Eleven Twenty-Three (36 page)

It’s occurred to me just how devastating the
Lilly’s End phenomenon must be to her psyche. The entire ordeal is
a question she did not ask and, worst of all, seems less and less
likely to ever present her with an answer. There’s no real reason
for her sister to have committed suicide, or for her parents to
have died the way they did. She’s never going to receive a
long-winded explanation of why Lilly’s End no longer exists from an
apologetic man in a business suit. Further, I have no acceptable
excuse for being unfaithful to Tara last summer, but it happened
regardless. Tara does not understand concepts like these.

We met in the fog one early morning just
under three years ago. It was my last week of school before winter
break, but I had started my vacation early and placed my classroom
duties on drunken automatic pilot. The past two days, I had been up
until the wee hours of the morning, hanging out with Hajime,
wandering the End, getting stoned, and mindlessly looking up
articles on the Toa Payoh ritual murders and DMT on Wikipedia. At
work, I had reduced myself to a permanent sleepwalking daze. Oddly
enough, no one seemed to notice.

I had gotten into the habit of stopping by
the local Starbucks before heading to Kennedy High School, and that
Wednesday before break was no different. The location at the corner
of Monroe and Kentucky was the first of what became three, even in
a beach town with a lower population than a third-world
village.

When I got to the café, it was still dark
outside and the ground lay obscured in fog. There were hazy orange
streetlights floating above the mist, giving the entire scene the
appearance of a student film dream sequence. My eyes were
half-closed. I fumbled in my pocket for car keys and thought that
perhaps I should have had the girl behind the counter pour another
shot of espresso into my latte. It was going to be a long day and
another all-too-short night.

That’s when I heard the loud plop of a
notebook on the ground behind me, along with the most touching
uttering of the phrase “son of a bitch” I’d ever encountered.

All I saw at first was the hair, which was
blond with brunette highlights then. After that it was the
shoulders, the supple chest, the hourglass midriff, and legs
obscured by baggy pajama pants. It was too early for rejection, I
decided, and knelt down to help the girl pick up the other two
spiral notebooks and the pocket-sized guide to MLA format. As I was
kneeling, she assured me that this was “not necessary, just very
nice of you.” I could smell the detergent soaked into the fabric of
the old blood donor t-shirt she was wearing. The pattern on her
black-and-white pajamas made me dizzy. I glimpsed the toe ring she
was wearing and noted the decimated-forest-green nail polish on her
fingers. I could tell by her nervous demeanor and scent that she
was chewing gum to keep from smoking.

“Long night?” I asked, trying to make eye
contact, but her face remained obscured behind notebooks, stray
bits of sleepy hair, and a pair of reading glasses.

“Just don’t ask me anything about the
marriage customs of indigenous peoples in Namibia and we’ll get
along just fine,” she sighed. “I’ve just spent the entire night
writing a paper on the subject and right now I’m kind of just
wishing the Owambo would fall victim to freedom fighters or
something.”

“That’s too bad, because I’ve been interested
in the Owambo for a while and thought I finally lucked out by
meeting you. I thought this might be my morning.”

“You can read my paper if you want. But fair
warning: there may be typos. Red Bull wrote it, not me.”

“
Typos?
Oh, well forget it,” I said,
flashing a grin. “To be honest, I’d much rather just hear it from
you.”

I was already obsessed.

The girl looked up with exhausted bemusement.
Her glasses obscured sleepy infatuated eyes and lips permanently
curved into a slight smirk that made one feel adored one moment and
ridiculed the next.

“Not bad,” she said, making no attempt to
obscure her inspection of me. “All you have to do now is buy me my
coffee and you’re in like flint, Mister…”

“Prescott,” I said, inconspicuously glancing
at my watch. “Layne Prescott.”

“Tara Tennille,” she said, extending a hand
that felt like three years of future when I shook it.

I bought her a cup of coffee and was in my
classroom flipping on the lights only four minutes before first
block showed up that morning. I didn’t teach much of anything the
day I met Tara, and added five points to all of my senior mid-term
exams based on a suggestion my strange new girl made while sipping
tentatively from a mocha cappuccino.

