Flutter WIngs

I have an idea. Ok. I know. Its seriously fucked up. I've been thinking about contacting my first ex-wife and apologizing for the time I broke up with her when our daughter was still so young. I'll never forget that day...my daughter crying, her pleading two-year old baby face savaging me in that awfulest moment. Thunder rolled as I stepped out of Maria's VW for the last time, my daughter's shrieking and the rain pounding as her mother sped off and I just stood there, the pathetic fool in a puddle from which I couldn't escape.

I saw Maria recently, first time in decades, at our daughter's wedding awhile back...she's quieter now and composed, matronly, settled. Married to an old school Southern gentleman who is as different from me as La. is from L.A.

I was nervous about them meeting but my wife took to her immediately. They found a corner of the apartment and locked onto each other, as women so often do, as if they'd both planned for the chance meeting and of course, thats exactly what both had done. I stood off to the side with Maria's husband, sipping an Italian beer, mostly in awkward silence, while our wives whispered and nodded knowingly.

="Pete hasn't changed."

Frau Tale reported Maria's assessment later, once we were back in the hotel room with the commanding view of the Jackie Robinson Apartments, which they built after they tore down Ebbetts Field on the day America died.

=She feels very, very badly for you. How everything's turned out.

Probably another phone call I need to make is to this woman I know in New Orleans. I spent the better part of two years with her there during the mid-90s.

New Orleans is where I should have gone and should have stayed. My destiny feels as tightly wedded to New Orleans as an oyster to its shell, just before the knife removes it.

Lena's a successful businesswoman and amateur ballerina, a powerhouse, a demurely Southern sweetness that is always in total control.

Over you.

I captured her heart momentarily in my hands and can still feel the dust from her fluttering wings on my fingers.

I still want her so bad I can taste it.

Recently, I went searching online and found her company's website. I clicked on "About Us" and there she was, serene and everwise, a gracefully aging fortress of feminine vulnerability.

Surely, I had my reasons then that made perfect sense, didn't I? There were male ego issues involved. There's the fact that my son was just a baby at the time and I still had these nightmares about a lost little girl crying in the rain.

Lena had two kids of her own and I couldnt bring myself to live with them while leaving another one of mine behind. They are both college age now and he's in high school. Ha! I didnt really raise him up, anyway.

Damn it!

I can still feel the heat and the resentment rising off the prison walls of her fancy house.

We spent every weekend together, mostly in bed, drinking red wine, making love, talking, making love, eating, making love, sleeping, making love, sleeping. Five times, ten times even, as I expertly picked the lock to her soul in the upstairs bedroom which overlooked the pool, the guest house and the rotting garden. I stood at that window so often, in self-satisfaction, overlooking so much.

She informed her elderly, Catholic parents that I slept in that guest house because I had nowhere else to go. She insisted that we always lie to them about the nature of our relationship. Lena's way of resetting the lock, which of course I never noticed.

Her dad saw through me clear to the third rung of hell...never once failing to graciously enquire about the well-being of my boy.

=You own me.

She'd gasp and shudder in spasms once we were alone, always with her riding tall in the saddle. She'd get so inside of hers, which took such a long, long time to develop, a very long time, so long that her facial expression when it finally happened made me laugh out loud sometimes.

Selfish, wasn't it, in that odd way of sexual bargaining, the expense of so much middle-aged energy and for what purpose, really, except to exult ourselves through casual degradation?

One day during a dispiriting trip to the home office in DFW, I was introduced to a new staff support employee, a freckle-faced Vietnamese girl who possessed the silky, underdeveloped body of a preteen. This was like her third day in town, and my schedule was open, so I invited her to lunch. It started out innocently enough, sharing lunch and then a few drinks after work. Soon I found out that she had left behind an abusive ex-boyfriend, her first and only, back home in Arkansas.

I guess she must have mentioned something to the ex at some point, because he began to call me regularly and leave messages on my voicemail, ominous in that he sounded quite buoyant, always ending cheerfully with the threat that he was coming down to meet me, just as soon as the judge restored his drivers license.

