The second time Giles got a cramp in his right calf where the three big muscles meet up near the inside of the knee--when he woke up in her bed in the morning and started to stretch--he as much as knew their thing was over and done. It was as if a tornado had entered his leg, twisting the juncture of the muscles like a fork twirling spaghetti, but the spaghetti was anchored at the other end to bones and tendons, and the twisting set off spasms that lasted for the longest two minutes he'd ever experienced. Wounds along the way, scars of past encounters, imbroglios, affairs, marriages, the whole intendu, marched past him in Crimean War Veteran battle array. You don't do wars of love in camouflage, you do them in parade dress. Wounds, memories, music, battle ribbons and all that entails.
A brick, of course, began it. Eleven, chasing red-headed Martha in a game of tag that spilled over to the edge of the schoolyard. The closer they got to the fence, the slower she ran and all the others were laughing behind them. Then she whisked out onto the sidewalk, grabbing the fence post and spinning around it onto brick newly laid in sand, a metaphor if ever there was. As he twisted back to almost catch her his sneaker skidded on the sand and his forehead whipped down against the sidewalk's brick edging, just the corner of a brick, buried deep in the sand like an Irish pike against the English cavalry, three equilateral sides more than a match for his skin, but happily not his skull, as the surgeon told him. "Lucky you have a thick skull," he said. "Don't take it to an extreme, though."
A long time later, at the end of a three year thing, talking to a future former girlfriend he had thought might be the one but wasn't, he cut his palm with the pruning shears he was using while he focused on an activity he later couldn't remember at all, but that had seemed then like the only thing that could free him from something that had ceased to be and would never revive. The thin clean white line across his palm at the base of his thumb was less than two inches long, but always stood out against the natural flesh tone of his hand like a white flag of surrender.
Flesh wounds, right? Yes. The knee thing, the knee and the ankle, though, were Crimea worthy--into the Valley of Death rode the six hundred. When he met her the first time, she was somebody else's date. And he was no bird-dogging pick-up artist, just a guy looking to connect, and have fun in the process. The role has evolved, but he was a Darwinist through and through. Give and get. He liked that better than give and take, since they frequently saw that as him giving and them taking. Long dark hair past her waist, more than seventeen, mean but oh so clean, in red light she looks green, she's a soft machine, prettiest girl he'd ever seen and she danced with him while her guy took a break to refresh their beers. She even said she wanted to see the pictures he'd taken of Mt. McKinley in Alaska, but by the time he got back from his dorm with them she and the guy were gone. In the process he'd sprained his ankle jumping down some stairs trying to hold onto his beer at the same time as the photos, and those purple and pink explosions on his ankle, what remained after weeks of medical, would always give him a twinge, like the calf and the palm, like his football knee where he was making the right play but something bent wrong because of the mud under his cleats and that something made a noise inside his head he hoped he'd never hear again. After that he could always feel the day before if rain was on its way.
Some years later, after her husband died much too young of asbestosis from a summer construction job, he and she met again. They worked together, then loved together, finding time to escape for brief, saturated periods, playing at romance. The wounds from the marriage he was into by then had been translated into the death of a 2 year old daughter who fell out a window where someone had unhooked a second story screen. He carried the girl down the hill, small limp bundle with the neck at a funny angle, to her grandfather the physician, knowing with every step that it was too late. Now time didn't matter, except to get past it. There was another child though, one that had been on the way at that time, and the wound itself was always within the reach of his shadow. So no matter how much he wanted to cauterize the situation, and move on to something new, it never seemed right.
She wore away at him, crying, moaning, pleading with him for a child of theirs, of their own, for her so she wouldn't be alone while he walked the ramparts of what had been and could not be forgotten or abandoned. He said he couldn't be there enough to be a real father, and besides what kind of father had he been? Accidents happen, we all know, and no one is responsible for most of what happens, she said.
One beautiful October day he went out in the late morning for his circuit of the reservoir and bridle path in Central Park. The distance was just right for him--about 5k-- and he'd lost weight and perhaps even gained a little clarity from the regular workouts and the buildings around the Park, where so many successful people--not untroubled, but listen they lived on the Park, hey--made their lives. He thought he owed this woman who had helped him thru his tragedy, and he thought, as good as he felt, that he could make the effort and find ways to be there for any such kid.
