Hit and Run
By Dave Esposito
“Tear up the floorboards, there, there! It is the beating of his hideous heart”!
Edgar Allen Poe, from The Tell Tale Heart
On what was not to be the last day of their relationship, David E. and Ann P. were on their way to New York City to see the ballet “Romeo and Juliet”, the one by Prokofiev. Both had hungrily looked forward to this event for weeks, and now they grew more excited as they rose up from the Lincoln Tunnel’s gradual incline and beheld glorious Manhattan and its buffet of skyscrapers laid out before them.
David and Ann had been in a relationship for five months or so, which began after she was no longer a student in a class he taught at a local community college. Even though it was the 1980s and he knew it was forbidden to date students, David couldn't help being attracted to Ann who was kind and poised, smart and pretty. She was the oldest member of the class at thirty, (he was one year older), and possesed talent and enthusiasm for her own photography which was documenting the Patterson Park neighborhood in Baltimore where she lived, and especially the kids who played on the sidewalks near her apartment. The class consisted of an hour of lecture beginning at 6 pm, and then three hours of darkroom work. Ann was the only student who would stay at the end of class and help David clean and prepare the darkroom for the following day’s classes, something the young students didn’t have much of a taste for, though they were supposed to help out too. She had a big job in the county government and even though David urged her to go home and take a break from all her work that day, she always insisted on staying and helping though it was often 10:30pm by the time they finished.
He started to notice that he made eye contact with her more than the other students during class lectures and so made a concerted effort to not fix on her too much. Fortunately, he developed a pretty good built-in-timer for these overly extended moments, and would break away and sweep his eyes to and fro over the rest of the class like a metronome, so the favoritism wouldn't be quite so obvious. Each week in the darkroom, she would print pictures taken of the neighborhood kids she had taken the week before and made duplicates to give away to each child on Saturday mornings when they were all out playing with their mothers watching. She explained that this put her in good stead for the coming weekend’s photography, and thus had no trouble finding willing subjects for her lens. As the semester went by, he found himself looking forward to seeing her new work each week along with the small talk during straightening up at the end of class which consisted of washing all the chemical trays, mixing new developer, stop bath, and fixer, and mopping the floors.
Though he was 31, David was still unformed and amorphous in many important ways, though he only had a vague sense of this. He was dreamy, and besides teaching photography, was a portrait photographer as well, and in love with women’s faces in particular. He became aware that crushes were an occupational hazard of staring at his subjects for hours in the camera viewfinder and shortly after, the developing tray where they dissolved upwards through the photographic paper into being.
For as long as he could recall, he had crushes on the opposite sex, and when someone became the object of his infatuations, he couldn't but magnify all of her qualities and particularities: she was beautiful, poised, fine, perfect, unattainable, to be adored, and far, far, better than him...and if only they were together, she would raise him up to her level, as playing tennis would with a club pro at a country club. Oddly, it never occurred to him to ask what could be in it for her; a guy who put himself way down, who lacked confidence and was needy too, (maybe he would be perfect for the person who liked projects or lost causes).
He had a mixed opinion of himself and thought he was maybe a B to B+; moderately good-looking, with a nice physique. As a young boy, he had seen the benefits of having muscles that could be observed, having watched "Hercules Unchained '' starring Steve Reeves a half dozen times on Million Dollar Movie in the summer of 1968, and had to admit the muscles were impressive, along with their destructive capabilities. They most definitely set Hercules apart from everyone else in the movie, especially when he would pull Parthenon-like pillars and buildings down with chains he had whipped around them, and which by the laws of physics, should have landed on his head.
He was athletic in high school. He played football, wrestled, and ran track. He was told by someone, (he could never remember whether it was a boy or girl), that he looked like a Greek god, and, yes, yes, he had to admit he could see what they meant especially when he compared himself to other boys, many of whom had body hair like gorillas. The "Greek God" bit of information provided him the motivation to lift weights after school with his buddies in a smelly mini-gym with no windows or ventilation of any kind. It stunk but that stink became linked with fellowship and hours of trading insults and comedy with a few other guys as vain and demented as he.
