City Man, Mountain Manby Bob Brill |
Part 1 appears in this issue. |
| conclusion |
Ellen came bouncing into the house one day, singing. She danced all around me, came to a stop in front of me, spread her arms out wide and said, “Notice anything different about me?”
“You seem a bit more upbeat than usual, if such a thing is possible.”
“You got that right.” She placed my hand on her belly. “I guess it’s too soon to notice any bulge.”
“I get it! I get it!” I cried. We had been trying for so long to make this happen. I took each of her hands in mine and we danced around the room.
I entered then a period of frenzied excitement. Nothing else would do but that I must immediately add a new room to the house, a room for our daughter. It was to be a daughter, of that I was sure. That room would be connected to our bedroom by an archway and since that was the dome room, our pleasure dome as we called it, which rose up out of the roof, certain structural problems presented themselves. I started sketching plans of how this could be achieved. After about a week I finally solved the problem, or so I thought, but I never got to test the idea.
I got up one morning anticipating the purchase of some lumber. I was singing in the shower. I came out to shave. Through my reflection in the mirror I saw another scene, a cityscape, a skyline of tall buildings and a glimpse of river. There was something disturbingly familiar about this, but I couldn’t place it. I dismissed it from my mind and went in to breakfast.
Ellen looked at me. “What’s wrong, Tom?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t give me that nothing. I know when something’s up with you.”
“I saw something strange in the mirror.”
“You mean besides your face?” She was grinning to let me know she was kidding, but at the same time I saw the concern in her eyes.
“Yeah, double exposure.”
“Like what happened to you before? When you saw the mountains and came home?”
“Like that. But it wasn’t mountains.” I knew about that now. Not from remembering, but from her telling it back to me.
She waited for me to speak.
“I saw the skyline of a big city.”
She gasped.
“Don’t worry. I have no intention of going to New York. I’d have to be crazy to do that.”
Ellen began to cry. I came to her and put my arms around her. “There’s no way I’m ever going to leave you.”
“I see it coming. You’re on your way again.”
“No way. No way. But Ellen dear, I have to get moving now.” I released myself and went to the fridge to get the milk. Glowing through all the items in our well-stocked fridge I saw the skyline of New York. I grabbed the milk and slammed the fridge door.
Ellen jumped to her feet. “You saw it again, didn’t you?”
“Yep.”
“Please don’t go to work today.”
“I’ve got to. It’s a big day at the school. My students are showing their finished projects to the other classes. I’d be missed. Besides, I want to pick up some wood.”
“I’m going to lose you, Tom.”
“No you won’t. Nothing can make me leave you.”
“You did it before.”
“Not this time. I’m on my guard now.”
I finished breakfast and went out to start up the Ford. Ellen came out with me, holding my hand. “I’m coming with you, Tom. I love you and I’m not going to let you go. If you’re going to disappear again, I’m going to disappear with you.”
“Okay, love, get in the truck. We can have lunch together down in Coppertown.”
Ellen climbed into the truck. I started it up and off we went. Twenty minutes later as we entered the curve that descends into Coppertown I saw the city again. It was close and huge. The double imagery was confusing and I drove off the road into a ditch. We were lucky. If we had gone off the other side we would be rolling down the mountain.
I got out and said, “Wait here, Ellen. I’ll walk into Coppertown to get help.”
“Oh no, lover. I’m coming too.”
Ellen descended from the cab and climbed out of the ditch. She grabbed my arm and we started the descent into Coppertown. In a few minutes I noticed that the scene around us was beginning to fade. I could barely see Ellen.
“Tom,” she cried. “You’re fading from sight.” She threw her arms around me. I held her tight. “Don’t forget about us, Tom. Please come back soon. Here, take my kerchief to keep me in mind.”
I took the kerchief and stuffed it in my shirt pocket. I could hear her crying, but could no longer see her. I held her close till she melted away and my encircling arms were empty.
She was gone. The road was gone. The mountains faded away and I found myself standing in Central Park. To my right I could see the tall buildings lining Central Park West. To my left I saw the Metropolitan Museum. I had indeed gone there once.
