Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: #20

I had treated the Rhodia like it was a a sacred text, some type of New American Standard published by Amtrak and left for the taking much like the Gideons leave their bibles in every Motel 6 I've ever slept in. But the longer the train remained motionless and the more I saw the same people, even my own family, the more I felt that the notebook was dead weight. It was part of a general sense of frustration that filled not just the random, overheard pieces of conversations but the blank spaces between them. Everyone seemed edgy.

Dead weight or not, however, I refused to part with the Rhodia. I had even touched my pen to one page when I thought I would write, but I couldn't get any more than a dot of black ink on the paper. As much as anything, I needed to find a space to sit alone--not to write, but to separate myself from the other passengers. I even envied my aunt and uncle for their dark, quiet beds. I no longer knew where my father, sister, and brother were. We had gone in different directions after our poker game, something that isn't easy to do when most of the available space is linear. Margie had fended off my half-hearted attempt to give her the notebook, though she said she would like to read it after I'd written something just to try to figure out which words were mine. Now, with pieces of tissue stuffed into my ears in an equally half-hearted attempted to keep outside noises out of my head, I opened the notebook and searched for and found one of Ophelia's writings.

Pomegranates

My parents were happy with Phil, and I probably should have kept him around. But we had been together since high school, and we had wearied of each other. Not in a bad way, I guess, but just in a regular way: we both had come to expect the other be new and surprising, and we both ended up disappointed when neither could live up to that expectation. Phil was a good man, and sometimes I miss him. I have especially missed him these last couple of months, though I am not sure he would be patient with my being sick. He was never patient, and as he continued to fail with his art, he reached a point where I knew he was also not living up to the expectations he had of himself. "I hate it," he said one afternoon. "I get the paints ready, and I end up producing garbage. And that's if I'm lucky. Sometimes I end up not painting anything."

Phil introduced me to pomegranates not long after we met. We had met near the river, and he had brought a pomegranate and a knife. "Try it," he said as he held one of the dark-red seeds to me. We sat by that river and cut our way through three pomegranates. When I washed my fingers in the bathroom sink later that night, I admired the stained fingertips I held under the water.

He was prolific when we first met. He could paint anything. Even pomegranates, and somewhere boxed in my parents' spare bedroom is a still life sketch of two pomegranates in a wooden bowl. The longer we were together, though, the less he painted. He kept an easel in his bedroom, and one night as we lay in bed, he told me he hated the thing. "When we're having sex," he said, "all I can think about is what I should be painting. And whenever I try to paint, I end up thinking about sex." I told him that he was probably not atypical for a man, but he did not see the humor.

We stopped seeing each other quite simply: we just stopped. "Have you seen Phil?" my parents would ask. No, I had not.

That was it. There seemed to be several more words on the page, but Ophelia had crossed them out with strokes of heavy ink. I closed the notebook and reclined my seat. I found myself thinking about Ellen--Miss Orange County--and how she could draw anything. I wondered if she was happy. I hoped she was. I hoped Phil was, too.