A Clean Break
In this shitty city, you can see fortune slipping through the cracks in the boardwalk, waiting for high tide to kiss the dreams and wash them out to sea with the eroding shoreline. The monster gods that wield a playful form of destiny hover just below the clouds, staring with fascination at the retired grandparents, assorted businessmen, drunken post-adolescents and beleaguered crackheads scrambling through the streets, using an uncanny sense of direction to find their way to the fickle hearts of glass tower deities.
Nostalgia rarely invokes the criminal associations it probably should. And although there are more relevant cities to summon reminiscing in a specific sense, Atlantic City holds a certain convenience along with a sense of appropriate atmosphere: the tumultuous highs and lows that are inherent within any relationship.
It wasn’t snowing, but it seemed like a distinct possibility. The gray clouds swarmed the tops of the casinos like dreary armies invading a territory without resistance. The wind whipped off the ocean in astute gusts that exhaled sea salt in particles clinging to the cold February air. The weather unfurled like a guilty conscience trying, without much success, to purge its sins on the awaiting population.
Inside the casino it was remarkably easy to disregard anything that was occurring beyond its walls, and that included the weather. A luminous mural of a clear night sky adorned the ceiling over the esoteric shops and overpriced restaurants. Excited crowds walked towards the gaming floor, searching for a heavy dose of charity from the hopefully sympathetic cards or the ideally altruistic slots. The smarter individuals anticipated a loss of funds, but the prospect of good luck was enough to make their own acts of charity thrilling and addictive.
I was satisfying addiction in a different way, and I could feel her distinct voice brush my eardrums with a nostalgic clarity that crept up from the past like an ascending ghost. I spun around quickly and found myself offering her an affectionate hug before I could even appreciate her appearance. Yet I still muttered the words “you look great” with complete sincerity.
It wasn’t until the embrace had concluded that I was really able to give her a thorough once-over. With the exception of her light brown hair fashioned into two symmetrical buns on either side of her head, she looked remarkably similar to our last meeting, which had taken place almost two years prior. Her petite body was highlighted with form-fitting jeans and a tight, casual turtleneck. The choice of apparel and hairstyle made her look both playful and endearing. A somewhat elaborate, but decidedly tasteful necklace hung down below her breasts. Its intermittent green stones complemented her pale, seaweed eyes, perfectly illustrating their ability to be simultaneously innocent and seductive.
She reciprocated the compliment on appearance. “So, did you pick a place for dinner?” she asked.
“Of course,” I replied leading her into the restaurant.
As we were seated, we gave off the overt impression of a long-standing couple and were treated as such. The initial conversation was petty and slightly awkward, but as we quickly worked through our first martinis, any nervousness or discomfort melted away with the warm, reassuring consolation of alcohol. We were just catching each other up on our respective families when the appetizers arrived.
“God, it’s really good to see you,” she said almost bashfully. “I was pretty nervous about meeting you.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know,” she picked at her calamari with mild interest. “I guess I’ve had bad luck with ex-boyfriends being totally insane.”
“Bad luck?” I asked with a scoffing chuckle. “Do you think your preferred style of breakup has anything to do with that? It seems like quite a coincidence that all the young men you’ve dated have a tough time with the relationship ending.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well you seem to have a distinct trend, Madison. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one involved in a relationship with you that felt like it would go the distance, due, in no small part, to your ecstatic praising of the relationship and your poor, vulnerable, trusting significant other buying into your high hopes.”
“Oh, poor significant other my ass.” It was her turn to scoff. “All those significant others clearly became unhappy. I knew if I didn’t end things then nobody would, which just means everyone is miserable.”
“But your husband is a different story?”
“I guess you could call Mike an anomaly.”
“Well I guess that makes Mike extremely fortunate or unfortunate, depending on your perspective.” I smiled, gave her a knowing yet demonstrative nudge then took a spoonful of bisque and chased it with a sip of martini. “Okay, so I’ll bite. What is it that makes your other ex-boyfriends so crazy?”
She finished chewing her mouthful of calamari before she replied. “Oh, the typical crazy ex type of thing. You know, emails out of the blue either praising or bashing me, the random drunk phone call here and there. Or my personal favorite, a week before my wedding I was propositioned to call it off with a trip to London as the deal-breaker. You know, a weaker woman might have taken that deal.”
