In Christian lore, there are two kinds of sin, mortal sin and venial sin. If you happen to commit the former type of sin, you are screwed. Mortal sins are unforgivable by gods, people, wives and mothers-in-law alike. Venial sins are the class of forgivable sins. So long as the gods, those you’ve trespassed or possibly your wife will give you time to repent, almost any venial sin can be washed away and your soul once again made pure.
In the middle ages, the Catholic Church took the cleansing of venial sins very seriously. They even went so far as to create a whole new imaginary place called Purgatory for just such a purpose. They went even further by selling indulgences to the living and prayer services for the dead to help the faithful manage their way through this dark and terrible place with the least trouble possible. One day, to the delight of many, a plucky young poet named Dante wrote many cantos describing the place in great and morbid detail.
As you might imagine, purgatory is an awful place. It basically consists of a remote mountain sticking out of the opposite side of the earth from Jerusalem with repentant sinners clinging to it on all sides. Every inhabitant is a sinner undergoing some sort of dreadfully painful atonement for their sins. The lucky ones, who are assisted through prayer (and money) by anyone who hasn’t yet joined them in Purgatory, are able to skip the interminably long punishment lines. They are afforded an escape from their awful fate and get to start enjoying the good life in a hurry. If I didn’t know better, I would swear that Dante’s Purgatory was an exact literary replica of the island of Oahu.
I woke that morning feeling good. It was an incredible contrast to the day before. I didn’t hurt. I had a skip in my step. I even caught myself singing “The Mayor of Bayswater” in the shower. As I showered, I imagined singing for an American Idol audition. Simon might not have sent me to Hollywood after hearing this cheeky number, I reasoned, but I was certain that he would have liked it. I hummed it into my morning shave and through the application of hair gel and cologne, finishing it off in my brassiest baritone, “And the hair from her dicky-dido hung down to her knees.”
The applause in the bathroom roared. It was just me whispering an excited “Ahhhhhhhh!” to myself, in such a way that it convincingly mimicked the screams of about ten thousand exuberant fans. I considered the contrast of my very on-pitch singing today (having done each of the three harmony parts in turn) with the horrifying noises that I must have produced in the bathroom only yesterday. The women, had they been awake for both performances, might have concluded that I was quite insane.
Today, I was ready for anything. Hell was behind me and Purgatory lay ahead. If Dante taught me anything, it is that Purgatory is doable. There was only one mountain to climb and I had been freshly and soundly shagged. There is something miraculous about being well bedded; it makes a man feel that he can do anything.
I knelt down to kiss my still sleeping Svetlana goodbye and whispered. “Je t'aime, mon chou,” into her ear. She didn’t stir, but smiled as she always did, feeling my kisses with her sleeping sixth sense. With a kick in my step, I headed out the door to the office, but not before perusing my bookcase for something to thumb through. It was obvious. Dante’s Purgatory jumped out, begging to be re-read. It was so coincidentally apropos that had it been standing next to a copy of “How to Get Rid of a Meddling Mother-in-Law,” I might have chosen it still. This would be educational. Surely Dante and his trusty guide Virgil would quickly lead me out of my own personal Purgatory.
I found myself still singing when I arrived at the office. After about an hour of work, I’d punched enough keys on the keyboard to meet or exceed the efforts of the past 5 weeks. I let the CEO know that there would be a showing of new software on Wednesday; a software engineer must release new things from time to time to stay relevant. I started into my new book and by the end of the first canto was ready to call Candy.
“Hi,” she said sullenly.
“Hi?” Was all I could think to say. Her familiar exuberance was gone. It suddenly made things greyer than the vog.
“Coffee time! My treat!” I chirped, to throw some excitement back into the air.
I was aware, having said this, that since I had known Candy, it was always my treat.
Despite her lacklustre greeting, Candy agreed to meet at our usual Starbucks, the one closest to her office. When I arrived at the register to order her special frappuccino, it had already been made. She had phoned in her order. I took our drinks to the spot with the comfy chairs and found Candy sitting there waiting. She was wearing a very pouty face.
“Whatever is the matter, my dear?” I said in a consoling voice.
“I felt like you were ignoring me yesterday.”
Really? I’d taken her driving for hours, walked on the beach, unloaded my problems and… Her pouty look continued to sear holes through the back of my head. I had to try and imagine exactly when I had possibly ignored her. It was impossible; I couldn’t think of a moment. It was time for an emergency blanket apology.
“I’m sorry, baby. I didn’t mean to ignore you. I was really in the most terrible mood yesterday. I’m a lot better now. It won’t happen again.”
“It just felt like you were only interested in Heather and it was all about her and you didn’t seem to care about anything that I had to say.” She scolded.
Aha! Then I understood. It was true. I was interested in Heather’s story. I suppose that I had imagined that she was also interested. I further imagined that had I not been there they would have carried on famously without me while Heather told her story, but now I knew I was wrong about that. I decided it best to cling to the apology I’d already made.
“Oh, Candy. I was just feeling a little down. That’s all. You have my full attention now!” I offered.
“Good!” She said as the sparkle start to return to her eyes. “Now promise me that you will never do that again.”
“I promise.” I said, not really being sure of what I was promising, but my pledge had melted the pout from Candy’s face and her sparkle flourished into a blaze. That was all that mattered at this moment.
Thinking back to everything that was said on the previous day, I suddenly remembered Candy’s contribution. It was a bombshell. She had a fiancé; a soulmate no less. From the time I’d know her she had never so much as mentioned anything like this in her life and yesterday she let it spill like it was absolutely nothing.
“So tell me, now that we have each other’s undivided attention. How long have you been engaged to Roland?”
“Raymond,” she corrected hurriedly. “For over a year now.”
“I can’t understand why you hadn’t mentioned him before yesterday. Is this supposed to be a secret affair? Is this relationship more of a fanciful idea of your mother’s as opposed to a romance of your own?”
“Oh no,” she lied. At least I think she was lying. “Raymond and I had a very strong connection when we first met. He has immeasurable faith in the Lord, and that’s what attracted me to him. He’s a very loving man. He spreads the Word on a Christian radio station three nights a week. We should listen to his show together! Also, as you know, he has this beautiful horse ranch in Waimonalo where Heather’s wedding reception will be. We could even go out there to ride if you want to.”
“So why didn’t you mention him before? Does he know about me?”
“Oh, silly! Everyone knows about you. It’s just that we have had so much else to talk about that I didn’t think that Raymond would fit into the conversation. You and I are always in such a rush!”
I had heard lies before and I was hearing one right at this moment. There is no way that a fiancé can slip one’s mind any more than a sighting of the Loch Ness monster wearing Star Wars underoos. My angel’s glow had softened in my eyes. She was less angelic all of a sudden. She had a personal agenda and would not stop at lying to conceal it.
“So have you set a date to marry him?” I asked. The truly engaged always have a date set.
“Well, his mother is not well and between that and his radio show, it seems like I only see him at church these days. I think we will start planning things once his mother is better.”
“Now that Roland is an open topic for conversation, I suppose that it’s time for me to meet him don’t you think?”
Candy looked up and to the left for the first time since I’d known her. She schemed. “Yes, let’s meet him tonight! We can listen to his radio show while we drive out to the ranch. Then you can hear him, meet him and get to know him, finally!”
Candy presented me with the back of her jaw for a goodbye kiss and once kissed, she skipped back to work. My evening was planned. I had a brief flash of worry that I my time would be better spent tending to my wounded marriage than wasting an evening sleuthing Candy’s fiancé story, but the worry subsided. I was still in a pretty good mood from the previous evening’s activity and thought I could rather use a drink of some sort to slow down my mind and better contemplate my situation. Despite the truce with my mother-in-law, I still had a situation that needed tender care in handling.
The feeling of being in Purgatory was ever present. I should qualify that. In the middle ages, purgatory was thought of as a real place. I’m sure that if Dante had been to Hawaii, his Purgatory would have consisted of Oahu and a half-dozen increasingly more boring islands such that the more exciting sins would get you the more boring islands as a punishment. Modern Catholics will tell you that Purgatory is not a place at all, however, but rather a process where one is cleansed of their sins to better prepare themselves for a perfect and eternal afterlife.
In Dante’s time, it was theorized that it would take a ridiculously long period of time to purge each and every individual sin; a period of hundreds or thousands of times longer than it took to commit the sin in the first place. I decided that I would not have that kind of time to devote to atonement and began to contemplate methods where I could purge my sins more expeditiously.
Then I wondered. What were my sins exactly? An average person will commit sins of various magnitudes almost every day, from little white lies to surfing the internet on company time, the latter of which would keep me in Purgatory for a very, very, very long time. How does one know which sins even matter anymore? Worshipping another god or taking god’s name in vain are constitutional rights in most countries that also have running water. Somehow I don’t think the ones about honouring one’s father or coveting a neighbour’s ass were relevant either. I suppose that the Ten Commandments were anachronisms even by Christ’s reckoning, since he only mentioned one or two.
So far, my life had been following in Dante’s footsteps, so I turned my thoughts to the seven deadly sins. The seven deadlies are a collection of forgivable or venial sins of a cardinal or really bad nature. In pre-renaissance times, it was determined that cardinal sins, if practiced often enough can add up to a mortal sin and become quite unforgivable. I reasoned that one of these cardinal sins was the likely source of my Purgatorial curse.
I began by ruling out gluttony right away. Though I had a penchant for good food and champagne, I was neither overweight, nor an alcoholic. Avarice was not my problem either, since no amount of money would exceed Svetlana’s ability to spend it. Sloth was right out, I worked day and night. There wasn’t much wrath in me, except a nasty letter to AT&T. Envy; I thought for a moment about envy. After a good long think, I realized that couldn’t come up with a single person on Oahu that I envied. That left lust. Was I lustful? I had a beautiful wife and a multitude of very attractive women friends. Sadly, I didn’t lust after any of them.
I counted the list, again. I only counted six. There was a sin missing. What was it? Pride; oh fuck, it had to be pride. As soon as I had said the word in my mind, I knew it was the obvious answer. All of the grief that I was suffering at this point my life could be traced back a single root cause and that was my ever-present sense of pride.
I did have a beautiful wife and a multitude of very attractive women friends. I had a cool car and a luxury apartment. I was a long time resident of enviable State of Hawaii. All of these aspects of my life fed my pride and the price of keeping these things was dear. I allowed myself to suffer for each and every thing that fed my pride. I suffered at the hands of the banks, the Immigration and Naturalization Services, my clients-come employers, my landlord, the credit card companies, my wife, and now my mother-in-law. Everyone who could make me suffer did and I had endured it all for the sake of my pride.
Then the real problem struck me like lightning. Had I committed any of the other seven deadlies, I would have been fine. I could have easily renounced those varieties of sin and began my penance immediately, but how could I part with my pride? How could I even mitigate it? My whole life up to this point had been an approval-seeking process, where I would pile up the the spoils of my various successes to reinforce my pride. My pride was everything to me. It was my soul.
Up to this point in my life, I had never even considered pride as a sin, especially not my pride. Yes, I had read Dante and Thomas Aquinas and I knew it was big on their lists of deadly sins. Before my predicament, I’d even mocked the list, citing that the seven deadly sins are necessary for the survival of the human race. For the first time in my life, I was seeing that pride had been deadly for me. What was worse is that I would not be able to atone for this sin easily, if I could atone at all. I would not be able to wash away the stains of pride afforded to me by beautiful women, cool cars and an exotic lifestyle without a complete and drastic overhaul of my life.
It was too much to think about. The irony of a sworn atheist being wracked by a cardinal sin was difficult enough to fathom, but there was more. This was happening while I was trapped in Purgatory and responsible for the care of an angel. They symbolism, real or imagined, was more than a sane mind should ever have to bear. At once, I knew what was coming for me in my dreams. A combination of fear and anger caused me to clench my fists in disbelief.
“I will not suffer this!” I swore aloud to an empty sky.
Passersby must have thought me crazy, but I was not far from Hotel Street where crazy is normal. I paid no mind to a gawking woman who blocked my way and made an awkward detour over the grass and around her. I returned to work and realized that my fists were still clenched. I knew my nightmare would return and that I would not be able to stop it. That was certain.
There was no way that I was going to be able to work. I picked up Dante’s Purgatory again and scanned through another few cantos. I hoped that maybe there were clues in it that would help me in what I knew was going to be a difficult time. I didn’t have to read far. The first terrace in Dante’s Purgatory deals with the proud. There, humility is both the punishment and the cure for pride. It was my least favourite emotion and perhaps my most often suffered one. I knew at once that I would suffer a great deal more.
I swore aloud and whipped the book across my desk. It hit the wall with a resounding thud. I wished I hadn’t thrown it. A co-worker or two had seen what I’d done. Now my co-workers would pass around the fact that was going crazy. It was time to go home. Beast or no beast in my home, I was no good to anyone at the office.
After a brisk walk home I arrived to find a happy pair. Mother and daughter were working away in the kitchen, chatting up a storm in their crazy Macedonian tongue. They talked and talked and talked and I could not fathom how it was possible that there was a subject left on earth for them to still be talking about. Svetlana kissed me happily and showed me the treats that she had been preparing for dinner. No one questioned why I was home so early and I did not volunteer an explanation.
I poured myself a very large glass of wine and bade that we change the language of conversation to English. After a bit of chit-chat it was evident that Svetlana was genuinely happy and Angelica seemed to be genuinely lacking her normal look of contempt for me.
“So, you ladies are not going to believe this,” I said temptingly.
“What? What? What?” The women begged.
“Candy has invited me out to a ranch this evening to visit with…”
Both women licked their lips in anticipation.
“…her fiancé!”
“No no, this is not possible,” said Angelica authoritatively. “When would she have time to meet a man when she sees you every day? This is not possible.”
It was a dig, but an uncommonly light one. I took it in stride. “I’m telling you. She had a fiancé all along. Apparently, he has a sick mother or something and she hasn’t seen much of him since she met us, or so she says, because he has not had time for her.”
“I can’t believe this,” Angelica added.
“It’s true!” I exclaimed. “I can take a picture if you like, but I am supposed to drive Candy out to meet him after dinner. I think we should all go out after that and I’ll tell you the whole story. I’m not planning to go in to work tomorrow so I can let my hair down a little tonight.”
I was already well on my way to relinquishing any pride I might have fostering regarding my employment situation. We chatted until dinnertime speculating on what sort of fellow might have captured Candy’s heart. The speculation continued through dinner with each aspect of the fiancé story being weighed and measured. We wondered how he might have courted Candy. We wondered how he asked her to marry him. We wondered if he asked her, or if she asked him or if her mother had set it all up or if anyone had asked anyone.
When dinner was done, Svetlana was practically pushing me out the door to go and fetch the answers to our many speculations. It was quite the opposite scene from the one where I expected to be begging forgiveness for offering Candy a ride. Sometimes Purgatory is simply elegant in its simplicity. I bade the women farewell and raced to my car like a superhero to his secret stash of super stuff.
I arrived at Candy’s at 7pm on the dot, just like we had planned. I called up. She said that she was going to be a few minutes and I punched the radio button for what I expected to be about a five song wait. Surprisingly, only a half a song had managed to play when I spotted Candy running toward the car.
“Hurry! Turn on the radio to AM 777!” Candy shouted as she buckled herself in.
I didn’t even know if I had an AM radio setting. After a minute of fussing with the controls, we were listening to the unmistakable sounds of Christian talk radio. Zzzzzzz, it was going to be a long drive. Raymond seemed pleasant enough on the radio, like a father giving advice to a child at one moment and quietly agreeing with a crazy caller the next. It was funny. The callers could say nearly anything and Raymond would listen patiently, quietly agree and go to the next caller.
Near the end of the show we were hurtling past Hanauma Bay, which is one of the most breathtakingly beautiful sections of road on Oahu. I tuned out to look at the waves and the rocks and…
“I’m going to close the show with the Lord’s Prayer,” said Raymond in his consoling radio voice. “This is a very beautiful version of the prayer that you don’t hear very often and I thought it would be nice to close the show with it today. It was written by one Dante Alighieri in the thirteenth century.”
“Oh! Fourteenth century, dude. It was written in the early 1300’s.” I blurted out.
I turned sharply, sharply enough to make all four tires on my car squeal, a difficult and scary thing to do. Raymond’s mistake had probably saved both of our lives. When he announced that he was going to end with Dante’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, I wondered what the chances were that I had been reading this same prayer only this morning. Dante had associated this very prayer with humility and it was therefore a remedy for pride. My disbelief had caused me to forget that I was driving to contemplate the odds that I was hearing this prayer for a second time in one day. It nearly caused me to drive us both off of a cliff.
Raymond read on,
“Our Father, You who dwell within the heavens
but are not circumscribed by them out of
Your greater love for Your first works above,
Praised be Your name and Your omnipotence,
by every creature, just as it is seemly
to offer thanks to Your sweet effluence…”
There was more of course and as Raymond read, I noticed that Candy had developed tears in her eyes. I imagine that even a non-Christian would have to concede that this was a very beautiful set of verses even after a rough translation from Italian to English.
“Well, we’ve heard his show,” I said. “Will he be as entertaining in person?”
