She broke it off and it put him in a mood. He usually liked
Georgetown in late November. He liked the feel of the cold, the freshness of
it. In one of the hundreds of imagining that trampled happily through his
generally contented mind, was that if people and seasons could be friends, he
and winter would get along swimmingly.
His six years living in Georgetown made him, in his view, a local.
He could now sniff at the suburbanites and the tourists, all gone
now, gone with the summer. The students and the rich walked the
narrow long streets again as the last grasps of red and amber foliage turned
its color to a relaxing, comfortable winter grey.
He pulled up the woolen collar of his plaid jacket and braced
himself against the night air. He had put on two undershirts, both of which
showed, strategically, from under his blue Oxford. One Tee-shirt, standard
white of course and the other dark purple.
He didn’t know where his winter coat was. Storage maybe. In the
summer she placed his winter clothes in storage, but he didn’t know where. A
dry cleaner someplace in town. She had told him, several times in fact, but he
missed it. Its not that he didn’t listen to her, it’s that sometimes, he
reckoned, he just didn’t hear her and she complained about that to him.
She wanted to move ahead, to go onto the next step and he didn’t.
Well, it wasn’t that he didn’t want to move along, he just didn’t want to move
along now and also because he had no idea what consisted of moving along. To
move in with her? Was it an engagement?
The chill turned his long, slim hands red with cold. He knew that
would happen and he had considered placing a pair of socks in his pockets and
using them as gloves, black socks of course. No one would see them as long as
he walked in the dark and kept his hands in his pant pockets.
He’d almost done it but the thought that if he was struck and
killed by a car, The Post would run a story about the Georgetown guy who was
killed wearing socks on his hands. They wouldn’t even have the good grace to
mention that they were black socks, evening socks.
Of course, they would run the story with a snarky headline
“Pedestrian socked crossing street in Gtown.” That’s what it would say too, the
bastards.
She knew where his gloves were. She put them someplace because he
recalled her standing in his apartment saying something about gloves.
God. No gloves and no winter coat. It was enough to make his break
with winter and go summer like everyone else. So he wore the socks.
It had all seemed so easy back then, a scant month before when she
had cast him out of her life, telling him everything would be better for the
both of them. His mother said the same thing. The picture she painted was
of grand multi-colored horizons opening with every new day, opportunities
for new love would be everywhere. Girls would fall from trees at his feet.
His father, Gtown 82, waddled into the situation, uninvited. He
promised him it was all for the best. He would be a different man, a better man
now, new and improved, smarter, taller, better looking, and most importantly of
all, he would be more desirable to women, whom, he promised, would fall out of trees and land at
his feet.
His sister, Loyola pre-med, told the truth. “I never liked her”
she said. It was her twisted way of supporting him in his time of sadness. His
Aunts, grandparent, and several Uncles also had some input if he wanted it.
The faster he walked the faster his pants slipped from his narrow
skinny hips. His belt was at her place. He forgot to take it. He resolved then
and there to always own two belts.
Girls. They were out there, those gorgeous beauties, the
ones who flirted with him on the Metro, filtering him with their comely smiles,
and then there were those ones he caught looking at him from across the tables
at Clyde’s. But he was with her, the her that held those gorgeous beauties at
bay and held him back from achieving true happiness, or at least more
happiness, he thought, editing himself as he so often did.
An insignificant but cold breeze blew down M street, past the
shops and restaurants, and found him, he was extraordinarily tall and difficult
to miss, hitting zero hour at the corner 35th and M. It said
hello by tossing a chill down his spine. He pressed his elbows to his boney rib
cage and lowered his head to warm himself and when the light changed he crossed
and walked up the slight incline that is 35th street and
stopped for a car to pass before crossing the street.
Gorgeous beauties, indeed, he huffed, who needs them? I need her
not a gorgeous beauty and recognizing the potential insult in the thought, he
reedited the sentence to himself.
He tried, in vain, once again, to thrust his long pale white hands
into the pockets of his sports coat only to find, once again, they were sewn
shut. He recalled the conversation he had with the salesman at the J. Press
store when he bought the God damn coat.
“This coat is defective”
“Why do you say that?” the salesman asked.
“The pockets are sewn shut”
“They are intended to be sewn shut” the salesman
whispered “A young gentleman does not carry goods and such in his
jacket pockets”
He was tempted to ask, “Why not?” but suppressed the question,
partially because he was intimidated and partially because the salesman was
old, and he seemed to know what he was talking about, so he just went with
it.
She was there that day. She had insisted he shop at that store,
part of her overall plan to convert him to her tribe, the tribe of the nice
people. The people she knew, the ones who knew why young a gentlemen does not
carry goods and such in his jacket pockets. The ones who would not have been
intimidated by a salesman. The people who didn’t know where Ohio was.
“Goddamn salesman,” he thought to himself over the roar of another
Jet inching its way to the airport. “Goddamn jet,” he added
But that’s how it had been during the three years they had been
together. There had been lots of goddamned salesmen who assisted her in her
transformation of him from an undergraduate Ohio import who needed a haircut to
one of the nice people of the Georgetown tribe.
He never really caught on to the whole Georgetown thing.
A large crow, black as night, landed on a phone wire
above him and settling in, casting a glance down at him and taking the bird's
gaze as a challenge he stared back but the shadowy creature refused to look away and so he did. And having
been soundly defeated in a staring contest with a common crow, his mood
darkened even more, and he realized he had been standing motionless at the same
corner on 35th street for at least five minutes or longer.
