The argument is so bad I walk out and live in my Village flat, ready for the wild bohemian life. Then I hear she has found someone else and suddenly I want her, I’m desperate, I’m mad for her. I can think only of her virtues, her beauty and energy and the sweetness of her weekend routines. If she takes me back I’ll be the perfect husband. I’ll take coupons to the supermarket, wash the dishes, vacuum the whole apartment every day of the week, chop vegetables for the big dinners every night. I’ll wear a tie, polish my shoes, turn Protestant.
Anything.
I don’t care anymore about the wild life of Malachy and Michael uptown, the scruffy Beats in the Village with their useless lives. I want Alberta, crisp and bright and womanly, all warm and secure. We’ll be married, oh we will, and we’ll grow old together.
She agrees to meet me in Louis’ Bar near Sheridan Square and when she walks in the door she’s more beautiful than ever. The bartenders stop pouring to look at her. Necks are craned. She’s wearing the rich blue coat with a light gray fur collar her father bought her as a peace offering after he punched her in the mouth years ago. There’s a silken lavender scarf over the collar and I know I’ll never look at that color again without thinking of this moment, that scarf. I know she’s going to sit on the stool beside me and tell me it was all a mistake, that we were made for each other and I should come with her now to her apartment, she’ll make dinner and we’ll live happily ever after.
Yes, she’ll have a martini and no she won’t go with me to my apartment and no I won’t go with her to her apartment because it’s over. She’s had enough of me and my brothers, the uptown scene and the Village scene, and she wants to get on with her life. It’s hard enough teaching every day without the strain of putting up with me and my whining about how I want to do this that and the other thing, how I want to be everything but responsible. Too much complaining, she says. Time to grow up. She tells me I’m twenty-eight years old but I act like a kid and if I want to waste my life in bars like my brothers it’s my business but she’ll have no part of it.
The more she talks the angrier she grows. She won’t let me hold her hand or even kiss her on the cheek and, no, she won’t have another martini.
How can she talk to me like this with my heart breaking there on the bar stool? She doesn’t care that I was the first man in her life, the first ever in the bed, the one a woman never forgets. All that doesn’t matter because she’s found someone who is mature, who loves her, who will do anything for her.
I’ll do anything for you.
She says it’s too late. You had your chance.
My heart is banging away, and there’s a great pain in my chest and all the dark clouds in the world are gathered in my head. I want to cry into my beer there in Louis’ Bar but there would be talk, oh, yeah, another lovers’ quarrel and we’d be asked to leave or at least I would. I’m sure they’d like Alberta to stay to adorn the place. I don’t want to be out on the street with all those happy couples strolling to dinners and movies and a little snack later before they climb into the bed all naked and, Jesus, is this her plan for tonight when I’m alone in my cold-water flat and no one in the world to talk to but Bill Galetly?
I appeal to her. I invoke my miserable childhood, brutal schoolmasters, the tyranny of the Church, my father who chose the bottle over the babies, my defeated mother moaning by the fire, my eyes blazing red, my teeth crumbling in my head, the squalor of my flat, Bill Galetly tormenting me with people in Platonic caves and the Gospel According to St. John, my hard days at McKee Vocational and Technical High School, older teachers telling me whip the little bastards into shape, the younger ones declaring our students are real people and it’s up to us to motivate them.
I plead with her to have another martini. It might soften her so much she’ll come to my apartment where I’ll tell Bill, Take a walk, Bill, we need privacy. We want to sit in the candlelight and plan a future of Saturday shopping, vacuuming, cleaning, Sunday antique hunting, lesson planning and hours romping in the bed.
No, no, she won’t have another martini. She’s meeting her new man and she has to go.
Oh, God, no. It’s a knife in my heart.
Stop the whining. I’ve heard enough about you and your miserable childhood. You’re not the only one. I was dumped on my grandmother when I was seven. Do I complain? I just get on with it.
But you had hot and cold running water, thick towels, soap, sheets on the bed, two clear blue eyes and fine teeth and your grandmother packed your little lunch box to capacity every day.
She climbs from the bar stool, lets me help her with her coat, drapes the lavender scarf around her neck. She has to go.
Oh, Christ. I could easily whimper like a kicked dog. My belly is cold and there’s nothing in the world but dark clouds with Alberta in the middle all blonde, blue-eyed, lavender-scarved, ready to leave me forever for her new man and it’s worse than having doors shut in my face, worse than dying itself.
Then she kisses my cheek. Good night, she says. She doesn’t say good-bye. Does that mean she’s leaving a door open? Surely if she’s finished with me forever she should be saying good-bye.
It doesn’t matter. She’s gone. Out the door. Up the steps with every man in the bar looking at her. It’s the end of the world. I might as well be dead. I might as well jump into the Hudson River and let it carry my corpse past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty across the Atlantic and up the River Shannon where at least I’d be among my own people and not rejected by Rhode Island Protestants.
The bartender is about fifty and I’d like to ask him if he’s ever suffered the way I’m suffering now and what did he do about it? Is there a cure? He might even be able to tell me what it means when a woman who’s leaving you forever says good night instead of good-bye.
But this man has a great bald head and massive black eyebrows and I have a feeling he has his own troubles and there’s nothing for it but to get off the bar stool and leave. I could go uptown and join Malachy and Michael in their exciting lives but I walk home to Downing Street instead hoping happy passing couples won’t hear the escaping whimpers of a man whose life is over.
Bill Galetly is there with his candles, his Plato, his Gospel According to St. John and I wish I could have my own place to myself for a night of whimpering into my pillow but he’s sitting on the floor staring at himself in the mirror and pinching whatever flesh he can find on his belly. He looks up and tells me I look heavy-laden.
What do you mean?
The burden of the ego. You’re sagging. Remember, the Kingdom of God is within you.
I don’t want God or His Kingdom. I want Alberta. She gave me up. I’m going to bed.
Bad time to go to bed. To lie down is to lie down.
It irritates me to have to listen to the obvious and I tell him, Of course it is. What are you talking about?
To lie down is to succumb to gravity at a time when you could spiral to the perfect form.
I don’t care. I’m lying down.
Okay. Okay.
I’m in the bed a few minutes when he sits on the edge and tells me of the madness and emptiness of the advertising business. Plenty of money and everyone wretched with stomach ulcers. All ego. No purity. He tells me I’m a teacher and I could save many lives if I studied Plato and St. John but first I have to save my own life.
I’m not in the mood.
Not in the mood to save your own life?
No, I don’t care.
Yeah, yeah, that’s what happens when you’re rejected. You take it personally.
Of course I take it personally. How else would I take it?
Look at her side of the story. She’s not rejecting you, she’s accepting herself.
He’s going around in circles and the Alberta pain is so great I have to get away. I tell him I’m going out.