Adam and Eve on a Raft

Some time ago in a little notepad, as a weasly young man, I wrote, "I seek to fall dangerously in love. Nothing else will do. No tempered or moderate thing. Nothing artifical or fake as a plastic Christmas tree. I want to love as voraciously as I breathe. I want to be deliriously drunk on love until I expire." Some time ago is an old person's way of saying I can't remeber when.

My cursive was beautiful then. Sweeping, swooping loops and wonderful perfect arches. Those are the luxurious and prosaic words generously afforded to a young man. But I am no longer a young man, just as life no longer generously affords me anything. I am a resident much like any other of White Hills Retirement Home in a small town in upstate New York little different than the next. A shell of my former self. Graying and skinny as ever. A bag of bones with my own teeth, thanks to 74 years of meticulous brushing (74 because I didn't brush my own until I was two).

As a young man I had been in love a few times. I fell in love once or twice along the way, but found myself, at some point or other, drifting as my eyes drift across the snowy acres out this frosty window. This disenchantment occured while she was talking or while they were sleeping and there I lied awake with my eyes open understanding that this wasn't love, at least, not as I thought it should be. It is a difficult reality to grasp because one holds on to the idea that they might be mistaken and no one likes to be wrong. There is danger in uncertainty and, at the very least, a loveless relationship isn't uncertainty — though it is certainly loveless. 

So rather than live in a state of dissatisfaction like the rest of the mopes, either out of cowardice or in some obligatory duty to conform or out of fear of being alone, I ended the relationship. One after another. The conversation usually occurred over dinner in some upscale restaurant. I am not sure why I did it in that way. Two of my exes expected me to propose, but instead they were told that things had gone too far — or far enough — and that I was leaving them. 

I took no pleasure in leaving anyone, or in being left. Who am I, after all, to leave anyone? I was neither a sadist, nor a masochist, so I derived no pleasure from either occurence. But it grew so common, one after another, that it became like an inevitable procedure and I felt myself efficient at it, just as I felt I was about the approximate worth of an old shoe to those who left me (before I could leave them). 

But just as I thought love would never happen to me, so it did. It didn't come upon a train, nor by bus. Nor with any fanfare at all. Not even with consent or with any measure of noticeable reciprocity. Nothing from her at all, actually. Except maybe the geniality of a kind smile, but that she generously offered everyone as a waitress in the corner street diner. She simply was and didn't seek anything at all from me. She was very attractive, but not overly or perfect in any partucular way. In fact, her flaws are what I admired most so I hoped to discover more of them. I hoped for stretch marks or vericose veins. She was no one I couldn't reasonably ask out and not in the least receive adequate consideration before she said no. If she said no. Nor was she someone where no was guaranteed. She wasn't someone too overwhelming or fatally flawed that meant we were doomed from the start, ill-fated, if you prefer. There was no evidence of a bipolar disorder or a defective mind in any way. In fact, quite the opposite, she had a beautiful mind that was perhaps scarred a little, or dinged up by some traumatic event that I wasn't privy to, but it was like a clipper ship that gracefully weathers the fiercest of storms and comes out even on the other side. And what was wounded I could mend. 

I had no reason to believe she was a trollop in any way. Not that I expected her to be the Virgin Mary, either. Happiness and pleasure are somewhere between the two, I think. But she could have been a trollop and it wouldn't have mattered to me. Not at all. Or she could have been a prude and I wouldn't have minded. Love welled in my heart when I first saw her when I ordered two eggs on toast and coffee that she called "Adam and Eve on a raft" and a "belly warmer." Then I heard her say it to the cooks and when she turned around and noticed me staring at her ass, she winked at me, great ass and all. She figured me out quite quick, I fear, for I like to be elusive, or at least complex. 

When my order was ready and placed on the window, they called it "Adam and Eve on a raft." Something else was "angels on horseback." They'd say "drag it through the garden" when it was with vegetables. You could "pin a heart to it" to get a tomato. Or "paint the bow-wow red" for a hotdog with ketchup. "Eve with a moldy lid" was apple pie with melted cheese on top. You can order a "first lady" for ribs. You can "drown the kids" to get boiled eggs. And you "give it shoes" when it's to go. I never ordered to go. 

