Fiona Maazel - Woke Up Lonely

“Dad, I’m leaving.” But instead he followed Wayne until brought up short by Deborah, who was standing in the doorway to their bedroom. She wore a thin pink nightgown. Her curly white hair, generally stiff, was wilting down her face. She’d been married to Wayne for fifteen years and seemed to be the worse for it every time Thurlow saw her.

“A visitor!” she said. “What’s the occasion?”

Wayne reappeared with Tyrone on his shoulder.

Thurlow blenched. He didn’t like animals, domestic or wild. He especially did not like this bird.

Apparently, the feeling was mutual, since Tyrone, whose wings had been clipped, took one look at Thurlow and thudded to the floor. Then went under the bed.

Wayne got on his knees. Thurlow looked at Deborah and asked for an umbrella. She looked at him, and the look was not nice.

Wayne said, “Come on, Ty, everyone loves you, just come out.”

Deborah said, “Wayne, please, you are being ridiculous. All you care about is this stupid bird.”

They carried on this way for some minutes. Thurlow didn’t understand much about what was going on. It was true their repartee had always featured what rankled most, only this bravado felt new.

Deborah went to the bathroom to change clothes. Wayne enticed Tyrone back into his cage. Then everyone returned to the living room.

“Son,” Wayne said, “the reason I was calling you is because Deborah and I, well, maybe it’s obvious, but we’re not getting along too well these days.”

Aha.

“What your father means is that we are ready for counseling. You’ve given us a wonderful life here, but it’s also a little strange and it’s put a strain on things and we think we need to talk to an outsider.”

Thurlow began to shake his head even as he tried to seem amenable. “Are you sure? Because I don’t think counseling is a proven science.”

Wayne snorted and stubbed his index finger on the table. He was about to slay Thurlow with evidence of how little he knew about marriage. “Maybe if you and what’s-her-name had tried counseling—”

Deborah cut him off, but she looked pleased. She lit up a Virginia extra-slim cigarette and brought it within inches of her lips. She had quit smoking years ago, and this was how.

Thurlow swatted the air to clear a path. “Okay, okay,” he said. “But leave it to me. I’ll find Ohio’s best,” which meant he would hire from within and they would never know.

04:25:32:08: A marriage counselor? Now? The universe laughs at me, but I can’t take a joke. Especially since my dad is right: I understand so little of love. Love and marriage. It’s as though all my experience ramped up to these days has taught me nothing. My first billow of desire? Fifth grade, improper fractions with Mr. Coombs, and to my left one Esme Haas in striped tee, navy-blue short shorts with white piping, and Tretorns, which she’d had the foresight to wear years before they were a fad. She’d been assigned to buddy me through class. She was older and adept in the augmenting of her self-esteem via charity; I was stupid and courting a one-and-seven-fourths chance of failing fifth grade. We sat at adjacent desks. In the tradition of another famous love capsized on food, I had an apple in class the day she showed. Every time Mr. Coombs wrote on the board, we’d pass this apple between us, our fingers mating in the relay of this fruit. I took to offering her an apple a day. But she stopped being interested. She had always been good at tiring of a thing the moment I realized it pleased her. Also, my grades were better; her work was done.

The years went by. We’d see each other in the halls. The summer before eighth grade, the rumor was that Esme had free passes to Disneyland because her dad understudied for Pecos Bill in The Golden Horseshoe Revue. She gave the passes out, and on my day, because I got winded quick and was not much for walking, I headed for the skyway funicular. There I found her on the floor, on a blanket, reading Steinbeck. We spanned the park, then walked for a while, but still, I never touched the ground.

Fast-forward to sophomore year of high school, Sunday in the market. Esme in a sleeveless denim vest and carmine mini. Bangles around her wrists, ankles, neck. Hair in a high ponytail, strafed green. Me beholding the cereals the way some people look at art. I was sixteen, and two years shy of a myocardial infarction because of my bad diet and weak heart. I listened to soft rock, had never kissed a girl; I did not know the president’s name. I was, essentially, an archetypal American boy growing up in the wealthiest, most enlightened country on earth, staring at Esme Haas, who had stalled in front of the cereals, too.

I got within a couple feet of her when she turned my way. And it was too late to be normal. I had no basket and no cart. I was backed up against the gondola shelves; a bracket spiked my neck. My palms were flat against the Special K. I looked like a jumper. I felt like a jumper. The tumult of my feelings had struck me dumb. Esme with her box of Kashi was leaving my aisle — Esme, whom I barely knew but who continued to rouse from me the urge to know her more.

She went to an East Coast university and then overseas, while I tooled around Anaheim. I still thought about her, of course, but figured she was lost to me and that in lieu of this fabled thing called happiness, I’d try something else. I started up a few meetings here and there. The idea? Show up. Talk. Share something of yourself. Get to know your neighbors. What I did not know then is that there are politics in numbers, and that when you bring the isolates together, sometimes they want to discuss the state of our union, to say that our lawmakers are charlatans who should be deposed and that only a sundering of this menace can return us to values touted in the Bill of Rights. And that sometimes, for saying this and joining up, they want sex. It’s the strandeds’ approach to intercourse: Let’s rend ourselves from humanity so we can find ourselves in each other. Still, these people were here and there, hardly a notable constituency among those for whom the Helix — though we didn’t have a name yet — was a way out of isolation.

The meetings got bigger. And more frequent. I began to think there was real purpose in this, which was when Esme reappeared. On my block. She was visiting her parents, driving a new car, and wanting to head into L.A. to a new restaurant she’d heard about, and did I know the way? I was twenty-four and enrolled at a local college but starting to be Helix full-time. I just happened to be home, looking for a Hamburger Helper Halloween costume I’d made with Norman many years before. In ’83, when I was thirteen, the semiotics of the white glove were incandescent in the sequined accessory of one Michael Jackson, though for me, it was all about the four-fingered Helping Hand, with red cuff and smiley face. That Halloween, the last I’d ever celebrate, Norman and I sported the Hand’s likeness through a gauntlet of evidence that said: Already, you are different.

So I’d come back for the glove, but really for providence, which explains itself post hoc, if ever.

I couldn’t tell if Esme remembered me, but I decided our history was so dull, it would compromise our future if I brought it up. She was wearing a baby-blue cardigan buttoned to the neck, and sunglasses she took off when I gave her directions, botched the directions, and then insisted I didn’t know the directions by name, only sight. She would simply have to take me along. I stood with my head braced against my arms, which were folded atop the driver’s side door. She got out of the car. She was a foot shorter than me. I’d seen her kind of hair on a billboard for a revolutionary shampoo product — bright, blond, emulsive. Her fingernails were pastel. Creamy pink for the virgin bride. She wore white leather Keds bound tight. She was a fortress, a turret, and in those embrasure eyes were the guns of Navarone.