PARADISE LOST

PARADISE LOST

Maggie knew she’d been speeding. Over ninety for miles now. Benjamin wouldn’t have liked that; he’d have feared for her life. But Benjamin wasn’t here, and she was already late for the gig, and besides, there weren’t any highway patrol cars out doing their job. Plus she’d only had the Monte Carlo for one week and still couldn’t get over how its curved, sleek thighs were speed incarnate. Mötley Crue rattled the speakers, causing her to butt-dance on the seat. Through the open window a hot wind blew.

The trouble was, she been looking for Paradise (who isn’t, she’d chuckled to herself, at first, before it wasn’t funny anymore) and still hadn’t seen a freeway sign. The familiar knot she often called stage fright was building up in her stomach; it suddenly wasn’t feeling quite like stage fright. Stage fright a person can do something about, like drive off a bridge. This, though, was more like fear—which of course stage fright was, too, but this fear was more like, God dammit, I’m actually lost. She hadn’t thought Paradise was this far, and if she’d known, she might not have taken the gig. Ratt was on now, but she cranked them down. Even though they were her current worship, they couldn’t compete with this feeling that was worse than stage fright.

There—way down the road—a sign. It didn’t look like a freeway sign;  it wasn’t green. And it was small—small and white, or dingy white, on a post. But coming closer, Maggie saw that it did say Paradise. ‘Paradise next right 2 mi.’ She braked hard and swerved onto the side road, which was directly behind the post and did not in any way resemble a freeway turnoff. What it resembled most was somebody’s driveway—somebody who couldn’t afford to fix the potholes and the cracked, sun-bleached asphalt. Somebody who was probably dead. Yellowed grass grew along the edges and even right up from the holes. 

The road trickled off toward the mountains, trailing its disconsolate way past a barn that was mostly fallen down. A sign on the barn was so weathered Maggie couldn’t read it, though it seemed like an election sign, for some candidate who was doubtless also dead. The knot worsened—the knot that wasn’t stage fright. Maggie wished to high heaven it was stage fright, because that would mean she had successfully found Paradise and then the Halo Lounge, and the guys would be setting up, plugging in, testing 1-2-3-4, smoking a joint out back. Then she could have stage fright to her heart’s content, because in half an hour she’d be doing her opening number, which she did really, really well, and the stage fright would melt away. It always did.

She turned on the headlights for comfort, though it was still the slow summer dusk. This was definitely no driveway. There were now only two tire tracks, headed across a pasture and disappearing over a low rise. Maggie was starting to suspect she should just turn around, but she wasn’t sure she ought to back into someone’s pasture. The feeling which wasn’t stage fright—which wasn’t even exactly a fear of being lost—which was somehow worse, more unbearable, than either of those—had begun to flood her whole body so she almost wanted to throw up. She kept thinking the word ‘wrong,’ preceding it every time with the word ‘very.’ But her stilettoed foot stayed on the accelerator, and her ringed hands clenched the steering wheel as if she were guiding the Titanic through a sea of icebergs. 

Then, rolling over the top of the rise, Maggie screamed. Not an outward scream, for someone to hear; this scream sucked backward into her lungs as if she would like to take it back before she’d done it. A man stood there. Not a woman, there was no chance of that; though many women are tall and thin, Maggie had never seen one either this tall or this thin, and there was a certain way of standing, a certain arrogant presumption of ownership. A ghost was the only other possibility, because of a fuzziness of outline, but Maggie dismissed that notion.

The man was hitchhiking! He held his thumb inert and low at the end of his arm in that way people do when they’re certain the car is going to stop. And Maggie had to stop. Benjamin would have advised her not to, but that’s because Benjamin loved her very deeply—how deeply, Maggie had maybe never quite grasped until this minute. But never mind Benjamin, he was home watching the kids. And Maggie had been raised to know that if you saw a hitchhiker, you stopped, period; the person might need help. She braked within fifteen feet of the man, keeping him in the headlights, trying to gauge whether he was a murderer or a runaway inmate from an asylum. Or a scarecrow. She didn’t see a weapon. Fumbling with the controls, she found the one that would open the passenger window. And seeing that, the man sauntered toward her.

That saunter—how familiar, somehow. The thighs were long, the knees loose-jointed, the knuckles swung forward as step by step he approached the car. When he was close enough, he leaned into the window and dangled his hands inside. “Hey,” he said. His voice was rough but quiet.

“Can I help you?” asked Maggie. “Do you need a ride?”

