Imagine what it means to be happily
married. Imagine a beautiful wife. Not the
model type, but a wonderful smile, a ready
laugh and, most importantly, her belief that
you are truly the man for her.
Add to this a plenty large house, a
more than comfortable income, and children
of which you can be rightly proud.
And when I say happily married, I’m
not talking simply content. I’m talking about
the kind of relationship by which your friends
judge their own romances and intendeds, and
always fall short.
Also imagine that this woman, we’ll
call her "Emma" to protect her from further
grief, has a fulfilling part-time job, so she isn’t
at all co-dependent and is a lively, interesting
conversationalist. Even after ten years of
marriage.
And the sex (Everyone always asks
about the sex!) is almost exhaustingly good.
Now, as healthy as this relationship
sounds, it was nothing close to what I had and
what I lost with one seemingly simple, but
apparently very damaging question.
‘The question?’ you ask. I guess
that’s the right place to start.
- - -
I suppose I was basking in the glow
of having left the house the morning after a
tender evening of late-night lovemaking. And
who would expect to be confronted with a seer
at the train station? At least not one without
religious flyers. And who would expect the
seer to be a little child, or at least start that
way? But let me tell the story as it happened.
I was walking to the train station, just
three blocks from my house. At the corner of
the station, where I cross the tracks, there was
a small girl, about eight years old, with a
basket of flowers. Something daisy-like, but
not daisies. I can’t remember what type of
flower.
She said as I passed, "For a dollar, I
will answer any question you might have." I
smiled at her and she said, "Truly."
It was the ‘truly’ that got my attention,
and feeling as good as I did and the sun
shining so warmly, I thought ‘what the heck.’
So I took out a dollar and handed it to her.
She pulled out one of her non-daisies and
said, "Go on, ask me anything. But only one
question."
As I said, I do not know why I really
asked the question I asked, but I did. Once
asked, and once answered, it could not be
unasked. I asked, "Who is the one for me?"
Suddenly I noticed that the
eight-year-old girl was actually a tiny, aged
woman, with eyes that shone cold as glass.
Surely, I could not have been so mistaken!
She seemed to change in front of my face! I
was a little taken aback, but was really trying to
figure out how I could have mistaken her for a
child. Was I that inattentive? She handed me
the flower, or at least I think she did, since I
was holding the flower when I got on the train.
She said, "Rachel Juliette Ludlow."
I was still a little stunned by her
transformation, and a little disappointed that
my charity had fallen into the hands of an old
woman instead of the young girl for which it
had been intended, that I simply furrowed my
brows at her and walked across the tracks to
the train stop.
The train came soon thereafter and,
once I found a seat, I noticed that I was
holding the non-daisy. I left it on the seat as I
exited downtown.
On a lark at lunchtime, I opened the
phone book and looked under Ludlow. There
were five entries, only two were
non-businesses and both were male names.
I put the phone book down and chuckled to
myself for even looking.
Later on, while I was searching for
something else on the web, I typed in ‘Rachel,
Ludlow,’ and was rewarded with two returns.
One was for a Rachel J. Ludlow in South
Carolina. The entry listed her address and
her phone number. A sudden cold shiver
went through me and I signed off and started
working on something else, trying to get my
mind off what I considered a creepy
coincidence.
Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence, I
thought to myself on the train ride home.
Maybe this old woman used to live in South
Carolina and had heard the name "Rachel
Juliette Ludlow" and thought she would give
me that name in response to my unexpected
question. Maybe she was just playing a joke
on me. Or maybe she was related to this
Rachel Juliette Ludlow. Her mother perhaps,
and wanted to see her happily married. Or
maybe it was just a lucky guess, her giving me
a fictitious name that came up on the internet.
Or, more precisely, almost came up on the
web. Probably, the Rachel Ludlow I located
had a middle name of ‘Judy,’ ‘June,’ or ‘Jill.’ I
wracked my brain for other "J" names it could
be. By the time I got home I had decided that
the whole episode was entertaining enough to
relate to my wife after the kids had gone to
bed.
A big mistake.
"Why did you ask that question?" she
asked. Her usual good mood had been
shattered.
I shrugged. "I don’t know," I said. I told
her about "basking in the glow" of our
relationship.
She shook her head at me, obviously
disappointed. "I still don’t get it. What answer
were you expecting?"
"I dunno," I repeated, wishing I had
never brought it up. "Not a name. Certainly
not a name I would find on the internet. Maybe
your name. Maybe the name of someone
famous. But certainly not-" She had started to
cry. "What?" I asked as tenderly as I could
manage.
"Forget it," she said.
"No," I said. "What?"
She stifled her tears and looked me
right in the eyes. "Why did you have to ask that
question, of all questions?"
