Chapter 10 ---- abandoned (working title)
(starting to write the really hard part of the story now, so thanks for sticking with it) ps: there are typos I have to fix in it! -- but needs word counts for Nanowrimo first...
*Everything beautiful is abandoned,* Sandman thought as he drove away from The Barrington Towers. *Every fucking thing.*
He hadn’t stayed to watch as Mark and Tim slammed the doors of the truck, and he hadn’t seen Natasha drive away. All he felt in that moment were the tracks of a few hot tears coursing down his face. He wiped them away. He would shoot something, and that would make the pain go away. He hadn’t thought that she would really leave. She had. He drove around for hours looking at locations before he went home.
“Zero Gallery called,” said Cathleen, as she brushed her long hair before the mirror in the bathroom that night.
“What?”
“You sold one to a collector.”
“Fabulous.”
“Well, aren’t we going to celebrate?”
“I’m not in the mood. I’m exhausted.”
He curled himself into bed and pulled the covers up tightly around him. A helicopter rattled the sky above, chasing someone in the dark lost night of the city of lost angels. He shook a little, trembling under the blanket.
“I’m freezing. Can’t we get some new bedding for this place?”
“I haven’t got time.”
“It’s cold.”
“Go pick something out if you want it.”
“I need you to help me.”
“I haven’t got time. You know I have to finish this dissertation, and all these reports, and I have to go back east next week.”
It was a long time before he said anything, and when he did, it was just: “Goodnight.”
Cathleen Sandman looked at herself in the mirror. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that she had slept with Greg at that arty farty party they had been to. She had known he wanted to for months. Those little squeezes as she passed him in the kitchen -- the way his fingers trailed across her ass by accident. It had been often. Besides, she was tired of the way John was in bed. At least Greg paid attention to her. *When was the last time John had?* she thought as she pulled the brush through the last golden strands. Then she smiled at herself.
She never said a word as she slipped under the covers, but one of her hands reached back and tried to cup one of his. There was no movement. John was asleep, into those thick sleeps he fell into. The ones where he would wake up in a nightmare with a flash of terror. It was what he had seen during the war that caused those. Sometimes she did her best to hold him while he shook.
She was gone before he woke up. The scent of the coffee was all that was left of her in the kitchen.
He walked out into the garden and looked at the roses, as the light wind blew through the leaves. They were full, and beautiful, and somehow they were all he had to counteract the effects of the city. He cut one, not thinking, and then realized he wouldn’t be seeing Tasha. So he tossed it over the fence into the alley behind their bungalow. She always chastised him for cutting them and bringing them in the house. They were for the neighbors, so she could gloat.
* * *
The traffic had been long, and finally Tasha and Mark and Tim had arrived.
“We can unpack in the morning,” Tim said. “What’s for dinner Mom?”
“You were expecting dinner?” Mrs. Collinsworth sniffed. “I had dinner with a friend.”
“I’m starving.”
“I guess you better get a pizza, then.”
Tasha watched them argue. She felt cold all of a sudden and so tired she could hardly move. Her cat was in the car, and she made a motion to Tim that she was going to go and get him. There wasn’t cat food either, or even one of her little dishes for him. Tim hadn’t wanted to unpack and she felt constrained by the taught anger like a rope between his mother and himself. She hadn’t had the idea that it would be like that, at all.
“I can run and get one, Tim,” she said.
“Alladin needs something too.”
“Oh, that’s right. You brought your cat.”
“I’ll get a pizza.”
“Good.”
“I’ll be right back.”
Alladin purred in his box on the back seat of the car. “We’ll be okay,” Tasha whispered against it. “You need food.”
It only took her a minute to start the car and go to the market, and the pizza place. She got Tim the largest one. The kind he liked with Canadian bacon and pineapple chunks. It never occurred to her about coffee for the morning.
“This is your shelf,” his mother said. “Only this shelf, and I don’t want you using any of my things.”
“I won’t Mrs. Collinsworth.”
Tasha put the pizza on the counter. Mark and Tim grabbed the box and headed for the sofa. They were watching a game and hollering back and forth. Natasha didn’t want to have to ask if she could borrow a little dish for her cat. She carried him into the room she had rented, and opened his little can on the floor of the bathroom. After he finished she gave him water in the same can. She wasn’t even hungry anymore. When she came back out the living room the pizza was all gone anyway. The three of them sat with their eyes glued to the television.
