Thursday, June 19, 2014

An Unexcused Absence

It’s not right, it’s completely not right, and if I weren’t absolutely schooled in grief, bereavement and loss, I wouldn’t take it.
“I’m going to go on a hunger strike until you return,” I tell Lady, who has the temerity to wander off to France for a month, for no good reason except that her husband is French and her daughter is half-French. Soooooo?
“Montalvo, are you going to join me in the hunger strike?” He’s joined us, my young son and less-than-accomplished parrot purloiner, in walking Lady home, since we’re savoring the farewell.
“I don’t think so,” says Montalvo.
“Not the right answer,” I tell him, “and if you’re going to be my son, you’ve got to know when I’m talking nonsense, which is most of the time.”
“Yes, Father,” he says.
“Father? That’s what he calls you? I like that….”
“So do I,” I tell her. She’s leaving for a month in three hours, and has she packed? Of course not!
“It’s a clear sign that you’re ambivalent,” I tell her. “It also completely portends that you shouldn’t go. Montalvo, kidnap Lady.”
“OK, Dad….” He’s picking it up nicely.
“Well, they have stores in France,” I tell her.
“Yes, but you need francs.”
Well, I don’t have francs but I do have—thanks, Taí—one Trinidad and Tobago dollar, as well as 40 Eastern Caribbean dollars. So I give her those, and she asks how long they have been traveling in my wallet. Over a decade.
“Hey, that’s wonderful! It’s got your energy! So every time I’m missing you, I’ll just take out the money and smell you….”
“It won’t be the same,” I tell her. I’m still having a hard time with it….
“Hey, can I take your backpack with me? It would be perfect for a carry-on….”
Right—so yesterday she had invited me to France—“hey, why don’t you come to France with us…”—and now it’s my backpack. And how is my computer supposed to get home?
So we unload the backpack, discovering an uneaten cookie from March of 2013 (I know this because the cookie was accompanied by a playbill), and guess what? In over a year, the cookie was miraculously unscathed by any passing microbe. Should I eat it? I decide no….
And now Lady is telling us about her mother, who had given her a manila envelope to open on the plane, since Lady was having major anxiety even thinking about boarding the plane, much less being trapped in it for eight hours. So what was in the envelope?
“It was filled with clippings of airplane crashes! Can you believe it? There wasn’t even a little note inside! She did it to get me to overcome my fear!”
“One tough bitch,” says Montalvo, admiringly.
“It’s simple,” I tell him. “We go to the hardware store, buy a padlock, and put it on the gate to their apartment building.”
“But then we’ll trap everybody in the building,” he points out.
“Not a problem—we can throw hummus wraps up at their balconies,” I say. I learned to think on my feet at Wal-Mart.
So now we’re at her apartment building and does she have her keys? Of course not, but she does her cell phone, as well as her husband in his underpants at home. So he comes down, and I take a good look at him, since how often do you see Frenchmen in their underpants? OK, maybe you do—and I bet Lady does—but I don’t….
“The fact that you don’t have your keys is a clear indication—as well as a major portent—of your ambivalence. You definitely shouldn’t go to France.”
“Don’t stop saying that,” she cries, and then tries to get us to believe that she meant, “Don’t! Stop saying that!” Ha! Montalvo and I aren’t buying it.
“What’s ambivalence?” asks Montalvo, a definite candidate for vocabularial supplementation. So we jog through the park of “ambi” words, and then begin to make up new words.
“Ambisexual,” I tell him. “There definitely should be an ‘ambisexual.’”
“But what would it mean?”
“Of both sexes,” I tell him. And then we meet Carlos, in full pirate regalia, who invites us to join him in his piratical pursuits: some days he makes ten bucks!
“I still can’t believe what Nico told me,” says Montalvo, “back there when we were saying goodbye.”
“What was that?”
“So I’m kissing Lady, and giving her your backpack and what does Nico say? He looks at me and says, ‘Don’t get arrested!’ Son of a bitch! I want to kick him in the face, the bastard.”
I can’t help laugh, and then consider—would a good father do that? So I throw him a bone.
“Don’t worry,” I tell him.
“He can’t help it,” I say.
“He’s just French….”


Can you believe it? Lady deserted us for THIS???


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