He actually did show up finally but only after I'd already quit and gone to work somewhere else. One of my ex-co-workers contacted me and relayed the scene with relish. Oh, my god. He came up and made quite a row, asking every startled employee he could find to point out my office. Glory pleaded with him to calm down, to please leave, that I wasn't there any longer. He ransacked the office for awhile, calling Glory a cunt and threatening to cut off my balls with a butter knife when he got his hands on me.

The police were summoned.

I might find Glory's number and give her a call, too, now that I'm thinking about it. I know what you are thinking, don't I? That I am making all this up, all this false bravado about me, that this is nothing more than a deceptive trick to bare my guilty soul, like that devil in the Camus story, seated in his crummy bar in Amsterdam, who draws in the listener by weaving a sordid tale and magnifying its significance out of all proportion, as if to offload his share of the blame for the evil nature of an entire civilisation.

But really, I must tell you, it was all simply an unfortunate circumstance at the intersection of overabundance, how the corner of Rodeo and Wilshire must feel to the lonesome hobo begging for dollars along it's curb, when suddenly, out of nowhere, he gets handed a twenty.

Right before the mind police happen along to dump his wasted ass back on skid row, where he belongs.

RIOTOUS!

Glory ended up marrying the whackjob and they now live happily ever after in the north Dallas suburbs with a house, two cars, a kid and a dog.

Lena kept wanting more and more. She became for me the opposite of what she projected, concealing an insatiable selfishness beneath the composed, kindly exterior. She assumed that I had to be simply as ecstatic as she was, darling, with the way in which our relationship blossomed, never seeming to notice at all that it was me, not her, doing the sacrificing, the career changing, the priority shifting, all of the endless traveling back and forth. Or did she?

Flights into and out of Louis Armstrong International slowly started to taper off, first every other week, then every third week, then less than that.

Then, the lame excuses.

=I have too much work. I have to take my son to gym lessons. Did I already say I had too much work?

Finally, I said goodbye to Uptown, forever.

My life immediately underwent miraculous improvements in other departments. I'd started up a business with another guy I'd met by chance and it's success overflowed beyond my dreams. Mephistopheles could not have planned it any better.

One night I met a guitar player in a club during the final call band break. Drunkenly, I described to him this song I had written about my relationship with Lena. Three/four time, an unusual minor key progression that I had discovered by accident while doodling around on the old Martin. It had fallen together somehow. On a whim, he asked me if I wanted to get up there with them after the break. Sure, why not?

I wrote out the chords on a napkin, hummed a few bars of the melody and tapped out the tempo on the bar top. He called over the bass player and the drummer, who then fooled around with it onstage for a few moments until a groove revealed itself.

Wow. Just wow. When we finished, there was a generous smattering of applause from the dozen or so patrons. You know its real when you hear it.

They decided to do one more with me and the guitarist started playing a very familiar old school riff. How did he know?

Sympathy for the Devil. The live version. They invited me to join them for a weekend gig at a different venue. I couldn't make it but thereafter I did stay in touch with them for a time. When they recorded an EP they honored me by including "Lena."

I thought about sending her a copy but that seemed too triumphant.

So I mailed her the lyrics, instead...without an accompanying note.

In the beginning

you came

every morning

You were the sun

rising up

without warning

In the end

I lost you

in a fog

In the end

me frothing

like a dog

But in between

you were alive

beside me

Unseen rope

confined me

You were alive

you were alive

beside me

You crossed the rubicon

astride me

And in between

I was alive

beside you

Your poetry

revived me

I was alive

I was alive

inside you!

I crossed the rubicon

inside you!

She never wrote back so I called her about a month later. She answered and spoke to me in a glum monotone. I didn't ask how she liked the song. I could tell she was acting, but haha, so was I.

Neither of us could ever be free.

Some lawyer who'd chased her around town for years had recently presented her with a diamond ring.

I felt compelled to tell her all about my three-sided relationship with Glory.

=Oh, Pete. Will you ever learn to value yourself?

She hung up abruptly, leaving me to stare at the wall for the longest time. I turned to catch my reflection in the window, a statue of a man with a telephone held to his ear.