Tasha sat with Alladin in the little blue room that was the first room she had ever rented. In some ways she felt grown up. It was the first place she had ever had on her own. Her thigs were outside at the curb, in the truck. She lay with Alladin and listened to the little dog yip as he ran in abstract circles outside. She really wanted to call her mother, but she had to wait until the next day, or the next week when she could get a phone installed. It’s not that she felt she had made a mistake, it’s just that she felt so very far from home. So very, very far from home.
It was late when Tim knocked at her door.
“Come and get in bed with me,” he said.
“No, Tim.”
“Come on, I want you too.”
“Tim I can’t.”
“Sure you can.”
“Tim I don’t want to do that.”
All of a sudden there was a horrible thing that floated in the air between them. An unspoken thing. Tim felt entitled to sleep with her, because she was under his mother’s roof, even though she had paid for the room.
He stood in the half-light of the hall looking at her and brushing his blond hair back from his forehead.
“I’m not comfortable doing that, Tim.”
“You’re just thinking of that guy aren’t you?”
“Tim.”
“You are aren’t you?”
“Tim, I...”
“You what?”
“I have to get over him.”
“Oh, I get it.”
“I still have so many tangled up feelings.”
“He was married Tasha.”
“I know but...”
“What?”
She couldn’t say anything. There was a lump in her throat so large it felt like a rock. She was going to start crying, even, but she didn’t want to in front of Tim. It would make her feel week. In that moment she had never missed anyone like she missed John Sandman.
“Come to bed with me,” Tim said.
“Tim I can’t.”
“Oh, right. It’s that guy. When Cece isn’t sleeping with Jeff she sleeps with other guys.”
“Tim, I don’t.”
“Then what did you want to live here for?”
“You said I could rent a room from your mom.”
“Yeah, so?”
“I paid her first and last.”
“So?”
“I need to think about school Tim. Like you are.”
“I don’t know whether this is going to work out Tasha. I guess we’ll just have to see if it does or not.”
A cold feeling of dread swept the room, as Tasha closed the door and said, “Goodnight.”
A feeling like she had never felt before. Suddenly she felt at the mercy of Tim, and his mother, even though she was a tenant herself. She picked up Alladin and curled him next to her. He was the only thing in the world she felt like she could hold on to. And she really, really wanted to call her mom. And more than that? She missed John’s voice. He had taken to calling her every day. This would be the first day she wouldn’t hear his voice, calling her “My sweet Babu.”
* * *
Twenty two is walking a plank as a young feminist. There is a married man claiming that he loves you. He’s an artist, and he’s doing everything you want to do, which is what he’s doing. You want to get your degrees, start working, gain respect as a woman in your own right. Twenty two is that guy from High School who had this big crush on you and he doesn’t really care whether you go to school or not. All he’s interested in is whether you can bring home some pizza or some bacon, and he thinks to himself, wow, she’s this really hard worker and so I don’t even have to. She’ll do everything for me and I can just hang out on this couch and watch games all day long. Thirty four is a feminist who has worked her fingers to the bone for that husband she had who was an artist. She’s tired. And she wants that baby she was promised. Her clock is ticking so hard it feels like it will break inside of her. They’ve been together exactly thirteen years, and now she has slept with his best friend named Greg because he no longer touches her. The African violets curl on the windowsills because they aren’t being watered. A young girl so in love stands at a window holding her cat, because she doesn’t know how to go on without him, the artist, and this purring is the only thing that makes sense. She realizes all she ever was, was a petal, that fell from a bush in full bloom. Sixty is a mother looking at her son and deciding she doesn’t like the girl he’s looking at. She’s going to do everything in the world to keep her son, a son. So he can never leave her side. So he can never be a man.
Sandman told her to call him. That’s all Tasha can remember after the first week in the rented room she calls a blur of blue. It seems the only thing in there are her tears, or the purrs of her cat. She has to keep closing the door on Tim and his arguments about why she should just go in his room, and the pressure is like a vise. She’s supposed to conform to something that she can’t. It’s only a week.
One week and she calls. He’d written his number on the last of the postcards. It was thrown in the box on the day that she moved, and she finds it while she’s unpacking. It’s the two of them kissing, and his tongue is sliding against hers and they look so beautiful in silver together. As if they are icons. As if they are outside the terrible reality of everything.
And she calls her mother, but she doesn’t tell her anything true. She says, “I’m fine.”
And her mother feels happy to hear it, happy that her daughter has left the man in Los Angeles, happy that she’s gone, happy that she has her apartment to herself at last.
