The Hideous Summer (Part 3)

Continued from Part 2

Then, when I arose at seven to shave, I encountered some trouble distinguishing my undulating features from one another in the bathroom mirror. In consequence I opened a deep gash just above my right eyebrow. No amount of styptic pencil would stanch the bleeding and since the bandages had belonged to Maryellen and I hadn’t replaced them it became necessary to apply a patch of toilet paper to the wound.

And when I finally got myself together and, with one finger hooked into a belt loop to hold up my pants, ventured outside, I was greeted by a glaring sun and a pile of festering garbage from a tipped over can. It was all I could do not to upchuck the morning’s portion of newly purchased Marshmallow Fluff and small consolation to know that my nasal passages hadn’t become hermetically sealed.

At work, where the ribbons on the air conditioning ducts were rippling nicely, it wasn’t long before I lapsed into a semi-stupor. I did, several times, raise myself and careen to the men’s room to pee or gag or both (and, having found no band aids in the first aid box with which to stem a persistent flow of blood, to also replace the toilet paper patch). But in my cubicle, movement was largely confined to the pulsing in my jaw.

Then, just before noon, there was a terrifying thunderclap behind me. I turned to look out the window and saw that the sky had become pitch black.

I also saw Maryellen.

A screeching brake drew my attention to the street three floors below and — my heart almost bolted from my chest and out through the glass — there she was strolling up the sidewalk across from me. Even with only one semi-functioning eye and the light gone there was no misreading the ponytail and that splayed, but oddly endearing walk that often befuddled — and froze in their tracks — people finding themselves in her path who couldn’t be sure on which side she intended to pass. And I could hardly fail to recognize the gray pinstriped pantsuit. She’d worn that new “power” suit to show to Barbara on the night before she left me. If I say that I was beside myself with joy I don’t begin to define the emotion I was feeling. Maryellen was back — she’d come back!

Then the rain began and, running, she made a sharp turn into the restaurant opposite my building. Calling out in a breaking voice to anyone within earshot that I was going to lunch, I raced to the hall and, bypassing the elevators, tore down the fire stairs and out to the street.

The rain was torrential now and clouds of steam were rising from the previously baking pavement. Dashing between cars with their headlights turned on and shining in already forming puddles, I was inside the restaurant in what couldn’t have been more than a minute after I’d spied her.

I’d never been in there before. Big and softly lit, linen tablecloths, beds of flowers along the base of the walls, all of the waiters male and uniformed, it was well off my lunch break spectrum. (Maryellen’s too.) It was also very crowded — every table looked to be occupied. And it was fiercely cold.

Just inside the entrance I stood as still as my excitement would permit and, with my working eye, tried to locate her. People were milling in front of me and I didn’t see her. I did see a beefy bartender take notice of me, and I saw customers who were queued in front of the maitre d’s station frowning in my direction. Squinting at myself in a full-length mirror next to me I had to concur that I was presenting myself inappropriately. First of all, I was oozing and/or dripping a variety of liquids. Besides the drain-off from a thorough drenching I’d suffered in the rain, and despite the frigid air, sweat was pumping from my every pore. Also, the latest toilet paper patch was already bright red with blood, an overflowing stream of which was reaching nearly to my cheek. Not only that, a mini glacier of mucous was floating from my nostril towards my upper lip. While I could count the socks I was wearing as a plus, the tail of my shirt was hanging out over my pants and my pants in turn were about to lose their tenuous grip on my hips. What’s more, my jaw was now sticking out a couple of inches, I was noticeably shivering and I knew I didn’t smell very good either. My breath alone, given the taste in my mouth, must have made coming within ten feet of me comparable to entering a chicken coop.

I was about to try and effect some superficial repairs to my face with my handkerchief when a line of sight opened and I saw Maryellen being seated with her back to me in a far corner of the room. It was a magical moment because the maitre d’ was just then pulling back his rope as if to usher me inside. Concerns about my appearance instantly evaporating, I responded to this action with a quick end run around the line that remained and headed in her direction.

Taking those first steps toward Maryellen I was buoyant. I understood that what the real problem had been all along wasn’t Maureen’s biological category but Maryellen’s wounded ego. Witnessing me with Maureen had been a blow to Maryellen’s womanhood. And she had masked her injury by descending to a speciesism that hardly spoke well of her character. With the passage of time, and coming to miss me, she’d recognized this and she’d realized too that as hurtful as my indiscretion may have been, it hadn’t been with another girl! Now she was contrite about her hysterical reaction. So contrite, and too embarrassed to come to me directly, she’d arranged to have our meeting appear to be accidental. She’d maneuvered, by just happening to be in my work neighborhood and prancing around in front of my window on our anniversary day, to have me chase after her.

