Despite the ominous dream, I awoke feeling sad rather than scared. I was truly sad. The English language is replete with words that mean “sad” and not a single one could really capture how overwhelmingly sad I was feeling. On this day, my sadness trumped misery, depression, grief, sorrow and wretchedness combined. I was, I believe, as sad as a person could possibly be.
My sadness wasn’t just an emotion floating around in my brain either; it was a particularly new state of existence for me. I was so fucking sad that my mind had made the whole universe around me into a sad and lonely… horrible place that could only fuel and satiate my sadness. The walls and ceiling of my lonely apartment dripped green with misery. The fake framed photographs mocked me with their toothy smiles and seemed to make the sound of shrill sardonic laughter.
Most mornings, I roll out of bed the moment my eyes are open. I wouldn’t say that I’m a morning person, but I don’t like to lie in bed without some reason for lying in bed. This morning I suppose I had a reason. Svetlana was sleeping as soundly as usual, but the way she was sleeping was somewhat unusual to me. This morning, she was leaning toward me with one arm draped over my chest. My god, she was so beautiful. I stared remorsefully at her perfect and beautiful face and knew, for my sadness was an oracle, that she would eventually leave me.
My eyes welled with tears. I rolled off the bed. The floor felt like a river of mud and every footstep I took was laborious and painful. Each step actually hurt, and not in a metaphorical way. I stopped thinking about my grief for a moment to consider my physical condition and came to realize that I was in real pain. Every muscle, joint and sinew in my body ached with a persistent and piercing pain. This was the pain of true sadness.
With no small amount of effort, I forced my body into the shower and fumbled with the controls. Too cold; too hot.
“Gaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!” I roared.
The overwhelming pain of the hot searing jets ripped me in two as I screamed and fell out of the tub with the shower curtain and the snapped curtain rod twisting and fluttering to the floor around me. Only a thin bathmat broke my fall. After a moment, the amount of pain levelled off to where it was when I was in bed. I checked to see if anything else had broken, like one of my bones perhaps and climbed carefully back to my feet. I jammed the fucked up shower curtain mess behind the toilet and wondered whether I should attempt to shower without it. Fuck it. I set the shower temperature to the least painful setting and climbed back in. Gallons of water merrily splashed to the floor and I just didn’t care. They formed into sad puddles all over the floor.
Wallowing in depression as I painfully soaked, I considered my ominous dream. If Dante’s Inferno was still rolling around in my dreams, the ‘coming thing’ must have been the beast. Unlike Dante, there was no Virgil to guide me through my own personal hell. I didn’t know what was coming for me. I would never learn what was coming, unless I was to return to that dream. How could I? The coming thing seemed to be so terrifying. A worry arose that experiencing both fear and depression in my dreams would eventually kill me. I could not live if I were to lose my problem solving dreams to nightmares of frightful omens. These days, dreams were my only respite from hell.
When I finished taking a shower, the women were still asleep. I surmised that they were only pretending to sleep. No one could have slept through the hideous noises that must have emanated from the bathroom. The sounds I had conjured must have been frightful. I let them pretend and as had been my routine, I gave Svetlana her morning kisses and whispered, “J’ai envie de toi,” in her ear.
I detected a slight smile take shape on Svetlana’s face, but I did nothing to stir her. I carefully made my way out of the bedroom, tiptoed past the beast and slipped out the front door. Unlike previous days, however, once I had made my escape, I had no feeling of freedom; sadness loomed over everything. Sadness is a unique emotion in that the more one thinks about it, the more sad and upset one becomes. I would have to stop thinking somehow, but it is impossible. All I ever do is think.
It was an unusually grey day for Hawaii. A volcanic fog had rolled in from the Big Island. Vog, it was called by the locals. It made the air heavy and people with breathing problems would often have their lives worsened by heavy vog. It was appropriate to my mood; however. It was so appropriate that I wondered if I hadn’t somehow created it. Stepping out into the grey, I approached my very red car. Its indomitable redness lashed out against the colourless world. I wondered where I should go from here.
Oh, no! I remembered that I was supposed to go to the beach with Candy and Heather. I couldn’t let either of them see me like this. A soon-to-be-married woman would not profit from hearing the lamentations of miserably married man. Displaying my profound sadness would set a terrible precedent in my relationship with Candy. I had to stay on top of her training. After all, I had a lot of time invested in her so far.
The phone rang. Candy. Shit. “Hello?” I answered, awkwardly.
“Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!” She squealed, “Are you ready for a fabulous day on the beach?”
Didn’t she notice the vog? How could she be so happy when my sadness had changed the very perfect weather we were all so accustomed to? Who even thinks of the beach on a grey day like this? I had to think.
“Yes, baby! I’m at my car now and I can be there in ten minutes. Are you ready?”
I hadn’t thought of anything. I raged at my brain to invent an excuse between sentences; still nothing.
“I’m already ready!” She said with her usual glee.
“On my way, baby.”
En route, I thumbed at my phone to call Heather. She’d understand that I wasn’t feeling up to a visit. Maybe she had already cancelled her plans for the beach. It wasn’t beach weather after all. She answered.
“Hey handsome,” she cooed.
“Hi, Heather.” I spoke with a bit of a whine already inflected in my voice. “I’m not so sure about the beach today. I had a really rough night. It’s hard to explain really, but I’m really not feeling my best. Are you still going?”
“Oh, Robyn! I go to the beach every day. I never miss a day. It’s impossible for me to miss. You have to understand that it is such a ‘healing’ place. Come! You’ll see why, when you get here.”
For all my grief, I had no will for resistance. They wanted me to go and I didn’t really have anything else to do. No sooner had I hung up with Heather than my car had somehow steered me to Candy’s. I called up and she said she’d be ready in ten minutes. I wondered how that was possible, since she was ready when I called twenty minutes ago and now she was… Oh, it was too stupid to think about.
Candy appeared in the rear view mirror, a vision in a red bikini and a red translucent wrap. More wild redness allied with me to rage against this grey world. She hopped into the car and presented her cheek for a hello kiss. I wondered how odd it was that after three weeks of consecutive days, each with at least one hello and one goodbye kiss that she was still quite careful to turn her head away from me each and every time.
This strange behaviour could perhaps use a little context. In Canada, or at least in the parts where I have lived, hello and goodbye kisses are very uncommon. There, even good friends and family members will avoid their use whenever possible. By contrast, in Hawaii the aloha kiss (the word ‘aloha’ means both ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ among other things) is used between men and women and women and women for all personal hello and goodbye occasions. Even perfect strangers, upon meeting for the first time will give one another an aloha kiss. Only when a man greets another man, will a handshake suffice. Male friends will often give an aloha hug, which consists of a handshake with the right hand and mutual close-fisted back pat with the left.
There is one more thing that needs to be explained. The aloha kiss itself can vary immensely from one set of kissers to the next. The standard form is where the aloha kissers will touch cheeks momentarily and kiss into the air making a pleasant and familiar kiss sound. More familiar kissers will tighten the kiss up a little and will make lip contact against each other’s cheeks. Personally, I consider the air kisses to be too ‘Hollywood’ and I’m usually quite determined to at least make lip-to-cheek contact if I am expected to engage in form of greeting kiss. Lastly, there are those aloha kissers who, even with a stranger, will kiss on the lips.
A curious sense of disillusionment would come over me every time Candy did her kiss charade. I would plant my kiss, striking the back of her jawbone and invariably hear that empty smack whistle past my left ear. It was maybe the first clue for me that there was something else to Candy, as thought she might be someone completely different than the person I thought I was experiencing.
We took the long way up to Bellow’s beach, past Hanauma Bay and around up the east coast of the island. I wasn’t in a hurry and refused to look at a map. Besides, it is a beautiful drive. I did my best to bite back the sadness that was still gnawing at my flesh.
“How long have you known Heather?” Candy began.
“I think nearly three years, though I’ve only run into her here and there. I’ve always felt like we should have been better friends, but she’s been too busy to chat every time we’ve found one another again.”
“Her fiancée is much younger,” she said with an expectant face.
“I remember her saying that, but I don’t think it’s a big deal. I’ve dated women that were older than me and Svetlana is the same age. I really can’t see how an age difference will affect them if they have a good relationship.”
“Much younger,” she stressed.
“Well, I guess we will see how that works for them, won’t we?” I nearly laughed, but my misery caught hold of me and prevented it.
“Do you know what else? “
I doubted that I would ever be able to guess what was on Candy’s mind except for the very obvious.
“No I can’t imagine, what?”
Candy smiled broadly. “They are going to have their wedding reception at my boyfriend’s ranch.”
I immediate impulse was to slam the brakes and skid my car sideways to a halt. This is exactly what happened in my head, though my body somehow managed to keep the car purring gently around Oahu’s east coast.
“Oh I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.” I said, choking back my astonishment.
“Yes, he’s my soulmate! My mom chose him for us at our church. He has his own Christian radio talk show. Basically, we’ve just been waiting until the time is right. Do you know what else?”
Christ! An infinite room of monkeys, having just completed Shakespeare’s complete works could not have typed a plausible guess for Candy’s ‘what else’.
Candy continued. “When Heather asked Raymond… That’s my fiancé, Raymond. When she asked Raymond if they could have the wedding reception at his ranch, he said ‘No’. He doesn’t like to do events out there anymore. Anyway, Heather mentioned it to me the other night. After I got home, I called Raymond and told him that I was Heather’s friend and that he should say ‘Yes’. He did! Now we get to tell Heather the good news! Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t this going to be a great day?”
This day was shit. Despite the new Candy revelations, which were too unbelievable at the moment to be appreciated in their entirety, I had not forgotten about the pain that was going through my every joint and muscle. I had not forgotten about my ravaged marriage or the beast living in my home. I had not forgotten about the shower curtain I’d ripped off the wall or the gallons of water I’d left on the floor. I had not forgotten that life, as I knew it was going to get worse and worse for as far as my mind’s eye could see.
“Great news!” I managed to blurt out with a hint of feigned joy. “Anything else?”
I braced my mind for anything; literally anything.
“No, that’s everything. You know you don’t seem as happy today as you usually are. Is something wrong?”
I’d been outed. I have the good fortune to possess a good imagination, but outright lying is not something that I can do with any conviction. I didn’t want to tell Candy what was wrong, but I would have to offer some sort of a clue.
“It’s my mother-in-law.” I offered. “This visit has just been too long and the strain is starting to wear me down. I’m sorry, I was going to call off our trip to the beach so I could stay out of sight, but that didn’t seem to be an option for anyone else.”
Perhaps for the only time that I had ever known her, Candy had nothing to say. She was silent for the rest of the trip. She reached across and put her hand on my shoulder, squeezing it while rubbing reassuringly with her thumb. The warm and generous caresses would normally have been a welcome salve for my misery, except that like everything else, my shoulder hurt. Ever stroke of her thumb sent a shiver of pain through my chest and into my heart. I counted a hundred and fifty-two strokes by the time we arrived.
We parked at Bellows Beach and hopped out of the car, leaving our shoes behind. The sky and water ahead looked grey but the air was moist, warm and inviting. Candy and I tiptoed over the pavement and grass toward the beach and by the time we had our feet on the moist sand we could make out Heather’s outline in the distance. Her long tresses were easy to spot from a distance. As we closed, I could see that she was wearing a flowing golden-brown silk wrap around her waist and a tan crochet bikini top. She was certainly easy on the eyes.
“Oh perfect timing!” She shouted over the sound of the ocean. We closed in and leaned toward one another for our aloha kisses. Candy’s was first, the standard cheek-to-cheek affair. Mine was next. Heather kissed me on the lips, gently. It was an overly long kiss for an aloha kiss, which is supposed to be more of a peck. She knew. I forgot that I had told her how miserable I was feeling. Her kiss was an aloha kiss, a comfort kiss and a flirtation all rolled into one very tender kiss. She was a master of flirtation, I had to admit.
“It was such a good idea for you to come.” She said comfortingly. “You are going to feel better in a little while. I just know it. The beach is a place to heal. You’ll see.”
Candy gave me a look of wonder. Of course she wondered how Heather could have just known what I had so painfully revealed to her in the car. She probably wondered if there was more for me to tell.
“Now Heather. We have come to hear about this new man of yours and I don’t want you to spare any of the details, especially everything you told us the other night, because we probably have all of those facts wrong by now. When you are finished, Candy has some good news to share with you, so start from the beginning. How did you meet him?”
“In time.” She said, and touched her index finger to her lips thoughtfully. “Let’s walk for a bit.”
Heather put her arm around my waist and guided me toward the ocean. Candy followed her lead and put her arm around my waist from the other side. Arm in arm in arm, we walked up the beach in ankle-deep water. The water would rush out and our feet would sink in the sand. Other times the water would rush in and rise above our knees.
We held our tight formation for about a mile without saying anything. It must have been a beautiful image to see the three of us, with Heather flowing in her golden earth tones and Candy in her red wrap. There was no one there to record the event and it remains mine alone to savour. While I can’t say that my sadness had melted away, the pain had certainly subsided. As we walked, I grew less and less conscious of the arms around my waist, which at first shot pain into my legs. I became more and more aware of the arms around my waist and the genuine affection that the embrace represented.
The beach had been a good idea, after all. We turned to walk back in the other direction, still arm-in-arm-in arm, breaking occasionally to escape a large wave or to pet a curious dog. Heather started to spill the details of her romance on the way back. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the early details. She was serving wine at a military function. Their eyes met. They fell in love and he got shipped to Iraq. This was a very typical story in Hawaii at the time. In these modern times, he would have been shipped to Afghanistan. The very minor detail that stuck in my memory was that her fiancé was twenty years her junior.
“So why marriage?” I asked, for so many reasons. “Did you consider a longer courtship? He won’t be back here very long before his next deployment.”
“Well, it is love.” She replied.
I knew exactly what she meant. Candy’s face looked quizzical. She obviously didn’t understand.
“So I guess that your life won’t change much, since he’ll be away so often. No?” I asked.
“No. I quit my job. I know he’s younger and not a high-paid colonel or anything, but I decided that it was time for me to be a housewife for once in my life.”
“Oh wow!” I said in astonishment. Part of the astonishment was my inability to think of something more clever to say. “I have to say that there is something to the man/housewife model that works. Svetlana and I have been living like that for five years now. I have to say that I like it for the most part.”
“Well, we got this tiny little house up on a hill near the base. Robyn, it has the most incredible view in the world. You have to bring Svetlana up for a visit when Brad gets back.”
“Oh nooooooooooo! Unless Brad get’s back soon, Svetlana won’t be here. She’s going t back to France for her bi-annual visit.”
I had more to say on that topic, but decided to spare the women my inevitable rant. To keep Svetlana’s European work visa active and alive, she had to return to French soil ever 6 months, whether we could afford to send her or not. The combination of my desire for unfettered access to Europe and Svetlana’s penchant to see her European friends made the trips a necessity. Alas, they were an incredible strain on an already strained budget.
“I’ll come with you!” Candy sang out.
“Oh, of course!” Heather said. “You guys look so great together. How are you feeling, Robyn? Better?”
“Yes, better. Thank you.” I said as Candy squealed and turned a little turn in the sand in delight.
“So we’ll all be together again in about two weeks. Perfect. Now Candy has news for you as well. I’ll let her tell you. I’m going to walk up ahead.”
“This is goodbye then.” Heather said, and she kissed me goodbye once again on the lips.
One doesn’t have to get far up the beach before voices get lost in the ocean sounds. I glanced back a couple of times to see Candy and Heather talking, holding hands and then jumping up and down together. It appeared that Candy’s news had worked wonders on Heather, who glided away more gaily than she had arrived. The ocean had cured her, as it always did. It had given me more relief than I had ever expected and Candy just floated above it all in the way that only angels can do.
I had made it to the grass when the jumping stopped and I sat to rest. Candy stole her way up to me on tiptoes.
“Oh what a perfect day!” She exclaimed, believing that it was.
As we drove back, I turned the car radio to a loud setting to drown out the possibility for conversation. I’d had enough conversation and I’d managed to hide the better part of my misery from Candy. I was concerned that my act would not last much longer. Song after song on the radio taunted me, bringing back and refreshing the pain. The sad songs inevitably reminded me of my impossible situation. The happy songs mocked me. Every song worsened my condition until I was as miserable as I had been when I woke up in the morning. Candy was oblivious to this, as far as I knew.
When we arrived at her home, I kissed her jawbone goodbye and drove myself to Ala Moana Park. I sat there for what seemed forever. The sun hadn’t set, but was about to. I knew I should be hungry. I was too sick to eat. I had no idea where to go. I couldn’t go home and it hurt to even move. For reasons I can’t explain, I kept the radio blasting, fuelling my misery to ever more perilous depths.
I stared out at the ocean. I was looking but not seeing anything. My every thought was directed to the next song on the radio. I wondered how and where it was going to hurt. Unexpectedly, my cell-phone buzzed in my pocket. The tiny screen read ‘Svetlana’. Jesus, the last thing I needed was to be bitched at. I debated whether to answer. I answered.
“Sweetie, come home,” was all she said. Her voice had pleading tone to it.
The words stuck me like a lightning. For all the hype and the angst and the shouting and the general state of commotion, I’d forgotten that she did still love me.
I went home. When I arrived, an apologetic and almost repentant mother-in-law greeted me at the door and commented that I looked good when I got some sun. Svetlana was stirring over a pot of fresh cooked pasta and I could see that she’d already created a Russian salad, one of my favourite dishes. I walked into the kitchen and she took a break from her cooking to give me a hug. A smile brushed across her face.
“Sweetie, we need you at home. OK?” She whispered.
I was speechless.
“Mom promises to behave. Just stay home.”
“OK.” It was all there was to say.
My pain suddenly melted. The sadness dripped away. When I went to the bathroom to freshen up, I noticed a nice new shower curtain, complete with the new plastic smell that filled the room. My universe had been turned upside-down, or rather rightways-back-up by two words, ‘come home’. I ate and drank with a beaming wife and a considerably more polite and courteous mother-in law. We talked about Heather’s wedding and her much younger man and all joked together about the time that they would have.
When the hour of night came, to my surprise, Svetlana followed me to the bedroom. This was a rare occurrence, since she stayed up most evenings long past my bedtime. On this day she came. I find that men and women are very different when it comes to describing love, particularly acts of love. Women are terribly graphic and are demanding for details. Men are quite the opposite and are content to hear little more than, “The deed was done.” In the hopes of satisfying both genders, I’ll say as much as I can in as few words as possible.
That night, Svetlana and I made love for the first time in a very long time. It felt like a first time. We savoured the passion unreservedly deep into the night. When we had exhausted ourselves, we collapsed together into a pool of contentment and satiety and did not stir for many hours after.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Monday, May 31, 2010
Chapter 5 - Heather
“He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” John : Somewhere in the middle.
