Please Don't Go (7 page)

“
I am astonished to say it’s welcome,” she replied, a giggle escaping her perfect little mouth. I wanted to reach across the table, to grab the back of her neck and implant her with the most ferocious kiss a man had ever fashioned for his lady. And in my mind, I considered her just that, from the moment she accepted me into her company.
My lady
. I repeated the thought in my mind over and over again—my lady, my lady, my lady, my lady, my lady. I fell in love on this day, before I could recollect any alternative to the matter. A perfect day in Galway. The waiter brought us Belgian lagers, and we sipped from them with an immobile gaze upon each other. The day became fatter with growing anticipation at each beat of our rhythmic pulses. “And so this friendship begins with my name. We drink refreshments. I presume that the next stage is a chatty walk through the shops and vendors. I show the tourist my favorite haunts in my lovely home town. Maybe a sweet kiss in front of Saint Nicholas’ Church. And you take me to your hotel bed. And where does that leave my heart when you run back to your country? Will the torment destroy me?” she asked, a prophetic playfulness that could only bring forth a shared laugh from us both. How brave, and without boundary, she spoke. It tickled my heart to no end, for I was smitten by this garrulous temptress. “But,” she added, “this would not be a first for me, I am sad to report. My heart has been broken a thousand fold, and it may very well happen a thousand more. Though never has it happened from a nameless man. Shall you rectify that?”

I laughed again, slamming my beer down with an invisible gust of bravado. “I haven’t told you my name, have I? Isn’t that how the custom goes?” I asked. I wondered to myself if this omission was on purpose, perhaps hoping with my own vision of future events that I could escape my tourist love spell without ever giving away my personal details. How quickly I had descended into scandalous bachelor behavior while abroad. My loins ached for something so badly that I had abandoned human protocols altogether. “Charles. My name is Charles and you are stomping upon my bleeding heart with your heel.” We toasted to the next step with another round of ticklish laughter, so pleased by our rotten morals, washing down our beers with a second and third round. By the time we had moved on to our jaunt through the cobbled streets of Galway, Aleesha had suggested that we visit my hotel room. She hated shopping, and even more so she loathed the boring machinations of tourists. I did not debate this notion, and so we set forth for a late afternoon dabble in the art of sin.

How scandalous I had become.

My mother would have been ashamed, but my passion outweighed my logic.

***

That evening, Aleesha and I had taken the proper path that was traditionally sought after in more typical whirlwind relationships. I told her my tale, and she told me hers.

When I lectured her on my collegiate escapades, in particular my viciously terrible days raging through hellish activities in my fraternity, she touched my hand with a buzzing vibration. She simply hummed with energy, as she had when I first met her. Maybe she was a true-to-life Siren, after all. We were close enough to the sea for this to be a legitimate possibility. When we had visited the Spanish Arch after our feverish bout of love-making, I had looked out into the water, picturing men clamoring for a grip on the mossy barnacled rocks, their formerly sturdy ship torn to bits behind them, flotsam of what once was durable and steadfast. As I stood there, my hand wrapped around Aleesha’s perfectly bony wrist, I pictured her throwing her head back in laughter, pointing at the ghostly sailors of my mind, insisting that they were too flimsy and worthless to be saved, testifying to God and country of their imminent doom.

We talked of our favorite artists. She insisted that the art museum in Dublin would absolutely floor my senses, and I promptly declared that I would visit that facility before I left her fine country. I explained some of the more unique counter-culture art movements from New York and California in the 1960s, all of which I had watched with a keen eye. Aleesha had read of Andy Warhol in newspaper and magazine articles, but was not very knowledgeable of his actual works. She could, however, recount the lyrics of David Bowie’s song “Andy Warhol.” I had picked up on the lines that she had missed (“Andy, take a little snooze...”), and she on the ones that I did not know (“Can’t tell ‘em apart at all, at all, at allllll...”). “Bowie is an artist to end all art,” she had declared after our impromptu sing-a-long, which I had wholeheartedly agreed upon.

