April 23, 2011
It's a rainy night, the evening before Easter, which means the normally busy Saturday party scene in Spain is almost quiet. Ed sleeps soundly beside her, and the even, gentle, in-and-out of his breathing calms her. That's what Ed does. He calms her. Makes her feel steady, sure, whole. Holly never takes that for granted.
But sometimes she remembers how good it felt to run mad.
Today was St. Jordi's Day – in Barcelona, a citywide festival that takes the place of Valentine's Day. Sweethearts stroll through the streets. Every woman receives a rose. Every man receives a book.
Holly tried to buy Ed a novel, but his Spanish isn't up to reading, and besides, he laughed, their bags are full enough already. And no rose for her, because they're flying out in the morning and there's no taking cut flowers on a plane. He promised to buy her a rose as soon as they're back home in the States.
She nodded and saw the good sense of it. She still does. But as she lies here tonight in their hotel room, awake well past midnight, all she can think is, Roger would have loved this.
He would have adored the idea of the old custom, and would have spent hours studying up on the history of it. Roger would have bought her a rose, maybe even slid it behind one of her ears and said she looked like a beautiful flamenco dancer. When they strolled through the Barri Gotic, he would have known all the history and whispered the legends to her as he took her hand. The molten, hallucinogenic quality of the Sagrada Familia cathedral … when she first looked at it, she could almost hear Roger's voice saying, Finally, a church where I can feel at home.
And when she bought him a book – his Spanish was excellent – he would have treasured it. Roger would have left behind every suitcase he had and walked onto the plane with nothing but her gift in his hand.
It's not that Holly idealizes Roger. Far from it. He is no more absent from her nightmares than he is from her fantasies. She remembers too well how dark he could be, how vicious he was to her at his worst. Even at his best he could be arrogant and self-pitying. But the accuracy of her memory is a double-edged sword: It demands that Holly remember the good along with the bad. And whatever else Roger was, he was a consummate romantic.
She's older now. The past few years, she's let the gray strands grow out so that her auburn locks are muted, softer and dimmer. New wrinkles announce themselves more and more frequently. When she kept squinting to read the small, high street signs in Barcelona, Ed gently suggested she pick up a pair of reading glasses sometime.
What would Roger make of her middle-aged self? He always spoke of her as the "girl of his dreams," reminisced about her in sky-blue sundresses she wore as a teenager. Part of his magnetic, unfathomable allure was the way he kept that young girl she'd been safe in his heart. Would he feel the same passion for a Holly whose hips are broader, whose skin is more creased and who has a pair of reading glasses hanging from a jeweled chain around her neck?
Somehow she thinks he would. He would only have seen the girl Holly, the Holly he first loved, no matter what. Roger was excellent at ignoring inconvenient facts.
She tries to imagine Roger as an old man. It's impossible. The dark, electric energy within him kept him vital even as gray streaked his hair. His face hardly seemed to age in the nearly 30 years she knew him.
And yet he died wasting away – weak, hardly able to move –
Holly turns away from Ed, not rejecting him, but hoping not to wake him. Because she can't hold back to tears any longer.
Roger made his peace with his demons on his deathbed. For a few short weeks or days – maybe only a few hours – he was the man he'd always wanted to be, the one she'd wanted to love. He faced his own self-destructive nature. Once more, he battled his cruelty and petulance and anger, and he finally, finally won.
The ultimate irony of his life – and of hers – is that by the time Roger had done that, he had no time left to return to her and redeem what they had been. He only had time to write her the letter that told her goodbye.
My eternal love, he called her.
She doesn't cry because she lost him. That's for the best. Even at their happiest, they wounded one another constantly. Even when she forgave him most deeply, Holly never got over the fear Roger had instilled in her that horrible night so long ago. Even his final victory of his inner darkness could not have healed their matching scars. They'd lost one another almost as soon as they found each other; it just took them decades to realize that.
Nor does she cry because he died alone. Holly has thought about his choice many times in the years since and has come to the inescapable conclusion that it was the most unselfish decision Roger ever made. He didn't use the power of his impending death to command her to his side, to win from her one more vow of her forgiveness – all of which he could have had. That would have comforted him, but it would have cost her. He knew that. He did without. Instead of the comfort of love and compassion, he contented himself with writing them that final note and trusting them to understand.
It must've required so much courage to face the dark alone.
In his last letter, he told her they belonged together in the night sky, like the stars against blackness – a mixture of darkness and light. Maybe he understood her better than she gives him credit for. Maybe better than she understood herself, back then. Tears in her eyes, Holly looks out the hotel-room window, hoping for a glimpse of the stars, but the city lights and the clouds conspire to hide them away. The scene blurs, and she wipes at her cheeks. It blurs again.
She cries because she misses Roger.
Sounds so simple, but it's not: Holly can never speak of how she misses him – not to Blake, who worships Roger's memory as though he were some sainted figure, nor to Ed, whose face sinks into a grimace at every mention of Roger's name. And what kind of woman is she, to still miss … to still love a man who hurt her the way Roger did? To want him by her side even now?
But she misses his sly wit. His intelligence. The intensity he brought to every experience. His grand gestures. She even misses hating him, sometimes.
Above all, she misses the delusion they shared – that if they could come together again, his wrongs would be undone. He would no longer be wicked; she would no longer be scarred. They wanted to love each other in order to make her whole again. To escape into the more innocent past.
However, the richness of their relationship had nothing to do with innocence. They demanded everything from each other – and that meant they could never escape the truth of their experience. Roger could never stop plotting, scheming, manipulating; knowing that, she could never trust him.
She never realized she'd spend the rest of her life missing him.
Dabbing at her eyes with the sleeve of her nightgown, Holly tiptoes across the room. Ed is all but snoring now. Gazing at him fondly, she imagines the rest of their lives together: cheerful, graying grandparents, alternating between visits to their ever-growing families and their trips all around the world. Eventually the voyages will become less adventurous. They will settle in a comfortable little house. He'll take up golf again. She'll probably buy a sun visor and join him. They will be happy. It's the old age she has chosen for herself, and it's a good one.
She will never question how much of Ed's heart still belongs to Maureen, just as Ed will never question how much of hers still belongs to Roger. They give each other that space. It's how their union works. What they have is more than enough.
When Ed dies, he will go to heaven with Maureen. She's always known this. Holly doesn't want to place any bets on where her soul is headed, but she knows – wherever it is – Roger awaits her there.
Holly reaches the tote bag she carried around Barcelona all day and slips her hand noiselessly inside. She pulls out a small blank book – one with ruled pages awaiting the writer's words. The cover is embossed leather, rich and masculine, the element that takes this ordinary item and makes it something special. This is what she bought on St. Jordi's Day.
She didn't buy it for Ed.
Once in a while, Holly decides, she'll open this up. She'll write in it about Roger: the good and the bad, the evil and the sweetness, all of it. The grandchildren they share might want to read it someday to know about the man they're descended from. Something of him can live on. Something of them. It's the only farewell they'll ever share outside of the night sky.
Holly imagines Roger's long fingers sliding the rose behind one of her ears. She looks up into the darkness where his eyes would have been and smiles.
END