Candy didn’t answer. She was still weeping.
“What’s the matter, baby?” I said in my softest possible voice.
“Oh, it is just so beautiful. Sometimes the Spirit just takes me and goes all through me when I hear so much devotion and such beauty. Wasn’t that a beautiful poem at the end?”
I nodded in agreement and reached over to stroke her shoulder to console her. It was a brief consolation, as I immediately had to downshift while we careened through another tight corner. The stage was set. A weeping angel and an on-air preacher-man were about to show me their incredible love for one another. I had no idea what to expect, having never dreamed that I would see anything like this in my life.
The ranch was not too much further down the road. I arrived at about the same time as an old beaten up Ford pickup. It was a red and white affair that had long since lost its looks to rust. I expected that it might have been Raymond at the helm, returning from his radio show, but how could Candy’s fiancé drive such a wreck? No combination of my brain cells would permit me to picture Candy heading to church in that rust-bucket. I supposed that if he owned a ranch, this couldn’t have been his only vehicle.
I pulled up next to the old Ford and ground to a halt in the gravel driveway. The Porsche had very wide tires and wasn’t comfortable on gravel. It seemed an awkward thing for me that moment, parking next to a farm vehicle. It was the first time I had felt strange behind the wheel since I bought the car. When the truck door opened, a man clearly in his mid 50’s got out. He had curly dark hair and deep set dark eyes and the facial lines of a man who had shouldered many worries. His countenance reminded me of an old farmhand who longed for better days.
“Rayyyyyyyyyyymond!” Candy squealed as she skipped across the gravel, throwing her arms around the older man’s neck.
In the English language there are many synonyms for disbelief, but none that really properly describe the sensation of being completely unable to believe something. Having had a day filled with unbelievable things and having used the word disbelief already several times on this day, I found myself feeling loathe to use it again. When Candy clung onto this old cowpoke, however, my brain was so utterly shocked with disbelief that I feared I might be struck dumb. After the embrace, Candy led him toward me.
“Roland…” Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. “I’m sorry, Ray-mond. It is a pleasure to meet you.”
“Oh I’ve heard a lot about you,” Raymond said with a knowing smile. “It’s good to know that you are keeping Candy out of trouble.”
“Oh thank you!” I said, trying to gain my composure. I didn’t know anything about him. What could I possibly say? “It’s a nice place you have out here.”
Raymond didn’t answer in a real sort of way. He just tipped his head and gave a little laugh. With a nod here and a gesture there, Raymond directed us up to his house. He had a picnic table in the back and brought out a bottle of wine and three glasses. He clearly lived there alone and I could see that Candy would have difficulty visiting him, since she didn’t have a car. Glancing around, I didn’t see any vehicles other than the rusty old Ford truck. The lack of vehicles alone might have throttled Candy’s relationship with him. I opened the conversation with a question.
“We listened to your radio show on the way out. I wondered where you got the idea to finish your show with Dante’s version of the Lord’s Prayer.”
“Oh, I like to mix things up and show people new things and old things when I can. Did you like that version of the prayer?”
“I liked it very much,” I confessed. “I was quite astonished to hear it, to be honest.”
“Robyn said you got the year wrong,” Candy chirped as a red hue filled my cheeks.
Oh, why did she say that? Here was more disbelief for my day. “Oh, sorry about that,” I floundered. “I just remarked that it was written in the early 1300’s… which is the fourteenth century and then noticed that we were driving off a cliff, so I might have overstated mistake.”
“That woke me up though; you might have saved our lives that moment.” I added. “How did you know about it? How did you decide to use it?”
“The Lord has been with us for a long time,” Raymond explained. “He’s inspired so many of us to wondrous things and great works. I like to use my show to remind people that His Word has been a source of healing and inspiration for people from many generations and parts of the world.”
Raymond smiled knowingly and his dark deep-set eyes sparkled a little in my direction. While he spoke, Candy sat next to him and sometimes on him, continuing to shower him with affection to which he paid absolutely no notice whatsoever. I puzzled. Raymond’s knowing look was altogether too knowing at that moment. I realized that his choice of Dante to end the show was no coincidence. Was he an angel or a devil in the Dantesque play that my life had become? I’d have to sort out his intentions and how he did this magic trick later, but I knew that none of this was an accident.
“But it was a beau…”
“Oh are you talking about that Lord’s Prayer on the radio?” Candy interrupted. “I couldn’t stop myself from crying when I heard that. It is so amazing. I just love it!”
Candy’s need for attention broke the spell of Raymond’s gaze. All of his mannerisms told me that he had something more to tell me, but with the spell broken, the conversation slowed to a standstill. Raymond was visibly tired and it looked like further conversation was starting to physically pain him.
“Well my dearest angel,” I said looking toward Candy. “I think it’s time I head home.”
I said “I” on purpose, not knowing if I would be leaving her here with her magical preacher fiancé or taking her back home with me.
“Can you give me one minute and wait by the car?” Candy asked.
“But of course.”
I thanked Raymond for the wine and the company and wandered back to my car. Glancing back as I walked, I could see Candy fluttering around him still seeking some sort of real attention. Raymond continued to puzzle me. I considered that our whole time there, he hadn’t kissed Candy once. He didn’t even give her the traditional Aloha kiss. He didn’t hold her hand or put his arm around her waist. He did not do anything that would have indicated that he had any interest in her at all, let alone the interest of a fiancé or soulmate.
Barely two minutes passed when Candy came skipping toward the car, ready to go.
“I’m surprised that you aren’t staying behind,” I said.
“Oh, we would never do that, silly! I just had a few questions about the wedding reception. I have to work tomorrow.”
That was a good enough reason for me, though it didn’t seem to be true. We buckled ourselves in and I surfed over the gravel, skidded onto the pavement and raced my way toward town. We had made it most of the way back in silence until, I finally broke it.
“I noticed that he’s a lot older than you, Candy.” I said as diplomatically as I knew how.
“When you talked about Heather’s age difference with her fiancé you said, ‘I really can’t see how an age difference will affect them if they have a good relationship.’” Candy retorted as though she was quite ready for what I would say.
She had recalled my quote from a couple of days previous; word for word. I suppose that her acting and singing experience must have given her an improved memory for recalling dialogue. I wished I could do that. It had been a long day and I had no time desire to press Candy for more information about this incredulous and seemingly cold relationship.
I dropped Candy at her home, glided carefully past the ever-watchful Waikiki police and into town to pick up Svetlana and her mother for a nightcap at Le Baron Noir. I wanted to see the Baron more than I didn’t want to see Angelica, and thought that a pleasant evening might be in store. Svetlana and Angelica were ready at the door when I arrived and we were tipping glasses of wine in no time.
We had actually barely sat down before Angelica started, “Tell me about this man, this fiancé to Candy. Tell me about him.”
With carefully chosen words I drew the picture of this old farmhand with a broken down truck. Both women followed the story with what seemed to be a mixture of delight and disbelief. I continued to tell them about Raymond’s seemingly indifferent, if not cold, attitude toward her.
“How can this be? How is it possible? This is not human!” Angelica insisted as the wine started to take effect.
Every nuance of the story inspired conjecture and speculation. The women sometimes would have to switch back to Macedonian, lacking the English words to express their more wild speculations. They asked me if I thought it might be an arranged marriage or if Raymond was a widower and gave lots of money to the church in exchange for Candy.
Each glass of wine made their speculations more outlandish. I specifically left out what I felt was the important part of the story, the Lord’s Prayer and Raymond’s knowing gaze. Their speculations were meaningless without that part. I answered what questions I could and united in laughter, the ladies speculated until The Baron was closed.
When we arrived home, I found myself not wanting to go to bed; tired though I was. Something had reminded me that I was in store for a serious nightmare however sleep came for me as it did every night. I hoped this night would not be the one that I had begun to dread.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Monday, August 2, 2010
Old Chapter (Ch. 7 - Purgatory)
In Christian lore, there are two kinds of sin, mortal sin and venial sin. If you happen to commit the former type of sin, you are screwed. Mortal sins are unforgivable by gods, people and in my case, wives and mothers-in-law. Venial sins are the class of forgivable sins. So long as the gods, your neighbours and possibly your wife will give you time to repent, almost any venial sin can be washed away and your soul made pure.
In the middle ages, the Catholic Church took the cleansing of venial sins very seriously. They even went so far as to create a whole new imaginary place called Purgatory for just such a purpose. They went even further by selling indulgences to the living and prayer services for the dead to help the faithful manage their way through this dark and terrible place with the least trouble possible. One day, to the delight of many, a plucky young poet named Virgil wrote many cantos describing the place in great detail.
As you can imagine, purgatory is an awful place. It consists basically a remote mountain sticking out of the opposite end of the earth with sinners clinging to it on all sides. Every inhabitant is a sinner undergoing some sort of dreadfully painful atonement for their sins. The lucky ones, who are assisted through prayer (and money) by anyone who hasn’t yet joined them in Purgatory, are able to skip the punishment lines, escape their awful fate and start enjoying the good life. After reading Dante’s book, it seemed to me that Purgatory is in almost every way, exactly like the State of Hawaii.
I woke that morning feeling good. It was an incredible contrast to the day before. I didn’t hurt. I had a skip in my step. I even caught myself singing “The Mayor of Bayswater” in the shower. As I showered, I imagined singing it for an American Idol audition. Simon might not have sent me to Hollywood, I reasoned, but I was certain that he would have liked it. I hummed it through my morning shave and through the application of hair gel and cologne, finishing it off in my best baritone, “And the hair from her dicky-di-do hung down to her knees.”
The applause in the bathroom roared. It was just me whispering an excited “Ahhhhhhhh!” to myself, which expertly mimicked the sound of about a thousand screaming fans.
I considered the contrast of my very on-pitch singing today (having done each of the three harmony parts in turn) to the horrifying noises that I must have made in the bathroom only yesterday. The women, had they were awake for both performances, could have concluded that I was quite insane. Today, I was ready for anything. Hell was behind me and Purgatory lay ahead and Dante taught me that if anything, Purgatory is doable. There was only one mountain to climb and I had been freshly laid. There is something miraculous about being well bedded; it makes a man feel that he can do anything.
I kissed the still sleeping Svetlana goodbye and whispered. “Je t'aime, mon chou,” into her ear. She didn’t rouse, but smiled as she always did. With a kick in my step, I headed out the door to the office, but not before perusing my bookcase. It was obvious. Dante’s Purgatory was begging to be re-read. It was so coincidentally apropos that had it been lying next to a copy of “How to Get Rid of a Mother-in-Law,” I would have still chosen it. Surely Dante and his trusty guide Virgil would quickly lead me out of my own personal Purgatory.
I was still singing when I arrived at the office. After about an hour of work, I’d punched enough keys on the keyboard to meet or exceed the efforts of the past 5 weeks. I let the CEO know that there would be a showing of new software on Wednesday; a software engineer must release new things from time to time to stay relevant. I started into my new book and by the end of the first canto was ready to call Candy.
“Hi,” she said sullenly.
“Hi?” Was all I could think to say. Her familiar exuberance was gone. It made things grayer than the vog.
“Coffee time! My treat!” I chirped, to put some excitement back into the air.
I was aware, having said this, that since I had known Candy, it was always my treat.
Candy agreed to meet at our usual Starbucks, the one closest to her job. When I got to the register to order her special frappuccino had already been made. She phoned ahead. I took our drinks into the spot with the comfy chairs and found Candy sitting there waiting. She was wearing a very pouty face.
“Whatever is the matter, my dear?” I said in a consoling voice.
“I felt like you were ignoring me yesterday.”
Really? I’d taken her driving for hours, walked on the beach, unloaded my problems and… Her pouty look continued to sear holes through my retinas. I had to try and imagine exactly when I had possibly ignored her. I couldn’t think of a moment.
“I’m sorry, baby. I didn’t mean to ignore you. I was really in the most terrible mood yesterday. I’m a lot better now. It won’t happen again.”
“It just felt like you were only interested in Heather and it was all about her and you didn’t seem to care about anything that I had to say.” She scolded.
That was true. I suppose that I had imagined that she was also interested in Heather’s story. I imagined that had I not been there they would have carried along famously without me, but I suppose I was wrong about that. I decided it best to cling to the apology I’d already made.
“Oh, Candy. I was just feeling a little down. That’s all. You have my full attention now!” I offered.
“Good!” She said as the light returned to her eyes. “Now promise me that you will never do that again.”
“I promise.” I said, not really being sure of what I was promising, but my pledge had melted the pout from Candy’s face and that was all that mattered at this moment.
Thinking back to everything that was said on the previous day, I suddenly remembered Candy’s bombshell. She had a fiancé; a soulmate no less. From the time I’d know here she had never mentioned anything like this in her life and yesterday she let it slip like it was absolutely nothing.
“So tell me, now that you have my undivided attention. How long have you been engaged to Roland?”
“Raymond,” she corrected hurriedly. “For over a year now.”
“I find it terribly odd that you hadn’t mentioned him before yesterday. Is this relationship more of a fanciful idea of your mother’s as opposed to a romance of your own?”
“Oh no,” she lied. At least I think she was lying. “Raymond and I had a very strong connection when we first met. He has incredibly strong faith in the Lord, and that’s what attracted me to him. He’s a very loving man. He shares The Word on a Christian radio station three nights a week. We should listen to his show together. Also, as you know, he has this beautiful horse ranch in Waimonalo where Heather’s wedding reception will be. We could even go out there to ride if you want to.”
“So why didn’t you mention him before? Does he know about me?”
“Oh, silly! Everyone knows about you. It’s just that we have had so much else to talk about that I didn’t think that Raymond would fit into the conversation. You and I are always in such a rush.”
I had heard lies before and I was hearing one right at this moment. There is no way that a fiancé can slip your mind any more than a sighting of the Loch Ness monster. My angel’s glow softened. She was less angelic to me now. She had a personal agenda and would not stop at lying to conceal it.
“So have you set a date to marry him?” I asked. The truly engaged always have a date set.
“Well, his mother is not well and between that and his radio show, it seems like I only see him at church these days. I think we will start planning things once his mother is better.”
“Well now that Roland is now an open topic for conversation, I suppose that it’s time for me to meet him. Don’t you think?”
Candy looked up and to the left for the first time since I’d known her. She schemed. “Yes, let’s meet him tonight. We can listen to his radio show while we drive out to the ranch. Then you can hear him, meet him and get to know him, finally!”
My evening was planned. I had a brief flash of worry that I had better tend to my marriage this evening rather than sleuth Candy’s story, but the worry subsided. Candy presented me with the back of her jaw for a goodbye kiss and she skipped off to work. I was still in a pretty good mood from the previous evening’s activity and thought I could rather use a drink of some sort to slow down my mind and better contemplate my situation. Despite the truce with my mother-in-law, I still had a situation that needed tender care in handling.
The feeling of being in Purgatory was ever present. I should qualify that. In the middle ages, purgatory was thought of as a real place. I’m sure that if Dante had been to Hawaii, his Purgatory would have consisted of Oahu and a half-dozen increasingly more boring islands. Modern Catholics will tell you that Purgatory is not a place at all, however, but rather a process where one is cleansed of their sins to better prepare themselves for a perfect and eternal afterlife.
In Dante’s time, it was theorized that it would take a ridiculously long period of time to purge each individual sin; a period of hundreds or thousands of times longer than it originally took to commit the sin in question. I decided that I would not have that kind of time to devote to atonement and look to methods where I could purge my sins fast.
But what were my sins exactly? People commit sins of various magnitude all the time, from white lies to surfing the internet on company time, the latter of which would keep me in Purgatory for a very, very, very long time. So far, my life had been following in Dante’s footsteps, so I thought about the seven deadly sins. Those are the lot of possibly forgivable or venial sins of a cardinal or really bad nature. Cardinal sins, if practiced enough can become quite unforgivable. I calculated that one of the Cardinal sins was likely to be my curse.
I ruled out gluttony right away. Though I had a penchant for good food and champagne, I was neither overweight, nor an alcoholic. Avarice was not my problem either, since no amount of money would exceed Svetlana’s ability to spend it. Sloth was right out, I worked day and night. There wasn’t much wrath in me. Envy; I thought for a minute about envy. After a good long think, I couldn’t come up with a single person on Oahu that I envied. That left lust. Was I lustful? I had a beautiful wife and a bevy of very good looking women friends. I didn’t lust after any of them.
I counted the list, again. I only counted six. There was a sin missing. What was it? Pride; oh fuck, it had to be pride. As soon as I had said it in my mind, I knew it was the obvious answer. All of the grief that I had suffered at this point my life could be traced back a single cause and that was my pride.
I did have a beautiful wife and a bevy of very good looking women friends. I had a cool car and a luxury apartment. I was a long time resident of enviable State of Hawaii. All of these aspects of my life fed my pride and the price of keeping these things was dear. I allowed myself to suffer for each and every thing that fed my pride. I suffered at the hands of the banks, the Immigration and Naturalization Services, my clients-come employers, my landlord, the credit card companies, my wife, my mother-in-law. Everyone who could make me suffer did and I had endured it all for the sake of my pride.
