the floor. From our fingertips to our toes, we can become a prime number! Two ones make 11! You laugh. At me? With me? Who cares? We’re naked. Let’s get splinters and lick our wounds.
Before I met you, I heard the voices of women who tried to tell me that I should turn this way or roll that way or sleep less like a stumbling truck. I've had my opportunity to celebrate and mourn. I don't know what I'm doing. I can't predict the future. I know that when we sit in that corner booth near the jukebox and you drink your dark beer, I feel less tragic. I stop staring at the dagger, and I actually enjoy the soft sound of your lips curling to a smile.
I don't know if it's worth it. I don't know if this love affair of ours is useless. I mean there were past voices. Some of them have pulled knives out of their boots and cut the ropes. I can feel myself floating loose through the universe because those people who were once harbors are now storms.
Is that all it takes? Past voices from the past telling me that I'm a sinner? I won't lie. The voices still rattle around inside my brain. When I am not sitting next to you in the Uber or on the bench by the side of the lake, I do hear them. Because what if they are right? What if they saw the shame and said “it’s wrong. This is all wrong.”
They would lie beside me and eventually get up, walking into the kitchen with a blanket and the white glow of a snow storm. They said to the sparkling night, “that’s not what I meant.” And they would turn with tears, and I could feel the radiator’s trembling pipes. Despite their revelations, I couldn’t stop my mouth from objecting. My poetry withers with their disappointment.
They left. They all left.
My voice was a light that threw the still images of my mind to the wall that always faced the bright eyes and the fine hairs of the arms that hugged the knees and preferred making love to the closing door than to me.
I spoke. I argued. They turned away from the window and said so quietly, “That’s not what I meant. That’s not what I meant, at all.”
I live with the truth that I am sad. I see the smiles and costumes of the happiest princes. I envy their choices. I have no choices left. My head slips. I regret my arms and legs. I am a fool. A dropout. I am double your age. I do my job usefully, but you are a candle. We have light because you burn. My light went out years ago. I fumble in my dark.
I am at a loss over my hair. It escapes and leaves behind old skin. It tilts my scales and makes the creases in my face. You can get lost in my wrinkles. I bought a new soap and ordered a treatment for my expanding scalp. My belt has reached the last notch. Should I cut a new hole?
I can walk to the water and sit on the bench like any old man, watching for the young ladies. They are bent over with laughs. You could be one of them, but these women don’t see me. And they won’t. If you were here, decorated with friends, you wouldn’t see me either.
Later, we can be drunk and asleep on the floor of your apartment, but soon the city’s yawning will wake us. When you blink at me, I am sure you will wonder…how did he get so old without me? That’s a quiet question. Just a fleeting song between mermaids. They sing. They sing. The deaf waters rise to meet me.
The lovely fingers grab for my crooked frown
Till human voices wake me and I drown.
Musée des
Beaux Arts
You lost a brother. I know there's a part of your heart that goes untouched and no matter how much I circle around and try to find my way, it's made of bricks now. It's not available for me or my amateur love. It was an unexpected thing, I know that. And the funeral that followed was something you had to help organize because your parents had rotted and could not hold the weight of it all. You and I are the same age, and I know at the time that you were piling the stones and pebbles around the body of your brother, I was lost in my own tragedy. I had a death in a way when my first wife filled our living room with accusations and her relentless decision to leave me. That was on the anniversary of my father's death. She could not let me mourn for one day longer. She tore the black from me and made a hole and pushed me into it. I stayed there for years and years. And while I was grieving my losses, you were doing your best to forget his decay. It makes me think of a lesson I taught my seventh graders not long after my marriage was erased. Of course I captured the boys just the way the Minotaur was held in the nasty twisting corridors of the labyrinth. And they found some identity with Icarus and his ridiculous inability to listen to his father's only warning. When Icarus flies to the Sun, one of my students asked me if he was an idiot. I said no. He's not. He just didn't listen. I'm certain that my ex-wife would have called me an idiot. I suffered from the same problem as Icarus. For me flying to the Sun wasn't about the joy of being able to fly. It was about the sun’s beauty. Because for me the sun has always been a woman. She had her own tragic history, the death of someone so young. He fell right in front of her. She must have seen his white legs disappear into the green sea. I saw you in the middle of a memory somewhere between the old Masters and the sculpture garden at the museum. You had your own students to escort across the ocean to Europe where all the best painters lived and died. I was told to sip beauty, but I didn’t listen. I opened my mouth as you crossed before me, and I swallowed you in giant greedy mouthfuls.
