See You on the Other Side

See You on the Other Side

- India Reid -

♦♦♦

Copyright © 2014 by India Reid

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.  For permission requests, contact the author via
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www.indiareid.wordpress.com

Some say that humanity is just not cut out for monogamy.

Scene: A man and a woman exchange forevers and rings.  They kiss.  One side of the church applauds politely.  The other side erupts in cheers.

Scene: A man and a woman pose for a family picture.  The children are crying.  The smiles are fake.

Scene: A man and a woman eat dinner together.  She’s wearing a new dress.  He smells like someone else’s perfume.

Scene: Five tons of flaming gas and dust flies through space.  A tiny blue orb sits in it’s path.  There will be a collision.  It cannot be stopped.

Cometfall approaches.

How would you go out?

I’d been having an affair with Tammy for six years when it happened.

But maybe “having” wasn’t the word-- we’d never really
had
anything.  There was the time that I accidentally saw her coming out of the shower through her open bedroom window while I mowed the lawn on the other side of the property line, and one sloppy, drunken kiss in the kitchen at a Christmas party… but apart from that, we had been completely faithful to our respective spouses-- more or less.  Tammy and I weren’t having an affair so much as we were planning to have one, eventually, at a later date. 

At first, it had been a joke, a running gag that we laughed at over phone conversations, text messages, the occasional email or two.  But at some point, the dirty talk had progressed and the laughing about it had stopped.  For a while, we had talked about doing it-- finally, really doing it-- when our kids graduated high school, but her youngest had gone to Berklee last year, and nothing had changed.  For as long as I’d entertained the idea of making love to Tammy Tompkins, the charming, beautiful housewife next door, actually doing so had been like standing on the edge of a cliff, too scared to jump but too proud to back away.

And then they announced the comet.

I heard it from Tammy first, before the newsrooms-- or god forbid, my wife-- could brief me.  Karen was at work and I’d been fucking with a painting, one that had been giving me trouble for months.  I could tell it was supposed to be the face of a beautiful woman, but every time I painted in the features they always came out wrong-- haughty, harsh or insincere.  My artist’s studio was in the back of the house, a little office filled with canvases and paint fumes, and I almost always left the door shut and my music on loud.  Fewer people bothered me that way.  All things considered, it was a miracle that I even heard Tammy ring the doorbell.

When I answered it, her tears were making her mascara streak her face.

“Let’s do it, Bobby.  Let’s leave,” she’d said as I cradled her against my chest in the living room.  On the TV screen before us, a stone-faced man in a suit had mouthed words that I couldn’t seem to hear.  My body had gone into lesser form of shock; all I could manage to do was read his lips.

Six months.

“You’ll leave Karen and I’ll leave David.  We’ll pack up your RV and go somewhere new-- anywhere you want, anywhere we can drive to,” Tammy had said.  “You can paint me in the desert, naked in Nevada with flowers in my hair, just like you said you wanted to.”

I had said that, I remember thinking.  The message was probably still in her phone, unless she had deleted them to keep David from seeing.  My inbox was still full of Tammy’s words, teasing thoughts and promises, hopes and dreams.  I didn’t even have to worry about Karen catching on.  She never even bothered to look.

“We’ll do it, won’t we, Bobby?” she had said, and at a loss for what else to do, I had said, “Okay.”

But I hadn’t been thinking about Tammy in that moment.  I’d been thinking about my life, the fragility of it all, the inevitability of my own demise.  And I’d been thinking about that damned painting, layer after layer of pastel mouths and piercing eyes, and how I’d probably never finish it now, because I wouldn’t be able to get it right in time.

♦♦♦

I sat on the front porch while Karen weeded the flowerbeds.  There had been rioting elsewhere, protests and orgies elsewhere still, but somehow, our neighborhood didn’t seem to have changed much.  Same quiet suburbs.  Same slow, lazy days.

“You don’t have to do that, you know,” I told her. 

Her hands worked through the dirt like they’d braided our daughter’s hair: meticulous, harsh, no nonsense… but at the same time, oddly loving.  Karen threw herself into gardening like she threw herself into anything, full force and holding nothing back. 

“I doubt the homeowners association cares anymore,” I added.