But, Tasha can’t really tell her, because Natasha Evergreen wants to be an adult, and she’s left home, and she can’t go to her grandfather because he is too old, and she can’t go to her father because he isn’t there anymore, and so there is nowhere to go. Except to grow up and go to school, and she will because she promised this to herself, and because Winter Quarter will be starting, and she’s enrolled, and she has no idea in the world about how she will be able to make it. Not with the love she feels she has lost, and not with Tim and what he is trying to make her do. So, she is caught in a kind of net and she swings back and forth, and back and forth, and from side to side, and all of her friends are concentrating on getting married and starting families and she wants that too.
So, she holds her breath and she dials his number from a pay phone because she can’t stand to be away from him, Not for one minute, not after she opened her body to him, to his love and all the walks on the beach and all the foolish dreams that young girls have at twenty two. And he answers the phone from his living room, more than likely, and his wife Cathleen is home and she’s in a different room attending to all those papers that she has to write and she’s hunched over her desk, writing and shuffling all the charts and figuring out all the statistics and into the center of this, comes the voice of Natasha Evergreen in tears, saying, “I miss you.”
His voice gets very low, almost to a whisper, and he says, “I need to call you back. How can I do that?”
“I’m at a pay phone.”
“Don’t move.”
“I won’t.”
“Give me the number.”
She fumbles standing in the booth trying to see where the number is, in that little booth, and finally she can make it out. She repeats it twice while he writes it down, through tears of relief. It’s the sound of his voice, this voice she loves so much. The voice of an artist. And she knows he’s one, and she doesn’t understand how hard that path is, for any artist. Or even how difficult it might be for two artists to be together because they have competing narratives.
“Don’t move,” John Sandman has said to her.
“I won’t,” she says. And she’s standing there in this little glass booth and it’s dark, and she has to go home soon to that little blue room that she rented that isn’t really home at all, in that house that doesn’t have her mother, just this other harsh woman who is her mother’s age who has followed her around all week, sniffing the air around her and making comments about everything she does, as if it is wrong or as if she has some kind ulterior motive and she doesn’t.
She doesn’t move because he tells her he is going to call her right back as soon as he can find a phone, and that he’s leaving right now, and just wait there.
And suddenly the phone is ringing in the booth, and she picks it up and it’s his voice and she has never been happier to hear anybody in her life and she is more madly in love with him in that moment than she will ever be with anyone again.
And she starts to tell him about Tim, and what has happened, and he listens from so far away, as if there were anything he could do, except that he’s her lover and she thinks that he should be her champion because that’s what she thinks men are supposed to be, or, because those are all the stories she knows about them when they are really in love, and she thinks he is, she wants to believe that he is, because he’s the one. Because when a woman sleeps with a man he is always the one, until something happens that destroys that.
And it seems like they stand there for hours talking, in the dark.
It will be like that until they can see each other again, because he’s telling her that they are going to and that he missed her so much the city felt like a tomb, and that he can’t even work because it’s so lonely without her.
Natasha Evergreen smiles into the receiver, hearing these things. She has never been so lonely in her life, for anyone. She lets him talk, and he talks for a long time about all the little things that have gone on in the week she has been gone, and then he asks her for the address because he says he wants to send her something, and he wants to know how to find her, and she tells him.
“My sweet Babu,” he says. “I’m going to drive up next week.”
And all of sudden she is clinging to this little thread of hope. The hope that his arms will be around her, the hope that they are going to make love again, the feeling of his body so warm next to hers and her arms all around him, pulling him in. That rose she hopes that he’s going to bring, in its silly tinfoil wrapper, the roses that he always brought to her, that she can’t really live without, like she can’t really imagine living without him, because she’s so very much in love, in the way that love only happens once in just that way.
“When can we talk again?”
“I’m getting a phone next week,” she says.
“Good, I can call.”
She doesn’t say anything, because she can’t. She isn’t going to stop it. She moved away and she can’t stop the thing that feels so much like true love.
Two days later, five postcards have arrived in the mail. Natasha Evergreen clutches them to her heart. Four dozen red roses are delivered, all long-stemmed, all in a huge vase that looks like it belongs at the Derby for the horse who won the race.
Mrs. Collinsworth assumed they were for her. One of her boyfriends, she thought. Having second thoughts. Maybe even Deano. She had torn open the card, and then she’d seen. Standing in the middle of the living room in her florid caftan she had inhaled the roses, over and over and over. *My son,* she thought. *My son.*
And she and Tim had sat in the living room for a long time that day the roses got there. When Natasha came back from looking for a job, which is what she had been doing every day since she had gotten there, Tim looked at her for the longest time.
“I don’t think this is going to work,” he said.
“Your living here,” said his mother.
Tasha could feel the daggers in her eyes, as if they were aimed straight into her heart.