Losses

by

Robert Israel

The doctor shone his flashlight into my eyes, and I felt the beam penetrate to the back of my skull.  He took notes – swirling loops instead of letters, scribbled on a notepad emblazoned with the logo of an anti-depressant medication – and lowered his eyeglasses onto the bridge of his nose.

“There’s nothing physically wrong with you,” he said, “other than that nasty gash on your arm.  Don’t you realize a loss like the one you’ve just gone through takes time to get over?”

My mother died a few days before.  The period of mourning, like the woman herself, played out as if on the set of a grand opera.  During the wake my sister and aunt accused me of abandoning her on her sickbed.  I told the doctor I flew into a rage, and how it still left me shaken.

“Take a couple weeks off,” the doctor said. “I’ll fill out the forms and give them to H.R. Don’t worry, you’ll get your full pay.”

I left for Los Angeles that night and checked into a hotel in Hermosa Beach.  From my window the Pacific was blue-green at sunrise and partially shrouded in fog by mid-morning.  Tourists were sitting on tatami mats on the beach with plastic pitchers and carry-alls of beer, sandwiches and chips.  I stopped for a muffin and coffee.  In the shop next door a poster gave the daily report of a local man who had set off from nearby Marina del Rey equipped with pontoons and a radio, foul weather gear and supplies harnessed to him in a raft so he could stride across the Pacific, bound for distant atolls.  A newspaper article said he had been out of work for a long time, and had made a deal with sponsors that his wife and child would be taken care of should some unforeseen catastrophe – a typhoon, let’s say, or a tsunami -- befall him.  Experts quoted in the article swore he’d never make it.  But he left from Marina del Rey anyway, like one of those supplicants who shave their heads and trudge up Himalayan footpaths where, in acts of ultimate contrition, they offer themselves up to an unforgiving deity.

I wandered down the boardwalk to the fishing pier.  A surfer with one leg, long beard, all dripping inside a shabby wetsuit, adeptly balanced atop his board and rode a wave into shore.  He was the legendary One-Legged Surfer of Hermosa Beach who had lost his leg years before by crashing into the pier’s pilings.  I sat down on a bench.  Fog rolled in persistently, determinately, and soon I couldn’t see the One-Legged Surfer of Hermosa Beach, or anyone else for that matter.  There were no fishermen on the pier.  The tourists were all a-gaggle down at the coffee shop.  I was half-hoping someone hawking tee shirts would mistake me for a tourist so I could kick his ass.  I was stewing.  How could one guy, minus a leg, hobble back on his surfboard, and another guy, with two legs, set off hell-bound for an almost-certain watery grave, while I sat on a wet bench, burnt to a crisp, weary, spoiling for a fight?

“You’re as jagged as this hunk of glass,” the doctor told me.  In a pair of tweezers he held a bloody shard he had just removed from my arm, a souvenir of a vase I broke at the funeral.  “And in case you didn’t know this already, your nerves are shot.”  He scribbled a prescription for lorazapan, and handed me sample packages of bacitracin.  “Give me a ring when you return and let me know how you’re doing.”

I stood facing the Pacific, the prescription bottle in my hand.  The scar had turned chalky-dark, the color of baking cocoa.  Leaning against the railing, I flung the bottle into the surf.

Two French words came to mind: rien, nothing, and personne, no one.  When I reached out, there was rien and personne.  I closed my eyes and saw myself, ever-receding, waving goodbye.  There was nothing, rien, I could claim for my own.  A quick glance over my shoulder: personne.  No one was there to help me find my way forward.

* * *

“She was so utterly fragile near the end,” my sister was sighing, holding her teacup in the family room of the funeral home.  “I spoke with the nurses every day.  They gave her a little extra attention, you know, you have to barter with them for that, so I brought them little gifts, boxes of chocolates, that sort of thing.”

“That was so very thoughtful of you,” my aunt Rose said.  “Too bad you had to shoulder the burden alone.”

“Oh, Rosie, dear,” Gail said, “the men in my life cannot be counted on for much,” and, she cast me a look.

“Do you want to go?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“I said, and you heard me, do you want to go at it, right here, right now,” my voice was loud.  “I’ll take you on, Gail, just you go ahead and try me.”

“You are out of your mind, Peter.”

“Mother is laying spread out in a goddamned casket in the next room, and you stand there, and have the nerve to put me down?  You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“There’s only one person here who should be ashamed raising his voice like that on such an occasion,” Rose said, and she huffed away.