"I told you," I responded, "because I
already knew the answer. Because the
answer is you. You are the one that’s best for
me. It can’t be this Rachel Juliette Ludlow or
anyone else. Because it’s you!"
This seemed to pacify her, for the
moment, but after we hugged and turned on
the television to see what was on, she said
softly, "Hubris."
I had learned from my earlier error that
evening and said nothing.
- - -
"Call her," said my friend Brian.
"No way," I said. "Not a chance."
"You have to call," he said, "or you will
never know if her middle name is Juliette."
"I don’t want to know," I said. "I don’t
care."
"Sure you don’t," he said, then he
smiled mischievously, and added, "If you
don’t, I will."
"If you do, I’ll kill you."
Later that night, as he was saying
goodbye to Emma, he turned to me and said,
"I will." I glared at him and awaited Emma’s
expected question, but she either did not hear
his comment, or was not at all curious.
I mouthed to Brian, "I’ll kill you!"
The next day at the office, Brian called
me. "It’s Juliette," he said. I swore so loud that
my assistant started and looked up from his
work.
"You called her?" I asked, surprised,
angry, and, of course, very curious.
"Uh huh," he acknowledged. "And
she sounded nice." Then he added, "though a
little suspicious."
"Then what?"
"Then what what?"
"Then what did you do?"
"I said ‘thanks’ and hung up."
"I am going to kill you," I said. I did not
know at the time that he was lying. He hadn’t
called her; he had not even searched for her
on the internet. It was his idea of a joke and,
had the subject been a lesser one and the
outcome happier, I would have laughed out
loud when I learned the truth. But by then,
since it took me over a week to learn that he
was simply being mischievous, I had lost my
ability to find humor in his misguided joke.
That night at dinner, while Emma was
cutting up a pork chop for our three-year old, I
was mulling over my options. I was not
weighing the advantages of calling her, for I
knew that I would, but how I should make the
initial contact. I still believed that the seer’s
pronouncement was simply a matter of a lucky
guess or of parroting a name she had heard
or been associated with in her past. But I
knew that I would always wonder about
Rachel if I did not meet her and, I was hoping,
discover the connection between her and the
seer.
It took me a second to realize that my
wife had asked me a question. I glanced at
her and she asked, "What are you so deep in
thought about?" Then she quickly added with
no attempt to hide her bitterness, "As if I didn’t
know."
- - -
"Hello?" The voice was a little shriller
than I had expected. I hung up the phone.
I called back a few minutes later. Still
the unexpectedly shrill voice, but this time a
little warier, "Hello?"
"Uh... hi," I offered weakly.
Now she was on her guard, "Who is
this? What do you want?" I remember her
slight hostility was unsettling, as if it were
undeservedly harsh. How could she know
that this call was anything but a normal phone
call? And if she expected it were out of the
ordinary, she seemed to make up her mind
that it was an intrusion with too little evidence,
I felt.
Unprepared for this conversation,
though I had made this phone call many times
in my head, I began to tell her the truth. "My
name is Jacob Bell. I was walking to work
one day-"
"Benjamin?" she gasped.
Had my heart stopped? Had my
breath and voice caught in my throat? I do not
know.
She asked again, "Benjamin?"
I nodded. Soon realizing that she
could not hear my nod, I said, so softly she
probably understood it without even hearing it,
"Yes."
Benjamin is my middle name.
- - -
She had met the same seer. Or
another of that ilk, since hers was first a boy,
who became an old man, and had given her
an iris, which withered before she got it to
water.
During that phone call, I did not
ascertain why she had asked the seer the
same question. I actually did little more than
listen to her tale. How she was walking to the
post office and passed the seer and asked
her question and had gotten my name as an
answer. She had received her answer and
flower for free. Also, unlike me, she had done
nothing after hearing my name. She had
shrugged it off as the rantings of an odd old
man and had it not been for the fact that the
man was a child at first glance, she would
have thought nothing of it at all. Maybe not
even remember the name the man gave her.
I also learned that she was not
currently and had never been married.
I called her again the next day, as
soon as I got into the office. "Perhaps, we are
the brunt of someone’s joke," I offered lightly,
hopefully.
"I thought the same thing all last
night," she said. "But I have never been to the
East Coast, nor do I know anyone on the East
Coast." She was obviously fastidious in her
thinking. "In fact," she continued, "I know so
very few people and none that I could even
imagine to play a joke such as this one."
Another bad sign that I missed at the time.
We tried to find a connection, even a
tenuous one, between our lives or our
circumstances. There was, in our combined
estimation, none.
I learned, during that conversation,
that she was sure fate had brought us
together. I remember thinking that it would be
easier for her to believe that than I, since she
was unmarried, had no children, and stood to
gain more from being pushed toward me than
I towards her.