To wax on about his looks; he had brown curly hair which was full and ebullient, with interlaced ringlets and wavelets so that the overall effect was that of a vaguely ancient Roman statue possessing gladiatorial distinction and the bloom of youth. His teeth were straight and though he didn't add that to his top-tier list of pluses, he did notice it when others were crooked which for him was mildly repellant. "Thank you, Lord, that I am not like the rest of men", he would proffer when he saw others with misaligned and snaggly teeth that reminded him of a mouthful of mixed-up chiclets. And although he was five feet six inches in height, he never thought of himself as short. He was medium, somewhere in the middle, "average" to his mind and he never knew, nor did he explore, whether girls and women preferred taller men, though he suspected that's why some wouldn't date him later on after high school. Never mind that most of them were taller than him to begin with, but even so, he didn't worry about this too much and was relieved actually, as it would mean women could be just as callow and superficial as he.
He was intelligent enough to get A's and B's and one or two C’s, and therefore knew he was no genius, suspecting that since math was difficult for him he might even be a little stupid. He had heard someone say, "if you could do math you were smart".... He didn't catch the end of that sentence, but, well....he could see the implications of that bit of math. If he did have one strength, it was one that he discovered in his sophomore year after breaking his leg in a varsity football game and having lots of time after school to learn how to goof off, which they don't teach in highschool but you learn anyway. He was a good observer of the many preposterous and outrageous thoughts to be mined from teen life, and could entertain others with them while playing the clown, which he did and still does to this day. A lot of his joking was self-deprecating, monkeyish, and instantaneous. He was often taken aback at the unexpected nonsense that would erupt involuntarily from his mouth, and let fly with no censoring whatever as long as the nuns were out of earshot. This led to an unfortunate, but memorable incident in the lunchroom in his junior year: While washing down his mother’s especially awful smoked beef sandwich with chocolate milk, instead of swallowing what was in his mouth first and then speaking, he choked on a bizarre thought that erupted out of nowhere and sprayed a chocolate outline of the boy eating french fries sitting across from him onto the concrete block wall just behind him. The boy himself fared far worse and the wall behind required touch-up paint later on by Bill the janitor.
When he was able to entertain others, by “saying it - not spraying” it, he alerted them that something was coming by gazing upwards until they noticed, and then remarking on something that had nothing to do with the conversation at the table, but was either shocking or nonsensical. His friends seemed to enjoy it, waiting for it to happen at lunch on a daily basis and chanting at him “go, go go!” for the show to start. Images and words bubbled up in his mind and often the mashup of incongruities and his own bursting into laughter a split-second before he said anything was hilarious enough to get his friends to crack up and start throwing things.
Sometimes his friends paid the price though, and got in trouble with the nuns when they couldn't suppress their reaction to his Wolfman and Dracula imitations which came over him suddenly, like a case of demonic possession, and which he sprang on them simultaneously. Often his fingers were pressed to his cheeks and scrunched into claws along with lower teeth protruding monster-like. Or he would stare at a well-behaved classmate, working studiously over his desk, with a set of practical joker false teeth he would slip in his mouth waiting for his victim to look up. Most times he pulled the dripping dentures out before the nuns could see that he was the instigator, which was a favorite word of theirs.
But there were plenty of times, when his mind wasn't moving a mile a minute, that he felt sad, alone, or bereft in some way.When he was in junior year history class they studied “Life in 1610, Jamestown; The Starving Times”, as the textbook put it. He felt starved-empty too a lot of the time when he was alone after school, bored, or in the house trying to avoid upsetting his Mom, who was overwhelmed with six kids and prone to exhaustion and regular breakdowns. Like two or three times a week. Actual, certifiable breakdowns where she would pull at her hair, pound her face with her fists, and sob red-faced until the fit left her. She had too many kids, too much laundry, endless demands on her physically and emotionally from all the clamoring kids, and being a front-row Catholic, forbidden to use birth control.