Then the real problem struck me like lightning. Had I committed any of the other seven deadlies, I would have been fine. I could have easily renounced those varieties of sin and began my penance immediately, but how could I part with my pride? How could I even mitigate it? My whole life up to this point had been an approval-seeking process with the spoils of my various successes piled up to reinforce my pride. My pride was everything. It was my soul.
I had never even considered pride as a sin before, at least not my pride. Yes, I had read Dante and Thomas Aquinas and I knew it was big on the list of deadly sins. I’ve even mocked the list, citing that the seven deadly sins are necessary for the survival of the human race. For the first time in my life, I saw that pride had been deadly for me. What was worse is that I would not be able to atone for this sin easily, if I could atone for it at all. I could not shake away the stains left by beautiful women, cool cars and an exotic lifestyle without a complete overhaul of my life.
It was too much to think about. The irony that a sworn atheist was being wracked by a cardinal sin was staggering enough, but there was more. This was happening while I was trapped in Purgatory and responsible for the care of an angel. They symbolism, real or imagined, was more than a sane mind could bear. At once, I knew what was coming for me in my dreams. A combination of fear and anger caused me to clench my fists in disbelief.
“I will not suffer this!” I swore aloud to an empty sky.
Passersby must have thought me crazy, but I was not far from Hotel Street where crazy is normal. I paid no mind to a gawking woman who blocked my way and made an awkward detour around her and returned to work, fists still clenched. I knew my nightmare would return and that I would not be able to stop it. That was certain.
There was no way that I was going to be able to work. I picked up Dante’s Purgatory again and scanned through another few cantos. I hoped that maybe there were clues in it that would help me in what I knew was going to be a difficult time. I didn’t have to read far. The first terrace in Dante’s Purgatory deals with the proud. There, humility is both the punishment and cure for pride. It was my least favourite emotion and perhaps my most often suffered one. I knew at once that I would suffer a great deal more.
I swore aloud and whipped the book across my desk. It hit the wall with a resounding thud. I wished I hadn’t thrown it. A co-worker or two had seen that. Now my co-workers would pass around the fact that had become crazy. It was time to go home. Beast or no beast at home, I was no good to anyone at the office.
After a brisk walk home I arrived to find a happy pair. Mother and daughter working away in the kitchen, chatting up a storm in their crazy Macedonian tongue. They talked and talked and talked and I could not fathom how it was possible that there was a subject left on earth for them to still be talking about. Svetlana kissed me happily and showed me the treats that she had been preparing for dinner. No one questioned why I was home so early and I did not volunteer an explanation.
I poured myself a very large glass of wine and bade that we change the language of conversation to English. After a bit of chit-chat it was evident that Svetlana was genuinely happy and Angelica seemed to be genuinely lacking her normal look of contempt for me.
“So, you ladies are not going to believe this,” I said temptingly.
“What? What? What?” The women begged.
“Candy has invited me out to a ranch this evening to visit with…”
Both women licked their lips in anticipation.
“…her fiancé!”
“No no, this is not possible,” said Angelica authoritatively. “When would she have time to meet a man when she sees you every day?”
It was a dig, but a light one. I took it in stride. “I’m telling you. She had a fiancé all along. Apparently, he has a sick mother or something and she hasn’t seen much of him since she met us, or so she says, because he has not had time for her.”
“I can’t believe this,” Angelica added.
“It’s true!” I exclaimed. “I can take a picture if you like, but I am supposed to drive Candy out to meet him after dinner. We can all go out after that and I’ll tell you the whole story. I’m not going in to work tomorrow so I can let my hair down a little tonight.”
I was already well on my way to relinquishing any pride I might have fostering regarding my employment situation. We chatted until dinnertime speculating on what sort of fellow might have captured Candy’s heart. The speculation continued through dinner with each aspect of the fiancé story being weighed and measured. We wondered how he had courted Candy. We wondered how he asked her to marry him. We wondered if he asked her, or if she asked him or if her mother had set it all up or if anyone had asked anyone.
When dinner was done, Svetlana was practically pushing me out the door to go and fetch the answers to our many speculations. It was quite the opposite scene from the one where I expected to be begging forgiveness for offering Candy a ride. Sometimes Purgatory is simply elegant in its simplicity. I bade the women farewell and raced to my car like a superhero to his secret stash of super stuff.
I arrived at Candy’s at 7pm on the dot, just like we had planned. I called up. She said that she was going to be a few minutes and I punched the radio button for what I expected to be about a five song wait. Only a half a song had gone past when I spotted Candy racing toward the car.
“Hurry! Turn on the radio to AM 777!” Candy shouted as she buckled herself in.
I didn’t even know if I had an AM radio setting. After a minute of fussing with the controls, we were listening to the unmistakable sounds of Christian talk radio. It was going to be a long drive. Raymond seemed pleasant enough on the radio, like a father giving advice to kids one moment and quietly agreeing with the crazy callers the next. It was funny. The callers could say nearly anything and Raymond would listen patiently, quietly agree and go to the next caller.
Near the end of the show we were getting past Hanauma Bay, which is one of the most breathtaking bits of road on the island. I tuned out to look at the waves and the rocks and…
“I’m going to close the show with the Lord’s Prayer,” said Raymond in his consoling radio voice. “This is a very beautiful version of the prayer that you don’t hear very often and I thought it would be nice to close the show with it today. It was written by one Dante Alighieri in the early 1400’s.”
“Oh! Fourteenth century, dude. It was written in the early 1300’s.” I blurted out.
I turned sharply, making all four tires on my car squeal, a difficult and scary thing to do. Raymond’s mistake had probably saved both of our lives. When he announced that he was going to end with Dante’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, I wondered what the chances were that I had been reading this same prayer only this morning. Dante had associated this very prayer with humility and it was therefore a remedy for pride. My disbelief had caused me to forget that I was driving to contemplate the odds that I was hearing this prayer for a second time in one day. It nearly caused me to drive us both off of a cliff.
Raymond read on,
“Our Father, You who dwell within the heavens
but are not circumscribed by them out of
Your greater love for Your first works above,
Praised be Your name and Your omnipotence,
by every creature, just as it is seemly
to offer thanks to Your sweet effluence…”
There was more of course and as Raymond read, I could tell that Candy had developed tears in her eyes. I concluded that even a non-Christian would have to concede that this was a very beautiful set of verses even after being translated from Italian.
“Well, we’ve heard his show,” I said. “Will he be as entertaining in person?”
Candy didn’t answer. She was weeping.
“What’s the matter baby?” I said in my softest possible voice.
“Oh, it is just so beautiful. Sometimes the Spirit just takes me and goes all through me when I hear so much devotion and such beauty. Wasn’t that a beautiful poem at the end?”
I nodded in agreement and reached over to stroke her shoulder to console her. It was a brief consolation as I immediately had to downshift while we careened through another tight corner. The stage was set. A crying angel and an on-air preacher were going to show me how much they love they had for each other. I had no idea what to expect, having never hoped to see anything like this in my life.
The ranch was not too much farther down the road. I arrived at the same time as a beat up old Ford pickup. It was a red and white affair that had long since lost its looks to rust. I expected that it must have been Raymond at the helm, returning from his radio show. No combination of my brain cells would permit me to picture Candy in such a vehicle. He owned a ranch after all; this couldn’t have been his only vehicle.
I pulled up next to the old Ford and ground to a halt in the gravel driveway. The Porsche had very wide tires and wasn’t comfortable on gravel. It seemed an awkward thing, parking next to a farm vehicle. It was the first time I had felt strange in it since I bought the car. When the truck door opened, a man clearly in his 50’s got out. He had curly dark hair and deep set dark eyes and the facial lines of a man who has shouldered many worries. His countenance reminded me of an old farmhand who had seen better days.
“Rayyyyyyyyyyymond!” Candy squealed as she skipped through the gravel and into the older man’s arms.
In the English language there are many synonyms for disbelief, but none that really properly describe the sensation of being completely unable to believe something. Having had a day filled with unbelievable things and having used the word disbelief already several times on this day, I found myself feeling loathe to use it again. When Candy leapt into the arms of this old cowpoke, however, my brain was so utterly shocked with disbelief that feared that I’d be struck dumb. After the embrace, Candy led him toward me.
“Roland…” Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. “I’m sorry, Ray-mond. It is a pleasure to meet you.”
“Oh I’ve heard a lot about you,” Raymond said with a smile. “It’s good to know that you are keeping Candy out of trouble.”
“Oh thank you!” I said, trying to gain my composure. I didn’t know anything about him. What could I possibly say? “It’s a nice place you have out here.”
Raymond didn’t answer in a real sort of way. He just tipped his head and gave a little laugh. With a nod here and a gesture there, Raymond directed us up to his house. He had a picnic table in the back and brought out a bottle of wine and three glasses. He clearly lived there alone and I could see that Candy would have difficulty visiting him without a car. I didn’t see any vehicles other than the rusty old Ford truck. I could see that vehicles alone might have throttled Candy’s relationship with him. I opened the conversation with a question.
“We listened to your radio show on the way out. I wondered where you got the idea to finish your show with Dante’s version of the Lord’s Prayer.”
“Oh, I like to mix things up and show people new things and old things when I can. Did you like that version of the prayer?”
“I liked it very much,” I confessed. “I was quite astonished to hear it, to be honest.”
“Robyn said you got the year wrong,” Candy chirped as a red hue filled my cheeks.
Oh, why did she say that? Here was more disbelief for my day. “Oh, sorry about that,” I floundered. “I just remarked that it was written in the early 1300’s… while we were driving off a cliff, so I might have overstated how I felt about the mistake.”
From that moment all the conversation was awkward and stilted. Raymond kept very quiet and was visibly tired. Candy continued to shower him with affection to which he paid absolutely no notice whatsoever. I considered that our whole time there, he hadn’t kissed her once. He didn’t even give her the traditional Aloha kiss. He didn’t hold her hand or grab her waist. He did not do anything that would have indicated that he had any interest in her at all, let alone the interest of a fiancé or soulmate.
A few comments were made about the upcoming wedding reception and after playing out that topic, we ended the meeting cordially. Candy escorted Raymond into the house and was out a moment later. We drove most of the way in silence until, I finally broke it.
“I noticed that he’s a lot older than you, Candy.” I said in diplomatic tones.
“When you talked about Heather’s age difference with her fiancé you said, ‘I really can’t see how an age difference will affect them if they have a good relationship.’” Candy retorted.
She had recalled my quote from days before word for word. I suppose that all her acting and singing experience must have given her an improved memory for such things. It had been a long day and I had no time desire to press Candy for more information about this incredulous relationship.
I dropped Candy at her home and whipped into town to take Svetlana and her mother down to Le Baron Noir for a nightcap. The ladies bristled with delight at every nuance of the story and speculated wildly about the situation. They surmised that it must have been an arranged marriage or that Raymond was a widower and gave lots of money to the church in exchange for Candy. Each glass of wine made the speculations more outlandish.
United in laughter, we speculated wildly until Le Baron was closed. I was not eager to go to sleep that night, but sleep came for me as it did every night. I hoped this night would not be the one that I had begun to dread.
In the middle ages, the Catholic Church took the cleansing of venial sins very seriously. They even went so far as to create a whole new imaginary place called Purgatory for just such a purpose. They went even further by selling indulgences to the living and prayer services for the dead to help the faithful manage their way through this dark and terrible place with the least trouble possible. One day, to the delight of many, a plucky young poet named Virgil wrote many cantos describing the place in great detail.
As you can imagine, purgatory is an awful place. It consists basically a remote mountain sticking out of the opposite end of the earth with sinners clinging to it on all sides. Every inhabitant is a sinner undergoing some sort of dreadfully painful atonement for their sins. The lucky ones, who are assisted through prayer (and money) by anyone who hasn’t yet joined them in Purgatory, are able to skip the punishment lines, escape their awful fate and start enjoying the good life. After reading Dante’s book, it seemed to me that Purgatory is in almost every way, exactly like the State of Hawaii.
I woke that morning feeling good. It was an incredible contrast to the day before. I didn’t hurt. I had a skip in my step. I even caught myself singing “The Mayor of Bayswater” in the shower. As I showered, I imagined singing it for an American Idol audition. Simon might not have sent me to Hollywood, I reasoned, but I was certain that he would have liked it. I hummed it through my morning shave and through the application of hair gel and cologne, finishing it off in my best baritone, “And the hair from her dicky-di-do hung down to her knees.”
The applause in the bathroom roared. It was just me whispering an excited “Ahhhhhhhh!” to myself, which expertly mimicked the sound of about a thousand screaming fans.
I considered the contrast of my very on-pitch singing today (having done each of the three harmony parts in turn) to the horrifying noises that I must have made in the bathroom only yesterday. The women, had they were awake for both performances, could have concluded that I was quite insane. Today, I was ready for anything. Hell was behind me and Purgatory lay ahead and Dante taught me that if anything, Purgatory is doable. There was only one mountain to climb and I had been freshly laid. There is something miraculous about being well bedded; it makes a man feel that he can do anything.
I kissed the still sleeping Svetlana goodbye and whispered. “Je t'aime, mon chou,” into her ear. She didn’t rouse, but smiled as she always did. With a kick in my step, I headed out the door to the office, but not before perusing my bookcase. It was obvious. Dante’s Purgatory was begging to be re-read. It was so coincidentally apropos that had it been lying next to a copy of “How to Get Rid of a Mother-in-Law,” I would have still chosen it. Surely Dante and his trusty guide Virgil would quickly lead me out of my own personal Purgatory.
I was still singing when I arrived at the office. After about an hour of work, I’d punched enough keys on the keyboard to meet or exceed the efforts of the past 5 weeks. I let the CEO know that there would be a showing of new software on Wednesday; a software engineer must release new things from time to time to stay relevant. I started into my new book and by the end of the first canto was ready to call Candy.
“Hi,” she said sullenly.
“Hi?” Was all I could think to say. Her familiar exuberance was gone. It made things grayer than the vog.
“Coffee time! My treat!” I chirped, to put some excitement back into the air.
I was aware, having said this, that since I had known Candy, it was always my treat.
Candy agreed to meet at our usual Starbucks, the one closest to her job. When I got to the register to order her special frappuccino had already been made. She phoned ahead. I took our drinks into the spot with the comfy chairs and found Candy sitting there waiting. She was wearing a very pouty face.
“Whatever is the matter, my dear?” I said in a consoling voice.
“I felt like you were ignoring me yesterday.”
Really? I’d taken her driving for hours, walked on the beach, unloaded my problems and… Her pouty look continued to sear holes through my retinas. I had to try and imagine exactly when I had possibly ignored her. I couldn’t think of a moment.
“I’m sorry, baby. I didn’t mean to ignore you. I was really in the most terrible mood yesterday. I’m a lot better now. It won’t happen again.”
“It just felt like you were only interested in Heather and it was all about her and you didn’t seem to care about anything that I had to say.” She scolded.
That was true. I suppose that I had imagined that she was also interested in Heather’s story. I imagined that had I not been there they would have carried along famously without me, but I suppose I was wrong about that. I decided it best to cling to the apology I’d already made.
“Oh, Candy. I was just feeling a little down. That’s all. You have my full attention now!” I offered.
“Good!” She said as the light returned to her eyes. “Now promise me that you will never do that again.”
“I promise.” I said, not really being sure of what I was promising, but my pledge had melted the pout from Candy’s face and that was all that mattered at this moment.
Thinking back to everything that was said on the previous day, I suddenly remembered Candy’s bombshell. She had a fiancé; a soulmate no less. From the time I’d know here she had never mentioned anything like this in her life and yesterday she let it slip like it was absolutely nothing.
“So tell me, now that you have my undivided attention. How long have you been engaged to Roland?”
“Raymond,” she corrected hurriedly. “For over a year now.”
“I find it terribly odd that you hadn’t mentioned him before yesterday. Is this relationship more of a fanciful idea of your mother’s as opposed to a romance of your own?”
“Oh no,” she lied. At least I think she was lying. “Raymond and I had a very strong connection when we first met. He has incredibly strong faith in the Lord, and that’s what attracted me to him. He’s a very loving man. He shares The Word on a Christian radio station three nights a week. We should listen to his show together. Also, as you know, he has this beautiful horse ranch in Waimonalo where Heather’s wedding reception will be. We could even go out there to ride if you want to.”
“So why didn’t you mention him before? Does he know about me?”
“Oh, silly! Everyone knows about you. It’s just that we have had so much else to talk about that I didn’t think that Raymond would fit into the conversation. You and I are always in such a rush.”
I had heard lies before and I was hearing one right at this moment. There is no way that a fiancé can slip your mind any more than a sighting of the Loch Ness monster. My angel’s glow softened. She was less angelic to me now. She had a personal agenda and would not stop at lying to conceal it.
“So have you set a date to marry him?” I asked. The truly engaged always have a date set.
“Well, his mother is not well and between that and his radio show, it seems like I only see him at church these days. I think we will start planning things once his mother is better.”
“Well now that Roland is now an open topic for conversation, I suppose that it’s time for me to meet him. Don’t you think?”
Candy looked up and to the left for the first time since I’d known her. She schemed. “Yes, let’s meet him tonight. We can listen to his radio show while we drive out to the ranch. Then you can hear him, meet him and get to know him, finally!”
