On The Verge

Mark Hillary

Movie lines streamed and he fell for every woman he saw while en route to Heathrow on the Piccadilly line with the woman that just broke his heart.  [NYCMidnight Flash Fiction Contest 2010 Challenge 2.  Prompt:  Romance, Commuter Train, Ice Cream Cone]

With you by my side, I don’t need success.

Irving knew this was a line, but the line wasn’t his.  It streamed through his mind from memory like a Tourette syndrome obscenity.  Lines had been popping up all morning, lines like let’s get married again and you’re the geisha of my life. Lines came with each new woman he saw, each new jaw line, calf, and strand of hair.  Lines came as he stared about the half full train and projected himself into the future into an unknown life with each unknown woman.  At each stop, the women changed, new lines emerged.  At each stop, a new life was imagined.

Irving sat with his back against the window, next to the doors of the train en route to Heathrow on the Piccadilly line.  His left arm rested on a pole.  His right hand was on his thigh inches from Phoebe’s paperback held open on her lap.  Phoebe looked like a librarian, bent over the book with her black hair pulled behind her ears.  Phoebe didn’t pay notice to Irving or what his eyes viewed.  Irving watched a college student, probably ten years younger.  She wore a driver’s cap above wavy blonde hair.  Her nose was pierced; her teal-colored eyelids were closed.  She napped sitting up.  Baby, some things are unmistakably American. Again, the words weren’t his.  He thought them as he wondered where she was going.  Perhaps America?

Irving and Phoebe were returning to Ann Arbor, Michigan.  There, she studied Marine Biology; he worked in HR at the university.

“How many more stops?” Phoebe said, looked up from her book.

At first, he ignored the question.  Then he looked around the train, at the map too far away to read.  He saw the flashing sign at the end of the car, but the next stop’s name had yet to display and the name would have meant nothing to him.  “I don’t know.  Won’t make this any faster.”

“Are you going to be like this the whole way home?”

He thought about back home, how different it would be now, how it was when they met at a school office three months ago.  He had helped her with a security breach with her building card.  He asked her out.  They had coffee, then drinks and dinner, then movies.  It became a two- then four-times a week kind of thing—cuddling in the morning, cheap wine and takeout at night.  Two months passed.  Winter was imminent.  Neither wanted to go home for the holidays.  They planned a trip, went on a trip.  The trip was ending.

He thought about last night and what she just said.  Shouldn’t I be like this? He said, “Like what?”

“Never mind.”  She looked down, flipped a page.  “I said I was sorry.  I can’t help this.”  She frowned.  “I still love you.”

Why’d you brake up with me, then?

She broke up with him the night before in the hotel room.  They shared ice cream cones—mint chocolate chip—and a bottle of white wine.  A romantic dessert, sure, but it wasn’t enough.  They talked for hours.  He blamed the trip.  He said, “All because of one breakfast?”

The breakfast that morning had been a disaster (slow, over-salted, under-cooked) and it was way too expensive.  He paid then stewed and whined as they toured the Tate Modern.  She took it personal.

“No, Irving,” she had said.  “It’s more than the breakfast or this trip.  It’s complicated.  I need someone… Someone more.”  Whatever that meant.

The train stopped and half the crowd inside the train was swapped with half the crowd on the platform.  An Indian girl in a gray business suit replaced the college student.  She read a newspaper.  A million nights wouldn’t be enough. Irving pictured her outside an office building on a street in front of a marble pillar.  She would loop her arm through his and tuck her forehead into his shoulder.  With this girl, anything was possible.

Irving felt Phoebe tap his shoulder.  “What are you going to do when you get back?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“No, I mean for New Years?”

New Years was two days away.  He didn’t know.  He shrugged.

“This sucks,” she said.

“Yep.”

They had the train ride, the airport, and then a long flight back.  It was a long time to be angry, to be this cool, distant, and obvious.  He sighed, put his hand on her leg.  She gripped his thumb, squeezed, and lightly rubbed the nail.  He stared above the Indian girl, listened to the sound of the train on the tracks.  It hissed, rumbled.  It sounded like a woodpecker pecking a rotted, wet tree.  He looked at the side of Phoebe’s face, her waning chin.  “That night in the jungle was heaven.”

“What?” she said, twisted her face.

He laughed at himself.  “Do you remember that movie we watched on the plane?  The Spanish one?  Women On The Verge…?”

She nodded, smiled.  “That was so good.”

It was probably the best part of the trip­—laughing, sharing headphones with the armrest up.  Still on our way.

But that was over a week ago.  Now, he felt dour, glum, partly due to London’s rain, cold, and gray, but mostly because it was all over.  He squeezed Phoebe’s knee then pulled his hand away as the train stopped and the doors opened again.  The stop was Barons Court.  He stood up and walked to a map.  He counted, came back.  “Twelve more stops.  Maybe twenty more minutes.”

She silently patted his leg.  A woman sat down across from him.  She wore a black blazer over a white tank top.  Her bangs were cropped at her brow.  The rest of her hair fell straight to the bottom of her neck.  Irving’s eyes followed the hair to the jacket, to the break of skin at the cutout of her shirt, to a silver necklace sitting across her collarbone.

I’m all yours.  I accept you as you are.

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