The text came at sundown, saying she was scared, a surprise text
since I thought we were through, she’d received another text from her stalker
and she feared he might show up at her door, and she needed someone to be there
with her if he did, with me driving in a panic in a car not a white steed to rescue
the damsel in distress, full of my own self-importance, only to find when I
arrived she was more collected than I was, motioning for me to sit on the couch
beside her as she turned on the TV to watch her favorite food guy, a man she’d
once met and later wrote about, whose books she kept on the sheets along with
mine and my boss’, she clutching me as I sat, perhaps mistaking me for him, her
fingers trembling as I realized she really was scared, and maybe truly believed
the boogie man would knock on the door, that kind-hearted chef who would love
her to death if given a chance.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Just hold me,” she said. “That’s what I need right now.”
She traded her CD for his book just as she had done for
mine, his book on her bed where mine had been last time, a little night reading,
she told me when I asked, she then asking more about him, claiming from what
she read of his book, “He’s really fucked up when comes to women,” with me staying
deathly silent, a tug of war going on in my chest, the green-eyed monster
stirring as I wondered what she had planned next, for him, for me, a sense of
doom hanging over the room, a kind of vacancy as if she was moving me out of
her heart, packing my possessions near the door for me to take with me as I
leave, not physical things, just those things I thought we had in common, an
eviction notice sitting on the bed with a book mark showing just how far she’d
read.
Would she read to the end the way she had with me or put the
book down and pick up mine again?
“Tell me more about him,” she said, giving me my answer.
I don’t know what I could have been thinking, posting a post
like that, a poem she couldn’t help but get offended by.
I can’t even argue that she mis-read it.
She’s smart enough to read my unconscious wishes, when I can’t
read them for myself.
A poem should not be used as a weapon, even by the unconscious,
like a knife between the shoulder blades by a once-trusted hand.
Caesar could not have felt so betrayed as she must have,
seeing it posted as it was.
I took it down, driving a stake through its heart, yet it
was not enough, splinters of the poem remaining fixed in the wound to haunt
both of us later, to raise doubts about whether this thing we had was right in
the first place. I burned the poem in self-sacrifice and even that won’t do,
writing another in apology she cannot accept, and perhaps should not, scared
about what the first poem signified and whether she can expect a back-stabbing
again.
What was I thinking? How can I make amends?
Or am I so scared of her I make a beautiful thing come to an
end, driving the spike do deep in its chest as to sever its spine.
He was the stalker she first met while she was still being
stalked by somebody else, a good-hearted chef, she said, who had allowed her to
become manager when the job she had applied for was as a bartender, a man
shecared for even though she said she
sometimes feared for her life, reading his threatening texts over and over as
if passages from The Bible, responding just often enough to keep him going,
even when she claimed she wanted him to stop.
“He lives in Brooklyn” she told me. “But he works just on
the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel.”
This implied if he had enough left to pay the toll, he could
get at her.
He was hardly her first stalker or her worst. She was still
shaking off a woman stalker when she applied at his swanky restaurant where he
served as chef. She hoped to learn enough from him to become a chef herself,
starting at serving tables and mixing drinks, not with the aim to manage, she
said, but to move up the ladder, having the misfortune of a romantic entanglement
with him, he claimed was love, when she didn’t- a rough road of petty skirmishes and mismanagement that put him and
the restaurant on the road to ruin, leaving her with fewer tips and a need to
find some better occupation. She said I broke her heart to leave. It certainly
broke his, starting him stalking her the day she quit, and she said she’s scared
the stalking may never cease.
She reported him to the local cops, yet still felt a little
sorry for him, calling him “good-hearted” if also deluded, sometimes reading
things in his texts that weren’t really there, though one thing is for certain,
he is desperate to have her back, and won’t stop until he’s succeeded.
“Why did you unfriend me?” she asked, as indignant as if I
had slapped her face.
“It’s hard to explain,” I said and meant it.
“Try,” she said coldly.
“It’s just too much.”
“What’s too much?” she asked. “I thought you liked me.”
“I do. But seeing your picture posted every morning when I
wake up is driving me crazy.”
“So, now you think I’m ugly?”
