HUMILIATION of a SAMURAI

two MARGARET

It was my father's offer, written in his kinked block lettering, each line a picket fence of plucked staples and pulled nails with Roman numerals and punctuation.

Dad's proposal specified only one condition.  I could study any major.  Choose any school and live comfortably off campus so long as I picked one of the Seven Sisters colleges. 

"Your father appreciates the value and power of these brands," Uncle Evan said.  "If I were your attorney, or your actual uncle, I'd advise you to accept his offer."

My mother was a poetry major until she met Dad and dropped out of Bryn Mawr.  I chose music at Wellesley and minored in poetry to piss her off.  Rowed crew as a freshman novice and damn near made varsity as a sophomore before I quit to join the sailing team.

I loved being on the water but I didn't care about silver cups and regattas.  I dreamed of going to sea where there are rules.  Rules that matter, that everyone understands and agrees upon because they serve only the cold logic of survival.  Those rules made sense in the days of Spanish galleons and three-masted schooners.  They made sense when sails gave way to steam and they still make fucking sense today.

Paperback volumes of Forester's Hornblower series crowded my nightstand.  I carried lengths of cotton clothesline in my purse and taught myself to tie a bowline on the bus.  Practiced under my desk in class and mastered the sheepshank, mast hitch and cut splice.  Found a thrift-store copy of Knight's Modern Seamanship and made flash cards of naval terms and definitions.  Began committing the 1889 International Rules of the Road to memory.

I never found the word 'maybe' used in those procedures and protocol, nor in Horatio Hornblower's adventures.  In fact and fiction, survival at sea demands a route from evaluation to action that is clinical and binary, a decision-making process that cuts quickly to execution.

The difference between jetsam and flotsam?  That's like a test marked Pass or Fail.

Jetsam refers to anything thrown from a sinking vessel in an effort to keep it afloat. Jetsam is evidence of a calculated response meant to avoid a catastrophic outcome at sea.

Flotsam is debris that remains afloat after a vessel sinks, like cargo and equipment. Excluding remnants of the ship itself, flotsam consists of the very items that could have been, should have been jettisoned to prevent the ship from sinking in the first place. Flotsam is evidence of a miscalculated response, or a complete failure to accurately assess the situation and identify the potential for peril.

To save a vessel in distress, you must first recognize the vessel is in danger.

True rearview? With the exception of the music we made together, most of my time with Vincent was wasted. I let those years slip by while grasping tightly to a ticket.  Standing at the back of a very long line.

And that's totally on me.

All I needed that day was a shred of peace.  Enough silence and sacred space to recover from another eight-hour-long punch in the face disguised as employment.

I took my breaks at my desk and did crossword puzzles.  Spent sixty silent minutes hunched over my phone in the lunchroom, nibbling on sadgirl snacks packed in plastic containers with snappy tops.  Visualized the ritual murders of my supervisors, a sick exercise meant to distract my mind from pinpointing the moment I fucked up my life and landed on the night shift, diddling a ten-key under a frozen clock and proofing bank transactions in a cold basement.

When I came home I only wanted the place to myself.  A few minor comforts. A hot shower, the cleanest pair of my cleanish hand-washed underwear. My favorite sweatpants, an effective dose of pills and a trashy movie. Instead I walked onto the set of a bad telenovela.

I read that a Navajo woman can effect a legally binding divorce by placing her husband's saddle outside their front door.  He comes home and sees it, he can't miss it, and that's it.  Divorced.

I haven't researched that to confirm it as fact but I really want to believe it's true because it's fairy-tale tragic to the point of romantic. And such a fuck-you genius way to silently say something that should be screamed out loud:

This is over.

We met on the job at a Seattle recording studio a year after I dropped out of school. He was a session musician and I came onto the project as a backing vocalist. I heard his voice between takes but I couldn't see him from my booth. I was with someone at the time so I wasn't exactly breaking my neck to get a good hot look.

When the vocals were down I watched from the control room.

The band ran through more takes and Vincent sat with his back toward the glass. Hooked one heel in the rungs under his stool and tapped tempo on a thick remnant of red carpet. He did everything the producer wanted, cutting fresh new slices of sound from the same sheet music every time after time. Opened up the spaces between the notes and went there.

Another take and he stood, head rolling over his shoulders in lazy eights, lower lip tacked under a tooth. All the affectations I hated and mocked when I saw other artists with far less talent trying them on with far too much effort but now I inhaled sharply and watched.  Heard everything. Believed what I was seeing.

We wrapped and met for drinks at the Rainbow Tavern. The session drummer's jazz band was tuning up to play.

I sat with the other vocalists and when Vincent came in I cleared my coat from an empty chair I'd refused to give up. Didn't know I was saving the seat for him until he walked past me to stand at the bar with the recording engineers and a blast of hot air rushed over something red beneath my ribs.

You fucking fool.

I took my sweet time pretending to check my coat pockets for something I couldn't find and I waited. Finished my drink. Stirred the ice and laughed along with the end of a conversation I'd not heard begin. Risked a peek and saw him looking at me.

What happened next was not an emotional response, please give me some credit. It was something tangible.  Heavy like a rare coin.  An odd chemical reaction generating its own sparks and smoke.

I inhaled, pushed my bottled breath against a pressure sealed inside me and that's when I knew. That look created something.  Connected us.  I didn't know his name but all at once it was clear that we were now two parts of a new and unknown One.

That sounds absurd, doesn't it?  It sounds ridiculous to me saying it now but if you were there, if you'd been me then you'd know every word you just read is true and you'd get the fuck off my back and listen.

Men are allowed to act recklessly upon things women are expected to defuse delicately.  Things like anger.  Instinct.  Obsession.  Men are forgiven when their gambled actions fail and create deficits, even disasters but women have to be sure, we have to be damn sure before we take a step toward securing the things we need or else we're silly.  Emotional and stupid.

In fact we are the species who have to really know things.  We're not allowed to fail and learn and try again so we research.  We gather data, sniff the wind.  We measure and observe.

In a crowded room, an airport terminal, a restaurant.  I can spot a couple and I know when they have it, something real but I won't call it love because that word means different things to different people.

Not everyone calls it love. Most of the things we truly need don't have names.

If I could learn the words for all the things I knew when Vincent looked at me I wouldn't need him to be part of it.  If it had a name, then I could seek it out, find it on my own.  Plan the motherfucker properly and get exactly what I want with someone else.

He sat beside me.

Said nothing. Didn't look at me as he reached and ran one hand into my hair, slowly pulled his fingers through.

He did it again and when the band took a break he looked at me and said:

"Let's go home."

And I knew.  I was so fucking sure.

We walked out together and drove home in the rain.