FOUR BOARDERS: Ch.1 - One Departure and Two Visitations (part 1)

“You don’t have to move all your stuff out. I have plenty of space. Clearly.”

Amy stood on the top of the stoop, holding a banker’s box. The word BOOKS was written with a black Sharpie in her neat, gently flowery script. I had lived with the box for over a month, along with dozens of others. I immediately wondered which books were in there. Did I buy any of them for her? Were any of the picture books in there? The ones I thought one day we’d read to our children, the children we were plannng, eventually. No chance of that now. Not a chance in hell.

“No, I can’t. I finally have an apartment,” Amy said. “You don’t need my stuff lying around.”

Two months earlier we had had the last fight. The last fight in a long series of fights stretching for back years. It was the same things, the same issues, repeating over and over until they blended into rhythmic chants.  Allen, you have to have some sort of passion.  Allen, you aren’t doing anything with your life.  Allen, I don’t know who you are, what you want. Rarely did the topic of our sex life come up, but since there wasn’t much to talk about, it didn’t seem worth it. After that last fight, when we both knew that it was over, I moved into one of the empty rooms in the brownstone I had purchased, purchased for us, one year earlier. Amy was picky about what furniture would fit with the hundred year old architecture so the vast majority of the house basically lay empty. And now she was taking half of that.

For the first month, she’d lived in the master bedroom, a phrase that still made me queasy. I lived upstairs in the media room, which contained a sofa with a pullout bed and the television. For a month we had lived that way, sharing the huge space, trying not to step on each other’s toes. A hellish month of deadly silences and occasional strained conversations. I watched a lot of late night television. A lot of early morning television. A lot of television. I found myself drawn The Discovery Channel when it kicked on to Man Mode at night: American Chopper, Monster House, World’s Dirtiest Jobs, Deadliest Catch. There was something about grizzled men, crab fishing in icy Alaskan waters, that I found appealing. To bond and suffer and not worry about anything but living.

I quickly realized I didn’t miss the sleeping next to her or even the talking to her. I just missed my own bed. I missed my closets and my bedside table.

The first Saturday after we called an end to it, she’d been out with friends. At ten p.m. I decided to have a beer. At eleven I started in on the scotch because I had finished all the beer. At midnight I started pulling all our books off the bookshelves, violently separating them into piles. Hers. Mine. Disputed.  When she got home at two, I had worked myself into a drunken fury of anger, guilt, jealousy, pain and fear. If before there had been any bridges left unburned, that night I doused them in gasoline and tossed a lit cigarette onto them.

I wonder which books are in that box.

Now I stood at the base of the stoop steps, looking up at Amy there, holding that banker’s box. She looked down at me, pretty but stiff, as always, with her look of sad pity that she did so well and I hated so much. Tiny, yet with muscles built from almost daily trips to the gym. Framed in the doorway of the turn of the century Brooklyn brownstone that I had once thought we would build our lives and our future family around. After we had lived together but separate for a month, she had moved out to couch hop and house sit and dog sit and who knows what else. I never knew where Amy was. It didn’t cross my mind often, except late at night, in that big empty house. At those times when the house would make its creaks and groans, as if were trying to console me but failing miserably, I would suddenly wonder where she was and if she was with anyone. With anyone.

I stopped crying and feeling sad for myself shortly after she left. The insomnia stayed. Once I did the math and figured that I was averaging four and a half nights sleep a week and had been since the last fight. I probably look like shit. She has no reason to stay. Hell, I don’t want her to. Which was true. Any love we’d had was gone and had been gone a long time ago, now just a misplaced memory I cared for her, like an old friend. But I had no desire to be near her.

But somehow her taking all her stuff out of that house was making me feel like an utter failure.

“How big is your place?” I asked walking up the steps. “You can’t have space for all of it”.

She looked right in my eyes and I saw again what it was that I fell in love with and now had no desire for. Gentle and caring, stubborn and prim in a counter-culture kind of way. Too much proverbial water had run under those now charred and collapsed proverbial bridges.

“I’ll figure it out, Allen. We aren’t responsible for each other. You never took responsibility any way.”

Wincing, I looked at my shoes. She’d bought me these shoes. Leather, nice. Steve Martins. No, Maddens. Steve Maddens. Jesus Christ, I can’t even buy clothing for myself. What the hell am I going to do now? Looking at Amy’s feet, I noticed she was standing on the doormat she had picked out. That she had taken half an hour to pick out at Target. How the hell am I going to be able to face Target by myself?

I asked, “Do you want the doormat? You can take the doormat if you want.”

She shook her head. I held out my hands towards the box and Amy handed it to me. Turning back down the steps I headed to her car parked right in front of the gate. She headed back inside to get another box of books, or the Cuisenart, or shoes. Putting the box of books in the trunk of her car, I lifted the lid to look inside. Cookbooks, Amy was taking all the cookbooks. Yes, she bought most of them but she knew how to cook. I needed those cookbooks. I needed the instructions, the rules. How was I going to put together anything without someone, something, telling me how to do it? Here I am, 34 years old and alone. No more future plans, nothing more to work towards. Might as well be the end of the world.

I closed the box and turned back towards the house. Amy was coming out with the lamp I’d always hated. Under my breath I whispered, “Bitch.”