“I’ll always take a ride from you,” the man said, in that same voice. “I always did.”

The voice was more than familiar. It reminded Maggie of telephone calls in the night. She couldn’t answer—and how could a person answer such an insinuation?

“You got yourself a Monte Carlo,” the hitchhiker now observed, swiveling his head to admire the interior. “Good for you. You always wanted one. So, what are you doing driving it way out here in the boonies?”

“I got lost,” Maggie replied with the tiny amount of breath she could still find. She could have asked him the same question, but she was afraid of his answer. “I have a gig at the Halo Lounge, and I’m late. I mean I’m really—”

He laughed. “So, you’re looking for Paradise.”

“Yes. Of course!”

“But you can’t find it anymore—’cause you don’t have me.”

Alright, he was who she’d suspected he was. She wouldn’t put a name to him. Even back then she hadn’t, referring to him in her mind as ‘that guy’ and not referring to him in anyone else’s hearing ever. He’d been her secret. He’d been different then, naturally, because this creature was more like a daddy-long-legs, preternaturally stretched out, and there was that inexplicable fuzzy outline that made him look like a shadow of himself. She knew, though. The hot breeze coming through the window past his body carried a scent of fresh-dug soil and of the past. 

“So,” he went on, “you had your year of paradise with me, and then out of the blue you married What’s-his-name.”

“Benjamin. His name is Benjamin.”

“Good to know. And is he paradise?”

“We aren’t looking for paradise,” Maggie answered, but her answer was stiff, as if maybe it weren’t quite true. “We’re two adults. We want honest communication, mutual respect.”

“Cool.” He laughed again as he pulled his cigarette pack out of his jeans. “That sounds thrilling. X-rated. I wouldn’t have thought that would be enough for you.”

“Well, it is.”

“Okay.” He lit a cigarette and exhaled just above the window. “You have kids?”

“Two.”

“And a house with a white picket fence?”

“It has a chain link fence. I don’t like it. We rent. Can you not let your smoke come in my window?”

“Sure thing,” he said, batting the air in front of his face. “So, is this what Jonathan wants?”

“Benjamin. His name is Benjamin.”

“Right. Three syllables, I got that part.”

“Benjamin is very happy,” said Maggie, knowing for sure, this time, that she wasn’t speaking truthfully. Benjamin’s unhappiness—sorrow might be a better word, with more gravitas—was like an icy ball-bearing at the center of his heart, always rolling in its frictionless way, and she knew it was there because she herself had put it there. She could see it clearly right now even though Benjamin was eighty miles away.

“I asked if it was paradise for Benjamin. You don’t have to answer; I just wondered if you knew. ’Cause it isn’t.”

“Oh? Because why?”

“’Cause you don’t give him what he wants most, what any man wants most.”

On the point of a retort, Maggie shut her lips tight. She could ask, What is it that I don’t give him? But she already knew. She didn’t give him herself—all of herself—her ‘true love,’ as the girls called it in grade school.

“That’s right,” the man smiled at her furious silence. After another drag and another ostentatious batting, he said, “You didn’t ever forget me. You kept me in your heart, or your memory, or your whatever you want to call it, and didn’t let go. And he knows I’m there. It jerks his chain, no?”

“I want to put up the window,” said Maggie. “The smoke really bothers me.”

“Yet you’re busting your gut to play in a bar with a hundred times this much smoke, and what’s more, you’re going to do it in a dress you would have worn when you were in your twenties, which was ten years ago. You’ll smoke a cigarette between every set, and three more at last call, and whenever some guy buys you a drink you’re gonna sit with him and drink it and listen to him saying, “Are you…uh…with anyone?” You’re gonna play ‘Proud Mary’ and ‘Taking Care of Business’ and act like it totally turns you on, when in reality you don’t ever want to hear those tunes again. Then you’ll drive your Monte Caaarlo back home, and Johnathan will wake up long enough to ask how the gig went.”

“BENJAMIN!” Maggie’s scream was outward this time, definitely for someone else to hear. Maybe, in fact, for Benjamin himself to hear, as if he could spirit himself to her side and tell her what to do.

“Sorry,” said the scarecrow. He dropped the end of his cigarette on the ground, right in the dry grass. Maggie couldn’t see whether he’d bothered to stamp it out, because now her head was buried in her hands, but she knew that of all the things she could accuse this man of, starting a grass fire wouldn’t be one. No, the things were worse than that. Worse because they all somehow led back to her own weakness. That year’s agonizing mix of passion and despair—the year her whole attention had been fixed on this personage—had even then ended her in a situation exactly like the one she was in now: a pair of tire tracks dwindling across a dry pasture. She’d seen it, and then she had married Benjamin as fast as she could, because the tracks had been terrifying and she’d wanted to be safe. Now, here she was.

