10086 Sunset Boulevard

Kent’s wife had not been much more than an acquaintance to Julia before Sunday. Now, as she had a chance to talk with Carly, she could understand why Kent had loved her, why they had been such a perfect couple.

Julia had met Kent five years ago and from that first meeting, it was clear they would become good friends. She had thought, on more than one occasion, that if it hadn’t been for Carly, she and Kent would have been so much more than friends. She even entertained the thought that things might change in the future. She was ashamed of those thoughts now. Ashamed of the envy she had felt towards Carly over the past few years.

The news of Kent’s death just five months earlier was a shock. It was still a shock and no one who knew him had really absorbed it just yet. Kent loved life and lived it to it’s fullest, always surrounded by friends and up for anything and everything. Collapsing, just after returning home from a skiing weekend, he was gone before the ambulance could get him to the hospital. He was just shy of his fiftieth birthday.

This was the first opportunity Julia had had to speak to Carly since Kent’s sudden departure. She had sent flowers and a sympathy card, but in person she had no idea what to say and so they sat and talked of other things. She admired Carly’s ability to look forward, filling her time after work with evening classes and planning a trip to the Galapagos Islands in the fall. Carly’s grief was palpable, even in her smiles and talk of the future. Julia realized that she was actually beginning to like the woman who had been married to Kent for twenty five years.

Kent had been the love of Carly’s life, they had raised two children together and now the children were young adults and had left home. This would have been the time for them to spend together, alone, as when they were first married. Now not to be.

For Julia it was different. Her husband had left her. She had not experienced the joy in her marriage, as Carly and Kent had, there was no partnership, they hadn’t traveled or enjoyed life together and had no plans for the future. The void in her life had been there before he walked out. The loss, once she got over the shock, was minimal.

But here they both were, neither one having anticipated that they would be without partners at this stage of their life.

They were silent for a while, munching on heavily frosted, colorful cupcakes garnished with Peeps bunnies, watching the children hunting for Easter eggs. How much happier she and Carly would have been on this occasion if Kent were still alive. He should have been there.

Without even thinking of what she said, until she saw the horror on Carly’s face, she uttered “what a shame it wasn’t my husband who dropped dead, instead of yours”.

Rising at seven, she dressed, put fresh sheets on the bed, walked to the bakery and picked up croissants, a newspaper and purchased a large bouquet of tulips from a vendor on the corner. Returning home, she put the coffee on, arranged the tulips in a crystal vase and headed to the shower. She went through the usual ritual of shaving her legs, oiling and scenting her skin and then slid between the clean sheets to enjoy the sweet anticipation of her Sunday Morning Special.

Arriving after his morning run, he looked in, through the doorway at her and smiled. He would join her shortly, after he showered. Soon he was there, warm skin on warm skin until eventually the dance started, the caressing, the loving and for a few blissful hours under the covers they existed only to please one another. At some point he would get up and bring them coffee, juice and croissants on a tray. Fortification for the next round of love making.

Their time was almost up and he would have to return to his home. He started to dress and then turned to her and said “I’ve been thinking”. An uncomfortable feeling grabbed her in the pit of her stomach. She enjoyed this relationship tremendously, free of any strings. It was how things should be, or so she thought. Full time relationships had not worked out well for her and she had no desire to ever enter back into another one. Seeing someone once a week made sure they’d never be entangled in each others daily grind, never fight about money, never grow tired of each other’s habits. She didn’t want any changes. She braced herself against what he would say next.

“We could do this on Saturday morning too”. In an instant he’d ruined a good thing.

Life was perfect as it was, all under her control. She took yoga classes four times a week, to keep her body limber for her Sunday morning workout between the sheets, she shopped at the farmer’s markets three times a week, went to plays and attended charity events. She played tennis and golf and lunched with clients. Her days were full and all through her busy week, she looked forward to the luxury of Sunday mornings.

Now they would have to stop. He had been the perfect choice, so she thought, believing that his prior commitments would ensure that this never happened. What would be next? A couple of evenings too and then what, he’d want to move in? Oh no, that wasn’t going to happen.

She’d redecorate her bedroom. She’d shop for a new bed set and drapes. The Twilight Jasmine candles she would light on Sunday mornings would have to be replaced with a new scent. Everything would be fresh, new, ready for her to start over.

She would do all of that as soon as she broke it off with him him and sent him home to his wife and kids.

Waiting at an airport was her favorite way to spend time, it was the time during which she felt suspended from her life, a time when she felt safe away from her reality. She’d arranged to get there early, just so that she could enjoy a good four hours of aloneness in the busy airport. Going back and forth between Oklahoma and Sacramento so much the past year had afforded her this luxury more than usual. Her sister, who financed these visits, lived in Auburn, just an hour’s drive from the airport and would pick her up on her arrival and bring her back after her visit.

