MONDAY: Miriam

BY NICK DI CARLO

Copyright is held by the author.

IT’S AN Ella Fitzgerald Sunday morning on the fringe of the California desert. I sit on my front porch, sipping coffee and staring at the road that goes past my house, heading nowhere. Dust stings my eyes and desolation seeps into my soul as I look at life in the rear-view, into the mirror that warns, “Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear.”

Ella sings Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me” on vinyl, as my memories drift 3,000 miles and a lifetime eastward to my final Adirondack summer.

I’d been spending that summer with Hailey at her lake house. Each day the sun shone bright and hot. After sunset, the star-pocked sky made nights cool enough for a fire.

Hailey had gone to Albany for a few days, and I enjoyed the solitude. When she returned, she brought her friend Debbie with her. Debbie’s dark hair and eyes presented a tempting contrast to Hailey’s pale skin and Alice blue eyes. She projected calm confidence while Hailey, highly strung, sometimes made me jittery. Debbie had studied music. Years earlier I’d played guitar in jazz combos, and I brought several cassettes of jazz and pop standards, so we had tons to talk about. Hearing a new voice with new things to say and saying them in new ways awakened bit of my brain that had grown dormant. I felt energized mentally. And emotionally.

After an especially hot Saturday when we’d all had too much sun and I’d served up too many Hemingway daiquiris, Debbie and I sat on the porch watching stars displace the setting sun while Hailey fixed supper. I’d mentioned a stiff neck, and Debbie offered a massage — as Hailey stepped through the door.

Later, I volunteered to clean up the dishes and kitchen. Hailey and Debbie settled in the living room. I could hear Hailey getting a fire going.

The kitchen squared away, I sat near the living room window and read Faulkner’s A Soldier’s Pay, preparing to teach it in the fall. No one spoke.

Hailey rose, saying, “I’m going to bed. Are you coming?”

“Be right up,” I answered.

Hailey shot me the look.

“Just a couple minutes,” I said.

With Hailey gone, Debbie spoke first. “I didn’t mean for anything….”

“Deb, nobody ever means it.”

“Maybe, but . . .”

I shrugged and turned back to my book. We sat in silence.

When I stood, Debbie said, “I’m not sleepy and I’d like to stay up. Would you stoke the fire for me?”

Placing another log on the hearth, I got a blaze going.

“Please keep me company awhile.”

Not sleepy myself, I said yes.

In a heartbeat, Debbie and I had been sitting too close for too long.

Upon waking, I knew that Debbie’s visit had come to its end. Hailey would drive her back to Albany, and I’d have the day to reflect upon how, as a child, I’d promised myself never to act the way my parents acted, especially my father — engaging in drinking and infidelity, hurting others as well as myself, creating circumstances in which I could never have nice things, the quiet, settled, respectable things I believed normal people had — people who didn’t go around breaking things and other people.

To avoid an uncomfortable breakfast, I woke up early, packed some sandwiches, fruit and a jug of Margaritas to get through the day. I set off to lose myself in the wilderness.

I strolled along the shore, gazing into the rising sun. An eagle launched from the pines across the water, circled above the trees, then patrolled the lake searching for a trout or pike breakfast. I turned inland and wove my way deep into the forest where two curious fawns appeared. We three critters stood still and silent. Cautious, curious, transfixed. I extended my hand, wishing one fawn or both be bold enough to sniff, nuzzle the two-legged alien before them when a doe emerged from the dense brush and calmly led her babies away.

I hadn’t thought of Hailey or Debbie, about the bastard I’d been, or how I’d broken my childhood promise to myself.

Sometime past noon, on the beach, a cooler of iced Margaritas by my side, and a well-thumbed copy of Hamlet in one hand, a frosted plastic cup in the other, a sliver of shadow blocked the sun. Looking up, I saw a most beautiful young woman staring down at me.

“Sorry I startled you,” she said. “I noticed you here alone and thought….”

Obviously younger than my almost forty years, she carried herself with confidence and casual grace — and all the sophistication I lacked.

“I’m Miriam,” she said.

When she asked to set her beach chair next to mine — it would’ve been rude to say no.

She initiated small talk; she was good at it. I offered her a Margherita; she accepted. Then she opened her copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, explaining she was finishing her Ph. D. in English Lit. Harvard, no less.

I told her I taught literary modernism — Hemingway, Joyce, Woolf.

“A Hemingway man reading Hamlet?”

“My favourite Shakespeare play; his only love story that I can stomach.”

“O tell me do.”

“All these screwed-up characters,” I said, “die for love. Claudius’s love of power gets things rolling. Hamlet loves his father’s ghost but can’t decide how to express it; Ophelia loves Hamlet, so she’s toast; Polonius loves his own voice; Laertes lusts for vengeance. Hamlet’s mother? Too Oedipal even for my Freudian leanings. Infidelity, incest, murder, revenge — more murder. Perfect love story. Perfect ending. Like Romeo and Juliet. Everybody dies in the end.”

“You’re kind of a nut.”

“Uniquely maladjusted.”

“Uniquely?” She pointed to my boombox. “What are you listening to?”

“Today my mood is Anita O’Day and Ella Fitzgerald.”

“Play something for me.”

I considered playing “Misty” for her but decided no. She might have seen the Eastwood movie, and I preferred that she thought me only maladjusted, not psychotic. I slid a cassette in and played “Taking a Chance on Love.” Anita O’Day with the Oscar Peterson Quartet. Then I switched to Ella: “Let’s Fall in Love.” Hardly subtle.