Maybe I fell in love when she spoke some of that diner lingo or some magic word that I was not conscious of. Or maybe it was in something she said, buried. Some sort of energy that emmanated from her. Or the tenor of her voice itself that struck something in me. Even now, all these years later, I fall in love with the thought of her which brings me a feeling of warmth and solace such that I've only ever known in previously thinking of her. Nothing else. She lit a light in me that has not waivered, dimmed, or diminished though I have not seen her in forty two and a half years. 

I was completely enamored by her but, perhaps, too much so. Too smitten and paralyzed in her presence to ever say the right words at the right moment. Offer anything more than my order and some subtle thing that she probably heard from a thousand other hungry men in various ways. Some blunt, some eloquent, some extravagant and ostenatious, but here I was, the impotent car salesman, who couldn't sell himself to her to save his goddamn life. I was content to simply see her rather than ask her anything consequential, to get a yes or no from her when I asked her if she wanted to spend the night with me, or to drink wine somewhere better than here, or to trek up the town mountain that wasn't a mountin at all, rather, that was a handsome hill. I was satisfied to know that she simply existed and I didn't ask anything of her for fear of a possible no which would jeoaprdize what little we had that meant so much, if only to me. 

I talked to her here and there. At times I was lucky and she sat beside me on a whim to eat or have a coffee or a drink while on a quick break. I assumed she was single, but there was never anything said to confirm that suspicion. At times, I thought had I asked she might have said yes, but at other times it was inconceivable.

For two years it went on this way, we ran the gamut of holidays, birthdays, twice, until the day she was not there. February 2, 1974 — Groundhog's Day. What a sickening feeling, I recall. At first to hope she was off sick, or that there was some logical reason. Maybe she drove to Punxsutawney to see that groundhog appear and prognosticate the fate of winter. But 10 years went by and I went on hoping she'd return. And every year that damn groundhog reminded me of what was lost. And in her absence, she foretold me of perpetual loneliness. 

Every day I went in ordering the same thing. I hoped that I'd see her again. I didn't stop going for the off chance that she would return. But time passed, another ten years and ten more until it was forty years later. How I can recall her still. Joking with me. Asking how I was getting along. How the sales business was because she knew I sold Buicks at the dealership on Coolidge Avenue. She said she wanted a pale-yellow 1970 Buick Electra convertible. In one of my moments of unusual courage, I told her I would bring her one someday and leave it as a tip. 

She laughed. I loved her laugh. Maybe it was her laugh that I loved. Or maybe it was the fact that she was just out of my reach, but not so far. Distant as Gatsby's green light across the bay in East Egg, but still a body of water away. An amount of distance one could spend an entire afternoon sailing. I remember another waitress asking me what I wanted as though she would do. 

"Two eggs and toast and coffee?" she smiled, so sure of herself. She had heard me order it a thousand times. I looked at her as though she didn't speak English. As though I couldn't understand because she didn't say it as Annabelle said it. My Annabelle Leigh. 

"Put the lights out and cry," I ordered. Otherwise, known to commoners as "liver and onions." My God how I like to think of her. How I like to drift like Adam and Eve on an actual raft upon a sad stream of despair.  

I am always in bright spirits, according to the reports a social worker composes of residents' behavior, which I stole from the office to read. On a Sunday when everyone else was in church, I wheeled myself to the office and jimmied the lock on the door and read my entire file. I was a pretend invalid. It would likely be considered a crime, I suppose. Breaking and entering of some kind. Everything was marked confidential. But I hardly doubt that they would haul me away to the hoosgow over it. There are things you are afforded at 76 that you were not afforded in your youth. The perks of being an old-timer, I suppose. 

The social worker's report was like terrible fiction. I suppose "Miranda" is a writer in her free time and that bleeds into her daily reports. She might think of herself as the next Danielle Steele. Somewhere in her pussy she is elegant. It is like a genie bottle. All women have that potential. Some have just been rubbed more than others. Dusted up, they call it. 

Her words, continued, "Often the patient sits at the window as though he is waiting for someone who never comes. He is visited by family, on occasion, contary to his languid behavior. But it seems that family is not for whom he waits. I have asked him who he is waiting for and he winks and tells me, Adam and Eve on a raft,' further exemplifying his delirium."

She goes on, "Adam often greets new residents and he is active in the thriving board game scene, playing cards and shuffleboard and miniature golf, the like. Twice reprimanded for gambling. No particular reverence for religion noted. Three times reprimanded for telling dirty jokes. And once for showing up naked to the annual Halloween Party, claiming he was going as 'The Statue of David.'" I stopped to chuckle in the dark confidential room I had invaded.  