“Yeah, I guess that qualifies as pretty crazy… or desperate.”
“But not you, I’ve barely heard from you in the past few years. It was like you just dropped off the face of the earth for a little while.”
“Well it wasn’t easy for me when you first broke things off. I mean, I think we can both agree it was a pretty intense relationship. But I feel like I got all my crazy out in one reasonably short burst. I just thought we needed a clean break, and I wasn’t ready for us to have any real interaction, especially with you being married.”
“Well I’m glad you got over that because it feels really good to be able to sit down with an ex and have a normal conversation, like they’re a legitimate old friend. I always knew you were different.”
The meal was littered with inside jokes and reminiscent retrospection. A familiar chemistry played between our bodies like a rambunctious child searching for the appropriate conditions to be inappropriate. We laughed at our own good-natured teasing and leaned in for the occasional grab of an arm or brush of a leg to add the exclamation point on increasing comfort. As dessert arrived and the glasses of additional martinis were cleared, the conversation moved into more personal territory.
“So I was pretty surprised that you actually wanted to get together,” she said casually as she poked her spoon into her sorbet. “I wasn’t sure how bitter you were or if you had any interest in seeing me.”
“I am pretty good at holding a grudge,” I responded truthfully. “But I can really only stay bitter for so long before it starts taking a tremendous amount of effort. I’m not thrilled about the way things ended, but life goes on.”
“We did have some pretty wild times together,” she said scanning the décor of the restaurant as if we had not just spent the better part of two hours there. “This place actually reminds me of that restaurant in Barcelona, you know, the one with the amazing sangria. If only our hotel room had been as nice as those eating accommodations.”
I laughed recalling the shoebox hotel room with two double beds pushed together to fashion a makeshift king-size. “Yeah, that was pretty classic. We definitely made the most of it though. Besides, it wasn’t nearly as bad as that hostel in Rome.”
She gave a forced shudder, but the smile remained on her face. “I was actually a little afraid to fall asleep in that place. I thought you might run off with that huge, drunk Polish guy who was clearly so fond of you.”
“Yeah, that guy was really enthusiastic about drinking with me. He didn’t take no for an answer!” I paused and threw the rest of my dessert cocktail down the hatch. “I was hoping you might come to my rescue; maybe say something like ‘oh, but we were just on our way out, sir.’ You know, make up some kind of excuse to get us out of there.”
“No way,” she replied, laughing harder. “It was priceless to see him force you in that seat and make you drink that awful whiskey. The look on your face was unforgettable.”
“Nice to know I was so amusing,” I said with a teasing sense of offense.
“Always,” she said as she leaned in to give me a quick peck on the cheek. “This is nice. I’m really having a great time with you.”
“Just like old times,” I said as I looked at the bill that the waiter had left on the table a few minutes earlier. Thoroughly impressed with the tab we were able to accrue over the course of the meal (a tab that was largely enhanced by the smorgasbord of various martinis), I put the appropriate amount of cash in the leather binder and returned it to the table. “So what now Madison? Dinner’s done and I’m thinking you’re probably a little too drunk to go driving home to your husband.”
“Yeah, that’s probably true.” She took the pristine white napkin off her lap and placed it on the table. “So how are you going to keep me entertained?”
“I think I can manage. What did you have in mind?”
“Well, I know you’re not much of a gambler. So what would you be doing right now if I wasn’t here?”
“In all likelihood I would probably be sitting with a drink in my room, watching some TV.”
“Okay, that sounds good to me,” she said as she stood up from her seat, took my hand and began pulling me towards the elevators. The crowds had grown thicker and it took a degree of creative maneuvering to get us there, but she led the way with unwavering grace. It was clear that the alcohol had made a greater impact on her inhibitions than it had on her motor skills. “I’m really curious to see the type of room your company has set you up with.”
“It’s not bad,” I replied. “I’m not one to complain about a free room. I really don’t travel for work very much, but the few times I have, the accommodations have been pretty respectable.”
The elevator doors opened and we joined an eclectic group of guests in its claustrophobic confines. The ride was quiet, with only a few subtle whispers spoken. Madison stood close to me, her back pressed against the wall of the elevator, her head resting on my shoulder and her hands enveloping my long fingers. The elevator climbed to the 47th floor and we exited as the doors opened.
