by Matt Baker
The Columbine shooting had just happened and I was day nine into the final night together with this girl I was in love with, residing in a Red Roof Inn off Interstate 94 in Deerfield, Illinois. This girl sat in bed with me holding the remote in her hand waiting for me to give her the okay to change the channel. But I didn’t. I kept watching the live helicopter shots from above as the cameras circled the area, zeroing in on the police officers surrounding the building, preparing to barge in and take out the attackers. I kept thinking it’s too late.
I was leaving town for new opportunities elsewhere and this girl and I were in love with each other and I didn’t want to leave and she couldn’t go with me. So we checked into the Red Roof Inn and stayed smashed and undressed.
We were romantic types exported from the boozy movies and mind-wringing music we relished. Our love at this point was fueled mostly on the intoxicants we ingested. Once those chemicals did their part, our love blossomed into something that we’d both seen on a screen, clinging to one another in an act of heroic destiny. I drank beer out of aluminum cans and she rolled joints in the nude, sitting at the “executive desk” swirling around and around in the “executive” chair, giddy with hopelessness.
Our youth was getting away from us. I was twenty-seven and she was twenty-one and we were quickly getting older. Too old to be acting like this. We knew it was going to end. We knew that we’d never see one another ever again. We didn’t talk about it. We probably even tried to deny it, privately to ourselves. I had a six hundred mile drive I’d been putting off for the past nine days and she had a fiancé she’d been ignoring and was past due reuniting with up in Madison.
And so this is how it happened.
If I go back to the beginning and start all over, I do see that there was a deeper love involved than I sometimes give credit for. Love of some type. There are so many kinds; it’s hard to tell which one is which. I was surely infatuated with her and she would laugh uncontrollably at my jokes in a way that spoke all I needed to know about her interest in me. She was beautifully fit in a sexy and effortless manner. Her hair long and straight with a slight flare at the bottom. Big brown eyes that could make me forget what I was saying in mid-sentence. A smile that was as wide as Julia Robert’s and fingers that were long, thin and danced everywhere she touched.
We worked together at a sandwich & soup café. She waited tables and I made the sandwiches and warmed up the soup. I was a has-been comedy writer who’d burned bridges, said bad things when drunk and was giving up without admitting it.
I knew all about her fiancé and her propensity to smoke weed whenever the chance presented itself. She was high all of the time. That was her life, her normal. It was a funny thing to get used to. This girl that looked like she walked out from the pages of Marie Claire or Vogue smoking tightly packed joints in the alley behind the building, kneeling between the dumpster and back door. Sometimes I would stand back there with her, not because I wanted to smoke but because that’s where she was and I wanted to be near her.
We got to hanging out together. At first under false pretenses, with our co-workers, thinking this somehow made it okay. But we both knew that the co-workers were our strategically-maneuvered play pieces that allowed us to spend more time together, even if we were sitting across from one another at a small round table in a packed bar in Evanston. It was fine this way. Making looks with one another, our eyes shiny with suspense, mystery and hunger for what was going to happen next and making guesses at when it would.
Someone would pick up the signals we were throwing back and forth and then purposely ask her about her fiancé in an attempt to spoil the emotional intensity. But it was too late. It was already there.
He’s fine, she would say. He was in medical school up at the University of Wisconsin, first year. They’d be engaged for nine months and had been together more than three years. She was a Northern Illinois University dropout living at home, working during the week and spending her weekends in Madison with her fiancé. Then she quit going to Madison every weekend so that she could spend more time with me. It became every other weekend and so on. She started to tell me that she thought she was falling in love with me. She was confused. You’re so funny she’d say, rubbing a finger over my lips before her eyes would close and her head fell forward onto my mouth. I’d already begun to feel that knotting in the stomach when we were apart, somewhere between throwing up and tears. On the weekends she was gone, I knew she was in Madison telling her fiancé that she loved him and how much she was looking forward to their life together.
