Читать книгу THE CORNER BETWEEN MY LIFE AND HERS - Tina Medley-Galloway - Страница 3

She found me lying in a pool of vomit and blood on the queen bed of the significantly aged dusty, mildewed cabin. The place she intended to meet me for a weekend of fervent passionate lovemaking, accompanied by wine, music, candles and everything else that made for incredible sex. I had left the heavy wooden door slightly ajar knowing her curiosity would lead her inside. She would not be accustomed to the house; it wasn’t my typical recommendation I usually took her to more expensive accommodations. It was overtly modest.

She had come in, calling my name, loudly at first, elated to see me, then more softly as she started making her way to the back of the cabin toward the bedrooms. For a moment, she probably thought I may have ventured into the gentrified town or went for a walk, but there was an airy almost vacant feeling in the air. An overwhelming sorrow had enveloped the small house. Sadness for what, she didn’t really know.

She had come as quickly as she could, leaving her soon-to-be ex-husband sitting alone in the Corner Shop Café on the corner of Bleeker and Bond Street. They had met earlier to discuss the impending divorce. He had given her the divorce papers to sign; they were still folded neatly inside her Louis Vuitton shoulder bag.

The drive up to the cabin from New York had been an almost impossible trip between the knowledge of her failed marriage and the eventuality of the affair. She had considered turning around, going back many times, but ultimately decided to keep moving forward. Her ex had promised to make everything as easy as possible (with the divorce) if she just signed the papers and went back to Germany. He had promised to pay the $4000 a month that she wanted and needed. She had no other alternatives—the thought of staying in New York was out of the question. I could never support her habits; this she knew from the moment she met me.

She had never thought of me as so affected, fragile. She remembered her thoughts when she first met me: young, talented, beautiful. All six foot three inches of me, chestnut brown eyes with skin to match, standing above her with a runner’s body and a well-developed vocabulary. I was nothing like Howie, who flaunted his money and fame to mask his increasing belly size and decreasing penis size. She had seen me completely different, possibly even describing me as impervious. This suicide had been furthest from her mind. What a bad judge of character she had turned out to be.

She screamed a high-pitched scream when she first saw my head bleeding from possibly losing consciousness and hitting the nightstand. She wondered if I had known I was about to die, known that I had taken too many pills and what the outcome would be? Or was I just too drugged up to know what I was doing? Did I think this would somehow dull my pain, but ultimately she would find me and I would live?

This was all too much for her. She began crying. Her cries where more like wailing and she felt a terrible ache and trembling throughout her whole body. She had passively loved me but didn’t know what to do. Her marriage was ending, she had debts she couldn’t pay, and she knew she didn’t really want to stay in the United States anymore.

She noticed the crumpled business card on the bed next to where I lay, Dr. Seymour Stewart. She was vaguely familiar with him. A “friend” (a previous companion of sorts), used to see the Dr. and suggested that she visited him when she first learned of Howie’s indiscretions. Had I been a patient? If so, obviously it hadn’t worked. There I was, blank gritty eyes attached to a limp body ravished by too many sleeping pills and cheap liquor. I was once a lover now a dead man with an open laptop computer sitting next to him. The laptop contained the last traces of my thoughts—emails that I had sent to everyone who meant anything to me, telling them why I had done this heinous thing, leaving behind a wife and young son. It seemed so bizarre and laborious.

She had always doubted the validity of “shrinks,” vividly remembering her mother (when she was a child growing up in Germany) diagnosed weekly with the same condition, an arsenal of prescriptions in the medicine cabinets. The prescriptions controlled the visions and dreams at times. Other times, her mother would wake up the family in the middle of the night, crying out for god knows what and god knows who. She was always afraid of those “shrinks.” They usually meant only one thing—the inability to comprehend authenticity from fabrications.

People in New York, though, considered shrinks as carefree as a trip to the dentist or the eye doctor. She knew Howie’s associates would visit them for every mental ailment imaginable, wasting their valuable time from the people who obviously needed their services more pressingly (me). If she had known, she would have said something (stressed the urgency), but how could she have known? I was so…reserved.

The soon-to-be ex-husband had purchased a one-way plane ticket for her to return to Germany. She didn’t know if she would ever come back to the United States, but she had held onto a hope that maybe she would get herself together—stop using cocaine on the weekends and drinking too many glasses of vodka and water. Maybe she could become the person that she wanted to be: a painter and a mother. That had been her intention when she first came to New York before she had ever met Howie or me. Now she had this affair that had turned into a nightmare. A dead man lying on the bed covered in his own vile vomit.

She dialed 911 and just slumped to the floor, describing to the operator what she had discovered between sobs and moans. She was curled up on the floor—a ball of a person—sounds coming from her body loud and angry. She described the smells: the awful stench of demise and dejection. She described the sounds: the stillness and unsettling peace. This felt like an out-of-body experience, something that had become all too familiar in the last few months since Howie had found out about the affair. This was only to be a way to reclaim her independence, to even the playing field between her and Howie. Somehow, it was now forcing her to become more dependent and even more uneven. This had all ended so unfortunately.

The operator said that they would send someone shortly almost robot-like in her response. They had heard these types of things all the time. Suicides: not a common event in her life though. The minutes before their arrival seemed like hours. She slowly moved from the bedroom where I lay to the open living area. There were no clocks on the wall, no microwave in the kitchen to display the time. It was a place to escape, a fitting place to end things.

The couch was old and smelled of wet dog. She didn’t know the owners of the cabin, but knew they must have owned a dog. The place reeked of dog. She hated dogs.

Her cell phone vibrated in her new purse, which had been a gift from a new man she had met on the Internet. The one she had gone to Mexico with, the one she was planning to meet in Berlin next month. He was nothing like me and yet very much the same, as most men she had bedded. He was also married and willing to risk everything for a few moments of something she could never really put her finger on. All her life she had this “it” that had brought her nothing but complications and predicaments. The cocaine, expensive clothes, decadent foods had all started as a rite of passage; she deserved these things. Then they turned into a need, and she needed to have these things. The men were the vehicles to get these things. I was different though, not as reckless, more grounded. She thought of me as the type to settle down with in a suburban town with a nice white picket fence. She found me out of place in New York—a wanderer looking for something he should never want. I was doing her a courtesy to end things. She was not the type you should want. She sat on the edge of the sofa, rocking herself back and forth.

Thinking, thinking, thinking.

She hadn’t expected it, but as she rocked back and forth, back and forth, she realized, through a flight of the imagination, that she had never really known me. That was supposed to be the beauty of these things; no strings attached, no one got hurt. Wasn’t that what she had told me when I told her that I loved her? Wasn’t that the excuse to dissolve the eight-month affair? What had she expected anyway? She had met me on the Internet. Weren’t those her words and not mine? And now she would never really know what the affair meant to me and how much I needed her in my life.

With every second that passed, the vibrating phone in her purse became increasingly irritating. It disturbed her thinking, which was already muddled from the rapid chain of events of the day and the rancid stink permeating throughout the house. She should have walked out the door, gotten some fresh air outside, but she didn’t want to move from the couch.

She was not someone who I had sent an email to. My love for her was an “illusion,” as she had very eloquently told me when I pronounced my feelings for her. She had just been a diversion; she realized this upon entering the cabin and finding me dead. She couldn’t understand what drove me to this because she never really knew me to begin with. This moment of realization came as the police knocked on the door of the cabin. She was paralyzed to move, sitting for longer than necessary, but eventually she opened the door and let them in.