Ode to Lata (21 page)

This is what she warned me about: the loneliness that we somehow learned to forget or ignore until someone penetrated our lives and reacquainted us with the joys and frustrations of cohabitation.  I wondered if this feeling became more acute with age; when, instead of craving attention only when seasonal allergies have disabled both body and spirit, we started to crave it everyday.

It was before I inserted my key and turned it, before I stepped into the darkness that through familiarity felt negotiable, that I thought about how I would suddenly have all that time and space in which to grieve privately.  Now the pearl colored couch, which had been her bed, appeared somehow incomplete and mournful without her.  The notion of all that space, all that silence without the clatter of conversation, suddenly terrified me.

The phone rang just in time.  I had forgotten to change the setting on the answering machine and it intercepted the call in just two short rings. And there it was –Nelson’s husky, substantial voice filling the room.  As my hand dashed for the receiver, I vowed to sound jovial.  I would force myself not to think about his week of repudiation.  If I sounded like I’d gotten over his neglect of me, that I intended on not leaving any more unreturned messages for him, maybe I could win him back.  I thought quite foolishly that I could manifest this outcome by sheer will alone and seized the phone to hear his voice break off from the speaker and pour into my hungry ears.

When Nelson, sparing the pleasantries that might otherwise have felt awkward, asked me if I was sitting down, my voice still struggled to walk the line of containment.  “Nelson, what’s wrong?  Whatever it is, you can just tell me, okay?”

In the hesitation of his voice, I pondered further.  What would he tell me?  What would surprise me at this point?  That he felt we should stop seeing each other completely?  Well, in reality, that had already happened.  Maybe he wanted to apologize for having made all those promises he would fail to keep.  Jesus, what if he had tested positive?  Oh, God, that must be it.  He’s positive and has been avoiding me because he suspects he may have endangered me or wants to protect me from suffering the same fate.  I leaned up against the wall instead of sitting down.  It felt cold against my back.  “What is it, Nelson?”

“Ali, I want you to know that I haven’t been meaning to avoid you,” he said.  “I got your messages but I…I’ve just needed some time to…get my thoughts together and find the best way of saying this to you.”

“Saying what, Nelson?  You know there’s nothing you can’t tell me.  I mean, I’m here for you, whatever it is.”

“I know, it’s…it’s going to hurt you, but I think it’s important that you know this.  I mean, you have a right to know this.”

“Tell me, sweetheart,” I encouraged him.  “What is it?”

“Your best friend and I have been sleeping together,” he said.

“Hunh?”

“Just what I said.”

“My best – what are you talking about? You mean… ”

“Yeah, Adrian,” he said and then sighed.  “I’m so sorry.  I’ve been meaning to tell you.  I’m so sorry, Ali.”

I took a slow deep breath and swallowed.  Then I started to slide down against the wall and sank to my knees.  I must have heard him wrong, I thought.  He couldn’t be saying this.  Maybe he was just playing some kind of sadistic game with me. 
Adrian and Nelson?
Adrian and Nelson?

“Look, I… I just couldn’t keep it a secret any longer.  I think you have a right to know.”

“Why?  Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I care about you, Ali.  Believe it or not, I do. And you need to know this.”

I closed my eyes. 
I don’t want to hear this!  I don’t want to know this!
I kept screaming in my mind.  My body felt as if it had been hit by a truck.  I was trembling but somehow couldn’t feel any pain.  The impact of his words had demolished me beyond any sensory awareness.

“Ali,” he continued, “I wanted to tell you a long time ago.  I did.  I just—”

“
A long time ago?
How long has it been?”

“A few weeks.  You know, Ali, I told him–”

“How many times?” I asked.

“How many times?”

“How many times did it happen?” I asked.

He paused.  “I don’t know.  About three or four, I guess.”

“Are you
still
sleeping with him?”

“No, no,” he said quickly, as if that might somehow appear redeeming.  “It’s all over now.  Look, Ali, I didn’t mean to hurt you.  I care about you, no matter what.”

