My Ex-Lover

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To: marla.jenkins@dch.com

From: Frank Flounder

Date: January 9, 2010

Subject: My ex-lover

Dear Marla:

Last night I looked up an old lover.

I don't know what prompted it exactly. I was on my way upstate when, suddenly, I found myself taking an exit ramp headed toward Connecticut.

My ex-lover lives in an old stone house in Greenwich, set off from a respectable distance on a tree-lined street that sees little traffic. It is the kind of house that skirts the line between class and swinging-dick hauteur: the kind of place that evokes a castle without actually being one, thus affording the owner a quiet dignity, as well as the measure of his balls.

When I got out of my car the street was so horribly quiet the sound of my footsteps seemed out of place, rude even, and so I took extra care to soften the sound as I crept around the edge of the house and into the back yard. The windows in front were dark, but out back a soft glow poured into the yard so that I could see without bumping into the deck chairs that were situated around a rather large pool. Indeed, the path to the pool house was so well lit it could have been daylight, and there was none of the fumbling and thrashing about that normally accompanies an ex-lover's illicit trespass. Even better, this being Greenwich, the door to the pool house was unlocked, as was the door to the liquor cabinet inside.

My ex-lover's husband had an excellent taste in scotch, as well as a fine collection of crystal tumblers. After sampling a few selections, I poured a glass of 18 year-old single malt, went back outside, and settled into one of the deck chairs. As I sat and sipped, the sound of clinking silver wafted into the yard from somewhere inside the castle walls.

I'd read about her nuptials some years ago in the Society pages of the New York Times. Her husband was new money, part of a Times affirmative action program to introduce the merely rich to the filthy rich, presumably so that the two could learn something from each other. I'd also heard somewhere that he'd recently retired and, to be honest, I don't know what he does now. He might be a professional sailor.

My ex-lover was, in point of fact, my old high school girlfriend.

I suppose that this admission calls into question, among other things, my choice of terms: after all, having a "lover," at the very least, implies that the subject knows something of love, so that by the time he takes a lover he has, at the very least, seen something of the thing. There is love, and then there are lovers, and they are different things entirely. But surely one cannot take the latter without having known the former.

And so now you might be thinking: what does a 16 year-old boy know about love?

But Marla, if love be defined by passions stirred, a feeling that collapses reason into delusion, if it be the raw stuff that leaves scars on the fists of the beholden, carved from the glass of a car window crushed in rage, if it be the sound of a ticking clock that echoes off the walls of the room in which you have locked yourself for two days, if it be that which makes you brave, or stupid, or that heady elixir that makes you think the happiest day of your life was the day you lost your virginity, well then, maybe I was in love.

I'd last seen my ex-lover twenty-two years ago. We were sitting in my car, talking about how Rachel Minter had given Donny Daust the clap. I was heading off to college the next day. She told me that she loved me (whether she knew anything of love is a different question), and I said that she was beautiful. That was not the right answer.

***

I got up from the deck chair and went towards the main house. My ex-lover was standing by a sliding glass window, talking on the telephone. From a distance she looked just as I'd remembered her, but when I got closer I saw that there were lines around her mouth and that her skin had begun to sag around her bones. Her hair, once so long and flaxen, was cut into a bob, perhaps to obscure the fact that it had since grown coarse. She looked tired.

I drew closer until I was only a few feet away. I thought about opening the sliding glass window and kissing her, right then and there, an act fraught with unpredictable results, but one which carried possibility, however remote, that it could conjure a simpler time, before the castle, when we were young and I held an ice pack to my ex-lover's nose, shortly after she'd been hit with a volleyball, or the time we made it on the 50 yard-line at midnight, or the time we snuck into old man Warren's pool to go skinny dipping one day in late summer, not long before I headed off to college.

Marla, have you ever really forgotten anyone? I suppose that my ex-lover has not forgotten me, though as I searched her face, as I watched her absently twirling that telephone cord with one finger, I could detect nothing of the girl she once was—her life is surely more complicated now, and her memories of me must be quite dim and subject to significant license. The Lord only knows what she may choose to remember, and anyway, she probably doesn't want to see what I have become.

I chose to go no further. I left my ex-lover, alone in her castle, and went back to my car. Dear Marla, some memories are better left as they are.

F.F.

Sent from my Blackberry wireless