Meet Me In Gettysburg — V

There was a knock at my door that stirred me after the third rapping. Each rap three distinct knocks. The first two played themselves into a dream I dreamt. I figured I had overslept. John wanted to go over the books this morning and it was probably him holding two cups of black coffee ready with the joke about how I like my women. I didn't set my alarm, but the sun broke in the room in a sliver of space between the drawn blind and the white-painted sash. 

 

I stood up and fixed my suit. My black cat Poe jumped down from bed and followed me to the door. I rubbed my eyes and any thought I had the previous evening had been washed away by a rain that came in my sleep. A cleansing rain, my father would call downpours as he stood in our Brooklyn apartment and looked out a window. I always thought he missed Arkansas in those times. He missed his mother and the porch swing and the chickens and the freedom of an unlocked door. Of birds in the trees and a shotgun over the mantle in case of raccoons or foxes. I missed him in such snippets of time. He would die in New York City, which seemed like such a tragedy. A terrible miscalculation on his part. I am of the mind that no one ought to die in New York City. It is a place meant to be visited and left. 

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I looked rather well considering I just woke up. I could play it off that I was not asleep if it mattered to me by the time I got to the door. But it didn't. Old Ben used to sleep at his desk, so I doubt it hardly mattered to John who seemed pleased with my performace over the past few months. I turned the knob and just as I was about to say, "Good morning" as cheerily as I could in such a way that ensured him I was continually fit for the job he hired me to do, that I suffered no lingering effect of my recent mental health crisis the night before by my realization, or delusion, that I was a character in a novel written by Beatrix Barrett, John was not there. In his place was Beatrix Barrett herself with tired eyes, tussled hair, all five feet three of her, beautiful in her disheveled appearance. She wasn't the picture her publishing company put out of her typing on an old typewriter in a pink room. 

I could not speak. My senses were arrested. Or perhaps she was not giving me the ability. I just looked at her and through her eyes I could see Amy MacKenzie, and deeper than that, my own soul. She broke out in tears and and covered her face. An oversized trench coat hung off her pitifully and was like something she stole from a coat closet somewhere or bought at a thrift store. I could not offer words to comfort her for she gave me no words. I just stared at her, having realized the purpose of my being, the entirety of my purpose which was to love and to adore her. To find her across 161 years of time and travel, and, at last, I had. In whatever clumsy way it was accomplished, so it was. 

She stood there so pitifully which was a contradiction to her usual confident self, albeit drugged or medicated, intoxicated or manic, as though she were reduced to her most emotional and raw self, stripped of all confidence and pride, all hope and desire, and left only in a state of vulnerable yet glorious despair. Sacked by all the troubles of life and confident by none of her achievements or advancements or their worth. Reduced to that of an abandoned child lost in the woods in a state of fragile psychosis that shook coldly like a dead and fragile leaf. But as she looked at me through her fat tears and the prison bars of her thin fingers which veiled her delicate face, she began to smile and the desperation turned to triumph and confidence as I stood there and did not dissipate as she might have expected that I would — as I expected that I would. 

Speak, you idiot, I prodded myself with electric rage.

"I — uh — please come in. I was just — um — getting ready for work and thought you were — um —"

She took no time to act, perhaps thinking I'd dissolve into thin air if she hesitated. As though a war, or a battle, or 161 years of fate might decide to intervene in lieu of her decisive action. That our existence was that of a balloon that not properly secured would fly away and land God knows where and whenever it was ready on the whim of a wind. She grabbed me and pulled me into her and kissed me harder than I had ever been kissed. Her tongue slipping into my mouth. Her teeth biting my lip and sucking as though for blood. Pulling me into her while undressing. Flinging articles of clothing across the room. There was no civility in it. No barter or exchange or doubt. And all of this was witnessed by the wallpapered walls, and the oil-painted Lincoln who appropriately stood to give his famed address, but who paused as though not to interrupt us.  

We tumbled onto the bed and devoured each other there as thoroughly and reciprocally as a person can devour and be devoured. To the bone. Until we were sore and satisfied and the moment became tender yet no less passionate as she quivered and I, in certain ways, convulsed. Hours passed and she lied there on top of me like I was a life preserver, holding on as though there was still some chance I would go or be lost. But I was there and it was real. As impossible as it was to believe, it happened at last and we both knew and felt it. I wasn't a figment of her imagination as I had feared. Nor was she one of mine. I wasn't the character of a novel she was writing, but of one she was living. I was a dangerous dreamer. I dreamed as dangerously as she lived.