His Mother’s chaos had an effect on him and his other brothers and sisters at home. They walled themselves off from her and each other. Through most of grade school and all of highschool his two companions, Sad and Alone, would find him in front of the mirror in the bathroom, or in the school's washroom, staring at his face, scanning for pimples, judging his looks, and combing his hair until he believed in what he saw. There weren't any mirrors in public generally, but there were store windows that cast his reflection, and in these he could sneak a glance sideways as he walked alone down a street so that the same observations he made at home could be instantly recalculated and updated as often as he passed additional windows along the sidewalk. There were reflections elsewhere too; chrome car bumpers, polished black granite building facades, and even in puddles after it rained. He particularly favored puddles, since it appeared he was simply watching his step and not engaged in vainglory.
Certainly, vanity did have something to do with the need to admire himself and to present to the greatest advantage, but there was something else too. In an infantile fashion his reflection was proof that he existed, that he was real, and that he was part of the world, …or part of a puddle at least. He knew this constant checking was infantile. He read somewhere that a baby can become upset when its mother walks out of a room and disappears, thinking she ceases to exist when it can’t see her. As teenage David ceased to exist without the constant reassurance of reflections.
That he was unformed and amorphous bears repeating. This had become more and more obvious to him as the years slid by, so much so that, now in his seventies, he looked back at the naivete of his early years with compassion mixed with a wincing cringing embarrassment. How little he knew back then! How he misunderstood himself and others. How, secretly, he thought he was smarter and wiser than he was by far; how others existed more as reflections in puddles than as fellow travelers, fellow sufferers. They became the recollections and regrets that plague old men.
It always hurt him when he was rejected by a girl. It all started with him admiring her from afar, and when the time seemed right, to approach her hoping that humor, or some kind of prepared statement he had rehearsed over and over would develop into actual conversation. He would focus on her face and forget to blink, and all the sensations that flooded his senses; the beautiful skin, the high forehead and cheekbones, the amazing ears with their pinkish lobes fleshy and soft like baby folds, the eyelids curved and dark when they blinked and then opened to him so that he could see his reflection in them, distracted and overwhelmed him. The actual conversation was disembodied, remote, and secondary, like a conversation heard from a great distance as in a wonderful dream he hoped would never end. He felt outside his own body, like he was on TV or onstage with an audience staring at him, his eyes wide open, his mouth and lips frozen in one expression, and his pants, like in a bad dream, about to fall down. He knew she would sense his discomfort but hoped she didn't, though it never occurred to him that she might be in a state similar to his; her mind divided between excitement and excruciating self consciousness.
One day after throwing the javelin for the school's track team, he walked alone towards the ramp that led to the school's locker rooms, javelin in hand, and to the distinct possibility of another hazing by the older boys. Head mostly down, he glanced up at the school with the same dread that condemned men face as they approach a bullet-pocked wall. The highschool ahead was laid out in a wide low ban of ochre-colored brick. It looked like a flat piece of burnt toast with a low, flat, pewter sky above it that might sink into the ground, like toast retracting back into a toaster to burn some more.
He reached the school building finally, and started up the ramp when Cindy Z. appeared in front of him. She was a girl from another homeroom who he often gazed at longingly, and who he sometimes noticed was staring at him too, though when their eyes crossed paths they both glanced away immediately. She had glossy black hair cut in a curve that followed her temple down to her cheek, and nice white teeth like little Christmas lights set against her dark complexion. She was good at Math. And that day, against the nuns rules, she was wearing makeup and black nylon stockings. The top of her dark blue school uniform skirt was cinched up far above her waist, kind of the way some of the town's old italian men would hike up their pants, and it looked somewhat childish and confusing to him. She brushed the long curved sweep of her hair out of her eyes several times, and with no small talk, outright asked him if he would like to go to a party. Her shoulders were slightly slumped as she explained that her sister and boyfriend would pick him up and bring him back home at the end of the night. David was astonished, excited and at a loss for words but regrouped momentarily and said yes. It was Tuesday.