“That’s not what I said,” I said, and knew just the opposite
was true. Seeing her image so often and in so many places made it impossible
for me to function or sleep, seeing her in my head when I needed to work, things
stirring in me at night that I hadn’t felt in years.
“You’re going to add me as a friend again, you hear me?” she
said.
I signed, said ye like a man condemned to hang, knowing
there was no way of escaping it.
Her poem posted on May 9, seems to follow up on one posted
two days earlier, written about but not for our temporary boss.
The central metaphor compares him to a prize she has been
after since early one and finally achieve, a prize curled up against her,
alluding to fire encounters when he had seemed ruthless to her, and she could
not tell what it meant, if anything at all.
This may well be reading too much into the poem and yet it
seems to verify what I had suspected after seeing his book on her bed.
Like most of her poems I have read so far, the craftsmanship
is stunning, the metaphor of a prize well-earned and the physical representation
of an idea of her prize curled up against her, as well as the weary tone one
might expect as the result of some great competition, the athlete after having
achieved her goal, rest wearily, perhaps worn out from the effort, but clearly
well-sated.
The poem suggests that this was a goal that started on an
early encounter when she suspected something behind his gruff reprimand, a glimpse
of some attraction she eventually succeeded in bringing to the surface, but not
without a struggle that wore her out. There is a sense of self-gratification in
this poem, of having accomplished what she set out to do, winning a prize that
curls up beside her even as she thinks back to when it started, a weary reflection
on it all, bringing them into close contact, perhaps even tenderness.
She called me to come to Cloud 9 for some afternoon delight,
only it wasn’t afternoon.
She had called it sick after being up all night with a monkey
going crazy in her brain. Her stalker had sent another long diatribe that
scared her.
She didn’t want to be alone and said she needed me to be
there.
She showed me the messages when I arrived, one long monologue
that seemed to me like a dialogue with one part of the conversation cut out.
She had also shown these to our temporary boss who insisted
that she give the stalker’s photo and other information to the office
receptionist to be stored in the company computer – just in case something happened,
and she needed to notify the police how to find the stalker.
I did not want to make the long trip up from the southern
most tip of the county, but she sounded in such distress, I did, traveling in
the sharp spring sunlight in which everything, including my senses, seemed
stark, the outlines of the world exposed and her place full of sharp edges that
might cut me to pieces if I moved the wrong way.
She seemed less terrified than I thought she’d be when I got
there, taking comfort – she said – in my presence, though later, she told me
she had things to do, details she kept in some mental datebook of things she
needed to get done or other people she needed to see, sending me back on the
long road south trailing a string of her texts I could not answer for driving.
The poem she posted a week ago may well explain the growing
distance between us.
The poem talks about her sharing her private hell with
somebody who was supportive enough to keep her from blaming herself for all the
bad things that have happened in her life, this backlog of self-incrimination
by which she has judged herself.
Just who this trusting person is, I can’t say for certain,
but it certainly not me.
My best guess would make it out to be our temporary boss,
who had taken her under his wing, giving her advice on how to deal with her
stalker as well as mentoring her.
She claims that when he first became our temporary boss, he
was rude to her and demanding, criticizing her in front of the other employees,
a condition that has obviously changed over the last few months as she came to
trust him more and more – he being kind enough so she could tell him some of
her darkest secrets.
This poem seems to be a reflection about his influence on
her, giving her the affirmation, she so desperately needs.
The structure of the poem shows her remarkable skill as a
wordsmith, the use of parallel phrases to build tension in the second part to
come to a dramatic conclusion.
But the brilliant part of the poems comes in the set up in
the first part, where she sets up reader’s expectation that she be found guilty
of all she’s blamed herself for in the past to ultimately and unexpectedly come
to the opposite conclusion of innocent.
Justice is about the speaker’s realization that she has been
wrong about thinking herself as guilty for all this time, blaming herself for
everything bad that has happened, and then finally, when she trusted someone
else to open up to him, he guided her out of the maize of self-incrimination,
someone kind and caring, who listened and then gave sage advice so ultimately
she came out understanding she was right all along.
This is not a poem written to this kind person, but an
internal monologue, one part of herself talking to another part of herself, passing
judgement on herself, but coming up with a positive conclusion, celebrating the
person who helped to achieve this, someone wise, kind and caring.