I guided her down the hallway to my room. Apparently I had forgotten to raise the temperature of the thermostat because we were greeted with an immediate chill as we entered. The lights were off, but the blinds were wide open, allowing us to view an iridescent collage as it tapered off into the ocean, like a pile of glowing breadcrumbs that had been repositioned in an attempt to lead a naïve victim to drowning. There was no trace of the veritable celestial covering as it was envisioned within the mural on the first floor of the casino. There was no moon or stars to compromise the oil black that blanketed the luminous structures. In fact, the shimmering cityscape seemed to give up its energy in the form of radiance ascending towards a deep ravenous mouth. It appeared as a kind of half-finished mosaic, providing a perfect depiction of surrender. But the real beauty was in the preceding power struggle.
She walked in ahead of me, apparently hypnotized by the view. She didn’t turn on the lights and she appeared to hover towards the window, slowly reaching up a hand to press against the glass. “It looks like we’re on a plane that’s landing,” she said, almost more to herself than to me.
“It does,” I said as I walked up behind her, “Except we’re not moving.”
“It makes me think of Europe,” she said wistfully. “ It’s weird how some days it seems like we were just there, and some days it seems like it was so long ago.”
“So where does today stand in that timeline?”
She thought for a moment, her gaze still concentrated on the scenic overview. Finally, she broke away and looked into my eyes. “It feels like we’re still there.”
In the dark room with her back to the window, she looked like a lost specter. The pulsing watercolor behind her shaded her mildly pale complexion with contrasts from some unfamiliar spectrum. The only part of her that still seemed to be existing in the room were her eyes, which had formed the catastrophic green one would only expect to see at the center of an atomic blast. They seemed to hang there in an amorphous color scheme, focusing deeply on my own eyes, as if searching for my true intentions.
Without any real hesitation, I leaned my face in towards hers and found her lips with my own. Enveloped in reciprocal desperation, our tongues fell back into familiar choreography, improvising and anticipating, dominating and submitting. I pushed her on the bed and climbed on top of her, pulling her turtleneck over her head and immediately putting my mouth to work on her neck and chest then moving south, using my tongue as a brush to paint the canvas of her body.
“No marks,” she managed to mutter in a single exhalation as my overzealous mouth reminded her she had a husband to go home to. She pulled my shirt off and as I began unbuttoning her jeans and kissing below her naval, she dug her nails into the skin of my back with the comfort of a consistent houseguest, as if her nails had once enjoyed a residence beneath my flesh and expected an eternity of open invitations.
“You can leave as many marks as you want,” I said as I yanked the tight jeans form her legs, throwing them somewhere in the darkness.
She rolled me over and straddled me, kissing my chest and stomach as she managed to work me out of my pants. After that it was only a matter of moments before the underwear was gone and I was inside her. Kissing her affectionately as she rode me, I watched the lights from the city trace her skin like millions of tiny fireflies looking for a place to settle. She tilted her head back, moaned and closed her eyes, as if she was searching the inside of her lids for an alternate reality.
The city watched our performance as we melted into memories of more exotic locales. The hotel room disintegrated around us, flaking off into splinters that flew like airplanes to a different continent, where love was muttered countless times in the context of unconventional architecture and clear blue waters; where local wine and hotel rooms met in a dizzying patchwork of sex and foreign television.
The climax came simultaneously for both of us, but in different worlds. It wasn’t so much the generality of the worlds that was different, but the specificity. In a combination of integrated still-frames, some of the details are bound to get lost or mixed up in the creation. Unfortunately, in a situation where passion, conscience, regret and history culminate with such force and surprise, it only makes sense for an individual to fall back into a recent and familiar habit. This became overly apparent as she screamed the name “Mike” at a pivotal orgasmic point.
Realizing her mistake, but having no interest in confrontation until the conclusion of the pleasure, she simply turned the name into a scream, perhaps hoping I was too immersed in my own world of enjoyment to notice the monumental error. However, as we both finished and she positioned herself on her back next to me, I made it rather clear that the mistake had not gone unnoticed.
“What the fuck was that?” I asked between heavy breaths.