“What’s your favourite song?”

“Hard to choose just one. Sometimes tastes change, moods change. But I listen to this often. I cued up Anita’s “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.”

We sat quietly for a while. The margarita jug gave up its last drop as the sun touched the tips of the western mountains.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“Yeah, but you probably have someplace to be.”

I did, but I lied.

Miriam ordered a nice, very dry New York Finger Lakes red with our dinner. While we ate, we talked about literature, grad school and about my love affair with modernism, along with a taste for existentialism which I acquired in Vietnam, telling her I belonged to what I called the New Lost Generation. After our second bottle, Miriam belted out one limerick after another, rhymes that could have made sailors blush, yet sounding more sophisticated than the street corner, barroom, crap game, and racetrack humour I grew up with.

I told her about a gin joint with a Wurlitzer loaded with jazz and pop standards. “Are you game?” I asked.

We drank Utica Club beer from the bottle and dropped quarter after quarter in the box. When I played Ella and Count Basie’s version of, “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” Miriam closed her eyes and swayed meditatively to the music.

We drank and danced. Miriam found O’Day’s, “The Man I Love” that begins with Anita’s voice soft and sultry. We danced slow and close, even after Anita started to swing the tune.

As the barkeep announced last call, we still held each other while Ella serenaded us with “Love is Here to Stay.” Gershwin, of course.

Outside, the cool early morning air felt like a slap in my face, reminding me that I’d stood up Hailey. What the hell was I thinking?

I drove on the back roads, hoping to avoid the cops. Back at the moonlit beach we sat on the damp sand where Miriam confessed that she had promised to meet somebody earlier. “I’ll have hell to pay,” she said.

“I’m in the doghouse, too.”

“Want to share?”

I confessed my lie about not having to meet Hailey and told her how I’d “sat” too close for too long before a too hot fire with the too, too right wrong woman.

“Oh. I see.”

We’d already done a litany of things we shouldn’t have, so what the hell, what harm in a moonlight swim.

Afterwards, we sat on the beach, our flesh pocked with goosebumps, our arms tight around each other — quiet — a long time quiet. I wondered what it all meant. In one day, I’d lived a fantasy — eagles, fawns and falling in love with Miriam. Me, falling in love? With Miriam? Me being twelve years older — what a foolish fantasy to imagine a future.

The sun poked its rose-gold nose over the pine-covered mountain. Time to go. One lingering kiss before parting, promising to keep in touch. The forest had worked its magic.

The next day I drove home to find Miriam’s voice saying, “I miss you,” on my answering machine. After that, we spoke often, spending long nighttime hours on the phone. That autumn, Miriam returned to Cambridge. We exchanged phone calls; wrote letters — actual letters — tender letters. I wanted Miriam in my life. Wanted to be in hers. I believed Miriam might be my last chance at a real life, the normal kind of life where even I could have nice things, fantasizing she could be to me what Tess became to Ray Carver. I planned to visit during the holiday break.

Wanting Miriam, I vacillated between ecstasy and insanity, getting crazier every day. And more worried. Should I, or shouldn’t I visit her? At night, I listened over and again to Sinatra’s “Fools Rush In,” and Old Blue Eyes convinced me to be a fool for love. Until.

Feeling stuck between what I wanted and the right thing to do had been my life’s pattern. Now, I found myself back between that rock and hard place. What would the right thing be? What, truly, did I have to offer? Miriam’s life was just starting. Mine had stalled.

I imagined seeing Miriam on her turf, among her peers…. All that friggin’ youth. Would I embarrass her? Would people ask, “Is that your father?” or blurt, “What a creep!” Would she then see me that way? When guys get older, we fear looking foolish, being the fool. Fear paralyzes us. Paralyzed me. I didn’t visit.

Before Christmas I received a job offer on the west coast, and I took it — my fantasy job — a new start — sun, surf and knowledge-starved students. I said fantasy, right? Big mistake. Reality bites.

I wanted to go home, to forests, lakes, rushing rivers. To the only place I’d felt at home. I wanted to see Miriam. But returning home suggested failure. Middle aged guy can’t handle success. And would Miriam want to see me?

Decades have passed. I still miss my hometown where I’d been a thriving medium sized fish in a medium sized pond. I miss my mountains, eagles, and fawns.

Have I thought about Miriam?

Every day.

With her I lived one perfect day.

With her, I imagined a future. Nice things.

And without, I ended up on the desert’s fringe, listening to my knees creak, watching my earlobes grow longer each day, sitting alone on my porch wondering “what if” as Ella sings, “But Not for Me.”

***

Nick Di Carlo, an erstwhile poet and inveterate short fiction writer has been careening about this planet for seven decades and a bit. He has taught writing and literature in traditional and non-traditional settings, including the Grand Tetons, the Grand Canyon and maximum security correctional facilities. He’s been recognized for his “vigorous, muscular prose in the service of an unflinching vision of the world.” Novelist Eugene Mirabelli has written: “Di Carlo’s stories are severe and uncompromising. They aren’t pretty, but they are real. His scenes are gritty and hard edged, his characters are lost, marginal and indomitable. The writer is a man of great ambition, honesty, and unflagging energy.” Read his work in Muleskinner Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, Guilty Crime Story Magazine, The Yard, Flash Fiction Friday, 50-Word Stories, The Orange Rose Literary Magazine as well as print anthologies.