He crossed the street. The crow didn’t.
Why didn’t crows go to Florida in the winter like everybody else
in the bird world?
He filed the question away to ponder in happier days.
It was growing darker.
“Life is a battle,” he thought, trying to remember the entire
quote from his graduate days at Georgetown. He narrowed his eyebrows to recall
it “Life is a battle….fight it now….Life is….”
He gave up trying to recall the quote and thought that maybe it
was Charlotte Bronte who said it or maybe it was from Jane Eyre. Yeah, that’s
who it was, Jane Eyre.” And Old Jane was damn right. Life is a
battle and at the moment he was losing the battle.
He’d met her at Georgetown. She was already in her Junior year, an
English major with a concentration on 17th-century British writers. That
right there should have set off his alarm bells he told himself.
Was it too late to return home ad study accounting and management?
After he graduated he would carry on as a third-generation CPA.
He didn’t return to Cleveland after graduation like he said he was
going to do. He stayed on for a Master's Degree he didn’t need in a subject he
didn’t particularly care about and then drifted into politics. She landed the
job for him. She said that a Georgetown friend of hers she’d bumped into at a
fundraiser for the blind or the deaf or something like that, he couldn’t
remember there had been so many of the goddamn things for so many causes,
anyway, her friend had a friend who knew another friend and that connection
landed him a staff position on the Hill.
Then he learned that she had dated the chief of staff, his boss, “For about a semester” she said. She insisted
that it was all a big nothing, a fling she said, but she refused to answer when
he asked her, repeatedly, if she had slept with him. They fought about it,
constantly and it humiliated him and he resigned for the job.
There were three or four other jobs that he quit or was asked to
leave. He didn’t care. None of them mattered. His parents sent money. That
bothered her too.
He fumed that she was all about what others thought, about
everything. politics, style, and fashion and where they vacationed and how long
they vacationed, and mostly what she cared about was what they thought about
her and what they thought about him.
There was that time when, over Sunday brunch at 1789 over on 36th Street,
he mentioned that he had spent that Saturday out at the Battlefield in Manassas
with an older coworker and how impressed he was to learn that the Confederate
troops had retreated backward so that if they were shot they would not die with
a bullet in their back. The story brought a temporary silence to the table
until someone remarked “My God, what a redneck thing to do” and they all
laughed.
She chewed him out afterward. “You embarrassed me,” she said “You
embarrassed us”
But there were good times, great times. Lots of them mostly spread
out over millions of precious seconds that he had replayed continuously since
they had parted.
He reached her apartment house door and waited. She would be along
soon. He knew her schedule.
He heard her voice from a distance “Why are you wearing a sports
coat? My God you'll freeze to death. Where’s your winter coat?
He didn’t answer. He did that thing all men do when they get
caught doing something stupid, he looked down and then to the side.
“It looks nice” she lied “Very chic” but then she
realized he had absolutely no sense of style at all, whatsoever, and that he
might take her words to heart as the ultimate truth as he so often did, she
corrected herself and added “But I understand that next month nobody will be
wearing that color”
“I’ll remember that” he lied. He wouldn’t remember that.
She knew he didn’t know where his winter coat was.
“Where’s your winter coat?” she asked.
He lifted his hands from his pocket and shrugged.
“Are those socks on your hands?”
She waited and then said “Your winter clothes are stored at
Atlas Cleaners at the top of Wisconsin Ave. I’ll drop the ticket off tomorrow,
and you can collect everything.
“Why do you have the ticket?” he asked more out of a sense
of self-dignity than anything else. They both knew the answer. If he had the
ticket he would have lost it.
“Did you want something?” she asked.
She knew the answer. But she asked anyway, in that understanding
way, knowing full well that he wanted everything that could not be and
everything the way it was. He knew that she would understand that, that she
would understand what he wanted because she always understood what he wanted,
that was what she did for them when they were together, she
understood.
But this time he felt that it wasn’t there, that thing, that
feeling, that unique way she had of knowing and of letting him know she
understood. It was gone from her, it was gone between them and they both felt
it and they felt a weary sadness fall over them and they were silent for a
moment and let the moment past, that God awful, terrible moment that ended
everything that was them.
“I was wondering if you know where my winter clothes are,” he
asked “My coats, you know, it’s so cold”
“At the Valet, up on Wisconsin” she answered again, patiently.
“Do I need a ticket or something?” he asked never having been to
the cleaners in the five years she had stored his clothes there.
“I’ll go there tomorrow and take care of it, you just pick them
up, later in the afternoon.” she answered and then smiled and added, “They’re
nice people, very professional.” She said that to assure him that walking into
the Valet would not be as horrendous as she knew he thought it would be.
There was a long silence.
“Are you all right?” she asked in her small voice.
He just shrugged.
“I guess I’m okay” he answered to the sidewalk He lifted his eyes
to her and asked “You? You all right?”
She tilted her head to the side in that way that she did, the way
he liked, the ways girls tilt their heads and she answered “No” she said “But I
will be”
And because she was a kind person, and because her understanding
of love was that it was eternal she added “And so will you” and she smiled and
so did he and there was another silence, this one pleasant.
“I think, we’re just young,” he said.
So they said their goodbyes and promised to call one another, have
lunch, someday, to stay in touch
He left. She went inside and they were them no more and it
was sad because they were decent sorts, nice people, good people.
And they still were all of those things, but they were just those things were
alone now.
