Things didn't go back to the way they were before Miriam showed up. At parties, I would watch as Lorrie scanned the crowd, hoping to see red hair crop up. Sometimes she would go home with man or a woman, only to call and wake me up so I could come pick her up, and she would be there of course waiting for me outside a house, or in a parking lot with fresh tear stains on her cheek.
I think it was around the second week of April, or the third perhaps, when I came home to find all three of her suitcases lying open on the living room floor. I remember stepping into the apartment and eyeing them on the floor just as she came out of her room with an assortment of cheap plastic coat hangers in hand. She did not act as if she had noticed me and began to try and stuff the hangers in one of the bags.
"They're not going to fit," I said.
"I'll make them fit."
"No, really. They aren't going to fit."
She didn't say anything but kept stuffing and beating them inside the bag. Eventually, she managed to close the top and zip the suitcase almost shut; there was only one end of a hanger sticking out that was preventing it from being zipped all the way.
"You're leaving then? Am I that bad of a roommate?" I thought that was clever at the time.
She looked at me. Her eyes were sadness and rage.
"No." She grabbed one of the bags and began to head toward the door.
"Want some help?"
"No."
I watched as she went out, came back in, got the other bag, went out, and came back in again. I followed her out to the car when she retrieved the third one. Turning to me, she said "keys?" and I gave them to her. It was her car, technically.
"Where are you going to go?"
"Nevada," she said as she threw her suitcases in the trunk.
"Why?"
"One of the people at the last party said they heard Miriam had gotten on a greyhound to Las Vegas."
This was too much. I chuckled nervously.
"So, let me make sure I've got this. You're going to drive across the country in a car that isn't worth a half dollar to chase after a rumor?"
"Yep," she said, slamming the trunk.
"She's not worth it."
"You've said that before."
"You're really fucking stupid if you think she's go—"
"Well I guess I'm really fucking stupid then, Mikhail," she said, shoving her apartment key into my hand so roughly that it left a red imprint. "I already let the landlord know and paid my half of the rent for this month. You've got long enough to find another roommate."
She opened the driver's side door; it whined mechanically.
"This is a mistake. You're going to regret this."
She turned to me and stared up into my eyes with something resembling defiance.
"You're not going to find her."
"I'm going to try."
"You don't have to."
"I know, but I'm going to."
She walked over, embraced me tightly, stood on her tip-toes and kissed me on my cheek. She stayed that way for a moment or so, her dry lips pressed against my cheek. Then she unwrapped her arms from around me, got in the Honda, and that was that.
"Write me when you get to Vegas, okay? So I know you got there safe."
"I will." She started the car; it groaned to life.
"Bye Peter," she said, rolling up the window.
I watched as the only person in New Jersey who knew my real name drove out of the parking lot and out of my life.
I didn't last long in Portsmith after that. If you had asked me why I was leaving, I would have told you it was because I couldn't find another roommate, but the truth is that I didn't bother looking. I quit my job, packed up my stuff, left a forwarding address to the landlord, and moved to a nice little town on the coast of Maine. I've been there ever since. I'm the news editor for the local paper and am married to a school teacher who knows how to bake quality quiche and recite Baudelaire in French. She wants to get pregnant.
It will be fall soon and like every year I will stake out on the porch of our house and read through the classics as my wife tries to talk to me about fertility treatments. I will roam the streets of Victorian London with Dickens's orphans; I will fly over Moscow alongside dear Margarita, clinging to broomstick for dear life; I will fall through time with Billy Pilgrim, and I will lie out in the great American wilderness beside Sal Paradise as he writes about the fireworks crackling and exploding above us. And I will wait for the letter that has yet to come.
Javy Gwaltney is an aspiring author, screenwriter, and essayist from South Carolina. He recently graduated from Winthrop University with a BA in English and is now pursuing graduate studies at Kennesaw State University. You can find his works in Thumb Smudge Java, The Smoking Poet, and his blog, which is updated sporadically. His other talents include reading prodigiously, serving as a fiction editor at THIS—A Literary Magazine, and making a killer oven pizza.
Comments (closed)
S. K. Aithal
2011-09-25 06:00:17
I liked the way Javy Gwaltney draws the portraits of Lorrie, Miriam and Mikhail/ Peter with equal sympathy and understanding, leaving the readers to arrive at their own judgments about them. Although the story refrains from explicitly raising the social issue, it is impossible not to feel saddened why persons like Mikhail/ Peter in real life have been slow in receiving general acceptance in society.