“I can be anyone I want to be.” He had told her, in unequivocal terms. He looked directly at her eyes as his hands automatically pulled a fork through light chocolate cake. He hated chocolate cake. That's what you were supposed to do with women, right? Look them in the eyes? He felt like he was suffocating, the chocolate cake stuck in his mouth. Now she looked to be a hundred miles away from him, but at the time in the darkened dining room, in the restaurant with the low ceiling and the flickering candles and the soft music and the cars roaring outside and the people laughing on the sidewalk she seemed very close. At the time, he felt that he could have touched her without moving. All he could see was her and she was beautiful. The light and the background noise of the restaurant melted into a lovely and warm flurry of colors and sounds and smells and it framed her face like a painting. The chocolate cake was killing him though, so he grabbed his sweating glass of cold water and nervously drank some. In his haste to look cool and confident he spilled some down his chin and her lips broke into a broad smile and a quiet laugh.
God, he was nervous. “I'm serious,” he said, “I've always been able to blend in wherever I want to. I can make friends with anyone.” She was older than him by two or three years; working on a doctorate in music while he was a struggling first-year law-student who held two part-time jobs. He played saxophone very badly, and he wore khakis and v-neck sweaters and when he smiled, the wrinkles on the side of his face spider webbed into a million different patterns. She was already hopelessly lost within him, but he had no idea so he continued to try different techniques, different strategies to make her laugh. By the end of the night he knew two things for certain; there was no way he would be able to act the way he had with previous girls: she saw through his charades and his cock-eyes grins. And two, he would have to think of a better place for their second date because the chocolate cake was horrible. Her plate was absolutely clean, and he caught the waiters eye and she brushed her hand against his as they left the table.
Thirty-four years and two children later he grabbed a wooden oar from the grass, still wet with dew, and tossed it into the rowboat before pushing it into the calm lake water. There was no sound and no movement, save for the quiet bobbing of water against wood. The water lapped gently at the shore and the lake was framed by towering pines and spruces and at the far end a soft fog bank was slowly enveloping a distant shore. This was where they had spent their honeymoon, and although he could have afforded better, she had insisted that they stayed in-country. She wanted to be surrounded by woods and lakes. A week in a cabin, she had proclaimed through the pillows and lace as they lay tangled in each other; soft Californian night air hung outside and the crickets chirped. “I think I can do better than a cabin honey.” She laughed her silent laugh and pushed him away with the tips of her fingers. He let the words roll from his tongue; allowing the syllables to effortlessly glide into chuckles the way he knew she liked. He teased her and she drew him close. They had spent a week here, amidst the towering trees and the quiet water. At the end of the week, they piloted his beat-up Saab into town to pick up more food and water and beer and drove back to spend another week. Those first two weeks melted into a month and before he knew it he had left his practice and written his first novel and she was giving music lessons in a local studio.
The love was consistent and strong, and it was the sort of love that persisted, like an subterranean river. It cut underneath the rocky terrain of their everyday life, occasionally seeping out in moments of professional weakness, a brush of fingers against skin, a lingering glance. At times it trickled slowly and seemed to run out completely. They followed many of the protocols of an American marriage; they broke all the rules they had set for each other. They would forgive each other; these were minor problems after all, right? In the grand scheme of the world, our love was stronger than fire, colder than ice, harder than steel, the man wrote in notes he would leave underneath her windshield wipers. He was the strong one. He could be anyone he wanted to be. He wanted to be a strong husband and a strong father and he planned out and carefully executed the next twenty years of his life with the meticulous attention of a professional actor, playing the part to perfection. He lost sight of himself and became the role. He was Zeus himself, with a supreme goddess at his side; he could conquer the world. He had, after all, conquered her heart, hadn't he?
It was then with no small amount of irony that his parents died first. The parents who hadn't spoken to each other in twenty years. He had been married for twenty years, he would occasionally remind himself. His parents had been estranged for as long as he had been married. The ring on his finger was testament to his success, his overarching triumph. He neglected to remember that although separated, his parents still wore their wedding rings; two matching gold bands in a cardboard box of personal effects that were delivered to his door from the hospital a day later. They had died within 14 hours of each other. Different causes though, the doctor continued, raising his eyebrows, pulmonary embolism and myocardial infarction. He laughed on the inside before beginning to cry. Their hearts had eventually broken. As much of a product of poor diet as it was lost romance, but the irony remained.
It all fell apart with terrifying speed. He longed for the days when he could be anyone. He could stop being a fifty-five year old man who had just lost his parents. He could start being something else. But he had lost that ability a long time ago. He had forsaken his ability to change himself into whatever he wanted, to divine some existential escape from the misery that engulfed his heart and mind and blasted like steaming water from his very pores and from the tears that streamed from his eyes. There was no love that was worth this, he had shouted at her in the kitchen, smashing a plate against the wall. There was no comfort; he was literally lost in his own grief.
And now she stood and stared at him from the distant shore of the lake where they had spent those first precious moments together. This was where it had started, wasn't it? How fitting that they return, two lost souls of romance, two ghosts silently orbiting a star that had died long ago, still dancing to a beat long forgotten. Maybe he could rescue her. The words echoed empty in the front of his mind. He stepped gently into the rowboat, his old joints groaning in protest. How long since his parents had died? Ten years? The time seemed to blend together and the mist of the morning enveloped him as he slowly paddled out into the lake. The wooden oar was cracked and faded and the skin of the hands that held it was not much better. Was this the same boat they had used together so many years ago?
She was leaving him, he already knew. She had already left, but this would make it final. He had to go see her, talk with her, make her realize...what? He didn't know the words that would make her forget the mistakes he had made. How he had systematically ignored her for several years. How he had forsaken her love for the pure, sanctimonious world of grief that he had constructed. He felt now, that there was a deeper level to his pain. More than a feeling – he knew it. There was some intermediate substrate that halted the rough current of his emotions; that lay like a blanket over his heart, protecting him from the rough abrasions of his mind. It was an unconscious layer of protection. He was not aware of its nature, no, not even fully aware of its existence. But he felt its presence there on the lake. It lay in perfect continuity with the terrain of his own heart, a warm blanket of moss over a boulder, a clean sheet stretched over a mattress.
Of course, she was gone too. He had known that when he left the shore, but still a small, child-like part of his brain held the faint hope that she would reappear as he approached the far shore. When he got within twenty or thirty feet he could make out a tangled underbrush of thorny vines and indifferent vegetation. She was not here. She had not been here in thirty years and she would never be here again. She had died, in a car accident just two weeks prior. She lay in quiet repose, he imagined, in his arms, held in his old hands. This is where he would scatter her ashes. They had been sealed in a plastic bag inside of a cardboard box, very similar to the one he had received from the hospital when his parents had died. Now he had two cardboard boxes and no parents and no wife. He had spent his grief on his parents; there was none left for her. The selfishness of the situation enveloped him, and anger filled the void, but only temporarily. Instead, he had felt a stronger compulsion. He acted now, erasing thoughts, and automatically withdrawing the small bag of fluff from the cardboard box. He placed the box at his feet and opened the bag and shook it into the still morning air. There was no wind, so much of the contents fell instead on the surface of the lake and floated, without moving. As he paddled back to the cabin and his car, the ripples from the movement of the boat passed quietly under the ashes, and soon the water was still again.
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