It was her trip; I just went along for the ride – not a long
ride, just down to the Statue of Liberty and back, yet long enough to see how
she must have looked during those long cruises when she was with the band.
She looked utterly professional, carrying pad and camera,
wearing a pants suit, her steady gaze surveying the landscape inside and top
side as well as that which we passed on either side of the Hudson.
This was the maiden voyage of a refurbished party boat,
destined to take on business and pleasure events in the future, but accommodating
big wigs and small fry to show off what this boat had and could do, equipped with
bar and kitchen, dance space, lounge area, tables and chairs, thought the food and
drink offered on this trip would not be the typical fair people might expect
when renting it for their cruise.
She moved from table to table, person to person, interviewing
anyone who would sit still along enough for her to question and snap their pictures,
not just the heavy weight politicians who she dealt with day in and day out,
but some of the ordinary folks who seemed delighted by her attention, as well
as the people who made the whole thing possible, people like those she might
have seen long ago and far away when she stood on the band stand instead of the
light weight musician performing on this short jaunt.
I would have loved to have heard her sing; I knew she wouldn’t,
even though she had once done so at the local performing arts center. She had a
different hat today than then, or even the one she’d worn on those longer cruises
and did not need to lose herself by changing boats (so to speak) midstream, she
needed to focus, needed to know which hat she needed to sear to get this chore
done.
Below deck, she moved like a panther, from room to room,
table to table, from the blue lighted area near the diners to the purple haze
near where the band played, a slim, powerful cat on the prowl, and a magnet for
the gazes of the men she passed, who did not know here, but would have liked to
, had this been a typical trip on which they could have offered to buy her a
drink.
All the drinks on this trip were free, handed out by cool
waiters and waitresses, all smiling all of the time. But she did not partake,
promising to go with me on shore later where we could both indulge.
Above deck, along the viewing promenade, she seemed less
mysterious, yet no less powerful, taking in the slanted beams of sunlight like
an at-peace lioness, calmed by the slight breeze of a chill wind, stands of her
hair flowing across her forehead. I could not see her eyes for the sunglasses.
She snapped my picture as if I deserved it, giving me a promising smile, not a
wink, but almost as good, suggesting that this was a special moment I would
later remember fondly, the motion of the boat so gentle for most of the time,
we might not have been moving except for the changing scenery on either side
and the approach of the statue where we were destined to turn around, the
halfway mark, for the trip, and perhaps for our journey together.
Later, in the restaurant, we indulged, she eating oysters;
we both drank wine, we laughing as if this might be the last time we would
every laugh together, our anchors down, our lives secure if only for this
moment in time, we both knowing this was all we could be sure of ever having,
and both of us grateful for having it.
She sent me a poem about truth then sent it to me to read, a
poem full of violent imagery, though the core of it seemed more in the line of
John Lennon’s angry song, “Just give me some truth,” in that she had no use for
the superficial or the polite and wanted to get down to the bone marrow, passed
the sinews of truth, asking for blood or nothing, looking to tear open the
flesh and muscle to get down deep to the bone, to reveal everything – ass all
those nice things civilized people tend to hide behind, needing to get down to
what counts, no trappings, just the truth.
I misread it or did not read it well enough, and she got
peeved. She had apparently also sent it to her stalker, or he had read it when
she posted it, and was even more peeved when his response was the same as mine.
She wanted to meet again for a drink and texted me for about
it for a couple of days after our strange breakfast at her apartment, though
even up to the point when I was driving north to meet her, the where and
exactly when remained unresolved.
She had first suggested one place a half block from the
office, then another, a little further on, but committed to neither. When I
arrived, I went to the office instead, raising more than a few eyebrows.
“This is not Tuesday,” the always gracious receptionist
said. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
No one was more surprised than she was when I appeared in
the bullpen near her desk, looking more than a little nervous. She tended to be
cocky in private, but rarely in the office, sometimes concerned about misspeaking,
being judged or exposed. Texting was always after, nobody to overhear.
“I’m not done,” she told me.