Man &
Wife
The Beginning
Polly's truck ate up the asphalt, and the tiny rocks leapt out of the driveway into the street. She'd had enough of her sister’s drunken romance. She said what she came to say, and she drove away in a cloud of exhaust and disappointment.
Minutes earlier, her words hit hard. “Who are you? How did you get into my sister’s life?” She was a cannon. She blasted me. I had no answers, but I sobered up… quick. When she turned to you, you were ready for the fight. You said one word, over and over. “Paul. Paul. PAUL!” Polly’s ex-husband. You repeated it every time she came to an exclamation point about me. When she ran out of words, you had some exclamation points of your own “YOU married a monster! Now it’s my turn!” She could not unlock you. The three of us stood on your family’s front porch in silence.
The early moon was a comfort, like the loons on the Chesapeake Bay.
Once Polly was gone, you collapsed. I carried you upstairs, barely holding onto my own consciousness. I carried you, fully dressed, and tucked you in without a word.
You could have been my daughter. I guess that was your sister’s point. It was the last time we would ever spend even a minute in your mother's home. Much later you became an orphan and my wife. But tonight we would sleep. I didn’t even kick off my boots. I just curled into you.
You grabbed me like a blanket. You pulled me close. I did my best just to keep you warm.
Hours earlier, before Polly showed up, I held my glass of whisky tight enough to crack it. I drank to get drunk for the both of us, but you turned a bottle of Moscato inside out. You weren’t looking to get drunk. You just wanted to sink as deep as me. Your eyes never left mine. You were going to “keep up” with me.
We were knocked out in your mother's bed since yours was now a sewing room. (That's what you get for going away to college.) All night my arm was numb and wrapped tightly around your denim waist. You fell asleep four times, sloshing your words around your mouth. Eventually you were out for good. The pain in my shoulder turned to gratitude. My feelings for you were bigger than pain. That’s something I never felt before. Those feelings of giving.
When I first got to your mother’s house the sun was still a part of the sky. I was ashamed to be so shy. My face was red and I couldn't do much more than stutter. “Are you al-al-always this much of a drinker?”
“I am now, partner.” You reached out and slapped me on my knee, laughing and singing. “Anything you can do…”
Your eyes weren't afraid to steady on mine, and every time you spoke you made poetry, unrhymed and honest. You recited lines from songs and psalms until you were too drunk to be coherent. I was twice your age, but I couldn't make sense of the words you were saying. I’m not a man of words, but your sentences were slices of something sweet. I didn’t have to understand you. I just leaned forward and took a bite.
Even if you were sober, I would have still been lost. You were pretty before I got drunk and just as pretty after. As pretty as they come. Smart but not smart enough (according to Polly) because there you were, in bed with me. That was the girl who dropped out of her graduate program. That was the girl with the hope in her eyes. You told me to stay. I said I would. You asked me how long? I kissed you instead. You fell into it. It was a wet kiss and a little off center, but you put your hand on my cheek and fixed it.
12 Years Later
Now, you turn your back, and I could carve my life story on the stiff white linen of your nightgown. You hold your pillow to your stomach like an unborn baby, and your anger swells your face and makes your cheeks sweaty like freshly washed apples.
Impulsive as hell, you were finally starting to think things through before you ran over reason.
“How did we get here?” The tears fell despite your edict that you were never going to cry over me.
