Being with Georgette #19
I walked along the road to the gap between the guardrail and the old bridge, the two-tone truss bridge a mile from my house.
The dirt trail led down the steep slope between the boulders to the river. The boulders had been blasted from a quarry on the other side of town to shore up the road on the approach to the bridge. A few boulders rose to my waist, and I patted one and, feeling its radiant warmth in the afternoon sun, I embraced it.
Georgette had stopped me on my way out the door and said she wanted a divorce. I could barely contain my glee, and all I could say was could we talk about it after my walk. She had said of course.
Three quick leaps through clouds of clicking grasshoppers brought me to the sandy beach at the water’s edge. The river flowed briskly for August, following three days of rain that had washed out Georgette’s camping trip with the girls over the weekend.
I stepped into the river and stood still until the minnows gathered around my feet.
The county line ran down the center of the river, accounting for the bridge being painted two different colors: green on the Morrow County side and maroon on the Park County side. The road was a state highway but the state contracted the maintenance to the county shops, and each shop used whatever paint they had on hand for last summer’s paint job.
“Catch anything?” an old man asked from his drift boat.
I shrugged and held out my empty palms. “Not a thing.”
A boy popped his head over the gunwale of the boat and lifted a stringer full of fish. “Put that down,” the grandfather said, and they drifted down around the bend.
I entered a grove of quaking aspen and lay down in the dry, summer grass and fell asleep.
* * *
When I awoke, nothing had changed. The trees were the same, the bridge was the same, and despite what you might have heard, the river was the same. Even the sun was the same.
Only ten minutes had passed, but I had slept deeply enough to have gone to the other side of the universe and back. I can always tell how well I’ve written in the morning by how well I sleep on my afternoon walk to the river. I had written well.
The only time Georgette joined me on my afternoon walk, we napped in this aspen grove and woke to see a bobcat drinking on the other side of the river. We watched it drink and admire itself in the surface of the water and finally wander off into the brush. Ever since, Georgette asks me when I return from my walk if I saw the bobcat, and I never have. I likely never will.
A couple of loud, lifted pickup trucks with patriotic flags flapping from their beds chased each other across the bridge. I thought about my novel that begins with a man trying to end it all by jumping off this same bridge. Each time he jumps, he wakes up on the beach downstream, and after three or four tries, he gives up and goes off on adventures of a kind of Shakespearean comedy where everyone gets what they deserve in the end.
I stepped into the river again, and found that not only was it the same river, it was the same step. The same minnows. The same me.
* * *
Back through the clouds of clicking grasshoppers, and through the field of boulders. This time when I caressed one, I felt nothing but the texture of the rock. I had become as warm as the sun.
Up the dirt trail and through the gap between the guardrail and the old bridge, the two-tone truss bridge a mile from my house.
* * *
Georgette was in her garden. She stood and said, “I’ve decided to divorce him.”
“I never liked him anyway.”
She stared with that look of yeah, you never do. She said, “I’m leaving in the morning. I’ll be back, but I don’t know how long it will take. He has a lot of property.”
I looked around at her flourishing garden.
She said, “Get Esther to help. Or just let it go.”
I nodded, already letting it go.
She went back to weeding between the potatoes, and I went to the house. As I opened the door I heard, “Did you see the bobcat?” I stepped inside, pretending not to hear, and let the door close behind me.
As I prepared dinner, I realized that despite her predictability in some things, the truth was you never love the same Georgette twice.
