[For L.P. - better things are coming.]
If you don’t believe in ghosts, you’ve never been broken up with in front of your own Christmas tree.
I see him every holiday around December 1, the moment I plug in the lights on my Charlie Brown-style artificial fir, though of course he’s not there. He’s probably busy with the leggy blonde I heard he starting seeing after me, the one who chain-smokes and is an assistant instructor at a dance school or a gymnast. I forget which.
And yet he’s sitting on my couch, crossing one leg over the other so that his ankle is resting on his knee. He’s wearing Pumas.
He’s drunk.
“And it’s not you at all,” he tells me. “I don’t want you to think it’s you because it totally isn’t.” He’s talking out of the corner of his mouth the way he always did. It was worse when he drank, stroke-like almost, the way his right side went paralyzed after a few Coronas with lime. I watch the tips of his front teeth as his lips formed the words. The left one had sharply defined ridges that I hadn’t noticed before I was focusing on them to get my mind off the fact that he was telling me he no longer wanted to go to make lasagna with me on a Thursday night, or see my hair tousled in the morning when I got up to pee.
He sighs. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I say nothing. The bulbs on the Christmas tree, the only light source in the room, are dotting their reflection like measles on the flat blackness of the TV screen. I am sitting on the stiff white couch in my apartment in a black nightie, one that shows too much cleavage, one that I selected before he came over and now want to rip off in humiliation and strangle him with so that there is no evidence that this moment ever happened. I take a throw pillow and clutch it in front of my chest. If you break up with me after I track you down a special-edition Misfits mug for Christmas, you don’t get to look at my breasts, the ones I exfoliated with coconut-scented sugar scrub, while you do it.
He continues. “It’s like, you’re great, right? You’re like, funny and like, clearly attractive and like, highly intelligent…”
You sound like an eleventh-grade girl, I think. I am being dumped by a shitfaced eleventh-grade girl.
He smears his hand on his forehead, trying to wipe the drunk away, a tactic I’ve used myself and can attest to firsthand of its ineffectiveness. He looks back up at me. “I know what you’re thinking. Fuck, this guy is stupid and drunk.”
“Couple that with ‘I’d like to remove your nuts with a rusty cheese grater and put them in a mason jar in my garage, you Christmas-ruining bastard’ and you’re halfway there.”
“Huh?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“But I’ve thought about it and yeah, I’m not picking the right time to do this, but the holiday is a great time to meet somebody, you know? I thought, ‘Hey, she could meet a really great dude at a Christmas party, and I could be standing in the way.’”
I pictured meeting a handsome doctor at a holiday soiree and saying miserably, “I’m sorry, I can’t give you my number. I have this guy I’ve been seeing who I have half-hearted sex with who barely speaks to me anymore but I really feel like he may be The One.”
I suppose I knew it was coming. We had barely spoken for weeks. In the beginning, we talked for hours at a time about news stories, gossiped about mutual acquaintances. He introduced me to the movie Swingers. I made him baklava. We drank two bottles of Merlot on his couch and listened to college rock LPs. Then, drunk and warm, we went to bed.
Then the end started, the way it usually does, in a slow evaporation. The calls became less frequent, the sex suddenly nonexistent. He claimed a demanding new work schedule, but I knew it was a lie. And then we were here.
I held out a few shards of hope when had he texted me that night: Just came from Dave’s party. Can I come over? Please say yes. Presuming that no one would come over at nearly midnight three days before Christmas to tell me they no longer desired even a hint of my company, I told him, absolutely, come over, and did he want Christmas cookies? I cleaned the kitchen counter with a Lysol wipe while I waited for him to come over, positioned the presents under the tree so that the most attractive part of the wrapping was facing forward. He was coming over, things were getting better, a tiny Christmas miracle all my own.
He knocked on my door. He was wearing a brown sweater. I let him in. He sat on the couch. He said, “I’ve had a lot to drink.”