My evening was planned. I had a brief flash of worry that I had better tend to my marriage this evening rather than sleuth Candy’s story, but the worry subsided. Candy presented me with the back of her jaw for a goodbye kiss and she skipped off to work. I was still in a pretty good mood from the previous evening’s activity and thought I could rather use a drink of some sort to slow down my mind and better contemplate my situation. Despite the truce with my mother-in-law, I still had a situation that needed tender care in handling.
The feeling of being in Purgatory was ever present. I should qualify that. In the middle ages, purgatory was thought of as a real place. I’m sure that if Dante had been to Hawaii, his Purgatory would have consisted of Oahu and a half-dozen increasingly more boring islands. Modern Catholics will tell you that Purgatory is not a place at all, however, but rather a process where one is cleansed of their sins to better prepare themselves for a perfect and eternal afterlife.
In Dante’s time, it was theorized that it would take a ridiculously long period of time to purge each individual sin; a period of hundreds or thousands of times longer than it originally took to commit the sin in question. I decided that I would not have that kind of time to devote to atonement and look to methods where I could purge my sins fast.
But what were my sins exactly? People commit sins of various magnitude all the time, from white lies to surfing the internet on company time, the latter of which would keep me in Purgatory for a very, very, very long time. So far, my life had been following in Dante’s footsteps, so I thought about the seven deadly sins. Those are the lot of possibly forgivable or venial sins of a cardinal or really bad nature. Cardinal sins, if practiced enough can become quite unforgivable. I calculated that one of the Cardinal sins was likely to be my curse.
I ruled out gluttony right away. Though I had a penchant for good food and champagne, I was neither overweight, nor an alcoholic. Avarice was not my problem either, since no amount of money would exceed Svetlana’s ability to spend it. Sloth was right out, I worked day and night. There wasn’t much wrath in me. Envy; I thought for a minute about envy. After a good long think, I couldn’t come up with a single person on Oahu that I envied. That left lust. Was I lustful? I had a beautiful wife and a bevy of very good looking women friends. I didn’t lust after any of them.
I counted the list, again. I only counted six. There was a sin missing. What was it? Pride; oh fuck, it had to be pride. As soon as I had said it in my mind, I knew it was the obvious answer. All of the grief that I had suffered at this point my life could be traced back a single cause and that was my pride.
I did have a beautiful wife and a bevy of very good looking women friends. I had a cool car and a luxury apartment. I was a long time resident of enviable State of Hawaii. All of these aspects of my life fed my pride and the price of keeping these things was dear. I allowed myself to suffer for each and every thing that fed my pride. I suffered at the hands of the banks, the Immigration and Naturalization Services, my clients-come employers, my landlord, the credit card companies, my wife, my mother-in-law. Everyone who could make me suffer did and I had endured it all for the sake of my pride.
Then the real problem struck me like lightning. Had I committed any of the other seven deadlies, I would have been fine. I could have easily renounced those varieties of sin and began my penance immediately, but how could I part with my pride? How could I even mitigate it? My whole life up to this point had been an approval-seeking process with the spoils of my various successes piled up to reinforce my pride. My pride was everything. It was my soul.
I had never even considered pride as a sin before, at least not my pride. Yes, I had read Dante and Thomas Aquinas and I knew it was big on the list of deadly sins. I’ve even mocked the list, citing that the seven deadly sins are necessary for the survival of the human race. For the first time in my life, I saw that pride had been deadly for me. What was worse is that I would not be able to atone for this sin easily, if I could atone for it at all. I could not shake away the stains left by beautiful women, cool cars and an exotic lifestyle without a complete overhaul of my life.
It was too much to think about. The irony that a sworn atheist was being wracked by a cardinal sin was staggering enough, but there was more. This was happening while I was trapped in Purgatory and responsible for the care of an angel. They symbolism, real or imagined, was more than a sane mind could bear. At once, I knew what was coming for me in my dreams. A combination of fear and anger caused me to clench my fists in disbelief.
“I will not suffer this!” I swore aloud to an empty sky.
Passersby must have thought me crazy, but I was not far from Hotel Street where crazy is normal. I paid no mind to a gawking woman who blocked my way and made an awkward detour around her and returned to work, fists still clenched. I knew my nightmare would return and that I would not be able to stop it. That was certain.
There was no way that I was going to be able to work. I picked up Dante’s Purgatory again and scanned through another few cantos. I hoped that maybe there were clues in it that would help me in what I knew was going to be a difficult time. I didn’t have to read far. The first terrace in Dante’s Purgatory deals with the proud. There, humility is both the punishment and cure for pride. It was my least favourite emotion and perhaps my most often suffered one. I knew at once that I would suffer a great deal more.
I swore aloud and whipped the book across my desk. It hit the wall with a resounding thud. I wished I hadn’t thrown it. A co-worker or two had seen that. Now my co-workers would pass around the fact that had become crazy. It was time to go home. Beast or no beast at home, I was no good to anyone at the office.
After a brisk walk home I arrived to find a happy pair. Mother and daughter working away in the kitchen, chatting up a storm in their crazy Macedonian tongue. They talked and talked and talked and I could not fathom how it was possible that there was a subject left on earth for them to still be talking about. Svetlana kissed me happily and showed me the treats that she had been preparing for dinner. No one questioned why I was home so early and I did not volunteer an explanation.
I poured myself a very large glass of wine and bade that we change the language of conversation to English. After a bit of chit-chat it was evident that Svetlana was genuinely happy and Angelica seemed to be genuinely lacking her normal look of contempt for me.
“So, you ladies are not going to believe this,” I said temptingly.
“What? What? What?” The women begged.
“Candy has invited me out to a ranch this evening to visit with…”
Both women licked their lips in anticipation.
“…her fiancé!”
“No no, this is not possible,” said Angelica authoritatively. “When would she have time to meet a man when she sees you every day?”
It was a dig, but a light one. I took it in stride. “I’m telling you. She had a fiancé all along. Apparently, he has a sick mother or something and she hasn’t seen much of him since she met us, or so she says, because he has not had time for her.”
“I can’t believe this,” Angelica added.
“It’s true!” I exclaimed. “I can take a picture if you like, but I am supposed to drive Candy out to meet him after dinner. We can all go out after that and I’ll tell you the whole story. I’m not going in to work tomorrow so I can let my hair down a little tonight.”
I was already well on my way to relinquishing any pride I might have fostering regarding my employment situation. We chatted until dinnertime speculating on what sort of fellow might have captured Candy’s heart. The speculation continued through dinner with each aspect of the fiancé story being weighed and measured. We wondered how he had courted Candy. We wondered how he asked her to marry him. We wondered if he asked her, or if she asked him or if her mother had set it all up or if anyone had asked anyone.
When dinner was done, Svetlana was practically pushing me out the door to go and fetch the answers to our many speculations. It was quite the opposite scene from the one where I expected to be begging forgiveness for offering Candy a ride. Sometimes Purgatory is simply elegant in its simplicity. I bade the women farewell and raced to my car like a superhero to his secret stash of super stuff.
I arrived at Candy’s at 7pm on the dot, just like we had planned. I called up. She said that she was going to be a few minutes and I punched the radio button for what I expected to be about a five song wait. Only a half a song had gone past when I spotted Candy racing toward the car.
“Hurry! Turn on the radio to AM 777!” Candy shouted as she buckled herself in.
I didn’t even know if I had an AM radio setting. After a minute of fussing with the controls, we were listening to the unmistakable sounds of Christian talk radio. It was going to be a long drive. Raymond seemed pleasant enough on the radio, like a father giving advice to kids one moment and quietly agreeing with the crazy callers the next. It was funny. The callers could say nearly anything and Raymond would listen patiently, quietly agree and go to the next caller.
Near the end of the show we were getting past Hanauma Bay, which is one of the most breathtaking bits of road on the island. I tuned out to look at the waves and the rocks and…
“I’m going to close the show with the Lord’s Prayer,” said Raymond in his consoling radio voice. “This is a very beautiful version of the prayer that you don’t hear very often and I thought it would be nice to close the show with it today. It was written by one Dante Alighieri in the early 1400’s.”
“Oh! Fourteenth century, dude. It was written in the early 1300’s.” I blurted out.
I turned sharply, making all four tires on my car squeal, a difficult and scary thing to do. Raymond’s mistake had probably saved both of our lives. When he announced that he was going to end with Dante’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, I wondered what the chances were that I had been reading this same prayer only this morning. Dante had associated this very prayer with humility and it was therefore a remedy for pride. My disbelief had caused me to forget that I was driving to contemplate the odds that I was hearing this prayer for a second time in one day. It nearly caused me to drive us both off of a cliff.
Raymond read on,
“Our Father, You who dwell within the heavens
but are not circumscribed by them out of
Your greater love for Your first works above,
Praised be Your name and Your omnipotence,
by every creature, just as it is seemly
to offer thanks to Your sweet effluence…”
There was more of course and as Raymond read, I could tell that Candy had developed tears in her eyes. I concluded that even a non-Christian would have to concede that this was a very beautiful set of verses even after being translated from Italian.
“Well, we’ve heard his show,” I said. “Will he be as entertaining in person?”
Candy didn’t answer. She was weeping.
“What’s the matter baby?” I said in my softest possible voice.
“Oh, it is just so beautiful. Sometimes the Spirit just takes me and goes all through me when I hear so much devotion and such beauty. Wasn’t that a beautiful poem at the end?”
I nodded in agreement and reached over to stroke her shoulder to console her. It was a brief consolation as I immediately had to downshift while we careened through another tight corner. The stage was set. A crying angel and an on-air preacher were going to show me how much they love they had for each other. I had no idea what to expect, having never hoped to see anything like this in my life.
The ranch was not too much farther down the road. I arrived at the same time as a beat up old Ford pickup. It was a red and white affair that had long since lost its looks to rust. I expected that it must have been Raymond at the helm, returning from his radio show. No combination of my brain cells would permit me to picture Candy in such a vehicle. He owned a ranch after all; this couldn’t have been his only vehicle.
I pulled up next to the old Ford and ground to a halt in the gravel driveway. The Porsche had very wide tires and wasn’t comfortable on gravel. It seemed an awkward thing, parking next to a farm vehicle. It was the first time I had felt strange in it since I bought the car. When the truck door opened, a man clearly in his 50’s got out. He had curly dark hair and deep set dark eyes and the facial lines of a man who has shouldered many worries. His countenance reminded me of an old farmhand who had seen better days.
“Rayyyyyyyyyyymond!” Candy squealed as she skipped through the gravel and into the older man’s arms.
In the English language there are many synonyms for disbelief, but none that really properly describe the sensation of being completely unable to believe something. Having had a day filled with unbelievable things and having used the word disbelief already several times on this day, I found myself feeling loathe to use it again. When Candy leapt into the arms of this old cowpoke, however, my brain was so utterly shocked with disbelief that feared that I’d be struck dumb. After the embrace, Candy led him toward me.
“Roland…” Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. “I’m sorry, Ray-mond. It is a pleasure to meet you.”
“Oh I’ve heard a lot about you,” Raymond said with a smile. “It’s good to know that you are keeping Candy out of trouble.”
“Oh thank you!” I said, trying to gain my composure. I didn’t know anything about him. What could I possibly say? “It’s a nice place you have out here.”
Raymond didn’t answer in a real sort of way. He just tipped his head and gave a little laugh. With a nod here and a gesture there, Raymond directed us up to his house. He had a picnic table in the back and brought out a bottle of wine and three glasses. He clearly lived there alone and I could see that Candy would have difficulty visiting him without a car. I didn’t see any vehicles other than the rusty old Ford truck. I could see that vehicles alone might have throttled Candy’s relationship with him. I opened the conversation with a question.
“We listened to your radio show on the way out. I wondered where you got the idea to finish your show with Dante’s version of the Lord’s Prayer.”
“Oh, I like to mix things up and show people new things and old things when I can. Did you like that version of the prayer?”
“I liked it very much,” I confessed. “I was quite astonished to hear it, to be honest.”
“Robyn said you got the year wrong,” Candy chirped as a red hue filled my cheeks.
Oh, why did she say that? Here was more disbelief for my day. “Oh, sorry about that,” I floundered. “I just remarked that it was written in the early 1300’s… while we were driving off a cliff, so I might have overstated how I felt about the mistake.”
From that moment all the conversation was awkward and stilted. Raymond kept very quiet and was visibly tired. Candy continued to shower him with affection to which he paid absolutely no notice whatsoever. I considered that our whole time there, he hadn’t kissed her once. He didn’t even give her the traditional Aloha kiss. He didn’t hold her hand or grab her waist. He did not do anything that would have indicated that he had any interest in her at all, let alone the interest of a fiancé or soulmate.
A few comments were made about the upcoming wedding reception and after playing out that topic, we ended the meeting cordially. Candy escorted Raymond into the house and was out a moment later. We drove most of the way in silence until, I finally broke it.
“I noticed that he’s a lot older than you, Candy.” I said in diplomatic tones.
“When you talked about Heather’s age difference with her fiancé you said, ‘I really can’t see how an age difference will affect them if they have a good relationship.’” Candy retorted.
She had recalled my quote from days before word for word. I suppose that all her acting and singing experience must have given her an improved memory for such things. It had been a long day and I had no time desire to press Candy for more information about this incredulous relationship.
I dropped Candy at her home and whipped into town to take Svetlana and her mother down to Le Baron Noir for a nightcap. The ladies bristled with delight at every nuance of the story and speculated wildly about the situation. They surmised that it must have been an arranged marriage or that Raymond was a widower and gave lots of money to the church in exchange for Candy. Each glass of wine made the speculations more outlandish.
United in laughter, we speculated wildly until Le Baron was closed. I was not eager to go to sleep that night, but sleep came for me as it did every night. I hoped this night would not be the one that I had begun to dread.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Chapter 6 - The Ocean
Despite the ominous dream, I awoke feeling sad rather than scared. I was truly sad. The English language is replete with words that mean “sad” and not a single one could really capture how overwhelmingly sad I was feeling. On this day, my sadness trumped misery, depression, grief, sorrow and wretchedness combined. I was, I believe, as sad as a person could possibly be.
My sadness wasn’t just an emotion floating around in my brain either; it was a particularly new state of existence for me. I was so fucking sad that my mind had made the whole universe around me into a sad and lonely… horrible place that could only fuel and satiate my sadness. The walls and ceiling of my lonely apartment dripped green with misery. The fake framed photographs mocked me with their toothy smiles and seemed to make the sound of shrill sardonic laughter.
Most mornings, I roll out of bed the moment my eyes are open. I wouldn’t say that I’m a morning person, but I don’t like to lie in bed without some reason for lying in bed. This morning I suppose I had a reason. Svetlana was sleeping as soundly as usual, but the way she was sleeping was somewhat unusual to me. This morning, she was leaning toward me with one arm draped over my chest. My god, she was so beautiful. I stared remorsefully at her perfect and beautiful face and knew, for my sadness was an oracle, that she would eventually leave me.
My eyes welled with tears. I rolled off the bed. The floor felt like a river of mud and every footstep I took was laborious and painful. Each step actually hurt, and not in a metaphorical way. I stopped thinking about my grief for a moment to consider my physical condition and came to realize that I was in real pain. Every muscle, joint and sinew in my body ached with a persistent and piercing pain. This was the pain of true sadness.
With no small amount of effort, I forced my body into the shower and fumbled with the controls. Too cold; too hot.
“Gaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!” I roared.
The overwhelming pain of the hot searing jets ripped me in two as I screamed and fell out of the tub with the shower curtain and the snapped curtain rod twisting and fluttering to the floor around me. Only a thin bathmat broke my fall. After a moment, the amount of pain levelled off to where it was when I was in bed. I checked to see if anything else had broken, like one of my bones perhaps and climbed carefully back to my feet. I jammed the fucked up shower curtain mess behind the toilet and wondered whether I should attempt to shower without it. Fuck it. I set the shower temperature to the least painful setting and climbed back in. Gallons of water merrily splashed to the floor and I just didn’t care. They formed into sad puddles all over the floor.
Wallowing in depression as I painfully soaked, I considered my ominous dream. If Dante’s Inferno was still rolling around in my dreams, the ‘coming thing’ must have been the beast. Unlike Dante, there was no Virgil to guide me through my own personal hell. I didn’t know what was coming for me. I would never learn what was coming, unless I was to return to that dream. How could I? The coming thing seemed to be so terrifying. A worry arose that experiencing both fear and depression in my dreams would eventually kill me. I could not live if I were to lose my problem solving dreams to nightmares of frightful omens. These days, dreams were my only respite from hell.
When I finished taking a shower, the women were still asleep. I surmised that they were only pretending to sleep. No one could have slept through the hideous noises that must have emanated from the bathroom. The sounds I had conjured must have been frightful. I let them pretend and as had been my routine, I gave Svetlana her morning kisses and whispered, “J’ai envie de toi,” in her ear.