But then my thoughts and emotions began to undergo abrupt and pendulous shifts. Practically convulsing with rushes of affection for her, and more than ready to indulge her in her little game, I quickly became indignant. Did this woman have any idea of the ordeal she’d put me through? What amends did she intend to make? Then, just as suddenly, I felt a wave of generosity. I would seek no retribution. I had to concede, after all — and I took some pride in my emotional maturity here — that my own reflex had I come home to discover a bra, a flea collar, panties and a leash in a sordid pile on the floor at the bedroom door would have been exactly the same as hers.

And then, as I continued to make my way toward her, forcing people to move tighter to their tables, spraying various forms of moisture on them, I felt a really bad feeling. Resting on the seat next to her was a new leather briefcase. I’d planned to buy her one like it — though not so expensive and much less masculine in style — for our anniversary.

But what was even more upsetting than the fact of the case itself was its color. It was cordovan. Maryellen hated cordovan. She had what could be construed as a pathological aversion to it. She said it reminded her of the shoes an uncle of hers who smoked cigars always wore. And she’d actually thrown out my best pair of shoes one night because they were cordovan. So seeing that bag profoundly saddened me. It made me feel that she’d already evolved into someone I didn’t know anymore; that our estrangement was complete and irrevocable.

Then it struck me (and with a force that almost made me stop in my tracks) that she wasn’t here for me at all but to meet someone else, someone I might even work with — maybe even Mintz who was being so benevolent because he was guilt-ridden about banging my girlfriend for what was probably weeks now, a girlfriend, furthermore, who couldn’t care less that I might see her with him on our anniversary day!

And then — I was looking at her ponytail and thinking that she’d kept it — I felt all right, I felt good, because women, it’s common knowledge, always change their hairstyle when they’re making a new beginning.

But coming to within a few feet of her I got pissed again. She was absorbed in the menu when her neck should have been craned toward the entrance in anticipation of my arrival. I found it gauche and disappointing, that though here to effect a reconciliation she would still take a cavalier stance toward me. Me a man who cared passionately about world affairs and who, alarmed by mounting evidence of his less than splendid character, worried that Clinton might have a Richard Pryor-type freebasing accident and burn down the White House. It was truly irksome. It was past exasperating. It was enough to make me want to grab her ponytail and yank her awake.

And yank is what I did.

“You stupid fool! You think you’ve got a leg up on people slacker-wise? For Christ’s sake, Maryellen. You own a dog you get it fixed!”

The first thing that impressed me about the grimacing face that snapped backwards to meet upside down with mine was the very wrong nose hair. A nanosecond later I was struck by the thick sideburns that ran very nearly to the jawbone. Then, as I was making a mental note to rethink my suicide option, I was reminded of the time my father took me to a Veterans Day parade. I was four and I remembered how he had lifted me up for a better view.

Confused? So was I. What happened was that some pear-shaped schmuck with a ponytail was sitting where Maryellen was supposed to be sitting. And promptly following my moment of contact with him, the bartender I’d seen coming in had embraced me from behind and raised me a foot or so above the floor. (I can still recall the freshly pressed scent of his black linen vest and a hint of Joop! Homme.) Then what happened was that, negotiating the aisles between the tables with a deftness I could only admire, he carried me back along the very trail I had myself so recently blazed and, without a word and much more gently than you would figure, deposited me on the street.

The rain had stopped but the heat had persisted — which ironically was now a relief after the chill of the restaurant, but under the circumstances, hardly something I could enjoy. I wished I had thought to inform this bartender that what we were dealing with here was grossly impaired vision, a very physical, not psychological, handicap and that I wasn’t, and could never be, the authentic wacko he thought I was. I also wanted to tell him that he was dead wrong if he thought that Maryellen had never liked me or that we hadn’t been close; that, on the contrary, and albeit on her way to a garbage can, she had once held my cordovan shoes in her hands. Then I wanted to say — my mental and emotional pendulum was swinging again at full throttle and now I was infuriated — how fucking dare you interject yourself into my personal affairs? And I wanted to say after that: Just what exactly is this shit you think you’re handing me?

I got back upstairs and to my desk all right but, when I sat down, I experienced an amazing weariness. I didn’t care that my pants, soaked from the rain, had made of my seat a bucket of ice. I’d never felt so enervated. It was as though all of my energy had leaked out of me. I half expected, when I looked down, to see blood seeping from my shoes.

