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October 15, 2008

excerpts from the novel he'll probably never finish

virginia is for lovers. or so said the license plate hurtling toward me as i skidded across the wet asphalt into a sea of amber lights. traffic. was i asleep? i had that sudden feeling that perhaps i had been. there is something about the rhythm of the interstate that can lull you in to a state of not quite consciousness until something startles you back to reality like a patrol car lurking in a median or nearly driving into the back of the mini-van in front of you. sometimes i get the sensation as i am coming out of a dream that i am trying to open my eyes - to see something important before it slips away....

where am i? there are no road signs or billboards that i can see. it is still not quite daylight. where did all of these cars come from? there is a mangled mile marker to my right that seems to be telling me that i am 174 miles away from where i had just been - or closer to where it is that i am going. hard to judge based on just the one mile marker. i suppose it depends on the direction you happen to be traveling or how close you are to a state line. i'm no good with directions. i never attended any boy scout sessions and i have never owned a compass. i just know that if you are traveling on Interstate 95 northbound from Hollywood, FL to Fort Lauderdale, Florida the ocean will be on your right.

i reached over into the passenger seat and fumbled through my maps and discarded snack wrappers until i found it. "it" was the small envelope addressed to me. an invitation from one gina james requesting my attendance - it still felt strange in my hands even though it had arrived in my mailbox 3 weeks ago. i had thought that gina james was gone forever. not gone in the sense that you turn on VH-1 news one morning and they are showing a montage of poignant life moments as they flash her date of birth and date of demise on the screen. not gone in the sense that some friends and colleagues turn up to ruminate on the loss of another young person who made the most of their time on this earth before being taken from us far too soon. if such a tragedy ever were to befall gina - VH-1 would probably not have anything to say about it. because gina is not famous. to my knowledge she has never appeared on television and i know for a fact that she has never written a hit song. she's just a girl from a town called fayetteville who had a fairly prominent role in the story of my life. and then one day she regretfully informed the producer of said show that she could no longer fulfill her obligations - the script was crap - her co-star was crap and could any consideration be given to writing her character out of the show. of course this brought about a lot of shouting and closed door meetings and passionate appeals but it was useless and soon she was off to find a starring role in a much less challenging program. she took a bow, packed her belongings, waved goodbye to the crew and gina james was gone.

it was like this for three years. in the beginning it was rough. i had no idea where she had gone. she didn't leave a number or a forwarding address. my friends were useless. they didn't know and didn't care to know. they just offered to buy me a round at whatever particular dive they happened to be into at the moment. her friends - of course - knew everything but they were not going to tell me anything. usually when a couple breaks up and they have mutual friends there is some sympathy and understanding. you know "we're sorry for your difficult situation - and just so you know we're not taking sides". there was none of that relationship courtesy being extended here. these folks had firmly chosen their side. of course there were rumours around - that she had moved back home to fayetteville to sort things out or that she was back at college finishing her nursing degree. i suppose i could have pulled out the trench coat and magnifying glass and tracked her down. i fancy myself a pretty intelligent guy. coming up i read most of the hardy boys books and all of the encyclopedia brown that i could get my hands on. and i was never surprised by the ending. i had solved many a difficult mystery with those three guys. but the truth is when it came to gina - i guess i did not really care to solve the mystery. being left is complicated. it happens. people grow and change and meet new people. and even though you might be perfectly happy and content in your relationship - the next time one of you turns up at a party or a pub without your significant other.... attractive strangers have that way of causing questions to form in your mind. how happy am i - really? i have been left under these circumstances before. and i have done the leaving. but this situation with gina. knowing that there was no one else. that was a little bit more difficult to deal with. i was angry but there was nowhere to really direct my anger was there? it wasn't as though she cheated on me. i couldn't fabricate violent fantasies in my head about thumping the guy that had bested me. she simply sat down one day - probably in our kitchen - did the math in her head and came to a decision that of all the things she wanted out of life she no longer wanted me.


so when i opened up the mailbox three weeks ago i was pretty surprised to see her name on an envelope addressed to me. i left it on top of the dresser for a couple of days unsure if i should open it or toss it. i was worried that it might be one of those confrontational letters people send sometimes once they have had a chance to sort out all of the ways that you have ruined their life. but the envelope was on the smallish side and the way the edges were carefully distressed it became fairly obvious that it was an invitation of some sort. but that could be bad news too. it could be a wedding invitation. by sending one of those to me - if that is indeed what it was - she was no doubt driving the point home that she was choosing not to be with me. on a very permanent basis. i was with someone else at the time so even that should not have mattered. but of course it did. then i started thinking and the inner encyclopedia brown went to work. the envelope on the dresser was from gina james. when a couple gets married the invitations are sent out by the parents of the bride. so i probably had nothing to fear. maybe she had gone back to college and now she was finished and she wanted me to attend her graduation. still i waited two more days before opening the envelope. the message inside was typical invitation speak listing the time, date, etc. but my eyes skipped immediately to the hand written bit at the bottom. it said: "please come - i would love to see you." once my stomach stopped imploding i was struck by the sensation that this might be a trap and it would probably be in my best interest to decline. i had some time decide. so i made a note of the date - hid the envelope at the bottom of the shoebox at the top of the closet and headed out the door to work. gina james was not gone. she was alive and well. and she wanted me at her garden party.

