Chapter 8
“Greg, it’s Bonnie again. Look, I don’t know where you are, you’re not answering the cell, so I just hope you’ll get this eventually. I really still miss you and I want you to come home.
“I know I’m probably just making it worse by calling you. That’s what people say isn’t it, that if you chase a man he’s sure to run? But I can’t help it. I don’t know why you think it’s all about the job and the money. It’s really not, it’s about you and me.
“I was thinking today about the time that we sat in our old apartment that whole weekend and read that book together. It was that cheesy thing about the immigrant woman, remember that? I don’t remember the name of it. Anyway, we sat around taking turns reading it out loud, and we never got dressed the whole weekend. Wasn’t it great? I miss that stuff, that stuff we used to do that was just stupid. Stupid stuff that we did together.
“I wish that we...”
The answering machine beeped and cut her off. She considered calling right back but decided it was pointless and hung up the phone as if she was putting her hand on his head, very softly. She didn’t even know if he checked the messages on his grandparents old machine.
In the back bedroom that had been Greg’s office she searched the shelves and found the book. I Come to America by Lisa Podber. She went back to the den and sat on the sofa with her legs folded and opened it up. She didn’t read in earnest, she just skimmed, refreshing her memory of the weekend she had recalled.
It came back in focus. She remembered how he had fried bacon and eggs for dinner because all he knew how to cook was breakfast food while she read out loud. After they ate, they had gone out on the balcony to smoke, still wearing pajamas. Afterward they had come back inside and curled up in the bed to get warm. Once there, he held the book while they both read in silence. He read slower; she had to wait for him to turn the pages. Once, to pass the time while waiting, she had touched his stomach with her nails. He put the book on the nightstand and kissed her, and an hour later they had been back to the book again.
The book itself had not been that great, but the weekend had been one of her favorite memories. She thought about how it was always that way. You remember that a movie was really great, but if you sit down and watch it again, it’s never as good as it was he first time. Who you were with, where you were, the mood you were in, they made it special. A romantic dinner could be drive-thru fast food eaten at a picnic table beside a divided highway. No candlelight required, no wine, no flowers. Bonnie figured that romance never really happens. It takes place in the secret spaces between all of events you can describe in your journal or jot in with shorthand in your calendar’s free places.
She knew early on that Greg felt the same way. That weekend, and other times like it, she was certain he understood, that his definition of love and romance were the same as hers. Not the same, but rather the male side of the same heart. As close as you could get in this world. She knew that he was the same Greg today and that he still felt the way had before. It had taken him five years to get where he was now, and there had been good times.
The blame wasn’t all Greg’s. She had watched him get organized and goal-oriented, watched him go from surviving the work week and sliding into the weekend to tapping his foot on Sunday nights in anticipation of getting back to work the next morning. She had enabled this sickness, advanced the infection by getting dinner on the table, keeping quiet, and by making life at home less stressful. That was Greg’s thing to say, that he had a stressful job and he didn’t need any stress at home. What he was really saying was that he had chosen to be in this stressful place, which used up all of his energy, and he was too exhausted to really participate at home. Bonnie saw now that Greg had been both the source and the object of the stress, and she had made it easy for him.
She asked herself if she would have let him wander off in the desert to die, or let him drown in a lake, or let him get lost in the mountains. If any of those things had happened, wouldn’t she have gone after him?
She went into the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee, still searching for the answer to the question of why she had enabled him. Out on the back patio, the sun still low enough to keep it in shade, she enjoyed her coffee and lit a cigarette. She saw the irony and smirked at herself. When he wanted to make his job his priority she had gone along. Yet she had fought him bitterly about smoking, and now she was doing it herself.
Spending the money he had earned hadn’t bothered her too much, and she cursed herself for her shopping trips and spending sprees. Looking at herself from the outside, talking to herself the way an angry friend would, it seemed that she had objected to him smoking because it endangered the wage earnings. To hell with the relationship, just keep those paychecks and bonuses coming in. That wasn’t true, and as she broke through the sarcastic conversation she was having with herself, she saw that they had both bought into the roles they had been taught were right. The hard working husband, the silent wife.
Greg wasn’t hardworking by nature any more than she was naturally silent. He had always been a people person with lots of friends, the kind of guy who never worked hard at anything except seeing the best in people. He was like scotch tape, sticking to everyone and blending in. As a Human Resource Director, he had taken his nature to the extreme, amplified it until it was an enlargement of a magnification of a facsimile. She was the hardworking and studious one, the one with focus. Who would have thought she’d end up being content with her title of Administrative Assistant, while Harold was striving for the next accolade and a higher salary bracket.
She liked her job, especially how it required her skills of organization and energy. It was fun to be the unseen brains behind management’s successes. Before they were married, Harold had been in sales, enjoying the perks and the occasional trip, having fun and getting by, and living for the weekends. She, on the other hand, had been steadily given more responsibility, and had set her sights on Office Manager, toying with the idea of someday gaining the VP of Operations position. Only twelve more credit hours and she would earn her professional M.B.A.