She lied on top of me and my fingers caressed her naked back that glistened like a lake of ice, the sweat sheening down her spine that sloped gently and perfectly in the hot room that cooled as we lied inert. An oscillating fan offered relief and Poe watched it as he made a place at the bottom of the bed to lie with us. And sweetly she lied upon me as though she had grown into me and sighed. We hadn't exchanged any words at all and needn't. Nothing else existed in my mind. I had no other duty or obligation. No other pleasure, no other comfort, no other happiness. That hole in myself that I carried all of my life had been filled and the silence wasn't akward, but pensive and warranted. We lied there for hours until we fell asleep. I wasn't due in to work for another hour or so, and there was no phone to disturb me. If I was late, someone would come to check on me, or they'd simply fill in. 

It was as though she cocooned herself into me and the lovemaking was her chrysalis stage and this was the person who emerged, circumfused in crisp ivory cotton sheets she seemed reluctant to peel from her body. It was the perfect state of existence. 

"That was very — proper," she said. 

"Proper," I repeated. "It is a lovely word." And when she mentioned she would dress to leave, I asked if she must go, and the word "must" seemed to hang there in contemplation. 

"No. I don't have to go anywhere. I must only do what I must do. I was only afraid that I had trespassed."

"One cannot trespass to where they belong, on to that which is theirs." 

"I couldn't have written a better line," she grinned. She had such a beautiful smile. A crease above her lip below her nose formed with it and I smiled at her beautiful lips. She was bountiful in every sense of the word. 

"I was afraid you wrote all the lines."

"How so?"

"I was afraid that I was a character in one of your novels, and I don't exist at all."

She nodded. "Are you satisfied now that you do exist?"

"I've never been more certain of it."

"Well, I guess I blew the Hallmark movie," she laughed. "I'll have to rewrite how we met again. Rather than me coming to your door as I did like a stray cat."

"How would that go?"

"I would come to check in. You'd be at the front desk. You would tell me there were no rooms available and I would be upset until you asked me if I ever heard of bedsharing. 'Bedsharing?' I'd ask a little confused. Then you'd say that you have half a bed in your room, the Lincoln Suite, to share. And you'd ask me how long I wanted to stay. And I would say 'forever if I could.' And you would tell me I would need to make a deposit. And that deposit would be a kiss and the book would end. The movie would roll the credits and everyone would feel happy. Maybe that is what I will call it."

"What?"

"Forever, If I could."

"That is proper." I smiled at her. She had such a beautiful face. Poe purred seemingly to enjoy his place on the bed. My bottom lip was numb from being bitten. I watched a ladybug crawl up the wallpaper near the headboard as though it were the most fascinating thing in the world. I got up when it was about time to go and she lied in bed, still wrapped in the bedsheets. She said she realized she was Amy MacKenzie in a former life, she remebered the kite, hide-and-seek, and she whispered those words over and over to herself in various states of consciousness, and she whispered them once more as though they consoled her. 

"Meet me in Gettysburg."

She rolled over and grabbed her phone and opened the notes and her thumbs began to tap the keypad. I knew she was working on the story, with the Hallmark ending, Forever, If I Could. I showered and brushed my teeth and made her breakfast which I laid upon the table, though it was well past noon. A vase of yellow daisies on the makeshift dining table provided an adequate still-life of the room which I saw her glance at. She didn't get out of bed so I took her breakfast to her and she ate and her fingers played softly upon my arm. Her nails tracing up and down. I stood there and admired her. She said she wasn't confident that her legs were operable, so she was staying in bed until at least I left because they felt like jello. The cursor blinked upon the screen of her phone awaiting her next word that would give life to someone or something. 

We made plans to have dinner that evening, to make love that evening, to drink, to laugh, to sing, to dance, all without saying a word about it. No one who ever spends their life together makes formal plans to do so. You make plans to go to Vegas, or to Florida, or this or that, but not to spend your life with someone. To give them everything. The cost of everyone and everything is the time you give up for it. Most of us are out on loan, contingent upon some reciprocal condition that if not met will result in the revocation of the agreement and a dissolution of the union. How fragile we all are in our make believe, settling for the convenient lover, the good enough, the bread winner, the breeder, or the trophy wife. We rejected all of those roles. The terrible guilt she felt for faking it had ravaged her, she confessed, manifested in a drug habit that she felt she had kicked when I opened the door. Now she was reborn. She was her true self again. And she was absolved of her sins because she found me, or I found her, and love cleanses everything. 

"How does it end?" I asked her of the story she was writing on her phone as I slowly stepped out the door looking back admiring her twisted up naked in the bedsheets. 

"This one doesn't," she smiled. "It never ends. It only begins again, and again, and again. Come home to me, darling. I will be here."

I smiled and closed the door, hoping that it wasn't the back cover of a book. Hoping she would be here when I came home.