I woke that morning assured that my life would indeed be eternal. It wasn’t all bad. I don’t have a world-class theory to explain how dreams work, but I’ve found that the most intractable problems of my life have been solved in my sleep. For expedience, let’s accept Freud’s theory on dreams and in this way we can agree that dreams are a form of wish fulfillment. From this, we can deduce that my most coveted wishes are to be able to solve various problems. Since I actually do manage to solve so many problems in a dream state, my life always seems to be much less complicated after I’ve had a good night’s sleep.
Despite the previous night’s drama, my sleeping brain had been carefully mitigating the damage from my infuriating bout with rage. It then set to the task of putting my new literary forays into context. I did not remember the dreams, of course. I rarely do, but I could sense that my brain had been trying to fit Dante and Nietzsche into some sort of a universal context. I could also tell that I had been trying to fit them into the context of my present life.
Dante was a simple fit. The Inferno begins with a semi-involuntary trip though the gates of Hell. After many twists and turns, it ends in the center of hell where the Beast is discovered chewing eternally on the most infamous of the betrayers of man, Brutus, Cassius and Judas. Two Romans and a Jew; I’m sure that is significant, but I don’t know why it’s significant just yet. I did know that my life had been furnished with my own personal beast and it was doing a fine job of chewing on me, though I hadn’t betrayed anyone. It wanted me to betray to justify itself. It taunted and tempted me.
In The Inferno, Virgil and Dante eventually made their way to the center of Hell. They climbed over and down the beast to escape into the next book and the next part of their adventure, Purgatory. My dreams assured me that I would also climb past my beast. I only had to survive two more weeks without incident. Was it possible? If so, I could enter my own purgatory and with luck, repair the damage to my marriage through repentance and the prayer of others.
Nietzsche made less sense and at the same time he was the only thing that made sense while I was awake. The idea of taking a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra door-to-door started to appeal to me. I could talk to people about morality and explain to them that they no longer need to be wicked to one another to be happy. Nietzsche changed everything. He changed everything over a hundred years ago and only a few people today are even slightly aware of the change. I wanted to shout his message from the rooftops.
I suppose that the reason so few people read Nietzsche begins with difficulty in reading his work; even his name is a little hard to pronounce. I’m sure that if he had a name like Smith or Jones he would have doubled his audience. As for the writing itself, I wasn’t certain that I had entirely understood what I read. For me, it was new and exciting and different and as I mentioned before, it changed everything. I’d have to get back to this later, however, as my home situation flushed up to remind me of itself.
Svetlana and the beastly one were still sleeping. All was quiet. It was Friday morning and after last night’s events, I was not eager to have any communication with either woman. I showered and dressed as quickly as possible and slipped out of the apartment without waking anyone; perhaps on this day they pretended to sleep. I strolled downtown toward work, where I decided that I’d finish off my book and take the rest of the day off for “personal use”.
I went through my new beast-inspired morning routine. I greeted my co-workers at HANIC, responded to a few unanswered emails, posted sundry witticisms on facebook and checked up with my online friends. When my routine was complete, I fetched a fresh latte from Starbucks, re-read a few sticky chapters of Nietzsche’s book and called Candy.
“Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!” she answered gleefully.
I arranged to take Candy to lunch. A long lunch would provide some good preparation for an even longer evening away from home. I didn’t know how long I was going to avoid returning home, but I was not eager to go back soon. Candy and I met up at our usual Starbucks. She ordered her usual Candy Special frappuchino and I had my predictably boring latte and a sandwich.
It wasn’t long before Candy noticed my general level of malaise. I don’t have any particularly effective techniques for hiding my emotions and even if I had, Candy would have laid them bare. I explained how my mother-in-law’s extended stay had overwhelmed me and that I wasn’t sure what to do about it. I was not about to reveal that my marriage was anything less than perfect, not this early in Candy’s training, but I could hear her alarm bells go off when I told her about my mother-in-law dilemma. I did not want to end up as one of those all too common advice-giving hypocrites who fail to follow their own advice.
So far in my relationship with Candy, we had actually managed to keep our pledges to see one another every day. So far, I had instructed her as best I could in the etiquette of secular life. I had even done so without casting disparaging remarks about her relationship with Jesus and the faith, which I can assure you, required all the willpower I possess. I had instructed her in the way of conducting various kinds of marriages and relationships and the merits and pitfalls of each brand of relationship. Most of all, however, I had instructed her in the Way of the Perfect Marriage, using my perfect marriage as an example. I explained how Svetlana and I had accomplished this miracle of perfection through love, patience and complete soul-reaching trust.
Candy’s lunch alarm went off in the middle of one of my pontifications and she signalled that she had to return to work. It had not been the extended lunch hour that I had hoped for. It was clear that Candy, for lack of knowledge of many things in secular life had learned the skill of punctuality. All indications in her speech pointed to the fact that she showed up to work on time and never shirked her responsibilities there. I decided I would not teach her otherwise. I bid her goodbye and warned that I would be at Le Baron Noir after work. She said she’d try to join me and after a careful goodbye kiss, she skipped out the door and back to work. I thought about whether to return to my own job. “Fuck work,” I thought, decisively.
Taking along a fresh latte, I wandered into Chinatown. Honolulu’s Chinatown is decidedly small, having seen San Francisco’s and Vancouver’s massive Chinese enclaves. It was also decidedly Hawaiian in many ways. All cultures on the island get a twist of Hawaiian added into them after a time. A Chinese restaurant in Honolulu, for example, might serve dim sum, but have a little mixing bowl for “shoyu” (the Japanese word for Soya sauce) and hot mustard. I wondered if a council of Asian eateries had decided long ago that all Asian foods must be served with shoyu and hot mustard.
The rest of Chinatown was largely made up of food sellers with fresh produce. The ones that interested me in particular, however, were the curio shops filled with various Chinese artefacts like mahjong tiles and ornate little carvings. I’m a sucker for dragons in particular, having been born in the Year of the Dragon. I had created my own quirky superstition where I required myself to have a dragon in every room of my home, office, or any place that I might frequent.
I searched three or four curio shops and came up empty handed. The only dragon I found was one for which I had an exact replica. Luckily, I had successfully squandered the afternoon without doing any work and started toward Le Baron Noir for the first drink of the day. Arriving early had its advantages. Rather than sequestering myself to the back bar as I did when Svetlana was with me, I took the point; the front bar-like table next to the door that overlooked the sidewalk. From the point, I could see who was walking by and who was coming in to the bar.
I was committed to a good evening and decided to start it with good champagne. I ordered a bottle of Taittinger. Tatties is one of my favourites because of its total lack of aftertaste. You can take a sip and forget what you were drinking before you can even set down your glass. This can be remedied, of course, by taking another sip. Soon, your glass in empty and your palette is ready for anything. After a few glasses, your mind is ready for anything. I often refer to it as sorbet for the brain.
No sooner had tipped back my first glass and started to reflect upon the day, than Candy appeared in the doorway. “Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!” she cooed and gave me a kiss hello.
“Bienvenue ma princesse. Champagne?” I asked, gesturing toward the champagne bucket.
“Oh, perfect!” She nodded. “I can certainly use some today!”
I started to pour her a glass from the bounty of glassware that the waitress had left with the serving. “What was your afternoon like? Did you miss me?”
“Oh it was all downhill after lunch.” She lamented. “It seemed that changes needed to be made to every contract in the whole office today. This has never happened before. I didn’t think I would ever be able to leave. I can tell you that I’ll be very busy when I get back to work on Monday.”
“I can’t believe that you work in an office, Candy.” I said earnestly, “Seriously, how it is possible that you don’t make your living as a singer?”
I knew the answer to this question and Candy repeated it faithfully. I suppose I just wanted to hear her answer it again or maybe I just wanted to hear the lyrical caress of her voice. I would have been happy to hear her read the menu, just to listen the magic of her song. I thought of a new question; well an old question really, but one that I like to ask people of all ages and professions.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Candy puzzled. “I think…” She puzzled some more, almost making me laugh with her acutely puzzled expression, but I resisted temptation.
“Well you know that I want to sing… But I would also like to…“ She puzzled a little longer and I swear that if I didn’t know intuitively that this didn’t happen, I would be telling you in all honesty that a light appeared above her head.
“I really need to move away from Hawaii. For my career, I need to be in a bigger city; Los Angeles or New York. I did a little bit of singing in California before, but it didn’t work out and I have wanted to go back ever since.” She sighed with relief after finally inventing her answer.
“I agree with you, my dear. I think that you would be a hit anywhere in the world with that voice of yours. Anywhere, that is, with a large enough audience to hear it.”
“It’s going to be hard to do.” She explained. “I don’t see how I am going to get out of Hawaii and start my career back up in an expensive city. I’m not like Svetlana where I can do whatever I want.”
“Perhaps you could be my ‘femme le matin.’” I joked, unthinkingly.
“What is a ‘femme le matin’?” She asked.
Candy did speak a little French. She could not have helped but to have learned some French from the operas that she sang. She would not know this term, however, because I was its inventor. I pondered whether to give her a real answer and decided that it would be safe.
“Remember the story I told you about the kissing archaeologist?” I began.
Candy nodded.
“One of the character’s in that story was Roxanne, a friend of Svetlana’s who was visiting from France. Do you remember? She was the blonde one with the FM radio voice? Maybe I only mentioned her in passing.”
Candy looked up and to the left for a moment and nodded again, but looked unsure.
“It’s OK if you don’t remember.” I consoled. “When Roxanne was visiting, she adjusted to Hawaii time very quickly. She would wake at 6:00 am with the sun and by the time I was up and showered she would have coffee prepared me, just the way I like it. We would have some light conversation, half in broken English and half in mutilated French and then I would head to work. It was a very pleasant way to start my work days and I honestly wished that her visit could have lasted for months.”
“Wasn’t Svetlana jealous?” Candy asked, knowing the probable answer.
“No, of course she wasn’t; she loved having Roxanne close at hand. They were best friends in France. One day, I remarked that it was nice to have a ‘morning wife’ to see me off to work. Svetlana marvelled at the term and ever since, she and I have shared this inside joke about how I should get myself a ‘femme le matin’. Some days, I honestly think that she might really let me have one, since she has rarely awoken before noon; at least since I’ve known her. I think that she feels a little guilty about that at times.”
Candy and I both laughed. I could see her processing what I had said quite visibly after her initial round of laughter had subsided. I sensed that she was visualizing what might have been like, had she had been in Svetlana’s place. She would not have had to take a job or worry about rent or food or any expense whatsoever. She could have spent every moment of her waking life advancing her musical career. Why, she might have even struck fame by now.
“Jamie!!!” I shouted.
Jamie presented herself in Le Baron Noir’s doorway and was carefully reading the menu specials sign. She looked over, happy to see me, but seemed to turn a little timid when her gaze fell Candy’s way. I beckoned her to the table and she came without hesitation.
“Jamie, Candy; Candy, Jamie! Oh I’m so glad to get you both together at last! Jamie? Champagne?”
Jamie gave a quick nod and I poured her a glass. I topped up Candy’s glass and my own.
“Santé!” I toasted loudly.
“À la votre.” Candy added cleverly with a raised right eyebrow as we all clinked glasses.
To this day, I have no idea how Candy knew to add that extra line to the toast. The waitress came round and I asked for another bottle of Taittinger. Jamie ordered one of the specials and I ordered twin sets of pommes frites, a favourite of passers-by. Jamie and Candy exchanged pleasantries while I retired to the facilities to talk to a man about a dog. I returned to find the table set perfectly, with arranged napkins and the knives and forks arranged in perfect symmetry. Jamie was putting the last knife in place as I sat.
“So how is your job going, James?” I asked.
“Oh, not so good.” She said, shaking her head a little. “The company I work for is so fucking disorganized that I can’t believe that they are still in business.”
“Oh no! That must be driving you mental! How are you dealing with it?”
“Well I’ve been putting out resumes on monster.com. I know that I can’t stay there much longer. It might not even matter, since I think they will lose all of their contracts.” She added.
I couldn’t imagine any company being organized enough for Jamie. Organizations, by definition, should be organized and anyone in any company that has Jamie on staff should promote her to the position of Chief Organization Officer immediately. She would organize the shit out of things.
I did check to see what was going on with Jamie’s employers. They were defence contractors and I knew a lot of people in the defence department, having done defence contracting in the pre-9/11 days; for some reason, Canadians could no longer be trusted after those attacks. Regardless, I learned that her company was indeed disorganized (possibly due to a shortage of Canadians) and truly was about to lose some very large military contracts. Armed with this information, I started priming the pump at HANIC for them to hire some new computer talent. They were not in the market for anyone with Jamie’s skills at the time, but I suspected that they might have need of someone like her one day soon.
Champagne and conversation flowed and as the night went on more friends arrived. Amazon, my tall redhead friend swept in and after a set of introductions, breezed into the growing crowd. Australian Jamie arrived too and sat with us for a while. Once Jamie had carefully eaten her entrée, I suggested that we break up our table and mingle our way the crowd around the bar. I had friends all over the Baron and was starting to feel confined, still sitting at the point.
Despite not being a First Friday, many of Honolulu’s who’s who were in attendance. I greeted each in turn, but the most interesting conversation of the evening was the one with Heather. Heather was a tall, attractive woman approaching 40. She had a rounded face, dimpled smile and curly sandy-blonde hair that fell past her shoulders. She was also a fellow Canadian and worked for one of the liquor distribution companies in town. I would see here and there and while we had a great rapport, I was thinking that I had not seen quite enough of her, especially considering our mutual heritage.
“What are you doing now?” I asked. “I haven’t seen you in an age!”
Heather showed me her hand, upon which was set a rather large diamond ring. “I’m getting married! Can you believe it? Next month!”
Despite the marriage news, everything about Heather was flirtatious. She walked, talked, nodded and blinked in a flirtatious manner. She was gifted. I expect that her profession gave her the means to practice her craft to perfection. When she kissed hello or goodbye, she would give you that little extra squeeze on the arm and the kiss would linger just that fraction of a second longer than it needed. It made you feel as though she would have rather given you a real kiss. When she looked at you, she looked at all of you. In conversation, if she would use physical contact to emphasize her every point, a touch here, a squeeze there. I didn’t smoke, but after a conversation with her, I felt like I needed to.
We chatted about her upcoming marriage plans. Her husband was a US Marine and would be spending months on end in Iraq or Afghanistan. She had left her job to become a kept woman and expressed how ‘bored’ she would be while he was away. Candy, both Jamie’s and a few of my other friends bobbed in and out of the conversation, but in an uncharacteristic fashion, Candy lingered trough to the end.
“We MUST spend more time together.” She implored, twirling a ringlet of hair in her finger.
“I agree. I don’t know how it is that we haven’t.” I replied. “I think that whenever I run into you, it is in a professional setting and I never get to really talk to you at length. Now I’m sorry that it has taken so long to spend any real time together.”
“How could you ignore such a pretty girl?” Candy interrupted.
“Well here is what you must do.” Heather said, giving my hand a squeeze. “My wedding is coming up in a few weeks and I’ll get you the invitations. Also, you guys should come and see my new place up on the North Shore. It’s very small, but the view is incredible!”
“We will.” I assured her, glancing quickly toward Candy. “But there is something I should tell you. I’m having just an awful time with my mother-in-law. She’s been visiting us for four weeks now and it is not good. I’m at the end of my sanity. I’m literally afraid to go home.”
“Come to Bellow’s Beach tomorrow morning. A walk on the beach will fix everything. You’ll see.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” I said.
Candy lit up with an inquisitive look, clearly wondering if the invitation extended to her as well.
Heather looked at me, eyes patient and glowing. “Look, Robyn. You have this amazing gift for bringing beautiful women together. You will be fine. You will be better than fine. Come to the beach with me tomorrow.”
A successful flirtation is made up of three parts. The first part is the compliment. This part gives acknowledgement to the other person that sexual desire exists. The compliment can be straightforward and sincere… even truthful, or as subtle as a casual glance across the room. The compliment is only successful if the flirtee truly understands and accepts the compliment. The second part of the flirtation is the excuse. When the flirtee accepts the compliment, they must be supplied with a reason why the flirtation is limited to a flirtation. A common practice for experienced flirts is to use the phrase, “If only…” Examples might include, “If only I wasn’t married,” or “If only you had more teeth.” The last and most important part of the flirtation is in its failure to lead to sexual congress. If a flirtation leads to anything sexual, then it was never a flirtation; it was a seduction.
Heather was a master flirt. She was complimentary and charming and invited me into all corners of her life while simultaneously showing off her brand new engagement ring. There were no contrivances. She flirted as naturally as she spoke. I was alarmed at having been so wonderfully, so terribly out-flirted this evening.
With Heather’s strange compliment still on my mind, I bid my ‘beautiful’ friends a good evening, and complimented them with a series of goodbye kisses. I saved my last goodbye kiss for Candy and asked if she’d join me at the beach the next morning. She was delighted with the offer and accepted.
When I arrived home, a constant flow of Macedonian and cigarette smoke still poured from the lanai. I skipped through it and into the bedroom as quickly as I could. I was undressed, in bed and asleep before either of them had a chance to speak to me. The truce had lasted another day.
As I slept, I dreamt of something foreboding. I dreamt that something was coming for me; something huge. I knew that this was not going to be a dream that would go unresolved.
I woke that morning assured that my life would indeed be eternal. It wasn’t all bad. I don’t have a world-class theory to explain how dreams work, but I’ve found that the most intractable problems of my life have been solved in my sleep. For expedience, let’s accept Freud’s theory on dreams and in this way we can agree that dreams are a form of wish fulfillment. From this, we can deduce that my most coveted wishes are to be able to solve various problems. Since I actually do manage to solve so many problems in a dream state, my life always seems to be much less complicated after I’ve had a good night’s sleep.
Despite the previous night’s drama, my sleeping brain had been carefully mitigating the damage from my infuriating bout with rage. It then set to the task of putting my new literary forays into context. I did not remember the dreams, of course. I rarely do, but I could sense that my brain had been trying to fit Dante and Nietzsche into some sort of a universal context. I could also tell that I had been trying to fit them into the context of my present life.
Dante was a simple fit. The Inferno begins with a semi-involuntary trip though the gates of Hell. After many twists and turns, it ends in the center of hell where the Beast is discovered chewing eternally on the most infamous of the betrayers of man, Brutus, Cassius and Judas. Two Romans and a Jew; I’m sure that is significant, but I don’t know why it’s significant just yet. I did know that my life had been furnished with my own personal beast and it was doing a fine job of chewing on me, though I hadn’t betrayed anyone. It wanted me to betray to justify itself. It taunted and tempted me.
In The Inferno, Virgil and Dante eventually made their way to the center of Hell. They climbed over and down the beast to escape into the next book and the next part of their adventure, Purgatory. My dreams assured me that I would also climb past my beast. I only had to survive two more weeks without incident. Was it possible? If so, I could enter my own purgatory and with luck, repair the damage to my marriage through repentance and the prayer of others.
Nietzsche made less sense and at the same time he was the only thing that made sense while I was awake. The idea of taking a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra door-to-door started to appeal to me. I could talk to people about morality and explain to them that they no longer need to be wicked to one another to be happy. Nietzsche changed everything. He changed everything over a hundred years ago and only a few people today are even slightly aware of the change. I wanted to shout his message from the rooftops.
