He put a hand on the wall to support himself beside my head, 'Every single word is because of you.'
'What about Helena?'
His head rocked drunkenly, confused, then he turned and looked round the room for her. 'She's fine. Fine. Pretty, French, the kind I always imagined was perfect.'
'She is perfect.'
He turned to me, suddenly sober, 'Virginia,' he looked around, 'I can't hear. Can we talk outside?'
I followed him out, the weather was cold, late summer and my dress had no arms or neck.
'Here,' he gave me his suitcoat, lit two cigarettes, and handed me one.
'I don't smoke.'
He kept his arm extended, stared at the one in his mouth and the one in his hand, 'Gonna make me smoke both.'
I took it and inhaled. I never have lost my love for cigarettes. No matter how many times I try to quit, I come back to luxuriate in the smoke.
He sat and I sat beside him.
'Gina,'
'Don't call me that,' a whisper through exhale.
'Right. Remember how we used to be? All those years ago when we were kids?'
'Yeah.'
'I miss that.'
'Me too.'
He looked at me and I returned his gaze. He spent years pouring his heart to me, bleeding on my sleeves, my shoes, on my very life and soul, but he said nothing. He stared and stared, his eyes turned to glass, not from drink but from something missing. He turned but I didn't. I watched him smoke his cigarette, his eyebrows furrowed, that sneer that he spent his life wearing unaware. It made people think he was angry or mean, but it was an unconscious mask for his boyish grin and girly laugh, both of which he never lost in adulthood. He inhaled deep and blew out strong the way he always did. Smoking too audibly, like it was a show, like he was Mastroianni in Italy decades before his birth.
He turned back, my cigarette gone, his flicked into the street, 'Will you smoke just one more with me?'
I nodded.
'It's my last so we have to share.'
'Okay.'
He lit it, puffed twice and handed it to me. I puffed once, let it dangle in my fingers. I stopped watching him and put my head on his shoulder. He put an arm around me and pulled me close. Finally. I miss you, I said but, for the first time, he didn't say anything. After a lifetime of talking too much, he finally shut up and just held me.
We must have been like that a long time. Too long for some but not long enough, not for me, and I know not for him. I think a part of me knew I would never see him again because I cried. I didn't know it till we were back inside and Terry told me my makeup ran.
Helena burst outside. 'There you are! Everyone's waiting for you.'
He turned, 'Okay. Give me a sec.'
'Hurry up, we're waiting for your speech and I already had our song go twice but couldn't find you so I'm playing it again.'
He smiled and laughed and said he would be right in.
We stared at one another again, his arm no longer around me. He put a hand to my chin, then to my neck, and kissed me on the forehead. I'll never forget you, he said taking my hand and leaving a piece of paper there. Then he was gone. I knew what it said without opening it because they all say the same thing.
***
Do you remember writing those? All those tiny slips of paper you would put in my hand, slip in my purse, or leave in my shoe when you left. I kept them all. I have everything you wrote me. All in a shoebox upstairs that I keep secret and have done so for as long as I had known you.
***
Marcel never was quite like other men. Owing to his peculiar nature, he never could be, even when he tried hardest to assimilate. It made him intolerable, unforgettable, he was loved and hated for all the same reasons, incorrigible and chaotic. He flew into fits, never of rage, but his bouts with himself, with the demons he spoke of everywhere lasted his entire life.
'They were my first memory. Staring over my mum's shoulder into this impenetrable blackness in the corner. I clung to my mum but she placed me there to sleep. Unaware, always unaware of the reason I never slept.'
'What are they like?'
You were far away, barely even talking to me, 'They're like shades and images. They swoop through the walls with faces of fire and ice and dive through my body, leaving me on fire or frigid. Hanging above my face visible even when I close my eyes, they sing a song that's always the same. A song I never remember but can't forget.'
Your knees pushed hard together, your teeth grinding, hands cold and tight, I touched you, a hand to shoulder. It was as if you awoke from deep sleep only to see my face buried in concern for you. You smiled the way I liked you to smile, bashful, like I caught you nicking candy.
'It's not a big deal.'
'You need to sleep.'
'I know,' far away again, your voice soft, hands tapping a beat on the concrete stairs beneath us. I waited for you to look up at me again, to return, but instead you smiled, hopped to your feet, 'Let's go for a walk.' You bounced on one foot then the other.
We walked. This was later, much later, after we left home and our love was different. Still so in love with me, I could see the pain of being near, but I needed you. Never could understand that so you hid from me for months, not answering your phone, pretending like you forgot about me. You never knew how much that hurt, how much I needed you near.
I could not love you. I tried so long ago.
Our walks were different then, not through woods and over streams, me piggybacked. Wide streets and sidewalks, traffic lights and noise, a pace apart, but you still lit cigarettes for two even though I always had my own. By then you smoked Red Puffins because you asserted they were best and I think it was one of many steps you took from me, picking a brand I didn't know, something we didn't discover together, and making it a part of your whole.
'Never thought I'd say it, but I miss the squirrels.'
