despite our best efforts

by Tony Rauch

We met and I was too old for her anyway. I was too old for marriage. At least that‘s the way I saw it. I was just too far gone, too far lost into my own little world. That’s why I never asked her out. It just didn’t feel right. It felt too leechy or something. I mean, I liked her and all, but who was I kidding, why would someone her age ever be interested in someone my age? Plus we worked together so that could’ve been awkward for the both of us, and in bad form for me in particular to ask her out. She had mentioned she wasn’t ready to get serious and besides I was 47 and thought it was all over on the love end anyway. I seemed to have had my time with the girls and that seemed all well over with by now. My time had been brief, bright, and intense. That was all I had ever gotten and it was all gone now. It had flashed on for me and then off just as fast—flashed and burned out—the love thing for me. I knew that and had come to terms with it a long time ago. Since then I had been just existing, just floating along with the wind.

And then we were thrown together.

We were put on a project together at work and spent many hours with one another until finally, in the end, she men­tioned offhand, “You know, I think I’m going to miss working with you, we get along so well,” and I said, “Yeah, I guess so, but I’ll be around so you can still call if you have any questions or anything. We’ll both be busy with new projects and all, but we could always meet up for lunch or whatever. I mean, it’s not like you’ve never seen me eat, like, a million times before or anything.” I didn’t think anything of it, only that it was all a polite good-bye thing to add to filing and boxing the last of it all. I hadn’t thought of us together at all because of our age dif­ference and because I just never had that lifestyle where I met so many new people whatsoever. She was twenty years younger than me, and we worked together, and she wasn’t really all that experienced with life and all that. Plus I’ve really seen them come and go over the years like you wouldn’t believe, to the point where people had become like leaves to me—falling in the air all around, circling on the slight breeze. Eventually, I just lost faith in people sticking around. The idea of being with someone had become an illusion to me, a cruel hoax. It just really didn’t matter at all to me anymore. They were just going to drift off anyway, so what was the point? You just couldn’t trust it—the whole people-sticking-around-and-being-in-your-life-for-very-long thing.

Then, about a month later she called with a follow-up question on the project and we had to meet up for lunch as I was in meetings all day. And we met up and got to talking and found out we were both jonesing for the big game. So we ended up meeting up at the big game on the weekend which was just lovely and pastoral instead of just saying our casual good-byes and staying at home like always. After the game, she stopped off at my place to look over a new volume I had acquired through guile and insistence. And she complimented my place politely and gushed at the other manuscripts in my collection and my little flower garden out back. She mentioned she was losing her charming little brick place to the evil strip mall developer’s wreaking ball. So I invited her to move into the spare room upstairs for a while as it was very warm up there; and so she did and we didn’t see much of each other for a long while as we were busy and constantly missing one another and into our own tiny little corners of the universe. But gradually we began to play pinochle together and eventu­ally construct large, elaborate puzzles and recreate mythical medieval cities on old tablecloths that we’d then hang up in the attic. And it all became so warm and comfortable and familiar. I guess this is what it’s like to be in love and I fell in love too late in life and now it feels like it’s way too late for me—that I’m twenty years older than her, twenty years too late, too late to explore that wilderness of warm sensations when she is near, too late to bathe in it all. Too late.

But then one time I got around to blurting out during one of our puzzle nights, “Will you marry me?” as I felt so comfort­able and relaxed around her, and Sinatra’s ‘In the wee small hours of the morning’ was on. It just seemed like a nice thing to mention, like a compliment only more sincere, even though I was sort of bored and tired and kind of half joking, and she laughed and I pointed out that I probably wouldn’t live very long anyway and that I was living on “borrowed time” as they say, that I was “running on fumes”, that I was probably destined to die pretty soon—keel over in my morning Wheaties and all that and they’d find me there, soggy wheaties all over my face—and that she could have all my money after I finally passed on since I didn’t have anything much to spend it on any­way, and that since we both had the bad luck in the way of per­sonal affairs, and that since we both got on so well and repelled the opposite sex like strong atomic magnets to the point that it was almost the only thing we were really any good at any more, that neither of us would probably be getting married anytime soon anyway, and just look at me, I’m getting on here so look at that and just see for yourself and she may just end up like me anyhow. So she right off agreed by shrugging a chirpy, “Yeah, OK, I suppose. I see what you mean,” just as I probably would have done, just as I was finding an ear and adding it to an important and prominent place on the puzzle and just as she added, “But just so you know, I’m not really into that whole money thing,” and I replied, “Oh, no, of course not, neither am I. I wasn’t implying anything at all, I was just trying to con­vince you to stay on with me, and to let you know that we’d be provided for and that I wasn‘t after money,” and then we even­tually grew to fall in love with each other over our lost medi­eval cities and tea. We fell in love despite our best efforts, despite our attempts to maintain a sort of professional “room­mate” politeness as we got on so well, neither of us wanting to upset the other because that would just about put me over the top and put an end to me once and for all. And then ten years later she got hit by a car in the pouring rain on an old wooden bridge and that was that. I retired to write this to you here and now—alone in my dark study surrounded by my old volumes and pictures of her.

And now here you are with me. Despite our best efforts I guess life just happens, just unfolds like an ornate rug, just unspools away from us. It’s all just empty and lost and gone now, blown away.

She was gone now, just like she was a lot when she was here but now she wouldn’t ever be back again. She was gone a lot—off on projects or vacations with her friends, cousins, or co-workers, and I was busy with my projects, hobbies, and pre-occupations. But she would always send photos of her exploits and I would frame them and place them up all around me in my study—her next to a giant marlin, her next to a B-list movie star, her next to an old, dusty leaning something, that sort of thing. She’d also send back glowing sunsets and foggy valleys and rolling landscapes, and I’d put them up in the hallway, as if to be seeing and feeling what she saw and felt. I never had the desire to follow along with her, although we did talk about it. I was far too tired, too occupied, too far gone into the deep, swampy recesses of my own musty world and busy at work, after taking a position at the Institute For South­ern Oration, and my work progressed at the institute, at the “IF-SO,” and at the Congress for New Urbanism. And, although we never spoke of it, neither of us feared straying or losing the other to another as we both knew neither of us pos­sessed any kind of luck or vocation to even be presented with that kind of situation. No luck or vocation in that already crowded arena.

And now I just sit here and listen to the sad songs of my youth and wish she were back here with me, with all of her sunsets setting around me, her forever misty valleys, her always leaning towers, her hopeful starlets, her pink luminous clouds, sprawling pastures, proud windmills, and that arching angel disguised as a white wooden bridge that took her like a great white unfolding angel up to heaven to look down on me forever and wait for me up there beyond her veil of clouds.