Ashleigh's Dilemma (4 page)

Sitting across from him at the
Subway
she did eventually ask steeling herself, “I guess I should really know…” She closed her eyes and quickly finished, “Is that how you feel about me? Are you in love with me?” He quickly rejoined with, “No, no! It's a just a story, just a story!” Later, though, as they were standing to leave, he cryptically added, obviously referring back to his story, standing close to her, wanting their eyes to meet, “Well, there is some truth to it, I suppose.” She wondered what he possibly could mean by that.

Their lunch hours continued, and lunch hour by lunch hour their conversations evolved so that each eventually knew the history of one another’s life. She told him how her father died - heart attack - and how she sat by her mother's side day after day until she died less than a year later – pancreatic cancer.

“Why aren't you married?”

Ashleigh opened with, “I loved a man once. He started fooling around... and it was over.” It was a lie. There had never been anyone.

“Boyfriends?”

Hesitation... “There was someone... he was almost perfect. I would have chased him myself, but... he liked someone else.”

That
half-confession, in particular, she wished immediately after saying it, and forevermore, she could take back. Typically, she was as angry with herself as she was with Patrick – he for probing too deeply, and she for revealing what she knew she should not. Whatever Patrick might say, or think, does not matter in the slightest, she told herself; even so, he already knew more about her than she liked, and that was unacceptable. It was frustrating that she had let herself open like that.

At first, Patrick
imagined Ashleigh might be a Lesbian but then quickly changed his mind. If she were not interested in a relationship, she would simply have dismissed him. The odd thing was, she kept coming back, agreeing to meet and, above all, talk. It became more and more obvious that she had spent most of her life in isolation, and to talk with someone casually and socially was new and in some way liberating for her, he thought.

S
he was, he finally decided, behaving the way she did because she simply didn’t know how to interact with people; men in particular. The ostensible reason for this, he knew, was her obsession with work. She had spent her life working and not mingling with others. She had not learned how to interact and no one had the nerve to tell her. She was obsessed with work and she openly admitted it. When pressed, she'd say, “I have to eat! If I stop working, I'll be replaced... as simple as that. It’s survival of the fittest.” He had laughed when he had first heard that but then realized she was serious. He made it a point to help her see an alternative path; perhaps then, he reasoned, she would be able to step back, relax more, and experience that all-important time to smell the roses. She seemed to realize that her preoccupation and obsession with her work was a weakness in her life, and that is why she agreed to meet with him, as if meeting with him at the
Subway
once a week was a way of introducing more balance into her life, as if she was performing a calculation. He could see she did not understand him even though his intentions were obvious, and he knew she was listening to what he said, and understood and even believed in what he said - but her behavior remained the same. Her work always came first even if some of that work was self-inflicted and ultimately hurting her. Like a true addict, she was obsessed and obsessive, and there seemed little neither she nor he could do about it.

For her part,
it was not about work, or her known obsession with work – it was about love, and her ability, or lack thereof, to love. Ashleigh sometimes wondered if her heart was made of ice, or even if she had a heart. She said all kinds of things she didn’t mean; she simply couldn’t help it. It was her fear of losing at love that did it. Looking in the mirror, she said, knowing the underlying truth behind it, “This is what I've come to. I cannot love. That is just me.” and then she'd turn away before the unbidden tears surfaced. She never cried. She could always feel the tears coming and could always stop them. She had cried when her mother died, yes – but not her father. She was not quite certain if she should be proud of that. Yet she wanted to cry and that is what really bothered her.

It was not the same when Ashleigh was young. She was never of the type to be carefree and open, but she did believe. In those long gone
days, she believed in love, in pure love. Love without boundaries: ‘loving someone because of who they were, and sometimes despite whom they might be.’ No strings attached - take me for who I am or don't bother and leave, just go away. You want sex? It is mine to give and I decide not to because, to love like that, to be close like that, intimate like that, we have to be one, as one soul before I let you touch me. Otherwise, sex is simply a physical thing, she argued, with no meaning other than the obvious purpose of reproduction.

T
hat's what ached within her – children. She would like to have a child. Modern women, truly modern woman, don't need a man to raise a child, she knew. She could petition to adopt a child – or, alternatively, become impregnated by someone she liked; or, even more important, select her mate from the sperm-bank, selecting someone with the correct genetic background. She was thinking in this case of a mate who at least qualified for a PhD, preferably in the Arts, with some innate talent to compliment her own bias towards the physical world of physics and engineering. The children: she would set them on the path of life instilled in all the moral and ethical beliefs that were the foundation of her beliefs. She would make sure of it. She would give them that and love.

She was simply too selfish to adopt a child she once said to Pat
rick, tossing all that aside and lying yet again to him, but Patrick would have no part of it. “No,” he said; “that's not you. You just want it to be right – too right, maybe.”

“Do you think we'll ever be able to graduate from
Subway
?” Patrick eventually asked, careful to include a smile. Ashleigh shrugged, once again non-committal. Over the days and months, they continued to meet at
Subwa
y Patrick had asked her to dinner; he had asked her out on hikes on the most beautiful of days, to the movies, a walk in the park, and each time she had had some excuse, work mostly. She never returned his calls, and never his emails, unless he asked a specific non-conversational question; a simple observation was never replied to; but when he asked her directly, she usually agreed to meet him, but only at the
Subway
. It was less than a block from where she worked and she had to eat sometime – or that was the excuse she always gave, as if she needed a practical reason to meet him for lunch.