Taken by surprise, I choked on smoke and laughed, 'The squirrels?'
You didn't turn to see my face but you knew I smiled. I knew from the way you kept your lips tight to hide your own. 'Yeah, all those squirrels back home. It's one of those things, the little ones, that people never think about. Never did it occur to me when I went to college that I'd miss having squirrels everywhere. Never even expected there to be a place squirrels didn't run.'
I blew smoke, the way the Puffin confined my lungs and constricted the way I breathed, there was something reminiscent of you in them. A way, a kind of madness that wanted everything without giving anything.
'They're an odd creature, vaguely human. Those little hands,' you wiped your hands back and forth mimicking a squirrel or a vaudeville villain, 'almost human but not. It's unsettling a little bit. Always imagine they're up to something, some nefarious plot.'
'Out to steal your nuts.'
You laughed and turned to me, finally, 'Yeah, exactly. I miss that, always looking over my shoulder to make sure a squirrel wasn't off stealing my horde of nuts.'
'I miss the trees.'
'You would.'
'I do.'
We walked. Spring, the weather getting warm, that stupid peacoat still draped over your bony shoulders, your haggard jeans, more hole than material, kept falling so you kept pulling them up.
'You need a belt.'
'Got one but the loops all broke. See.'
Every loop missing, I can't say I was surprised then the way clothes and appearance never meant much to you. But your shoes always were leather, fine and dressy. You looked a mess, a chaos of patterns and styles. I used to dress you better.
It seemed like hours later when the gloaming hit and we were sitting in that concrete park with artificial waterfalls not yet turned on for the year. Do you remember what you said then?
'It looks like a giant's stairway.'
It did. Big rectangles of concrete reaching up and up for no reason. From any other direction it was a mountain of concrete but from this one it was a stairway to the land of giants.
'Gina,' t
he night came and left us beneath that starless sky. The air chilled the way it does in spring and our breath condensed afore us. Or maybe that was the smoke, the Puffin spilling from my tightened lungs.
'I miss the stars,' I said to stop whatever it was you wanted to say.
'I miss you.'
'You needn't. Answer your phone every once and again.'
You rolled onto your back, exhaling smoke loud but not on purpose, 'I'm sorry.'
So many thoughts raced through my head, like what my boyfriend thought because I didn't answer when he called. You could do that to me, remove me from my life, even from my loves, if only for a day. I think that's all you wanted at times, a chance to recollect how a part of me had always and would always belong to you. I thought of you beside me. We drifted apart over the previous three years. We were so in love once but it fell apart and it broke you to pieces. You stood outside my house some nights. I know because I saw you but I never told anybody about that. Neither did I tell anyone about the letter you left on my door, all thirty pages of it typed up but with the manic sentences of a sleepless night. It was the first of many. It began as an apology then worked its way to a love letter then on past to an accusation and drifted near suicide note then back to love and full circle to apology.
Even in despair and calamity your words delved deep and cut to my soul. The love you had for me, the love you shared so readily, so fully, it frightened me. So in love with me that you were ready to die if only for my touch. I have them all, the thirty or forty you wrote me from the end of high school till your insane quest across the globe chasing the ghost of films that may not have ever even been. This was before then but when I look now I see that the seeds were already there taking root.
'Gina.'
'Marcel.'
'You're perfect right now.'
I pulled my hair over my face, my smile not meant for you anymore.
'Pensive and thoughtful, a thousand miles away. If I was a painter I'd paint you here for the rest of my life.'
'You paint.'
You laughed, 'Throwing paint at pieces of paper doesn't count.'
'I like them.'
'They're fun but they're not paintings. Not the way I mean when I look at you.'
'Stop.'
'Gina,'
'No.'
'I love you.'
I started walking away then. My face and mind a battlefield of memories and dreams and emotions, and I longed for the woods and the treespirits because they never tugged me so, always consoled me when I got lonesome.
You followed me all the way home, five steps behind. When I got to my door your face was masked in smoke and shadow.
'You ruin everything sometimes.'
Your hands deep in pockets, biting down on the cigarette, its ember aglow, 'I know.' The words barely got to me before they were carried away by the breeze. I went inside but watched you from my room.
You smoked two more cigarettes on the stoop, your elbow on your knees, hand pressed to forehead. I made a promise then that if you looked back to my room I'd forgive you and walk home beside you. It wasn't the first time. It began long ago that I made bets with myself concerning you. Small ones at first, that if you called between this and this minute that I'd answer with I love you, but those were the first ones. Later they became promises that if you just kissed me I'd stay, if you wrapped your arm around me I'd promise to never let you go.
But you got up and ambled away, slow, giving yourself lots of time to see me there but you never turned, the smoke trailing behind.
Days later while going through my purse I found two notes on tiny pieces of paper. One said, I love you. The other said, I'm sorry.
***
There's this old belief and there was a time when studies were always being done that appeared to prove it. We can recreate the past and bring it back to life through words. They were called Creation Compositions. Some memories never let go. Marcel never could let me go but I find more with age that neither can I him. If a person can capture their memories proper and set it all down on paper then that person comes back. Not just the way memories come back but the way that a lost friend returns.