Four glacially slow days later, he and Cindy Z. were in the backseat of a 1968 Chevy Impala, her sister and boyfriend up front. Her sister was laughing a lot and seemed much older than the boy she was with, who kept quiet as if he owed her a debt of silent gratitude just for the privalege of driving her around. David and Cindy looked straight ahead, locked in stress and awkwardness by some strange strait-jacketed energy that flowed between them. Her sister kept turning and looking over her shoulder to see what was going on in the backseat. There was nothing going on in the backseat and no conversation either; they looked to her like a young immigrant couple from the old country frozenly staring at the camera for posterity. But she kept checking. David wasn't sure if the older sister hoped he would make out with Cindy, or just the opposite, to make sure she was OK and things weren't getting out of hand. It felt more like the former though, like she had set this up and was chaperoning her sister through some kind of right of passage; her first kiss maybe. In any event, it was a very uncomfortable experience for everyone; a disaster really. Cindy and David could barely function, conflicted as they were between excitement and vague expectations that would not be met. Still, their hands touched now and again, which was electrifying for David, and that welded those moments to his memory for the rest of his life, maybe more so than even his first kiss, but only because it happened first.
After he was dropped off at home, he assumed she wouldn't want to see him again and so he avoided her from then on. She never approached him either, and since they never talked about the evening, it faded away. He resumed his everyday life and daydreams and didn’t think about her much but in truth he was scared of her, even repelled, as if he had escaped a dangerous situation which he couldn’t fathom but which invaded his sleep with turbulent dreams that night and for weeks after.
Years later when he took up with Ann P., he was more confident but still prone to falling for people he didn't know or understand at all, except for how he built them up in his mind. He was rejected by women and he rejected women. Not as many as rejected him, and later on in life he was glad that was the case as he would rather suffer the pink slip of a break up than be the one causing the pain. Twice he had broken up with someone, and watched them cry sitting on the end of a bed. He looked on, like he did as a child watching his Mother cry when she couldn’t handle life and he felt numb, helpless, and full of guilt. Even for that night with Cindy, which was so early in the grand scheme of the romantic lives of both of them, he wondered did she feel hurt? Did she go home and cry and feel diminished? Did her sister console her and attack him? He would never know. But he knew he felt like he’d done something wrong. That it was wrong to want someone one minute and flee them the next.
As he grew older, he had difficulty connecting the infatuations from the past with those of the present. It was as if he had stayed back in Highschool for twelve plus years and couldn't move on to the next class because he was slow and unable to learn. He still fixated on women as works of art; unreachable dreams, beauty incarnate, perfect in all respects, and goddesses - they were anything but human beings! But something was changing slowly in his mind and heart. It was the knowledge that his views were confused and tangled in the past; that his idealizing the world and a whole sex of people had as its purpose trying to right some intolerable wrong...
