Stars and Rocks
By S J Tweed
When I was thirteen years old, my mother committed suicide and I decided to become immortal. Standing on an empty field, which hadn’t been mowed in some months, while the breeze petted the unruly grass, I knew I was in tune with the workings of the world. I could never leave this earth because I was so at one with it. I was a committed transcendentalist even though, at this time, I had no idea of what this truly entailed. Nature was everything and factories were bad; that was the end of it. Now I sit in this bar, where the bartender knows me on a first name basis, and won’t allow me a tab since my last birthday: a time I now refer to as ‘the incident’. I used to smell daisies before I gulped pints, but hey, what’s a failed painter to do these days once 5pm rolls around?
Yesterday I cried. I’m a man who underwent his childhood in the fifties so it was a new experience for me. I don’t feel embarrassed about crying at the age of sixty-two. Actually, I would rather like to do it again. It felt good to release the ache in my chest and I think I could make a hobby of it. Observe exhibition A, the insurance administrator who cries and downs a beer simultaneously. My wife, Lauren, perused medication at the chemist across the street, while I wept until I thought I’d cough up a lung, until I realised what I’d been missing out on all these years. Turns out my waste disposal of a soul came with an evacuation button.
When I got home, I called June because, for the first time in a very long time, I felt like I could.
A woman in her mid-sixties strides into the bar, a picture of spiked hair, long earrings and double denim. June grins boyishly as she drags an empty seat close to my side of the table. Last time we saw each other was through the fingered glass of some metro doors in a grubby Paris station, both still fuming after an argument the train conductor ensured we never really got to finish. Yet another one.
She pats my hand, clasping it briefly. June was a hippy and a visionary, and seeing her again makes my stomach bubble to the rhythm of her vodka and coke. We should have hugged, yet I had remained seated - against all dictates of manners - to ensure that we didn’t. A wave of hedgy detachment absorbs me, and I can’t say why.
June speaks and suddenly I can tell you the very moment I fell in love with her, where mere moments ago I wasn’t even sure it had been love. A few of us had been throwing pennies into a rusty paddling pool for almost an hour. Later those pennies would be viewed as donations towards a gypsy circus with a tent as exotic as a Victorian opium den. As we moved on, June and I walked apart from the group a little. The sun blazed down on us insistently that day and it must have made her feel like she could trust me. Abruptly, she lamented over how everyone placed such a tremendous emphasis on the duty to love your family.
“I don’t need instruction; I do it with my whole heart. No one raises the problem of how to stop loving them when that love destroys you. It’s your obligation verses your survival.” She threw away a hard laugh, cheeks lifting a little too wildly.
“Survival already knows all the dirty moves, so naturally it wins.” I offered, nodding because I understood the terrible grief that accompanies the loss of someone you loved very much indeed. In snippets, the following years revealed a vague tale of an adored father and brother being dragged over coffee tables and embroidered cushions on a Sunday afternoon, only to be imprisoned for embezzlement. The details arrived in the same sharp bursts of scalding spouts that must be let off a pressure cooker.
Yet, June kept mum about family to most people. She was going to guard how she invested her love now - someone would have to be the inferno to her flame before she risked grieving another cherished soul. From that moment forth, I swore to be the exception, to be so exceptional that she would have to return my ardour. However, somewhere along the way I found other vows, to another woman.
“Remember Woodstock?” She asks breathlessly and I observe as she revisits the aroma of cooked sun cream and summer grass. I never made it to Woodstock. Allowing our clasp to falter and my gaze to drop, I wonder who June is mistaking me for.
“Remember the canal?” She tries again in an illicit murmur, confidence renewed.
It is a code. What she really means is: remember the kiss we shared along that canal? I don’t have to try to recall it because I think about it every, single day - as I comb my hair, while I push paper at work, during the silence of dinnertime. It feels like it happened only yesterday as, in a way, for me it did. We were dining alone that night because the arty friend that June had invited on the trip was, by some act of providence, bedridden. Food poisoning. Poor Lisa and yet lucky us; it was the only time the woman stopped talking about her on-off partner Harry or her randy Labrador.
“Best kiss of my entire life.” I blurt recklessly, ruining the mystique but hoping to hit gold in the endeavour. Or anyone else’s life as I like to think…
“You never kissed me that way again. And you know, you ruined me. No other man ever came close to it either. Must have been too much moonlight.” She half joked with a half smile. Too much competition, I correct her gently. I tell her that I didn’t repeat the performance because she never gave me the lip time.