So, I waited at the desk on the floor below reserved for me
on Tuesdays unaware of her leaving the building until she sent a text saying, “I’m
outside.”
Then, when I got outside, she texted to say she was at the
first bar she’d suggested a half a block away, and true to her word, she was seated
on a bar stool when I arrived, sipping on a glass of white wine, less like a
damsel in distress than a queen on her throne. But she didn’t look happy – not distant
the way she had been during our vegetable and egg breakfast, more annoyed, and
not, fortunately, at me.
She complained about the bartender, claiming he was rude. He
didn’t seem to notice us, but I recalled her reaction to the former cop/politician
at the German bar previously and wondered if she knew the bartender personally
and had a person gripe, I knew nothing about, and did not feel comfortable drinking
here in front of him.
After our first drink, she suggested we change bars to one
across the street, which we promptly did and settled at a table with our backs
to the street.
“You know none of this will work, we have no future,” and
she responded as she had before, “We can’t worry about the future. This has to
be moment to moment.”
It was more than our difference in ages. I felt confused,
floating in a perpetual fog, all too aware of just how playful she could be,
and how vague she became when I pressed her as to what she wanted from me.
My brain went into a freeze each time she sent me a photo of
herself or posted a new one on Facebook. I offended her once when I unfriended
her in a stupid effort to put a halt to the parade of images that greeted me
there each morning. I was hooked on something. I just couldn’t figure out what,
and it wasn’t just the German beer messing with my head.
Why couldn’t I even finish a meal when I was around her?
I was not in control of anything, and it scared me to
imagine what this forebode.
What was I doing breathing the same air as she breathed,
listening to the rise and fall of her voice, stumbling behind her, my heart
feeling as if it was missing beats? It was like nothing I had ever encountered before,
and I wasn’t sure I could survive it.
She talked and talked, and I listened, watching her lips
move more drunk on her than on the drink I was drinking. The same questions
spun around in my head. What does it all mean? Where would it all go?
I later tried to describe it in a poem, talking about how
her cigarette smoke swirled around us like bitter-sweet perfume, her hair framing
her face.
I didn’t want this to be a mid-life crisis, something
inspired by my approaching morality.
Something had brought us together, not fate or destiny,
something else, something darker, something she knew about, and I didn’t.
Again, I knew all this would end up in pain, for me, for
her, and maybe other spirits I knew nothing about.
After what must have been hours, I told her I had to go home.
She seemed disappointed but walked me back to my car parked near the office, where
I gave her a kiss and fled.
She was already texting me by the time I reached home, and
sending me pictures, some of them of her naked.
The texting never stops, only gets interrupted by need for
sleep or shower, my phone on vibrate so it sometimes even wakes me when I dose.
Sometimes it’s merely a photo, too dark to make out at
first, the details of which emerge only after a long time of staring.
Most pictures are pictures of her, with hat or slanted
smile, though at times they show her with others, no explanation, no clue as to
who they are, and when I text back to ask she responds “friends,” but no
context, and when I press she gives me something such as “I thought you would
be interested,” or “Just keeping your informed,” when informed is the last
thing she is doing.
Sometimes the pictures are so dark I have to download to
lighten them and in one case find her in an image of her on her roof, “what is
this?” she doesn’t say, just the face and the potential fall, nothing to say if
she will take the plunge or not, my palms sweating as if holding onto the end
of rope that keeps her safe, staring at the image, wondering about it,
remembering the first poem she wrote about me that said “Don’t fucking save me”
with me asking, “How can I when you’re there and I’m here,” wondering will she
take a picture, too, as she falls.
She wears masks, trying out each new one to see which one
fits her best, always starting out as a novice, and then a master, each new
experience a stepping stone to her next great adventure, trickling up – as she
once claimed, , me, my boss, the owner, then on to some new profession, new
face she’ll wear in some new office – this time as what she is now, next time
somebody else, clinging to each of us as if rungs of a ladder.
“I’m stalking you,” she told me once early on, in one of
those many flirtatious phone calls.
“You know how old I am?” I asked.
“I know.”
“Then why are you doing this?”