“Don’t ever presume you know me,” I said.  “Push me further, and you’ll find out.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“If it sounds like a threat, Gail, well, it is, yes.  I will strike back.  I will visit upon your wretched miserable petty and ugly life everything I’ve stored up inside me since we were kids, and I have a long memory, and I don’t care who hears it.  Now back off, and get the hell out of my face,” and, as I lunged for my sister, my arm collided with a glass vase of flowers, shattering it on the table beside me.

* * *

The scene between Gail, Rose, and myself might have been avoided had Mike, a friend since high school, been at the wake.  If nothing else his physical presence might have deflected the blows.  In truth, Mike was in worse shape than I was, perpetually down on his luck.  He had married a high school sweetheart, but that ended after less than a year.  His second marriage lasted only a scant few years longer.  There were strains I didn’t notice whenever I was with them, so I was surprised one night when he called to ask if I would serve as a character witness at the impending divorce hearing.  It was an amiable breakup, if such a thing is possible.  At first I thought he was doing quite well, but there are contusions one never sees.  He never healed from the first two marriages and entered a third, sired a child, and four years later she walked out on him, too, taking the kid in tow.  He wound up back in divorce court, losing custody except for court directed visitations.  Now he was preoccupied because he was about to be engaged to future wife number four who he had met in a chat room online.  It had never occurred to me over the years of witnessing how his quarrelsome personality wreaked havoc on his intimates that the reason we got along so well was that I asked nothing of him.  It was a lopsided friendship, grant you, but it worked until I asked for time on his calendar.  I needed a friend to rally for me during a time of grief, I told him.  He replied that he couldn’t help, he quite simply didn’t have it in him.  Abruptly, he hung up the phone.

A few days later Mike sent a text message asking if I wanted to get together, you know, talk about old times, yuck it up, that sort of thing, with no mention of my mother’s passing.  I found myself doing mental math.  The numbers didn’t add up.  All those years of helping him when asked and now, nothing: it just didn’t compute.  What worked for so many years didn’t work now.  So I countered indifference with indifference.  I wrote back and declined to meet up with him, and closed the message with one word: endgame.

All along I overlooked or ignored or didn’t want to see who Mike, my sister Gail, and my aunt Rose really were all along, because it was easier not to see.  Now they looked differently to me, clearer than I had ever seen them before, when I was always giving, never needing, and blindly accepting whatever they dished out.  That all changed the moment they lowered my mother into the groun

* * *

I drove down Sepulveda to Venice Beach and stopped at a computer café to check my mail.  There was a message from Angela, a woman I’d been dating back in Chicago.

“Bill told me you took a medical leave,” she wrote.  “I’m sorry your mother’s passing has been so rough for you.  Did you get the flowers?  I sent them to the funeral home in a nice vase.  I couldn’t make it, because I was in New York.  I met someone who lives there.  It’s still early to tell, but we’re getting along fine, so far, he likes me and I like him.  I wished you had phoned to say you were having a hard time, but maybe you couldn’t, but it felt weird finding out from Bill that you had left town.  I’d like to say let’s get together when you get home, but let’s take a break, OK?  I know you said you loved me, and that was hopeful.  I mean, I held out hope.  But nothing’s come of it.  Really, I just wanted to say I’m really very sorry about your loss.”

I left the computer café just as the sun was setting.  Couples were nuzzling one another while windsurfers and swimmers, skateboarders and bicyclists, goggle-eyed tourists with cameras and scantily-clad women in two-piece bathing suits, all competed for attention.  I sat down at the Venice Bar and ordered a beer.  An acid rock band began blasting away.  I got pulled off my barstool, and thrust into the arms of a woman twice my size that had the torso of a man, because she had once been a man.  When I broke free, I was pulled into the arms of another dancer, finally stumbling out of the bar and onto the boardwalk surrounded by a hoard of panhandlers, tee-shirt salesmen, and snake charmers.  A young woman approached me.

“Hey, mister, you got a minute?”

“Sure,” I said.

“I lost everything.  My car got boosted.  My wallet was in my backpack, and now it’s gone.  You got any money?”

I took a couple singles from my pocket.

“Jeez, is that all you can come up with?” she said.

“I’m afraid so.  Been on a bit of a losing streak myself.  But my luck has just changed for the better,” I said, even though I had nothing more to go on except the reassurance of my own voice.

I left her, and the other hucksters by the seawall, in the shadows of the burnt-orange beach, at low tide, the sun having sunk into the Pacific, and the lights of Santa Monica Pier twinkling on the horizon.

End

Robert Israel is a Boston, Mass. based writer and editor whose work has appeared in daily and weekly newspapers.  This story, based on his experiences in the Los Angeles area, is his second published piece of fiction.