David and Ann settled into their seats at the Metropolitan Opera. The performance of Romeo and Juliet that day in New York City was wonderful. They were seated up in the balcony stage right, but still had a great view of the stage and were thrilled to watch the lights go up just before the performance started. Ann whispered that these ascending lights were also known as “Sputniks,” like the Russian satellites. “That was it, of course, of course”, he whispered back excitedly towards her and he wanted to kiss her ears that were an inch away . She looked so pretty and soft as the lights dimmed down and they held hands until the Sputniks reached the ceiling…
Here in their seat, and five months into their relationship, he was already worried that the first flush of romance had faded and that he wanted to move on. Things had started off so well, like they always did in his relationships, then slowly his anxiety grew as her goddess status waned and she became mortal, and he began taking her for granted. Part of him wanted to end it; because it had to end, it always ended; he was feeling trapped and smothered but angry too because deep down he knew it had nothing to do with her. She was really nice, and fun, she cared about other people and seemed to care for him too, as odd as that was for him to accept. In the past he had felt that affection from other women and it both scared and repelled him like it had with long-ago Cindy, and it was usually the kiss of death for the relationship. And now here he was again, with feelings of remorse, guilt and a growing compulsion to fire the explosive bolts and escape this unbearable situation like one of those little sputniks flying up into space. Several times, once when driving, once over breakfast she asked him if he was OK. A wave of fear rose up in him like a black tide and he almost blurted out his awful desire to end things. But fear and guilt held him back again, and he reassured her everything was fine. This happened several times over the next few days. He was on the verge, on the brink, teetering like a tree that was being chainsawed and ready to fall, but he let the urge of total destruction sweep over him, to be postponed for another day Then, a week later, they were taking a walk on a nearby trail in the late afternoon. He grew quieter and quieter, and then, head down, it started to fall out of him like a rain-soaked landslide. His mind overwhelmed and in chaos had begun to form words but those words he had begun changed somehow in mid-stream and all she heard was, “Ann, I’ve got to tell you…”, “I really am…you really are…, I’ve been think things over…”, and then something broke inside of him, “I love you, I love you, I don’t, I can’t say it any other way…” She turned and looked at him head-on and cupped his face with the palms of her hands; her fingertips touching the corners of his eyes. “I knew you were going to say that; I knew it. I was waiting for you to say how I feel…” He was shocked at how this burst from him; thoughts unbidden from nowhere but deep inside him; from the same pile of jokes and imagination of his youth, but now containing bits of truth and hope. There were tears in the corners of his eyes but he made sure she couldn’t see them. He felt exposed and mortified and thrilled at the same time. They ran into the woods together, and, apelike, he tried to climb a tree…
It seemed like for the next two weeks the word love was in every sentence, or at least every paragraph of their conversations. One Sunday morning he was drinking coffee and she was reading the Times entertainment section. She exclaimed, “Yes!” and called him over to her to take a look. Romeo and Juliet was finishing up its run at the Met the next weekend and like that they made a snap-decision not to pass it up. They bought tickets that day as well as booking a place to stay overnight in New Jersey after the performance. She was enthusiastic and he was too, and yet over the coming week the old fears and anxieties about the two of them returned and became a part of the background of his waking hours. Not again, he thought despairingly. A thought occurred to him in bed awake one night, and occurred again, then recurred, then became a drumbeat. The drumbeat warned him that the trip was fraught and that anything could happen. He felt mixed up and anxious but he kept it under control, and wore a smiling face in her presence though it loomed over him like a shadow.
Both of them had listened to the ballet for weeks before their trip and were quite familiar with the music by the day of the performance. They had purchased the music on CD and loved it from the get-go, vocalizing the music without words in the living room, the kitchen and, best of all, in the shower. He played Romeo and she played Juliet and so he took the thunderous passages in the Overture and she took the high sweet ones. When she grabbed a glass of iced tea in the kitchen and tried to drink the poison from it, he leaped to wrest it from her hands, spilled much of it on her, and then was forced to spit it out at the sink after it went down the wrong pipe prompting her to perform a heimlich maneuver on him. She then patted him on the back till he burped and that ended it at which point she made herself another iced tea.
For all the listening they did beforehand and then playing it continuously while driving into the city, nothing could prepare them for the power of the ballet and the music seen and heard together. David noticed this first in members of the audience near him who were misting up if not outright crying. Ann sat quietly and still next to him and he turned his head towards her just as tears spilled onto her cheeks. And though he was more the misting up type, this sent him over the brink and for a moment he felt out of control with emotion. It was the music and ballet, but it was her crying too that was even more powerful and which made him shake for a moment. And even though he knew it was the ballet affecting her, he felt that old guilt and pain of being responsible somehow. He held her hand for the rest of the performance with both of his, and when the performance ended, they and many others in the audience embraced each other, and the standing ovation was long, slow, and full of gratitude and love.