After a brief silence she said, “This is moment to moment,” knowing
as I knew this thing had no future, pointless, and yet, I felt as hooked as old
catfish, unable or unwilling to wiggle off her hook, “Moment to moment,” I
thought, wondering where it would go, knowing even at the start of it this
would end as these things always ended in pain, telling her and trying to
convince myself, it would be worth it.
Puffed up clouds ride the blue sky over head on this stark
morning, each beyond my reach – like a daydream.
I try to read them the way gypsies read tea leaves, but I
have not that gift.
The Hudson
is stiff with the masts of sail boats, each boasting a full breeze that sends
them up stream despite the changing current.
To be master of our fate, to decide where life takes us, to
have – as Faulkner once pointed out – and to have not is what life is really
all about.
I am not a sea master, barely master of my own boat, cast
this way and that by changing tides as the seasonal lick of waves touches me,
and I move whim takes me, not will.
The two often conflict, where I should go and where I do go,
what I should do, but don’t.
I walk along the Hoboken
side like a ghost lost at sea, never quite able to put my feet back onto solid
ground, always subject to a sudden shift of wind.
I thought I knew where things were, and I find I know
nothing.
But if this is all there is, I have to take it – and be
satisfied.
You can’t get through to people no matter how you try.
They’ll always think the worst of you, making up the details in their heads to
some how turn sincere, honest and kind gestures into something dark, which you
could not have imagined thinking up in a million years.
You can never be kind enough to overcome their suspicions,
can’t shed light on that dark interior that always suspects the worst of you.
Kindness to them becomes some kind of wedge to get passed
defenses they have spent their life time building.
Early on, you might get an invitation inside, but even that
is dangerous business, shaping you into that bull which no matter how you turn
is bound to crack of piece of china – and in the panic of noise and crashing,
you panic and make it worse, getting thrust out never to get trusted again –
the victim of their exaggerated expectations that had painted you into some
kind of hero, instead of someone ordinary, making you into a monster because
you could not possibly deal with the insanity they claim is yours.
As in the old Rolling Stones song, saints are sinners in
that world, and the kinder you are the more you seem like a villain,
undermining their world view,
You try to help and they think you are saying there are
incompetent. You try to make peace, and they think you’re trying to undo them,
plotting somehow to take from them something you never wanted in the first
place.
You can’t be kind enough or brave enough or truthful enough.
You can only try.
He said we were the two best writers here, and didn’t want
to get in between us, meaning he didn’t want to take a side.
I know he’s half right. I’m not as good as many people think
I am. I’m not a natural writer the way she is. I’m still knocking my head
against a wall.
That’s why I read what she does the way I used to read
masters in college or the work of other college writers I envied like Michael
Reardon. I’m always trying to do what they do. I did this when I first got to
the paper when we still had Andy Newman. I’m envious like that now.
It’s that competitive bit inside of me, and yet, I know I’ll
never really be as good as Reardon, Newman or her. I can only try.
The storm came and went last night leaving a wet spear over
the landscape, but no real relief from the heat.
This August is drawn out like a perpetual torture, thick
with heat and so humid I struggled to wash out last night’s sweat before I
start a new sweat this morning.
I head for the north office for a morning ritual I have not
taken part in a while where the weary faces of groggy fellow workers stumble in
after a weekend’s excesses. I miss the place and the people like I have rarely
before, feeling every bit a prisoner in the cave like mostly abandoned offices in
the south
But it is not as easy chore, even at this late date.
The heat and humidity over a troubled water I still don’t
completely understand.
You don’t breathe in and out on days like this. You just
suck the humid air in and hope you don’t drown.
I climbed out of my shoulder this morning, groping for the
towel and wondered where I was less wet in the shower or out.
Life might be a sink whole out of which there is not escape,
but it’s a curious sink hole filled with curious motivations, and I’m one of
those people who likes to take rides even at the risk of not surviving.
This is what I am thinking when I stare in the mirror to
shave. My face is evidence to yet one more mad cap adventure, especially around
the eyes which look hurt, sometimes when they aren’t, but always probe things
they shouldn’t.
I’ve never been able to mind my own business about anything.
I’m too curious a cat for that, a cat who has used up his nine lives so often I
have to believe in reincarnation since I am living proof.