She dropped her cigarette butt into the empty flowerpot she had been using since Greg left. Getting up, she felt that the best way to be happy and reunited with Greg would be for each to go back to their original selves, before they had changed. She could be the driven one and Greg could be the happy-go-lucky one. But that didn’t seem to make sense either. Something had happened to them and she wasn’t sure if it could be undone. She didn’t want a career of the kind Greg had gotten himself into, even though she knew she could become anything she wanted in that world if she really wanted.
Bonnie went back to the living room and dropped into the precise spot she had been before, only this time, she sat down on something hard. She reached under butt and drew out CD, brand new in the shrink. She knew she hadn’t bought it, and knew it hadn’t been there when she went outside to smoke.
“Who did this?” she said out loud, stood up and looked around. “Is somebody there? Greg, are you in here somewhere?”
She ran to the kitchen and grabbed a knife from the butcher block, proceeded to go about the house calling out. No one answered. Once she had checked all of the good hiding places, all of the spots she had thought of while watching horror movies late at night, the locked the doors and went back to the den.
Instead of using it as a weapon, Bonnie cut open the CD she had found. The cover featured a black and white photo of a house that resembled the one from ‘Psycho.’ It was called ‘Imaginos’ and it was by Blue Öyster Cult.
This was just the kind of crazy thing Greg would’ve done when they were in college. If he wanted her to listen to the CD, she would. She smiled, sure that he had left it for her to listen to, thinking that there must be some message in the music or the liner notes.
She stuck the CD into the stereo and hit play, plopped back onto the sofa. She lik
ed it, relaxed and shut her eyes enjoying the music. There was a booklet inside the CD cover. She opened it to the first page:
IMAGINOS: A RANDOM ACCESS MYTH
She read on. A short introduction to the concept album told the story of a man born in the 1800s, a legendary character named Imaginos possessed of shadowy powers who is able to make his dreams become real. It told of his quest to find a mysterious black mirror, which when finally found and taken to Europe, somehow resulted in the First World War.
Bonnie wondered if Greg liked this CD because he saw something of himself in the Imaginos character the CD revolved around. He was a human resource manager, which she could see as “mastery of faces and names,” a characteristic Imaginos was said to have. She filed that away for the moment, really enjoying the mysterious message Greg had sent her. It wasn’t as good as having him with her, but it was a connection and it occupied her mind, appealed to her sense of mystery and adventure.
“Greg knows I love puzzles,” she said to herself.
When Track 8 began to play she sat straight up listened more intently. It was the best song on the CD so far, and when it was done, she played it again. The music was excellent, the lyrics haunting and surreal. It was hard to figure out what it was really about; but the first person story seemed to be from the perspective of the character Imaginos. He had been abandoned by the sea, died, and been brought back to life by the band, or at least that’s what she gleaned. In her mind it seemed that it was an allegory about the restorative power of music, but she wasn’t at all sure.
Bonnie finished the CD. When the last trick was done she backed up to Track 8 again, hit the repeat button so that it would play over and over again. It was a good CD. She liked it, but it wasn’t clear to her why Greg would want her to listen to it, or what message he was trying to send through it. Before this CD, the only song Bonnie had heard by the band was “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” and Greg hadn’t mentioned that he was a fan of the band.
“Sweetie, this is like when we used to sit around and try to do the New York Times crossword,” she said. “Vanna, can I buy a vowel?”
Settling in for the long haul, she got up and fetched a pad, a pen, and a glass of wine, and reclaimed her spot on the floor.
Greg = Imaginos
Discovery
Dreams are realized
Once she put the pen to the paper, it only took a few strokes to see Greg’s message clearly. He saw himself as Imaginos, an epic character who could realize anything he could conceive. He was turning himself around, finding himself. He wasn’t ready to come home yet, but he was beginning to see that imagining what he wanted to become was the first step to being the person he wanted to be. She poured another glass of wine, feeling warm and content, very confident that she had deciphered Greg’s message perfectly. It was only a matter of time before he would be ready to come home.
Smoking inside seemed like a recipe for a stinky house, so she went out onto the patio into the late afternoon heat. She lit up and dragged deeply, enjoying the polite buzz of her wine and the rush of the cigarette. The heat didn’t bother her in the slightest. The sun’s rays were warm and good, coming down on her in slices divvied up by the privacy fence. Bonnie looked in the direction of the sun and smiled to herself.
“I knew I’d figure it out,” she said.
From the other side of the privacy fence, to the left of the gate, she heard the bwow-wow sound of a plastic trashcan lid hitting the ground, and wondered if a dog or a cat was trying to get into the trash. Picking up bits of soggy paper towel, chicken bones, coffee grounds and filters, and tatters of white plastic bag would be a drag. Bonnie went to the gate and peered out through the half-inch gap between the boards.
A man in a blue and yellow checked jacket had pulled a red, white, and blue polka-dotted bag containing one slice of bread and two heels from the trash and was lazily picking up the lid and replacing it with care. She watched quietly.
The man, barely two feet away, looked up at her with light blue eyes set in a face as tanned as oak. He did not smile, but looked at her without fear or malice or surprise or any other emotion she would have expected. It was the kind of look that a police sketch artist could not have captured if given a lifetime. Only the Dutch masters could have given it a reasonable shot.
Bonnie’s cigarette smoldered between her fingers as the man walked away down the sidewalk bread in hand.