She was silent. As I turned on my side to look at her, I could see her eyes open and staring up, hoping the ceiling would provide her with an answer. “I…I…” She was stuttering slightly and I could see what appeared to be a tear forming in the lower corner of her left eye, like a cloud forming at the shoreline of some bipolar body of water. “I’m sorry,” she was finally able to mutter. “I guess it’s just been so long, and that’s the name…”
Her words trailed off. I could see her mouth moving, but there was no sound. As she attempted her explanation, my own anger collected in synaptic fireworks, exploding with Fourth of July ferocity. This was not the end I had envisioned. The simple validation of the evening had been accomplished: it was clear there was a degree of uncontrollable attraction between us that was not likely to ever dissipate, which invited a certain satisfaction. But the fact that her husband (even in name alone) had interjected at such a crucial time became a glaring hiccup in an otherwise perfect evening.
With a remarkable amount of restraint, I looked at her with as much sincere affection as I could muster. “You don’t have any reason to apologize,” I said understandingly. “He’s your husband and his is the only name you should be screaming.”
The pain of these words was especially aggravating because I knew how true it was. I had agreed to this rendezvous, telling myself it was some form of revenge. Like she would spend time with me and realize the error of her ways; like she would be so overwhelmed with nostalgia and regret that she would profess her undying love for me, only to have me shoot her down with the compassion of a military dictator.
Instead it felt as though she had won the upper hand. I had initiated the desperate act and what should have resulted in unwavering pleasure for me had simply concluded in ruin and longing. It was obvious that my feelings for her were still strong, and it was obvious that she would revel in the lasting impression she had left on me.
And the familiarity of our interaction had proved more evocative for me than I had anticipated. The reminiscent conversations had essentially acted as photo albums in the form of dialogue, bringing to mind all the powerful memories captured within the sky-high walls of our relationship. At this point, I wanted nothing more than to disregard the entire meeting as an unmitigated mistake
“You know sometimes I really thought you hated me because of the way things ended.” Her words pulled me from my own mental trepidations. “I know it was tough, it was tough for me too, but I never wanted to hurt you.” She paused as if contemplating whether to say the next words. “I loved you so much.”
I was caught off guard. I was also less than enthusiastic about offering her more satisfaction than she undoubtedly already had, but I knew it didn’t matter at this point. “I loved you too,” I said dejectedly, almost defeated. “Probably more than you’ll ever know.”
“Do you still think about me?”
“Probably more than I should,” I replied.
She reached out her hand, touched my cheek, leaned forward and kissed my forehead. She sat up and moved towards the window without redressing. Naked in the glow of the city, it looked as if she was calculating her chances of flying. Moving behind her, I put my hands around her and kissed her neck. We were phantoms in the window’s reflection, floating seamlessly above a skyline like two naked angels. There was nothing but streets and humans below, conjuring all the side effects of existence to climb their way to the tips of our toes.
***
I was hoping for a clean break. It seemed, however, that the window had other intentions. With our close proximity to the glass, it was impossible for me to create enough force to shatter it with one blow. Instead her head met the window with a sickening thud, barely offering a fracture.
She was dazed. With a small slit dripping blood into her right eye, she turned around to look at me with pure confusion. I pressed her face forward with a certain degree of warmth, as if pleading with her to simply observe our breathtaking view. I then grabbed the back of her head and pushed it into the window with as much force as I could. The window held its ground with surprising resiliency, but it had started to splinter. Small pieces of glass stuck to her face like she was some human pincushion. The blood was flowing freely now, streaming down her face and naked body. I pulled her head back again and with one more forceful thrust into the window, it shattered completely. The glass exploded outward, offering a reflective sort of precipitation that sprinkled down to the street below. Her cheeks caught the razor-sharp fractures that remained in the windowpane and shredded like thin paper. Her neck did the same. The blood gushed over my hands like crimson rapids as I bent to the floor, grabbed her ankles and threw her into the cold night sky.
I watched the wind whip her arms and legs back like she was some cotton doll. The thought had crossed my mind that because of the violent surprise and blood loss, she would simply pass out before dropping a single story. But as the updraft whipped her around, I could see her lucid expression training itself on my face. With eyes that emitted sadness like the movie projector of some heartbreaking film, she floated towards the oblivious cross streets of everything and nothing, landing with the graceful force of a fallen angel.
This material is the property and copyright of its owner. Copyright © 2008 LegalZoom.com
