SolsticeA Story by Robert Tusitala O'Neill Inspired by this being 12/21/2013 and the fact I have not yet written a short story here. This was written today "live," if you will!
Dan walked out of the small country train station into the snow. It was soft and thick and marshmallowy, spread like a fluffy icing all across the landscape of this little Adirondack village. Now the train seemed to become a distant memory of another time, having chugged away with all of its loud billowing interjection upon this hushed world. The only thing around him not drained of all color was the metallic silver of the train tracks, leading away into the black bareness of the trees.
The stillness and quiet was present with such intensity as to create a feeling of immediacy and expectation in the sharp, cold air, impossible to ignore. The sometime bustling little town was now struck dumb by the spell of the cold. Dan felt suddenly aware of his breath, as if his easy respiration were the unrestrained chuffing of some wild beast. He looked around himself furtively, checking for on-lookers, but the perfectly uncompacted snow gave no imprint as evidence of any human or animal locomotive effort within at least the last many hours. The silence seemed to rumble in his head from a distance, as if he could hear the pulse of the Earth being repeated in fractional echos by the millions of angles of each perfect snowflake, reverberating in his anticipating ears. He gazed around at the scene in tableau for a full five minutes. It seemed wrong to come crashing into this Norman Rockwell painting without a suitable 1950s sweater vest. However, he knew he had come for a worthy purpose! The sincerity of his effort made him almost embarrassed at himself about the good of what he was doing. -Back home for the first time in years- and he couldn't keep the family waiting, even if that meant staggering out into the snow without taking the time to truly absorb the entirety of its immaculate stillness. He broke free of his rapture and crunched through the crust of snow on the sidewalk. Kicking the snowfluff ahead of him like a kid as he walked, he made his way down Railroad Avenue toward his little side street, lined with elm trees. He couldn't help feeling naughty like some adult was looking over his shoulder, waiting to make eye contact with him before shouting, "Hey, stop having all that fun!!" He felt like Gene Kelly in his famous scene from "Singing in the Rain," expecting a nosy policeman to pop out at some corner and waggle his finger disapprovingly. Then a harder feeling took hold of him. He sighed mightily at what the family would ask him. What would he answer when they asked him why it had been so long? He thought of Vicky, the beautiful self-centered brat he had run away with all those years ago. There was no pride in having won her narcissistic little heart. She may have been the prom queen, but out of a class of less than a hundred people, there weren't many obvious choices. She was undoubtedly the most attractive woman he had ever been with, and in his youthful, lusty froth of obsession, it seemed a major achievement. He had been the dog that caught the car, and then got hooked on to the bumper, with only a lung full of exhaust to show for it. He imagined his friends back home had been jealous for a month or so, then promptly moved on...realizing their friend and their mutual object of desire had disappeared from their lives forever -or at least the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, Dan had found himself in New York City with a woman who was rapidly realizing she had been a big fish in a little pond and was now a little fish in a wide and mercurial ocean. She sought solace in demanding ever more of him, as a way to try to make sense of her displacement from queen to pauper. It became her sole aim to use him to gain her own self-worth back in the eyes of other men. The tension quickly became so thick he could only cut through it with a diamond! He bought the ring, and told himself this had been what he wanted, but something made him hold back from instantly going through with it. One of her few, equally shallow friends -Susan- had gotten wind of his purchasing a ring of some magnitude and had gossiped about it until it got back to Vicky. She was, therefore, very impatient about the manner and timing of its coming to her. While she hadn't stated it directly, she clearly had some very extravagant ideas about how the proposal might go, and she was none too subtle about dropping hints regarding when and where and how it should happen. A rebellion had been brewing in Dan's heart for quite some time, but this was the push he had needed to tip the scales against her. He began to delight in withholding satisfaction from her, and her ire was so inflamed that it was almost immediately clear to him all he had carefully ignored when he fell in love with her in the first place. One day he found himself a new place to rent, and just before the first of the month he moved out the small number of possessions that were really his, without telling her. She was out with her gossiping friend Susan on his dime, enjoying an upscale bar he had suggested. He didn't even leave her a forwarding address. He had carefully planned this night to coincide with his moving offices at work as well, to a very different location downtown. He let his old co-workers know not to forward her calls. It wasn't something to be proud of. He knew it was a sign of his cowardice that he couldn't stand up to her, but he also didn't want to know what she could bring out in him if he actually did find a voice for all the things he really thought of her, after coming to know her as well as he did. It seemed the least cruel way to let her discover her own faults. Besides that, he wasn't doing as badly at finding his place in this big city as she had. In single-mindedly working towards providing for his woman's personal psychological fixation on continuous social advancement, he had unintentionally advanced himself out of his miserable little satellite office and into the corner office downtown for the head of his department at work. Now that she was no longer unbalancing him with feelings of guilt and worthlessness, he could actually climb the ladder much more effectively by honing the skills he had learned -from her- to treat as a reflex. With success came different sorts of women. Surprisingly not all were as gold-digging as the one he had left. Yet, in many ways Vicky had been a great instructor to him in her true art. He had learned to quickly sluice the gange into neat tailing piles, while deftly assessing the value of the rarer precious gems and the real nuggets as he came across them. For a time he concentrated too heavily on women of resources and who brought him personal renown when they would stride sensuously into the office with his lunch -at his urging, of course. After awhile though, he realized that he didn't get as much satisfaction from his coworkers jealousy as he did from his current fling's loyalty and dedication. These were things he hadn't felt before from a partner and the more he had of them, the more he learned he needed them above all other things. So then he came to know Jean. He had met her at a friend's dinner party. A young French woman who was staying on a work visa, she was quiet and unassuming