I wanted, badly, to go home.

As if the gods were ready at last to show me some mercy I scored a break. Mintz had gone to visit a client and he would not be back. Freeing me of an explanation to make, this news tapped a reserve of adrenaline I was astonished to learn that I had and I got myself out of there too.

Yes, back outside, I thought to check out the restaurant again because it dawned on me that the timing of Mintz’s departure was too coincidental and that maybe the real mistake I’d made was to believe that I’d made a mistake and that it had been Maryellen sitting there — and waiting to meet that “cute old man.” But too weak at this point to make the effort and the pain in my tooth, which I’d been oblivious to during my misadventure, now expanding into every corner of my head, the best I could do was hope that the cook had hepatitis.

It was right about then, I think, that the commander of my immune system yelled something like “Every antibody for itself!” and took off through the nearest orifice. Now I have no recollection whatsoever of making it to my apartment. (Did I take the subway? A cab? I couldn’t have walked, could I?) And I don’t remember what I did when I got there; I think I just passed dead away. But I do recall that at some point in the evening I felt a searing pain behind my eyes and that I had a fever that exceeded the temperature in my apartment, which itself must have been in the mid-hundreds. The abscess, it turned out, had spread to my brain and, seen lying on the floor by passing neighbors who called an ambulance (I’d unwittingly, but luckily, left my apartment door wide open when I got home), I was immediately dispatched to the ICU, where the doctors told me later, they were all but sure they were going to “lose” me.

***

When I was released from the hospital it was already fall and, to go with an exhilarating briskness in the air, there were some dramatic changes to take note of.

For openers: Although I was minus two teeth (which, for a reason I’ll explain in a minute, I opted not to replace), my jaw was back to normal, my nose and throat were clear and dry, my forehead had stopped bleeding and I owned a new pair of contact lenses.

But of special significance was the radical change in my emotional disposition; a transformation which derived from the knowledge that I was in the gods’ good graces. While they’d punished me severely for my despicable behavior, they’d deemed me worthy of living!

With this recognition I was, much of the time, near to euphoric. By going through all that I had and surviving it, I felt that I’d successfully atoned for both the crime I’d perpetrated with Maureen and the capital crime I’d presumably committed prior to my birth. In the fevers of my elation, they’d conflated and, for all practical purposes, become one and the same.

If you think about it, this is some spectacular shit!

(Yes, I knew of course that I would still croak someday. But the concern that my demise might be imminent or at best premature, had pretty much disappeared. That burden — along with the fear of a ghastly afterlife — had lifted.)

While my pacing as well as my heavy drinking were now in the past, something that hadn’t changed was my tendency to ruminate — it was my nature after all. And remembering now that Maryellen had told me she might be home early that day, I wondered if the answer to the mystery of what happened with Maureen hadn’t been there to see all along. Was it possible that I’d subconsciously orchestrated the whole thing? I mean, my problem with mortality maybe even more desperate than I’d realized — and sensing, somewhere in my brain, the magnitude of what I could achieve — had I seized on the concurrence of a random hardon and a bitch in heat, to intentionally commit an appalling but redeemable crime in order to fashion a chance to experience my complete and total absolution?

Had I fucked a dog to feel myself eligible for eternal life in heaven?

With these thoughts — and the realization that what I’d fundamentally wanted all my life was what I got — came another thought. It was a given that my feelings for Maryellen had led me to try and win her back. But had her importance in my life also qualified her to represent an objective that was far deeper than winning her back? Was securing her forgiveness, that is, about her forgiveness alone, or (and this would likewise be true of her horrified reaction when she came upon Maureen and me) had I made of her a surrogate for the gods?

If so, I didn’t require a proxy any more.

I don’t want to leave the impression that I was perfectly okay. I still cared about Maryellen and there were hours when I missed her a lot. I also, on occasion, did suffer spasms of shame and self-contempt. But when that happened, I would run my tongue into the hollow my lost teeth had left. This little ritual would remind me of the price I’d paid for what I’d done and it did much to help me sustain my new equilibrium.

And, to be sure, I still had no idea what the future held for me. (I had the same job — thank you, Mr. Mintz, I guess.)

But I knew that I had a future.

Then, from a block away one afternoon, but for certain this time, I saw Maryellen. She was arm-in-arm with a guy who was a ringer for Richard Nixon and, for some reason, it made me think of a photo she’d shown me of her boyfriend before me who’d had a pronounced unibrow. Although the sighting made my blood jump, I didn’t follow her.