the elevator stopped on the 5th floor and i inhaled deeply as the doors opened. i could never get used to the smell of the office first thing in the morning. bad coffee, stale perfume, and the persistent smell of freshly burned popcorn. every afternoon around 2:30 a woman called wanda would step out of her cube head to the break room and proceed to char a bag of microwave popcorn. it's been like this for years. wanda has never developed a craving for any other kind of snack, the vending machine company has never stopped stocking microwave popcorn and the company refuses to upgrade to a properly sized microwave capable of popping a bag of popcorn. so the rest of us are forced to live with the smell. you get used to most smells after awhile. i remember i bought a bottle of perfume for gina as a christmas stocking stuffer. i bought it at one of those shoppes downtown that we used to walk by on our way home from that italian place. i do not know the first thing about fragrance shopping so i asked the girl behind the counter what sort of thing she liked. she was wearing low cut top and i liked that and she was very friendly. together we narrowed it down to two choices. i was having trouble deciding because they both smelled the same on the cardboard sample card. so she applied the perfumes on either side of her neck to let me experience the smells on an actual person. it was very nice. i chose the left side and was on my way. it turned out to be a bad choice in the end. gina loved it and she wore it every day for months. but it didn't smell the same on her neck. i know that people have different chemistries and all that so maybe gina had a chemical deficiency that made this perfume smell badly on her. i don't really know. i just know that she was not happy when i asked her to stop wearing it. it's funny how i get to that story from the burned popcorn story. gina's neck did not smell as badly as burning popcorn. but it was pretty awful.

pete stopped by my desk at 9:45 with a cup of coffee. he does this every day. it's as though he can never think of a good excuse to come over to my desk and strike up a conversation. we work on the same floor but not in the same department. and the functions performed by our departments would never give us a reason to interact. so in an effort to break the ice pete comes by my desk every morning with a cup of coffee. i don't know if pete has caught on yet that i don't really care for coffee. not that it matters. after 15 minutes those drab grey fabric cube walls close in on you and you look for any excuse to abandon your post. and so pete and i kill a few minutes in this way every morning talking about sports or what direction the new ceo will take when he joins the company and usually we adjourn our meeting by agreeing to meet up for lunch and maybe a drink at a pub at the end of the day.

that thing i said earlier about my split with gina and my friends not really caring - pete would be one of those friends. and it's not as though he is a bad person. pete's actually a pretty great guy. he just also happens to be one of those guys who got married straight out of college and realized pretty quickly that he would actually prefer not to be married. which is strange because his wife appears to be very lovely and supportive and she makes an effort to look nice when they go out. but pete wants out. they have been married for awhile now and pete and i are roughly the same age but the way he talks you'd think he was fifty. i was pretty down after the breakup and when i first told him about it he reached into his emotional core to find some words of encouragement and emerged with something that sounded alot like "lucky bastard". so maybe he really is unhappy in his marriage. maybe he and the wife have money problems or they can't get pregnant or they can but he doesn't want kids or something like that. the thing is when you are single and unattached and you're trying to meet a soulmate or a bedmate or whatever that loneliness is the primary source of your unhappiness. but once you've made that commitment to another human being for life - or for as long as you can stand it there are hundreds of thousands of ways that you can be unhappy.

all i know is that when we go to the pub after work he spends the entire time talking about all of the attractive women in the bar and how he is missing out. and it is true there are alot of attractive girls that frequent the pub. as it happens this pub is four blocks from our office and five blocks from the university. so even though the drinks are crap for the most part we reserve our booth three or four days a week. thursday nights they have drink specials and then there's a quiz at nine so that's usually the day that we go a bit overboard and pete makes every effort to reclaim his misspent youth. after he has had a few he will sometimes try to chat up some of the girls. most of the time it's a real disaster. pete knows alot about sports but he doesn't know much of anything about popular music or celebrities and he wears the same faded dockers with boat shoes on an almost daily basis. so he's not exactly got alot of the assets that the 18-24 year old set might seek out. one time the girl from the perfume shoppe was in the bar and pete made a pass at her. i managed to pry him away and put him into a cab. later on i bought her a drink and we exchanged phone numbers which ultimately resulted in me going over to her place a few times to watch movies. and i'm no film buff, but her taste in movies was disastrous. and she owned maybe ten albums total and it's not like they were desert island albums either. she just did not care that much about music. i loaned her a couple of albums but i don't think she ever listened to them. and that was a real turn off. so in the end even though her neck always smelled really nice we didn't have that much in common and it never went anywhere permanent.

pete thought i was crazy for breaking things off with her. and he went on about how he wished he had the chance to find out for himself if she really was as "shallow" as i claimed she was.....

Posted by young_christopher at 10:22 PM | Comments (1)