I detected a slight smile take shape on Svetlana’s face, but I did nothing to stir her. I carefully made my way out of the bedroom, tiptoed past the beast and slipped out the front door. Unlike previous days, however, once I had made my escape, I had no feeling of freedom; sadness loomed over everything. Sadness is a unique emotion in that the more one thinks about it, the more sad and upset one becomes. I would have to stop thinking somehow, but it is impossible. All I ever do is think.
It was an unusually grey day for Hawaii. A volcanic fog had rolled in from the Big Island. Vog, it was called by the locals. It made the air heavy and people with breathing problems would often have their lives worsened by heavy vog. It was appropriate to my mood; however. It was so appropriate that I wondered if I hadn’t somehow created it. Stepping out into the grey, I approached my very red car. Its indomitable redness lashed out against the colourless world. I wondered where I should go from here.
Oh, no! I remembered that I was supposed to go to the beach with Candy and Heather. I couldn’t let either of them see me like this. A soon-to-be-married woman would not profit from hearing the lamentations of miserably married man. Displaying my profound sadness would set a terrible precedent in my relationship with Candy. I had to stay on top of her training. After all, I had a lot of time invested in her so far.
The phone rang. Candy. Shit. “Hello?” I answered, awkwardly.
“Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!” She squealed, “Are you ready for a fabulous day on the beach?”
Didn’t she notice the vog? How could she be so happy when my sadness had changed the very perfect weather we were all so accustomed to? Who even thinks of the beach on a grey day like this? I had to think.
“Yes, baby! I’m at my car now and I can be there in ten minutes. Are you ready?”
I hadn’t thought of anything. I raged at my brain to invent an excuse between sentences; still nothing.
“I’m already ready!” She said with her usual glee.
“On my way, baby.”
En route, I thumbed at my phone to call Heather. She’d understand that I wasn’t feeling up to a visit. Maybe she had already cancelled her plans for the beach. It wasn’t beach weather after all. She answered.
“Hey handsome,” she cooed.
“Hi, Heather.” I spoke with a bit of a whine already inflected in my voice. “I’m not so sure about the beach today. I had a really rough night. It’s hard to explain really, but I’m really not feeling my best. Are you still going?”
“Oh, Robyn! I go to the beach every day. I never miss a day. It’s impossible for me to miss. You have to understand that it is such a ‘healing’ place. Come! You’ll see why, when you get here.”
For all my grief, I had no will for resistance. They wanted me to go and I didn’t really have anything else to do. No sooner had I hung up with Heather than my car had somehow steered me to Candy’s. I called up and she said she’d be ready in ten minutes. I wondered how that was possible, since she was ready when I called twenty minutes ago and now she was… Oh, it was too stupid to think about.
Candy appeared in the rear view mirror, a vision in a red bikini and a red translucent wrap. More wild redness allied with me to rage against this grey world. She hopped into the car and presented her cheek for a hello kiss. I wondered how odd it was that after three weeks of consecutive days, each with at least one hello and one goodbye kiss that she was still quite careful to turn her head away from me each and every time.
This strange behaviour could perhaps use a little context. In Canada, or at least in the parts where I have lived, hello and goodbye kisses are very uncommon. There, even good friends and family members will avoid their use whenever possible. By contrast, in Hawaii the aloha kiss (the word ‘aloha’ means both ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ among other things) is used between men and women and women and women for all personal hello and goodbye occasions. Even perfect strangers, upon meeting for the first time will give one another an aloha kiss. Only when a man greets another man, will a handshake suffice. Male friends will often give an aloha hug, which consists of a handshake with the right hand and mutual close-fisted back pat with the left.
There is one more thing that needs to be explained. The aloha kiss itself can vary immensely from one set of kissers to the next. The standard form is where the aloha kissers will touch cheeks momentarily and kiss into the air making a pleasant and familiar kiss sound. More familiar kissers will tighten the kiss up a little and will make lip contact against each other’s cheeks. Personally, I consider the air kisses to be too ‘Hollywood’ and I’m usually quite determined to at least make lip-to-cheek contact if I am expected to engage in form of greeting kiss. Lastly, there are those aloha kissers who, even with a stranger, will kiss on the lips.
A curious sense of disillusionment would come over me every time Candy did her kiss charade. I would plant my kiss, striking the back of her jawbone and invariably hear that empty smack whistle past my left ear. It was maybe the first clue for me that there was something else to Candy, as thought she might be someone completely different than the person I thought I was experiencing.
We took the long way up to Bellow’s beach, past Hanauma Bay and around up the east coast of the island. I wasn’t in a hurry and refused to look at a map. Besides, it is a beautiful drive. I did my best to bite back the sadness that was still gnawing at my flesh.
“How long have you known Heather?” Candy began.
“I think nearly three years, though I’ve only run into her here and there. I’ve always felt like we should have been better friends, but she’s been too busy to chat every time we’ve found one another again.”
“Her fiancée is much younger,” she said with an expectant face.
“I remember her saying that, but I don’t think it’s a big deal. I’ve dated women that were older than me and Svetlana is the same age. I really can’t see how an age difference will affect them if they have a good relationship.”
“Much younger,” she stressed.
“Well, I guess we will see how that works for them, won’t we?” I nearly laughed, but my misery caught hold of me and prevented it.
“Do you know what else? “
I doubted that I would ever be able to guess what was on Candy’s mind except for the very obvious.
“No I can’t imagine, what?”
Candy smiled broadly. “They are going to have their wedding reception at my boyfriend’s ranch.”
I immediate impulse was to slam the brakes and skid my car sideways to a halt. This is exactly what happened in my head, though my body somehow managed to keep the car purring gently around Oahu’s east coast.
“Oh I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.” I said, choking back my astonishment.
“Yes, he’s my soulmate! My mom chose him for us at our church. He has his own Christian radio talk show. Basically, we’ve just been waiting until the time is right. Do you know what else?”
Christ! An infinite room of monkeys, having just completed Shakespeare’s complete works could not have typed a plausible guess for Candy’s ‘what else’.
Candy continued. “When Heather asked Raymond… That’s my fiancé, Raymond. When she asked Raymond if they could have the wedding reception at his ranch, he said ‘No’. He doesn’t like to do events out there anymore. Anyway, Heather mentioned it to me the other night. After I got home, I called Raymond and told him that I was Heather’s friend and that he should say ‘Yes’. He did! Now we get to tell Heather the good news! Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t this going to be a great day?”
This day was shit. Despite the new Candy revelations, which were too unbelievable at the moment to be appreciated in their entirety, I had not forgotten about the pain that was going through my every joint and muscle. I had not forgotten about my ravaged marriage or the beast living in my home. I had not forgotten about the shower curtain I’d ripped off the wall or the gallons of water I’d left on the floor. I had not forgotten that life, as I knew it was going to get worse and worse for as far as my mind’s eye could see.
“Great news!” I managed to blurt out with a hint of feigned joy. “Anything else?”
I braced my mind for anything; literally anything.
“No, that’s everything. You know you don’t seem as happy today as you usually are. Is something wrong?”
I’d been outed. I have the good fortune to possess a good imagination, but outright lying is not something that I can do with any conviction. I didn’t want to tell Candy what was wrong, but I would have to offer some sort of a clue.
“It’s my mother-in-law.” I offered. “This visit has just been too long and the strain is starting to wear me down. I’m sorry, I was going to call off our trip to the beach so I could stay out of sight, but that didn’t seem to be an option for anyone else.”
Perhaps for the only time that I had ever known her, Candy had nothing to say. She was silent for the rest of the trip. She reached across and put her hand on my shoulder, squeezing it while rubbing reassuringly with her thumb. The warm and generous caresses would normally have been a welcome salve for my misery, except that like everything else, my shoulder hurt. Ever stroke of her thumb sent a shiver of pain through my chest and into my heart. I counted a hundred and fifty-two strokes by the time we arrived.
We parked at Bellows Beach and hopped out of the car, leaving our shoes behind. The sky and water ahead looked grey but the air was moist, warm and inviting. Candy and I tiptoed over the pavement and grass toward the beach and by the time we had our feet on the moist sand we could make out Heather’s outline in the distance. Her long tresses were easy to spot from a distance. As we closed, I could see that she was wearing a flowing golden-brown silk wrap around her waist and a tan crochet bikini top. She was certainly easy on the eyes.
“Oh perfect timing!” She shouted over the sound of the ocean. We closed in and leaned toward one another for our aloha kisses. Candy’s was first, the standard cheek-to-cheek affair. Mine was next. Heather kissed me on the lips, gently. It was an overly long kiss for an aloha kiss, which is supposed to be more of a peck. She knew. I forgot that I had told her how miserable I was feeling. Her kiss was an aloha kiss, a comfort kiss and a flirtation all rolled into one very tender kiss. She was a master of flirtation, I had to admit.
“It was such a good idea for you to come.” She said comfortingly. “You are going to feel better in a little while. I just know it. The beach is a place to heal. You’ll see.”
Candy gave me a look of wonder. Of course she wondered how Heather could have just known what I had so painfully revealed to her in the car. She probably wondered if there was more for me to tell.
“Now Heather. We have come to hear about this new man of yours and I don’t want you to spare any of the details, especially everything you told us the other night, because we probably have all of those facts wrong by now. When you are finished, Candy has some good news to share with you, so start from the beginning. How did you meet him?”
“In time.” She said, and touched her index finger to her lips thoughtfully. “Let’s walk for a bit.”
Heather put her arm around my waist and guided me toward the ocean. Candy followed her lead and put her arm around my waist from the other side. Arm in arm in arm, we walked up the beach in ankle-deep water. The water would rush out and our feet would sink in the sand. Other times the water would rush in and rise above our knees.
We held our tight formation for about a mile without saying anything. It must have been a beautiful image to see the three of us, with Heather flowing in her golden earth tones and Candy in her red wrap. There was no one there to record the event and it remains mine alone to savour. While I can’t say that my sadness had melted away, the pain had certainly subsided. As we walked, I grew less and less conscious of the arms around my waist, which at first shot pain into my legs. I became more and more aware of the arms around my waist and the genuine affection that the embrace represented.
The beach had been a good idea, after all. We turned to walk back in the other direction, still arm-in-arm-in arm, breaking occasionally to escape a large wave or to pet a curious dog. Heather started to spill the details of her romance on the way back. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the early details. She was serving wine at a military function. Their eyes met. They fell in love and he got shipped to Iraq. This was a very typical story in Hawaii at the time. In these modern times, he would have been shipped to Afghanistan. The very minor detail that stuck in my memory was that her fiancé was twenty years her junior.
“So why marriage?” I asked, for so many reasons. “Did you consider a longer courtship? He won’t be back here very long before his next deployment.”
“Well, it is love.” She replied.
I knew exactly what she meant. Candy’s face looked quizzical. She obviously didn’t understand.
“So I guess that your life won’t change much, since he’ll be away so often. No?” I asked.
“No. I quit my job. I know he’s younger and not a high-paid colonel or anything, but I decided that it was time for me to be a housewife for once in my life.”
“Oh wow!” I said in astonishment. Part of the astonishment was my inability to think of something more clever to say. “I have to say that there is something to the man/housewife model that works. Svetlana and I have been living like that for five years now. I have to say that I like it for the most part.”
“Well, we got this tiny little house up on a hill near the base. Robyn, it has the most incredible view in the world. You have to bring Svetlana up for a visit when Brad gets back.”
“Oh nooooooooooo! Unless Brad get’s back soon, Svetlana won’t be here. She’s going t back to France for her bi-annual visit.”
I had more to say on that topic, but decided to spare the women my inevitable rant. To keep Svetlana’s European work visa active and alive, she had to return to French soil ever 6 months, whether we could afford to send her or not. The combination of my desire for unfettered access to Europe and Svetlana’s penchant to see her European friends made the trips a necessity. Alas, they were an incredible strain on an already strained budget.
“I’ll come with you!” Candy sang out.
“Oh, of course!” Heather said. “You guys look so great together. How are you feeling, Robyn? Better?”
“Yes, better. Thank you.” I said as Candy squealed and turned a little turn in the sand in delight.
“So we’ll all be together again in about two weeks. Perfect. Now Candy has news for you as well. I’ll let her tell you. I’m going to walk up ahead.”
“This is goodbye then.” Heather said, and she kissed me goodbye once again on the lips.
One doesn’t have to get far up the beach before voices get lost in the ocean sounds. I glanced back a couple of times to see Candy and Heather talking, holding hands and then jumping up and down together. It appeared that Candy’s news had worked wonders on Heather, who glided away more gaily than she had arrived. The ocean had cured her, as it always did. It had given me more relief than I had ever expected and Candy just floated above it all in the way that only angels can do.
I had made it to the grass when the jumping stopped and I sat to rest. Candy stole her way up to me on tiptoes.
“Oh what a perfect day!” She exclaimed, believing that it was.
As we drove back, I turned the car radio to a loud setting to drown out the possibility for conversation. I’d had enough conversation and I’d managed to hide the better part of my misery from Candy. I was concerned that my act would not last much longer. Song after song on the radio taunted me, bringing back and refreshing the pain. The sad songs inevitably reminded me of my impossible situation. The happy songs mocked me. Every song worsened my condition until I was as miserable as I had been when I woke up in the morning. Candy was oblivious to this, as far as I knew.
When we arrived at her home, I kissed her jawbone goodbye and drove myself to Ala Moana Park. I sat there for what seemed forever. The sun hadn’t set, but was about to. I knew I should be hungry. I was too sick to eat. I had no idea where to go. I couldn’t go home and it hurt to even move. For reasons I can’t explain, I kept the radio blasting, fuelling my misery to ever more perilous depths.
I stared out at the ocean. I was looking but not seeing anything. My every thought was directed to the next song on the radio. I wondered how and where it was going to hurt. Unexpectedly, my cell-phone buzzed in my pocket. The tiny screen read ‘Svetlana’. Jesus, the last thing I needed was to be bitched at. I debated whether to answer. I answered.
“Sweetie, come home,” was all she said. Her voice had pleading tone to it.
The words stuck me like a lightning. For all the hype and the angst and the shouting and the general state of commotion, I’d forgotten that she did still love me.
I went home. When I arrived, an apologetic and almost repentant mother-in-law greeted me at the door and commented that I looked good when I got some sun. Svetlana was stirring over a pot of fresh cooked pasta and I could see that she’d already created a Russian salad, one of my favourite dishes. I walked into the kitchen and she took a break from her cooking to give me a hug. A smile brushed across her face.
“Sweetie, we need you at home. OK?” She whispered.
I was speechless.
“Mom promises to behave. Just stay home.”
“OK.” It was all there was to say.
My pain suddenly melted. The sadness dripped away. When I went to the bathroom to freshen up, I noticed a nice new shower curtain, complete with the new plastic smell that filled the room. My universe had been turned upside-down, or rather rightways-back-up by two words, ‘come home’. I ate and drank with a beaming wife and a considerably more polite and courteous mother-in law. We talked about Heather’s wedding and her much younger man and all joked together about the time that they would have.
When the hour of night came, to my surprise, Svetlana followed me to the bedroom. This was a rare occurrence, since she stayed up most evenings long past my bedtime. On this day she came. I find that men and women are very different when it comes to describing love, particularly acts of love. Women are terribly graphic and are demanding for details. Men are quite the opposite and are content to hear little more than, “The deed was done.” In the hopes of satisfying both genders, I’ll say as much as I can in as few words as possible.
That night, Svetlana and I made love for the first time in a very long time. It felt like a first time. We savoured the passion unreservedly deep into the night. When we had exhausted ourselves, we collapsed together into a pool of contentment and satiety and did not stir for many hours after.
My sadness wasn’t just an emotion floating around in my brain either; it was a particularly new state of existence for me. I was so fucking sad that my mind had made the whole universe around me into a sad and lonely… horrible place that could only fuel and satiate my sadness. The walls and ceiling of my lonely apartment dripped green with misery. The fake framed photographs mocked me with their toothy smiles and seemed to make the sound of shrill sardonic laughter.
Most mornings, I roll out of bed the moment my eyes are open. I wouldn’t say that I’m a morning person, but I don’t like to lie in bed without some reason for lying in bed. This morning I suppose I had a reason. Svetlana was sleeping as soundly as usual, but the way she was sleeping was somewhat unusual to me. This morning, she was leaning toward me with one arm draped over my chest. My god, she was so beautiful. I stared remorsefully at her perfect and beautiful face and knew, for my sadness was an oracle, that she would eventually leave me.
My eyes welled with tears. I rolled off the bed. The floor felt like a river of mud and every footstep I took was laborious and painful. Each step actually hurt, and not in a metaphorical way. I stopped thinking about my grief for a moment to consider my physical condition and came to realize that I was in real pain. Every muscle, joint and sinew in my body ached with a persistent and piercing pain. This was the pain of true sadness.
With no small amount of effort, I forced my body into the shower and fumbled with the controls. Too cold; too hot.
“Gaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!” I roared.
The overwhelming pain of the hot searing jets ripped me in two as I screamed and fell out of the tub with the shower curtain and the snapped curtain rod twisting and fluttering to the floor around me. Only a thin bathmat broke my fall. After a moment, the amount of pain levelled off to where it was when I was in bed. I checked to see if anything else had broken, like one of my bones perhaps and climbed carefully back to my feet. I jammed the fucked up shower curtain mess behind the toilet and wondered whether I should attempt to shower without it. Fuck it. I set the shower temperature to the least painful setting and climbed back in. Gallons of water merrily splashed to the floor and I just didn’t care. They formed into sad puddles all over the floor.
