Shambles 2
Looking up into her eyes, I see the annoyance and shock there. Staring, waiting for a reply, she simply looks back as if she is used to this sort of thing from me.
Again I look around. The entire place is foreign. Hell, she is foreign. I mean really, what was with the get up? Who the hell dresses like that? She looks like some sort of badly dressed school marm.
Snapping back to my confusion and fear, I respond to her and shake my head for some clarity. I recalled in the cartoons of my childhood the characters often shook their heads quickly with the sound of some odd percussion and miraculously they were cognizant of whatever clever thought had eluded them. Well, fuck, that didn’t work at all.
Do I play along that I’m this Mr. Lockwood fellow or do I come clean and admit that I haven’t the slightest idea who that is?
Well, being a man and in this extraordinary place that I don’t recognize, but in which I seem to be expected I figure I can play it off.
“Yes ma’am,” I say, “who is it that is calling? I have a screaming headache. I wonder, could you kindly take a message and find out...could I return the call?”
Ever so rudely, she strolls over to the desk and lifts the receiver. She pushs the button on the phone for the current line that it is flashing in her eye saying it is on hold.
“Hello, yes oh, excusez moi. Oui français. Juste un peu. Mon anglais est meilleur,” she spoke into the phone.
For some reason I recognize this as French and that I had been speaking English. She continues in English with much more ease. What I hear next starts to connect the dots, that is if had any dots to connect. I wasn’t even sure if I had dots or why the living hell I was talking about dots.
I heard her end of the conversation. She was reminding someone of my “condition” for which she used air quotes. My mind started to wander. I have a “condition?” What the fuck bitch?
Under further exploration with my eyes only I can tell that this space is unrecognizable because I’ve never been here before. All the glamour and glory countered what I know of my modest space. I really preferred my modest, lowly, semi tidy, almost clean place to the pretense and enormity of where I sit now. She continues to blather on on the phone. I forgot to focus and listen. So, now when I get the hell out of here I don’t where to go.
I stand on what feel like wobbly legs. Steadying myself on the arm of the couch I turn to look out the window. She is clearly eyeballing me and it makes me uncomfortable. I stand up straight and with all the confidence and nobility I can muster I start to walk toward the large sparkling clean window. About halfway there I feel the floor coming toward my face. How is the floor rising to meet me? With a sigh of all the air in my lungs and a sense of embarrassment I realize it’s not. I’ve gone to meet it. My lower lip rolls along the parquet floor as I come to a stop. Through the muffle of the cheap plastic soles I hear the arrival of the woman at my side.
She makes the tsk..tsk sound with her mouth as she leans down to, what I assume is chide me, but with a kind and loving voice she simply says, “ Here let me help you.”
Getting me to my feet I shuffle bedside her to one of those odd couches. I flop down with the exhaustion of an old man. She fusses at me that I can’t keep making those kind of sudden moves or I’ll face plant every time. Perpetually lost, I ask her why she is calling me by that name? She tells me because it is my name.
“Why are you lying to me? Who are you?”
“I’m not. I’m Mrs. Lockwood. I’m your wife.”
“That’s impossible, that’s not my name. Furthermore, I wouldn’t marry anyone who dresses like that!”
Her eyes downcast and with a quiver of her lip, she looks into my eyes. She places the soft warm palm of her hand on my cheek and holds it there. There are tears in her eyes and one escapes and makes a trail down the mound of her cheek and off onto and over her myriad wrinkles. I look back and wonder how I can be married to such an old, but stubbornly pretty woman. Wiping her tears with the back of her hand she helps to steady me to standing. Slowly we shuffle over to a giant gold ostentatious mirror. What I see looking back at me is an old man. Grey hair, sagging face, stray whiskers. I must have trouble shaving, and piercing blue eyes that are looked on by her face from next to my shoulder that is slightly hunched. She smiles the truest dearest smile. I know not why I don’t know her any longer. I’m sure I did one day and I believe we made one another quite happy, but all I know now is that I don’t know myself and I don’t know her.
Maybe she’ll call me Mr. Lockwood until I die and maybe I’ll hear her for that long. I believe her smile and her tears tell me all I can grasp at this time.
“Now lady can you take me to the tennis courts? I am going to be late for my match.”
“Yes sir, Mr. Lockwood.”