Fonda and the Cunning Fennec Fox- Conclusion

24 April 2014

0829 hrs

            Well, Patient Reader, here we are again.

            Below these words lies the conclusion to Fonda and the Cunning Fennec Fox, as promised..  But you already know that if you read the blue title up there.  

            So without further delay, I present to you the Rest of It.  Are you ready?  Splendid!

Fonda and the Cunning Fennec Fox

Conclusion

            Fonda and I desired one another, and we reveled in the desiring, and in the being-ness of it. 

            I stood there in the garden; a woman wept before me.  I searched for the words I needed to say.  I searched for the words she needed to hear; I searched for words that reconciled our needs.  All she said while weeping onto my chest was my name, tasting it warm and sweet in her mouth: “Fox . . .  Fox . . . Fox . . .”

            I murmured words like, “OK . . .  alright . . .” I held her in my arms and kept her warm and safe from everything that was outside her body.  I could not save her from the ravages of the Fonda inside her.  Her traitorous lungs; her wounded heart.

            We were in love with each other.  It had happened, somehow.  We had both crossed a threshold without realizing it.  She in her disbelief and I in my reluctance.  I was not worthy of Fonda and she could not see that.  She saw in me my potential but was blind to my inertia; simply put, it was too much work to move toward her heart.

            We drove back to campus; drove back to her home away from home, and, I realized, the adage applied to me as well.  Here was the place she and I spent fully a third of our lives, sometimes more, and we were restless and caged like the animals we all are.

            That was the only time I saw Fonda weep.

            She sat next to me on the bench seat of my truck.  She rested her head on my shoulder and snuggled up comfortably to my heart, where she fit like a jigsaw piece.

            She had reassembled herself, and I could crane my neck and see her, beautiful as sunset, in my rear-view mirror. 

            My heart rumbled restlessly; my mind was horrified.

            Then there was a September too beautiful for the following to occur:  “We should move in together,” she said.  “I love you, you love me- we could make it work . . .”

            I was overjoyed (yes, Patient Reader . . .  there was a time I felt joy, even overjoy . . .)

            Together, we were unstoppable; a whirlwind; a juggernaut.  Beautiful and brilliant as Deneb, she could banish the shadows of my very dark, dense neutron star.

            And I would shower her with . . .  with what?  What could I give her that would keep her here with me?  What could I give her that she could take and still keep her will to live?

            What could she get from me that all the others could not?  All of them got the very best of me until they did not.  I am the perfect mate until I’m not.  I am everything a woman wants in a man until they change their minds.

            People leave me.  It’s a fact.  If you could hear the tone of the narration in my head as I type this, Patient Reader, you would know that I am not whining as I say this.  I am simply stating a fact.  People leave all of us, all of the time.  We are a gregarious animal, Man, and we seek the solace and the comfort of one another until we do not, and then we break relationships like the fragile glass bubbles that we are.  Not one of us has kept every friend or lover or well-met fellow in our lives, and even the ones we choose forever leave.  Or we leave them.  Loss and Death; two of the Stages of Life. 

            The hottest of suns burn bright and die, as will our heroine, leaving behind the cooling cinder of that dense neutron star, as is our hero.

            Arteries in mothers’ heads explode while the now-ungrounded fathers put cigarettes out on their children.  They push them through shower doors with glass raining down like hatred.  They ask their fourteen-year-old sons if they ever thought they might have caused their mother’s stroke.

           Sometimes those sons pass the night holding a pistol to the sleeping father’s face, trying very hard, excruciatingly so, to find one good reason not to blow that fucker’s brains out.  And after an eternity, that boy only finds two completely different reasons.

            1:  The explosion of the gunshot would startle and terrify the mother, already infirm in the hospital bed on the other side of the boy,

  

          2:  The fatigue that settled into the boy’s arm and shoulder as he kept that pistol raised through a good chunk of the night, thinking.

   

         These two reasons are what might keep a father alive long enough to die from his vices at fifty.

    

        We drink liquor because it’s medicine and we trick ourselves, beguile ourselves to its healing properties; this panacea that allows us to feel good . . . or maybe nothing at all.  Numb is always better than pain, and there are times in each of our lives, where those are the only choices we get.

           We stab the disrespectful, nearly gutting them before our buddies, horrified, push us into a ride that turns into a getaway.  We speed off hoping that no one got the plate number; we wonder what the big deal is while our friends around us fret and their terror incrementally slides over to anger.  Fucking ASShole are words that might come from their mouths.

     

       We make love until there is the realization that love has as many definitions as there are people to define it and then we realize that love has infinite definitions which means it has no definition at all and if something has no definition at all then that means it does not, cannot, exist, and if something with no definition cannot exist well, then we come to the realization that love does not exist.  And so who are you to believe in me?  Who are you to believe in US?

            Who are you to tell me that it will work when it never does?  I’m not falling for that seventeen times in a row . . .

            I never laid a hand on a woman in anger . . .  I never needed to. 

            Symbolically, metaphorically, literally, I turned my back to Fonda and her words and stared out the window.  I felt her words sting and slap and burn as they left her mouth at 1100 feet per second and slammed into my heart.

            The Easter Seals Clinic was across the street next to the Ronald McDonald House.  I remember when the clinic had the politically correct name, “Crippled Children’s Clinic.”  Nice, huh?  We should all, every one of us, have gotten in line.  Because we all are, every one of us, Crippled Children.

            You fucking tell me I’m wrong.

            “I love you too, Fonda,” said I to the window, the cool glass fogging, “So very much . . .”

People out the three floor down on the street, walking about their busy day, living and dying.

            “ . . . But how much longer do you have?”

            She turned on her heel; I heard it and saw it reflected in the window.  I was there and I watched her wounded heart leave.  

