Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

Still draped over me like a wilted rose, Sara was now half-asleep. We stayed that way awhile, sandwiched together between chair and table, serenaded by Stan Getz’s breathy sax atop a Jobim composition from the sixties. Sara often cooked to bossa nova, disappearing into the lush sway of its rhythms, the sandy scent of its melodies. Unless she was cooking for a crowd, in which case she went Jackson 5 for the energy boost.

“Go lie down,” I said, patting her back. “I’ll clean up.”

She planted a delicate kiss on my neck. Then came another, and then a warm, wine-dipped whisper. “Come with me.”

“You’re sound asleep.”

“I can rally.” She lifted her head and tried to make her bleary eyes dance, but it was a dance that foretold swift collapse. I wasn’t without sympathy: if I were in a relationship with me, I’d have to beer-goggle too.

Her eyes closed in a hazy flutter. I soothed her back with the tips of my fingers and surveyed the disturbance of plates, glasses, and utensils in front of me.

Sara let out another long hush of a breath. Just as she drifted off, she drizzled a sigh of words into my ear. “I’ve always hated this table.”

Sara and I, classmates in high school, had reconnected during my band years. One afternoon, on the way to Warren’s to go through some new material, Jumbo and I stopped into a strip mall deli to pick up sandwiches, and as we waited for our takeout, I ran into Marianne Sadler, a friend from the old neighborhood. After we’d exchanged pleasantries, Marianne gripped my shoulder. “Did you hear Sara Rome lost a kid?”

“What?” I remembered the girl from school, a stylish broomstick, quietly intelligent, someone you knew your whole life and noticed only in a certain, limited way.

“Her son, Drew. Just a few weeks ago. Totally unreal.” Marianne had become friendly with Sara through mommy-and-me classes. She told me Sara was now an interior designer.

“Jesus. How old?”

“Two.”

“Jesus.”

I don’t know what compelled me to call her the next day. Maybe it was the blade of tragedy cutting deep in the place where I’d grown up and into the people I’d grown up with. And why wouldn’t I call? It was me. In those days, I owned the world.

“Is this Sara? Sara Rome?”

“Yes,” answered a lifeless voice.

“It’s Teddy Tremble. Do you remember me?”

“Of course, Teddy. Wow. How are you?”

“I’m okay. Listen—I just ran into Marianne Sadler. She told me some awful news. I’m so sorry . . .” As my voice trailed off, I heard only a quaking breath on the other end.

A half hour later, I was sitting on a black sofa in an immaculately decorated den, a mirror with a mosaic assemblage of pastel tiles hanging overhead. Our paths hadn’t crossed since graduation, but Sara was still long and lean, with black hair and penetratingly Welsh blue eyes. Her face now seemed gaunt and lifeless, unnourished by food or sleep.

“You didn’t have to come over,” she said.

I looked around the room. Toys sat undisturbed in bins lined up along the wall, a jarring orderliness to the colorful games and playthings. The place was full of quiet, empty of mess. Her husband, Billy, had fled to the office for a few hours.

The accident had happened on the ride home from the Academy of Natural Sciences, where Billy and Drew had spent the morning marveling at dinosaur fossils, digging for bones at the mock archaeological site, and working up the nerve to touch turtles and snakes cradled by young staff members. On their way out of town, an SUV raced through a red light and rammed into the door where Drew was strapped into his car seat. Billy escaped with a few gashes and bruises. Drew died at the hospital before Sara could get there.

She seemed eager to shift the subject. How was it, she wanted to know, that a mediocre student of average popularity and unremarkable charisma could land himself in a world-famous band? She didn’t quite put it like that. She told me I looked exactly the same as I did in high school, which was not in this case a compliment, since rock musicians do not aspire to the appearance of dishwater-dull teenagers.

A few years later, when Lucy and I were tunneling into divorce, I moved into my condo. My decorating vision being what it was, I thought it best to outsource all decor decisions and immediately thought of Sara. Really, it was an excuse to call her. I hadn’t been able to shake her story, my connectedness to it all.

Sara made my condo up nice and swank, a place I could only pretend to fit into. My life was anything but normal in those days, so she’d be over at odd times trying to pin me down on blinds versus curtains, steel blue versus denim blue, my views on something called a sconce, and oh, how about an island in the kitchen? She always seemed to be working, combing through catalogs, holding swatches up to the light, and often swinging by my place deep into the evening so as to oblige my anarchic schedule. It never even occurred to me that the late hours helped keep her mind from wandering into other places, from going home, where her husband no longer lived. More than once, I asked her how she was doing, employing a tone that made my meaning clear, and each time she answered, without looking up, with a curt “I’m fine.” I started offering her a late-night drink, and then found myself offering her an early-morning coffee.

It was not a romance born of romance. The rhythms of courtship unfolded over carpet patterns, tables, comforters. I did not wow her with limos to Broadway shows, introductions to Michael Stipe. I did not take her to a meadow with a picnic of chutneys and urge her to smell the eucalyptus in bloom, nor did I lead her out to a beach at midnight and enchant her with lines like “Do you know what the Mayans used to say about the moon?” I was an open door, that’s all, and she walked through it.

I welcomed her into my condo and my life because she was beautiful in a real and natural way, and she seemed like a portal out of the world of the fickle and into the world of the sophisticatedly mundane. Where conversations concerned friends’ upcoming birthdays, pesto sauce preferences, and the pitiful state of the school district. Where it was perfectly acceptable to pass an evening together holding lattes at Barnes & Noble.

There was nothing about her that brought the thorny end of Tremble to my nose. That’s why I connected with Sara. Why she connected with me is a bit of a mystery. Maybe it was because I neither required nor offered depth of any kind; my waters were shallow, she could see the bottom. Maybe it was to escape the metastasizing poverty in her core; maybe it was because she had already succumbed to it. All I know is that by being with me, one day at a time she began to walk different blocks, speak of different things, and distance herself from who she was.

Compared to the heavy Wagnerian circumstances of Sara’s separation from Billy, the dissolution of my marriage was easy listening. It wasn’t the age-old story either: I didn’t dump my minor-league wife for a piece of ass worthy of a rock star, although by all standards and clichés I had every right to do so. Lucy was my college girlfriend, cute and comfortable, like a Volkswagen Beetle. At the time we got together, I was no more than a political science major who happened to be in a band. After graduation, when our demo miraculously got some attention and things began to spiral, Lucy bravely bore the adjustment to being a band widow, despite her nagging suspicion that everyone in that industry was a closet heroin addict.

There were, however, little things—you could call them signs—that indicated my marriage was in trouble. We stopped going to movies together because we couldn’t agree on one. Musicwise, we were totally incompatible, which might seem like no big deal—you play your albums, I’ll play mine—but it reflected a more basic divide. Once, when Bitches Brew was on the stereo, she said that all jazz sounded the same. That stung. When she announced that her favorite song was “Against All Odds” by Phil Collins, I knew our days were numbered.