U didn’t say anything.
HIM: I didn’t?
ME: No. Nothing. Why didn’t u say anything?
HIM: I was busy fucking u.
ME: K. But.
HIM: Stop being garrulous. I won’t put up with it.
ME: Meaning?
HIM: I like you a lot but I won’t put up with a needy woman.
ME: You just sprung this Paris trip on me. Not fair.
HIM: Plenty of time to catch up when I get back.
ME: Yes. How long gone?
HIM: 10 days.
ME: 2 long.
HIM: Wish u could be in my hotel rm in Paris.
ME: Me 2.
HIM: U r an incredible lover.
ME: So r u.
HIM: Miss you already.
I hated that he was so far away. I despised that my life seemed so narrow while his was wide open. He was in Paris while I remained in a suburb of a vast forsaken city. It would take me at least six months to save enough money to buy a coach seat on a plane to Europe. I’d have to consider staying at youth hostels even though I would now probably be older than most of the other people staying there. I’d grown up in the neighbourhood where I was born. I’d moved into my landlord’s duplex in part because it was less than a mile away from my mother’s place.
He told me he travelled business class. He said he stayed at four-star hotels and often employed a driver for his international trips. He acted in a self-important manner. I resented HIM for it yet I also admired his social and professional status. I knew I didn’t have a fake bone in my body. What you saw was what you got. That might not be so with HIM. I believe image was important to HIM. Yet I wanted HIM to acknowledge me in his life as an equal, not this common woman he liked to fuck. When he said he was going to Paris I felt left out. Why couldn’t I accompany HIM? There was the matter of my leaving my job during that time. But if we were together, really together, then he would make room for me during these business trips. He’d never invited me to his apartment. I wondered whether I would ever meet his children.
And he never gave me much warning (if any) about these trips. He’d disappeared to Seattle and now to France. He could still be in our city with his wife or another woman. What I did know was that he was not with me right then. He was very far away, wherever he was. Scott Peterson, the famous wife-killer, had called his mistress and told her he was in Paris when in fact he was at a barbecue in Stockton. I always thought it so ironic. Stockton was the polar opposite of Paris. It would be like comparing hot dogs to lobster. And Scott Peterson had gone so far as to mention the fireworks over the Paris sky. Was my lover another Scott Peterson?
I hated that I was in so deep with HIM. There was no trust between us. Yet I lusted after HIM despite my suspicions that he was not being honest with me. What was I to do, tell HIM to send me a photo of himself in front of the Eiffel Tower?
Thinking about HIM in Paris made me think about the novels I had read over the years. Always, always, unrequited love was the central theme. Was I now my own tragic heroine in the novel I called my life?
For time is the longest distance between two places.
Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
This is what I understood: I’d been alone too long. I’d put all my bets on HIM. HIM. But I hardly even knew HIM. I was starring in my own movie. In the end he would leave me. I’d taken the melodramatic road.
It was my mom who inspired my love for literature. She too loved the written word. When I was a little girl my mom read bedtime classics like Madeline or The Berenstain Bears. But by the time I was in the first grade it was Mark Twain she began to read, as I lay in my bed ready for slumber.
Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were my favourite characters of all. How could they not be? These boys and their crazy adventures continue to make me smile. But it was the pure beauty of Twain’s colloquial words that my mother and I loved the most. We lost count of the times she read the two books to me. Soon I was able to anticipate the next scene in the book. I’d interrupt her to yell out, ‘No. No. It’s not fair that the King and the Duke have captured Jim. Huck has to rescue him.’ My mother would stop reading the book for a moment and smile. We both knew Huck would manage to free Jim. She’d close the book.
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