“Mr tall, dark and handsome.” June assents quietly. It’s a private joke and her resurrection of it makes me tingle with exclusivity. “Certainly I was tall, but fair as a Grecian Godchild,” I take the lit cigarette from June’s extended fingers with their sultry, marron nails, attempting to silence my doctor’s condemnations from my mind. “Now, I stoop whilst worrying I don’t have enough milk for my morning cup of coffee.” I miss my youthful good looks dreadfully.
We relive the kiss together this time. It was a late Venice summer, and everything was lighter then. The evenings imitated the absent sun’s heat while thin ice drowned within fizzy alcohol. Our gondola rocked gently as we turned and swayed into each other against distant jazz music. The kiss came last. In fact I’m not sure it was anything so trivial as a kiss, but rather a vessel to see the rest of the world through. A rare moment of transcendence that June and I had journeyed through as a whole. Our faces tensed with daring, bodies crushed, lips soft… School children with olive skin regarded us from the shore. The girls in tartan dresses giggled through cupped hands while the boys applauded us loudly, swinging their thin arms like novice dragonflies. In a rare moment of abashment, June nestled into my shoulder, allowing me a glimpse of two elderly ladies who fondly regarded us from their neighbouring fruit boat with wrinkled smiles. My throat stung with elated tears, destined never to be cried; instead, I sealed them inside of me as unspent keepsakes. Laughter echoed across water that mimicked a fuchsia sky. We were all unguarded affection, gripping onto neither motive nor meaning, but to be cherished and relived.
“I’m planning to take a husband” June states whilst stubbing out a characteristically half-finished cigarette atop the mottled silver case it had originated from, a habit fostered over a nomadic lifetime.
“Who is the lucky younger man?” Evidently my jealousy enjoys better health than the rest of me.
“Still deciding…” She mumbles through a mouthful of stale bar crisps.
“So, my blessing or advice?” I manage to get out.
“Both, if you’re offering. After all, you’re the expert here. Why did you get married?” She questions with faux journalistic zeal.
“Curiosity.” I shrug. No, I got married because the world had briefly turned into a merry go-round, and through the whirling bright colours I heard the promise of eternal intimacy. I had been seduced by the ideal of Happily Ever After. The prospect of a fresh start with a new girl. Our marriage is the product of two drama-junkies’ decision to seek domesticity together, petrified of a lonesome finale.
“Curiosity killed the cat.” June states from behind an unreadable glare. She is inferring that I still haven’t learnt to comprehend the seriousness behind my own flippancy. After all, curiosity killed our relationship too.
“I ate a croissant in a park under this beautiful, blazing sky this week. It was utter bliss, until I came across an article about a thirty-eight-year-old woman on sabbatical from her work as a museum curator.” She continues casually, slapping her hand on the table we share as if it is a deserving cheek. I wait as June takes a second to gather her thoughts.
“After three weeks, somebody found her. It took that long for the stench to work its way down into the flat below hers’. I’d prefer not to go like that – all gooey and alone.” June masks her gravity in a lipstick reapplication. “My hands were all buttery from the croissant, so I couldn’t even flip the page. I had to reread it so many times it gave me indigestion. How’s that for symbolism?”
If it had been anyone else, I’d have suggested that it was perfectly acceptable to smudge a daily with some wayward pastry dribble, but I’ve been in enough libraries with June to know how she felt about a soiled page. I beseech her never to fear; that she’ll always have me. My insistency snowballs as I announce that I would rather die myself, than let anything happen to her. I avow that I worry about her, even if no one else does. June fixes me with a look.
“Jeffery, it took you three years to return my call this time. It’s been twelve since we last set eyes on one another; you really think you’re going to miss me before three weeks elapse?” June says, allowing her rhetoric to peter out. I drain my last dregs of beer, although it’s more foam than hops at this point.
“Love or lust, which one wins out?” I pose, my words cutting through a fellow bar dweller’s guttural laugh. I learnt how to detract attention from a subject matter after my mother threw herself off that waterfall and my classmates wondered why. It has remained my most valuable skill to date. I believe it to be the most important lesson she ever taught me.
“Love, I imagine. I hear it conquers everything.” June responds dryly, her head supported by her palm.
“That’s what they would have you believe, but lust is demanding, fervent, thoughtless, partnered. You see, to me, love is the mild-mannered pansy, queuing behind lust, waiting his turn to dissect the carnage lust leaves in its wake. Love’s the discerning bin man of the story” June argues that love surmounts character failings, rendering it more powerful, and we continue on like that for an hour or so. Maybe we will carry on with that discourse for the rest of our lives.
“Marriage does not guarantee you won’t die alone, June. Occasionally, it even serves as the final, undeniable confirmation that there is no respite from loneliness. Stick with singledom; it’s an obvious ailment and you get to believe a white wedding would act as the perfect solution.”
