The following is an excerpt from Thomas G. Fiffer’s novel in progress.
I was riding home on the train, listening to The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. I was at the part where he talks about the letter, the horrid, spiteful, contemptuous letter he sent his former lover, Veronica, when she let him know she’d taken up with his soon to be former, soon to be dead best friend. It reminded me, not in its tone but in its outcome, of the terse termination note I had sent all those years ago to J. The one that said, “You want a piece of my heart you cannot have.” I was listening intently to the British narrator’s fluid voice, simultaneously snarky and wistful, feeling the deep undertone of melancholy set under the sharp excitement of late middle-age romantic opportunity. And then my phone rang. It was J.
“I bought a book today.” She was a welcome interruption, a ray of light filtering through the dusk as the winter sun slipped down earlier and earlier on my evening commute. “Six-word love stories, based off the famous one Hemingway wrote about grief. You know the one I mean? I’ll find it for you.”
“I already know it: ‘For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn.’”
“Yes.”
I thought of my son, S, my miracle child who almost didn’t happen, how every time I said, trying to help him handle the anxiety of anticipation - Christmas, birthday, trips to visit Grandma, a toy ordered online and awaited expectantly in the mail - “It’ll be here before you know it,” he parried my platitude with, “I already know it, Dad.” And then I thought of the miracle of knowing J again, of knowing the woman I’d already known as a girl, of somehow bridging 18 years of distance, the span of two decades of wishing and wondering, not ever waiting but always wanting, of time filled with emptiness, of emptiness filled with the passage of time.
We know why relationships falter and crumble. The reasons have been exhaustively documented. And the reasons themselves do not hold our interest. Incompatibility. Insensitivity. Inexperience. Insufferable boredom. Infidelity. Irreconcilable differences. These “ins” eventually out us, and when things break down, or more accurately break up, whether in youth or middle age, there is, inevitably, a betrayal of sorts, whether that act involves another person or not. It’s not so much the why of the ending but the how that captivates us, the fight to the death that engages the spectator, the steaming train wreck that attracts the voyeur, the blood in the water that brings out the shark in us, and the frightfully large shadow the how casts on our own shrunken life, causing us to stare inward in silent horror while turning primly to the person next to us and muttering, “Tut, tut. Tsk Tsk. What a shame, for it to end that way.”
It is the same with how love starts. The why is a mystery, so we look for God in the endlessly repeated details. The random meeting in a crowded restaurant. The long-avoided fix up by a friend. The eye-opening blind date. The bumping into one another on a bright stretch of green grass bordered by blue flagstones under a cloudless sky on a perfect summer day. J and I met in such a place, on such a day, late in the summer of 1985, on the lawn in front of Yale’s Sterling Library, when her Frisbee landed at my feet. I reached down to pick it up, she ran over, and as I rose, I fell . . . into her enormous, beautiful blue eyes, the color of the Caribbean. And as I remember it, I just stood there. Motionless. And she said, “Hey, are you going to give me my Frisbee?” And I said, “I’ll give you your Frisbee if you tell me your name.” That must be the way it happened, because I couldn’t possibly invent such a lame pick-up line. The color of the frisbee? I recall it was lime green. But what was it Julian Barnes said about history and memory? "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation. . . . The history that happens under our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it's the most deliquescent." You might want to look up that last word, before it melts away. To this I would add, as your life goes by your past arrives before you know it (I already know it, you say, archly), and your future recedes into the insurmountable middle distance. Do you detect a tinge of regret? The sad thing is, you don’t think of your present as becoming your past, not while she’s still warm in your arms, and you rarely appreciate the light you’ve lost while you’re still squinting at it, with the wide-eyed fondness that informs the backward glance. Can you really, as Yeats suggested, cast a cold eye on life, on death, and let the horseman pass by?
And I remember another summer, in another apartment, where the seeds of our demise as a couple were sown. Can I do this, in six-word sentences?
I failed to understand her grief.
She needed me. I wasn’t there.
I did not pass the test.
I was not yet a man.
No, I didn’t already know it.
Evaporation is invisible, until you notice.
Now J was reading to me, over the phone, choice selections from her new book of six-word stories. Each line an opening chapter, and a story in its own right. I was laughing, sighing, commenting, fully engaged, my head turned to the window as the train rolled along through the darkening suburban night.
“I have a sentence,” I said. “Anyone listening knows I love you.”
She countered with one from the book: “I told you. It affects me.”
“Ahh. Here’s another: Who threw away the love letters?”
“Perfect.” Then, “Why did you marry that one?”
“Is that in the book or are you asking me a question?” Silence.
“Page 26.”
We continued, speaking in six-word sound bites, conversing in a kind of code, a literary shorthand that we translated on the fly. Hers she drew from the pages of the book. Mine were graffiti from the walls of my heart.
“He made her first among equals.” My offering.
“A scripted life, with narrow margins. Page 44.”
“Never again, but then again, never?”
“Once a lover, now a friend. Page 23.”
“Some things can never be explained.”
“One should never return a gift. That is the second to last entry.”
“Mmm. And the last?” I asked.
“May I have this last dance?”
I couldn’t resist the opening. “Take my arm. I will lead.”
Photo credit: By JD Hancock from Austin, TX, United States. Cropped and edited by Daniel Case prior to upload - 1970 Baby Shoes and Blanket, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25859529