unless you got onto a subject she was passionate about, then she would get excited and assail you in her perfect (and carefully pronounced) English with relevant facts and details of all kinds -all of which were really interesting. She had a strange sense of humor and would often poke fun at him without him knowing until quite a bit later. He could be a little insulted by it, since he felt more vulnerable having come from a small town and clearly not being quite on her level of intelligence. He respected her for it though, and she clearly did not abuse her advantage. In fact, he could tell she was sincere in wanting him to share in the appreciation she had for the world. He felt at last he could be confident he had found a lady of quality! For the first time since he left, he wanted to go home and show her off to his family. He wanted the friends and family he had left back home to see that he had finally done alright for himself. At last he wouldn't have to be ashamed at leaving with the town prima donna. He began to introduce the subject of her meeting his family over a dinner out at her favorite restaurant in the city, but when he mentioned it she suddenly blanched and looked mournfully away from him. "What is it?!" he begged of her. She was reticent to answer. Finally she turned to him and in her carefully practiced English she said, "I am already married. Your friends were kind enough to help me escape here because my husband is violent and an adulterer. I want nothing more than to stay in this country and marry you, but if I do the truth is bound to surface, and our marriage would be invalidated. I have spent the last two weeks thinking of what I would answer if it came to this. I know you are not asking me to marry you, but you haven't seen your family in many years. If I meet your family, then wouldn't it embarrass you to have to tell them I was just a passing fancy?" Dan was both confused and hopeful in hearing her words, but he couldn't deny the truth of them. While it seemed that marriage should be a way for her to escape permanently, it also was true that naively going through with it would mean her situation would be investigated and she would likely be deported when it was discovered she was already married. France was not one of those countries where you could hope the records might be easily bribed out of the hands of officials, or where they might not be able to determine this young lady's proper status as a married woman. Still, it was obvious to him she was in need of rescue. Couldn't she get a divorce? He asked her... "No, divorce for me is out of the question because I have a well-known family with ties all over Europe. We are Catholics and it would be scandalous to divorce. In the U.S. you have more understanding in these cases than we do in France. Even if I could prove he was unfaithful, it might be difficult to be granted my freedom. His family are proud of their mistresses. I believed I was in love when I met him, and he treated me as his only one, but even then I suspect there were others. My family encouraged me to pursue him, however, because he was very well-established and would always do very large demonstrations of his love for me. Later I realized this was more a show for my family than of legitimate passion for having me in his life. When I was finally married and moved in with him, the kindness quickly faded and while he bought me fine things I began to feel I was like a fancy car to him. I told him that, and then he beat me. I tried to explain I wasn't ungrateful, but I wanted his love...not to be a prize horse in his stable. This only made him more angry. At last he revealed to me that he had been seeing at least three other women. I found out my family knew of at least one of them, and I couldn't stand it anymore. I had to leave. I wrote your friends to have them apply to get me a work permit, and they were kind enough to do it. Now I don't know what I want to do...I'm sorry! -I just wanted to have some happiness with you." She finished and was looking at him with gleaming eyes over the dimly lit restaurant table. Dan was moved by her story and yet was angry at himself for not being clever enough to find a solution. It seemed like if he had just been born a bit smarter he would already know of a way to work this out perfectly. It wasn't coming to him though. He wanted to just tell her to try for a divorce anyway, but she was clearly more aware of the situation than he was and she had told him in no uncertain terms it wouldn't work. He didn't know what to do. Instead he just stared blankly at her, his mouth half-cocked -not quite ready to go off at any target. "I will see you later, I suppose. I guess I better go home now. I can take a cab..." Jean said at last. Like an idiot, "But..." was all Dan managed to blurt out as she mercifully walked away. He was so heartbroken at that exact moment, he didn't know how to account for what had hit him. He had realized both how much she meant to him, and how impossible it was to have her, all at the same time. He was weighed, balanced, and found wanting! Dan knew he wasn't capable of solving a problem of this magnitude...He was still just a kid, not even quite 25, and though she was the same age as he was, it was clear she was leagues ahead of him in worldliness. Then Dan started to think of who he knew that WOULD be able to solve this. He was still not connected enough within the ranks of New York City life, to know any lawyers or other respectable people he could afford to go to, even if he pleaded for help through friends. He did, however, know of a family friend back home who could help. The man was an overweight, irascible and difficult to get along with caricature of a small town lawyer. He had been a school chum's father, and Dan always felt sorry for his friend for having a strict father who could inevitably weasel out of his son whatever mild foibles he had hoped to hide from the wider world. There was an unhealthy competition between the man and his son, where he always needed to prove who had the bigger intellect -despite that the contest was always uneven from the start. Dan began to make plans for how he would get in touch with the grumpy old lawyer. As difficult as it was, he didn't want to see his own family until this impediment to his happiness had been removed. It was a point of pride that he be able to present his bride to be untainted by legal entanglements. Showing up after all these years with a girl who was at best soon to be sent back to Europe at the end of her work visa was not what he had in mind for his grand return to his hometown! Besides, Jean was the first woman he had met who made him really think of how it would be to have a partner at the family Christmas dinner. Someone he could take around town and point out where all the epic struggles of his youth had taken place! (MORE COMING...) © 2016 Robert Tusitala O'NeillFeatured Review
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Added on December 21, 2013Last Updated on July 24, 2016 Author
Robert Tusitala O'NeillAlameda, CAAboutI'm foolishly romantic. I like realism and surrealism in all different forms of art. I feel that when you can use reality to show your truth, then you have achieved the most powerful form of art pos.. more..Writing
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