face her. There was a look in her eyes I had never seen before. I
started to say her name but her lips cut me off. It wasn’t until about
ten seconds later that I even figured out what was happening.
“Let me get this straight, Charly, my balls are safe, right? I
mean, we’re not at a party, I wasn’t drunk, and youkissed me, right?”
I said. I lied a little, because I actually felt as woozy as if I had
swallowed a bottle of tawny port.
She looked at me smiling softly, then she patted my leg and said,
“Your balls are in good hands.” We laughed and I held her tightly,
burying my face in her neck. In the luxury of the moment I noticed
that something was missing—and it was something that seemed to
display much greater profundity in its absence than it could ever
achieve when it was there. The nature of this thing was uncertain to
me at the time. It was as if a large, pneumatic drill at a nearby
construction site had been shut down—or, I realized, as if a staticky
radio had been finally, mercifully turned off.
That was the first day of the best of my life. In the year that Charly
and I were together, I had become a happier, better person. Sure
those are grand, general terms, but all I knew was that I could
tolerate living for the first time I could remember. It was no longer
that all life was suffering, but that all life was suffering, unless Charly
was with me. In which case it was succulent. I dug her most
indubitably. Indobedobedobitably, as that legendary Zen poet Frank
Sinatra might say. I could never leave her.
But, as fate would have it, she left me. It wasn’t because of
anything I did or didn’t do, but for something that she had no choice
but to go through with. Charly had been offered a rare opportunity to
go to Ethiopia with an aid group and help some poor famine victims.
It looked great on a resume. And presumably it was a nice thing to do
for people who were suffering. Nevertheless, I couldn’t stifle the cry,
“Well what about mysuffering? How could you leave me to starve
without you?”
Of course, she said it was only for a year, and she would come
back to me, but this was something she had to doand how can we
know how much we love each other until we spend some time apart,
and we hadn’t been apart for two yearsand she loves me more than
ever and this way we’ll know if we were really meant to be together
and I need to be free from her for a while anyway because my life is
kind of in a rut as it is, and thatshe’s too much of a distraction, and
BIG AMERICAN BREAKFAST
16
 |
 |
 |
 |