I suppose that the reason so few people read Nietzsche begins with difficulty in reading his work; even his name is a little hard to pronounce. I’m sure that if he had a name like Smith or Jones he would have doubled his audience. As for the writing itself, I wasn’t certain that I had entirely understood what I read. For me, it was new and exciting and different and as I mentioned before, it changed everything. I’d have to get back to this later, however, as my home situation flushed up to remind me of itself.
Svetlana and the beastly one were still sleeping. All was quiet. It was Friday morning and after last night’s events, I was not eager to have any communication with either woman. I showered and dressed as quickly as possible and slipped out of the apartment without waking anyone; perhaps on this day they pretended to sleep. I strolled downtown toward work, where I decided that I’d finish off my book and take the rest of the day off for “personal use”.
I went through my new beast-inspired morning routine. I greeted my co-workers at HANIC, responded to a few unanswered emails, posted sundry witticisms on facebook and checked up with my online friends. When my routine was complete, I fetched a fresh latte from Starbucks, re-read a few sticky chapters of Nietzsche’s book and called Candy.
“Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!” she answered gleefully.
I arranged to take Candy to lunch. A long lunch would provide some good preparation for an even longer evening away from home. I didn’t know how long I was going to avoid returning home, but I was not eager to go back soon. Candy and I met up at our usual Starbucks. She ordered her usual Candy Special frappuchino and I had my predictably boring latte and a sandwich.
It wasn’t long before Candy noticed my general level of malaise. I don’t have any particularly effective techniques for hiding my emotions and even if I had, Candy would have laid them bare. I explained how my mother-in-law’s extended stay had overwhelmed me and that I wasn’t sure what to do about it. I was not about to reveal that my marriage was anything less than perfect, not this early in Candy’s training, but I could hear her alarm bells go off when I told her about my mother-in-law dilemma. I did not want to end up as one of those all too common advice-giving hypocrites who fail to follow their own advice.
So far in my relationship with Candy, we had actually managed to keep our pledges to see one another every day. So far, I had instructed her as best I could in the etiquette of secular life. I had even done so without casting disparaging remarks about her relationship with Jesus and the faith, which I can assure you, required all the willpower I possess. I had instructed her in the way of conducting various kinds of marriages and relationships and the merits and pitfalls of each brand of relationship. Most of all, however, I had instructed her in the Way of the Perfect Marriage, using my perfect marriage as an example. I explained how Svetlana and I had accomplished this miracle of perfection through love, patience and complete soul-reaching trust.
Candy’s lunch alarm went off in the middle of one of my pontifications and she signalled that she had to return to work. It had not been the extended lunch hour that I had hoped for. It was clear that Candy, for lack of knowledge of many things in secular life had learned the skill of punctuality. All indications in her speech pointed to the fact that she showed up to work on time and never shirked her responsibilities there. I decided I would not teach her otherwise. I bid her goodbye and warned that I would be at Le Baron Noir after work. She said she’d try to join me and after a careful goodbye kiss, she skipped out the door and back to work. I thought about whether to return to my own job. “Fuck work,” I thought, decisively.
Taking along a fresh latte, I wandered into Chinatown. Honolulu’s Chinatown is decidedly small, having seen San Francisco’s and Vancouver’s massive Chinese enclaves. It was also decidedly Hawaiian in many ways. All cultures on the island get a twist of Hawaiian added into them after a time. A Chinese restaurant in Honolulu, for example, might serve dim sum, but have a little mixing bowl for “shoyu” (the Japanese word for Soya sauce) and hot mustard. I wondered if a council of Asian eateries had decided long ago that all Asian foods must be served with shoyu and hot mustard.
The rest of Chinatown was largely made up of food sellers with fresh produce. The ones that interested me in particular, however, were the curio shops filled with various Chinese artefacts like mahjong tiles and ornate little carvings. I’m a sucker for dragons in particular, having been born in the Year of the Dragon. I had created my own quirky superstition where I required myself to have a dragon in every room of my home, office, or any place that I might frequent.
I searched three or four curio shops and came up empty handed. The only dragon I found was one for which I had an exact replica. Luckily, I had successfully squandered the afternoon without doing any work and started toward Le Baron Noir for the first drink of the day. Arriving early had its advantages. Rather than sequestering myself to the back bar as I did when Svetlana was with me, I took the point; the front bar-like table next to the door that overlooked the sidewalk. From the point, I could see who was walking by and who was coming in to the bar.
I was committed to a good evening and decided to start it with good champagne. I ordered a bottle of Taittinger. Tatties is one of my favourites because of its total lack of aftertaste. You can take a sip and forget what you were drinking before you can even set down your glass. This can be remedied, of course, by taking another sip. Soon, your glass in empty and your palette is ready for anything. After a few glasses, your mind is ready for anything. I often refer to it as sorbet for the brain.
No sooner had tipped back my first glass and started to reflect upon the day, than Candy appeared in the doorway. “Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!” she cooed and gave me a kiss hello.
“Bienvenue ma princesse. Champagne?” I asked, gesturing toward the champagne bucket.
“Oh, perfect!” She nodded. “I can certainly use some today!”
I started to pour her a glass from the bounty of glassware that the waitress had left with the serving. “What was your afternoon like? Did you miss me?”
“Oh it was all downhill after lunch.” She lamented. “It seemed that changes needed to be made to every contract in the whole office today. This has never happened before. I didn’t think I would ever be able to leave. I can tell you that I’ll be very busy when I get back to work on Monday.”
“I can’t believe that you work in an office, Candy.” I said earnestly, “Seriously, how it is possible that you don’t make your living as a singer?”
I knew the answer to this question and Candy repeated it faithfully. I suppose I just wanted to hear her answer it again or maybe I just wanted to hear the lyrical caress of her voice. I would have been happy to hear her read the menu, just to listen the magic of her song. I thought of a new question; well an old question really, but one that I like to ask people of all ages and professions.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Candy puzzled. “I think…” She puzzled some more, almost making me laugh with her acutely puzzled expression, but I resisted temptation.
“Well you know that I want to sing… But I would also like to…“ She puzzled a little longer and I swear that if I didn’t know intuitively that this didn’t happen, I would be telling you in all honesty that a light appeared above her head.
“I really need to move away from Hawaii. For my career, I need to be in a bigger city; Los Angeles or New York. I did a little bit of singing in California before, but it didn’t work out and I have wanted to go back ever since.” She sighed with relief after finally inventing her answer.
“I agree with you, my dear. I think that you would be a hit anywhere in the world with that voice of yours. Anywhere, that is, with a large enough audience to hear it.”
“It’s going to be hard to do.” She explained. “I don’t see how I am going to get out of Hawaii and start my career back up in an expensive city. I’m not like Svetlana where I can do whatever I want.”
“Perhaps you could be my ‘femme le matin.’” I joked, unthinkingly.
“What is a ‘femme le matin’?” She asked.
Candy did speak a little French. She could not have helped but to have learned some French from the operas that she sang. She would not know this term, however, because I was its inventor. I pondered whether to give her a real answer and decided that it would be safe.
“Remember the story I told you about the kissing archaeologist?” I began.
Candy nodded.
“One of the character’s in that story was Roxanne, a friend of Svetlana’s who was visiting from France. Do you remember? She was the blonde one with the FM radio voice? Maybe I only mentioned her in passing.”
Candy looked up and to the left for a moment and nodded again, but looked unsure.
“It’s OK if you don’t remember.” I consoled. “When Roxanne was visiting, she adjusted to Hawaii time very quickly. She would wake at 6:00 am with the sun and by the time I was up and showered she would have coffee prepared me, just the way I like it. We would have some light conversation, half in broken English and half in mutilated French and then I would head to work. It was a very pleasant way to start my work days and I honestly wished that her visit could have lasted for months.”
“Wasn’t Svetlana jealous?” Candy asked, knowing the probable answer.
“No, of course she wasn’t; she loved having Roxanne close at hand. They were best friends in France. One day, I remarked that it was nice to have a ‘morning wife’ to see me off to work. Svetlana marvelled at the term and ever since, she and I have shared this inside joke about how I should get myself a ‘femme le matin’. Some days, I honestly think that she might really let me have one, since she has rarely awoken before noon; at least since I’ve known her. I think that she feels a little guilty about that at times.”
Candy and I both laughed. I could see her processing what I had said quite visibly after her initial round of laughter had subsided. I sensed that she was visualizing what might have been like, had she had been in Svetlana’s place. She would not have had to take a job or worry about rent or food or any expense whatsoever. She could have spent every moment of her waking life advancing her musical career. Why, she might have even struck fame by now.
“Jamie!!!” I shouted.
Jamie presented herself in Le Baron Noir’s doorway and was carefully reading the menu specials sign. She looked over, happy to see me, but seemed to turn a little timid when her gaze fell Candy’s way. I beckoned her to the table and she came without hesitation.
“Jamie, Candy; Candy, Jamie! Oh I’m so glad to get you both together at last! Jamie? Champagne?”
Jamie gave a quick nod and I poured her a glass. I topped up Candy’s glass and my own.
“Santé!” I toasted loudly.
“À la votre.” Candy added cleverly with a raised right eyebrow as we all clinked glasses.
To this day, I have no idea how Candy knew to add that extra line to the toast. The waitress came round and I asked for another bottle of Taittinger. Jamie ordered one of the specials and I ordered twin sets of pommes frites, a favourite of passers-by. Jamie and Candy exchanged pleasantries while I retired to the facilities to talk to a man about a dog. I returned to find the table set perfectly, with arranged napkins and the knives and forks arranged in perfect symmetry. Jamie was putting the last knife in place as I sat.
“So how is your job going, James?” I asked.
“Oh, not so good.” She said, shaking her head a little. “The company I work for is so fucking disorganized that I can’t believe that they are still in business.”
“Oh no! That must be driving you mental! How are you dealing with it?”
“Well I’ve been putting out resumes on monster.com. I know that I can’t stay there much longer. It might not even matter, since I think they will lose all of their contracts.” She added.
I couldn’t imagine any company being organized enough for Jamie. Organizations, by definition, should be organized and anyone in any company that has Jamie on staff should promote her to the position of Chief Organization Officer immediately. She would organize the shit out of things.
I did check to see what was going on with Jamie’s employers. They were defence contractors and I knew a lot of people in the defence department, having done defence contracting in the pre-9/11 days; for some reason, Canadians could no longer be trusted after those attacks. Regardless, I learned that her company was indeed disorganized (possibly due to a shortage of Canadians) and truly was about to lose some very large military contracts. Armed with this information, I started priming the pump at HANIC for them to hire some new computer talent. They were not in the market for anyone with Jamie’s skills at the time, but I suspected that they might have need of someone like her one day soon.
Champagne and conversation flowed and as the night went on more friends arrived. Amazon, my tall redhead friend swept in and after a set of introductions, breezed into the growing crowd. Australian Jamie arrived too and sat with us for a while. Once Jamie had carefully eaten her entrée, I suggested that we break up our table and mingle our way the crowd around the bar. I had friends all over the Baron and was starting to feel confined, still sitting at the point.
Despite not being a First Friday, many of Honolulu’s who’s who were in attendance. I greeted each in turn, but the most interesting conversation of the evening was the one with Heather. Heather was a tall, attractive woman approaching 40. She had a rounded face, dimpled smile and curly sandy-blonde hair that fell past her shoulders. She was also a fellow Canadian and worked for one of the liquor distribution companies in town. I would see here and there and while we had a great rapport, I was thinking that I had not seen quite enough of her, especially considering our mutual heritage.
“What are you doing now?” I asked. “I haven’t seen you in an age!”
Heather showed me her hand, upon which was set a rather large diamond ring. “I’m getting married! Can you believe it? Next month!”
Despite the marriage news, everything about Heather was flirtatious. She walked, talked, nodded and blinked in a flirtatious manner. She was gifted. I expect that her profession gave her the means to practice her craft to perfection. When she kissed hello or goodbye, she would give you that little extra squeeze on the arm and the kiss would linger just that fraction of a second longer than it needed. It made you feel as though she would have rather given you a real kiss. When she looked at you, she looked at all of you. In conversation, if she would use physical contact to emphasize her every point, a touch here, a squeeze there. I didn’t smoke, but after a conversation with her, I felt like I needed to.
We chatted about her upcoming marriage plans. Her husband was a US Marine and would be spending months on end in Iraq or Afghanistan. She had left her job to become a kept woman and expressed how ‘bored’ she would be while he was away. Candy, both Jamie’s and a few of my other friends bobbed in and out of the conversation, but in an uncharacteristic fashion, Candy lingered trough to the end.
“We MUST spend more time together.” She implored, twirling a ringlet of hair in her finger.
“I agree. I don’t know how it is that we haven’t.” I replied. “I think that whenever I run into you, it is in a professional setting and I never get to really talk to you at length. Now I’m sorry that it has taken so long to spend any real time together.”
“How could you ignore such a pretty girl?” Candy interrupted.
“Well here is what you must do.” Heather said, giving my hand a squeeze. “My wedding is coming up in a few weeks and I’ll get you the invitations. Also, you guys should come and see my new place up on the North Shore. It’s very small, but the view is incredible!”
“We will.” I assured her, glancing quickly toward Candy. “But there is something I should tell you. I’m having just an awful time with my mother-in-law. She’s been visiting us for four weeks now and it is not good. I’m at the end of my sanity. I’m literally afraid to go home.”
“Come to Bellow’s Beach tomorrow morning. A walk on the beach will fix everything. You’ll see.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” I said.
Candy lit up with an inquisitive look, clearly wondering if the invitation extended to her as well.
Heather looked at me, eyes patient and glowing. “Look, Robyn. You have this amazing gift for bringing beautiful women together. You will be fine. You will be better than fine. Come to the beach with me tomorrow.”
A successful flirtation is made up of three parts. The first part is the compliment. This part gives acknowledgement to the other person that sexual desire exists. The compliment can be straightforward and sincere… even truthful, or as subtle as a casual glance across the room. The compliment is only successful if the flirtee truly understands and accepts the compliment. The second part of the flirtation is the excuse. When the flirtee accepts the compliment, they must be supplied with a reason why the flirtation is limited to a flirtation. A common practice for experienced flirts is to use the phrase, “If only…” Examples might include, “If only I wasn’t married,” or “If only you had more teeth.” The last and most important part of the flirtation is in its failure to lead to sexual congress. If a flirtation leads to anything sexual, then it was never a flirtation; it was a seduction.
Heather was a master flirt. She was complimentary and charming and invited me into all corners of her life while simultaneously showing off her brand new engagement ring. There were no contrivances. She flirted as naturally as she spoke. I was alarmed at having been so wonderfully, so terribly out-flirted this evening.
With Heather’s strange compliment still on my mind, I bid my ‘beautiful’ friends a good evening, and complimented them with a series of goodbye kisses. I saved my last goodbye kiss for Candy and asked if she’d join me at the beach the next morning. She was delighted with the offer and accepted.
When I arrived home, a constant flow of Macedonian and cigarette smoke still poured from the lanai. I skipped through it and into the bedroom as quickly as I could. I was undressed, in bed and asleep before either of them had a chance to speak to me. The truce had lasted another day.
As I slept, I dreamt of something foreboding. I dreamt that something was coming for me; something huge. I knew that this was not going to be a dream that would go unresolved.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Chapter 4 - Apprenticeship
Among the crimes against humanity committed by early Christians, neither crusade nor inquisition compares to moving the Sabbath to a Sunday. This was perhaps the most egregious and long lasting of all the crimes. The move to Sunday was undoubtedly to mark the resurrection, but the result was to create one of the most dreaded features of the modern day world; the Monday.
My professional career has been good to me, having afforded me the ability to avoid Mondays from time to time. I’ve been able to take Mondays slowly and work only part of the day. Some Mondays, I could miss out on altogether. This Monday was completely in-my-face unavoidable. Svetlana would rarely awaken on a weekday before I was long at work. I would give her several kisses before I’d leave… knowing somehow that she could sense them. She would often remark later in the day that she awoke, feeling kissed. Once I left the bedroom, however, Monday was all over me like bad news.
The beast laid in the living room, asleep on her back, limbs splayed and lightly snoring. She was undoubtedly dreaming of new torments to spring upon me in the days and weeks to come. I tiptoed past her, grabbing a couple of books from the shelf without looking. Carefully, I stole toward the door and affected my escape. Monday or not, there would be no mother-in-law for me on this day if I could help it.
At the time, I worked for the Hawaiian National Insurance Company or HANIC as they called themselves. I never really considered myself a full HANICan, since I was first hired as a contractor and only negotiated a job-type job to keep Svetlana in the country. They paid me pretty well, especially by Hawaiian standards but they knew, I knew and they knew that I knew that they had me by the short hairs. To quit or take another job would mean the end of my time in Hawaii, the end of my time in the United States, and possibly the end of my marriage; all on the same day. It was the first time in my life that I had ever felt enslaved.
I made up for the feelings of slavery by showing up a little late for work and leaving a little early. Sometimes I would skip a day. Often I’d work from home. Whatever I did, however, I felt that HANIC always got its money’s worth. I had already saved the company millions with my software and every month I put them in a better position to understand their own business and save even more. I don’t think that it would be merciful to explain the kind of software that I wrote for them since the description might put an average reader fast to sleep or alternatively drive them mad. Let me just be clear that if you are turned on by insurance data, a description of my software would exceed your wildest fantasies.
This would not be a day for new software. This was going to be a day for avoiding my mother-in-law and doing any activity to avoid thinking about how she would be infesting my apartment for another three weeks. This would be a day for keeping my sanity and preventing her destroying my marriage and… I was already thinking about her. Quickly, I glanced down at the books that I randomly pulled from the shelves. The first was “A Handbook for Perl.” Dammit! I would not be programming today. The other was Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” Double dammit! I didn’t think I was ready for this book.
I was still struggling through philosophy books from earlier eras and really hadn’t made any sense of them. I had read a lot about the history of philosophy, but in terms of actually reading the great works themselves, I hadn’t made it anywhere near as far as Nietzsche on the philosophical timeline. Fate put this book in my hand, however, so it would be my next book regardless. I decided that I could always read it again later if the message completely was lost on me. Between Nietzsche and my Internet life, I was armed with enough planned escapism to endure a full and miserable day without torment.
I arrived at HANIC at 8am sharp, alarming many of my co-workers with the fear that there might be a staff meeting or some other important thing about to happen that would require my attendance so early in the morning. I assured a few HANICans that it was OK and that they could relax. I was only there at this ungodly hour because of my mother-in-law. I added that they would be seeing a lot of me over the next three weeks. Most understood completely and offered their sincere sympathies.
My desk was always a clutter of two or three computers, each with a separate monitor and keyboard. The lesser used computer was for creating software and the favoured computer was set up for talking about the software I wanted to create. As an employee, it took about 5 to 10 times as much time to discuss the software I wanted to create than it did to actually create it. As a contractor, the ratio was reversed. I loathed being an employee with every cell in my body. We talked endlessly about things that could seemingly never be accomplished for lack of more talking.
