I would have
been grateful for an emergency vehicle at that point so me and my conical structure
could sink into the ground. Christ on crutches, was it possible to be so
detrimentally wicked? And had she actually depicted a smiley face after the word faithful, or was I going mad?
What a wench! I mean, the nerve!
White tiles? Good sex? As if I cared about her stupid kitchen! Or her weekends
in the country! As if I gave a shit whether
her new man drinks coffee or tea! But no, Dave drinks both! Dave is versatile! He can have a cup of coffee
and only hours later sit down and metamorphose into a tea drinker! Well, blimey!
What a modern, modern man!
And where the hell did she come off
lecturing me about creativity? Last I checked, the International Herald Tribune was full of spelling errors,
substandard word play, and second-rate writing, and The Daily Mail was a semi colon away from smut. And just what was
she photographing in London on the weekends? The bobbies in their helmets? A
double decker bus?
Granted, there was no mention of The
Blue Bear or of my show at the Premier Regard, but I’d changed my mind about
her. A woman so desensitized to my feelings that she pens letters about her
home renovation was capable of purchasing a painting I originally did for my wife. If, as a genuflection to the
healing process, I hadn’t erased Lisa’s number from my cell phone, I might have
actually phoned the demoness to find out for sure.
If Lisa was going to be out of my
life, she needed to be out, not this
half-ass situation in which she sent me handwritten letters with the interest
level of a To-Do list. Maybe I should give up drinking? Maybe she should give
up writing me for God’s sake! She
said she didn’t love me, but her actions proved the opposite. Women! Intent on
our destruction, they leave us no escape.
I folded the letter back into the
envelope and waited for a hearse to haul away the sordid remnants of my morning.
No emergency vehicle came, and no funeral. It was just another grey beginning
to a grey Parisian day, one in which I was going to have to find the courage to
tell my wife that The Blue Bear sold.