"For a thin man of 76," the report further illucidates, "he is the very definition of 'young at heart.' He doesn't ever complain. Has not filed a single grievance. He has a fantastic mustache that looks like a fat sable lying on a warm pink duvet. But Adam suffers from bouts of delirium and alzheimers. The doctor has given him 6-8 months, which seems willfully generous. It isn't evident if Adam understands this diagnoses, or if he accepts it. No, it isn't obvious to me at all."

I am beginning to think she is in love with me. She's pretty, but she is not my type. I can smell a social worker a mile away. 

They caught me in the office reading my file and the angry resident advisor, Heidi Hitler, the German girl with the hairy armpits, I'm sure (though I've never seen them to tell), wheeled me out, scolding me as she did. "This is a major infraction!" she barked. You might be kicked out. They're not going to look to kindly upon this! Those are the things she said to me. I was wearing my sunglasses and as she pushed me back to my room I looked up at the lights in the hallway which were that of a spaceship and there were moments that I seemed to travel back in time with each flourescent light that I passed under. Flickering, flickering, flickering, still. Flickering, flickering, flickering, still. Until the last one when I was somewhere else entirely. I couldn't see Heidi Hitler's face anymore looking up. Rather, I saw only the bright light and then the black orb of someone else's face eclipse it. Heidi Hitler had inavertently thrust me into a time warp. And there she was. There was my darling waitress from the fancy corner diner. My darling, Annabelle Leigh. 

She was never mine in any way other than she was in my greedy thoughts. Trapped there, maybe against her will, if she knew it. No one else in the world called her Annabelle Leigh, she had told me. That was my name for her. She didn't know the Poe poem. It was indeed her name, first and middle, but they called her Anna. Annabelle, they say, is a little girl's name. But to me it was not. To me it was the most beautiful name ever strung together. That of pure poetry. That of what Poe wrote in his last complete poem, his Leigh spelled differently as "Lee," but still, nonetheless, it was Annabelle Leigh.  

We loved with a love that was more than love. That is what I want. Not this petty shit they have in hideous bars to terrible music and bad drinks and cackling hyennas. She looked down upon my face from above asking me if I was okay. I smiled and said that I was. 

"I thought you passed out on me."

"On you?" I smiled. "No. Never." 

"The usual?" she asked. 

"The usual," I affirmed. Two eggs on toast. Adam and Eve on a raft. To be suddenly young again after realizing the realities of old age is quite a shock. The usual tiredness of my legs was gone. My face felt new again and what I had lost had returned as it were nearly fifty years before. This was likely a medical condition, I realized. Some kind of hallucination caused by a sudden rush of blood to the head or a release or dopamine or whatever it is that could trigger such. I read somewhere in a scientific journal that when a person dies the mind is flooded with some reserve of natural chemicals that cause delusory thought. Mescaline, maybe it is. Yet, here I am where I was. In the same amber-lit diner in which I met her, with all the brass ornaments and rails and the copper bartop and fancy things and the same people from before who now were unwittingly participants in my dream or delusion, forty two years later. 

She smiled and sat down at the bar, a ways down from me where she was speaking to some girl with cropped orange hair about something that I was not privy to yet, but that I would know in a matter of days when she would confess it to me in confidence. Something about the girl's boyfriend cheating on her and how it came as a surprise because no one thought he was gay. Because no one was gay in 1972 besides Olympic swimmers and ice skaters and certain piano players. I longed to know of it because I was drunk on her and had been so since the first drink which came with a glance. 

This was her natural habitat and I was a guest. How sad she made me to think of her being so close yet unattainable in a way because a man knows the limits of his fortune, even when he doesn't, and even when he dreams delirious dreams and hopes that God intervenes on his behalf in some grand and generous way. A loan of sorts, he begs God for. But somewhere in the heart, he knows, nothing would ever come from it other than inexorable grief. Not grief by something specifically tragic or as dramatic as a betrayal of trust, but grief from a prolonged association that would culminate to nothing but a few now and then exchanged glances and words in passing, and a series of flattering compliments, some spoken with only eyes that had to look as desirous and hungry as an animal starved for someone I thought never to exist. But heartbreak is not defined in any certain way. Sometimes it is by lies and betrayal and other times it is more simply by the hand of a prolonged and unrealized dream that dissipates into clean thin air.