Meeting after meeting was scheduled to discuss every small act of anticipated creation. After a time, meetings for me were measured solely by the quality of the beverages and snacks. I never cared for the content, because nothing was ever decided. On the rare occasions when a decision was handed down, however, there was little incentive to complete it. Like my marriage and my living situation and everything else in my life, work was an inescapable trap.
Luckily there were no meetings today and I headed straight into my Internet life. I had a rich and wondrous Internet life with a complete cast of characters to keep me amused for hours on end if need be. To begin, I had three email accounts; Gmail for private matters, my consulting company mail for my corporate dealings and another account for a new company that I was dreaming to start, should I ever shake off the fetters of slavery. Apart from email, I also had many chat programs. There was MSN for good friends, ICQ for random chat, Yahoo for old friends that hadn’t updated their lives, Skype for the webcam junkies and my little used Google chat, which I used only to talk to a single friend from the U.S. military. Lastly, I decided that Monday would be a great day to try out a new technology; I would create my own facebook page.
facebook, I decided, was going to be important. It wasn’t the mess that classmates.com or MySpace had become. About a year earlier I tried to be cool by setting up a MySpace page, wanting to see what all the fuss was about. For all I know, the page might even still be out there somewhere. I immediately started to receive friend requests and email from young women between 18 and 20. Most of them had web cams and would solicit a fee. Great; MySpace was a cyber-brothel. “That’s great for the kids,” I thought.
Armed with my morning coffee, I decided to ignore my various flashing and beeping chat programs and start straightaway into my facebook page. Immediately, I learned that unlike MySpace, there was no way to screw up the page with poorly embedded HTML features. Every other friend’s page was easy to read as a result. Some might call the homogenous pages boring, but when you consider how terrible MySpace had become, it was a bit of a blessing. I put in my name and my birthday and my marital status. Before an hour was done, I had my favourite books, TV shows, movies, quotes, hobbies and an assortment of trivia all loaded up. Lastly, I acknowledged a couple of friend requests, one from Jamie and the other from Svetlana. It was a good start.
By the time I was a full facebook member, it was approaching 10am. Over in Central Europe it would be 10pm. I had to get to my chat programs before my European friends were all asleep. My Internet chatting life had grown quite complex over the years. I started with a UNIX protocol called “talk” back in the early 90’s and met my first Internet girlfriend that way, an English professor from Australia. A relationship ensued and nearly a marriage. There was some travel, but ultimately we found that we got along better in the Internet than in person. I only mention this to point out that chatting can be a life-changing endeavour. The English professor instilled in me a passion for literature and philosophy that I have held to this day.
In these modern times, I had a created a sort of triage for chat requests. I would meet new people on ICQ through random chat. They would always find me, often hailing from various non-English speaking countries and the chatter would most usually want to practice using English. Once I had chatted to someone on ICQ long enough and considered them friends, I would graduate them to MSN or Skype. These programs are more robust, have more features and work well with microphones or webcams. Even Svetlana and I chatted for months on end in our early courtship when we were separated by two oceans.
The most important of my chat buddies was Erica, a high-ranking civil servant from Finland. I had known Erica for 2 years or so and she had finally taken up the idea of visiting me in Hawaii. I thought that Svetlana might make good use of her company and I looked forward to her upcoming visit with alacrity. Svetlana had of course, also agreed to the visit and though she lacked my enthusiasm, she knew that accompanying a tourist around the islands would give her significant opportunities for taking new photographs. Svetlana, with five years of encouragement, had become an excellent photographer.
Sure enough, Erica was online and waiting for me to respond. “Robyn!” She had already typed. “I’m just about to buy my tickets, but I need to ask you something. Are you there?”
“Oh! Hi there, gorgeous.” I chirped. “What is it? Have you settled on dates?”
“Yes I have; six weeks from today exactly. I must ask you a favour, however.”
“Whatever you like, my dear. What is it?”
Hesitant, she asked, “Is it all right if I bring my daughter with me? She would also like to see the islands.”
I wasn’t entirely pleased to hear this request. The conversations that took place in my home were generally not geared toward children. Nothing in my home was geared toward children. I had an emergency bucket of Lego, in case of a visiting child were to spend an afternoon, but three weeks?
“How old is she?” I asked with an air of shyness.
“21.”
“Haha. I don’t see that it will be a problem then. Does she like Lego?”
Erica laughed and was clearly relieved that I agreed to her request. In turn, I related the latest twists and turns of my mother-in-law saga to her. She was sympathetic enough, though I don’t know if I was able to fully articulate the gravity of my discomfort through the MSN chat program. There are only so many emoticons one can use when one types. I figured that there would be more stories to tell and decided to spare Erica the discomfort of my emotions until I had more news. It was time for excitement for the both of us. Soon, Erica would be adding herself to a long list of Internet friends that would graduate to an “in real life” friend before the next month was over.
I spent a little more time catching up with various other chat buddies in London, Shanghai, Vienna, Moscow, Istanbul, New Delhi and Rio de Janeiro. Also, I checked in with Jamie, my sister and brother and a couple of other local friends from Oahu. Once I was apprised of the situation locally and from around the world, thoughts of Candy popped into my head.
Candy wasn’t in my Internet universe yet. I called. Voicemail; Candy’s melodious voice message greeted me and assured that she would call me back. I’ve had experience with single, beautiful women and answering machines from both sides of the line. They tend to get a very high call volume and it is only the privileged few that get their calls answered. Even fewer get their calls returned. Moments later my phone rang. It was Candy! “Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!” she sang.
It turned out that Candy worked only about a block from my office. I invited her for lunch and she eagerly accepted. We agreed to meet at one of the three Starbucks downtown, the one closest to her office. I arrived before Candy, and ordered a coffee and a sandwich. I thought to order Candy’s drink too. “I’d like a grande mocha frappuccino in a venti…” I started to explain.
“Oh a Candy special!” The barista interrupted. “We have already made it. Candy phoned ahead.”
Without hesitation, she added the concoction to my tab. I paid and carried everything off to a table to wait. While I waited I thought it curious that it was pre-arranged for me to pay. I started to recall that I had paid for everything that Candy had touched or wanted since I met her. Oh well, I was going to be bankrupt in a few months. What did it matter?
I didn’t get to think for long, before Candy arrived! She was larger than life. She work a clingy print dress and what I can only describe as too much makeup. True to her character, everyone in the coffee shop made a note of her entrance. I confess that I felt a small amount of pride that I would be the one to entertain her. I reminded myself that I wasn’t here to entertain her. She was my gift from the gods. It was my job to train her.
“Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!” She sang loudly enough that the whole room could hear.
I got up to give her the standard Hawaiian aloha greeting, a weak hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Hey, gorgeous!” I chirped!
“How great it is that we work so close? We can meet here every day!”
The words, “every day” weighed heavily upon me for a second. I looked up to consider a response. “Yeah, what are the chances?” was all I could come up with.
“It’s fate!” She assured me and I nodded in agreement.
“I’ve been working downtown for 5 years now, so I have a few different girlfriends that I meet for lunch. Hopefully, you’ll get a chance to meet some of them. I’m sure they will love you.”
“That is so weird!” She said. “Have you always been in an open relationship?”
I bristled. “An open what?”
“How long have you been in an open marriage?” She asked again.
The training had officially begun. “I’m not in an open marriage.” I explained. “I told you the story about how I met Svetlana, didn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“Well when I met her, I had no less than about 50 women friends with whom I’m in regular contact. Some are local and even work downtown; some live on the mainland, some are from back home in Canada and some are out there on the Internet. A few, I’ve attempted to have relationships with. A few, I’ve been intimate with, but since my wedding day, I have not been intimate with any of them, except of course with my wife.”
“But you said you have ‘girlfriends’.” She reminded me.
“Oh!” I laughed. “I have so many women in my life that it was just too complicated to for me to make a distinction between an ex-girlfriend, a casual woman friend or an ex-lover. I decided to make the word ‘wife’ the demarcation line for any assumptions about my lifestyle. My girlfriends are friends who are women or girls, such as you are, and my wife… is my wife. It’s a very simple system and it seems to mitigate more suspicion than you might think it would create.”
“Oh that makes perfect sense to me now.” She agreed, smiling.
“There’s more.” I added. “You might have found it a little strange that I talked to you in the first place or was able to be as friendly as I was in the presence of my wife.”
I related a story to Candy about an outing early in my marriage. Svetlana and I went out to a club in Waikiki for a friend’s birthday party. He had rented a hotel rooftop bar for the soiree and all the best people were going to be there. Svetlana and I were entertaining one of her girlfriends who had come from Paris, for a few weeks. I remarked how much more pleasant her visit was when compared to that of my mother in law. Svetlana’s friend, Roxanne was a petite gorgeous blonde in her early 30’s. She spoke such a soft and perfect French that with your eyes closed, you’d swear that she was a jazz DJ on late night FM radio.
We had also invited along my business partner at the time, Lisbeth. Lisbeth was a broad shouldered, stern looking brunette woman in her late 30’s. I suppose that one could say she was attractive, but her viciousness in business matters precluded any thoughts I might have had about the possibility that she was a woman at all. The three women and I shared cocktails and a small bathroom, clamouring for various portions and lotions designed to make us each look and smell beautiful.
When we arrived at the party we found it to be a grand affair. There was food, music and wine flowing generously. Everyone was particularly well dressed by Hawaiian standards, both men and women. The women and I took a found a couch and a pair of chaise lounges positioned around a coffee table. We occupied it and quickly filled it with drinks and it wasn’t long before we were joined by another woman who introduced herself as Beth.
She was a short woman with a short name and no one in our group knew her. Beth must have decided that we were the people to get to know at this party and soon she was one of us. She swapped stories and explaining that she was an archaeologist, slipping in that we should all go to her place for an after-party when this one was over. If I wasn’t mistaken, she was flirting with each member of our group individually and the whole group collectively.
While on a sortie for a look around for party celebrities and fill my glass of champagne, Beth pulled up beside me in the line and put her arm around my waist. I offered to buy her a drink. She accepted and quite unexpectedly kissed me. It was not a Hawaiian aloha kiss at all, but rather a full open sensual full-of-meaning-and-innuendo kiss. I was taken aback and didn’t know what to do. So far, the night had been so perfect. I decided to accept the kiss, a little, and immediately look away as though it was a mere trifle.
I remember thinking that the kiss had taken far too long to complete and that I was glad that Svetlana hadn’t seen it as I would not have had any excuse. No sooner did I think this than I looked up from over Beth’s shoulder to see Svetlana looking on. Unthinkingly, I reached for her hand, pulled her to my other side and kissed her as passionately as I knew how. “I’m getting us champagne, baby. Ready for another glass?”
“Of course, Sweetie!” Was all Svetlana said. She clung to me a little more tightly and kissed me back again. At that very moment, I knew that we were going to have a long and happy marriage.
When I finished the story, I could see that Candy wasn’t sure what to make of it. She obviously didn’t see a clear moral in it and sat silent for a moment with a puzzled look.
“Our marriage,” I explained. “Has lasted as long and as perfectly as it has, because we have not had to battle the spectre of jealousy.”
“I could not live that way.” Said Candy as if to assure me of a certainty.
“You have no choice, my dear. You see, Svetlana and I have conceded that in social settings where there is alcohol and attractive people, inappropriate advances are often more expected than unexpected. The moral is in how you and your partner handle them. Svetlana and I decided in that moment, without words, to handle things ‘with grace.’”
“In five years, we have never had a real argument.” I added.
“Wow! How is that possible?” Candy asked rhetorically with a look of approval.
The lesson had taken. I had talked through Candy’s lunch and she was late in returning to the office. She gave me an aloha kiss goodbye and rushed for the door. I sank back in my chair to think about the story again. It was true that Svetlana and I never argued. My first marriage had been a constant battle from the moment I said “I do,” and I was not going to relive those days. When Svetlana was to disagree with me on anything, I’d tell a joke and change the subject. Otherwise, if it was in my power to concede the disagreement, I’d simply let her have her way. Svetlana knew that I did not like to argue and I am certain that she made concessions of her own to spare me whenever possible.
I returned from lunch feeling satisfied with my work. I brushed past my co-workers and curled up in a chair with my book, having first positioned my monitors to keep me hidden from passers-by. A moment later, I was staring at the first page of Nietzsche’s book in utter disbelief. What was I reading? By the second page, Zarathustra was astonished by the actions of a saint he met in the wilderness who was singing and dancing for God. A few lines later, Zarathustra was concerned about how saint hadn’t learned that God was dead.
Now I was astonished and my astonishment continued to grow from one page to the next. I wondered how this book could have ever been published in stodgy old pre-war Europe. Clearly, I had a lot to learn. I’m sure I’ll always have a lot to learn. Nietzsche thought differently about everything. Politics, religion, and morality were all turned on their heads in these pages. I checked to confirm the publishing date; 1887. I wondered how it was possible that none of what was in this hundred year old book had ever occurred to me and felt embarrassed.
As the days went on Svetlana caught cold, presumably the same cold that caused her mother to extend her stay. I continued to meet up with Candy over lunch, buying her a mocha frappuccino each time. She never took food at lunchtime. We continued our discussions about life and I would end each one with a little lesson on how to create the perfect marriage. I neglected to mention how my marriage sliding toward financial bankruptcy and how I doubted that our perfect marriage would survive such a crisis. I suppose in those days that I thought I’d find a last minute solution.
I continued my lessons with Nietzsche. He instructed me that the holders of the truth had become the Pharisees and that every now and then someone has to come and break the tablets. He was that someone, yet it seems that those tablets have been well repaired. I don’t have any reason to believe that human morality or “traditional family values” have changed much since the time of Augustus. It is easy to see how things could be improved in the world. I drank in Nietzsche like wine, intoxicating myself with it.
During the first few evenings of Angelica’s “renewed occupation” I found myself Candy-less and more or less unwilling to do any reading in the early evenings. I certainly didn’t want to entertain my mother-in-law as I did not know whether I could handle many more of her barbs. I rarely have patience for books in the evening, especially if I’m feeling restless and for several consecutive nights I went to Le Baron Noir after work to intoxicate myself with champagne, rather than philosophy.
Svetlana had, in the mean time, taken to sleeping with her mother in the living room and by Wednesday night I let her know of my disapproval. We were a flirtatious pair by any measure but always landed in the same bed at night. Seeing her sleeping with her mother made me uncomfortable and gave me the sense that I was being cheated on. The sensation was powerful. I had never felt jealousy with Svetlana before and it was dripping from my fingertips three nights running.
Thursday night I came in especially late, maybe 2am. It’s not difficult to get from one conversation to the next with ease and lose all sense of time when the champagne is flowing. On some days, it takes the sun itself to come up and interrupt your story. I came home with the satisfaction of knowing I’d get a couple of long overdue snuggles with my wife before nodding off to sleep. That was all I would see of her as it would be another early day at the office.
What happened next is a difficult part of the story to tell. If I’ve done my job as an author, you have already learned that I do not become angry. I don’t get into fights out of rage or malice and I don’t even like to argue; well not counting a rousing debate on politics or religion. When I got home this night, however, I found Svetlana fast asleep on the airbed next to her mother. At first my eye twitched with anger. I was quite unaccustomed to this and I had to think about why I would be angry. My matrimonial bed had not been robbed by another suitor after all. I had never felt jealousy with Svetlana before.
Jealousy raged within me. I didn’t like this feeling at all and I wasn’t sure how to abate it. My reason, intervened to tell me that perhaps Svetlana had forgotten my request since I made so few demands upon her. I crept down beside her and gently shook her, calling her name or rather her pet name. “Sweetie…”
She did not stir. I stepped back to feel the green monster of jealousy envelop me again. I was truly in a rage. I have so little experience with rage, that I had no idea what to do with the emotion that had eclipsed my reason. Reason said “Don’t do this or you’ll go to jail! Don’t do that or you’ll lose your wife.”
Rage told reason that it didn’t care for reason. Perhaps luckily for everyone, my rage was inexperienced and had no idea what to do. Reason, who’d been pushed to the corner reminded me once again of the Flintstones. Fred was always filled with rage and no one ever suffered too badly from the worst of his outbursts, except maybe Barney. I channelled Fred. I turned on all the lights and sat myself down so as to mitigate any unwanted physicality. With the loudest voice I could muster without shouting, I announced. “Everyone up! Time to get up!”
The women stirred, sleepily and angrily. Their anger was nothing to rage. “I told you that I wanted you back in my bed, and you couldn’t do that for me.” I scolded Svetlana.
I turned to Angelica. “And you! I want you out of my house and I want you out now.”
“I don’t stay, I want go.” Angelica rattled in what seemed an overly emphasized Macedonian accent, even for her. “You, you hitted my daughter, you bastard.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you are talking about and I don’t care. You have 10 minutes to get the fuck out of my house or I’ll call the police. Pack your shit and get out!”
I arose, stomped into the bedroom and shut the door and sat on the bed to wait for what I expected to be a very unpleasant aftermath to my rage. I heard a lot of Macedonian spoken on the other side of the door and made out a single line of English. “Call the police, he is violent.” The old crone shouted.
The rage in me was completely gone. All it took was for me to yell and my reason had returned completely, devastatingly. I started to realize that if they worked as a team and corroborated a story, they could have claimed that I really was violent. Surely, Angelica was aware of such a vile scheme and had proposed it to Svetlana. She was already trying to intimidate me with it. Svetlana had always been so protective of her mother. Reason also suggested that I had killed my marriage right then and there. I sat on the bed and awaited the outcome like a condemned prisoner.
About five minutes later or maybe it was three days later; I could not tell; Svetlana gently knocked and came into the bedroom. She spoke very softly with tears in her eyes. “Sweetie,” she cooed. “Let us make a truce tonight and leave my mother to sleep. I will stay here with you.”
There was not a sliver of rage left in me and Svetlana’s truce was the last thing I expected to hear. “Ok, Sweetie,” I nodded.
Svetlana cuddled into my shoulder as I sunk wearily into the master bed. Sleep came to take me as it does all men.
My professional career has been good to me, having afforded me the ability to avoid Mondays from time to time. I’ve been able to take Mondays slowly and work only part of the day. Some Mondays, I could miss out on altogether. This Monday was completely in-my-face unavoidable. Svetlana would rarely awaken on a weekday before I was long at work. I would give her several kisses before I’d leave… knowing somehow that she could sense them. She would often remark later in the day that she awoke, feeling kissed. Once I left the bedroom, however, Monday was all over me like bad news.
The beast laid in the living room, asleep on her back, limbs splayed and lightly snoring. She was undoubtedly dreaming of new torments to spring upon me in the days and weeks to come. I tiptoed past her, grabbing a couple of books from the shelf without looking. Carefully, I stole toward the door and affected my escape. Monday or not, there would be no mother-in-law for me on this day if I could help it.