Here she was again, heading back now, to Oklahoma. This would be the last visit for a very long time, the last chance to enjoy the airport. While she waited, she imagined herself as someone else, someone with a far more desirable life than hers. A jet-setter, although her cheap shoes and vinyl handbag would have been a dead giveaway to any passer-by that she was not a woman of means.

This trip was a little different though. Her sister had been working on settling her parents estate, since their passing a year ago. She had a cashiers check in her purse for $12,875.22 and in her current situation, this seemed like a small fortune. It should have been $52,875.22, but she and Maurice had borrowed money from her sister over the past two years, totaling $40,000 and of course this money was subtracted from her share of the estate as repayment of the debt. She could have really done something with that extra $40,000. But it was water under the bridge, or rather, bourbon under the bridge.

She and Maurice were drunks. Maurice also had a nicotine habit, to the tune of two packs a day. And then there was the dope he’d started smoking to try and counter the pain from all the physical ailments that came along with a diet rich in alcohol and carcinogens. He didn’t have much success at holding down a job and her infrequent employment with the temp agency didn’t help towards getting them out of the rut they’d dug themselves into.

It was mid February and she was heading home to him at her least favorite time of year. Her “coat” was a thick sweatshirt with a hood. She used to joke that they drank away their new shoes, their winter boots and new winter coats and she’d make guzzling noises to accompany it all going down the drain. Maurice used to laugh. So did she, but inside she ached and mourned her former lifestyle. One she had known years before he had come into her life. It was a life filled with beautiful clothes, warm coats, fine dining, vacations and choices. All those wonderful choices that still lay ahead. But she had made some bad choices along the way and things were different now.

Now she was shackled. Shackled to a man who only saw her in terms of what she meant to him and she knew that when she returned, instead of allowing her to pay the rent a few months in advance, he’d tell her to hold on to the money, put it in the bank, because they might need it. It would be siphoned off for the usual array of anesthetics he deemed necessary and she’d be right back to living in fear of eviction.

Happy people were all around her, going to exotic destinations, meeting exciting people. She stared down at her feet. When did she buy those shoes? Jesus, they had been bought by her ex husband eight years ago. She was still wearing those shoes, because she had never been able to afford new ones. She was heading back to one of the worst winters on record and she had no coat and no boots. Then she noticed something else. There were no shackles around her ankles. None.

She got up, went over to the coffee shop and ordered a large white mocha, a double. She sat by the window and watched planes take off and enjoyed her seven dollar coffee. When the blast from the sugary caffeinated mixture hit her full force, she marched up to the Southwest ticket counter, plopped down her ticket and asked “what do I have to do to turn this into a one way ticket to Hawaii?”.

Sunday afternoon was all she had to look forward to now. She would sit on the porch, alone as she had been for the past two years, sipping absinthe, allowing her mind to wander. When he had been here, he would drink absinthe with her on Sundays and after the absinthe they always made love. As they grew older and their sex life diminished, the Sunday absinthe ritual remained, even if they only lay together in an absinthe afterglow.

Sipping the aromatic aperitif she remembered the first Sunday they had shared a glass. Forty years ago, when he was a man in his late thirties. He was her neighbor, a friend and he’d offered to do her hedges, claiming that he needed to try out his new electric hedge trimmer. Her hedges didn’t really need trimming. Afterwards she invited him inside for some refreshment. Absinthe.

He’d downed the first glass in one gulp. He was a beer man. She laughed and told him to sip the second glass, it wasn’t a gulping beverage. He wasn’t sure he liked the taste, but it was seductive.

He wore no shirt that day, just jeans and a tool belt. She savored the absinthe while she took him in with her eyes, letting her gaze lower in a slow tease, following the sweat as it made a trail from his chest to his navel. By the time her eyes dropped below his tool belt his zipper was strained.

The taste of absinthe mingled with the taste of him. How a sense memory could bring everything flooding back to her, almost too painful and yet such a delicious memory. He had joked later, to their friends, that she had gotten him drunk and taken advantage of him.

He didn’t know that she’d had many an absinthe Sunday alone. Sipping and watching him while he worked on his house or his yard or washing his car, she’d fantasize about the first time they would drink together, wondering if she’d ever have the nerve to make a move.

Now, once again, she drank absinthe alone as she looked out upon her overgrown hedges.

Inspired by, but by no means about, my friend Linda.

He sat in her parlor, sipping insipid tea and munching sausage rolls filled with fake veggie sausages. He tried not to stare at the mason jar of kidney stones, prominently displayed on the mantel like some twisted trophy. She had said they belonged to her ex lover, that men always left a little of themselves behind. He’d already lost his appetite before she served him tea.

She failed to notice that the man sitting on her couch was willing to endure this discomfort because he thought her worth the effort.

Polite in his bold faced lie, he pretended to enjoy the sorry fare and she knew her aloneness would remain untouched another day. She would wait for the man who would come to her parlor and declare “this tea is like gnat’s piss, there’s no meat in my sausage and for the love of God, let go of the ex’s stones”.