"I came to you
when no one could hear me
I'm sick and weary
of being alone
empty streets and hungry faces
the world's no place
when you're on your own
a heart needs a home..."
Richard Thompson, "A Heart Needs A Home"
On my out to town for a night out, singing along to an old Steve Earle CD blasting its way through the car stereo, feeling good and trying not to pick up another speeding ticket as I drove through the dusk.
Feeling good, and then I spotted a hotel off to my left, and as my eyes laid themselves upon the sight of it I felt my heart sank for a moment. Damn. It's April 17th, I thought. An anniversary. I thought of April 17th, 1995, and of April 17th, 1993.
April 17th, 1995...
I'd married Lauren the previous July 23rd in England. We'd had a week's honeymoon in the Lake District and then I came home to file the paperwork for her green card with the INS. We thought it might be two or three months before they approved it all and let her into this country for good, and I had just started a new job in the network operations center of a large bank.
We miscalculated, and badly. It took almost nine months before she finally got her visa. We didn't see each other at all during that time. We waited in limbo, hoping to hear something. They said she couldn't come for a visit and I didn't have much vacation time, having just started that job. And I needed that job; the INS wanted some proof that I could support her once she arrived her. So we waited impatiently, living on hope and letters and very expensive weekly phone calls.
Finally, on Monday, April 17th, with her brand-new green card in her wallet, she arrived her to begin our life together.
I met her at JFK just past noon that day. My mother decided to treat us to a limousine ride to make the trip a little more enjoyable. I worked nights at the time, managing the third shift in the ATM department, and I worked that Sunday night. I drove home, showered, nearly trembling with anticipation, and then my father drove me over to meet up with the limo.
It was mammoth; room enough for a couple of wedding parties, two bars, two television sets, leather seating. I sat in the back with a cup of coffee and the New York tabloids for company. I tried to read the sports sections but felt too wired to concentrate on any story for more than a couple of sentences at a time. I mostly stared out the window with a smile glazed on my face, looking out at a day that had dawned clear and bright and warm, not a cloud in the sky, perfectly appropriate weather for a joyous reunion.
We finally got to the airport and the driver dropped me off at the British Airways terminal and told me he would circle for as long as it took for her to get through customs. I waited in the arrivals area, checked on a monitor for the status of her flight. After a bit, I don't remember how long, but not very, I saw it had changed to "arrived." A few moments later, passengers started coming through. I anxiously scanned the crowd for Lauren, but saw no sign of her. The arrivals wandered off, the crowd thinned, and still no Lauren. Finally, no one left in that part of the terminal but myself. Five minutes passed, then ten, then fifteen. I looked outside and saw the limo pass by. Twenty minutes, and still no Lauren, and no one else.
Twenty five minutes passed. No sign of her. Thirty minutes. And then the doors swung open and there she was, my wife of almost nine months, my wife I had not seen in what seemed like forever. I ran to her, and we embraced. The feeling that came over me in the moment of that embrace is a feeling that I believe every even moderately decent human being should experience once in their life.
After a few minutes, when we could finally manage to speak to each other, she told me they had sent her into a small room to wait. She sat there for that half hour alone, wondering what she was waiting for. An INS person finally came in and took an envelope from her, opened it, matched the contents against the contents of an envelope of his own, looked at her, nodded, and said simply, "go ahead."
We walked outside and she moved to cross the road toward the parking area; she didn't know about the limo, she'd thought I'd driven down.
"Wait here," I said.
"Aw, c'mon dear, I wanna get outta here," she said.
"Just wait."
"Why?"
"You'll see."
A couple of minutes later, the limo pulled up, and the driver got out and took her luggage. She laughed. The driver opened the door for us and we climbed in and headed back upstate. Three hours later, he dropped us off at the hotel I drove by last night.
We were headed to Maine for another honeymoon week the next day.
The afternoon faded into evening and we laid in a massive bed. The feel of her skin pressed against mine a feeling I will never forget, the sight of the reddish-pink waning light of that day bleeding through an opening in that room's slightly open curtains permanently burned into my memory.
Driving by that hotel last night, I felt the sadness over the far too soon loss of her two and a half years ago surge through me, but then the sadness melted into a wistful gratitude, that I had once lived to see such a glorious day.