At the time, I worked for the Hawaiian National Insurance Company or HANIC as they called themselves. I never really considered myself a full HANICan, since I was first hired as a contractor and only negotiated a job-type job to keep Svetlana in the country. They paid me pretty well, especially by Hawaiian standards but they knew, I knew and they knew that I knew that they had me by the short hairs. To quit or take another job would mean the end of my time in Hawaii, the end of my time in the United States, and possibly the end of my marriage; all on the same day. It was the first time in my life that I had ever felt enslaved.
I made up for the feelings of slavery by showing up a little late for work and leaving a little early. Sometimes I would skip a day. Often I’d work from home. Whatever I did, however, I felt that HANIC always got its money’s worth. I had already saved the company millions with my software and every month I put them in a better position to understand their own business and save even more. I don’t think that it would be merciful to explain the kind of software that I wrote for them since the description might put an average reader fast to sleep or alternatively drive them mad. Let me just be clear that if you are turned on by insurance data, a description of my software would exceed your wildest fantasies.
This would not be a day for new software. This was going to be a day for avoiding my mother-in-law and doing any activity to avoid thinking about how she would be infesting my apartment for another three weeks. This would be a day for keeping my sanity and preventing her destroying my marriage and… I was already thinking about her. Quickly, I glanced down at the books that I randomly pulled from the shelves. The first was “A Handbook for Perl.” Dammit! I would not be programming today. The other was Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” Double dammit! I didn’t think I was ready for this book.
I was still struggling through philosophy books from earlier eras and really hadn’t made any sense of them. I had read a lot about the history of philosophy, but in terms of actually reading the great works themselves, I hadn’t made it anywhere near as far as Nietzsche on the philosophical timeline. Fate put this book in my hand, however, so it would be my next book regardless. I decided that I could always read it again later if the message completely was lost on me. Between Nietzsche and my Internet life, I was armed with enough planned escapism to endure a full and miserable day without torment.
I arrived at HANIC at 8am sharp, alarming many of my co-workers with the fear that there might be a staff meeting or some other important thing about to happen that would require my attendance so early in the morning. I assured a few HANICans that it was OK and that they could relax. I was only there at this ungodly hour because of my mother-in-law. I added that they would be seeing a lot of me over the next three weeks. Most understood completely and offered their sincere sympathies.
My desk was always a clutter of two or three computers, each with a separate monitor and keyboard. The lesser used computer was for creating software and the favoured computer was set up for talking about the software I wanted to create. As an employee, it took about 5 to 10 times as much time to discuss the software I wanted to create than it did to actually create it. As a contractor, the ratio was reversed. I loathed being an employee with every cell in my body. We talked endlessly about things that could seemingly never be accomplished for lack of more talking.
Meeting after meeting was scheduled to discuss every small act of anticipated creation. After a time, meetings for me were measured solely by the quality of the beverages and snacks. I never cared for the content, because nothing was ever decided. On the rare occasions when a decision was handed down, however, there was little incentive to complete it. Like my marriage and my living situation and everything else in my life, work was an inescapable trap.
Luckily there were no meetings today and I headed straight into my Internet life. I had a rich and wondrous Internet life with a complete cast of characters to keep me amused for hours on end if need be. To begin, I had three email accounts; Gmail for private matters, my consulting company mail for my corporate dealings and another account for a new company that I was dreaming to start, should I ever shake off the fetters of slavery. Apart from email, I also had many chat programs. There was MSN for good friends, ICQ for random chat, Yahoo for old friends that hadn’t updated their lives, Skype for the webcam junkies and my little used Google chat, which I used only to talk to a single friend from the U.S. military. Lastly, I decided that Monday would be a great day to try out a new technology; I would create my own facebook page.
facebook, I decided, was going to be important. It wasn’t the mess that classmates.com or MySpace had become. About a year earlier I tried to be cool by setting up a MySpace page, wanting to see what all the fuss was about. For all I know, the page might even still be out there somewhere. I immediately started to receive friend requests and email from young women between 18 and 20. Most of them had web cams and would solicit a fee. Great; MySpace was a cyber-brothel. “That’s great for the kids,” I thought.
Armed with my morning coffee, I decided to ignore my various flashing and beeping chat programs and start straightaway into my facebook page. Immediately, I learned that unlike MySpace, there was no way to screw up the page with poorly embedded HTML features. Every other friend’s page was easy to read as a result. Some might call the homogenous pages boring, but when you consider how terrible MySpace had become, it was a bit of a blessing. I put in my name and my birthday and my marital status. Before an hour was done, I had my favourite books, TV shows, movies, quotes, hobbies and an assortment of trivia all loaded up. Lastly, I acknowledged a couple of friend requests, one from Jamie and the other from Svetlana. It was a good start.
By the time I was a full facebook member, it was approaching 10am. Over in Central Europe it would be 10pm. I had to get to my chat programs before my European friends were all asleep. My Internet chatting life had grown quite complex over the years. I started with a UNIX protocol called “talk” back in the early 90’s and met my first Internet girlfriend that way, an English professor from Australia. A relationship ensued and nearly a marriage. There was some travel, but ultimately we found that we got along better in the Internet than in person. I only mention this to point out that chatting can be a life-changing endeavour. The English professor instilled in me a passion for literature and philosophy that I have held to this day.
In these modern times, I had a created a sort of triage for chat requests. I would meet new people on ICQ through random chat. They would always find me, often hailing from various non-English speaking countries and the chatter would most usually want to practice using English. Once I had chatted to someone on ICQ long enough and considered them friends, I would graduate them to MSN or Skype. These programs are more robust, have more features and work well with microphones or webcams. Even Svetlana and I chatted for months on end in our early courtship when we were separated by two oceans.
The most important of my chat buddies was Erica, a high-ranking civil servant from Finland. I had known Erica for 2 years or so and she had finally taken up the idea of visiting me in Hawaii. I thought that Svetlana might make good use of her company and I looked forward to her upcoming visit with alacrity. Svetlana had of course, also agreed to the visit and though she lacked my enthusiasm, she knew that accompanying a tourist around the islands would give her significant opportunities for taking new photographs. Svetlana, with five years of encouragement, had become an excellent photographer.
Sure enough, Erica was online and waiting for me to respond. “Robyn!” She had already typed. “I’m just about to buy my tickets, but I need to ask you something. Are you there?”
“Oh! Hi there, gorgeous.” I chirped. “What is it? Have you settled on dates?”
“Yes I have; six weeks from today exactly. I must ask you a favour, however.”
“Whatever you like, my dear. What is it?”
Hesitant, she asked, “Is it all right if I bring my daughter with me? She would also like to see the islands.”
I wasn’t entirely pleased to hear this request. The conversations that took place in my home were generally not geared toward children. Nothing in my home was geared toward children. I had an emergency bucket of Lego, in case of a visiting child were to spend an afternoon, but three weeks?
“How old is she?” I asked with an air of shyness.
“21.”
“Haha. I don’t see that it will be a problem then. Does she like Lego?”
Erica laughed and was clearly relieved that I agreed to her request. In turn, I related the latest twists and turns of my mother-in-law saga to her. She was sympathetic enough, though I don’t know if I was able to fully articulate the gravity of my discomfort through the MSN chat program. There are only so many emoticons one can use when one types. I figured that there would be more stories to tell and decided to spare Erica the discomfort of my emotions until I had more news. It was time for excitement for the both of us. Soon, Erica would be adding herself to a long list of Internet friends that would graduate to an “in real life” friend before the next month was over.
I spent a little more time catching up with various other chat buddies in London, Shanghai, Vienna, Moscow, Istanbul, New Delhi and Rio de Janeiro. Also, I checked in with Jamie, my sister and brother and a couple of other local friends from Oahu. Once I was apprised of the situation locally and from around the world, thoughts of Candy popped into my head.
Candy wasn’t in my Internet universe yet. I called. Voicemail; Candy’s melodious voice message greeted me and assured that she would call me back. I’ve had experience with single, beautiful women and answering machines from both sides of the line. They tend to get a very high call volume and it is only the privileged few that get their calls answered. Even fewer get their calls returned. Moments later my phone rang. It was Candy! “Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!” she sang.
It turned out that Candy worked only about a block from my office. I invited her for lunch and she eagerly accepted. We agreed to meet at one of the three Starbucks downtown, the one closest to her office. I arrived before Candy, and ordered a coffee and a sandwich. I thought to order Candy’s drink too. “I’d like a grande mocha frappuccino in a venti…” I started to explain.
“Oh a Candy special!” The barista interrupted. “We have already made it. Candy phoned ahead.”
Without hesitation, she added the concoction to my tab. I paid and carried everything off to a table to wait. While I waited I thought it curious that it was pre-arranged for me to pay. I started to recall that I had paid for everything that Candy had touched or wanted since I met her. Oh well, I was going to be bankrupt in a few months. What did it matter?
I didn’t get to think for long, before Candy arrived! She was larger than life. She work a clingy print dress and what I can only describe as too much makeup. True to her character, everyone in the coffee shop made a note of her entrance. I confess that I felt a small amount of pride that I would be the one to entertain her. I reminded myself that I wasn’t here to entertain her. She was my gift from the gods. It was my job to train her.
“Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!” She sang loudly enough that the whole room could hear.
I got up to give her the standard Hawaiian aloha greeting, a weak hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Hey, gorgeous!” I chirped!
“How great it is that we work so close? We can meet here every day!”
The words, “every day” weighed heavily upon me for a second. I looked up to consider a response. “Yeah, what are the chances?” was all I could come up with.
“It’s fate!” She assured me and I nodded in agreement.
“I’ve been working downtown for 5 years now, so I have a few different girlfriends that I meet for lunch. Hopefully, you’ll get a chance to meet some of them. I’m sure they will love you.”
“That is so weird!” She said. “Have you always been in an open relationship?”
I bristled. “An open what?”
“How long have you been in an open marriage?” She asked again.
The training had officially begun. “I’m not in an open marriage.” I explained. “I told you the story about how I met Svetlana, didn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“Well when I met her, I had no less than about 50 women friends with whom I’m in regular contact. Some are local and even work downtown; some live on the mainland, some are from back home in Canada and some are out there on the Internet. A few, I’ve attempted to have relationships with. A few, I’ve been intimate with, but since my wedding day, I have not been intimate with any of them, except of course with my wife.”
“But you said you have ‘girlfriends’.” She reminded me.
“Oh!” I laughed. “I have so many women in my life that it was just too complicated to for me to make a distinction between an ex-girlfriend, a casual woman friend or an ex-lover. I decided to make the word ‘wife’ the demarcation line for any assumptions about my lifestyle. My girlfriends are friends who are women or girls, such as you are, and my wife… is my wife. It’s a very simple system and it seems to mitigate more suspicion than you might think it would create.”
“Oh that makes perfect sense to me now.” She agreed, smiling.
“There’s more.” I added. “You might have found it a little strange that I talked to you in the first place or was able to be as friendly as I was in the presence of my wife.”
I related a story to Candy about an outing early in my marriage. Svetlana and I went out to a club in Waikiki for a friend’s birthday party. He had rented a hotel rooftop bar for the soiree and all the best people were going to be there. Svetlana and I were entertaining one of her girlfriends who had come from Paris, for a few weeks. I remarked how much more pleasant her visit was when compared to that of my mother in law. Svetlana’s friend, Roxanne was a petite gorgeous blonde in her early 30’s. She spoke such a soft and perfect French that with your eyes closed, you’d swear that she was a jazz DJ on late night FM radio.
We had also invited along my business partner at the time, Lisbeth. Lisbeth was a broad shouldered, stern looking brunette woman in her late 30’s. I suppose that one could say she was attractive, but her viciousness in business matters precluded any thoughts I might have had about the possibility that she was a woman at all. The three women and I shared cocktails and a small bathroom, clamouring for various portions and lotions designed to make us each look and smell beautiful.
When we arrived at the party we found it to be a grand affair. There was food, music and wine flowing generously. Everyone was particularly well dressed by Hawaiian standards, both men and women. The women and I took a found a couch and a pair of chaise lounges positioned around a coffee table. We occupied it and quickly filled it with drinks and it wasn’t long before we were joined by another woman who introduced herself as Beth.
She was a short woman with a short name and no one in our group knew her. Beth must have decided that we were the people to get to know at this party and soon she was one of us. She swapped stories and explaining that she was an archaeologist, slipping in that we should all go to her place for an after-party when this one was over. If I wasn’t mistaken, she was flirting with each member of our group individually and the whole group collectively.
While on a sortie for a look around for party celebrities and fill my glass of champagne, Beth pulled up beside me in the line and put her arm around my waist. I offered to buy her a drink. She accepted and quite unexpectedly kissed me. It was not a Hawaiian aloha kiss at all, but rather a full open sensual full-of-meaning-and-innuendo kiss. I was taken aback and didn’t know what to do. So far, the night had been so perfect. I decided to accept the kiss, a little, and immediately look away as though it was a mere trifle.
I remember thinking that the kiss had taken far too long to complete and that I was glad that Svetlana hadn’t seen it as I would not have had any excuse. No sooner did I think this than I looked up from over Beth’s shoulder to see Svetlana looking on. Unthinkingly, I reached for her hand, pulled her to my other side and kissed her as passionately as I knew how. “I’m getting us champagne, baby. Ready for another glass?”
“Of course, Sweetie!” Was all Svetlana said. She clung to me a little more tightly and kissed me back again. At that very moment, I knew that we were going to have a long and happy marriage.
When I finished the story, I could see that Candy wasn’t sure what to make of it. She obviously didn’t see a clear moral in it and sat silent for a moment with a puzzled look.
“Our marriage,” I explained. “Has lasted as long and as perfectly as it has, because we have not had to battle the spectre of jealousy.”
“I could not live that way.” Said Candy as if to assure me of a certainty.
“You have no choice, my dear. You see, Svetlana and I have conceded that in social settings where there is alcohol and attractive people, inappropriate advances are often more expected than unexpected. The moral is in how you and your partner handle them. Svetlana and I decided in that moment, without words, to handle things ‘with grace.’”
“In five years, we have never had a real argument.” I added.
“Wow! How is that possible?” Candy asked rhetorically with a look of approval.
The lesson had taken. I had talked through Candy’s lunch and she was late in returning to the office. She gave me an aloha kiss goodbye and rushed for the door. I sank back in my chair to think about the story again. It was true that Svetlana and I never argued. My first marriage had been a constant battle from the moment I said “I do,” and I was not going to relive those days. When Svetlana was to disagree with me on anything, I’d tell a joke and change the subject. Otherwise, if it was in my power to concede the disagreement, I’d simply let her have her way. Svetlana knew that I did not like to argue and I am certain that she made concessions of her own to spare me whenever possible.
I returned from lunch feeling satisfied with my work. I brushed past my co-workers and curled up in a chair with my book, having first positioned my monitors to keep me hidden from passers-by. A moment later, I was staring at the first page of Nietzsche’s book in utter disbelief. What was I reading? By the second page, Zarathustra was astonished by the actions of a saint he met in the wilderness who was singing and dancing for God. A few lines later, Zarathustra was concerned about how saint hadn’t learned that God was dead.
Now I was astonished and my astonishment continued to grow from one page to the next. I wondered how this book could have ever been published in stodgy old pre-war Europe. Clearly, I had a lot to learn. I’m sure I’ll always have a lot to learn. Nietzsche thought differently about everything. Politics, religion, and morality were all turned on their heads in these pages. I checked to confirm the publishing date; 1887. I wondered how it was possible that none of what was in this hundred year old book had ever occurred to me and felt embarrassed.
As the days went on Svetlana caught cold, presumably the same cold that caused her mother to extend her stay. I continued to meet up with Candy over lunch, buying her a mocha frappuccino each time. She never took food at lunchtime. We continued our discussions about life and I would end each one with a little lesson on how to create the perfect marriage. I neglected to mention how my marriage sliding toward financial bankruptcy and how I doubted that our perfect marriage would survive such a crisis. I suppose in those days that I thought I’d find a last minute solution.
I continued my lessons with Nietzsche. He instructed me that the holders of the truth had become the Pharisees and that every now and then someone has to come and break the tablets. He was that someone, yet it seems that those tablets have been well repaired. I don’t have any reason to believe that human morality or “traditional family values” have changed much since the time of Augustus. It is easy to see how things could be improved in the world. I drank in Nietzsche like wine, intoxicating myself with it.
During the first few evenings of Angelica’s “renewed occupation” I found myself Candy-less and more or less unwilling to do any reading in the early evenings. I certainly didn’t want to entertain my mother-in-law as I did not know whether I could handle many more of her barbs. I rarely have patience for books in the evening, especially if I’m feeling restless and for several consecutive nights I went to Le Baron Noir after work to intoxicate myself with champagne, rather than philosophy.
Svetlana had, in the mean time, taken to sleeping with her mother in the living room and by Wednesday night I let her know of my disapproval. We were a flirtatious pair by any measure but always landed in the same bed at night. Seeing her sleeping with her mother made me uncomfortable and gave me the sense that I was being cheated on. The sensation was powerful. I had never felt jealousy with Svetlana before and it was dripping from my fingertips three nights running.
Thursday night I came in especially late, maybe 2am. It’s not difficult to get from one conversation to the next with ease and lose all sense of time when the champagne is flowing. On some days, it takes the sun itself to come up and interrupt your story. I came home with the satisfaction of knowing I’d get a couple of long overdue snuggles with my wife before nodding off to sleep. That was all I would see of her as it would be another early day at the office.
What happened next is a difficult part of the story to tell. If I’ve done my job as an author, you have already learned that I do not become angry. I don’t get into fights out of rage or malice and I don’t even like to argue; well not counting a rousing debate on politics or religion. When I got home this night, however, I found Svetlana fast asleep on the airbed next to her mother. At first my eye twitched with anger. I was quite unaccustomed to this and I had to think about why I would be angry. My matrimonial bed had not been robbed by another suitor after all. I had never felt jealousy with Svetlana before.
Jealousy raged within me. I didn’t like this feeling at all and I wasn’t sure how to abate it. My reason, intervened to tell me that perhaps Svetlana had forgotten my request since I made so few demands upon her. I crept down beside her and gently shook her, calling her name or rather her pet name. “Sweetie…”
She did not stir. I stepped back to feel the green monster of jealousy envelop me again. I was truly in a rage. I have so little experience with rage, that I had no idea what to do with the emotion that had eclipsed my reason. Reason said “Don’t do this or you’ll go to jail! Don’t do that or you’ll lose your wife.”
Rage told reason that it didn’t care for reason. Perhaps luckily for everyone, my rage was inexperienced and had no idea what to do. Reason, who’d been pushed to the corner reminded me once again of the Flintstones. Fred was always filled with rage and no one ever suffered too badly from the worst of his outbursts, except maybe Barney. I channelled Fred. I turned on all the lights and sat myself down so as to mitigate any unwanted physicality. With the loudest voice I could muster without shouting, I announced. “Everyone up! Time to get up!”
The women stirred, sleepily and angrily. Their anger was nothing to rage. “I told you that I wanted you back in my bed, and you couldn’t do that for me.” I scolded Svetlana.
