Forty years ago, and far more than a decade since I'd returned from Europe, I
went back to France a newlywed. My new wife Dora dragged me cautiously
through these streets I'd learned so well, where my eyes scanned those faces
and eyes and smiles, hoping for a glimpse of familiarity. We stayed in a
small bed and breakfast, somewhere near the border to Belgium. There was a
small box-shaped car there, rented, giving us free reign over what we wished
to pursue. She worried about me not using maps. Sad, she didn't know
everything about me.
Dora was a French major in college, and passionate about the culture. This
honeymoon trip, a weeklong exploration of France, was the culmination of a
life's dream for her. For me, it was the bandage slowly peeled off an ancient
wound, a return to this place that brought such bitterness and anger. All I
could do was subtly direct things away from the most tormented memories, to
point the soft, smooth-minded girl I'd married away from the things that
scared me to revisit.
"How about we go see the Arc de Treeumph today!" she said to me, her eyes
widening to absorb the full European skies.
"That could be good." I replied, burying myself beneath the thick blankets.
"And then," she says, walking to the bed and serpentinely sliding under the
covers, settling onto me, "tonight we can go to the Eiffel Tower, when it's
all lit up, which I think would be very, very romantic. Don't you think?"
I tightened up, trying to think of a way to work her out of it, away from the
thought. She sensed my muscles pulse, and turned her bright, cheerful eyes to
me. Then that frown. Oh, I hated that frown.
"I just, I don't know. It'll end up being anticlimactic, and you probably
really won't, well, like it all that much. From what people tell me."
My poor reasoning only served to amplify her nasal whine. "But you know it's
one of the reasons I wanted to come in the first place. I spent my whole life
dreaming of a romantic night under the stars, above the City of Lights, and I
want to share it with you, tonight."
Dammit.
As long as I've known her, there's always been this perfectly pure aspect to
Dora. Her smile, this shining bridge tiled with ivory marble, proclaims it's
innocence in purity and perfection. With her every action she verifies this
indicator. She shines, she glows, and sometimes she makes me smile. That's
why I married her, not for her complications or her quirks or for the
interesting things she says when she's upset, I married her so I could come
home and bask in a bright and shining love. Silly me, I thought that would be
a simple thing. It never is. I didn't fall madly in love with her, and it
wasn't anything simple that grew to intense passion- it's a calm, respectful,
relaxed love A chosen love. One day, I decided that I might as well get
married, and that she'd be as good as any to marry. I wanted a safe bet, then
and for the rest of my life. Sure, this is not the best way to make life
decisions, but at that time in my life I could have cared less. I wanted
security, I wanted that blanket of care that
a wife could provide, so I reached out to the nearest one available. And that
one day, I asked her to marry me, and no surprise, she said yes. Four decades
later, there's not been a day where in my deeper recesses I haven't regretted
that decision.
And it plagued me throughout the France trip. I dreaded making it to Paris,
dreaded facing the Tower and Notre Dame and all the other faceless enemies in
that city of lights. They all screamed at me, mocked me for my failures and
losses, and for my settlement on this silly trifle of a girl. Dora was all
grins throughout, speaking the language with that stilted Boston accent, with
such pride in her knowledge of a people she barely
knew. Yes, I loved her, but so much of me hated her.
She didn't know the story, and now, even four decades later, she still
doesn't know the story. I don't talk to Dora about things like that, we don't
tell sob stories. Everything between us has been about the present, in the
current. There's been no living in the past, not between the two of us, and
there's no psychoanalytical deconstruction. She's so unlearned about so many
concepts, foreign to so many aspects of the world, that it's not fair to her.
Dora doesn't deserve to hear my demons, about what strange going-ons inhabit
my mind. For a woman who cooks and cleans and takes care of her children,
supplying endless love, it's not something she needs to deal with. At that
point and today, I know that she would collapse, that handling it would be
impossible. I wonder if she ever can. No, I know she never can. Dora has been
an unknowing innocent to my bruised psyche for all these years, and that day
was the closest I ever came to telling her. The past churned at the
floodgates, and nearly arched through. I absorbed
it, reattained my grip over myself, and realized I couldn't get out of it.
"Alright. I'm sorry, I've just been feeling awkward here Brings back memories
of the war."
Dora, sympathetic to oblivion, squeezed me tight beneath the covers. "I'm
sorry, honey, I didn't know. You were here during the war?"
"Yeah, during the invasion." I looked out the window, at the brown dirt path
leading to the main road, leading to Paris. My eyes rose to the skyline, at
the ripened clouds, and I was sad. "And, well, I stopped in a few times after
the war."
But let me start from the beginning.
I'm an old man now, but I can still remember my youth. Not period pieces like
when I was three or two as many my age will brag about. I don't remember
specificalities, I remember feelings, emotions, thoughts. I remember that I
was a quiet boy. I remember I liked baseball, and the Yankees, and the Rex
Sox. I would read science fiction pulps and comic books. When I was fourteen
I owned the first Superman comic book. I was shy,
and I was nervous. I kept to myself most of the time, and when I made friends
I made them for a purpose, to strategize. There were no bonds made as a
child, it was just me, alone on the jungle gym. My parents and I, and we were
the only friends we needed.
That life, my early life was one of silence, of alone splendor where I would
explore my world in a vigorous hunger to understand, to know, to comprehend.
I was born and raised in Salisbury, Massachusetts, which is just another
small town where people come from. No one moves there, in fact true
citizenship is limited strictly to the people that were born here. Entire
worlds open up and close every day, as another child is born in the same
hospital they'll one day die in. It's no glamorous lifestyle, to be sure. We
were a pit stop, nothing more. City dwellers, rich in mirth and brash
rudeness, pass through and dismiss it on their way to the water park, mocking
the simplicity of the people and their dependence on one silly highway for
life. Does a public transportation system a city make?
Never once, in the eighteen years I lived there, did anything exist outside a
twenty mile radius. I was in love with the streets, with the plain, standard
parallelism that binded the aggregate parts together. It was normality, and
it reveled in that fact. I took on this place, absorbed my surroundings, and
became master of all I could see. There was my bike, this brilliant red
three-speed Schwinn Roadster, that I'd ride up and around the never-changing
streets just to find what I could see. The people were the same, daily, and
like decade-worn lovers, they all began to resemble one another. Women of a
certain age fit a type, and the males differed relative only to their rough
exteriors. Businesses were uniform and stubbornly limited. You could get
shoes, but from only one manufacturer, and from only Jack's Shoes at the
downtown Plaza area. There were only three restaurants in town: the Eagle,
which was the cheap dive; the Legendary, the special occasions place owned by
the rich D'Agostinos; and Joe's, the mi
lkshake and burger place all the kids went to. I never ate at Joe's.
Evolution didn't exist in Salisbury, the place just expanded, adding more
detail to the monochrome mosaic. It was plain, average, and people liked it.
They didn't want selection in things, they just wanted comfortable living.
The highway made many of them quite comfortable, and enabled Salisbury to
become the boomtown it turned into in the 60s. But I knew it before it was
cultural, before it had festivals. When I lived there it was a village, a
communal organism that worked like clockwork. It's complicated now, it's
bogged down in the year we're in, a part of the world for the first time.
Indeed, the world has it whole.
One day, and it happens for everyone at different points- the world existed.
It was a coming of age, when you realized the depth of civilization and the
world and life. Life in a small town will stunt your growth How many great
men have we lost to the local school board? How many people could have
changed, or destroyed the world? I realized the enormity of the place when I
left Salisbury, when I found a place on the planet, on an island of rocks and
caves and many, many people. Jonly Bonly (working title): Chapter Two |