I keep digging into things, those interconnections that
perpetually get me into the most trouble, as if I am living in the midst of
some Sherlock Holmes novel, doing my best to be Sherlock rather than his inept
partner, Dr. Watson.
Sometimes this isn’t even personal – no emotional tie except
to see what happens next, though in most cases, I’m up to my neck in it and
debating at which point I go under for the last time.
Somehow I never do. Somehow I find some ledge to grip on and
hoist myself out, but I always leave a little bit of myself behind, pathetic souvenirs
I can never get back, and the hotel clerk puts into a box marked lost and
found.
My mark is less like Z for Zorro than the fading footprints
of a man walking a perpetually vacant beach, falling into sink hole after sink
hole until one swallows me up.
I always push things too far, like an acupuncturist with a
long needle poking and poking until he hits a nerve, and me always getting
kicked when I do.
The pain is a strange reward for somehow getting a reaction
from what otherwise appears to be a piece of stone.
But not stone.
Just bone and flesh so cold global warming could not thaw
them, flesh filled with untapped minerals of love and tenderness trapped
inside, and to which the needle cannot possibly reach, causing only pain.
I need to learn to stop pushing. I need to learn that there
are some things that can’t be tapped, and no matter how hard I try or how hard
I dig, and no matter how much I ache to strike the mother load, I never will.
She coughs in the dark, light leaking through the slightly
opened door from the hall where a stair rises to the roof while another
descends into the depths of a building dim with worn steps and nightly voices.
The old building is polished and painted, so you almost do
not see the cracks or wear, splinters on the banister smoothed over by coats so
thick they inflate the wood and keep fingers from being poked when people rise.
She sits on the sill blowing smoke out the window at the
religious vista below, street lamps setting to light bits and pieces of
brightly colored children’s toys the deep shadows dampen.
She is alone – even when people are with her – glow of the
cigarette, sad laugh emitted with each puff of smoke.
There is music, but it is almost always inside her head,
songs past and present, but so rarely future, as if the metronome stops each
times she thinks of tomorrow or has already stopped and what she hears are
merely echoes of what once was.
On this night, no mood shows through the thickening clouds,
but the drip of rain drops plots on the sill outside, one slap after another;
as she drums the tips of her fingers on the still dry inside sill.
She is waiting for something that might never come.
Someone perhaps.
A sole event she has only a partial vision of, but never
clear enough to count on, never detailed enough to predict.
It’s the cleanest place I’ve ever seen. Not one thing out of
place, not even in the kitchen.
And you wouldn’t know she owned a cat, least of all two,
until you saw them sprawled.
All of it, like a dream, or a cloud, a drifting sense of
lost senses the moment I come through the door.
Soft but not too soft.
Like a biosphere in which all the elements are pre set, to
some idea she has in the back of her mind, leaving me to figure out where
exactly I fit into the scheme.
She knows how I ache to fit in even when we both know I am
too imperfect, a flawed piece of furniture with some scrape or nick turned
against the wall to keep from sight, a flaw I can’t cover up even though it is
hidden deep inside of me.
Her hands give her away, slender fingers, unpainted nails,
not too frail or delicate, able to grab hold of life and hold on.
She grasps less as straws than at gold rings she finds just
out of reach, envisioning herself as accomplished but not quiet enough to get
all that she believes she deserves, no aces up her sleeves, no rabbits in her
hat, and yet a magician who must some how make life pay off while she can still
live to enjoy it.
She is too impatient to wait, knowing enough about herself
that if she doesn’t get it now, she might never get it, and so life is a matter
of finding the right magic words to wave with her magic wand to make the box
open that supposedly contains all she could wish for.
This is not what it means to read in bed, telephone gripped
in my sweating palm, electronic stimulation, each text dripped into me,
stroking my insides.
Who is on the other side?
I see the face because some come with images, but not at all
the face I recall.
There is something different in this look, and the world
shifts, moving up and down, in and out, until I’m near seasick.
There is something primitive in all this, stripping away all
the unnecessary formalities.
Each message like a bulletin to some great event I am
witnessing from a distance and yet touches me deeply like an electric shock.
I lose reason and panic.
This is not at all what I intended, even if in some deep
sense is it something I need.