I turned to Angelica. “And you! I want you out of my house and I want you out now.”
“I don’t stay, I want go.” Angelica rattled in what seemed an overly emphasized Macedonian accent, even for her. “You, you hitted my daughter, you bastard.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you are talking about and I don’t care. You have 10 minutes to get the fuck out of my house or I’ll call the police. Pack your shit and get out!”
I arose, stomped into the bedroom and shut the door and sat on the bed to wait for what I expected to be a very unpleasant aftermath to my rage. I heard a lot of Macedonian spoken on the other side of the door and made out a single line of English. “Call the police, he is violent.” The old crone shouted.
The rage in me was completely gone. All it took was for me to yell and my reason had returned completely, devastatingly. I started to realize that if they worked as a team and corroborated a story, they could have claimed that I really was violent. Surely, Angelica was aware of such a vile scheme and had proposed it to Svetlana. She was already trying to intimidate me with it. Svetlana had always been so protective of her mother. Reason also suggested that I had killed my marriage right then and there. I sat on the bed and awaited the outcome like a condemned prisoner.
About five minutes later or maybe it was three days later; I could not tell; Svetlana gently knocked and came into the bedroom. She spoke very softly with tears in her eyes. “Sweetie,” she cooed. “Let us make a truce tonight and leave my mother to sleep. I will stay here with you.”
There was not a sliver of rage left in me and Svetlana’s truce was the last thing I expected to hear. “Ok, Sweetie,” I nodded.
Svetlana cuddled into my shoulder as I sunk wearily into the master bed. Sleep came to take me as it does all men.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Chapter 3 - The Beast
Few words or phrases in the English language will strike terror in a man’s heart like that of “mother-in-law.” Given the choice between spending 5 minutes with a mother-in-law, or a month in solitary confinement with a radioactive Al Qaida suicide bomber, part werewolf, part vampire with a case of bubonic plague, an AK-47 in one hand and an Amway briefcase in the other, standing on a stack of Watchtower magazines… Well, you get the point. If brought together for a worldwide summit, mothers-in-law from every corner of the globe, regardless of creed, religion, culture, social class or political leaning, could find immediate and unanimous consensus on one issue. They would agree that their daughters are all in need of better husbands.
When I got home that Saturday afternoon, my mother-in-law was sitting out on the lanai (the Hawaiian word for balcony) with Svetlana. They were smoking. It seemed to be their only real mother-daughter activity of any note. Angelica, who was anything but angelic, had come to stay for three weeks and Sunday was to be her last day. She was a tall slender woman and looked to anyone other than me, possibly attractive. When I looked upon her, I could only see her monstrous traits. Her voice was damaged from years of smoking and she even sounded like a monster when she spoke. These days, her every utterance filled me with dread.
Angelica came to visit us for three weeks. I was certain that she had come with a design on breaking up our marriage, but the three weeks were almost at an end and I was still married. She had failed. Like any monster story, however, one knows that the beast will persist with its nefarious plans until it has either completed its evil task, or has been killed. Regardless of this truism, it is still considered a crime to kill a mother-in-law in almost every country on Earth, or at least in all the countries that I checked.
“To-mor -row, you’re out-out-out of here.” I sang to myself joyfully, quietly, as I filled up a large glass from a chilled box of chablis.
Five years earlier and only a few months into our marriage, Svetlana and I moved out of my humble downtown bachelor studio and into a luxury apartment next to Restaurant Row. At 20 stories in the air, we had a magnificent view of the ocean, the harbour, Aloha Tower, and with a little squinting, the Honolulu Airport in the far background. I suppose I took the view for granted, since I was almost always at my computer, shielded from the sun and its reflection, but Svetlana spent most evenings out on the lanai. It was impossible for me to perform any kind of work with my mother-in-law on the premises, so I strolled out onto the lanai, glass in hand, to see how my beloved and her mother were doing.
Their conversation immediately grew hushed and I could see that they were both laughing. I leaned down and kissed Svetlana gently on the top of the head and asked, “So? What’s the joke?”
Angelica burst out first, “When you sleep with other women, wear a condom!”
What the fuck was she talking about? “What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked, looking back and forth at them both for a clue.
“When you sleep with other women, wear a condom!” Angelica persisted. “I want my daughter to be protected.”
“Yeah, sure.” I said, and then looked toward Svetlana, who was still looking pleased with herself. “Are you planning something special, Sweetie?”
No answer. Much later I thought that Angelica was making a pointed reference to how I spent the morning with two different women. I’ll never know. They both just grinned like idiots and I retreated to my desk, sank deep into my chair and even deeper into my book. “It would all be over tomorrow.” I thought to myself and Ovid and his gods and monsters took me away.
As my eyes grew weary after a few hours and I slinked off to bed. Svetlana and her mother were still chattering away endlessly in their odd Macedonian tongue. I floated into a dreamland full of gods and goddesses imposing their edicts and transformations onto hapless mortals who had the misfortune to come into contact with them. I swear that an interruption shook the gods still for just a moment as I felt soft kisses on my cheeks and forehead. I don’t know if the kisses were dreamt or real, but for that moment I felt loved.
The next day, I woke early. Svetlana was asleep as usual. I would have the morning to myself if Angelica didn’t stir. I looked down my phone list and considered breakfast with a girlfriend. I didn’t usually petition the same person for two days in a row and decided against calling Jamie, though I might have liked to hear her perspective on Angelica’s condom statement in the context of her many ‘rules’. I’m sure she would not have been impressed. I decided that I needed an escape from everything.
Books can be an escape for me, but never a really fantastic escape, because of the way I read. I discovered, quite by accident one day when I was reading an illustrated book, that the sentence I was reading to myself did not match the illustration. I discovered that perhaps for years, I had been reading groups of words and forming my own sentences from them. This is a handy skill for reading and skimming technical manuals, however it is a similar to dyslexia for reading prose. I had developed techniques for combating this disability since, but this morning I decided that playing a game would be a more satisfying escape.
My virtual addiction, as I called it, was the World of Warcraft. I had a 60th level mage in the game, which at that time was about as powerful a being as a player could be. Every time I stepped into the game’s virtual world, I was rewarded somehow. I would either acquire more gold, more high-end equipment, or more points for some long term objective. It was impossible to play the game without some small reward. Feeling beleaguered, I decided that I could use a reward, despite having promised Svetlana that I would avoid playing the game while her mother was here.
I got lost in the game, playing for about an hour or two, or maybe three. I was happily killing a bunch of whirlwind-like creatures when I noticed that my mother-in-law was no longer sleeping on the air bed. Dammit. I heard the shower going. She obviously saw me playing and it was too late to change that. I played on. When she emerged from the bathroom, before I could greet her with a chirpy ‘Good morning’ she said, “You would make a lot more money if you didn’t play games all the time.”
More money? If this had been a Flintstones cartoon and not real life, Fred would have jumped up in a rage, pointed at the door and shouted, “Out! Out!! Out!!!”
Anger isn’t an emotion that has played a large part in my life. When things go wrong, I generally tend toward, sadness, disappointment or guilt before I choose anger to deal with my situation. Not this time. I was angry. I was furious! I was keeping her daughter in no small degree of luxury in Honolulu and she was my guest… eating my food… drinking my wine… I had nowhere to direct my anger. The United States is one of the countries where it is illegal to kill a mother in law, though I did wonder if I’d get off having told the judge what she said. Too risky. The solace I’d acquired from 3 hours of gaming was gone. The best course of action was to leave without saying a word. That was best. When I return, I thought, she would be gone. Life could resume.
I left abruptly, hopped in my car and headed toward Waikiki, thinking about breakfast; thinking about my mother-in-law; thinking about Candy. The throaty thrum of the Porsche motor rumbled in my belly and vibrated away the angst. Thoughts of my morning anger were shaken to the pavement as I spiritedly dodged in and out of traffic. Noon had past and I wondered if Candy had remembered her pledge of daily contact. I still thought of it as a joke, but I’d be damned if I was the one to be the one to break the pledge first. I decided to play along; at least for a day or two. I called.
“Hiiiiiiiiiiiii!” She yelped excitedly over the phone.
“Are you ready for lunch?” I asked. “I haven’t had breakfast yet.”
“Oh! Perfect!” She sang. “I just got home from church and it was so wonderful and you should have seen it. Maybe you can go with me next week. I’m starving! Can you pick me up?”
Every phrase she uttered was like recitative from some beautifully lyrical opera. Candy was impossibly easy to talk to. When she spoke, I mused. When I spoke, she didn’t listen so much as fixate on every word with the excitement and wonder of a small child. I began to wonder if my metaphorical references toward Candy were an understatement. I had been describing her as an angel, but she was in so many ways exactly what you would expect a true angel to be like. Her voice and countenance were angelic by any account. Her naïveté concerning the world around her seemed impossibly child-like for a woman her age. Her fascination with nearly everything suggested that she had never stepped foot on this earth.
Perhaps she was an angel. Perhaps she fell into my lap as some sort of divine retribution for refusing to believe in a god. I wondered at the possibility of a divine bureaucracy that would punish humans and angels alike by juxtaposing them in a situation where they might better themselves from the experience. The angel would of course grow more respectful of their position once learning of the labours and toils of humans while the human would learn of the heavenly realm they would have to aspire to. Decidedly a better teacher than a student, it would be up to me to make sure that Candy received a good education.
I picked Candy up at Kapiolani Park, just a little past the zoo. Considering that Honolulu is in the middle of nowhere, the zoo is of a reasonable quality with many exotic exhibits from the wildest reaches of Africa. Also, if you are on a budget, you can see the giraffes for free. Today we were not on a budget, however, and we raced off to one of my favourite haunts; Pappilon restaurant at the Ala Moana mall. This open air restaurant features a majestic view of the ocean, Ala Moana Park and we would be arriving at my favourite time of the day, 2pm.
When we got to Pappilon’s, the lunch rush was over and the shifts were changing and the service was a little confused, but the sun was starting its descent into the ocean. We had a little over 4 hours to enjoy the afternoon before the sun would plunge into the ocean and the island would plunge into darkness. I ordered a bottle of Taittinger and a cheese plate… with an extra helping of a mascarpone to go with the fruit. I love Taittinger’s champagne. It has such a neutral taste that you almost forget drinking it; even between sips. There would be food, there would be wine, but this combination of treats would aid conversation rather than hinder it.
Candy was clearly unused to these surroundings. She was unused to fancy restaurants. She was unused to champagne. She was unused to any Sunday conversation that was not church related. After a little small talk and a little more champagne, however, our conversation began to flow even faster than the Taittinger’s. I began to fill in the details from the day before. I told her how I met Svetlana and how it was love at first sight and how we drove to Stonehenge and took the Chunnel to Paris. I told her how we were married just a few months later and how our marriage had been perfect; well mostly perfect.
Then Candy started to fill in her life story too. She told me how her father had passed away and how her mother had raised her under strictly Christian guidelines. She told me how she had a personal relationship with Jesus and how she didn’t really understand how a person could live without Him in their life. She meant me. I was quite accustomed to this kind of question and we went into a short discussion regarding the benefits of atheism vs. Christianity and vice versa. Considering her upbringing, she took my atheism pretty well, though she vowed to pray for me to one day see the Christian “light”, prayers that have apparently gone unanswered.
We talked until the sun set and I decided that it was about time that it was safe for me to return home. I indicated that I should get going but Candy wasn’t finished with me. She had decided that it would be very important for me to meet her mother. “There’s a problem.” She said. “It is very important that you say that you are a Christian when you meet her.”
“I can pretend to be a Christian, I suppose.” I said with no small amount of surprise. “Do I need to be a particular kind of Christian?”
“Yes. You can’t say that you go to a church that my mom also goes to or she will know that you are not telling the truth. She knows everyone from many churches.”
“Well,” I thought. “I can say that I’m with the Church of England. I really don’t think that there is one of those on the island. If there is, I doubt that an American protestant would ever go to one. They are really very boring and don’t have sing-alongs, just fire-and-brimstone style sermons and old stodgy sounding hymns.”
“Perfect!” Candy chirped. “I’ll tell her that! Only where will I say that you go to church now that you are here?”
This was an interesting game and now that I was playing, I wanted to win. “There is a Russian Orthodox church on Queen Street that I visited once for Easter Mass. Tell her that I go there. They sing a lot, but not like at your churches, it is all in Russian. Are you sure I need to be Christian.”
“Oh, it is very important!” Candy exclaimed. “My mother has a way of praying people out of my life. I do not want to lose you in this way.”
“You can do that? You can prey people out of other people’s lives?” I said, astonished.
“Oh my mother can and she has. She is very close to the Lord.” Candy confided.
“Well I’ll be the best Russian Orthodox-going Church of Englander I can be; just for you. At least until we can convince your mother not to pray me away.”
Candy laughed. Then the thought hit me. I wished that I could stop my mother-in-law from trying to pray me away. I wished that Svetlana would have had a plan for me to follow to have kept me out of the way of her mother’s monstrous wrath. I knew that it was more likely that her mother was growing weary from Svetlana’s complaints. On the rare occasions where I had the temerity to say “No!” to Svetlana, whether it was for a new piece of camera equipment or another trip abroad, she would simply ask her mother next. Her mother would always pay… or rather her mother’s husband would always pay.
With Candy, I had a plan. We had a plan. I was going to be in her life for a while and no mothers were going to stand in our way. That moment, I thought of a scripture from the Book of Matthew, somewhere in the middle, “Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”
I changed the word ‘man’ in the passage to ‘mother’ and then to ‘mother-in-law’ when I repeated it to myself. It was strangely satisfying to think that it would be a sin against a Christian god for anyone to interfere with me and my wife. It would also be a sin to interfere with me and Candy since it was likely a god that sent her to me. I drove Candy home with a smug sense of satisfaction. We had a plan for a long and prosperous friendship. My mother in-law was likely a thousand miles over the Pacific right now and I could return home to pick up the pieces and mend my marriage with Svetlana.
When I arrived home, I was tired, but happy and relieved. I unlocked the door to see Svetlana in the kitchen cooking dinner. I walked into the kitchen to give her a hello kiss. “Zdravo, bebe.” I cooed to in her native tongue.
After receiving a kiss back, I wheeled out of the kitchen and into the living room. There was still an air bed. There was still a mother-in-law smell. There was still mother-in-law stuff. Jesus. There was still a mother-in-law. I felt instantly dizzy and nauseous. I debated whether to faint or throw up. I looked back at Svetlana for answers.
“Sweetie,” She whispered sheepishly. “My mother was sad because she was sick for most of this last week of her visit, and we decided she should stay a little longer.”
“How long?” I asked vigorously, failing to hide my distaste for the news.
“Three more weeks.” She consoled.
I had just survived three weeks of this harpy and I was at my wit’s end. I did not know if I could stand another day. Three weeks would drive me mad and I was sure of it. Still nauseous, I declined to take any dinner and went straight to bed. No marriage could survive this. The red-haired beast had won the day.
When I got home that Saturday afternoon, my mother-in-law was sitting out on the lanai (the Hawaiian word for balcony) with Svetlana. They were smoking. It seemed to be their only real mother-daughter activity of any note. Angelica, who was anything but angelic, had come to stay for three weeks and Sunday was to be her last day. She was a tall slender woman and looked to anyone other than me, possibly attractive. When I looked upon her, I could only see her monstrous traits. Her voice was damaged from years of smoking and she even sounded like a monster when she spoke. These days, her every utterance filled me with dread.
Angelica came to visit us for three weeks. I was certain that she had come with a design on breaking up our marriage, but the three weeks were almost at an end and I was still married. She had failed. Like any monster story, however, one knows that the beast will persist with its nefarious plans until it has either completed its evil task, or has been killed. Regardless of this truism, it is still considered a crime to kill a mother-in-law in almost every country on Earth, or at least in all the countries that I checked.
“To-mor -row, you’re out-out-out of here.” I sang to myself joyfully, quietly, as I filled up a large glass from a chilled box of chablis.
Five years earlier and only a few months into our marriage, Svetlana and I moved out of my humble downtown bachelor studio and into a luxury apartment next to Restaurant Row. At 20 stories in the air, we had a magnificent view of the ocean, the harbour, Aloha Tower, and with a little squinting, the Honolulu Airport in the far background. I suppose I took the view for granted, since I was almost always at my computer, shielded from the sun and its reflection, but Svetlana spent most evenings out on the lanai. It was impossible for me to perform any kind of work with my mother-in-law on the premises, so I strolled out onto the lanai, glass in hand, to see how my beloved and her mother were doing.
Their conversation immediately grew hushed and I could see that they were both laughing. I leaned down and kissed Svetlana gently on the top of the head and asked, “So? What’s the joke?”
Angelica burst out first, “When you sleep with other women, wear a condom!”
What the fuck was she talking about? “What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked, looking back and forth at them both for a clue.
“When you sleep with other women, wear a condom!” Angelica persisted. “I want my daughter to be protected.”
“Yeah, sure.” I said, and then looked toward Svetlana, who was still looking pleased with herself. “Are you planning something special, Sweetie?”
No answer. Much later I thought that Angelica was making a pointed reference to how I spent the morning with two different women. I’ll never know. They both just grinned like idiots and I retreated to my desk, sank deep into my chair and even deeper into my book. “It would all be over tomorrow.” I thought to myself and Ovid and his gods and monsters took me away.
As my eyes grew weary after a few hours and I slinked off to bed. Svetlana and her mother were still chattering away endlessly in their odd Macedonian tongue. I floated into a dreamland full of gods and goddesses imposing their edicts and transformations onto hapless mortals who had the misfortune to come into contact with them. I swear that an interruption shook the gods still for just a moment as I felt soft kisses on my cheeks and forehead. I don’t know if the kisses were dreamt or real, but for that moment I felt loved.
The next day, I woke early. Svetlana was asleep as usual. I would have the morning to myself if Angelica didn’t stir. I looked down my phone list and considered breakfast with a girlfriend. I didn’t usually petition the same person for two days in a row and decided against calling Jamie, though I might have liked to hear her perspective on Angelica’s condom statement in the context of her many ‘rules’. I’m sure she would not have been impressed. I decided that I needed an escape from everything.
Books can be an escape for me, but never a really fantastic escape, because of the way I read. I discovered, quite by accident one day when I was reading an illustrated book, that the sentence I was reading to myself did not match the illustration. I discovered that perhaps for years, I had been reading groups of words and forming my own sentences from them. This is a handy skill for reading and skimming technical manuals, however it is a similar to dyslexia for reading prose. I had developed techniques for combating this disability since, but this morning I decided that playing a game would be a more satisfying escape.
My virtual addiction, as I called it, was the World of Warcraft. I had a 60th level mage in the game, which at that time was about as powerful a being as a player could be. Every time I stepped into the game’s virtual world, I was rewarded somehow. I would either acquire more gold, more high-end equipment, or more points for some long term objective. It was impossible to play the game without some small reward. Feeling beleaguered, I decided that I could use a reward, despite having promised Svetlana that I would avoid playing the game while her mother was here.