I repeated her first name to myself
throughout the morning, noting its non-association to the word
“terra,” which I found disappointing. Later I found out by doing a
quick search online that the entomology of the name Tara was
actually Sanskrit for “shining” and Kurdish for “star,” though I
doubted she knew either of these things.

Three days and two exhausting phone
conversations later, on the eighteenth of December, we went on our
first date. It was in Orlando doing…something. I don’t remember
exactly. Aside from the sights of China, everything outside Lilly’s
End has always been a blur to me, including much of my subsequent
life with Tara. There was a dinner somewhere that looked like a
rainforest. It was cold and our breath steamed. We held hands and
stared at huge Lego sculptures. A constant stream of girls on their
way to some club judged us in their passing, and they seemed to
approve. Tara ran into a friend of hers from class in front of an
almost-empty Irish restaurant. A boat full of silent tourists slid
by and Tara lit a cigarette. I had a drag of hers. A man who didn’t
look like he worked there asked to take a picture of us and we let
him. When I finished a Coke and tossed the empty cup into a trash
bin, I saw a gas mask stuffed down into the garbage bag.

At the end of the night, we drove back to the
End and she kissed me in the parking lot of the Starbucks where we
met. There were stars above our head, glimmering as faintly as
exorcised spirits. Tara pointed up at them and whispered, “That’s
us.” I was freezing but happy and wouldn’t let go of her hand until
I dropped her off at her dorm.

I secretly decided that night that the world
was a magical place and chance encounters did not really exist,
that no truly important event was ever left to coincidence. It was
no accident that I met Tara that morning, just like it was no
accident three years and thousands of miles later when I met a man
named Mr. Scott in a crowded airport bar.

It didn’t take long to fall in love with
someone like Tara. She was a beautiful and engaging woman, an
obvious fan of home hair coloring kits, and adept at conversations
on things that “mattered.” This was quite different from the kind
of girls I was used to dating and occasionally sleeping with before
I met her. I decided right away that a life with Tara meant
irreversible evolution on my part. With this one, there would be no
more dining in franchise restaurants. No more summer blockbuster
films. I’d be eating less red meat. I’d have to start caring about
things deemed important and would have to feign sympathy for
bulimics and children with Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome. No more jokes with
a punch line involving the acronym PETA. I’d have to put a halt to
the almost constant stream of insults and condemnations I made
concerning my family and students. I would be required to train
myself to look at the world without grimacing.

But it was all worth it, I assured myself.
Tara was original, gorgeous, crazy about me, and wholly dedicated
to making the world a better place. I was entranced, and admired
her passion despite the fact that I did not share it.

It turned out that my new girlfriend came
with quite a résumé. In high school, Tara Madison Tennille was the
vice-president of the National Honor Society and an active member
in the Latin Club and FBLA. She had the tenth highest GPA in her
graduating class. Not many of her classmates were aware that the
spoiled floozy, the one with the blond hair and the
less-than-savory reputation that graduated a couple of years prior,
was Tara’s older sister, and Tara was happy to keep it that way.
The day she graduated, a lot of people clapped and Chloe exchanged
numbers with a guy she hadn’t seen since the time they had sex in
an orange grove.

Once she was in college, Tara briefly
contributed vocals to a pop punk band that included two guitarists
from Korea and a Romanian drummer before quitting that and getting
involved with the atheists and existential humanitarians who hung
outside of Cooper Hall instead. She was friends with most of the
other girls in her dorm. On Saturdays, she enjoyed going down to
the beach by the lighthouse to watch members of the local art
course paint the same horizon a dozen different ways. She would
wear expensive pajamas and the most carefully messy ponytail
imaginable to her earlier classes just to prove she didn’t care
about outward appearance.

Everything that Tara did fit this mold, now
that I think about it. The more impulsive and poorly managed she
tried to be, the more carefully orchestrated and carried out it
became. Even her “spontaneous” decision to join me in China a few
months ago could not have been more researched, scrutinized, and
planned on her part.