Wallowing in depression as I painfully soaked, I considered my ominous dream. If Dante’s Inferno was still rolling around in my dreams, the ‘coming thing’ must have been the beast. Unlike Dante, there was no Virgil to guide me through my own personal hell. I didn’t know what was coming for me. I would never learn what was coming, unless I was to return to that dream. How could I? The coming thing seemed to be so terrifying. A worry arose that experiencing both fear and depression in my dreams would eventually kill me. I could not live if I were to lose my problem solving dreams to nightmares of frightful omens. These days, dreams were my only respite from hell.
When I finished taking a shower, the women were still asleep. I surmised that they were only pretending to sleep. No one could have slept through the hideous noises that must have emanated from the bathroom. The sounds I had conjured must have been frightful. I let them pretend and as had been my routine, I gave Svetlana her morning kisses and whispered, “J’ai envie de toi,” in her ear.
I detected a slight smile take shape on Svetlana’s face, but I did nothing to stir her. I carefully made my way out of the bedroom, tiptoed past the beast and slipped out the front door. Unlike previous days, however, once I had made my escape, I had no feeling of freedom; sadness loomed over everything. Sadness is a unique emotion in that the more one thinks about it, the more sad and upset one becomes. I would have to stop thinking somehow, but it is impossible. All I ever do is think.
It was an unusually grey day for Hawaii. A volcanic fog had rolled in from the Big Island. Vog, it was called by the locals. It made the air heavy and people with breathing problems would often have their lives worsened by heavy vog. It was appropriate to my mood; however. It was so appropriate that I wondered if I hadn’t somehow created it. Stepping out into the grey, I approached my very red car. Its indomitable redness lashed out against the colourless world. I wondered where I should go from here.
Oh, no! I remembered that I was supposed to go to the beach with Candy and Heather. I couldn’t let either of them see me like this. A soon-to-be-married woman would not profit from hearing the lamentations of miserably married man. Displaying my profound sadness would set a terrible precedent in my relationship with Candy. I had to stay on top of her training. After all, I had a lot of time invested in her so far.
The phone rang. Candy. Shit. “Hello?” I answered, awkwardly.
“Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!” She squealed, “Are you ready for a fabulous day on the beach?”
Didn’t she notice the vog? How could she be so happy when my sadness had changed the very perfect weather we were all so accustomed to? Who even thinks of the beach on a grey day like this? I had to think.
“Yes, baby! I’m at my car now and I can be there in ten minutes. Are you ready?”
I hadn’t thought of anything. I raged at my brain to invent an excuse between sentences; still nothing.
“I’m already ready!” She said with her usual glee.
“On my way, baby.”
En route, I thumbed at my phone to call Heather. She’d understand that I wasn’t feeling up to a visit. Maybe she had already cancelled her plans for the beach. It wasn’t beach weather after all. She answered.
“Hey handsome,” she cooed.
“Hi, Heather.” I spoke with a bit of a whine already inflected in my voice. “I’m not so sure about the beach today. I had a really rough night. It’s hard to explain really, but I’m really not feeling my best. Are you still going?”
“Oh, Robyn! I go to the beach every day. I never miss a day. It’s impossible for me to miss. You have to understand that it is such a ‘healing’ place. Come! You’ll see why, when you get here.”
For all my grief, I had no will for resistance. They wanted me to go and I didn’t really have anything else to do. No sooner had I hung up with Heather than my car had somehow steered me to Candy’s. I called up and she said she’d be ready in ten minutes. I wondered how that was possible, since she was ready when I called twenty minutes ago and now she was… Oh, it was too stupid to think about.
Candy appeared in the rear view mirror, a vision in a red bikini and a red translucent wrap. More wild redness allied with me to rage against this grey world. She hopped into the car and presented her cheek for a hello kiss. I wondered how odd it was that after three weeks of consecutive days, each with at least one hello and one goodbye kiss that she was still quite careful to turn her head away from me each and every time.
This strange behaviour could perhaps use a little context. In Canada, or at least in the parts where I have lived, hello and goodbye kisses are very uncommon. There, even good friends and family members will avoid their use whenever possible. By contrast, in Hawaii the aloha kiss (the word ‘aloha’ means both ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ among other things) is used between men and women and women and women for all personal hello and goodbye occasions. Even perfect strangers, upon meeting for the first time will give one another an aloha kiss. Only when a man greets another man, will a handshake suffice. Male friends will often give an aloha hug, which consists of a handshake with the right hand and mutual close-fisted back pat with the left.
There is one more thing that needs to be explained. The aloha kiss itself can vary immensely from one set of kissers to the next. The standard form is where the aloha kissers will touch cheeks momentarily and kiss into the air making a pleasant and familiar kiss sound. More familiar kissers will tighten the kiss up a little and will make lip contact against each other’s cheeks. Personally, I consider the air kisses to be too ‘Hollywood’ and I’m usually quite determined to at least make lip-to-cheek contact if I am expected to engage in form of greeting kiss. Lastly, there are those aloha kissers who, even with a stranger, will kiss on the lips.
A curious sense of disillusionment would come over me every time Candy did her kiss charade. I would plant my kiss, striking the back of her jawbone and invariably hear that empty smack whistle past my left ear. It was maybe the first clue for me that there was something else to Candy, as thought she might be someone completely different than the person I thought I was experiencing.
We took the long way up to Bellow’s beach, past Hanauma Bay and around up the east coast of the island. I wasn’t in a hurry and refused to look at a map. Besides, it is a beautiful drive. I did my best to bite back the sadness that was still gnawing at my flesh.
“How long have you known Heather?” Candy began.
“I think nearly three years, though I’ve only run into her here and there. I’ve always felt like we should have been better friends, but she’s been too busy to chat every time we’ve found one another again.”
“Her fiancée is much younger,” she said with an expectant face.
“I remember her saying that, but I don’t think it’s a big deal. I’ve dated women that were older than me and Svetlana is the same age. I really can’t see how an age difference will affect them if they have a good relationship.”
“Much younger,” she stressed.
“Well, I guess we will see how that works for them, won’t we?” I nearly laughed, but my misery caught hold of me and prevented it.
“Do you know what else? “
I doubted that I would ever be able to guess what was on Candy’s mind except for the very obvious.
“No I can’t imagine, what?”
Candy smiled broadly. “They are going to have their wedding reception at my boyfriend’s ranch.”
I immediate impulse was to slam the brakes and skid my car sideways to a halt. This is exactly what happened in my head, though my body somehow managed to keep the car purring gently around Oahu’s east coast.
“Oh I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.” I said, choking back my astonishment.
“Yes, he’s my soulmate! My mom chose him for us at our church. He has his own Christian radio talk show. Basically, we’ve just been waiting until the time is right. Do you know what else?”
Christ! An infinite room of monkeys, having just completed Shakespeare’s complete works could not have typed a plausible guess for Candy’s ‘what else’.
Candy continued. “When Heather asked Raymond… That’s my fiancé, Raymond. When she asked Raymond if they could have the wedding reception at his ranch, he said ‘No’. He doesn’t like to do events out there anymore. Anyway, Heather mentioned it to me the other night. After I got home, I called Raymond and told him that I was Heather’s friend and that he should say ‘Yes’. He did! Now we get to tell Heather the good news! Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t this going to be a great day?”
This day was shit. Despite the new Candy revelations, which were too unbelievable at the moment to be appreciated in their entirety, I had not forgotten about the pain that was going through my every joint and muscle. I had not forgotten about my ravaged marriage or the beast living in my home. I had not forgotten about the shower curtain I’d ripped off the wall or the gallons of water I’d left on the floor. I had not forgotten that life, as I knew it was going to get worse and worse for as far as my mind’s eye could see.
“Great news!” I managed to blurt out with a hint of feigned joy. “Anything else?”
I braced my mind for anything; literally anything.
“No, that’s everything. You know you don’t seem as happy today as you usually are. Is something wrong?”
I’d been outed. I have the good fortune to possess a good imagination, but outright lying is not something that I can do with any conviction. I didn’t want to tell Candy what was wrong, but I would have to offer some sort of a clue.
“It’s my mother-in-law.” I offered. “This visit has just been too long and the strain is starting to wear me down. I’m sorry, I was going to call off our trip to the beach so I could stay out of sight, but that didn’t seem to be an option for anyone else.”
Perhaps for the only time that I had ever known her, Candy had nothing to say. She was silent for the rest of the trip. She reached across and put her hand on my shoulder, squeezing it while rubbing reassuringly with her thumb. The warm and generous caresses would normally have been a welcome salve for my misery, except that like everything else, my shoulder hurt. Ever stroke of her thumb sent a shiver of pain through my chest and into my heart. I counted a hundred and fifty-two strokes by the time we arrived.
We parked at Bellows Beach and hopped out of the car, leaving our shoes behind. The sky and water ahead looked grey but the air was moist, warm and inviting. Candy and I tiptoed over the pavement and grass toward the beach and by the time we had our feet on the moist sand we could make out Heather’s outline in the distance. Her long tresses were easy to spot from a distance. As we closed, I could see that she was wearing a flowing golden-brown silk wrap around her waist and a tan crochet bikini top. She was certainly easy on the eyes.
“Oh perfect timing!” She shouted over the sound of the ocean. We closed in and leaned toward one another for our aloha kisses. Candy’s was first, the standard cheek-to-cheek affair. Mine was next. Heather kissed me on the lips, gently. It was an overly long kiss for an aloha kiss, which is supposed to be more of a peck. She knew. I forgot that I had told her how miserable I was feeling. Her kiss was an aloha kiss, a comfort kiss and a flirtation all rolled into one very tender kiss. She was a master of flirtation, I had to admit.
“It was such a good idea for you to come.” She said comfortingly. “You are going to feel better in a little while. I just know it. The beach is a place to heal. You’ll see.”
Candy gave me a look of wonder. Of course she wondered how Heather could have just known what I had so painfully revealed to her in the car. She probably wondered if there was more for me to tell.
“Now Heather. We have come to hear about this new man of yours and I don’t want you to spare any of the details, especially everything you told us the other night, because we probably have all of those facts wrong by now. When you are finished, Candy has some good news to share with you, so start from the beginning. How did you meet him?”
“In time.” She said, and touched her index finger to her lips thoughtfully. “Let’s walk for a bit.”
Heather put her arm around my waist and guided me toward the ocean. Candy followed her lead and put her arm around my waist from the other side. Arm in arm in arm, we walked up the beach in ankle-deep water. The water would rush out and our feet would sink in the sand. Other times the water would rush in and rise above our knees.
We held our tight formation for about a mile without saying anything. It must have been a beautiful image to see the three of us, with Heather flowing in her golden earth tones and Candy in her red wrap. There was no one there to record the event and it remains mine alone to savour. While I can’t say that my sadness had melted away, the pain had certainly subsided. As we walked, I grew less and less conscious of the arms around my waist, which at first shot pain into my legs. I became more and more aware of the arms around my waist and the genuine affection that the embrace represented.
The beach had been a good idea, after all. We turned to walk back in the other direction, still arm-in-arm-in arm, breaking occasionally to escape a large wave or to pet a curious dog. Heather started to spill the details of her romance on the way back. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the early details. She was serving wine at a military function. Their eyes met. They fell in love and he got shipped to Iraq. This was a very typical story in Hawaii at the time. In these modern times, he would have been shipped to Afghanistan. The very minor detail that stuck in my memory was that her fiancé was twenty years her junior.
“So why marriage?” I asked, for so many reasons. “Did you consider a longer courtship? He won’t be back here very long before his next deployment.”
“Well, it is love.” She replied.
I knew exactly what she meant. Candy’s face looked quizzical. She obviously didn’t understand.
“So I guess that your life won’t change much, since he’ll be away so often. No?” I asked.
“No. I quit my job. I know he’s younger and not a high-paid colonel or anything, but I decided that it was time for me to be a housewife for once in my life.”
“Oh wow!” I said in astonishment. Part of the astonishment was my inability to think of something more clever to say. “I have to say that there is something to the man/housewife model that works. Svetlana and I have been living like that for five years now. I have to say that I like it for the most part.”
“Well, we got this tiny little house up on a hill near the base. Robyn, it has the most incredible view in the world. You have to bring Svetlana up for a visit when Brad gets back.”
“Oh nooooooooooo! Unless Brad get’s back soon, Svetlana won’t be here. She’s going t back to France for her bi-annual visit.”
I had more to say on that topic, but decided to spare the women my inevitable rant. To keep Svetlana’s European work visa active and alive, she had to return to French soil ever 6 months, whether we could afford to send her or not. The combination of my desire for unfettered access to Europe and Svetlana’s penchant to see her European friends made the trips a necessity. Alas, they were an incredible strain on an already strained budget.
“I’ll come with you!” Candy sang out.
“Oh, of course!” Heather said. “You guys look so great together. How are you feeling, Robyn? Better?”
“Yes, better. Thank you.” I said as Candy squealed and turned a little turn in the sand in delight.
“So we’ll all be together again in about two weeks. Perfect. Now Candy has news for you as well. I’ll let her tell you. I’m going to walk up ahead.”
“This is goodbye then.” Heather said, and she kissed me goodbye once again on the lips.
One doesn’t have to get far up the beach before voices get lost in the ocean sounds. I glanced back a couple of times to see Candy and Heather talking, holding hands and then jumping up and down together. It appeared that Candy’s news had worked wonders on Heather, who glided away more gaily than she had arrived. The ocean had cured her, as it always did. It had given me more relief than I had ever expected and Candy just floated above it all in the way that only angels can do.
I had made it to the grass when the jumping stopped and I sat to rest. Candy stole her way up to me on tiptoes.
“Oh what a perfect day!” She exclaimed, believing that it was.
As we drove back, I turned the car radio to a loud setting to drown out the possibility for conversation. I’d had enough conversation and I’d managed to hide the better part of my misery from Candy. I was concerned that my act would not last much longer. Song after song on the radio taunted me, bringing back and refreshing the pain. The sad songs inevitably reminded me of my impossible situation. The happy songs mocked me. Every song worsened my condition until I was as miserable as I had been when I woke up in the morning. Candy was oblivious to this, as far as I knew.
When we arrived at her home, I kissed her jawbone goodbye and drove myself to Ala Moana Park. I sat there for what seemed forever. The sun hadn’t set, but was about to. I knew I should be hungry. I was too sick to eat. I had no idea where to go. I couldn’t go home and it hurt to even move. For reasons I can’t explain, I kept the radio blasting, fuelling my misery to ever more perilous depths.
I stared out at the ocean. I was looking but not seeing anything. My every thought was directed to the next song on the radio. I wondered how and where it was going to hurt. Unexpectedly, my cell-phone buzzed in my pocket. The tiny screen read ‘Svetlana’. Jesus, the last thing I needed was to be bitched at. I debated whether to answer. I answered.
“Sweetie, come home,” was all she said. Her voice had pleading tone to it.
The words stuck me like a lightning. For all the hype and the angst and the shouting and the general state of commotion, I’d forgotten that she did still love me.
I went home. When I arrived, an apologetic and almost repentant mother-in-law greeted me at the door and commented that I looked good when I got some sun. Svetlana was stirring over a pot of fresh cooked pasta and I could see that she’d already created a Russian salad, one of my favourite dishes. I walked into the kitchen and she took a break from her cooking to give me a hug. A smile brushed across her face.
“Sweetie, we need you at home. OK?” She whispered.
I was speechless.
“Mom promises to behave. Just stay home.”
“OK.” It was all there was to say.
My pain suddenly melted. The sadness dripped away. When I went to the bathroom to freshen up, I noticed a nice new shower curtain, complete with the new plastic smell that filled the room. My universe had been turned upside-down, or rather rightways-back-up by two words, ‘come home’. I ate and drank with a beaming wife and a considerably more polite and courteous mother-in law. We talked about Heather’s wedding and her much younger man and all joked together about the time that they would have.
When the hour of night came, to my surprise, Svetlana followed me to the bedroom. This was a rare occurrence, since she stayed up most evenings long past my bedtime. On this day she came. I find that men and women are very different when it comes to describing love, particularly acts of love. Women are terribly graphic and are demanding for details. Men are quite the opposite and are content to hear little more than, “The deed was done.” In the hopes of satisfying both genders, I’ll say as much as I can in as few words as possible.
That night, Svetlana and I made love for the first time in a very long time. It felt like a first time. We savoured the passion unreservedly deep into the night. When we had exhausted ourselves, we collapsed together into a pool of contentment and satiety and did not stir for many hours after.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Chapter 5 - Heather
“He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” John : Somewhere in the middle.
I woke that morning assured that my life would indeed be eternal. It wasn’t all bad. I don’t have a world-class theory to explain how dreams work, but I’ve found that the most intractable problems of my life have been solved in my sleep. For expedience, let’s accept Freud’s theory on dreams and in this way we can agree that dreams are a form of wish fulfillment. From this, we can deduce that my most coveted wishes are to be able to solve various problems. Since I actually do manage to solve so many problems in a dream state, my life always seems to be much less complicated after I’ve had a good night’s sleep.