I got lost in the game, playing for about an hour or two, or maybe three. I was happily killing a bunch of whirlwind-like creatures when I noticed that my mother-in-law was no longer sleeping on the air bed. Dammit. I heard the shower going. She obviously saw me playing and it was too late to change that. I played on. When she emerged from the bathroom, before I could greet her with a chirpy ‘Good morning’ she said, “You would make a lot more money if you didn’t play games all the time.”
More money? If this had been a Flintstones cartoon and not real life, Fred would have jumped up in a rage, pointed at the door and shouted, “Out! Out!! Out!!!”
Anger isn’t an emotion that has played a large part in my life. When things go wrong, I generally tend toward, sadness, disappointment or guilt before I choose anger to deal with my situation. Not this time. I was angry. I was furious! I was keeping her daughter in no small degree of luxury in Honolulu and she was my guest… eating my food… drinking my wine… I had nowhere to direct my anger. The United States is one of the countries where it is illegal to kill a mother in law, though I did wonder if I’d get off having told the judge what she said. Too risky. The solace I’d acquired from 3 hours of gaming was gone. The best course of action was to leave without saying a word. That was best. When I return, I thought, she would be gone. Life could resume.
I left abruptly, hopped in my car and headed toward Waikiki, thinking about breakfast; thinking about my mother-in-law; thinking about Candy. The throaty thrum of the Porsche motor rumbled in my belly and vibrated away the angst. Thoughts of my morning anger were shaken to the pavement as I spiritedly dodged in and out of traffic. Noon had past and I wondered if Candy had remembered her pledge of daily contact. I still thought of it as a joke, but I’d be damned if I was the one to be the one to break the pledge first. I decided to play along; at least for a day or two. I called.
“Hiiiiiiiiiiiii!” She yelped excitedly over the phone.
“Are you ready for lunch?” I asked. “I haven’t had breakfast yet.”
“Oh! Perfect!” She sang. “I just got home from church and it was so wonderful and you should have seen it. Maybe you can go with me next week. I’m starving! Can you pick me up?”
Every phrase she uttered was like recitative from some beautifully lyrical opera. Candy was impossibly easy to talk to. When she spoke, I mused. When I spoke, she didn’t listen so much as fixate on every word with the excitement and wonder of a small child. I began to wonder if my metaphorical references toward Candy were an understatement. I had been describing her as an angel, but she was in so many ways exactly what you would expect a true angel to be like. Her voice and countenance were angelic by any account. Her naïveté concerning the world around her seemed impossibly child-like for a woman her age. Her fascination with nearly everything suggested that she had never stepped foot on this earth.
Perhaps she was an angel. Perhaps she fell into my lap as some sort of divine retribution for refusing to believe in a god. I wondered at the possibility of a divine bureaucracy that would punish humans and angels alike by juxtaposing them in a situation where they might better themselves from the experience. The angel would of course grow more respectful of their position once learning of the labours and toils of humans while the human would learn of the heavenly realm they would have to aspire to. Decidedly a better teacher than a student, it would be up to me to make sure that Candy received a good education.
I picked Candy up at Kapiolani Park, just a little past the zoo. Considering that Honolulu is in the middle of nowhere, the zoo is of a reasonable quality with many exotic exhibits from the wildest reaches of Africa. Also, if you are on a budget, you can see the giraffes for free. Today we were not on a budget, however, and we raced off to one of my favourite haunts; Pappilon restaurant at the Ala Moana mall. This open air restaurant features a majestic view of the ocean, Ala Moana Park and we would be arriving at my favourite time of the day, 2pm.
When we got to Pappilon’s, the lunch rush was over and the shifts were changing and the service was a little confused, but the sun was starting its descent into the ocean. We had a little over 4 hours to enjoy the afternoon before the sun would plunge into the ocean and the island would plunge into darkness. I ordered a bottle of Taittinger and a cheese plate… with an extra helping of a mascarpone to go with the fruit. I love Taittinger’s champagne. It has such a neutral taste that you almost forget drinking it; even between sips. There would be food, there would be wine, but this combination of treats would aid conversation rather than hinder it.
Candy was clearly unused to these surroundings. She was unused to fancy restaurants. She was unused to champagne. She was unused to any Sunday conversation that was not church related. After a little small talk and a little more champagne, however, our conversation began to flow even faster than the Taittinger’s. I began to fill in the details from the day before. I told her how I met Svetlana and how it was love at first sight and how we drove to Stonehenge and took the Chunnel to Paris. I told her how we were married just a few months later and how our marriage had been perfect; well mostly perfect.
Then Candy started to fill in her life story too. She told me how her father had passed away and how her mother had raised her under strictly Christian guidelines. She told me how she had a personal relationship with Jesus and how she didn’t really understand how a person could live without Him in their life. She meant me. I was quite accustomed to this kind of question and we went into a short discussion regarding the benefits of atheism vs. Christianity and vice versa. Considering her upbringing, she took my atheism pretty well, though she vowed to pray for me to one day see the Christian “light”, prayers that have apparently gone unanswered.
We talked until the sun set and I decided that it was about time that it was safe for me to return home. I indicated that I should get going but Candy wasn’t finished with me. She had decided that it would be very important for me to meet her mother. “There’s a problem.” She said. “It is very important that you say that you are a Christian when you meet her.”
“I can pretend to be a Christian, I suppose.” I said with no small amount of surprise. “Do I need to be a particular kind of Christian?”
“Yes. You can’t say that you go to a church that my mom also goes to or she will know that you are not telling the truth. She knows everyone from many churches.”
“Well,” I thought. “I can say that I’m with the Church of England. I really don’t think that there is one of those on the island. If there is, I doubt that an American protestant would ever go to one. They are really very boring and don’t have sing-alongs, just fire-and-brimstone style sermons and old stodgy sounding hymns.”
“Perfect!” Candy chirped. “I’ll tell her that! Only where will I say that you go to church now that you are here?”
This was an interesting game and now that I was playing, I wanted to win. “There is a Russian Orthodox church on Queen Street that I visited once for Easter Mass. Tell her that I go there. They sing a lot, but not like at your churches, it is all in Russian. Are you sure I need to be Christian.”
“Oh, it is very important!” Candy exclaimed. “My mother has a way of praying people out of my life. I do not want to lose you in this way.”
“You can do that? You can prey people out of other people’s lives?” I said, astonished.
“Oh my mother can and she has. She is very close to the Lord.” Candy confided.
“Well I’ll be the best Russian Orthodox-going Church of Englander I can be; just for you. At least until we can convince your mother not to pray me away.”
Candy laughed. Then the thought hit me. I wished that I could stop my mother-in-law from trying to pray me away. I wished that Svetlana would have had a plan for me to follow to have kept me out of the way of her mother’s monstrous wrath. I knew that it was more likely that her mother was growing weary from Svetlana’s complaints. On the rare occasions where I had the temerity to say “No!” to Svetlana, whether it was for a new piece of camera equipment or another trip abroad, she would simply ask her mother next. Her mother would always pay… or rather her mother’s husband would always pay.
With Candy, I had a plan. We had a plan. I was going to be in her life for a while and no mothers were going to stand in our way. That moment, I thought of a scripture from the Book of Matthew, somewhere in the middle, “Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”
I changed the word ‘man’ in the passage to ‘mother’ and then to ‘mother-in-law’ when I repeated it to myself. It was strangely satisfying to think that it would be a sin against a Christian god for anyone to interfere with me and my wife. It would also be a sin to interfere with me and Candy since it was likely a god that sent her to me. I drove Candy home with a smug sense of satisfaction. We had a plan for a long and prosperous friendship. My mother in-law was likely a thousand miles over the Pacific right now and I could return home to pick up the pieces and mend my marriage with Svetlana.
When I arrived home, I was tired, but happy and relieved. I unlocked the door to see Svetlana in the kitchen cooking dinner. I walked into the kitchen to give her a hello kiss. “Zdravo, bebe.” I cooed to in her native tongue.
After receiving a kiss back, I wheeled out of the kitchen and into the living room. There was still an air bed. There was still a mother-in-law smell. There was still mother-in-law stuff. Jesus. There was still a mother-in-law. I felt instantly dizzy and nauseous. I debated whether to faint or throw up. I looked back at Svetlana for answers.
“Sweetie,” She whispered sheepishly. “My mother was sad because she was sick for most of this last week of her visit, and we decided she should stay a little longer.”
“How long?” I asked vigorously, failing to hide my distaste for the news.
“Three more weeks.” She consoled.
I had just survived three weeks of this harpy and I was at my wit’s end. I did not know if I could stand another day. Three weeks would drive me mad and I was sure of it. Still nauseous, I declined to take any dinner and went straight to bed. No marriage could survive this. The red-haired beast had won the day.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Chapter 2 - The Pledge
Waking up with a hangover on a Saturday was not new to me; in fact it was becoming quite a regular happenstance. In the year previous, I had just barely managed to rescue my life and marriage from the brink of disaster. To do this, I had to put up Svetlana in a small apartment in Paris while I worked doggedly to restore our previous life here in Hawaii. To maintain the status quo in Hawaii, I sold my soul to an employer and subsequently lost the ability to make any extra income. I lost the ability to take time off to think about my situation, lost the ability to do any new deals, lost the ability to move, breathe, care. The hangover stepped in to remind me of each and every thing wrong with my life on a grand scale followed by a reminder of everything wrong that I had ever done… ever.
I needed a distraction and quickly. There was no sense in working on any of my business schemes, since I could not execute anything of importance with an employer for an anchor around my neck. I had my game. Computer games give me a lot of solace, since they provide one with a continuous set of small rewards for the simple act of logging in. I looked toward my bookshelf. Dante’s “Purgatory”? Ugg, not now. Asimov? Hmm… later. Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”. Perfect. Everyone was asleep as I melted into the chapter before thinking to do anything else.
I guess I wasn’t surprised to find that it was a book about transformations. There were stories of gods and men transformed into beasts, beasts evolving into humans and humans ascending into godhood. Soon, my mother-in-law would awake and resume her bloody quest to transform my wife into a monster and me into a bachelor. I looked down at the list of friends in my phone. Breakfast with a friend would solve all my immediate problems. I love breakfast and I love my friends and these two things together would make all the bad in the world go away. There was one thing I was forgetting through the hangover mist, something I had to do. I remembered; Candy.
I called Jamie. She was my most loyal friend and usually available for breakfast at a moment’s notice. For her, hangovers and breakfast didn’t usually work well together, but with any luck I could catch her after her morning grumblings (she was not a morning person) and before she had eaten. I was in luck. She was still hungry and in reasonable spirits. We’d have a lot to talk about. I looked around the apartment. Svetlana was still asleep and I suspected she would not stir ‘til well after noon. My mother-in-law was sleeping on an air-bed in the living room. I shuddered to look at her; already a beast.
I’d hoped that the air bed that I provided for her would have been uncomfortable enough to shorten her stay, but to no avail. She slept as soundly through the mid-morning sun as her daughter. I doubted that she would stir for anything less than an earthquake. After a quick shower, check of my email and an obligatory update of facebook, I was off.
I met up with Jamie at my favourite breakfast nook. It’s a come-as-you are sort of café near the new theatres on Ward Avenue. Honolulu is a strange city in that there are not a lot of breakfast places and the few that do serve breakfast stop at 10 or 11am. This is not a good situation for a night owl or anyone that needs to party. I don’t want to eat a hamburger at the best of times and I certainly don’t want one for the first meal of the day. Café Java was different though. It was one of the few eateries in town that would serve breakfast all day long. The service was slow and the ambiance was far from noteworthy, but they served me the necessary hangover fighting fare; eggs Benedict, caffe latte and freshly squeezed orange juice. I could feel my hangover squeal in terror at the mere mention of Café Java.
Jamie. Jamie, Jamie, Jamie. I could say this seventy more times. Unlike Candy, I really don’t believe that the combined efforts of Shakespeare, Voltaire, Freud, Nietzsche and a host of literary and philosophical greats could convene in an afterlife think tank, and produce one jot to accurately describe Jamie; not using mere words. They would need spreadsheets, video, pictures, diagrams and transcripts of expert witness testimony to explain only half of Jamie’s eccentricities. Here, I can only hope that with all the writing skills I possess, that I may relate to you a small but sufficient explanation of Jamie to include her in this story.
Anyone who has ever called themselves my friend has assuredly had something unique to their character; a certain je ne sais quoi that separates them from the norm. Undoubtedly, this is not coincidence, as I am attracted to those who stand out in a crowd. Unlike my other friends with but a single oddity, however, Jamie did not possess a single quality that might be considered normal. Her mannerisms, her hopes and dreams, her every breath seemed to separate her from normalcy as far as normalcy can be described. Certainly even the way our friendship began, with her fierce and penetrating hatred toward me was anything but normal; quite abnormal, to be true; even for me.
I met Jamie at a wine-tasting ball sponsored by the Australian Chamber of Commerce. Hawaii has its various ethnic and geographical groups and since the islands are halfway between Australia and the rest of the United States, Australia treats Hawaii like it is actually a part of the Unites States. The Australian government even built an embassy in Honolulu for some reason. Unless an Oahu event is Japanese in nature, as there are plenty of Hawaiians with a Japanese heritage and plenty of Japanese tourists to fill their ranks, these ethnic-oriented celebrations generally need extra outsider bodies to round out their numbers. The Australians were no exception to this rule and only about one in ten people at the soiree were of Australian origin, the rest being from just about everywhere else.
The event was supposed to be “black-tie”, which by Hawaiian reckoning translates to “please wear a suit jacket if you own one, otherwise an aloha shirt is fine.” I arrived in a tuxedo, true to the spirit of the dress code. Jamie was already there when I arrived. She was single and single purposed. Like so many women I knew in Honolulu in the 35-45 year old range, she was perpetually single. At this black-tie event, she deduced that she had a good chance to meet a well dressed single man whose life goals would include advancement in his business career.
Having already sold my soul to an insurance company, I had no interest or ability to do anything new in business and took to watching the crowd. Drinking copiously, I noticed her for the first time stalking the men, like a cat; very much like a big cat. Naturally, I was attracted to this curiously odd behaviour and eventually dragged myself up and out of my chair to have a closer look and perhaps make an introduction.
I had no sooner closed in on her when an Australian friend of mine, Melinda, jumped in to introduce us. “Jamie,” she said. “I want you to meet Svetlana’s husband, Robyn.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Jamie said, her eyes darting off toward the field of prey.
“Oh, I didn’t know you were friends,” I said, looking surprised.
Melinda nodded and slipped away to make more introductions. Having been introduced as a husband rather than some potentially single guy, it was too late to observe Jamie’s curious hunting technique as a prospective victim. I tried to make a little small talk to give me time to rethink my introduction plan. She glanced back at me hurriedly, with an air of disgust.
“Look, I’m here to meet single men,” she scolded. “Leave me alone.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to…” I tried to add in.
“No!” she cried and hurriedly walked away to acquire a new hunting position.
How abrupt! I had imbibed too much wine to feel slighted by her reproach and grew rather fascinated by her technique. She moved. I followed. She moved again and like a naturalist on the Serengeti, I kept up behind her. Her hunting technique grew more and more nervous by the minute and she glared back at me with increased levels of agitation as I pursued. Eventually her looks turned to what I can describe as pure unfiltered hatred. In my drunken state, it was oddly satisfying.
Like in so many Hawaiian affairs, the island itself intervened to bring about the metamorphosis of this relationship that had started so beautifully. I learned that apart from Melinda, that a few other girlfriends of mine were also mutual friends with Jamie. Crazy Sally in particular, who was a consistent breakfast buddy of mine, claimed to see her at least once a week. She learned of Jamie’s enmity with me from Jamie herself. I had a running joke with Crazy Sally about how I felt so sorry for Jamie, being that she was probably so terribly in love with me, but could not have me since I was married. I would mime her lament and feign my own torment that I could not return Jamie’s true love since my heart was taken by another.
This running gag continued for months when Oahu finally threw Jamie and I back together again. Melinda and Svetlana shared a birthday that was only a day apart. We conspired to combine their birthday celebrations into one large party, inviting people from both of our sets of friends. We compiled a guest list of over 100, a short list and fully expected everyone on the list to arrive. They did arrive, nearly down to the last invite. Almost the first to arrive was the incredibly punctual Jamie. We had finished decorating by that time and there were few other guests. I decided to be a good host, brave her gorgon stare and welcome her to the party. If permitted, I thought I might let her in on the mutual Joke that Crazy Sally and I had been sharing all these months.
I was permitted and when Jamie heard the story she laughed. She laughed. I had never seen her so much as dare to brook a smile, but at that moment, the absurdity and longevity of this inside joke had melted whatever barrier she had built up against me. She poured out her laughter and I drank it in. Jamie and I began our awkward, frustrating and completely indestructible friendship from that day forward.
I was 5 minutes late for my breakfast date with Jamie at the Café Java. When I arrived, Jamie had been there waiting for exactly 5 minutes. She was picking at the menu board with her forefinger in her peculiar way, looking for the perfect breakfast. She would always go for something healthy, and toiled between the muesli and an avocado selection. I knew what I wanted before I got there. She went for an avocado omelette and I put in our orders, slipped the cashier my card and took our number 12 table marker outside to enjoy the weather, the food, the conversation, and the company.
Jamie sat without a word in the particular way that she always did. I took a long look at her, thinking of what to say. She was pretty, not beautiful, but pretty in that rare sort of pretty without makeup kind of way. She had wispy red-blonde hair that came down to her shoulders. It always looked the same. Her hair style never changed regardless of whether we were at work, playing tennis, or at a black tie ball. It looked carefully styled and yet messy at the same time. Throughout our friendship I would often find myself staring at it, wondering if this time I could make sense from the senseless-yet-ordered disarray.
“So what did you do last night?” I asked. “We all missed you downtown.”
“Oh I was on a date with this guy I met from match.com,” she grimaced, looking down.
“And?” I said hopefully.
“I don’t think there is a connection,” she said.
Jamie and I had had this conversation before; several times before. Her dating rules were the hardest to follow in the history of dating rules. She had rules for how the first date was to be conducted, what was allowed on the second and the permissible features of the third. Everything had to be in its place for her or there would be fireworks. Her match from last night had probably never dated anyone with Asperger’s syndrome before; the poor bastard. In addition to what was allowed on a date, Jamie had come to many conclusions as to what was allowable for conversation, how the fork and knife must be used, when an how to order the food, pair the wine and a great many other things that a hapless date could never know in advance. As her friend, she must have had to forgive my thousands of transgressions against the order she had set up for the world around her.
Our meals arrived and Jamie began to arrange her napkin, utensils and plate in order to best consume her meal. As she prepared to carve off her first bite of food, I broke the silence.
“I met someone last night,” I interrupted.
Jamie stopped preparing her first bite and looked confused for a moment. She was ready to take a bite of her food and yet, had to respond at the same time. Her decision finally landed on a reply. “Oh that is bad, especially right now,” she added.