“I don’t know where ‘here’ is.” I was full of excuses and explanations, but I would rather erupt than tell you my thoughts. That’s because my thoughts wrapped around my heart and squeezed like the heart attack I had two years ago. Only, this was worse. You weren’t interested in saving my life tonight.
Maybe you're grieving the loss of the youth that you had to sell so that we could buy the dirty old trailer we lived in for the first four years. ‘The Love Dump’ you called it. It was tiny, but we never fought back then. That trailer was a sanctuary for our crooked love.
“Older doesn't mean better.” The venom was just getting started. “And it certainly didn't mean rich.” You cocked your fist back and punched my transgressions and scribbled love and turned to the bed. Your anger at me is loud in spite of the silence. You went to bed without saying good night. The absence of those words went skyward like the displeasure of Vesuvius.
It's the quiet before the fiery quilt, but it's not quiet enough for me to find a way to fall asleep without you. I had already wasted my life when you were still a child. Just a baby to be honest. When you met me, you made up your mind that you were going to marry me. It didn't matter what I said. I didn't even have to get down on one knee.
It was your family that begged you, but you weren't listening to them. You put words in my mouth, You said “yes.” And now you've got legal paragraphs wrapped around you instead of a blanket. How are you going to get any sleep?
That’s what you'll think when you wake up. I think about rolling you over and kissing you and reminding myself how lucky I am. But that's not how I am. My luck ran out a long time ago. And so will you. You’re almost there. In fact, I might be only one sleep away from being an unmarried man.
You'll get in the passenger side of your sister's pick-up truck, and she’ll give me a smile for the first time ever. She’ll take you from me in another cloud of desertion, only she’ll have you. I'll be left here under the same ash that's always been there for me since before you knew how to walk or talk or kiss like a wife.
The first and the last night. That's what I have here for you. Who knew I would be the poet? Who knew I would be the one with all the words?
Love
and a
Question
The stranger knocked on the door with a soft hand. Had I not been staring at “my wife” so intently I might not have heard him. Opening the door, I saw his blackness against the blackness of night, and it really was only his voice that made him stand out to me. "It's very late and I've had a tough time finding the road and getting myself back." I looked over his shoulder. The road disappeared into the nothingness where there were no lights filling the windows of the dark homes. "I really have nowhere to stay." It was late. I said "let me look up at the sky, and we'll see how much light there is for you." The leaves were tattered and thin. Winter would take them soon.
Behind me I knew she was leaning into the mirror, lost in the worry that autumn was almost gone. She dreaded winter, And I could feel her fear from anywhere in the house. We were newly married, and now I would have my chance to see what life was truly like with this woman who could find silence in the dim reflection of herself.
She seemed ready for bed from the minute we got home hours after the ceremony. She had wandered upstairs and down, dressed in the nothingness that she would wear to sleep that night. Half naked. Half gym shorts. Her hair had escaped from the elaborate contraption that she had pinned to the top of her head. Wherever she put the wedding dress, I would never see it again for all the years that we would be married.
There was something that glowed red that was plugged into the bathroom wall, and because she had not turned on the lights her skin had changed colors and she looked not unlike a stop signal. I could only imagine how this stranger was affected by her shirtlessness.
If he had asked for food or a pint of gin, I would have gladly packed up a bag. But what type of man would want to bring sorrow to the newly married rooms of a newly married couple on the first evening of their newly married life? I leaned into the door. It would have slammed if I let it. But I couldn't. Instead the three of us pondered the blackness that surrounded us as the winter forced me to make the first grown up decision of my newly adult life.
Author’s Note:
All stories were also inspired by some of my favorite poems. The poems are:
“Storm Windows” by Howard Nemerov; “The Tyger” by William Blake; “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold; “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by TS Eliot; “Musée des Beaux Arts” by WH Auden; “Man and Wife” by Robert Lowell; “Love and a Question” by Robert Frost