She was living at home for medical reasons. Her doctor and parents felt it was better, at least for awhile. She’d been hospitalized for three months because of an eating disorder. Her fiancé supported her parents desire to keep her at home. She’d suffered two major episodes. One in high school and the most recent while a junior at N.I.U. where she’d failed all her classes and moved back home where her eating disorder worsened. She recounted all of this to me one night with her head was buried in a pillow. She asked that I never bring it up again. It wasn’t anything she wanted to talk about with me. It was all that her fiancé and family wanted to talk about – how she was doing, how she was feeling.
She said: I used to be this normal, all-American girl and then I couldn’t hold on anymore. It doesn’t matter what I want. Everyone else tells me what I want. This thing I have, this eating thing is the only thing I can control.
I said: Sweetheart, you don’t have to say anything else.
Our feelings intensified and her obligations began to blur. She was ready with excuses when she needed them to keep her fiancé at bay for a few more hours or until the next day. That first night we made love, I was nervous. I’d never been with someone who was so committed in another relationship. I knew that once I entered her I’d never be able to leave.
We both knew this wasn’t a casual thing. We weren’t two drunks who pressed ourselves together in hope that the fireworks would explode on their own.
I kissed her in the places I hadn’t been able to before. She lay naked, her head turning from to side to side, making noises I didn’t need to interpret. Everything else went the way you always hope it will. There were no awkward pauses as positions changed or embarrassing entanglements with sheets. It was like a beautiful dance, always touching through the choreography of our movement.
Her fiancé began to ask questions, often he asked the same question several times to see if she gave the same answer. Sometimes she didn’t. She had different versions, different excuses, she was having trouble keeping it all straight in her head. It wasn’t adding up in his mind. He knew something was going on but he wasn’t sure what. He didn’t know if she’d slipped back into her eating disorder behavior, if she was overdoing it with the weed. But he hadn’t yet accused her of seeing someone else. She confided in me all that he said.
He showed up one night unannounced at work. I’d never seen a picture of him and really only had a vague idea what he looked like. But when he came to the counter and asked for her, I knew immediately who he was. I said, yes, and called out her name. She looked at me and then him, both of her lovers, standing three feet apart. He had no idea who I was and I stood there running a white rag through my hands, looking him over carefully and thinking that I hope he doesn’t hang around for long because in a few hours when this place closes up I’m going to be fucking his fiancé.
She ran up to him, kissed him on the cheek and dragged him away to the corner by the front door and sat down. They talked for twenty minutes. Some tense words were exchanged, she was reassuring him, patting him on the hand and being the first to lean over the table to kiss him goodbye. It was a Sunday night. I knew he was probably on his way back up to Madison.
That was close, she told me later that night. He’d been in town looking for her at the usual places, at her house, her friends’ apartments. He couldn’t find her. I’ve been with you, she said. He knows something is up.
Do you care? I said.
Not really.
Not at all?
Well, not right now I don’t.
Soon her guilt began to get in the way of us even though it was thrilling for me, distant from any repercussions of my actions, her shouldering all the risk, taking the chance. It was when she was the most guilt-stricken that I would kiss her the hardest, say the least and last the longest. When we were done, she would look at me like I had done something terribly wrong. But she never said I had. The farther down we had fallen the less we seemed to talk. In an indirect way justice had been served and we were living out our last free days in full style before our punishment would begin. The day she had to go back to him for good and forever deny that the last five months had ever happened and I had to face the facts of my life, that loneliness bid me welcome in a way I’d never been able to completely rid myself of. My life was one reckless leap after another; a love affair, to remind me of all that I’d missed out on.
On the one weekend a month she did drive up to Madison to spend with him, I made sure I had plans. My friend Mike and I would hit this bar in Rogers Parks that was open until five a.m. and eat pretzel sticks and drink vodka poured neatly over ice. Mike knew my predicament but didn’t ask much. He thought she was a beautiful girl and that was all that mattered to him. It is what it is, he’d say. Nothing more.
He went on:
One day, it’ll be over. And there’s no way you can know when that is. She’ll call you on the phone some night and cry and say it can’t go on anymore. She’ll profess her love for her fiancé and say that you were a mistake. And you’ll get pissed and say, what do you mean a mistake? And she’ll cry more and tell you how confused she is and you’ll think that phone call will be the end of it, but it won’t be. She’ll call you the next day and forget the conversation ever happened. And then you’ll be the one confused and that’s when the hard part really begins, my friend.
