"Leaving is the hardest thing" she said once, "and I've always hated happy endings".
I
didn't expect her to say goodbye, she left me a burgundy lipstick kiss
on the chin, a pack of white roses and a handwritten note on her
perfumed pillow. I won't tell you what was in it because it would reveal
things about her that I don't want anyone else to know. She reminded me
of the seaside, the cold sand and the sudden rush when her little doll
hand first slid into mine.
When I close my eyes now I see her moving seamlessly to Nouvelle Vague's Dance With Me,
her snake skin heels kicked off and left behind like a nightmare. She's
the only girl I've ever known that looks taller in her bare feet.
"Give me one reason to be happy", she said. I could think of a few more.
She comes back late, Chloe, I'm violently
awakened by her razor silhouette fixed in the artificial back light from
the doorway. She stands there like a marble statue for the smallest
part of an eternity before soundlessly stepping out of her wrinkled
dress, leaving it behind in a branded blood pool on the naked floor.
"It's
so dark" she whispers as she climbs into bed, touches down softly like a
butterfly behind me and puts her warm little doll hand between my
thighs. I would stop a waterfall before going back to sleep, memories of
other nights like these are keeping me amplified and wide awake in the
deafening silence. She's as close as Henry used to be and the
microscopic twitches from her piano fingers are slowly making me wet.
"I
dreamed about fireflies" she says in the morning, "or maybe they were
stars". She's gone now, I answered with a lie just to keep her smiling.
I've been told I taste like revolution, since then I always drink on Fridays.
I
meet Chloe for lunch in the Meatpacking District, the dark alcohol
rushing through my veins helps dissolve the acrid hipster smell around
the table. She leaves everything she ordered untouched apart from the
tall glass of rye whiskey, then pays the bill with the firm's credit
card.
"He's here" she says, suddenly, "I'm seeing him on Sunday".
It's been the elephant in the room for weeks now, hearing her say it
should make it easier to bear but it doesn't. We both know it's a
funeral, later I wander around the McQueen store without any sense of
direction, picking out snow white roses for Sunday.
Lately I've found spaces to breathe in but
something toxic is coming to disrupt the silence. I feel it in the way
she whispers over the phone on early weekend mornings, Chloe, the little
tornadoes of despair she creates and scatters across the wooden floors.
She
used to sleep so quietly like on a death bed, now she wakes me by
accident as she gets up before dawn on Saturdays. "It's C" she said when
I asked her. Always "C", never "father", never "dad".
Just
moments ago now: she and I in the dusk, the last reflections of sunlight
on her apple skin as she looks right through me. "Do you ever get tired
of running?" she says, then turns to pick up a cigarette from her
jacket pocket. I wait for her to light it but she never does. This
silence is thicker than blood.
From time to time I come to think of Henry.
Remembering what he looks like is slowly getting harder, when I imagine
his voice I hear the irregular heartbeat from a broken telephone line
and nothing more. I stopped collecting photographs of people I know when
my father died, the fear of forgetting them keeps me from falling
asleep too easily.
I tried reading Proust once. Henry said it
changed his life, he doesn't call me as often as he used to and the last
time we spoke he called me Odette. His flowers are scentless now, just
like the Givenchy cardigan he left behind like a Trojan horse in my
night stand drawer.
Last week I bought a stamp for the letter I
wrote. The thought of sending it to him gives some form of meaning to
the words again, after all this wasted time.
New York on Halloween reminds me of downtown
Los Angeles on, well, any given day. The significant difference is that
La La Land actually scares me.
Chloe claims to have nothing in
common with her colleagues but insisted on spending the evening with a
dozen of them in an obscure studio apartment in Tribecca. "You know how
it is" she says but I really don't. Their semi scripted soap opera
monologues about themselves (Kanye West playing in the background) went
on for an hour before someone wanted to know what I do. I told him about
the joy in finding a perfect balance between Diazepam and Zoloft to
make life seem a little less surreal. He didn't ask any more questions.
I
woke up in my dress one or two days later, I couldn't tell, and went
for a walk through the park. All around were smiling people, if the
buildings had crumbled down it could have drowned out the noise.