- - -
I planned a trip to see Rachel over the
upcoming weekend. My wife had passed this
escapade off as some horrid phase I was
going through and hoped that it would soon
end. My friend Brian, who normally came to
dinner every Friday evening and might have
found a way to put an end to my folly, was
away on business and not expected until the
following Friday. (At which time I learned he
had lied about calling Rachel.) My wife
wished me goodbye that Saturday morning
with such a coldness that I knew -– and yet
still continued on my journey! – that our
relationship would never be the same and
would, in all likelihood, come to an end no
matter what happened between Rachel and
myself.
Rachel met me at the gate. She was a
good five inches taller than I was (something I
hate in a woman!), overweight by at least
twenty pounds (another thing I hate in a
woman!), and so plain to look at that I
wondered why God had bothered to make
something so bland. She was as
unimpressed with me, I fear.
My opinion of her fell throughout the
visit. She had these elaborate rituals for
simple tasks, such as making tea, or even
getting ice from the freezer. Each took many
unnecessary steps, involved wiping her hands
several times and, between every few steps,
she would lose her train of thought, remaining
motionless for moments at a time (the habit I
hate most of all!). Add to this her obvious
disregard for my impatience with her
slowness and you can see how much
discomfort that afternoon caused us both.
As we parted happily (happily that we
could be away from each other!) a few short
hours later, I understood why she remained
unmarried.
What I could not understand, and
shuddered at the thought, was why she was
‘the one for me.’
Elliot was unsympathetic. "You are a
dickhead," he said thoughtfully. "Yup. That’s
the word. If ever anyone was a dickhead, it’s
you. That’s all there is to it."
Elliot, or as he is known in our small
circle ‘Mr. Cholesterol,’ is overly-large and
never one to err on the side of tact. He is also
a really nice guy.
"You, my friend," he continued, "took
the American Dream and flushed it down the
toilet. Bet it all on one roll of the dice, and
came up snake eyes."
He was right. My home life was
miserable. Emma would hardly look at me.
The kids seemed poisoned against me for
hurting Mommy so. She had cried almost the
entire time I was in South Carolina, and since
she so infrequently cried, my transgression
was made that much worse.
It was Friday night and Brian, Elliot and
I were sitting around Elliot’s card table eating
pizza. Emma had ‘requested’ that Brian and
I go out for the evening. Or, more correctly,
asked Brian if he wouldn’t take his ‘friend’ out
of the house for a while. I had been relegated
from ‘husband’ to ‘friend of a friend.’ Not a
good sign.
I had already learned that Brian never
called Rachel. In fact, in front of Emma he
declared, "Do you think I would mess up your
relationship? Had I known you were
boneheaded enough to act on my little joke, I
would have never made it." To make matters
worse, he repeated it to Emma in almost
exactly the same words. "If I knew he was
boneheaded enough to act on it, I never would
have made that joke." It was not a comforting
moment.
"I’ve actually given it some thought,"
said Brian. "When Emma told me you went
to Ess Cee last weekend, I tried to get my
head around it. Here’s how I see it," he
began. Apparently, I had become a third
person in my buddies’ psychoanalytical
efforts. "You," he pointed at me, "are a loser."
Elliot cackled, spitting out a mouthful
of pizza as he did. I was too far into my own
misery to so much as flinch.
"Let me explain," continued Brian,
almost pedantically. "We all agree that this
seer of yours was the real deal. She named a
woman that you never knew and disguised
herself as a man and gave your name to this
Rachel creature. That’s convincing enough for
me. Okay so far?"
"Go ahead," I said. I was looking for
any advice at this point, even Brian’s
scatter-brained efforts. Elliot simply nodded to
Brian. He was enrapt.
"So if this seer is the real deal, then
this Rachel creature is the one for you. If
she’s the one for you and she is a loser, then
you," again he pointed at me, this time with a
piece of pizza in his pointing hand, "must be a
loser, too."
Elliot was obviously impressed by
Brian’s logic. He added, "They say for every
man there’s a woman. I guess Emma is not
the woman for a loser like you." They both
looked at each other, obviously pleased with
their tight assessment of my loser-dom.
For myself, I felt as though I were
having one of these dreams where you have a
loose tooth. You try to see how you can
secure it, since it’s the only tooth you get in
that spot, and you knock out a different tooth.
Now you have a missing tooth as well as a
loose tooth. So you try to secure both teeth
and then you knock out a third. This continues
until you have no teeth and wake up. In other
words, I was merely hoping that I would soon
wake up from the complete collapse of my life
from one simple error.
Throughout my reverie, my two pals
were still discussing my fate and any options I
had.