What do I do? I said.
There’s nothing you can do. It’s too late. You have to live through it.
I knew Mike was mostly right. This hadn’t even happened yet, the phone call, but the misery had already begun to settle around me. I was more careful with what I said to her. I thought before I spoke and chose carefully what subjects I brought up in conversation.
We were less free around each other.
Because of what Mike said and the way things were going I decided to avoid this mess that was inevitable. I began looking for a job. A real job. Permanent employment. This comedy writing thing wasn’t going anywhere. I knew it. I hadn’t sold anything in eighteen months. One of the prerequisites for my job search was that the job had to be out of state, somewhere new and far away. The way I envisioned it, I would slip away in the middle of the night when my windows were not yet de-iced, navigating the Chicago interstate system at three in the morning by way of a softball sized circle in the middle of my windshield, driving as fast as I could, getting over it as fast I could and by daybreak, as I traversed through Indiana or crossed over into Iowa or approached central Illinois, whatever my destination, my new life would begin, fresh, clean, without her, whatever her name was. That’s how it had to be.
I found a job as a fundraising assistant for a non-profit organization that raised money for various human rights and social issues. The job was in Lawrence, Kansas. I’d made the trip, flying to Kansas City and driving a rental car to Lawrence. I told her I was visiting old friends in KC. I left out the Lawrence part of the travel story. She knew I was dealing out half-truths, but she left it alone, saying that she was glad I was able to get away for a few days.
There’s been a lot going on, she said. You and me and this, whatever it is that we are. I mean, I know what it is but I don’t know what it means. What does this mean? Us?
Does it have to mean anything? Can’t it just be what it is?
She said, No, it can’t. Not forever, it can’t.
I didn’t say anything else. I knew that I did the right thing in having an escape plan, the new job in Kansas, six hundred miles away, even though I felt awful about it. I just didn’t know when I was going to let her know. I’d told my new job that I wasn’t sure when I could start exactly. I said that my current job needed me for another month or so as I transitioned out of my position and helped train the person taking my place. I lied to them, telling them I was working as a financial aid advisor at Northwestern. A friend of mine, who was really a financial aid advisor at Northwestern pretended to be my boss when they called checking up on the details of my resume.
I had time on my side. So I thought.
She was becoming more fragile. She’d drift off and stare blankly. Once she walked out during a movie. It took me fifteen minutes to realize she wasn’t coming back. I found her in the parking lot, sitting on the ground, cross-legged, next to my car, smoking a joint in the open, under the rays of artificial light. Her movements were slower and she was fussing over her food a lot more, saying she wasn’t hungry. We gradually began to talk less and less and made love more and more. I lit candles and turned the television volume on low to help drown out all the noise in our heads. She’d cry when it was over and I didn’t dare ask her what was wrong. That could wait. It had to wait.
Then we got caught.
He’d told her that his spring break at the University of Wisconsin was a week later than it actually was. He instead had been following her around for almost a week and he found out all he needed to know. Surprisingly he was not angry in a way you’d anticipate. He didn’t care to talk to me or threaten me as I would have figured. I don’t know what happened when they got together to talk through all of it. I didn’t hear from her for four days. But I could imagine enough, that he was feeding her shame and humiliation, making sure she chewed all of it. I knew she was sacrificing herself for him, declaring her love for him, calling me a mistake, nothing-important, a wish-she’d-never-met-me kind of thing.
Mike and I visited the bar. We talked about it.
You gotta tell her about Kansas. Tell her you’re outta here, he said.
I will.
Tell her soon, he said. The next time she calls, tell her. I’ve seen these things get real crazy. The longer you wallow in this shit, the messier it gets. Trust me. I know these things. This is where you need to get out, this is your chance.
I know.
I know you know. This is the hardest part. You need to get out now but I know you won’t.
Why won’t I?
Because you want her now more than you ever did. You feel like you love her more than he does, like he doesn’t deserve her, that you know her in a way no one else does. And you are probably right.