   

            I saw Fonda twice more after that.  In January the following year, she came by my office.  She was so beautiful.  Neither of us spoke of her previous visit. 

            I told her I was getting married the following month, on Leap Day, and she seemed none-too-surprised. 

            Without telling her, she knew that all I was doing was filling the hole in my heart wherein only she would fit.  Jigsaw, remember? 

            Without skipping a beat she asked, “Am I invited?”

            I was stunned.  I am never stunned.  “Of course you are,” my head all fuzzy and light. 

            Neither my first wife, Shmaren, nor I loved one another.  She was in love with the idea of marriage and I needed to forget about the way I wound the world.

            I needed the Chaos of this world to drown the order of Fonda’s.

            I gave Fonda one of the extra invitations I kept in my desk drawer.  Shmaren had over 400 guests coming:  I had less than twenty.  I was handing them out like typhus.

            We embraced for the last time, the apples in her hair still bright and green in my mind like a Granny Smith or a green apple Jolly Rancher.  Her light perfume . . .  her natural scent . . . these all lingered long after she left me the second time.  I smelled her out of my shirt when no one was looking, all the rest of the day.   

            After the wedding she came up to me, materializing out of that crowd of strangers.  Shmaren’s guests.

            “You left something out when you said your vows,” Fonda observed. 

            Actually, I left several things out:  That hole “Her Mother and I,” bullshit when the Preacher asks the father who gives the bride away.  That and, “Whatever God has joined together let no man put asunder . . .” What a crock of shit.

            Yes, Patient Reader, I was married in a church.  Not just a church, but on the campus of the Bible College where I, not too much later, received my theology diploma.

            Fonda was wearing a smart silk suit, soft light pink in color.  Her skirt just touched the tops of her knees and her heels were low enough to not be considered scandalous.  Her hear was perfectly done, with a twig of baby’s breath woven into it.  She was the most beautiful woman in Alabama.

            To which part, I wondered, was she referring?

            “The part where the preacher asks, ‘If there is anyone who objects to this wedding, speak now or forever hold your peace . . .’  I was going to stand up and object, right here in this church full of phony people and your phony wedding.”

I was stunned.  I am never stunned.

            “I am in love with you, Fox,” she continued, “and you are in love with me.  We belong together, and you won’t let me love you.” And she began to cry.  Softly, privately, but there were tears there, and I was the only one who knew her heart enough to know from whence those tears came. 

            Well, what the hell could I say?  That everyone leaves?  Everyone leaves me?  That whole crazy speech you, Patient Reader, read earlier in the post?  Fuck no.

            Tell her that I am too much to bear?  That I will only be her favorite haunting demon?  That I will be her very best mistake?  That she was in love with a ghost?

            I could have given her a thousand reasons why we would have never worked, and every single one of them would have been a lie.  I wanted her more than life itself.  She was life.  I needed her more than the oxygen burning within my cells.  We did belong together. That much was true. 

       My love for her, squeezed out of my heart so completely that her cup would have spilled over, leaving all that overflowed to come back to me.  A love like that, were I to only hand it over, would show the IS that I deserved her.

            But that was fantasy.  That’s a fairy tale, or one of those fucked-up cookie-cutter romantic comedy bullshit movies.  You know, boy meets girl, boy and girl are happy for the middle third of the movie, then the last third is comprised of some stupid misunderstanding and a tearful break-up and then John Cusack holds a ghetto blaster above his head and Peter Gabriel’s voice rings out across the morning . . .  Yeah . . .  I’m that old.

            How could I tell her that I was scared?  That the phenomenon of Fonda was more terrifying to me than any sickness I had ever read about or witnessed?  She held all of the cards.  She was in control.  She held the reins of my wild heart.  We were too late . . .

            The cold stones of her eyes, those aquamarines, bright and hopeful, dark and disappointed.  They filled with tears another at the reception would have seen as joy for me and my new wife.  But they were the clear and bright blue of the sad Sargasso Sea.  The place where eels are born.  The shark pools.  Barracuda.  Pain . . .

            Her harpoons they pierced me, and I bled into the yawning space between us.

            Even in her hatred of my cowardice; in her loathing of the weakness in me, there was no other word to describe her, my love, than beautiful.

            She could slay me with one look born from pain, and to be with me would harden her face into a grimace of agony.  I would have turned her into ugliness.

            For all of that ugliness she saw laid forth from my own spilling heart, it was only my love for her I saw reflected in the pure pools of her eyes.  I sipped form them this new wine; tasted the salvation of myself in the tears that were exactly as salty as the sea. 

            Her love for me was too great and I could not bear the weight of her dreams.  She believed in me too much.

            I found out in 2012 that Fonda had died in 1997.  She was the ripe old age of twenty-seven- a veritable elder in the CF community. 

            So I stand outside her door in the mansion of my memory, my flushed and florid face cooled against the bright blue wood.  I find I have stepped from her room, back into the corridor of the here and now, and my heart is . . . well, enough about my heart.

            I see the door recede as I back away- blue and cool/warm against the red walls of the wing in which she rests.  I hope I did not do her a disservice with this story.  I portrayed her as accurately as I could.  A person who changed me so profoundly 23 years ago. 

            I had loved someone, Once Upon A Time.

            Thank you, Patient Reader.  Thank you for reading this and not getting so bored you gave up. 

            Thank you for not only allowing me to tell this tale, but for sticking around long enough to see it out.  

            So I must leave you to your day and go about my own.  I'll be back on the rants that some of you may be missing.  I apologize to those of you who find these stories too . . . blech . . . and simply need me to get back to raging against the machine.  Don't worry:  I have plenty to say. 

Always I remain,

The Cunning Fennec Fox