Missing her already
I sit in the car as she waits for the doorman to flag down a cab.
She is a blur for the pounding rain.
Yet even from across the street I can tell that her smudged makeup is not from the raindrops, but from tears.
I pity the doorman who has become drenched with the failed effort to get a cab, though at the same time I hope he can’t find one for a while.
I need this last look at her before she steps out of my life forever.
Hollywood and the silver screen calls her like a siren, with me a frustrated Odysseus strapped to the mast of a doomed ship in New York
Madison Avenue is my beat and it doesn’t run into Hollywood Boulevard anywhere.
She can’t stay, feeling too cramped by the Broadway stage.
I don’t blame her.
You have to grab what life has to offer or regret it for an eternity.
Yet I feel so empty inside – with a gap a mile wide she once filled.
The gray day doesn’t help, leaving me with a mood of despair inside and out.
The radio is worse, playing song after song with “miss you” as the predominant theme.
I flick it off and listen to the drumming fingers of rain on the roof of my car.
The cab comes. She waits until her bags are stowed in the trunk then rushes from under the awning to take her place in the back seat.
I see the glow of her blonde hair fade for half a black, then watch until the cab fades before my head falls forward onto the steering wheel.
A tap taps on the glass.
I roll down the window and see a drenched cop telling me I need to move my car.
I want to give him a hard time.
I want him to lock me up so I can’t obey the urge go chase after her and beg her one more time not to go.
Instead, I nod, start the engine, drive the car to the first legal space I find, then I notice the blinking tavern light, each blink matching the dull throb of pain in me.
I miss her already, I think, quoting one of the stupid songs from the radio.
Then I climb out of the car and head for the bar to get drunk.