I couldn't be there, yet there I was again in that diner. In one of many suits I wore to the dealership. To relive her perhaps before I die. Maybe this was some sort of process in dying. Before you go to the other side you get to live through again your greatest regret. Or possibly this is the grievance process when your unwritten and unspoken complaint is to be lived over again and this time you have the opportunity to change it. To demonstrate how it was not some egregious error greater than human. To do something different than before. Or maybe a sympathetic God lets us dream our sweetest dreams all over again — one last time — with one last breath. Or is this Heaven? 

I tried not to look at her, futilely, but the attraction was even greater now than it was then when I first lived and went through it because it came without the curiosity of being renewed. And I stared into the abyss of her black hair and reveled in something that didn't exist. That I only dreamed to exist. That she would fake with another. I was a dope. I was a dope in a leisure suit with a Nixon for President pin on my lapel and she was a dope falling for every cock from here to Timbuktu to satisfy something that cannot be so meaninglessly satisfied. Or maybe she didn't. I just assume women do those sorts of things. 

Sitting at the bar I thought of that report I read in the retirement home. "Adam often wears the same maroon sweater, sits at the window and stares out onto a snowy hillside where children sometimes play and sled. Perhaps he is reminiscing about some lost youth. Sometimes there are deer out there frollicking. Other times there is nothing but infinite whiteness, an exapnse of seeiming nothingness that goes on and on. It is as though he waits for some one. But who? Who is Annabelle Leigh? Is she a figment of his imagination? That I fear for him."

She gave me a belly warmer and asked how I was. How I'd been. I gave the usual answers. I told her about car sales. About deals she could get on Plymouth Dusters, though she was interested only Buick Electras, which she couldn't afford. Then she sat next to me and exhaled and I inhaled her. How fragrant was her soul. It was as though we traded something in those exchanges when I could smell the faint scent of sweat that eeked through her antiperspirant and her under garments. I imagined that wild hot dew in that bush in her panties. Or maybe she shaved. 

She looked tired so my desire only increased despite my concern for her and what was wrong with her. This was my comeback.

"It's good to see you again," I said quietly. 

She smiled. Nodding. So striking in that amber light. A better shade of orange it was. Penguin's Diner. No specific reason ever given for the name. Penguin's Diner, I repeated. The name would change in twenty years for everyone but me. To me it wouldn't be anything but Penguin's Diner. 

"You act like you haven't seen me in years," she smiled.

"It feels that way. Can I tell you something?" 

"You can," she grinned. She was attentive when she listened. She looked me in the eyes and waited patiently. Not everyone is that way, I've come to learn. One of the lessons in life that comes in living it. Most people seem to just wait for their turn to speak. But not Annabelle. Not Annabelle Leigh. 

"Just a few minutes ago I was in a retirement home. I don't know if by telling you that I will somehow open my eyes and be back there again. Maybe this is some sort of violation of the rules of coming back. To speak of it."

"Coming back?" she asked befuddled. 

"From the future. 45 years from now, I guess. I can't actually believe I'm here." I looked around in awe at the tacky decor. The neon penguin over the bar that witnessed it all. That waddled back and forth. I never sat at the bar because Annabelle Leigh never served the bar. Barb served the bar. And I had no interest in Barb. 

"Maybe you dreamt it. I have wild dreams sometimes and —"

"No. I didn't dream it," I replied gently. "It is crazy, I know. But —"

"Well, it's interesting. You've done all this before. So how does it turn out? What happens in the next 45 years?"

"Nothing in my favor. You disappear and I wander in here for forty years. Looking for you. Waiting, really, because I know you're gone."

"Looking for me?"

"Yes."

She nodded as though she understood and exhaled. She had beautiful exhalations. She had Little House on the Prarie exhaltions. Wholesome. There is a blizzard in there. Albert dies in there. It is one of those things that someone might not notice, but I noticed in those moments between noise. I suppose I understand why I've noticed, but I am not likely to admit it. She looked at me carefully as though she were in serious deliberation. I suddenly regretted telling her until she spoke again.

"What is the name of the nursing home?"

"White Hills Retirement Home in Amnesty, New York."

"Amnesty. My cousin lives in Amnesty."