“Fuck the homeowner’s association,” she said.  “This is for me.”

There was sweat across her brow, long tendrils of dark brown hair pressed damp against her temples, and a streak of dirt across the curve of her cheek.  I’d fallen in love with Karen for her looks, first and foremost.  Everything else-- her passion, her drive, her liberal usage of the f-word-- all of that had been sort of an afterthought. 

But then her hair had started coming in silver here and there, and I hadn’t fallen in love with her laugh lines in the same way I’d loved the brown eyes and pink lips they surrounded.  The stomach that had curved so beautifully when it carried our children never returned to the smooth, flat plain of abs that she’d had when I married her.  The fact of the matter was, I didn’t feel the same way about her age spots as I had about her freckles.

And that was the difference between Karen and Tammy.  Karen had always been so resigned to getting older, but Tammy would never grow old without a fight.  She was youthful Tammy, who went tanning on Saturday mornings and dyed her hair blonde, golden in the summer and ashen in the winter; botox-junkie Tammy, whose face was smooth and flawless, even if she did constantly look surprised; Tammy with the big fake tits her surgeon husband had created to his liking and then ignored as he lost himself in the bottle and his work; Tammy dancing in a tight red dress, when Karen showed up to parties in an oversized cardigan and a bad mood.

I meant to do it then, break it to Karen that I was leaving.  I’d already told Tammy that I would-- soon, as soon as it felt right.  She’d wanted to leave right away, as fast as we could pack our suitcases, but I’d made her understand.  I had to.  I might not have loved Karen anymore, but I didn’t hate her like Tammy hated Dave. 

We weren’t bitter toward each other.  We had just grown apart. 

I hadn’t been the best husband to Karen, but I could be a good enough friend to let her down gently.  I wasn’t just going to walk out without another word-- she deserved an explanation.  I owed her that much.

“Why does it matter, though?” I asked her, watching the ferocious way she attacked the crabgrass growing next to the azaleas.  “It’s all going to be gone before long, anyway.”

And then she stopped, looked up at me with those big brown eyes that seemed so plain compared to Tammy’s blues, the uprooted undesirables still clutched in her clenched fists.

“Everything still matters, Bobby.  We’re here.  We’re alive.  Everybody has to go someday-- you don’t just get to write off the universe because you know when that someday is.”

That wasn’t true, though.  The Baldwins from down the street had shot themselves as soon as they’d heard the news.  We’d heard their guns go off in quick unison as we did the dishes that night.

But in that moment, it wasn’t the Baldwins I was focused on-- it was Karen.  She looked so goddamn impassioned, with this womanly fierceness about her that called to mind Boudica, Joan of Arc, a hundred thousand Valkyries descending upon a battlefield when in reality, she was just sweaty and covered in dirt and pulling weeds.

And I couldn’t do it.  Not then.  You can’t just leave someone who has that kind of intense determination toward life when you have so little hope left in living.  If I was a stronger man, maybe-- but in that moment, I was drowning, and Karen was a life jacket to cling to while I tried to find my way to shore.

“You’ve got dirt on your face,” I pointed out, but my voice came softly when I’d meant to be condescending.

“I know,” Karen grinned.

When Tammy smiled, she did it tentatively, like she was listening to a joke that she quite wasn’t sure was funny.  But when Karen smiled, her whole face lit up, like a lighter put to a warehouse full of gasoline.

♦♦♦

The second time I tried to leave Karen, we were washing dishes.

I’d never been one of those husbands who couldn’t pick up a rag-- at least I had that much going for me.  When we were both home, Karen and I made dinner together, and we cleaned up together afterward, with her washing and me drying.

The problem was, as far as I could remember, it was the first time we’d both been home for dinner in months.  Between the nights that Karen would stay late at work, and the nights that I was too involved in my paint sets to leave my studio, I could hardly remember the last time we’d cooked together.  On Karen’s alone nights, there were usually delicious,healthy leftovers in the fridge in the morning that I could heat up for lunch the next day, but when I was on my own, I usually just made instant noodles or, if I was feeling especially lazy, hotdogs.  Karen had never had a problem making something nice without me around, but there was something about cooking that seemed silly to me if I was only cooking for myself.