“I see what you are,” she murmured through her fingers. “You’re my conscience.”

“Whoa!” He laughed again and stuck his head farther in the window to lean on his elbows. “That would be hilarious,” he said. “No, babe, I’m certainly not your conscience. In fact I’m the cold truth your conscience is here to face. You won’t let go of the past, so you won’t give the present a chance. Ben-ja-min—that poor sucker. You want it still to be back then, so you live it. Ruffly little girlie skirt, huh? Just right for a teenager. ‘Rollin on the river’…seven-year-old Monte Carlo, wow, you’ve arrived. And you haven’t noticed you hate it.”

Maggie wanted to argue these points, each in turn; her dander was up, and she didn’t like being defined by this cocksure spider who didn’t know her at all, now or then. Certainly it was hard to hear that she was ridiculous, which seemed to be what he was saying. But to argue, she would first have to disregard what she knew to be true, which was that she was ridiculous. Her skirt—well, her legs were still excellent, that wasn’t the problem. She could technically pull off these outfits around which she had designed her stage persona. But why should she? She was better than that now. She was an actual woman. At least she could be, if she were to honor her own womanhood.

It flashed across her mind how last month, when they played at Blotto’s Bar, just when they were starting their third set, a drunk stumbled up to the bandstand, turned his back on the musicians, lowered his pants, squatted down and pooped on the floor. Not that this was usual—it hadn’t exactly happened before—but it now stood for whatever the scarecrow was telling her, which was: God yes, she was so sick of it. She hated ‘Proud Mary.’ She hated playing in front of a mound of shit. She hated the brainless hollering, even the clacking of pool balls. She no longer belonged in that world. And even way back then, she’d come to hate where the scarecrow was leading her, those tire tracks that would surely end in a shallow mud-pond where fly-tormented cattle cooled their ankles. All of it was—yes, she could see it—against her conscience. Her poor conscience that had been forced to crevel in the basement of her mind while she lived a long-exhausted dream.

“Come on, Mag,” the exhausted dream was saying,  as he pulled the door open. “Bygones be bygones and all that shit. Let me in. I’ll take you to Paradise. It’s not that far—”

“No!” shouted Maggie. What a wonderful word. She drove forward fast till he had to let go of the handle. “No,” she kept on saying as she spun the Monte Carlo backward into the grass. 

Because there was Benjamin. The Benjamin with whom she’d stood before the Justice of the Peace and promised, in an absent-minded way, to love, honor, and obey. Benjamin, she thought now, was really something. If he’d been a guy with sad puppy eyes, he might have stood up on his hind paws to whimper, “I know you don’t love me as much as I love you. I accept that.” But he wasn’t that kind of man. His eyes were clear grey, wise and stern together, and he stood on his two booted feet to say, in silence, “I’ll wait.” Which he had, for all these years, focusing on his work and waiting.

So, it was a question of movement, of motion. Maggie thought of this while slamming the car into first and pressing her sandal down hard on the accelerator. Life could not and would not stand still. Change had to be happening every minute, and change was motion. It wasn’t clinging to a worn-out self—nor a dead-end passion. Maggie could feel the whole force of motion this minute, as if an enormous ship were turning in the water, slowly slowly slowly, but solidly, gathering impetus just from its unstoppable intention to turn. The Monte Carlo was moving…the low slow curves of dry pasture were moving…the grey streak of dusk on the horizon was moving…Maggie herself was moving. The heart under her ribs was moving. The only thing that was not moving was the scarecrow, or the daddy-long-legs, whose only change was to get longer in every limb until he was more like smoke than shadow. Flimsier … wispier …disintegrating before her very sight in the rear-view mirror.

Seventy-five was just right—not fast enough to kill her, but fast enough for her to follow her passion. For it was passion itself that had moved, and this was—as Maggie absolutely saw and would never forget—a matter of choice. You could put passion wherever you wanted to, and then you could follow it. This was the difference between a woman and an idiot. She, Maggie, would by choice put her passion where it could do her some good—on Benjamin. On the little beings she was the mother of. She would put her passion on her new life, her new persona. She could put it on anything she chose.

In which case, she would be as reborn. All the world was choice and movement. All the world was hers.