I pictured Ellen standing alone crying in the road to Coppertown. I took out my cell phone and pressed 1, the code for Ellen’s phone.
A woman answered, not Ellen. “Who is this?” I said.
“Tom, where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling you for a week.”
“Put Ellen on the phone, please.”
“Who the hell is Ellen?”
“O my god. Cheryl!”
“You’ve been getting careless, Tom. I’d rather not know about your other girlfriends.”
That was the beginning of another interminable episode in New York. My old apartment was still there. It had only been a week New York time that I’d been gone. Cheryl had the key and let me in. We picked up right where we left off. When we weren’t screwing, we were fighting or lying around drunk or stoned. I had been fired by the cab company.
For weeks I did nothing but mope around missing Ellen. I got a job as a waiter, but I screwed up and lost it after two weeks. I got work helping an exterminator battling New York’s infinite cockroach population, but after a few months I quit. I got one dead-end job after another. If I wasn’t fired, I got bored and quit. I was out of work a lot of the time, which gave me plenty of leisure to mope and get drunk.
The memory of my life with Ellen faded away. I knew there was something seriously wrong with my life, but I didn’t know what it was and I didn’t know what to do about it.
One night Cheryl found a woman’s kerchief in my bureau drawer and gave me a hard time about it. “Smells like one of your women, Tom.”
“I haven’t got any women, Cheryl.”
She sniffed it. “Nice perfume,” she said as she tied it around her neck and struck a pose with one hip jutting out. “Maybe you’d pay more attention to me if I smelled like this.”
“Take it off. It doesn’t belong to you.”
“Make me.” I knew what she was angling for. Sometimes our arguments got physical and we would wrestle and end up screwing on the floor.
“Just take it off and you won’t get hurt.”
“Must belong to somebody real special, right, lover boy? So who gave it to you?”
“That’s none of your business.” Actually I had no idea where I had gotten it, but she was so right about it being special, though I couldn’t say why, and I didn’t want her touching it.
“Come and get it, big boy.”
I slapped her hard. She looked surprised, then rage took over and she came after me swinging. I seized her wrists and pushed her back across the room. She tripped over a footstool and went crashing to the floor. I jumped on her and pulled at the kerchief. It came loose from her neck, but she held on tight, cursing and spitting. I cursed and spit back as we tugged on the kerchief until finally I gave a huge yank and it ripped. That’s when I went berserk and started punching her. Pulling her to her feet I muscled her over to the door.
“Go take a walk,” I cried. “If you stay here another second, I might end up killing you.” I opened the door, shoved her into the hall and slammed the door. She pounded on the door screaming. The neighbors started shouting. I shouted back. Finally, she stopped yelling and I could hear her crying on the other side of the door. In a quiet voice she said, “Let me get my things.”
“No, you’ll just start in again.”
“No, Tom, you can have your damn scarf. I just want to get my things and leave. You won’t have to see me again ever.”
Something in her voice told me that I had finally exceeded her capacity for humiliation. I opened the door. She really did look a mess. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just went nuts. You can come back in.”
She gathered up her purse and her coat without looking at me. She took the key to my apartment out of her purse and dropped it in a chair, then turned and walked out the door.
For the next few hours I alternated between feelings of shame and self-pity. These feelings churned in my gut, filtering through my mind and turning into sluggish thoughts like: What a jerk I am. I don’t deserve to have a girlfriend. She’ll be back. Just wait. Tomorrow she’ll call and want to come back. No she won’t. I’ve gone too far this time.
I drank nearly a full quart of whiskey as I indulged myself in suffering. But the focus shifted away from Cheryl as I played with the ripped kerchief, breathing in its perfume. I felt a sense of loss much deeper than the loss of Cheryl. Or the loss of my self-esteem. Finally I passed out on the bed.
I woke up in a stupor. Gray morning light was filtering in through the dirty windows. I stumbled out of bed, still half-asleep, and headed for the bathroom, painfully whacking the back of my hand on the bathroom doorknob. In the mirror I saw my haggard, hung-over face and far away across the desert a range of beautiful mountains.
Copyright © 2009 by Bob Brill