“How can you even say that?” I hissed.  “How dare you say that!  You slept with him, Nelson.  It’s not like you shared a bar of soap with him.  Where was your concern when you fucked him?”

“Ali, I…”

“All this time… ”

“I’m sorry, Ali.  You’re right, you’re absolutely right! What I’ve done, it makes me feel ashamed.  But I didn’t want to keep you in the dark.  The only reason I didn’t tell you any sooner is because I wanted it to come from your friend, you know?  I wanted him to have the opportunity to come clean but…”

The manner in which he kept referring to Adrian as my friend allowed his repentance a cunning transference of blame.  It was being shifted, the transgression Adrian’s more than his. 
Your best friend and I… Your friend…
Not once did he call Adrian by name, as if to remind me that this deception had been co-orchestrated by none other than my best friend.  As if to say that in the face of his early confession, in the face of our twelve weeks together as opposed to the several years shared by my friend and me, the more accountable party, the malefactor who had designed this hellish betrayal, was Adrian.

And then Adrian’s face, his little pale face with the adoring amber eyes and prominent lashes, lashes that could make even his most venomous intentions seem benign, flashed through my mind.  His callousness, the mottled, deceitful dimension of his personality started to reveal itself to me.  And that’s when the pain began to overshadow the initial shock.  A heaviness came over me and although I could feel the solid floor under my legs, I felt as if I was being gobbled up.

“Ali?  Are you there, Ali?”

“Yeah,” I whispered.

“Look, I told him he could blame everything on me.  I told him, but he just
refused
to come to you about this.  He said that what you didn’t know wouldn’t hurt you.  I guess he was just too scared to do it, so I just had to be the one.”

“
Why
are you really telling me this, Nelson?  You don’t want me and this whole thing with him is over anyway!  Why tell me about it at all?”

“You have a right to know, Ali.  I’ve been carrying this around—”

“Nelson, please,” I said.  “This is making me sick!”

“Okay.  But I
do
care, okay?  You’ve gotta’ believe that.”

“And that absolves you, is that what you think?  That you can just drop your pants and fuck him and you’re exonerated because you’ve suddenly developed a conscience?  Is that what you think?”

“No, no, I didn’t expect that.  I don’t expect for you to forgive me, okay?  I just wanted you to know that, strange as it sounds, you’re still very special to me, Ali.”

I breathed out heavily.  “You’ve got some bloody way of showing it.  Don’t ever call me or come near me again.”  And with that I hung up the phone.  For some time I sat paralyzed, feeling the vigorous thumping of my heart, my face trembling, looking at the couch from where I lay crumpled on the floor.

Then I cried.

RED

There is pandemonium in the room.  I stand barefoot, crying hysterically in my flimsy vest and underpants and I look at these two larger than life people going amok.  There is shouting and screaming and a lot of movement, and it’s very confusing and I can’t understand what’s going on.  I only know that it’s bad.  Very, very bad.  I cry harder.  Louder.  Wanting desperately for them to stop.  Wanting to drown out their screams with my own.  But they ignore me completely as they ferociously charge at each other.  It looks like they have both gone mad.  Again.  My father hits his head against the wall in a frenzy.  My mother looks possessed.  Her cries are now a jumble of horror and bewilderment, and her shaking hands are raised up to her face as if she is about to tear at her own flesh as she watches him.  Her dress is tattered from their jousting, and her hair is a disheveled mane. Her nose is running just like mine, the tears and mucus pooling around the gaping mouth and chin.  I know I see blood, but I’m no longer sure where I see it.  There is a little bit of red everywhere it seems.  On the wall.  On their hands.  On their faces.  In my mind.

I am standing in the middle of the room.  Can’t they see me?  Why aren’t they protecting me from all this?  Why am I standing here watching? They’ve forgotten that I’m right here, that must be it.  An unwilling witness, absorbing their heinous treatment of one other.  They have dismissed my existence as smaller, less meritorious than their bloodthirsty paroxysm.  So I continue to cry, abandoned in their strife.  Witnessing something still unfathomable to a three year old.

