A Summer in Time

He bought a record from some musicians while he and she were waiting for a plane.

When he returns to their apartment alone, he sits down on a makeshift floor-couch she fashioned from fabric and foam and gazes at a window on the opposite side of the room framing a row of black iron steps. He settles back numb, overwhelmed by the emptiness and silence. After a few moments he feels a corner of the record pressing into the side of one of his thighs. He stands, peels the cellophane wrap from the record's jacket, and walks the shiny vinyl disc over to a turntable.

The turntable no longer works automatically, so his lifts the needle and places it down on the spinning disc.

Incan pan flute music.

He stares down at it, recalling the face of one of the musicians who had a clay-colored pudgy nose, piercing black eyes, shiny gold front tooth, and who was wearing a splendidly colorful hat with ear flaps.

The music starts out light and cheerful, but as the composition progresses it reflects the mixed feelings about what it must be like to come from another place and time to play music for money in an airport terminal in a modern American city.

The place inside him where mixed feelings can churn is already full. He gingerly lifts the needle from the record, turns the turntable off, and then sits back down and listens again to the silence. He breathes in, closes his eyes, and can feel the life he and she made here settle. Nearly four years of internal construction.

He feels it weigh down on him like a lead-filled x-ray jacket. When he manages to breathe out again he opens his eyes and his vision is acute: the room and everything in it is throbbing in synch with the inflated beat of his heart. Familiar objects that were muted and blurred stand out loud and distinct: a brownish cluster of dry leaves on the end of a stem of fern crackle, cracks in the walls and ceiling creeping like spider legs whistle.

They demand his attention; he does nothing, just stares.

Then his hands move out in front of him as his eyes travel out through the window and his mind follows: he thinks he can hear and feel her ordering a glass of wine in the airplane right now. “ Un verre de vin, s'il vous plaît.” Then. “Aucun, no de non, ne font cette eau.”

Oddly, perhaps, it's not his ears or eyes that hear and see this, but his arms and his nostrils.

He lets his eyes close softly again.

He's overwhelmed by the lingering fragrance of her scent -- as exotic and familiar to this room as she had been. A soft, clean and vibrant scent, like lemony linen. The fragrance wafts over him, bringing back enticing vibrations of coolness and earthiness, fun, excitement; and now, worry, sorrow.

He opens his eyes and looks into the darkening sheaths of clouds visible through the steps of the fire escape. His first night without her, drawing near.

‘How much I miss you already.'

He smiles wanly, wondering, ‘Then why are you gone?'

There's no response to that question, only a dizzying paroxysm of sensation, making him unable to move, physically or mentally.

He stares at his desk with the big metallic IBM typewriter atop it and the piles of paper next to it. The pile of paper is the story he started writing here, completed in Paris on yellow legal pads, and is now revising and typing. He asked for a year alone to turn it into a publishable novel.

His upper body moves forward toward the work, as his gaze goes in the direction of the window. Then he sits still, stuck like the biblical ass that starves between two equidistant piles of hay.

His feeling of paralysis is augmented by a kaleidoscopic series of images replaying every questionable decision he'd ever made in his life. From the time as a child he won a contest and picked a prize that his siblings disliked and ridiculed, to taking the wrong exit tonight on the way home from the airport. It's gut wrenching – how the potential for each decision to be wrong, no matter how trite or borrowed from long ago, brings up freshly piquant feelings of loss, fear, failure.

He forces his eyes open wide, breathes out and wills his thoughts, paradoxically, to just let it all be, even the fears. Then he closes his eyes, breathes in softly and conjures an affirmation to fortify his resolve.

He sighs: ‘Just let it be. Accept life as it is, and yourself as you are. She's gone. That's it, for now.'

The room sways more gently. Objects do not return to a mute blur, though they stop glaring at him noisily. His thoughts and heartbeat pulse more regularly. The chatter in his mind no longer mimics the cadence of the click click click sound of her heels across the wood floors when they argued, and his heart stop ballooning to the recollections of the quiet explosions of optimism that took place here when they shared hopes, dreams, made love...

From within this quiet, his mind moves forward closer to the present. He recalls how at the airport when they were waiting in line for the plane that would take her away, he left to go off by himself to buy a record from the Peruvian musicians. She smiled at him on his way back for doing something so mundane and characteristic at a time like that.

Then, how, as they continued waiting together in the plodding line, without saying a word to one another they agreed to part before the pace of waiting and empty time somehow set them off on one another. Something that was taking place frequently, unpredictably, and without any apparent reason or resolution. They never knew what would start them off at one another, or how to stop it.

He clutched her far shoulder with his hand to seal the nonverbal agreement and then hooked his fingers under the sleeve of her blouse so that she would turn to face him. Their faces drifted toward one another and then away. When they finally touched it was clumsily kinetic, like two skewed magnets no longer able to keep track of attraction and repulsion. The warmth of her breath against the side of his face made him move to kiss her, softly, lips to lips. They paused like that momentarily, breathing into one another's mouths like a couple of small frightened animals. Then he removed his lips from hers and pressed his face against the side of hers, hugging his face to hers. She clucked in her throat from the pressure and they laughed and released.

He backed away holding onto one of her hands, gazing at the long muscle rising up from her other hand as she lifted the bag next to her in order to move forward and away a few feet more.

She turned back to face him only one more time. Her voice cracked slightly, her eyes watered, but she looked at him resolute. “Je t'aime. Bye-bye.”

"Je t'aime!” he rejoined. Than added desperately, “No matter what."

*

The first time he traveled to Europe he was met by her in Luxembourg . She traveled by train from Paris the same day to meet him. It was circuitous, but the least expensive way for him to travel. He volunteered to take the train to Paris by himself, but she responded agreeably that she liked trains and meeting people in stations.

Their reunion at the train station felt at first the same way it had last summer when they would be apart while she visited relatives in other parts of the States. One of her relatives was a friend of his, which is how they became acquainted.

So now, after being separated for the length of time it takes a human to create a new life – nine months -- just seeing one another again was enough to make them feel a shared sense of accomplishment and relief. They had started something they each felt was special, and managed to maintain it in spite of all the sundry alternatives and distractions time relentlessly presents. They held on via cables crisscrossing the world's largest ocean, and light pieces of airborne paper flying back and forth over it.

They hug lightly and moan softly. When they disembrace they share a charmed smile.

Continue reading

Download a copy of "A Summer in Time"

$15.00