When I finally heard from her, she asked me to meet her for lunch at this Vietnamese place in downtown Evanston. When I showed up she thanked me for coming and I knew then that everything was different.
Don’t thank me for coming, I said. That’s silly.
I was scared. I knew her thanking me was her way of putting me somewhere else in her mind, peeling me off of her. I also knew it wasn’t working the way she thought it would.
I grabbed her hand across the table and she pulled back and I reached all the way over, wrapping my hand around her wrist and pulled it back towards me, setting it down on the table and slipping my fingers between hers. She looked down, shaking her head to herself.
That’s not why I asked you to come here, she said.
When she looked up at me, right in the eyes, I saw that she’d been crying for the past four days, probably longer. She looked aged, puffy and sick. I asked her if she was eating. She said she was, just not very much. Then she said it:
I think this has to be it. I think this is it. Isn’t it? It’s over, right?
No, it’s not.
I squeezed her hand harder.
Yes, yes, it is, she said. I’m sorry. I can’t do this. I’d do it if I could. You know I would.
She got up and left.
I wrote her a letter and mailed it to her parent’s house. I wrote that I understood that she didn’t want to see me but that I didn’t believe it. I wrote that I didn’t care about everything else, that I only cared about her. I wrote that I was moving in three days. I wrote about Kansas and the new job.
I mailed the letter on Monday morning, mailed it to an address eight miles from my apartment.
The next day she called.
You’re moving, she said?
I’m moving Thursday. Seemed like a good time as any.
You’re moving?
Yes.
I can’t believe it. You’re moving?
Why does it matter?
You can’t do this to me. Not now.
On Thursday she watched me load up my clothes and books and picture frames into the trunk and back seat of my Honda. I’m leaving the furniture, I said, when she asked if this was all I’m taking. I’m renting a furnished place in Kansas, I explained.
That afternoon she convinced me to get a room somewhere, one last time, she said, beginning to tremble. I need you, she said. I need you, she said over and over again until I opened my passenger car door and told her to get in. I drove to the Red Roof Inn because it was the only hotel I could picture immediately in my head. We drove in silence. I got the room key and drove around to the back. It was two in the afternoon and we were the only car in the parking lot.
The day after the Columbine shooting, we got dressed while watching the news coverage. What is it with these kids, we said to one another. That’s all we talked about, the Columbine shooting. We discussed our own theories, single parent homes, media violence. Finally I couldn’t handle it anymore and said: Are you ready?
I drove to her parents’ house and parked on the street in front of the mailbox. I figured parting words were appropriate but I didn’t know what those words were. I hoped she had a letter folded up in the shape of a heart that she’d hand me and tell me not to open until I got to Kansas. Or she’d memorized a love poem that she’d recite with tears falling out of her eyes. I wanted it to be painful, for me. I wanted her to be unscathed by this. I wanted her to be whole again, to be that girl she talked about before anyone knew her.
I was ready for anything. I was ready to pull out of her subdivision and check back into the Red Roof Inn. I was ready to turn down my job in Kansas if she decided that she wanted me more than her fiancé in medical school.
Then she smiled in a way I hadn’t seen before and said: I guess this is it. I think really when I think about it, this was probably a mistake. You and me. Us. I don’t mean for it to sound bad.
I looked at her for a long time. She stared straight ahead but occasionally I caught her eyes glancing over at me. I watched her.
She said, This is hard, I know. But you’ll be fine. I think I’ll be fine too. I think everything will work out.
Its okay, she said. She squinted her eyes tightly shut but when they opened everything came undone.
It’s okay. It’s okay, she said.
But I couldn’t tell who she was talking to.
I picked up her hand from her lap, pried each finger free from her clenched fist and put her hand to my face, moving it gently over my lips, my closed eyelids.
Don’t, she said.
Please don’t, she said.
I opened my eyes and she watched her hand touch me. It was like her hand was no longer apart of her. She was a spectator, a bystander. I moved her hand down my neck, across my shoulder blade and up over my chin to my lips again. I did this several more times until our beautiful dance was over.
