Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 11 - Jameson's Fountainhead

Photo by Mukul Wadhwa on Unsplash

It was time for a change, Gordon knew.  But he’d stagnated so long, either unable or simply unwilling to relinquish his grief, that he didn’t know if change was even possible anymore.

He sat at the tiny round table in his tiny square kitchen, unemployed for a grand total of only seven hours.  That was a change, at least, albeit one he didn’t expect.   

He felt more lost than ever before, even when he lost his wife.

At least in those first days after Marie died there was bittersweet happiness mixed with his grief.  It was impossible not to smile when his memories of Marie were still so fresh and abundant.  Even as he mourned her death those many years ago, he’d see her face sliding into his psyche.  He’d see their wedding day and their wedding night. He’d see the long yellow dress she wore when he handed her the key to Hewing Grocery after they’d signed the papers and entered the store for the first time as owners.  He could recall every vein and wrinkle on her hands and holding them in the dark of a movie theater.  He’d remember her terrible singing voice, and yet she’d sing all the louder to make him laugh.  She was gone then but still felt so close.

But no more.  Forty years, gone, and yet he’d never moved on.  It was entirely his fault. 

“All a waste,” Gordon said and tapped the handle of his tiny tea mug.  “This whole damn life. All a waste.”

He’d brewed a cup of plain Lipton tea earlier, taken the first sip too quickly, and scalded the side of his tongue. As he now sat waiting for his drink to properly cool, he couldn’t stop rubbing his tongue against the inside of his cheek.  

Sitting in silence for so many hours he saw the imperfections all around him now more clearly than ever. Would those imperfections he now saw still be there had Marie not died?  Would those defects have still appeared if Marie was still with him once the store closed? 

Perhaps, had Marie lived, together they would have ventured to new vistas outside of Burkett.  Instead, Gordon stayed — not really living — amongst the grief and mourning.  

Forty years.

He looked at the frayed cabinet edges, and how all but one of the cabinet doors sagged from their hinges.  How had he never seen that before, how old everything looked?  He noticed a groove in the linoleum floor that he didn’t realize was there, where the pattern was worn smooth between the refrigerator and stove, and another groove between his sink and the cabinet where he kept most of the dishes.  How many years had it taken for those parts of the floor to be sanded away beneath his feet?  

In the upper corners of the room, cobwebs had returned, and at the baseboards, the painted wood had faded to a near-colorless beige.  Even the table at which he now sat wobbled at the slightest touch.  The dinginess of it all was now uncomfortably clear.

It was yet more to regret upon a mountain of regrets.  No, not just a mountain, but a range of mountains, running in all directions with insurmountable peaks of lost opportunities, lost chances, and remorse.  Regret ran endlessly in every direction and Gordon felt at that moment that perhaps there was no escape from any of it.

Why had he held onto Hewing Grocery after Marie died, pouring what pittance of a life insurance policy she had into life support for that blasted store?  Why did they ever think they could make the store work in the first place, anyway?  Why did Marie bother to marry someone like Gordon, with his always protruding gut and obviously limited ambitions?  Why would she marry someone who would resign himself to forty years working for the very company that destroyed all his pathetic dreams? Their pathetic dreams.  Why did he stay in this house long after Marie was gone? 

Why hadn’t he moved somewhere, like Florida, perhaps, away from all this cold?  Sell this house with its stupid mortgage that still wasn’t paid for after all this time, after refinancing so many times and basically starting over for no reason at all?  He could have moved somewhere warm, near the water, and lived in a tiny apartment — because really did he need more than that? He could have spent the last four decades working on local charter boats, helping tourists reel in the catches and cleaning their fish for tips.  

If not Florida, then there were forests and countries and lakes and cities he could have visited, had the money been there. But the truth is he wouldn’t have. He never wanted to go anywhere alone.  What would be the point if he couldn’t go with Marie?  Without Marie, he had no vision.  