There is rapid movement again and it jolts me.  My mother is suddenly lying on the floor, unconscious, her eyes closed, her hands gnarled, open and motionless.  The screaming has ceased, and my father turns away from the wall and falls to her side, looking down at her ruefully, his white buttonless shirt now stained with blood and hanging open over his knees.  He calls out her name repeatedly, ignoring the family and concerned neighbors pounding on the door to our flat.

Now I hear only my own cries taking over the room, rising above his remorse, struggling over my being cast aside.  I feel adrift as the only two people in sight continue to drown into the floor.  I’m lost and terrified.  Pushed further into the sea of their atrocity.

Why isn’t somebody coming to get me? 

EVEN

I looked at Adrian from across my dining room table.  It had been laid out meticulously for our dinner.  Considering this a special occasion in some perverse way, I’d brought out the china that Adrian had helped me secure at a Sunday swap meet on Melrose.  A jaded divorcee was eliminating every semblance of her ill-fated union at throwaway prices.  Not only had he helped her wrap it diligently with newspaper, but he helped me wash it all and display it in the shelf space that separated my dinning room from the kitchen.

Some time before he had meekly rapped on my door, I surveyed the apartment as if was an arena for the final phase of our invisible war.  A war of which until now I had been uninformed. A war which, unbeknownst to me, had been raging momentously.  I wanted Adrian to see that my emotions hadn’t spiraled out of control when I had learned of it.  Just because he’d gone and fucked my lover three or four times, just because he’d turned a deaf ear to my pain over the breakup – while all the time being responsible for it – I hadn’t been destroyed.  The apartment he had helped me move into and renovate was still in the impeccable condition that Mummy had left it in, the way those familiar with my particular habits would expect to find it.

I considered the commendable job we had done after the Northridge earthquake had compelled me to change zip codes in Santa Monica the year before.  Together, we pledged, we could accomplish anything.  Two guys who would rather have facials and pay to watch a pair of typically muscled movers do all the hard work had not only managed to kindly transport all of the former tenant’s banal Levitz furniture out – the mammoth chocolate corduroy sofas, and the chipped Formica dressing table – but also moved my credit-line subsidized Z-Gallery acquisitions in.  The colossal Picasso and Delaroche prints replaced the unobtrusive and functional Ansel Adams.  Out went the twenty-dollar halogen lamp with its myriad settings and on came the track lights that illuminated the paintings and spherical African masks behind my glass top dinning table.   Now, here we were, in the apartment we had proudly ameliorated together,  Adrian unable to look me in the eye, and me strangely calm, contrary to my celebrated reputation as a high-strung drama queen.  I waited for the words to come from him.  Through the course of the day, I had sifted through my thoughts with spasms of both rage and pain.  Eventually, when the futility of the situation, the mere inexplicability of Adrian’s actions had drained me, I had even resigned to crying. 
Why had he done this?
  I asked myself over and over again. 
How could he live with himself?
  Images of them together, scenes of their bodies colliding against each other in sweat and semen dredged into focus.  The sounds of their reciprocal moans, of their limbs twisting and turning to accept one another as they erased my existence, deafened my ears.  I knew even after I had decided to forgive him that the pictures of their indiscretion, their humiliation of me, would reverberate perpetually in the murky depths of my mind.  Moments would come when, angered by something else, disappointed in something quite inconsequential about Adrian, I would remember this incident. 

As Adrian’s pathetic repentance stumbled forth, I began to wonder if I had somehow, without consciously meaning to, licensed their betrayal of me.  As I struggled through the day, visualizing them together, I was horrified to realize that mangled right along with the pain and my visions was a distinct feeling of arousal.  It made me question the normalcy of feeling that way.  If that was an indication of an exclusive form of perversion in me.  If that same perversion and the liberal and unconventional sexual situations that I had indulged in with Adrian had somehow legitimized his actions; made his deception of me appear excusable to him.