Despite the previous night’s drama, my sleeping brain had been carefully mitigating the damage from my infuriating bout with rage. It then set to the task of putting my new literary forays into context. I did not remember the dreams, of course. I rarely do, but I could sense that my brain had been trying to fit Dante and Nietzsche into some sort of a universal context. I could also tell that I had been trying to fit them into the context of my present life.
Dante was a simple fit. The Inferno begins with a semi-involuntary trip though the gates of Hell. After many twists and turns, it ends in the center of hell where the Beast is discovered chewing eternally on the most infamous of the betrayers of man, Brutus, Cassius and Judas. Two Romans and a Jew; I’m sure that is significant, but I don’t know why it’s significant just yet. I did know that my life had been furnished with my own personal beast and it was doing a fine job of chewing on me, though I hadn’t betrayed anyone. It wanted me to betray to justify itself. It taunted and tempted me.
In The Inferno, Virgil and Dante eventually made their way to the center of Hell. They climbed over and down the beast to escape into the next book and the next part of their adventure, Purgatory. My dreams assured me that I would also climb past my beast. I only had to survive two more weeks without incident. Was it possible? If so, I could enter my own purgatory and with luck, repair the damage to my marriage through repentance and the prayer of others.
Nietzsche made less sense and at the same time he was the only thing that made sense while I was awake. The idea of taking a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra door-to-door started to appeal to me. I could talk to people about morality and explain to them that they no longer need to be wicked to one another to be happy. Nietzsche changed everything. He changed everything over a hundred years ago and only a few people today are even slightly aware of the change. I wanted to shout his message from the rooftops.
I suppose that the reason so few people read Nietzsche begins with difficulty in reading his work; even his name is a little hard to pronounce. I’m sure that if he had a name like Smith or Jones he would have doubled his audience. As for the writing itself, I wasn’t certain that I had entirely understood what I read. For me, it was new and exciting and different and as I mentioned before, it changed everything. I’d have to get back to this later, however, as my home situation flushed up to remind me of itself.
Svetlana and the beastly one were still sleeping. All was quiet. It was Friday morning and after last night’s events, I was not eager to have any communication with either woman. I showered and dressed as quickly as possible and slipped out of the apartment without waking anyone; perhaps on this day they pretended to sleep. I strolled downtown toward work, where I decided that I’d finish off my book and take the rest of the day off for “personal use”.
I went through my new beast-inspired morning routine. I greeted my co-workers at HANIC, responded to a few unanswered emails, posted sundry witticisms on facebook and checked up with my online friends. When my routine was complete, I fetched a fresh latte from Starbucks, re-read a few sticky chapters of Nietzsche’s book and called Candy.
“Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!” she answered gleefully.
I arranged to take Candy to lunch. A long lunch would provide some good preparation for an even longer evening away from home. I didn’t know how long I was going to avoid returning home, but I was not eager to go back soon. Candy and I met up at our usual Starbucks. She ordered her usual Candy Special frappuchino and I had my predictably boring latte and a sandwich.
It wasn’t long before Candy noticed my general level of malaise. I don’t have any particularly effective techniques for hiding my emotions and even if I had, Candy would have laid them bare. I explained how my mother-in-law’s extended stay had overwhelmed me and that I wasn’t sure what to do about it. I was not about to reveal that my marriage was anything less than perfect, not this early in Candy’s training, but I could hear her alarm bells go off when I told her about my mother-in-law dilemma. I did not want to end up as one of those all too common advice-giving hypocrites who fail to follow their own advice.
So far in my relationship with Candy, we had actually managed to keep our pledges to see one another every day. So far, I had instructed her as best I could in the etiquette of secular life. I had even done so without casting disparaging remarks about her relationship with Jesus and the faith, which I can assure you, required all the willpower I possess. I had instructed her in the way of conducting various kinds of marriages and relationships and the merits and pitfalls of each brand of relationship. Most of all, however, I had instructed her in the Way of the Perfect Marriage, using my perfect marriage as an example. I explained how Svetlana and I had accomplished this miracle of perfection through love, patience and complete soul-reaching trust.
Candy’s lunch alarm went off in the middle of one of my pontifications and she signalled that she had to return to work. It had not been the extended lunch hour that I had hoped for. It was clear that Candy, for lack of knowledge of many things in secular life had learned the skill of punctuality. All indications in her speech pointed to the fact that she showed up to work on time and never shirked her responsibilities there. I decided I would not teach her otherwise. I bid her goodbye and warned that I would be at Le Baron Noir after work. She said she’d try to join me and after a careful goodbye kiss, she skipped out the door and back to work. I thought about whether to return to my own job. “Fuck work,” I thought, decisively.
Taking along a fresh latte, I wandered into Chinatown. Honolulu’s Chinatown is decidedly small, having seen San Francisco’s and Vancouver’s massive Chinese enclaves. It was also decidedly Hawaiian in many ways. All cultures on the island get a twist of Hawaiian added into them after a time. A Chinese restaurant in Honolulu, for example, might serve dim sum, but have a little mixing bowl for “shoyu” (the Japanese word for Soya sauce) and hot mustard. I wondered if a council of Asian eateries had decided long ago that all Asian foods must be served with shoyu and hot mustard.
The rest of Chinatown was largely made up of food sellers with fresh produce. The ones that interested me in particular, however, were the curio shops filled with various Chinese artefacts like mahjong tiles and ornate little carvings. I’m a sucker for dragons in particular, having been born in the Year of the Dragon. I had created my own quirky superstition where I required myself to have a dragon in every room of my home, office, or any place that I might frequent.
I searched three or four curio shops and came up empty handed. The only dragon I found was one for which I had an exact replica. Luckily, I had successfully squandered the afternoon without doing any work and started toward Le Baron Noir for the first drink of the day. Arriving early had its advantages. Rather than sequestering myself to the back bar as I did when Svetlana was with me, I took the point; the front bar-like table next to the door that overlooked the sidewalk. From the point, I could see who was walking by and who was coming in to the bar.
I was committed to a good evening and decided to start it with good champagne. I ordered a bottle of Taittinger. Tatties is one of my favourites because of its total lack of aftertaste. You can take a sip and forget what you were drinking before you can even set down your glass. This can be remedied, of course, by taking another sip. Soon, your glass in empty and your palette is ready for anything. After a few glasses, your mind is ready for anything. I often refer to it as sorbet for the brain.
No sooner had tipped back my first glass and started to reflect upon the day, than Candy appeared in the doorway. “Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!” she cooed and gave me a kiss hello.
“Bienvenue ma princesse. Champagne?” I asked, gesturing toward the champagne bucket.
“Oh, perfect!” She nodded. “I can certainly use some today!”
I started to pour her a glass from the bounty of glassware that the waitress had left with the serving. “What was your afternoon like? Did you miss me?”
“Oh it was all downhill after lunch.” She lamented. “It seemed that changes needed to be made to every contract in the whole office today. This has never happened before. I didn’t think I would ever be able to leave. I can tell you that I’ll be very busy when I get back to work on Monday.”
“I can’t believe that you work in an office, Candy.” I said earnestly, “Seriously, how it is possible that you don’t make your living as a singer?”
I knew the answer to this question and Candy repeated it faithfully. I suppose I just wanted to hear her answer it again or maybe I just wanted to hear the lyrical caress of her voice. I would have been happy to hear her read the menu, just to listen the magic of her song. I thought of a new question; well an old question really, but one that I like to ask people of all ages and professions.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Candy puzzled. “I think…” She puzzled some more, almost making me laugh with her acutely puzzled expression, but I resisted temptation.
“Well you know that I want to sing… But I would also like to…“ She puzzled a little longer and I swear that if I didn’t know intuitively that this didn’t happen, I would be telling you in all honesty that a light appeared above her head.
“I really need to move away from Hawaii. For my career, I need to be in a bigger city; Los Angeles or New York. I did a little bit of singing in California before, but it didn’t work out and I have wanted to go back ever since.” She sighed with relief after finally inventing her answer.
“I agree with you, my dear. I think that you would be a hit anywhere in the world with that voice of yours. Anywhere, that is, with a large enough audience to hear it.”
“It’s going to be hard to do.” She explained. “I don’t see how I am going to get out of Hawaii and start my career back up in an expensive city. I’m not like Svetlana where I can do whatever I want.”
“Perhaps you could be my ‘femme le matin.’” I joked, unthinkingly.
“What is a ‘femme le matin’?” She asked.
Candy did speak a little French. She could not have helped but to have learned some French from the operas that she sang. She would not know this term, however, because I was its inventor. I pondered whether to give her a real answer and decided that it would be safe.
“Remember the story I told you about the kissing archaeologist?” I began.
Candy nodded.
“One of the character’s in that story was Roxanne, a friend of Svetlana’s who was visiting from France. Do you remember? She was the blonde one with the FM radio voice? Maybe I only mentioned her in passing.”
Candy looked up and to the left for a moment and nodded again, but looked unsure.
“It’s OK if you don’t remember.” I consoled. “When Roxanne was visiting, she adjusted to Hawaii time very quickly. She would wake at 6:00 am with the sun and by the time I was up and showered she would have coffee prepared me, just the way I like it. We would have some light conversation, half in broken English and half in mutilated French and then I would head to work. It was a very pleasant way to start my work days and I honestly wished that her visit could have lasted for months.”
“Wasn’t Svetlana jealous?” Candy asked, knowing the probable answer.
“No, of course she wasn’t; she loved having Roxanne close at hand. They were best friends in France. One day, I remarked that it was nice to have a ‘morning wife’ to see me off to work. Svetlana marvelled at the term and ever since, she and I have shared this inside joke about how I should get myself a ‘femme le matin’. Some days, I honestly think that she might really let me have one, since she has rarely awoken before noon; at least since I’ve known her. I think that she feels a little guilty about that at times.”
Candy and I both laughed. I could see her processing what I had said quite visibly after her initial round of laughter had subsided. I sensed that she was visualizing what might have been like, had she had been in Svetlana’s place. She would not have had to take a job or worry about rent or food or any expense whatsoever. She could have spent every moment of her waking life advancing her musical career. Why, she might have even struck fame by now.
“Jamie!!!” I shouted.
Jamie presented herself in Le Baron Noir’s doorway and was carefully reading the menu specials sign. She looked over, happy to see me, but seemed to turn a little timid when her gaze fell Candy’s way. I beckoned her to the table and she came without hesitation.
“Jamie, Candy; Candy, Jamie! Oh I’m so glad to get you both together at last! Jamie? Champagne?”
Jamie gave a quick nod and I poured her a glass. I topped up Candy’s glass and my own.
“Santé!” I toasted loudly.
“À la votre.” Candy added cleverly with a raised right eyebrow as we all clinked glasses.
To this day, I have no idea how Candy knew to add that extra line to the toast. The waitress came round and I asked for another bottle of Taittinger. Jamie ordered one of the specials and I ordered twin sets of pommes frites, a favourite of passers-by. Jamie and Candy exchanged pleasantries while I retired to the facilities to talk to a man about a dog. I returned to find the table set perfectly, with arranged napkins and the knives and forks arranged in perfect symmetry. Jamie was putting the last knife in place as I sat.
“So how is your job going, James?” I asked.
“Oh, not so good.” She said, shaking her head a little. “The company I work for is so fucking disorganized that I can’t believe that they are still in business.”
“Oh no! That must be driving you mental! How are you dealing with it?”
“Well I’ve been putting out resumes on monster.com. I know that I can’t stay there much longer. It might not even matter, since I think they will lose all of their contracts.” She added.
I couldn’t imagine any company being organized enough for Jamie. Organizations, by definition, should be organized and anyone in any company that has Jamie on staff should promote her to the position of Chief Organization Officer immediately. She would organize the shit out of things.
I did check to see what was going on with Jamie’s employers. They were defence contractors and I knew a lot of people in the defence department, having done defence contracting in the pre-9/11 days; for some reason, Canadians could no longer be trusted after those attacks. Regardless, I learned that her company was indeed disorganized (possibly due to a shortage of Canadians) and truly was about to lose some very large military contracts. Armed with this information, I started priming the pump at HANIC for them to hire some new computer talent. They were not in the market for anyone with Jamie’s skills at the time, but I suspected that they might have need of someone like her one day soon.
Champagne and conversation flowed and as the night went on more friends arrived. Amazon, my tall redhead friend swept in and after a set of introductions, breezed into the growing crowd. Australian Jamie arrived too and sat with us for a while. Once Jamie had carefully eaten her entrée, I suggested that we break up our table and mingle our way the crowd around the bar. I had friends all over the Baron and was starting to feel confined, still sitting at the point.
Despite not being a First Friday, many of Honolulu’s who’s who were in attendance. I greeted each in turn, but the most interesting conversation of the evening was the one with Heather. Heather was a tall, attractive woman approaching 40. She had a rounded face, dimpled smile and curly sandy-blonde hair that fell past her shoulders. She was also a fellow Canadian and worked for one of the liquor distribution companies in town. I would see here and there and while we had a great rapport, I was thinking that I had not seen quite enough of her, especially considering our mutual heritage.
“What are you doing now?” I asked. “I haven’t seen you in an age!”
Heather showed me her hand, upon which was set a rather large diamond ring. “I’m getting married! Can you believe it? Next month!”
Despite the marriage news, everything about Heather was flirtatious. She walked, talked, nodded and blinked in a flirtatious manner. She was gifted. I expect that her profession gave her the means to practice her craft to perfection. When she kissed hello or goodbye, she would give you that little extra squeeze on the arm and the kiss would linger just that fraction of a second longer than it needed. It made you feel as though she would have rather given you a real kiss. When she looked at you, she looked at all of you. In conversation, if she would use physical contact to emphasize her every point, a touch here, a squeeze there. I didn’t smoke, but after a conversation with her, I felt like I needed to.
We chatted about her upcoming marriage plans. Her husband was a US Marine and would be spending months on end in Iraq or Afghanistan. She had left her job to become a kept woman and expressed how ‘bored’ she would be while he was away. Candy, both Jamie’s and a few of my other friends bobbed in and out of the conversation, but in an uncharacteristic fashion, Candy lingered trough to the end.
“We MUST spend more time together.” She implored, twirling a ringlet of hair in her finger.
“I agree. I don’t know how it is that we haven’t.” I replied. “I think that whenever I run into you, it is in a professional setting and I never get to really talk to you at length. Now I’m sorry that it has taken so long to spend any real time together.”
“How could you ignore such a pretty girl?” Candy interrupted.
“Well here is what you must do.” Heather said, giving my hand a squeeze. “My wedding is coming up in a few weeks and I’ll get you the invitations. Also, you guys should come and see my new place up on the North Shore. It’s very small, but the view is incredible!”
“We will.” I assured her, glancing quickly toward Candy. “But there is something I should tell you. I’m having just an awful time with my mother-in-law. She’s been visiting us for four weeks now and it is not good. I’m at the end of my sanity. I’m literally afraid to go home.”
“Come to Bellow’s Beach tomorrow morning. A walk on the beach will fix everything. You’ll see.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” I said.
Candy lit up with an inquisitive look, clearly wondering if the invitation extended to her as well.
Heather looked at me, eyes patient and glowing. “Look, Robyn. You have this amazing gift for bringing beautiful women together. You will be fine. You will be better than fine. Come to the beach with me tomorrow.”
A successful flirtation is made up of three parts. The first part is the compliment. This part gives acknowledgement to the other person that sexual desire exists. The compliment can be straightforward and sincere… even truthful, or as subtle as a casual glance across the room. The compliment is only successful if the flirtee truly understands and accepts the compliment. The second part of the flirtation is the excuse. When the flirtee accepts the compliment, they must be supplied with a reason why the flirtation is limited to a flirtation. A common practice for experienced flirts is to use the phrase, “If only…” Examples might include, “If only I wasn’t married,” or “If only you had more teeth.” The last and most important part of the flirtation is in its failure to lead to sexual congress. If a flirtation leads to anything sexual, then it was never a flirtation; it was a seduction.
Heather was a master flirt. She was complimentary and charming and invited me into all corners of her life while simultaneously showing off her brand new engagement ring. There were no contrivances. She flirted as naturally as she spoke. I was alarmed at having been so wonderfully, so terribly out-flirted this evening.
With Heather’s strange compliment still on my mind, I bid my ‘beautiful’ friends a good evening, and complimented them with a series of goodbye kisses. I saved my last goodbye kiss for Candy and asked if she’d join me at the beach the next morning. She was delighted with the offer and accepted.
When I arrived home, a constant flow of Macedonian and cigarette smoke still poured from the lanai. I skipped through it and into the bedroom as quickly as I could. I was undressed, in bed and asleep before either of them had a chance to speak to me. The truce had lasted another day.
As I slept, I dreamt of something foreboding. I dreamt that something was coming for me; something huge. I knew that this was not going to be a dream that would go unresolved.