Instead, he stayed all these years in this deathtrap of a house where traffic sped up and down the road outside, where there were metal bars on most of the homes on his street and alarm systems that Gordon couldn’t afford. All he could afford was grief, and he had that in spades.

“What should I do, Marie?” he asked out loud.  

The S-word had come to his mind more times that afternoon than it had all the years since his wife died.  In those months after burying Marie, sleeping next to the void she’d left in their bed, there had been moments when the loneliness and loss were unrelenting weights that wouldn’t stop bearing down and he seriously considered taking the fast way out.  

The thing that stopped him then was that he wasn’t so sure that the fast way would be all that easy.  He didn’t pretend back then to know where someone ended up after they offed themselves, but he had a pretty good idea of it, and that was the only place he wanted to avoid more than where he was after first becoming a widower.

But now?  

He pushed his chair away from the table and retrieved a framed photo of their wedding day that he kept on his bedside table.  Its once silver frame had grown dark gray and tarnished over the years.

Returning to the kitchen, he propped the frame upon the table and stared at the picture.  Marie didn’t look much different in the photo than she did a year before she died.  Before she got sick.  Next to her in the photo, wearing his tuxedo and broad smile, Gordon still had a full head of hair back then, and only the slightest sign of the rotund gut that would later accompany his admittedly bad combover.

“What do I do, Marie?” he asked the photograph.  “What would you do?”  

An out-of-the-ordinary thought slipped into his mind.  

Start small. 

Then there was another unexpected thought.

He hadn’t been to the movies in a while.  Again, he wasn’t much of a fan.  

But when life at Hewing Grocery was too hectic, when they’d close and lock the doors and sigh heavily after a difficult day, Marie would flirt and cozy up to him.

“Take me to a movie, Gordon,” she’d ask sweetly.  “Take me to a movie and hold my hand in the dark.”

And Gordon, eternally vulnerable to her wiles, would gladly relent.  They’d go to a movie, and perhaps share popcorn, or stop for ice cream afterward, and often make love after that.  So very long ago.

About half a mile down the road at the end of Maplethorpe Avenue, the now dilapidated movie theater was still in operation in the nearly abandoned strip mall that surrounded it.

He hadn’t had the paper delivered in years.  Couldn’t afford to.  Likewise, his cell phone was month-to-month, the most basic plan of the bunch, and he’d never had much interest in or need for a computer.  Therefore, Gordon didn’t have a way to check movie times, even if he did want to go see a film and reminisce about simpler times with Marie.

The sky outside was turning orange.  Gordon brought his cup of tea to the window and peered through.  Cars passed his house on Maplethorpe Avenue.  The homes he could see were awash in shadows.  

“Take me to a movie tonight, Marie?” he spoke out loud to no one.

Without another thought, Gordon set his cup on the table, locked the door behind him, and started walking.  When he arrived at the theater’s ticket booth, he wasn’t even sure how to proceed.

“One, please,” he told the pimply-faced teen behind the glass.

“Which movie?”

“Which one starts next?”

“Jameson’s Fountainhead starts in five minutes,” the teen said.

“That’s a good one?” Gordon asked.

“That’s the one that starts next,” the kid answered.

The inside of the theater was worse than he remembered.  It was too cold, and even though it was humid outside, the sky rippling with the threat of a storm, the humidity from the theater’s air conditioner made him frigid.  He wished he’d brought a sweater.

“What am I doing here?” he mumbled. 

Instinctively, he moved to the seats on the far right, where Marie liked to sit all those years before.  He found three open seats and took the one in the middle, sitting down at the moment the lights went dark.  He rubbed his arms and shivered.

Two trailers played, followed by a commercial inviting him to buy popcorn and a Coke.  The theater was surprisingly full, and Gordon had a fearful thought that maybe some of his recently former co-workers may be there.  He felt like a stranger in a strange land, though he lived just a half mile down the street.

Gordon immediately regretted this spontaneous decision and slunk down lower in his seat.