"How would you like to go to a castle this weekend?"

"I work," she said apologetically. I remained undeterred. 

"How about next weekend. You can have the flu." 

She smiled. "We haven't been on a date. This is a bit sudden, wouldn't you say?"

"In the previous life I came in here for two years because you always worked weekdays. Tuesdays and Thursdays. I could count on you. Every single week without fail, I looked forward to Tuesdays and Thursdays because you were here. If you weren't here when I ordered I was devastated. I'd have a bad day. I'd sell no cars. That was an unofficial rule. I kept telling myself that I would ask you out the next time I saw you. But — I never did. Some days I wouldn't talk to you at all because something wasn't right. Or I didn't feel I had the right moment. Then the moment passed because you moved away. Someone mentioned you moving and I was devastated. Maybe it was to Buffalo or somewhere. But I kept coming back just in case you returned. I came to this place for 40 years just hoping you'd someday come back. But you never did. And now I've been given the chance to come back one more time, I cannot just not ask you. Implore you, rather. At least if you say no I would have asked and I can go back to that retirement home and wither away with some resolve. But I got to ask. Please. Tell me how you feel."

"You came in here for 40 years hoping I would come back?

"It is that simple."

"That isn't simple at all. That is blowing my mind. I've never heard anything like that. In all the pick-up lines and flirtations I've encountered. No one has ever said anything of the sort."

I ordered the usual. And when it was being cooked I excused myself and drove to the dealership on Coolidge Avenue and picked out the only pale-yellow Buick Electra convertible on the lot and drove it to The Penguin Diner. My meal was up when I got back and Annabelle Leigh looked at me as though I were a space alien. 

"You ain't kidding, are you?"

I shook my head. Then after I finished my eggs and toast I handed her the keys for a tip. 

"You aren't serious?" 

"I am. Marry me. There's no use in pretending there is anyone else in the world for me or anyone else in the world for you. We are soul mates. I know. I know for the both of us."

She exhaled. She went outside and looked at the car and her eyes were as big as the penguins on the sign. Flashing back and forth in blue and pink neon. This way to that. That way to this. She said yes and leaped into my arms. The patrons and cooks and everyone else who followed us out to the street applauded and there she was in my arms. Once and for all. 

I woke up all those years later in the retirement home. It was a dream, I realized. A beautiful but, albeit, delusory dream. A puff of smoke. A dandelion spore just out of my grasp. Heidi Hitler was warning me to not speak of the incident to anyone. But even though it was a dream, I smiled. I felt the warmth of it through me. It is better, I realized, to live in the dream of someone you love rather than in the reality of someone you don't. 

I smiled looking out onto those snowy hillsides that were otherwise empty apart from a pine tree here and there that only I seemed to notice. Then at last, up the winding road that seemed to get lost in the abundance of bucolic scenery, came a pale-yellow Buick Electra. A sight for sore eyes, one might say. She checked in with administration and announced she was here to check out her husband who was here by some mistake. I could hear her shouting down the halls. "He is the writer. Adam Peacock. He is here by mistake!"

The receptionist grumbled, suddenly thrust in an awkward moment. 

"Don't you know who he is?" she went on as though I were King Tut. I could hear her shout. I needed no other satisfaction in life than that. I grinned out the window at the pastoral setting. At the emptiness of the hillside that looked like a blank page. A well of ink stowed up inside me. What I would do to cure writer's block was quite alarming. First jail and now this. It's a wonder I wasn't already divorced. 

I got my things and said goodbye to the other residents like a president leaving office. Not in disgrace, but at the end of his natural term. My wife cringed. But I sat in the passenger seat and thanked Annabelle Leigh as we drove home to Sleepy Hollow. To our cabin in the woods. On that boat that was more like a sleigh than anything.  

"My hero!" I proclaimed, grinning, still wearing my resident slippers.

She looked over at me and couldn't help but to chuckle. Then she shook her head. 

"It's a wonder I found you this time!" she sighed exasperated. 

"It is a wonder you found me at all," I agreed. "When we get home, please, Adam and Eve on a raft?"

"Yes, dear," she agreed. "The usual. Adam and Eve on a raft."

I was dangerously and deliriously drunk on love. More than I ever could have hoped. The Buick purred like a tender pussy all the way home. 

Goodbye, White Hills. Goodbye.