I didn't mean to but I had to.
My husband, George, he doesn't know. Neither do the kids but they're mostly gone but for Marcel. He's the age now that you were when we met. I think I named him so because I knew he was my last chance to bring you back. I thought if a name could mean anything then maybe it could mean so much more.
He's more you than he is his mother or father.
I write when he's gone working and the house is quiet and lonely. Sometimes I sit in the woods with just a pen and this notebook. I never was a writer so it takes me a long time to go. Some days I only get down a sentence or two. Most days only a word. I ask the trees what they remember about us. You know what they say?
They say we were in love.
I told them that it wasn't so and they laughed the way trees do, which is to shake out a leaf or two. Then I told them about the years we lost one another and about all the many things I did to you. All the pain I put you through without ever trying. They know about you and they understand or help me to understand better. I told them about the letters. At first they laughed but I read them a few, the first and the last one. They cried. I never did hear a tree cry before that but I sat out there for a full four hours reading those letters to them and moments got punctuated by a loud creak like a scream and it brought tears to my own eyes after all these years.
I bet you never thought I would read those again and again but I know them all by heart. Every word.
After that they began to understand. They told me that our love belonged to them. We belonged in the forest. They tell me that that's the real reason I came home. I looked for you.
Maybe they're right. They believe it so.
And maybe you're right. You were right, I mean.
I can hear you now even, your voice soft the way you always told me when you would say, You don't deserve to be lonely. Your breath warm on my neck, me wrapped in your arms.
It was a love we shared without trying. It lasted half your life no matter how long we spent apart.
I miss you so.
But all I have now are the memories so I'm trying to write it all down the way you always did. You were the writer not me. But what you wrote buried this all so deep that only I knew. You knew I would know and that's why you gave it to me first. It was the longest of your letters.
I read it to the trees today. The story of the time we shared. I explained how you inverted us, made me the boy and you the girl but wrote from my perspective. There was a boy who meets a girl near the ocean and right away the girl loves him. For months they grow into one with their identities so bound within the other that separating for even moments was painful. They woke in the night and called the other who shared the same dream. They spent their days together and their nights sneaking out to sit beneath the moon and her sister stars. The world began to collapse around them but they stood in the center of it all as if it was not real until an eclipse shattered the sky and they lost one another for the first time. The boy searched for the girl who searched for the boy but only ever found his echo. The boy whispered to the girl everywhere he went to try to show her the way out of the night and she stumbled after him for years only to find him the same, unchanged despite the years. You wrote about a girl who loved a boy and a boy who never could decide if he loved her back or not. It ends the way it begins. On accident and ambiguous.
I never got to tell you what I think of your book. The only one of the many you wrote to see the world during your life. They're all published now. Did you know that? You're famous.
I think you planned that the way you planned so many things. That no one would be stupid enough or brave enough to follow through on.
The trees cried again and told me to speak no more of you because they could not take it. They said emotions were different after death. A body can feel while alive but
in death one must relive perpetually the emotions and there's no body to distil or balance the sensations of grief and loss and pang. After death there is only the emotion unburdened and unhampered by consciousness and body rhythm. Their tears startled me and I won't return tomorrow.
The rest is up to me.
I wish you were here. I would ask you what I never did and I would ask you if it was because of me.
Your book ends without ending but you wrote the ending with your death, I suppose. So much of our life is that book, despite the magic you buried it under, that it couldn't end in words.
I know that now but I wonder if I even could have given you a different ending.
***
My favorite note he ever wrote was simple: Please, remember me fondly.
***
I never quite knew what you loved more once we became separate people, me or the films. 'I'm on a journey through time and across continents' was how you described it to me when I asked you what you did so many nights without sleep and your eyes blacked out by forgotten hours before a screen.
'What did you watch?'
Summer then, it must have been because you called me. You missed me most in summer. So do I. My shirt stuck to my back and your brow was speckled with sweat. It smelt like rain and later it would and you would say to me, I hope it rains forever. I knew what you meant. Our hands held then for the first time in years and I made another promise when I heard that but instead you told me to follow and I did though the rain was heavy and warm and my jeans wouldn't fit right later and I had no other clothes. You gave me--do you remember?--an old shirt and shorts that I kept until a move or two later when they disappeared. They smelt like you even after two washes and I wore them when I slept. My boyfriend then didn't like them but they never did. Every single one hated you because they knew and could see your love for me.
'Oh man, watched so many things lately. The Passion of Joan of Arc, most importantly, probably. It's wild, shot all in close ups and it makes you dizzy and it makes you crazy but it's perfect and it makes your heart fall through your chest and your eyes roll back in your head till you're catatonic from her eyes, that fierceness, like a caged beast, like the hand of god.'
When you talked about what you loved you became someone new. No matter the depressions or the anxieties or the misfortunes, film turned you sprightly and that mad gleam entered your wide eyes and your lips curled at the edges of your mouth and it stayed open until you remembered the cigarette turned halfash in your hand.