He tried his best to follow along — something about a divorced advertising executive arranging a road trip with his two kids and estranged wife — but Gordon couldn’t stop thinking about Florida.  

Florida?

The thought first came to him that afternoon, amidst all of his other regrets.  Why hadn’t he taken chances after losing Marie? Why hadn’t he taken control of his life?  

An even more pressing question came to him then: is it really too late, or is there still time?

Florida.  

He’d never even been there, and certainly didn’t know one part of the state from the other.  He knew Cape Canaveral and Disney World were somewhere in the middle, and Miami and Key West were at the very bottom.  But where would he even go if he actually wanted to go there?

He was seventy-two years old. This was a terrible idea.

But terrible or not, there was a question that suddenly demanded an answer.

He didn’t need his house.  Not really.  He still had a mortgage, but there had to be some equity in the place, surely.  Could he live off of that? What if he just sold the house and moved south?  How many years did he have left, anyway?  He knew how to live on the cheap.  Why not do it somewhere not haunted by forty years of loneliness and grief?

As the credits started to roll, Gordon couldn’t even remember the main character’s name.  At some point during the movie, he made a decision without fully realizing it.  

He wasn’t wanted in Burkett?  He didn’t have a life here?  Fine.  He’d go somewhere else.  

He walked out of the theater and realized he was actually smiling, which made him want to smile even more.  He crossed the road at the end of the parking lot and headed down Maplethorpe Avenue toward home.  

“Am I really going to do this?” he asked himself as he passed in front of the closed gas station on the corner. He nodded his head in affirmation.  “I think I am.”

It was at that moment that he heard a woman scream.  His smile melted instantly.  

The sound had come from behind the station, at the end of a narrow darkened alley running between the service station doors and a tall wooden fence.  Gordon looked back toward the theater where the parking lot had already emptied from the day’s last showtimes.  Ahead of him, Maplethorpe Avenue’s sidewalks were deserted in both directions, yet the streets were racing with traffic.

Should he wave someone down to help?  Who would stop? No one, of course.

Then he heard another scream, distinct and fearful, from behind the gas station.  It was a woman’s scream, shrieking in horror. After that came a third, this one more prolonged and hanging in the air as if suspended and floating with the heaviness of the storm clouds that had gathered in the sky above while he was in the theater.

Gordon looked both ways on the street and thought about crossing.  Should he run away or should he investigate the scream? He’d lost his job earlier that day for getting involved where he wasn’t wanted. 

He saw an opening to his left that would get him halfway across the street.  Bracing himself, he ran to the double yellow lines in the middle of the road.  To his right several cars bore down in his direction, then passed, opening up another gap.  He raced again, a driver in a pickup truck bleating out a honking warning just as Gordon reached the sidewalk on the other side where he was now met with silence from the direction of the gas station.

“What am I doing?” Gordon said, as he bent over to catch his breath.  He looked back across the street, back towards the gas station.  Gordon shook his head, stood up straight, and dodged traffic to cross back over to the gas station.

Back across, his face now dripped with sweat as he walked toward the pumps. The hum of lights above him buzzed like a gnat in his ear. He edged around the corner into the alley entrance next to a large green dumpster that teemed with stench and flies.

“You okay back there?” Gordon called into the darkened alley beyond the dumpster. 

Further back at the rear corner was a locked chain link fence overgrown with ivy that cordoned off the rear of the gas station.  Gordon looked back toward the cars sweeping back and forth along Maplethorpe Avenue and wished those street lights were brighter.  He walked past the dumpster, into the shadows and the black.

“Hello?” he called out.  “Anyone there?”

There was a clinking sound behind the ivy-covered fence, followed by the crash and breaking of a bottle.  He thought he heard a whimper, followed by suppressed laughter and Gordon recalled the previous Friday when he was balancing his checkbook at the kitchen table and heard similar noises outside in his carport.

“Hello?” he called out again.

He remembered his thought that maybe he should buy a gun. 

Photo by Mario Scheibl on Unsplash