The Distance

The Distance

Stan’s out of town again and his wife, Melinda, is sitting in a fancy French restaurant, but she doesn’t catch what the name is. Only the address – 7290 Bradbury Boulevard, about ten miles out of Phoenix. Ten miles, she’s thinking, that’s far enough right? Far enough from home that strangers have to ask if it’s Mrs. Helsing or Ms.

The mustached waiter’s getting antsy, he looks like he’s having a minor facial seizure, but she’s too anxious herself to care. When he starts twitching like a geriatric coronary patient she throws him a bone.

“Bloody Mary, chief,” she says, and slaps the patent black menu on the glass table. He looks more relieved than a man who finds the restrooms after eight glasses of sherry, and hurries off.

This is good, she thinks. He told me it would be no big deal. I’d come, incognito, and we would talk first, before...

She knows she’s completely calm. Completely. She smoothes the invisible wrinkles in her head scarf.

How far’s Luxembourg from Phoenix? She wonders. Not far enough.

Some sequined tart with a pseudo French accent is singing a slow jazz song, sensuous and round. The smoke from fifty casually held cigarettes swirls around her; the plastic coconuts suddenly look even more ersatz than before. Almost like Vegas on our honeymoon.

She hopes Stan’s cheating on her right now with a little French prostitute like the one onstage. He probably is. That bastard. He’s probably “working late” in the Luxembourg red light district.

Always working late…yes, that’s her Stan. The good provider, she thinks with a snarl. She’s denying it as hard as she can, but she knows – there was never a time that Stan didn’t have enough money to let them live comfortably.

The Bloody Mary finally comes. She rolls her eyes, but the waiter doesn’t see it from behind the dark glasses.

Those were the days, she thinks. Melinda would be home a couple hours earlier than Stan from her job at the clinic, but when the sky was quiet and clouded blue, and the oak tree branches were like coal-black veins, Stan would walk through the doorframe after working four hours overtime. Such the stoically idealized man from the 1950s. Utter romance. So young back then.

The apartment was small, but they didn’t know it back then, because there was no furniture. Melinda, dark-eyed, would sit cross-legged on the floor across from Stan, and together they would eat leftovers out of quaint little cartons. She remembers how Stan would suddenly shed his stoic mantle, and talk and talk and talk… And she would sit at so close a distance, two feet away, and listen.

She longs for that feeling again. Melinda is no hedonist, and never will be, but the guilty wanton desire is there – like a low, humming, dead space between the leaves of the trees – to feel that close to a fellow human being again.

Frustration.

Is that why I’m sitting here, all dressed up in a goddamn disguise? Because my husband is a good man who works overtime to pay the bills…?

She blames herself.

And then she rationalizes. He should have been there for her when she got her promotion at work. He should have held her hand as her baby came out broken pieces. He should have been a thousand places that were left empty.

How close can two human beings touch each other, anyway? She wonders. Melinda waxes philosophical for a moment. She feels the divide…a membrane between her individual self and every other person on the planet. A separation of self. Sometimes she loses herself, too, to that distance. How deeply can one being claim to know another? Maybe people aren’t supposed to be able to comprehend the complexity of another person at their deepest. Maybe the closest a human can come to understanding someone else is sex. She doesn’t know anymore.

She crosses her legs in the black pencil skirt. She estimates that there’s a one in one million chance Stan would walk through that door right now. Melinda shrugs it off, and checks her watch. Nine-fourteen. Nigel is going to be late in 30 seconds.

Thirty…

Stan telling her that real estate investment was a stupid idea…

Twenty six….

Stan slamming the door after losing his job….

Seven…

Melinda, thinking just for a second, that pills are the least painful way…

Five…

Stan searching for her hand in a dark movie theater back when they were kids, shyly taking it in his…

Two…

Melinda, thinking, as he touched her hair so tenderly in that theater…Stan’s a good man…

“Excuse me, Mrs. Helsing, would you care for another drink?” asks the waiter.

She panics. Nigel – he could be here at any moment!

“No, thank you, I have to go now – please!” I can’t let him see me if I’m changing my mind.

She dashes out to the curb, trench coat in arm, but she sees a payphone across the street.

The skies are quiet and dark as she darts across the street almost stealthily. The wind carries the whispers of lies and regrets, but she doesn’t feel the guilt. Guilt is now vestigial.

She dials the number he left her on the fridge door that she didn’t know she memorized.

She can feel him thinking of her – the phone rings once – and she can feel him, his soul, for the very first time…or perhaps, the second. A third mechanical ring.

“Hello, Stan? – Please come home.”