Exhausted

From an old book of mine called Safekeeping

I wrote a book twenty seven years ago, it was published in 2000. I looked at it this morning. How did I know what I was doing? I didn’t. An old friend of mine had died, a man I’d been married to, divorced from, and become close friends with. When he died, these little pieces came flying out of me, and it took me a hundred pages to realize what I was doing. This is a piece of it. I wrote mostly very short, it was a bit like popcorn blowing the lid off. Nothing new is showing up these days. So why not? Let’s call it from my archive, and hope I get away with it. I don’t know who I was when I wrote this. I wish she’d pay me a visit now.

EXHAUSTED

She was always tired then. That is why being tired now makes her feel young. She was up all day and half the night what with the kids and boyfriends. What with the cigarettes and the whiskey. What with the wild wild women. She was the wild wild woman herself, of course. Got no sleep. Didn’t really care. Still looked good. Loved her kids. Once she hitched a ride home at three in the morning from Avenue C. She was waiting for the bus, and a couple of guys stopped, she could see through the windows they had martini glasses in their hands. One of them rolled the window down and started to hit on her a little bit. “Lookin’ good,” he probably said, or “Big legs,” one of the compliments of those days. It was four degrees above zero and she was wearing loafers with no socks and no stockings and her coat had only one button left. She wasn’t much of a dresser. The driver said, she could hear him through the window, “Leave her alone, man, it’s too cold. Don’t hassle the chick.” She said, “Can I have a ride to Fifth?” and they opened the back door. They were friendly and very nice. She knew it would be okay. And it was. They let her out on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 8th Street near where she lived. She was sure she knew what was safe and what wasn’t. And luckily for her, she was right most of the time. The rest of the time she was lucky.

Those days are gone forever and good riddance, no doubt. What is it? Thirty years ago? The world seemed innocent then. She knows now it wasn’t. She looks at her watch. Two-thirty in the morning. She is tired, but nothing is wasted, she uses it to remember the old days. Exhaustion is her servant, where once it was her master. She looks out her window, uptown, at the water towers, at the squares of light in other windows. Where a man she hadn’t met back then, a man she was about to meet, a man whom she would love and hate and love again, a man with whom she would spend the next thirty years, give or take, has died. Died. It seems impossible, She can almost see his windows from her window. She can almost hear his voice. Anything might happen. She doesn’t want to go to bed.