In many cases we scratch the scab instead of allowing the wound to return to flesh, and with the best of intentions and the purest of energy we can miss even more badly. Near the pump house the second time around, going uphill toward the East Side, he stepped into a crater, less than a foot deep, and his good knee whipped backwards, not popping all the tendons and ligaments, but inside the joint something went whizzing like a cat o nine tails, slicing through part of the padding his meniscus represented-- a free floating bone wedge like an Aztec obsidian axe exists within the knee joint itself, the most unstable joint in the body, the price we pay for walking erect, and had functioned like a guillotine. The next day he had to squat to get out of his chair at the office. After the usual procedures and tests he got the joint scoped and Hoovered out. And got a cane and was discharged.
On the way back to the office his first day out of the hospital a thunderstorm came along. Early December. His mind was clear now that there would be no additional child. She would be in the office and this would be no easy conversation. None of this god is watching us stuff, or it wasn't meant to be, or everything happens for a reason--none of that would be as honest as he would have to be. By then the sidewalk in front of his office building, terra cotta bricks from Mexico, had soaked up the rainwater and a sudden freezing wind materialized. As he found his feet flying out from under him--it was all in slow motion--dropping his Brooks Brothers leather attaché case just where he would land so he didn't shatter his coccyx, he had the remaining presence of mind to throw up his hands and say "you win." Just in case. There was, of course, no you, just him/them/us. This knee too, much worse and more unstable than the other one because of the injury after the surgery, would never be right, would warp his way of walking, and give him a sort of helical twist to his spinal column that he had to work every step to align the bodily machinery and keep everything going forward and in a semblance of balance. He often felt like a blind man and his own body was the light.
The acme of this learning experience occurred several years ago, going over to his buddy's and meeting his new girlfriend. She played cello, raised dogs, and liked beer. She had a good smile and good accoutrements. She was funny. The three of them shared a few cold ones and told old favorite stories for an hour or so before he made his exit. As he walked out of the kitchen and looked at the wet raw wood on the back deck and at the few overhead stars, he thought why don't I have this? Later he learned that she cried all the time and cancelled dates constantly on short notice, and that her dogs liked to run away, so she spent a lot of time on the phone looking for them and getting them ransomed, for which his pal played chauffeur and banker until he ran out of gas. She also had a ski knee problem herself, which meant there were certain things she just couldn't do--without drawing a picture of same or being too graphic in one's description.
He didn't know any of this as he walked into his kitchen after driving home. All he felt was nothing worth feeling. He found the gunmetal Australian Leopard Tank cigarette lighter he'd gotten in Sydney at their Bicentennial. The clerk at the local mega-pharmacy had told him that even though it was a butane gas lighter it would take the old fashioned lighter fluid they used in World War II for their Zippos and Ronsons. Shoulda, coulda, woulda-- didna. At home, he tried to squeeze the nozzle into the port, with poor success. In the dimness of the light from outside--he wanted to smoke a cigar, a small cigar like Bat Masterson or Erroll Flynn and maybe feel more on top of things, less at their mercy, but then the flint hit the wick and the stamped aluminum gun and body, saturated in fluid, ignited around his right hand. The flesh would explode into blisters bigger than dragons' eyelids by the next morning--and produce hairless fingers on all five digits, but as the fire focused to a low blue he felt something after all, something good, and he liked especially the way the flame resonated like a drum solo against the brushed aluminum of the double sink. That put paid to the marriage, which he commenced at that moment to bury next to his dead daughter in his mind and in fact--it was as if the burning signaled the end of his sentence for his past misdeeds.
In the current case, after the calf cramp signal's repetition, he tried to consider rationally the pluses and minuses on the current relationship report card, a B slash B minus, based on the semi-half-assed matrix he'd neatly torn out of a women's magazine at his dentist's. Mentally double checking to confirm that this represented a signal event and not just dehydration after a hot night, he remembered that moment, early on in their relationship, when she suddenly bit off the very tip of his tongue one night as passions were rising and clothes flying off, her teeth feeling like the flick of a moyel's razor on the boy child's foreskin. There's always a tell, the signal where you either run the red light as it breaks out of the yellow or screech to a bone-shattering halt. She shrieked and laughed when she realized what she'd done, laughing all the way through her apology, which he replayed in his mind as he also remembered being bent nearly double later that night while trying a different position, which had translated then, as now, into an indeterminate but extended recuperation.
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Page created: November 1, 2009