Our banter dipped and dove through topics that I cannot fully recall in hindsight. Politics, but ever so briefly, since it tended to cause strife amongst strangers who were unaware of each other’s tender world views. We talked on religion for a stint, but employed a similar tactic of soft shoes and barely audible whispers. Aleesha and I had agreed that sports in general were a magnificent bore. We both loved animals and hated to eat mushrooms. I preferred a cold beer, whereas she fancied something more classy, like a shandy (a mixture of lager and lemonade, which I had not yet sampled while frolicking “across the pond”).

She had lived in the Burren of Ireland all her life, but had only recently relocated to Galway. “Something about the streets. You can’t get lost, but it never looks the same way twice. It’s as though the city reinvents itself every morning. That may sound silly, but I swear it to be true!” she exclaimed, and I replied that a daily genesis in Galway was a perfectly reasonable assumption. Her statement intrigued me. She so very much loved the city, and I could see that passion smoldering in her eyes. It was then that I realized I had fallen into a deep madness for this young lady, knowing that she was so very bound at the hip to this city, that she could never be torn away from it, not even by a wild-eyed fleeting American like myself. Though I knew this to be utter silliness, that our love could not continue beyond my two day stay in her city, it saddened me to my very core. Maybe it was the mere thought that there could be no further growth, under any circumstances. Though the rational part of me wanted nothing more than what had already transpired, the romantic in me felt pity for our doomed eventual condition. “This city breathes in and out. If you close your eyes, you can hear it,” she said, and I nodded, not really hearing the words for what they implied. Rather, I stayed affixed, eyeball to eyeball, with the light of her being. “Close your eyes, dummy,” she barbed at me with a jesting smile. My expression changed, as if to say, “Oh yes, I understand.” I clenched my eyelids shut and listened.

At first, there was nothing. The quiet murmur of pedestrians and tourists, the click and clack of a few wooden shoes, the soft thud of sneakers and rubber soles. There was no automotive traffic allowed in the downtown area, so that was a blessing to my auditory experiment of observation. I could hear only people and their daily plots, unwinding in slow motion. Their voices blended together in a sort of maelstrom of sounds. The brushing noises of people’s legs swishing together, the fabric of their pants making soft rhythmic music.

And then it happened. A slowly churning fiddle in the distance. The voice of a young man, explaining to his mate that the art of film is a bloody dying animal. A dog barks, soft but raspy. A door swings open, a group of chatty men emerge, speaking in turn on the laurels of capitalism and its alternatives. The wheels of a cart, squeaking as the burdensome load is dragged through the streets by a local laborer.

They were speaking to me, one at a time, making their presences known in turn. It was as though they were conducting themselves in a symphony, and I was the lone audience member. Each instrument, an echoing chamber in the heart of Galway, chimed in with its own interpretations of bustling activity, soft and riotous at the same time. It was composing itself out of mere human existence. The lack of gas-guzzling motorcades and blaring horns added to the charm of it all. A smell of burning peat struck my nose and it, too, became a newly recruited sound in the flurry of it all. I did not long for home. I longed to stay. This cornucopia of sound enveloped me, and I soon realized that this was the same way the city would have sounded one hundred years earlier. Two hundred years even. Sure, their conversational topics would have been different (perhaps speaking of the unilateral king instead of capitalism), but the general idea would have been just the same.
This
is how humans live.
This
is what humans do.
They
make symphonies every single day. “It’s glorious,” I said, a barely audible whisper. I broke from my concentrated trance at the sound of Aleesha busting forth with her infectious giggle. “This city is perfection, personified,” I added.

Her face grew stern. “Then why don’t you stay with me?” she asked.