June stirs the diminishing bubbles around her drink, studying the abyss that I present. The last of the hopeless romantics, and a stubborn dreamer to boot, my prognosis of her plans disappoints her, and now she pauses with the ayre of one hit by a shotgun bereavement. A few moments pass and she bids me adieu because it is a weekday tomorrow, a workday. Yet, it was Wednesday last week and it will be Wednesday the week after next. It is this, right here, that is making tomorrow important. Before I entered the chalky fumes in this bar, I had decided that this meeting would act as the accumulation of our love story; the gritty disillusionment after the credits roll. I came here ready and willing to let the dregs slip down the drain of poor-timing. I was going to allow that despot called Time, to devour the last morsels of feeling left between June and I.
But not now.
I’ve sat on the fence when it got tough. I’ve left June to fight our battles while I watched from concealed corners. With few reliable truths in life, I knew that my birthday would bring a card - in a fat envelope stuffed to brimming point, containing heartfelt letters from her - forlornly asking how I was, desperately missing my philosophising. They came like clockwork. I blush, painfully aware that I did not reply to a single one. Now she’s telling me, in her own way, that our Romeo and Juliet saga is over and she’s survived.
Suddenly, I’m on the street, amongst the tangerine lamps and the strolling diners newly emerged from their greedy meals. I bellow her name and she steps out onto the wet road, rolling on her ankle and heading into the path of an impatient taxi. I grab her. She has not escaped me. The driver shakes his sallow head at us.
“Help me...” I repeatedly plead with her, although I know that she won’t. But I won’t be derailed by her limp frame, her removed regard. I rake my fingers through her hair; if I could melt into her I would do so without hesitation. I can hear the Italian schoolgirl’s laughter once again as, dizzily, I sway us like we’re dancing on that gondola again. But it’s riding a shaky sea.
“June, let’s finish the tapestry,” I implore her, “because in my heart I know we’ll weave a masterpiece.” I register some bouncers descending on us from the green-hued doorway of a neighbouring nightclub. Perhaps they have arrived at the suspicion I am trying to harm June. But I’m not. Not anymore.
“You may be bruised, I’m bloodied,” I urge, “but if we can just make it to the finish line, ahead of the past and the bickering, Utopia awaits us in the winner’s cup. My companion… My forgiving friend. We will laugh at our luck, finding an unlikely soul mate in each other. Let’s make it all worth it. Let’s frustrate each other never-endingly.”
Then she kisses me. The bouncers halt in their descent, before returning to their perch. June’s kiss is golden petals jolting against the murky storm, exquisite and familial but it’s all give. She kisses me for my own sake, alone. Her mouth is making a gift of our relationship. An act of departure from our epic because she doesn’t need us anymore.
“I thought once that I had broken your heart when I left,” She says, “and years of guilt crawled by before you phoned me yesterday. You were fine. It was then that I realised, you could have found the courage to let me into your life. And that you’ve felt this way for dear knows how long. Instead, you just cut me out. You may have stopped making art, but you repainted me with Lauren without twitching so much as an eyebrow. I’ve forgiven you a lot of things I shouldn’t have. This isn’t the hard part, Geoff: declaring your feelings. I’ve known how you feel for a long time, and I have to tell you, you don’t feel like this. Not consistently anyway.”
Contradictions flood through me and I tightened my grip on her. However, June remains as neutral as a nursing home pallet.
“The past is our evidence; not our enemy to be evaded. You loved me, Geoff, but you’re a fickle man.” She raises her palm, continuing. “Don’t interrupt. How long before you start racing me instead of all those other predators you’re incriminating now? Time isn’t our problem. It’s been our scapegoat, yes, but eternity couldn’t bind us together any more than the abundance of fate and opportunity we’ve been privy to since we were those foolish children at that flea-ridden circus.”
I tell her I love her for the very last time. That she’s nailing the coffin shut while I’m still breathing inside. Streaks of mascara, moistened by my own tears, creep in spidery lines down her cheeks. They age June terribly. However, she is composed as my voice trembles all the more violently in comparison. She tells me that she adores me from my elegant mind down to my animal socks and back again, and I recognise it for the conclusion that it truly is.
It’s Wednesday so June is going to invest in the machinations of the world, because she’s tired of being a hippy and a visionary, and because it will afford her the honeyed satisfaction of routine. There is little disappointment in routine. June lets go of me, forcing me to do the same to her.
“Happy Birthday, Geoffrey. May all good things happen for you. But remember that, so long as you wish for the stars, be prepared for ugly rocks in your palm.” She is telling me I won’t be getting a birthday package this year, even though it will be my last year.
Hollow, I watch her retreat with the private knowledge that soon June will have to grieve me; and the awful doubt as to whether she actually will.