&&&&
Saturday, April 17th, 1993...
My dad's fiftieth birthday the following day.
The previous fall, Lauren and I had slowly became friends, and then lovers. At the tail end of that fall, in late December, she returned home to England, but we had promised each other on the day she left that we would see each other again. That day had finally arrived that Wednesday, when she landed in New York late that afternoon.
My mother had decided to throw a dinner party that Saturday night in honor of my father's milestone birthday. We drove up from my place to my parents' late that afternoon, my eyes burning with fatigue all the way; Lauren and I had slept a total of maybe six hours over the previous three nights.
She was nervous about meeting my family. I can still remember what she wore that day: black pants and a sort of off-white cable-knit sweater. We sat in my parents' living room, on their couch, and she told me she was so nervous she was sweating. I laughed and said, c'mon, they know how happy you make me, they'll love you. I reached behind her and ran my hand underneath her sweater, down her neck and shoulders. She was, in fact sweating.
I had warned her not to take offense at my father's lack of words, but that night, he regaled us with stories of his youth. As we drove back to my place a few hours later, she said, "so, I thought you said your dad never talks and just reads or sleeps on his recliner?"
"I don't know what got into him tonight," I laughed. "Maybe it was seeing me with you, maybe it was the presence of a couple of his old friends. I don't know."
"Do you think they like me?" she asked.
I took her hand, and looked over toward her.
"They loved you. Trust me."
They did.
&&&&
Saturday, April 17th, 2010...
A mile or two past the hotel I started singing along to the Steve Earle again.
The fog of memory lifted and I re-entered the present.
I arrived at my destination, got out of the car, rang a doorbell.
A minute or so later, a woman appeared out of a doorway, and we said our hellos.
We stood there, somewhat awkwardly, I suppose. The scent of her perfume gently rose up to me. I had a sudden urge to simply throw my arms around her, but I had not the slightest idea if she would welcome such a gesture, so I stood my ground, I stood there in silence while she talked about the nearby lilac and magnolia (I think it's a magnolia) tree.
&&&&
A little while later we walked up to the door of bar. A large sign in red lettering read, "proper attire required at all times, no exceptions." We looked alright: she's lovely, and if I don't belong on the cover of any magazines, I'm not half-bad myself. You could do worse in a forty-three year old man than me, I guess.
We went inside and sat down at the bar. The TV had a baseball game on, scoreless in the fourteenth inning, not something you see every day.
We ordered drinks and started talking.
Somehow we got onto the subject of flying and I told her about the first time I ever flew, the first time I went to see Lauren, and of how a three hour wait and my deep fear of flying combined to lead me to get very drunk before I got on the plane that day.
She replied with a story about flying back here from Seattle with her then-boyfriend a fair number of years ago. Halfway across the continent, out of nowhere, the oxygen masks dropped down, and then a pilot announced that the flight had hit some sort of very serious trouble.
She said she thought it was all over at that point. And she said she felt oddly at peace in that moment; resigned to her fate, and thinking that perhaps she sat seconds from some sort of paradise. She thought of her family, of her parents and sister and brother, she felt sorrow for the heartbreak her demise would bring them, but she said she also felt certain that they would make it, eventually, that they would someday be alright. She said she remembered a baby screaming, and that the baby had no oxygen mask over its face.
We talked about how maybe a plane crash wasn't such a bad way to go. Maybe not as good as dying in your sleep at eighty-something after a long, happy life, but then, a plane crash was quick and painless, we suspected: you probably wouldn't feel a thing.
&&&&
A few hours later, after seeing a movie that left us disappointed, I drove her home. We talked for a moment and then hugged good-bye. She got out of the car and I looked straight ahead and sighed. I heard a soft tap at the passenger side window and looked over. She stood there looking in with a hand up, gently waving. I raised a hand and waved back. I watched her walk in front of the car and then up toward her door. She turned and waved again, and I waved back.
I sat there for a moment and then I drove off through the empty streets and on into the night, shocked at how the glory of long-gone Aprils somehow now manage to dance peacefully alongside the hint of Aprils that may come, or may not.