“
How I would love to,” I replied, my brow furrowing. I sipped at my coffee, biting away the truth beneath the layers of my person. “I would love nothing more than to spend my days cajoling through the cities and towns of Ireland. But my job is my home, and my home is my job. I could never leave America.” At this, she shook her head. She saw a hesitance in me, that which I was fighting with great measures to hide from her. I had only known her this one day, and she had willfully asked me to stay with her in Galway? Surely, she was as mad as a hatter. But so was I, with a nugget of love deep inside of my stomach, something that I had only previously witnessed in films and books and theater presentations. Even in music, women and men spoke of the story (and the glory) of love, ever since I was a child. And I believed them, every last one. Their testimonial could not be lies, but such a thing was never known to happen in my idyllic world. They crooned in my ear that love could show its face in the darkest of alleys, when the world seemed on the brink of utter collapse. Love was around every corner, and I understood this. But still, I disbelieved the concept of blind passion at its very root. “That is not to say that I will ever forget this day, for as long as I’ll live. And we have another day before us, which we should not soon forget. Tomorrow, I plan to stay as late as possible, before heading off to my next destination in Killkenny. I would be a fool not to spend every last second of that day with you.” I looked to the horizon, visible from between the stone facades of shops and restaurants. The sun was on the verge of dipping below, and our night would begin. It would lead into, without any doubt, a second cavalcade of unrepentant love-making, and an eventual nap. We would awake at dawn, make love again, eat breakfast. Walk the streets looking for a newspaper. Eat lunch. Make love one final time. Eat dinner. And I was gone from her life forever. Maybe we would write to each other, but just as likely we wouldn’t. It was all laid out before me, as right as rain, and Aleesha sensed it as well. We would fall in love just enough over our two days to cause a painful rift upon my departure.

“
You cannot leave me. This day can’t end. Tomorrow can’t, either. I won’t let it. Don’t you see?” she asked of me, this woman who I had only known since after my breakfast. Added to that, we had been half-drunk for a majority of that period. Was I losing my seedy gourd? “I’ve just met you, lover. And already it will be too much for me to bear.” She placed her face into her trembling ivory hands and began to cry. I reached across the table, rubbing at her wrists, wanting to weep a spell myself. When she slapped my hands away from her, I could only abide with understanding of her emotions. “Can’t you simply mull the thought?” she asked from between her fingers, her acutely applied makeup running between her fingers like little rivers of paint.

I nodded. In hindsight, maybe I was only satiating her to continue on without dramatics, that I may sop my quill in ink one last time. “Yes. I will certainly mull the thought,” I said to Aleesha, the sobbing Queen of the Port of Galway, and I meant it at some infinitesimal level of consciousness. “I will mull for you, for all my days,” I added, not knowing what I was really intending in such words. Maybe I would regret them. I kissed her cheek and she smiled again. We simply stared at each other, and for more than an hour. I was like stone, and she was my Medusa, and I could not control myself.

***

Jackie leaned in over Zephyr’s shoulder, being ever so nosy as she was prone to be. “How’s it coming? What’s the verdict?” she asked.

“
Just fine. I’m not sure I like his content, but his style is just fine by me,” Zephyr noted, rubbing his chin. He placed a thin white receipt from the drugstore (he had purchased a package of cough drops and box of condoms) into the groove of the book, slamming the titanic tome shut with a dusty thud. “You’ll have to read it when I’m done. Of course, you’ll probably kill it off in one sitting,” he said. Jackie had a tendency to simply devour books, stories, and magazines in record times. Zephyr often questioned her as to whether she actually retained content from her readings. Surely, there was no way to grasp all of the material when your eyes could barely keep up with your mind. Though she was not what one would call a speed-reader, she had a focused dedication to the words on the page, scanning through with her illuminated eyes the way Zephyr imagined a Fritz Lang robot would.

“
That thing? I’ll read the whole volume, cover to cover, in one weekend. You watch me, buddy,” she goaded him. Though it sounded like an inflated dash of ego, it was most likely a very true prophecy. Jackie wrapped her fingers over each of Zephyr’s tightened shoulders, running them into the groove of his clavicles. “You seem tense. You still thinking about that stuff at Rattup’s house again?”