Halfway to You(17)

I watched him go, his hunched shoulders bobbing down the street, the night making his outline turn silvery, then black. He crossed a bridge, then another, not looking back. Then he disappeared around a bend, and suddenly the night felt so cold, and tears pricked the corners of my eyes at the unbearable thought that I’d never see him again—and I didn’t even know why.





ANN


Venice, Italy

September 1984

In my hotel room, I pressed my lips together, my face hot.

I’d met Todd ten hours ago—ten hours. Logic told me that I shouldn’t feel rejected, but I did. It was different from the rejections in France or the acute disappointments of my childhood—it was raw. I sank to the bed with a soft, involuntary wail.

This was stupid. I was being naive. This was just another heartbreak in an endless parade of heartbreaks. I didn’t know him . . .

. . . and yet I couldn’t ignore the sense that I was supposed to know him. I had never felt so at ease with another person. Content. Had I been wrong in thinking the magnetism was mutual?

Convinced that my frantic attraction was a sign of weakness, I was determined to climb above the ache, so I did the one thing that always helped me process my feelings: I wrote.

I spilled my heart upon those pages; the words tore and shredded. I uncorked a bottle of wine. I lit a cigarette, then another. I didn’t edit; I didn’t look back. Writing my emotions—abstract and nonsensical as they were—was the only way to pacify their urgency.

Thinking about Todd, and love, and disappointment also got me thinking about my mother. She’d been a quotation clerk on Wall Street before my father fired her to cover up their affair. How scary it must’ve been to raise a baby by herself.

Hardship made my mother irresponsible and mean spirited, but she wasn’t a bad woman. She continually dated the wrong men, men who tore down her self-esteem. But at her core, she was an all-out romantic—always heartbroken over the world—and I think that’s why she drank. I can’t say I fault her for that. Loneliness could turn a person into a caged, hungry dog, growing wilder by the night.

Inside my own inebriated fog, I finally understood: alcohol put the dog to sleep.

As I wrote, I imagined my mother’s life through a new lens and wove a story that was true and not true, her and not her, me and not me. I followed the story like a raft on a river, my emotions the undercurrent but the sights all new.

My creative urgency didn’t last, though.

On the fifth day of my bender, I realized that as much as I liked the foggy productivity of being drunk in my hotel room, an abyss was opening up underneath me. I could hear my mother’s voice in that abyss, calling me down, and I didn’t want to join her. I set down my pen and drank three glasses of water. I spent my sixth and seventh days hungover and creatively blocked, staring at a blank notebook page as if I could will words onto it.

Doubt crept in, as melancholy as molding fruit. The rot led me to call my mother.

I’d checked in only twice that summer, and both instances, she had been hammered. Our conversations had been superficial and unfocused, like getting a whiff of the tar I’d spent my whole life stuck in. By leaving, I had freed my limbs of the sticky, awful life I’d had before.

But Mom was still the only person who’d understand the cloying sorrow that Todd had left behind.

I crept downstairs to the hotel lobby and convinced the night manager to let me use the phone. It was eleven in the morning in Colorado. When Mom answered, the sound of her hit me square in the chest. When she wasn’t inebriated, she had a clear, feminine voice, like Glinda the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz.

“Mom?”

“Annie?”

I was so far from home. So, so far.

“Is everything all right?” she asked.

A man’s voice rumbled in the background, asking if she wanted rocks in her drink. She told him yes.

“Annie?” she prompted, sipping audibly, ice clanking.

“Hi, Mom,” I said. “I’m in Italy.”

“Is something wrong?”

We weren’t close enough for me to just call. My heart fractured just a little, a delicate hairline crack. “No, nothing wrong.”

“Really?” Another mumble from the man, a slight giggle from my mother.

“Mom, I think . . . I don’t know what I think, actually. I met a man.”

I explained Todd all in one big rush of breath: how we’d spent a day together, and how I’d felt such a strong connection to him, and how I realized—just on this phone call—that perhaps I ought to go to Greece to find him. Was that totally crazy?

“I’m being crazy, right?” The irony was not lost on me that I was asking my mother—she wasn’t exactly an expert in relationships. But at least she was a dreamer.

There was a long pause before she said, “Greece, huh?”

I’d been so focused on Todd that I hadn’t considered the Greece part of the conversation. I cringed, thinking she might be angry or hurt that her daughter was living the fantasy she’d spent so long aching for—to find love on an Aegean beach.

“Mykonos, actually.”

“Oh,” she breathed wistfully. “Like Jackie.”

“Is that where she went?” I asked, but of course I knew; I just didn’t want to admit the full extent of my thoughtlessness. I waited, my teeth clenched. Instinctively, I held the phone away from my head, expecting a shout.