It probably should have been my first hint that things were not going to end well.
So here he was now, trying to salvage my feelings somehow while I stare at him with widened eyes and measured breathing. He puts his head in his hands, then looks back up at me and says, “It’s like, I don’t even know where I am these days. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. I’m on like, Wizard Time.”
Oh, Christ Jesus, he just said he’s on Wizard Time. He’s blaming our break up on the time-space continuum.
Too drunk to sense my horror, he moves closer to me, pats my bare leg that I am trying to cover with what little material my nightie will allow, because we’re pals now. His jeans graze my bare leg and I tremble in resentment.
Get your fucking Levi’s off of me.
He smiles at me. “You really are great,” he says. He bends down towards my lap and I jump. He kisses my knee.
I’m so shocked I don’t say anything, just sort of look at him with my mouth partially open, my jaw poised for argument, but nothing comes out.
“I just kissed your knee,” he smiles.
“Yeah,” I acknowledge.
“Oh, my God, I just kissed your knee,” he moans, and throws his head back on my couch, which, in its starched rigidity, bounces him slightly.
He closes his eyes. I’m wondering if maybe he’s about to pass out, in which case, I could easily bludgeon him with the wok I have sitting on the stove strictly for aesthetic value, but it’s late and I’m tired and I’m not sure that I have enough baking soda to get the blood out of the couch, but before I can check the pantry he shakes his head and comes to.
“It’s late,” he says.
“It is,” I answer.
“I should go,” he says.
“Yeah,” I answer.
He gets up and stumbles to the door.
“Do you need a ride home?” I ask, then immediately regret it. If he takes me up on it, it will be five more miserable minutes I have to spend with someone who has dumped me in front of the emblematic light of Christ.
“I can walk,” he says. He looks at me thoughtfully in that horrible, wrenching way he has, and says with what appears to be the beginnings of sobriety or a last-minute mustering of somberness, “Goodnight, Laura.”
I hate the sound of my name in his mouth. I smile at him weakly and shut the door with a slow, heavy thud. I hear him leave out of the front door of the apartment building, can even make out his footsteps on the cold sidewalk. The room is quiet.
“Fucking Christmas,” I say, and switch off the lights of the tree.
Years later I stand in front of the same tree, but mercifully, a different couch. Change, always change. Nothing, thankfully, is permanent.
The apparition still appears, but I immediately recall its flesh and blood counterpart, the one I find walking down our mutual block every now and again. He’ll stop to ask me about a new bar or to discuss the mutual acquaintances that we’ve let slip away, and sometimes when he talks I’ll watch the ridges of his teeth. I wonder if he remembers planting one on my knee. Whether it’s time or meeting new people who come in and make a mess of things, I find that the ache for him is gone. He’s skin and ridges of teeth and a voice that I knew better years back when it meant something, when it meant everything.
It’s easy for us to talk, but I’m in a hurry to meet someone for coffee. We say our polite goodbyes.
“You look good,” he tells me.
“So do you,” I tell him. This is a lie. His hair looks terrible.
I’ve opened a box of ornaments donated to me by my mother, old family decorations that have been downsized in her effort to de-clutter the garage. They are the only witnesses to the haunting. I put my brother’s homemade sponge-mouse ornament on one of the branches of the little tree, and it smiles largely at me. “You’re doing better and better,” it winks.
“Couldn’t have been worse than before,” says the shark, a present from one of my schoolteacher father’s old students, while it dangles heavily on the bottom of the tree.
“I bet this year will be the best yet,” the sequined peacock promises, and sits near the crown of orchids I’ve used for the tree topper. Bird ornaments should go near the top of the tree, my mother always said.
I gather up the forest green cord from the floor and walk it towards the outlet on the wall, and when I plug it in, the 50 bits of 2.5 Watt light glows through orchids and mice and peacocks and onto the window panes and my own skin, and everything shines.