As I watched Karen chop onions for the bolognese sauce, it occurred to me that Tammy didn’t cook at all.  Her fridge at home was filled with yogurts and diet drinks, her trashcans riddled with takeout boxes.

“Fuck,” Karen cursed. 

I looked up from the tomato I’d been dicing-- fresh from Karen’s gardens-- to see a flash of red as she moved a cut finger away from the knife and into her mouth.  There was blood on her lower lip, and tears in her eyes-- more likely from the onion than the knife.

“Clumsy me,” she mumbled, laughing slightly.  “Good thing I chose vet school over med school.”

Even with her eyes watering and blood leaking from her veins, she could still find humor in the situation.  I probably would have panicked, I realized-- I hated blood-- but Karen’s calm reaction left me feeling levelheaded and capable as a result, enough that I could flip the tap on and guide her over to the cold water while I fished for a bandaid and a paper towel in the cupboard beneath the sink.

“Here,” I said, emerging with a Scooby Doo Band-aid that was probably as old as our youngest child.  I blotted the blood away from the cut gently with the paper towel, then wrapped the bandage around her finger.

“Jenkies,” she smirked. 

Her tongue flicked out across her lips, wiping away the red stain she’d left there and leaving a sheen of saliva in its wake.  God, how I had loved those lips, still so pink and full.  Tammy had full lips too, of course-- but her husband had paid for those, just like he had her nose and her cheekbones and those strange, awkward implants in her ass.

Karen turned back to chopping as if the incident hadn’t happened at all.

“No meat for the sauce-- do you mind?” she asked.  She didn’t take her eyes off her work this time, so I tried not to either, though her lips were still at the forefront of my mind.

“No, that’s, uh… that’s fine,” I said.

We only made small talk over dinner.  Our neighborhood was sleepy and serene as ever, save for the occasional suicide, and Karen had never been one for gossip.  Tammy could chatter on and on about nothing in particular for hours, maybe even days on end, but Karen was the kind of woman who said what was on her mind when she felt like it, and could stand to listen to silence when she didn’t.  It was probably why she didn’t have many friends in the neighborhood.  She had no desire to put on airs and pretend to be interested in the petty lives of the people around us.  Karen wasn’t always as amiable as I would have liked, but no one could ever call her ingenuine.

I planned to tell her during the dishes-- I’d worked it all out that morning. 
Karen, I’m thankful for our time together, but I can’t do this anymore.  Karen, you’ve been so good to me, but it’s time for both of us to move on.
  In the foggy mirror of the bathroom after my shower, I’d practiced my faces: apologetic, sincere, verge-of-tears, empowered.  It seemed poetic somehow.  We’d wash the dishes clean, and I’d wash myself of our marriage.

But it wasn’t as simple as that.

Karen’s fingers brushed mine as she handed me a plate.  The tips were purple and pruned from too long spent in the hot water, though I’d bought her more pairs of rubber gloves than I could even begin to count.  That was how Tammy washed dishes, hands hidden behind yellow rubber as she shoved as many as she could into her dishwasher, not even bothering to rinse them first.  But Karen had always thought dishwashers were a waste of water, even before talk had started to go around that the taps would all run dry soon.  Karen did the dishes by hand, state of her fingers be damned.

Feeling her touch again left me startled.  It was far from electric-- there were no sparks to be had between us anymore-- but her fingertips were warm from the dishwater, and there was flesh to her touch when Tammy’s skin seemed to barely contain only botox, silicon and bones.  It felt so good-- so foreign, but yet so comforting-- that I found myself trying to make it happen again with every plate she handed me, every knife, every cup.  How long had it been since I’d held Karen?  Since I’d kissed her natural, perfect lips?  Since those fingers had wrapped around my--

No.  We’d stopped touching, stopped kissing, stopped fucking for a reason.  Karen was my past, and Tammy was my future-- what little future I had left.

“So… Karen,” I began.  It was awkward, what I was saying, forcing myself to say.  There was nothing honest or organic about it.  Maybe there couldn’t be.  Maybe it was just one of those conversations that couldn’t go smoothly, no matter how you decided to put it.

“So, Bobby,” she shot back.  That was Karen.  Always joking.  Never serious.  Probably couldn’t be, even if she tried.