“Oh it’s not a ‘thing’,” I said. “Just a woman that I think is very interesting. She sang in my ear. It was quite unforgettable.”
Jamie finally took a bite of her avocado omelette and looked like she was thinking hard while she chewed. Finishing the bite, she asked. “Why do you need another friend? You have me.”
“I didn’t know that there was a limitation on the number of friends I should have.” I responded, a little agitated.
“Well if this new friend doesn’t alienate you from Svetlana,” she said. “She will take time away from your current friends, including me. How will this be any good at all?”
A metamorphosis occurred. Suddenly Jamie became the Rain Man. “Oh oh, this is definitely going into my injury book. Yeah. This is definitely an injury.”
I woke from the daydream. Jamie was Jamie again. The daydream was cruel and I scolded myself, but bit on my tongue a little to suppress a laugh. Jamie was right. I needed another woman for a friend like America needed another war. Jamie was wrong. A person can’t have too many friends and my wife was spending all her time with her mother anyway. I needed other new perspectives on my problems and to get those I would need more friends.
“I’m going to call her, I think.”
“Well you know the rule,” she pointedly reminded me. “You are not supposed to call for 3 days after you first get someone’s number.”
I didn’t know this rule. I’m not sure that even is a rule, yet here I was being reminded of it. I considered whether it was possible to be reminded of something that was never in your head to begin with. Why would someone wait three days anyway? What sort of person would wait like that? I pictured Ovid’s telling of the three-day-rule. I wondered if Pyramus and Thisbe would be alive today if Pyramus had waited three days before talking to Thisbe through the hole in the fence. No, definitely not. I thanked Jamie for joining me on short notice and she thanked me for breakfast and we headed our separate ways.
“What does Jamie know about relationships?” I muttered to myself while I watched her walk away and called Candy the next moment.
One ring. Two rings. Three rings. I grew impatiently nervous. Just before the fourth ring there was a click. Answering machine? No it was Candy! “Hello?” she sang inquisitively.
“Hello, Candy? It’s me Ro…”
“Robyn! Hi!!!” the excitement in her voice pealed like the bells at the gates of heaven.
“I hope you don’t mind that I didn’t wait three days to call.” I nervously joked.
“Oh, my God, no! Oh, we should go for coffee. Three days! What is that all about? Are you busy right now? Let’s go for coffee. I had such fun last night.”
It was magnificently simple. I arranged to meet Candy at the Starbucks on Kalakaua Avenue at the end of Waikiki. No time to waste. Like Apollo pursuing Daphne, I dashed to my chariot, engaged in a brisk and spirited ride, and was at the end of Kalakaua in record time. I daresay that Apollo himself could not have managed the trip so quickly. The corner was filled with beach-goers of every description from the overweight and terribly sunburnt tourists to the perfectly formed gods and goddesses of the surf.
Nothing was as amazing as what I was about to see though. Candy was there; so pure, innocent and angelic, gracing the Starbucks doorway. Most importantly, she was waiting for me. Sporting a flowing wrap and a bikini top, her warm and inviting smile was so… so touched by the heavens that once again I had to check that I wasn’t dreaming. I wasn’t, and greeted her with open arms and shared the traditional island greeting of a hug and kiss on one cheek. The dulcet ring of her greeting reminded me of the aria she whispered from the previous evening. My knees weakened once again.
Taking the lead, I sallied up to the bar to order coffees. Mine, a caffe latte. Candy’s, a grande chocolate macchiato in a vente cup with extra whip cream and a chocolate drizzle. Could I have expected anything else? We retired to a table and began to chat, exchanging life stories from childhood to the present day. We spoke in grand swaths, skipping details. Candy had lived most of her life in Hawaii. Her mother was an important figure in a church and was off travelling. Her father had passed on. She was working at an engineering company doing books or paperwork of some sort. Her passion was singing and she had some professional work in California, but it sounded like that was long since over.
I told her about my life in Canada, how I had a large family and about how I was mostly raised by women, about my terrible relationship with my father and how I came to be married to Svetlana. Candy was easy to talk to and she seemed to be terribly interested in every detail of the conversation. When she spoke, her melodious voice was so hypnotizing that she could have been reading from the phone book and kept my full attention.
Our coffee talk concluded with a pledge. “Robyn?” she asked. “Promise me that we will see each other every single day from now on.”
I hadn’t even considered such an agreement with my wife and didn’t know what to say. Her eyes gleamed with sincerity. “I promise,” I said, vowing to myself that I should at least try to keep this most preposterous of promises.
Times were changing. My relationships were changing. My feelings were changing. My attitudes toward work, marriage, friendships, Hawaii, and life were all changing. I parted with Candy at that very same shop and went home to finish my book, knowing that the next day would be another day of changes, another day of Candy and I wanted to know as much about metamorphoses as I could.
I needed a distraction and quickly. There was no sense in working on any of my business schemes, since I could not execute anything of importance with an employer for an anchor around my neck. I had my game. Computer games give me a lot of solace, since they provide one with a continuous set of small rewards for the simple act of logging in. I looked toward my bookshelf. Dante’s “Purgatory”? Ugg, not now. Asimov? Hmm… later. Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”. Perfect. Everyone was asleep as I melted into the chapter before thinking to do anything else.
I guess I wasn’t surprised to find that it was a book about transformations. There were stories of gods and men transformed into beasts, beasts evolving into humans and humans ascending into godhood. Soon, my mother-in-law would awake and resume her bloody quest to transform my wife into a monster and me into a bachelor. I looked down at the list of friends in my phone. Breakfast with a friend would solve all my immediate problems. I love breakfast and I love my friends and these two things together would make all the bad in the world go away. There was one thing I was forgetting through the hangover mist, something I had to do. I remembered; Candy.
I called Jamie. She was my most loyal friend and usually available for breakfast at a moment’s notice. For her, hangovers and breakfast didn’t usually work well together, but with any luck I could catch her after her morning grumblings (she was not a morning person) and before she had eaten. I was in luck. She was still hungry and in reasonable spirits. We’d have a lot to talk about. I looked around the apartment. Svetlana was still asleep and I suspected she would not stir ‘til well after noon. My mother-in-law was sleeping on an air-bed in the living room. I shuddered to look at her; already a beast.
I’d hoped that the air bed that I provided for her would have been uncomfortable enough to shorten her stay, but to no avail. She slept as soundly through the mid-morning sun as her daughter. I doubted that she would stir for anything less than an earthquake. After a quick shower, check of my email and an obligatory update of facebook, I was off.
I met up with Jamie at my favourite breakfast nook. It’s a come-as-you are sort of café near the new theatres on Ward Avenue. Honolulu is a strange city in that there are not a lot of breakfast places and the few that do serve breakfast stop at 10 or 11am. This is not a good situation for a night owl or anyone that needs to party. I don’t want to eat a hamburger at the best of times and I certainly don’t want one for the first meal of the day. Café Java was different though. It was one of the few eateries in town that would serve breakfast all day long. The service was slow and the ambiance was far from noteworthy, but they served me the necessary hangover fighting fare; eggs Benedict, caffe latte and freshly squeezed orange juice. I could feel my hangover squeal in terror at the mere mention of Café Java.
Jamie. Jamie, Jamie, Jamie. I could say this seventy more times. Unlike Candy, I really don’t believe that the combined efforts of Shakespeare, Voltaire, Freud, Nietzsche and a host of literary and philosophical greats could convene in an afterlife think tank, and produce one jot to accurately describe Jamie; not using mere words. They would need spreadsheets, video, pictures, diagrams and transcripts of expert witness testimony to explain only half of Jamie’s eccentricities. Here, I can only hope that with all the writing skills I possess, that I may relate to you a small but sufficient explanation of Jamie to include her in this story.
Anyone who has ever called themselves my friend has assuredly had something unique to their character; a certain je ne sais quoi that separates them from the norm. Undoubtedly, this is not coincidence, as I am attracted to those who stand out in a crowd. Unlike my other friends with but a single oddity, however, Jamie did not possess a single quality that might be considered normal. Her mannerisms, her hopes and dreams, her every breath seemed to separate her from normalcy as far as normalcy can be described. Certainly even the way our friendship began, with her fierce and penetrating hatred toward me was anything but normal; quite abnormal, to be true; even for me.
I met Jamie at a wine-tasting ball sponsored by the Australian Chamber of Commerce. Hawaii has its various ethnic and geographical groups and since the islands are halfway between Australia and the rest of the United States, Australia treats Hawaii like it is actually a part of the Unites States. The Australian government even built an embassy in Honolulu for some reason. Unless an Oahu event is Japanese in nature, as there are plenty of Hawaiians with a Japanese heritage and plenty of Japanese tourists to fill their ranks, these ethnic-oriented celebrations generally need extra outsider bodies to round out their numbers. The Australians were no exception to this rule and only about one in ten people at the soiree were of Australian origin, the rest being from just about everywhere else.
The event was supposed to be “black-tie”, which by Hawaiian reckoning translates to “please wear a suit jacket if you own one, otherwise an aloha shirt is fine.” I arrived in a tuxedo, true to the spirit of the dress code. Jamie was already there when I arrived. She was single and single purposed. Like so many women I knew in Honolulu in the 35-45 year old range, she was perpetually single. At this black-tie event, she deduced that she had a good chance to meet a well dressed single man whose life goals would include advancement in his business career.
Having already sold my soul to an insurance company, I had no interest or ability to do anything new in business and took to watching the crowd. Drinking copiously, I noticed her for the first time stalking the men, like a cat; very much like a big cat. Naturally, I was attracted to this curiously odd behaviour and eventually dragged myself up and out of my chair to have a closer look and perhaps make an introduction.
I had no sooner closed in on her when an Australian friend of mine, Melinda, jumped in to introduce us. “Jamie,” she said. “I want you to meet Svetlana’s husband, Robyn.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Jamie said, her eyes darting off toward the field of prey.
“Oh, I didn’t know you were friends,” I said, looking surprised.
Melinda nodded and slipped away to make more introductions. Having been introduced as a husband rather than some potentially single guy, it was too late to observe Jamie’s curious hunting technique as a prospective victim. I tried to make a little small talk to give me time to rethink my introduction plan. She glanced back at me hurriedly, with an air of disgust.
“Look, I’m here to meet single men,” she scolded. “Leave me alone.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to…” I tried to add in.
“No!” she cried and hurriedly walked away to acquire a new hunting position.
How abrupt! I had imbibed too much wine to feel slighted by her reproach and grew rather fascinated by her technique. She moved. I followed. She moved again and like a naturalist on the Serengeti, I kept up behind her. Her hunting technique grew more and more nervous by the minute and she glared back at me with increased levels of agitation as I pursued. Eventually her looks turned to what I can describe as pure unfiltered hatred. In my drunken state, it was oddly satisfying.
Like in so many Hawaiian affairs, the island itself intervened to bring about the metamorphosis of this relationship that had started so beautifully. I learned that apart from Melinda, that a few other girlfriends of mine were also mutual friends with Jamie. Crazy Sally in particular, who was a consistent breakfast buddy of mine, claimed to see her at least once a week. She learned of Jamie’s enmity with me from Jamie herself. I had a running joke with Crazy Sally about how I felt so sorry for Jamie, being that she was probably so terribly in love with me, but could not have me since I was married. I would mime her lament and feign my own torment that I could not return Jamie’s true love since my heart was taken by another.
This running gag continued for months when Oahu finally threw Jamie and I back together again. Melinda and Svetlana shared a birthday that was only a day apart. We conspired to combine their birthday celebrations into one large party, inviting people from both of our sets of friends. We compiled a guest list of over 100, a short list and fully expected everyone on the list to arrive. They did arrive, nearly down to the last invite. Almost the first to arrive was the incredibly punctual Jamie. We had finished decorating by that time and there were few other guests. I decided to be a good host, brave her gorgon stare and welcome her to the party. If permitted, I thought I might let her in on the mutual Joke that Crazy Sally and I had been sharing all these months.
I was permitted and when Jamie heard the story she laughed. She laughed. I had never seen her so much as dare to brook a smile, but at that moment, the absurdity and longevity of this inside joke had melted whatever barrier she had built up against me. She poured out her laughter and I drank it in. Jamie and I began our awkward, frustrating and completely indestructible friendship from that day forward.
I was 5 minutes late for my breakfast date with Jamie at the Café Java. When I arrived, Jamie had been there waiting for exactly 5 minutes. She was picking at the menu board with her forefinger in her peculiar way, looking for the perfect breakfast. She would always go for something healthy, and toiled between the muesli and an avocado selection. I knew what I wanted before I got there. She went for an avocado omelette and I put in our orders, slipped the cashier my card and took our number 12 table marker outside to enjoy the weather, the food, the conversation, and the company.
Jamie sat without a word in the particular way that she always did. I took a long look at her, thinking of what to say. She was pretty, not beautiful, but pretty in that rare sort of pretty without makeup kind of way. She had wispy red-blonde hair that came down to her shoulders. It always looked the same. Her hair style never changed regardless of whether we were at work, playing tennis, or at a black tie ball. It looked carefully styled and yet messy at the same time. Throughout our friendship I would often find myself staring at it, wondering if this time I could make sense from the senseless-yet-ordered disarray.
“So what did you do last night?” I asked. “We all missed you downtown.”
“Oh I was on a date with this guy I met from match.com,” she grimaced, looking down.
“And?” I said hopefully.
“I don’t think there is a connection,” she said.
Jamie and I had had this conversation before; several times before. Her dating rules were the hardest to follow in the history of dating rules. She had rules for how the first date was to be conducted, what was allowed on the second and the permissible features of the third. Everything had to be in its place for her or there would be fireworks. Her match from last night had probably never dated anyone with Asperger’s syndrome before; the poor bastard. In addition to what was allowed on a date, Jamie had come to many conclusions as to what was allowable for conversation, how the fork and knife must be used, when an how to order the food, pair the wine and a great many other things that a hapless date could never know in advance. As her friend, she must have had to forgive my thousands of transgressions against the order she had set up for the world around her.
Our meals arrived and Jamie began to arrange her napkin, utensils and plate in order to best consume her meal. As she prepared to carve off her first bite of food, I broke the silence.
“I met someone last night,” I interrupted.
Jamie stopped preparing her first bite and looked confused for a moment. She was ready to take a bite of her food and yet, had to respond at the same time. Her decision finally landed on a reply. “Oh that is bad, especially right now,” she added.
“Oh it’s not a ‘thing’,” I said. “Just a woman that I think is very interesting. She sang in my ear. It was quite unforgettable.”
Jamie finally took a bite of her avocado omelette and looked like she was thinking hard while she chewed. Finishing the bite, she asked. “Why do you need another friend? You have me.”
“I didn’t know that there was a limitation on the number of friends I should have.” I responded, a little agitated.
“Well if this new friend doesn’t alienate you from Svetlana,” she said. “She will take time away from your current friends, including me. How will this be any good at all?”
A metamorphosis occurred. Suddenly Jamie became the Rain Man. “Oh oh, this is definitely going into my injury book. Yeah. This is definitely an injury.”
I woke from the daydream. Jamie was Jamie again. The daydream was cruel and I scolded myself, but bit on my tongue a little to suppress a laugh. Jamie was right. I needed another woman for a friend like America needed another war. Jamie was wrong. A person can’t have too many friends and my wife was spending all her time with her mother anyway. I needed other new perspectives on my problems and to get those I would need more friends.
“I’m going to call her, I think.”
“Well you know the rule,” she pointedly reminded me. “You are not supposed to call for 3 days after you first get someone’s number.”
I didn’t know this rule. I’m not sure that even is a rule, yet here I was being reminded of it. I considered whether it was possible to be reminded of something that was never in your head to begin with. Why would someone wait three days anyway? What sort of person would wait like that? I pictured Ovid’s telling of the three-day-rule. I wondered if Pyramus and Thisbe would be alive today if Pyramus had waited three days before talking to Thisbe through the hole in the fence. No, definitely not. I thanked Jamie for joining me on short notice and she thanked me for breakfast and we headed our separate ways.
“What does Jamie know about relationships?” I muttered to myself while I watched her walk away and called Candy the next moment.
One ring. Two rings. Three rings. I grew impatiently nervous. Just before the fourth ring there was a click. Answering machine? No it was Candy! “Hello?” she sang inquisitively.
“Hello, Candy? It’s me Ro…”
“Robyn! Hi!!!” the excitement in her voice pealed like the bells at the gates of heaven.
“I hope you don’t mind that I didn’t wait three days to call.” I nervously joked.
“Oh, my God, no! Oh, we should go for coffee. Three days! What is that all about? Are you busy right now? Let’s go for coffee. I had such fun last night.”
It was magnificently simple. I arranged to meet Candy at the Starbucks on Kalakaua Avenue at the end of Waikiki. No time to waste. Like Apollo pursuing Daphne, I dashed to my chariot, engaged in a brisk and spirited ride, and was at the end of Kalakaua in record time. I daresay that Apollo himself could not have managed the trip so quickly. The corner was filled with beach-goers of every description from the overweight and terribly sunburnt tourists to the perfectly formed gods and goddesses of the surf.
Nothing was as amazing as what I was about to see though. Candy was there; so pure, innocent and angelic, gracing the Starbucks doorway. Most importantly, she was waiting for me. Sporting a flowing wrap and a bikini top, her warm and inviting smile was so… so touched by the heavens that once again I had to check that I wasn’t dreaming. I wasn’t, and greeted her with open arms and shared the traditional island greeting of a hug and kiss on one cheek. The dulcet ring of her greeting reminded me of the aria she whispered from the previous evening. My knees weakened once again.
Taking the lead, I sallied up to the bar to order coffees. Mine, a caffe latte. Candy’s, a grande chocolate macchiato in a vente cup with extra whip cream and a chocolate drizzle. Could I have expected anything else? We retired to a table and began to chat, exchanging life stories from childhood to the present day. We spoke in grand swaths, skipping details. Candy had lived most of her life in Hawaii. Her mother was an important figure in a church and was off travelling. Her father had passed on. She was working at an engineering company doing books or paperwork of some sort. Her passion was singing and she had some professional work in California, but it sounded like that was long since over.
I told her about my life in Canada, how I had a large family and about how I was mostly raised by women, about my terrible relationship with my father and how I came to be married to Svetlana. Candy was easy to talk to and she seemed to be terribly interested in every detail of the conversation. When she spoke, her melodious voice was so hypnotizing that she could have been reading from the phone book and kept my full attention.
Our coffee talk concluded with a pledge. “Robyn?” she asked. “Promise me that we will see each other every single day from now on.”
I hadn’t even considered such an agreement with my wife and didn’t know what to say. Her eyes gleamed with sincerity. “I promise,” I said, vowing to myself that I should at least try to keep this most preposterous of promises.
Times were changing. My relationships were changing. My feelings were changing. My attitudes toward work, marriage, friendships, Hawaii, and life were all changing. I parted with Candy at that very same shop and went home to finish my book, knowing that the next day would be another day of changes, another day of Candy and I wanted to know as much about metamorphoses as I could.
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