Patrick questioned her about her friends. She had a handful, spread throughout the country. She tried to visit them at least once a year, she said.

“That must keep you on the road a bit.”

She turned red and he realized, piecing it together, that she was only talking about three or four people, perhaps five, all of whom were women, and all married with children. Of course, she flew out west two or three times a year to visit her brother and his wife and children.

“Do you get along with your brother?”

“No, not really.
We've learned to tolerate one another.”

“How about his wife?”

“She's okay; a little disorganized… She drives me crazy.”

“You love her; I can see that
- and raising kids does that to one. I always remembered my mother saying she lived her days in a constant state of quiet desperation.” 

Ashleigh never directly asked Patrick about this life and experiences; it was Patrick who asked the questions
about her life and reciprocally volunteered his life’s story.

“And the children?”
he asked.

“I worry about them. The world is not what it used to be. I worry where it will take them.”

“It's not all that bad; they'll survive.”

He could have told her, but didn't, about his childhood in Rhodesia: the hard work, the bountiful land, the black workers that helped with the harvest, the open spaces, the girl who was the first to capture his heart – the war
. None of this was said though. He did manage to say, “In the changeover, all the land was redistributed to the Blacks and we were forced off our land. We had the world to choose from and my father chose Canada.” He could have added the reason his father gave, “To get as far away from Africa as possible...” He could also have explained how his mother suffered from nervous breakdowns, one after another, until, after his father died – a sudden stroke that left him in a coma for a week, then claimed him – she quickly followed him to the grave by an overdose of tranquilizers. He did manage to describe his father's funeral. “My father was a teacher. Even after he'd been retired for many years, people came to pay their respects. The church overflowed into the street. He was that kind of man.”

Ashleigh absorbed this in silence - never a comment - but he could see she understood and felt what he said.

Sometimes their conversations were halting, with periods of silence; and then Ashleigh would explode into talking about her work, dwelling on the minutiae, the words she wrote, the reviews given, and how she corrected them. When she did this, she seemingly exploded into life as if her work was more important than the world they were trying to create between themselves. He would have a hard time stopping her, but she seemed to be aware of this characteristic and finding a place to break off would stop and let him change the subject.

Patrick came to believe they were drawing closer. Ashleigh was obviously conflicted; every time he maneuvered himself closer, she would instinctively raise her barricades; but then, as if
realizing it, she would lower them a little, smile, and lean toward him, intently listening. She was not used to this closeness, he knew, as if no one had tried to be close to her like this before, at least not in a long time. He believed he could feel the reaching within her, and kindling warmth.

It took a while, but Patrick eventually began to believe he was falling in love with Ashleigh. The feeling crept up and hit him between the eyes. He would always recall the day he finally admitted that he was in love. It was new for him too. He was on a hike, late fall, no leaves, snow threatening. He stood alone on the bank of the river he and Ashleigh had walked along months before and imagined that Ashleigh might be falling in love with him too. His heart soared when he imagined what it might be like when that final barrier within her came crashing down. She would be able to throw all of her commitment to life in his direction. She would no longer be alone and nor would he.

There were a lot of reasons to believe this just as there were an almost an equal number of reasons not believe it
. Why else would she agree to have lunch once a week? There were cryptic things she would say, as if she was thinking about their relationship. “I don't know if I could live with anyone; my habits are my own, someone else in close proximity would feel like an invader,” and he would think she might even be considering the possibility of allowing their relationship to take a turn toward eventually living together. There was also the way she'd brighten when he'd suggest that one day they might share a holiday and hike up through mountain trails, marveling at the mountains with the snow on their peaks, and marveling equally at the cold stars against a black sky as they sat by a warm fire. He'd say these things to himself because they were in his heart. He also said them because he wanted them to be true.

Eventually, Patrick confessed his growing love. He did so on
Valentine's Day
. A few days before they were to meet for their scheduled lunch, he mailed her a poem he had struggled with for over a week. When she opened it, she read,

Dearest Ashleigh,

The towering pine pins heaven,

My love,

As the snow slowly lowers

Down the mountain.

Even as I dwell on the breath you breathe,

The same as mine.

The cold is eternal and the night empty,

My darling,

With only the silent stars staring

From their fathomless void.

But I hear their siren call no more,

My sweet;

I hear only the beating of your heart,

Synchronized with mine.

Autumn winds tear down the tortured pine,

My love,

Tumbling over rock and settling into

The hollow place against your door.

Even as I begin to feel the flickering warmth

Of the golden flame.

But
I think, too, like you,

My love, my sweet, my darling,

I have known the songs of autumn

Too long.

Patrick.

He met up with Ashleigh the next day and she was angry. It was obvious right from the start. First she made him wait; she was twenty minutes late. It was also in her face, the stiffness in her shoulders, the glare in her eyes, the way she glanced away as he greeted her.