I woke that morning assured that my life would indeed be eternal. It wasn’t all bad. I don’t have a world-class theory to explain how dreams work, but I’ve found that the most intractable problems of my life have been solved in my sleep. For expedience, let’s accept Freud’s theory on dreams and in this way we can agree that dreams are a form of wish fulfillment. From this, we can deduce that my most coveted wishes are to be able to solve various problems. Since I actually do manage to solve so many problems in a dream state, my life always seems to be much less complicated after I’ve had a good night’s sleep.
Despite the previous night’s drama, my sleeping brain had been carefully mitigating the damage from my infuriating bout with rage. It then set to the task of putting my new literary forays into context. I did not remember the dreams, of course. I rarely do, but I could sense that my brain had been trying to fit Dante and Nietzsche into some sort of a universal context. I could also tell that I had been trying to fit them into the context of my present life.
Dante was a simple fit. The Inferno begins with a semi-involuntary trip though the gates of Hell. After many twists and turns, it ends in the center of hell where the Beast is discovered chewing eternally on the most infamous of the betrayers of man, Brutus, Cassius and Judas. Two Romans and a Jew; I’m sure that is significant, but I don’t know why it’s significant just yet. I did know that my life had been furnished with my own personal beast and it was doing a fine job of chewing on me, though I hadn’t betrayed anyone. It wanted me to betray to justify itself. It taunted and tempted me.
In The Inferno, Virgil and Dante eventually made their way to the center of Hell. They climbed over and down the beast to escape into the next book and the next part of their adventure, Purgatory. My dreams assured me that I would also climb past my beast. I only had to survive two more weeks without incident. Was it possible? If so, I could enter my own purgatory and with luck, repair the damage to my marriage through repentance and the prayer of others.
Nietzsche made less sense and at the same time he was the only thing that made sense while I was awake. The idea of taking a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra door-to-door started to appeal to me. I could talk to people about morality and explain to them that they no longer need to be wicked to one another to be happy. Nietzsche changed everything. He changed everything over a hundred years ago and only a few people today are even slightly aware of the change. I wanted to shout his message from the rooftops.
I suppose that the reason so few people read Nietzsche begins with difficulty in reading his work; even his name is a little hard to pronounce. I’m sure that if he had a name like Smith or Jones he would have doubled his audience. As for the writing itself, I wasn’t certain that I had entirely understood what I read. For me, it was new and exciting and different and as I mentioned before, it changed everything. I’d have to get back to this later, however, as my home situation flushed up to remind me of itself.
Svetlana and the beastly one were still sleeping. All was quiet. It was Friday morning and after last night’s events, I was not eager to have any communication with either woman. I showered and dressed as quickly as possible and slipped out of the apartment without waking anyone; perhaps on this day they pretended to sleep. I strolled downtown toward work, where I decided that I’d finish off my book and take the rest of the day off for “personal use”.
I went through my new beast-inspired morning routine. I greeted my co-workers at HANIC, responded to a few unanswered emails, posted sundry witticisms on facebook and checked up with my online friends. When my routine was complete, I fetched a fresh latte from Starbucks, re-read a few sticky chapters of Nietzsche’s book and called Candy.
“Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!” she answered gleefully.
I arranged to take Candy to lunch. A long lunch would provide some good preparation for an even longer evening away from home. I didn’t know how long I was going to avoid returning home, but I was not eager to go back soon. Candy and I met up at our usual Starbucks. She ordered her usual Candy Special frappuchino and I had my predictably boring latte and a sandwich.
It wasn’t long before Candy noticed my general level of malaise. I don’t have any particularly effective techniques for hiding my emotions and even if I had, Candy would have laid them bare. I explained how my mother-in-law’s extended stay had overwhelmed me and that I wasn’t sure what to do about it. I was not about to reveal that my marriage was anything less than perfect, not this early in Candy’s training, but I could hear her alarm bells go off when I told her about my mother-in-law dilemma. I did not want to end up as one of those all too common advice-giving hypocrites who fail to follow their own advice.
So far in my relationship with Candy, we had actually managed to keep our pledges to see one another every day. So far, I had instructed her as best I could in the etiquette of secular life. I had even done so without casting disparaging remarks about her relationship with Jesus and the faith, which I can assure you, required all the willpower I possess. I had instructed her in the way of conducting various kinds of marriages and relationships and the merits and pitfalls of each brand of relationship. Most of all, however, I had instructed her in the Way of the Perfect Marriage, using my perfect marriage as an example. I explained how Svetlana and I had accomplished this miracle of perfection through love, patience and complete soul-reaching trust.
Candy’s lunch alarm went off in the middle of one of my pontifications and she signalled that she had to return to work. It had not been the extended lunch hour that I had hoped for. It was clear that Candy, for lack of knowledge of many things in secular life had learned the skill of punctuality. All indications in her speech pointed to the fact that she showed up to work on time and never shirked her responsibilities there. I decided I would not teach her otherwise. I bid her goodbye and warned that I would be at Le Baron Noir after work. She said she’d try to join me and after a careful goodbye kiss, she skipped out the door and back to work. I thought about whether to return to my own job. “Fuck work,” I thought, decisively.
Taking along a fresh latte, I wandered into Chinatown. Honolulu’s Chinatown is decidedly small, having seen San Francisco’s and Vancouver’s massive Chinese enclaves. It was also decidedly Hawaiian in many ways. All cultures on the island get a twist of Hawaiian added into them after a time. A Chinese restaurant in Honolulu, for example, might serve dim sum, but have a little mixing bowl for “shoyu” (the Japanese word for Soya sauce) and hot mustard. I wondered if a council of Asian eateries had decided long ago that all Asian foods must be served with shoyu and hot mustard.
The rest of Chinatown was largely made up of food sellers with fresh produce. The ones that interested me in particular, however, were the curio shops filled with various Chinese artefacts like mahjong tiles and ornate little carvings. I’m a sucker for dragons in particular, having been born in the Year of the Dragon. I had created my own quirky superstition where I required myself to have a dragon in every room of my home, office, or any place that I might frequent.
I searched three or four curio shops and came up empty handed. The only dragon I found was one for which I had an exact replica. Luckily, I had successfully squandered the afternoon without doing any work and started toward Le Baron Noir for the first drink of the day. Arriving early had its advantages. Rather than sequestering myself to the back bar as I did when Svetlana was with me, I took the point; the front bar-like table next to the door that overlooked the sidewalk. From the point, I could see who was walking by and who was coming in to the bar.
I was committed to a good evening and decided to start it with good champagne. I ordered a bottle of Taittinger. Tatties is one of my favourites because of its total lack of aftertaste. You can take a sip and forget what you were drinking before you can even set down your glass. This can be remedied, of course, by taking another sip. Soon, your glass in empty and your palette is ready for anything. After a few glasses, your mind is ready for anything. I often refer to it as sorbet for the brain.
No sooner had tipped back my first glass and started to reflect upon the day, than Candy appeared in the doorway. “Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!” she cooed and gave me a kiss hello.
“Bienvenue ma princesse. Champagne?” I asked, gesturing toward the champagne bucket.
“Oh, perfect!” She nodded. “I can certainly use some today!”
I started to pour her a glass from the bounty of glassware that the waitress had left with the serving. “What was your afternoon like? Did you miss me?”
“Oh it was all downhill after lunch.” She lamented. “It seemed that changes needed to be made to every contract in the whole office today. This has never happened before. I didn’t think I would ever be able to leave. I can tell you that I’ll be very busy when I get back to work on Monday.”
“I can’t believe that you work in an office, Candy.” I said earnestly, “Seriously, how it is possible that you don’t make your living as a singer?”
I knew the answer to this question and Candy repeated it faithfully. I suppose I just wanted to hear her answer it again or maybe I just wanted to hear the lyrical caress of her voice. I would have been happy to hear her read the menu, just to listen the magic of her song. I thought of a new question; well an old question really, but one that I like to ask people of all ages and professions.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Candy puzzled. “I think…” She puzzled some more, almost making me laugh with her acutely puzzled expression, but I resisted temptation.
“Well you know that I want to sing… But I would also like to…“ She puzzled a little longer and I swear that if I didn’t know intuitively that this didn’t happen, I would be telling you in all honesty that a light appeared above her head.
“I really need to move away from Hawaii. For my career, I need to be in a bigger city; Los Angeles or New York. I did a little bit of singing in California before, but it didn’t work out and I have wanted to go back ever since.” She sighed with relief after finally inventing her answer.
“I agree with you, my dear. I think that you would be a hit anywhere in the world with that voice of yours. Anywhere, that is, with a large enough audience to hear it.”
“It’s going to be hard to do.” She explained. “I don’t see how I am going to get out of Hawaii and start my career back up in an expensive city. I’m not like Svetlana where I can do whatever I want.”
“Perhaps you could be my ‘femme le matin.’” I joked, unthinkingly.
“What is a ‘femme le matin’?” She asked.
Candy did speak a little French. She could not have helped but to have learned some French from the operas that she sang. She would not know this term, however, because I was its inventor. I pondered whether to give her a real answer and decided that it would be safe.
“Remember the story I told you about the kissing archaeologist?” I began.
Candy nodded.
“One of the character’s in that story was Roxanne, a friend of Svetlana’s who was visiting from France. Do you remember? She was the blonde one with the FM radio voice? Maybe I only mentioned her in passing.”
Candy looked up and to the left for a moment and nodded again, but looked unsure.
“It’s OK if you don’t remember.” I consoled. “When Roxanne was visiting, she adjusted to Hawaii time very quickly. She would wake at 6:00 am with the sun and by the time I was up and showered she would have coffee prepared me, just the way I like it. We would have some light conversation, half in broken English and half in mutilated French and then I would head to work. It was a very pleasant way to start my work days and I honestly wished that her visit could have lasted for months.”
“Wasn’t Svetlana jealous?” Candy asked, knowing the probable answer.
“No, of course she wasn’t; she loved having Roxanne close at hand. They were best friends in France. One day, I remarked that it was nice to have a ‘morning wife’ to see me off to work. Svetlana marvelled at the term and ever since, she and I have shared this inside joke about how I should get myself a ‘femme le matin’. Some days, I honestly think that she might really let me have one, since she has rarely awoken before noon; at least since I’ve known her. I think that she feels a little guilty about that at times.”
Candy and I both laughed. I could see her processing what I had said quite visibly after her initial round of laughter had subsided. I sensed that she was visualizing what might have been like, had she had been in Svetlana’s place. She would not have had to take a job or worry about rent or food or any expense whatsoever. She could have spent every moment of her waking life advancing her musical career. Why, she might have even struck fame by now.
“Jamie!!!” I shouted.
Jamie presented herself in Le Baron Noir’s doorway and was carefully reading the menu specials sign. She looked over, happy to see me, but seemed to turn a little timid when her gaze fell Candy’s way. I beckoned her to the table and she came without hesitation.
“Jamie, Candy; Candy, Jamie! Oh I’m so glad to get you both together at last! Jamie? Champagne?”
Jamie gave a quick nod and I poured her a glass. I topped up Candy’s glass and my own.
“Santé!” I toasted loudly.
“À la votre.” Candy added cleverly with a raised right eyebrow as we all clinked glasses.
To this day, I have no idea how Candy knew to add that extra line to the toast. The waitress came round and I asked for another bottle of Taittinger. Jamie ordered one of the specials and I ordered twin sets of pommes frites, a favourite of passers-by. Jamie and Candy exchanged pleasantries while I retired to the facilities to talk to a man about a dog. I returned to find the table set perfectly, with arranged napkins and the knives and forks arranged in perfect symmetry. Jamie was putting the last knife in place as I sat.
“So how is your job going, James?” I asked.
“Oh, not so good.” She said, shaking her head a little. “The company I work for is so fucking disorganized that I can’t believe that they are still in business.”
“Oh no! That must be driving you mental! How are you dealing with it?”
“Well I’ve been putting out resumes on monster.com. I know that I can’t stay there much longer. It might not even matter, since I think they will lose all of their contracts.” She added.
I couldn’t imagine any company being organized enough for Jamie. Organizations, by definition, should be organized and anyone in any company that has Jamie on staff should promote her to the position of Chief Organization Officer immediately. She would organize the shit out of things.
I did check to see what was going on with Jamie’s employers. They were defence contractors and I knew a lot of people in the defence department, having done defence contracting in the pre-9/11 days; for some reason, Canadians could no longer be trusted after those attacks. Regardless, I learned that her company was indeed disorganized (possibly due to a shortage of Canadians) and truly was about to lose some very large military contracts. Armed with this information, I started priming the pump at HANIC for them to hire some new computer talent. They were not in the market for anyone with Jamie’s skills at the time, but I suspected that they might have need of someone like her one day soon.
Champagne and conversation flowed and as the night went on more friends arrived. Amazon, my tall redhead friend swept in and after a set of introductions, breezed into the growing crowd. Australian Jamie arrived too and sat with us for a while. Once Jamie had carefully eaten her entrée, I suggested that we break up our table and mingle our way the crowd around the bar. I had friends all over the Baron and was starting to feel confined, still sitting at the point.
Despite not being a First Friday, many of Honolulu’s who’s who were in attendance. I greeted each in turn, but the most interesting conversation of the evening was the one with Heather. Heather was a tall, attractive woman approaching 40. She had a rounded face, dimpled smile and curly sandy-blonde hair that fell past her shoulders. She was also a fellow Canadian and worked for one of the liquor distribution companies in town. I would see here and there and while we had a great rapport, I was thinking that I had not seen quite enough of her, especially considering our mutual heritage.
“What are you doing now?” I asked. “I haven’t seen you in an age!”
Heather showed me her hand, upon which was set a rather large diamond ring. “I’m getting married! Can you believe it? Next month!”
Despite the marriage news, everything about Heather was flirtatious. She walked, talked, nodded and blinked in a flirtatious manner. She was gifted. I expect that her profession gave her the means to practice her craft to perfection. When she kissed hello or goodbye, she would give you that little extra squeeze on the arm and the kiss would linger just that fraction of a second longer than it needed. It made you feel as though she would have rather given you a real kiss. When she looked at you, she looked at all of you. In conversation, if she would use physical contact to emphasize her every point, a touch here, a squeeze there. I didn’t smoke, but after a conversation with her, I felt like I needed to.
We chatted about her upcoming marriage plans. Her husband was a US Marine and would be spending months on end in Iraq or Afghanistan. She had left her job to become a kept woman and expressed how ‘bored’ she would be while he was away. Candy, both Jamie’s and a few of my other friends bobbed in and out of the conversation, but in an uncharacteristic fashion, Candy lingered trough to the end.
“We MUST spend more time together.” She implored, twirling a ringlet of hair in her finger.
“I agree. I don’t know how it is that we haven’t.” I replied. “I think that whenever I run into you, it is in a professional setting and I never get to really talk to you at length. Now I’m sorry that it has taken so long to spend any real time together.”
“How could you ignore such a pretty girl?” Candy interrupted.
“Well here is what you must do.” Heather said, giving my hand a squeeze. “My wedding is coming up in a few weeks and I’ll get you the invitations. Also, you guys should come and see my new place up on the North Shore. It’s very small, but the view is incredible!”
“We will.” I assured her, glancing quickly toward Candy. “But there is something I should tell you. I’m having just an awful time with my mother-in-law. She’s been visiting us for four weeks now and it is not good. I’m at the end of my sanity. I’m literally afraid to go home.”
“Come to Bellow’s Beach tomorrow morning. A walk on the beach will fix everything. You’ll see.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” I said.
Candy lit up with an inquisitive look, clearly wondering if the invitation extended to her as well.
Heather looked at me, eyes patient and glowing. “Look, Robyn. You have this amazing gift for bringing beautiful women together. You will be fine. You will be better than fine. Come to the beach with me tomorrow.”
A successful flirtation is made up of three parts. The first part is the compliment. This part gives acknowledgement to the other person that sexual desire exists. The compliment can be straightforward and sincere… even truthful, or as subtle as a casual glance across the room. The compliment is only successful if the flirtee truly understands and accepts the compliment. The second part of the flirtation is the excuse. When the flirtee accepts the compliment, they must be supplied with a reason why the flirtation is limited to a flirtation. A common practice for experienced flirts is to use the phrase, “If only…” Examples might include, “If only I wasn’t married,” or “If only you had more teeth.” The last and most important part of the flirtation is in its failure to lead to sexual congress. If a flirtation leads to anything sexual, then it was never a flirtation; it was a seduction.
Heather was a master flirt. She was complimentary and charming and invited me into all corners of her life while simultaneously showing off her brand new engagement ring. There were no contrivances. She flirted as naturally as she spoke. I was alarmed at having been so wonderfully, so terribly out-flirted this evening.
With Heather’s strange compliment still on my mind, I bid my ‘beautiful’ friends a good evening, and complimented them with a series of goodbye kisses. I saved my last goodbye kiss for Candy and asked if she’d join me at the beach the next morning. She was delighted with the offer and accepted.
When I arrived home, a constant flow of Macedonian and cigarette smoke still poured from the lanai. I skipped through it and into the bedroom as quickly as I could. I was undressed, in bed and asleep before either of them had a chance to speak to me. The truce had lasted another day.
As I slept, I dreamt of something foreboding. I dreamt that something was coming for me; something huge. I knew that this was not going to be a dream that would go unresolved.
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