They left the theater, his arm around her waist, and walked onto the plaza in front of the opera house. It was still light out, since they had attended the matinee. Pigeons were flying all around playing touch-and-go from plaza to sky, to the giant fountain in front of the Met., and the city, the people, the streets and sidewalks seemed transformed by the afterglow of the performance; the sky too, blazing orange between the gunmetal gray towers facing west and casting sharp-edged shadows by the millions everywhere. Ann's cheeks were pink and ruddy and her eyes watered from the slanting sunlight of late afternoon, and the lingering effects of the performance he thought. Then her sunstruck irises lit up from within in a once in a lifetime green and brown he had never seen and suddenly it struck him that she was another soul, separate, fully-formed and real, not the reflection or projection of himself or any other man. “Greetings fellow traveler”, he said to himself.
They walked south and in a couple of minutes entered Damrosch Park, which was on the way back to their car. They were alone in the park and it was quiet in the city for a moment. They walked silently, each in their own thoughts, sad and emotionally spent from the performance with its doomed yet uplifting love. Everything they thought and everything they heard and saw in front of them seemed heightened and preternaturally real, especially her eyes, which continued to hold the afterglow of the now dimming day.
Then a small figure emerged from the blasting light, walking towards them and casting a long dagger-like shadow in their path. It moved slowly and shakily along the sidewalk. In another moment David could see it was an old man dressed in a suit, overcoat, and hat, and using a cane. He walked robolike planting his feet in a sort of monster-like plodding stagger. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds and his suit hung from his neck down like a noose. Then Ann gasped, her hand covering her mouth, and David saw the front of the old man's gray suit trousers were wet and stained and that his face was ashen, his eyes staring down the street towards some far off fog-shrouded shore. A massive gunmetal gray skyscraper reared up behind him, itself stained with an enormous shadow cast on its first twenty or thirty floors. The building and its monstrous shadow seemed like it would fall right on the old man like a dead god. Ann and David felt that they had moved from one tragedy to another in the space of a few minutes. For a moment, the old man embodied all suffering in the city, all that was wrong, all that was tragic, a dying ember of a creature, tired, afraid, unloved, and mindlessly terrified by the darkening world around him. David and Ann lowered their heads as if walking into a storm. Where was his family, or some sort of caretaker, he thought. Ann sighed and whispered, “So sad”. They had passed more than a few homeless people that day and it barely registered on them, just dilapidated furniture on the street to step around. But the blasting light, the abyss-like shadows that cut through everything, the tragedy at the Met, and now this ghost of King Lear in their direct path, was enough for Ann and David to cling together, to hold onto each other for dear life and protection, and to hold their breath as this apparition passed by. They walked on.
Ann cried softly back in the car as they pulled away from the skies and towers of the city which were now soft and gauzy in the twilight. Then they blinked out in the rearview mirror as David and Ann entered the Lincoln Tunnel, and for a few moments there was no one in front of them, just two headlights bouncing off the tiled tunnel walls. He looked at Ann and suddenly saw her old and tragic and alone in a room somewhere. The guilt and remorse of his present and past covered him like a sepulcher. Why put it all on him he thought. What made him think he was to blame or for that matter, that he could destroy a person by leaving them behind? He didn’t know that about her at all; he thought she might be plenty strong, far from holding the power of life and death over her, she might weather anything he could throw her way and move on - and be all the better for it! Then the old man in the park appeared before him in his thoughts and David E. was terrified, and he searched for a reason why and then he knew the reason why.
The car, now surrounded by other cars, in an oddly relaxed communal fashion, slowly climbed the gentle incline out of the tunnel and then the flash of light at the end of it came into view. David E. turned to Ann P. who had closed her eyes, and said softly and carefully, “I love you”. Then he said it again and she nodded back and he knew this time he meant it for good.