Before that foggy morning outside the coffee
shop, Tara briefly dated two overweight engineering majors and a
bisexual DJ just to show the world that she put no barriers on
love, though in the end she fell for a guy with an almost identical
socio-economic background to her own in a manner that would have
surprised no one.

Every time someone would question Tara’s
bizarre life decisions, her catch-all (and sometimes insufficient)
response was “Well, I’m a psychology major, after all.”

But I always thought Tara enjoyed the
idea
of being a psychology major more than she would ever
enjoy the actual practice of it, just like she was more infatuated
with the concept of being a humanitarian than with making true
life-risking humanitarian efforts. She could stand on orange
vermillion bridges and spout off morbid statistics and anecdotes
about dead people’s last moments for hours, but never took much
interest in talking to a would-be jumper in an effort to stop them
from becoming another bridge story. She’d send dozens of e-mails to
everyone she knew with links to a whole cache of websites dedicated
to liberating the peoples of various despicable countries across
the globe, and yet if presented with an opportunity to distribute
food and medicine to villagers somewhere in the Irrawaddy Delta,
would quickly pass and send in a donation instead. Tara’s always
preferred to remain the messenger of awareness for every crappy
thing that’s ever happened rather than working to stop any of the
crappy things from happening in the first place.

This is not so terrible a position, however.
Hajime would simply slather a canvas with red, black, and gray
paint and bring it up during a bout of drinking to make the same
statement. Hajime has always used his own myriad causes as the
center of intellectual one-ups known only to him, while Tara simply
hides behind hers in an effort to never admit that the world is
truly a bad place and that she is, in the end, deathly afraid of
it. Further, things do not improve no matter how much one rants and
raves and sends in scant checks for twenty-five dollars to
UNICEF.

For the first two years, things were mostly
fine between us. I helped her with papers, she helped me grade
mine, and I made a point to take her with me to every function my
school held to ward off any suspicions from my administrators that
I was anything other than a clean-cut, all-American liberal guy
with no interest in radical politics or experimental drug use. She
met my mother and nodded to everything she said, made excuses for
my absence every time my father called, and never once blamed any
of my more selfish actions on the fact that I was an only child. We
talked about politics and the trends of technology. We handed out
flyers for an organization working to stop famine in North Korea.
There was angry talk about fossil fuels. We discussed where we were
when the Twin Towers fell (oddly enough, both of us were in a
doctor’s office, and we were getting good news that day). We stared
into each other’s eyes and never flinched once.

She seemed as close to perfection as I could
ever meet in front of a franchise coffee shop.

We moved in together her senior year of
college, had sex at odd times of the day, and ate bowls of Corn
Pops late at night while watching
The Colbert Report
. There
were stuffed animals thrown around my bedroom that seemed to
spontaneously reproduce while I was off at work. Tara vacuumed
obsessively, unable to get a stain out of the carpet that I never
could see when she pointed down at it in disgust. She cooked
flavorless meals in the kitchen and insisted that we not dine out
more than once a week. She liked to spend Sundays naked in bed,
perfecting her
Sudoku
skills and sipping from glasses of
organic orange juice.

But the quiet times no one notices, the
little pauses in the steady stream of relationship chatter, grew
longer and longer, and I began to notice them. One night I
involuntarily fantasized about my voluptuous female boss at school,
Ms. Chinaski, and another night I had a nightmare where every time
I tried to speak, Tara literally ate my words before they could
foster any sort of meaning. Worst of all, when Tara visualized
marriage, she thought of Christmas trees and polished dinner
tables, front porches and worthy causes, inside jokes and our
withered old hands one day clutching each other after a lifetime of
unfathomable happiness and fulfillment. When I attempted to picture
the same institution, I saw nothing more than overpriced hookers
and hotel rooms that looked too much like hotel rooms, days of
silence and weeks of arguing, empty beer bottles and ruined
make-up. I saw a nineteenth century expressionist painting. I saw
my mother and father.