"-throw himself at Emma’s feet and
beg-"
"-see if he can make things work with
Rachel creature-"
"-visitation rights-"
"-try to find the seer-"
I looked up. "What?"
Brian was startled by my sudden
interest. "I just said," said Brian, "that maybe
you should try to go back and find that seer
again."
I leapt up from my chair, which fell
backwards with a crash. "If I didn’t want to
smash your head in right now," I exhalted, "I’d
kiss you!" I left the room in a hurry.
Three weeks later, camped out like a
bum at the train station and getting stares
from all the people I used to commute with
(not to mention having lost my job) I finally
caught sight of the flower girl again. She had
a basket of those non-daisies and was
standing at the far end of the platform,
precisely in the opposite corner to where I met
her originally.
I hurried over to her, pulling out the
dollar I had stashed in my pocket for this very
moment.
"Another question?" she asked. It was
the voice of an old woman, scratchy and
hissing, coming from a young girl’s face. She
seemed both condescending and
unsurprised.
I nodded. And then froze. The
question I had in my mind "Why did you do this
to me?" would in no way solve my plight or get
me my old life and wife back. If I asked her
"What should I do?" which was my runner-up
question, she might not give me the answer I
sought. She could answer pretty much
anything.
So, groping for a question, I handed
her the dollar, accepted her flower and once
again asked, "Who is the one for me?’
This time Emma couldn’t control her
rage. She slapped my face (pretty hard
actually) and screamed, "You asked the same
fucking question?!? You waited by the station
for three weeks, ignored your children, lost
your job, rotted like a common vagabond, and
asked the same fucking question?!?"
I nodded.
Suddenly she became sober. "You
know," she said softly, "until this very moment I
had a small piece of my heart left for you. A
small piece that grew a little bit every day you
waited by that station. A small piece of my
heart that grew just a fraction every time one of
our neighbors looked at me and shook their
head, embarrassed at you for my sake. A
small piece of my heart that almost warmed
when I secretly watched you, from under my
umbrella, as you sat by the station in the
middle of the night in the pouring rain.
"I thought you were giving up
everything for me. And the least I could do, I
thought, was to begin to forgive you." She
started to sob. Then yelled, more like
screeched, a sound straight from hell, "Then
you asked the same fucking question! Not
‘How do I win her back?’ Or ‘What can I do to
get things back to the way they were?’ No!
You had to ask the same fucking, fucking,
fucking -- Oh, I hate you!" Once more, she
slapped my face. This time so hard tears
came from my eyes.
"Do you want to know what she said?"
I asked as calmly as I could, though shaking
and on the verge of tears.
"No! I don’t give a fuck what she said!"
"You," I replied anyway. "She said
your full name. Even your middle name."
She literally collapsed onto the
ground, as if she were a puppet and someone
had cut her strings. She was shaking and
sobbing in a low, rolling moan. I sat down by
her and cradled her into my arms.
"It was you all along," I said softly.
"And I knew it. Yet I stupidly put it to the test.
Hubris. It was pure hubris. I was so happy
with you that I was willing to test fate. And fate
won. You were right. Hubris. Just stupid
hubris."
She returned my hug, limply, and we
both cried for what seemed like hours.
- - -
Emma and I are back together. The
kids once again love their Daddy and we live a
normal and mostly happy life. No one uses
us as the perfect couple anymore, and for
good reason. While things returned mostly to
normal, Emma never quite got over what she
called ‘The Rachel Episode.’ But we are
happy enough, and, certainly, happier than I
ever deserved to be again.
- - -
Folklore says that every man and
every woman has a perfect "other half." That
our goal in life, the secret to any possible
happiness, is finding that person. Weeding
that person out from the billions of choices in
hundreds of countries and settling down with
her, without letting anything get in our way.
The divorce rate and the level of
misery in this world prove, to many, that we
are falling short of our goal. But not to me.
Because who says that your perfect other, the
so-called ‘one for you,’ has anything to do with
happiness?
- - -
"I’ve got to know one thing," said
Brian, years later, after the children had left for
college and Emma was away helping
arrange for a nursing home for her ailing
Mother.
"What’s that?" I asked, looking at the
cards in my hand and trying to figure out how
many cards I needed for gin.
He took a sip of his drink and
swallowed. "I’ve been thinking about this one
a lot. A lot." He stared at me until I looked up
from my cards. "That second time you asked
the seer that question. You know, ‘Who is the
one for me?’ Did she really give your wife’s
name? "
I took a sip of my drink, picked up a
three of clubs, discarded a seven of spades,
and pointed to the two piles of cards on the
table in front of us. "Your turn," I said.
The End
© Copyright 2002 TheNoMonster (UN: nomonster at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
TheNoMonster has granted Writing.Com, its affiliates and syndicates non-exclusive rights to display this work.