I had thought that same string of thoughts a thousand times, and still it kept looping, day after day, digging a pit in my mind. Shit.
We cleared a rise and caught sight of the rest of our tribe lounging in the shade on the grassy median of the highway. Jim had all six of our little windmills working, bless his soul. The guy was pushing sixty, twice the age of most of the rest of us, but he was always working. The windmills were set as close to traffic as possible to harvest the wind of passing vehicles. They spun pretty good each time a vehicle passed. The tribe had also spread a couple of the smaller solar blankets on the sunny spots in the grass, and pitched our tents.
Jeannie met Colin with a hug, and a “How’d it go?”
Cortez asked if I wanted to go to the Minute Mart with him and Ange to buy food. I told him I’d pass, that we only had two bikes, so they could travel faster alone. Truth was I didn’t care much for Cortez, though I loved Ange to death. Cortez was too aggressive-salesmany for me, and had the sort of thick, meaty lips that would make any man look like a thug. I didn’t understand what Ange saw in him, although I don’t know, maybe I was just jealous because Ange was so damned hot and she was with Cortez.
I sat up against a tree and typed a message to Sophia as cars whooshed past and the windmills spun.
Thinking about you, I wrote.
Love u so much. Miss u like crazy. Going hm to sleep, she wrote.
Why did I always have the urge to find a printer and print out her messages? It was as if I wanted hard evidence, something I could show to someone to prove that this beautiful woman loved me. Am I that insecure? Some part of me is, yes, especially now that I’m a bum.
Another message came through:
Can I see u?
I could barely type fast enough. Yes! Rt. 301 N, median strip, W of Metter.
See you in 40 min. : ) Can’t wait!!!!!
I leapt to my feet, grinning like an idiot.
A passing truck slowed; a plastic fast-food cup flew out the passenger window and hit me in the neck. Soda splashed across my face and chest.
“Faggot!” a woman screamed out the window as the truck sped off. She had to be sixty.
“Fat ugly bitch!” I screamed, though she wasn’t fat, and couldn’t hear me anyway.
Jim handed me a filthy hand towel. “Don’t let it get to you,” he said in his calm Zen voice. I located the cleanest spot on the towel and wiped my chest with it.
“What the hell is going on?” I said. “We’re not illegals. Now it’s anyone who doesn’t have a home?”
Jim could only shrug and return to his windmills. Well, our windmills. Everything was common property; everything was shared. Capitalism was a luxury we could not afford. It’s amazing how quickly your deeply held values crumble when the cupboards are bare.
Thirty minutes later I spotted Sophia’s silver Honda in the distance. I could barely stand to wait for the car to cover the distance between us. I stepped to the edge of the curb and watched as her face became distinct, a big smile on her beautiful brown lips. I hopped in before she came to a complete stop, reveled in the cool air as I waved goodbye to my tribe.
Sophia leaned over and gave me a wet kiss by my ear, struggling to watch the road at the same time. “Hi there.”
“Hi,” I said, taking her free hand in mine, enjoying the contrast of our brown and white fingers laced together. “How was work?”
“It sucked ass,” she said. She always said that. But she also knew she was damned lucky to have a job. Accountants were mostly still employable, even with a forty-something percent unemployment rate (which didn’t count the millions of refugees who were landing on beaches and hopping over fences every day). Sociology majors, on the other hand, were eminently unemployable. I should have listened to my parents. Although, come to think of it, when I was struggling to decide on a major my parents told me to follow my heart. There were eighty million artists, blackjack dealers, documentary filmmakers, florists, and fellow sociology majors who were very sorry they’d followed their hearts.
Sophia pulled into the Wal-Mart parking lot, parked in the far corner and left the car running, for the air conditioning.
“I brought you some things,” she said. I loved her beautiful island accent. She twisted to pull a plastic shopping bag out of the back seat and toss it casually into my lap. She tried so hard to make it seem like nothing, to keep our relationship on equal footing. I opened the bag and peered inside: soap, bug spray, vitamins, aspirin, protein bars, and a twenty dollar bill. Whenever I saw her, she had supplies for the tribe. She was a god damned saint.
A waxy package caught my eye. I pulled it from the bag and smiled.
“Baseball cards?” Like an idiot, I used to buy them every spring—a rite of passage into baseball season left over from childhood. When we first met, when I still had a job and the world was as it had always been, I bought a pack in a coffee shop and opened them at the table, introducing her to the players as I thumbed through their cards. She’d been a cricket fan on Dominica—in desperate need, as I saw it, of an introduction to the greatest bat and ball game in the universe.
She laughed. “Subsistence rations.”
I ran my finger across the foil seal, held the breach to my nose and sniffed. I shut my eyes, sighed as the smell of freshly minted baseball cards triggered fond memories. I pulled out the cards. They felt so clean and slick in my filthy hands. “Chris Carroll,” I said, studying the first card. I flipped it over. “How’d he do last season? I didn’t get to see many games.”
And suddenly I was crying. Sophia threw her arms around me and cried with me. “I wish—” she said, but stopped herself. I knew what she wished. We stayed like that, huddled together, our wet faces buried in each other’s neck.
“I only have until two, then I have to… go home,” she said after a while. Which meant, that’s when Jean Paul would be home, and even at such an indirect mention of her husband, that familiar cocktail of jealousy/hurt/despair lanced my stomach.
Sophia didn’t lie to her husband about us. He was deeply hurt, and quietly angry, but he tolerated it, because he didn’t want Sophia to leave him. In other words, Sophia had all the power in the relationship, whether she wanted it or not.
As I see it, there are four types of relationships. There are those where you’re madly in love with someone, and her feelings are tepid. In that case she has the power, and you struggle to convince her to love you by trying to be witty and fascinating, forever seeking her approval for what you say and who you are, and grow increasingly pathetic in the process. That was where Jean Paul was.
There are those where the other person is in love with you, while you can only muster a warm and murky fondness for her. In this case you carry a knot of guilt, because you feel like a walking lie; you’re forever trying to feel what you don’t feel, and end up consumed by an existential emptiness, convinced that, not only can you not feel love for this person, you have become incapable of loving anyone. That’s where Sophia was with Jean Paul, and why there was enough room in her heart for me.
Third, there are those where you’re not in love with the other person, and she is not in love with you. There is a nice balance here; you’re on the same page, so there is no need to struggle, no one feels like a loser and no one feels guilty. There is a sadness, though. When you look into someone’s eyes and see the blandness you feel reflected there, it’s hard not to wonder why you’ve chosen to be in a relationship that’s the equivalent of a permanent Valium drip. This sort of relationship had always been my specialty, for reasons I don’t quite understand.