The Wind Cries Mary

Quick preface: The characters in this story are completely fictional. Specifically, the "Mary" in this story bears no resemblance to wonderful wife Mary who is the best! Thanks for visiting and enjoy!

            I probably should have at least thrown on a pair of real pants. Or maybe a jacket. Come to think of it, one of those polar-explorer parkas would have been great. Pajamas and nor’easters, it turns out, aren’t a great mix. As it stands, the stiff pre-dawn air is tearing through me like fire through newspaper. Or whatever the exact opposite of that would be.

            Mary doesn’t seem to mind, cozily prepared with a red pea coat and Burberry scarf (a Christmas gift from me of course). I’m just standing there frozen - watching as she clumsily picks her way across the street. She’s left deep trudge marks in the un-plowed snowdrifts, her fashionably absurd sheepskin boots compressing the snow. The boots she got herself.

            She drives away in the car we leased together last year leaving me standing here like an idiot. Luckily, this part of the Brooklyn actually does sleep eventually so the jokers on our block who would usually be lolling around are snoring their lives away at present. A vicious blast of wind crashes against my exposed arms and face with malicious intent, reminding me to get my stunned ass back inside. For a frightening moment I can’t recall the code to get into the building and a wave of panic piles onto my already confused systems. Suddenly my mnemonic kicks in (Mantle-Mantle-Namath for 7-7-1-2) and I punch the keys quickly.

            Inside it’s warmer, but not enough that it matters. The floor in particular remains a frigid enemy. The elevator’s been on the fritz lately, so I begin my ascent up the stairs, the hard wood caustically devoid of carpet. The cheap scent of motel-caliber cleaning solution pervades the shabby furniture and dull brass rows of mailboxes in the over-lit lobby. I’ve always hated this fucking building.

As I climb the five flights of merciless goddamned iceblocks of stairs, I’m replaying the last couple hours in my head to try and convince myself that it hasn’t happened. Funny how we do that when something shitty happens. I guess it’s the first stage of grief right? Anyways, I get to the part about how we rushed into things and got married before we had really figured ourselves out as individuals when I realize there’s no stairs left. Now is probably not the best time to visit our - I mean my - buddy Arturo in #904, so I head back down a few flights.

It sort of looks like the place has been robbed (the door was unlocked after all), but it doesn’t strike me as odd; this is what it normally looks like. After a year of marriage and six more months living together, I guess neither of us figured out that the other wasn’t about to spontaneously acquire obsessive-compulsive tendencies and clean the place up. Wrong again. Maybe that’s a sign.

A quick glance at my alarm clock hits me like an executioner’s axe: 3:46am. My usual 7am wake-up isn’t going to cut it with the car gone. I can’t believe she took the damned car. I figure I’ll have to walk to the subway then ride in, hopefully catching an A train. If I miss that I’ll just call in sick, the C takes for-fucking-ever. I haven’t been able to think straight in hours, ever since my new nemesis dropped that sack of bricks directly on my forehead, but for some reason I can remember the train schedule. Good times!

Screw it, it’s not like I’m going sleep anyways. I give up on trying to set my alarm and head back out into the living room. I flip on the TV and start brewing a pot of coffee. I’m making too much of course, I’m fairly accustomed to our usual two cups each routine and too lazy and stupefied to compute the proper amounts of grounds and water for the right amount. I just stand there while it brews, forgetting the TV is even on.

So why am I now a soon to be divorcé at the ripe young age of 24 you ask? At this point you are better off talking to Mary. Here are her original words, as near as I can remember them (her words appear in quotes. My attempt to translate these astonishingly vague quips into human are in italics):

 “Everything happened so fast.”

When you proposed, I should have said ‘no.’ At some point during the eighteen-month engagement, I could have maybe brought up the fact that I’m not ready but I decided against it.

            “I don’t feel like I can pursue my dreams with you.”

I got into Stanford law and you once mentioned that you never wanted to live near your parents again, so I have a built-in excuse to ditch you.

“You haven’t exactly been prince charming lately.”

Cuter-looking guys than you have been eyeing me at the gym.

That kind of thing. I guess it boils down to her being a bitch. At least that’s what all my friends will say and what I’ll probably end up convincing myself. It’s not true of course, not even close. She’s actually a very kind person. It illustrates, in a microcosmic kind of way, just exactly how much this particular conundrum sucks ass: I want to hate her, but there’s really no way. She didn’t cheat (that I know of), she isn’t on drugs (that I know of), she never abused me or anything like that (although one time she punched me smack on the nose during sex, but I’m fairly convinced that was an accident)…

I can hear a light wind rapping at the frozen window, soft but gaining speed as it compresses between the buildings. The air is a continuous whisper, carrying its own hushed and alien gossip on an unabated stream. As I’m pouring the coffee pondering for the umpteenth time what in hell I’m going to do with my life, a whooshing swirl of a gust caresses the outer wall and echoes around the living room and into the cramped kitchen, wending its way to my ear. It sounds crazy, but for just a moment, it almost sounded like her name.

meH. reeEEE.

This delightful semi-hallucination is interrupted by the charge of the street plow outside, burying a few parked cars and sweeping away the last traces of Mary’s boots from the snowy avenue. For some reason a bittersweet memory bursts into my mind, a complex recall smashed into a single blink. We were in Chinatown on one of our first dates reading fortune cookies. Mine had been something banal and ordinary, like YOU WILL SOON RECEIVE A PLEASANT LETTER FROM AN OLD FRIEND or some such nonsense. But Mary had gotten this gem: A ROYAL SURPRISE IS IN YOUR FUTURE. That was when I started calling her “my Queen.” Once or twice she’d called me “King,” but only during the honeymoon. This makes me think of what she must be feeling right now. She’s a crier, so she’s probably all weepy. She’d better be.

I stir some milk into my coffee and head towards to couch. I flip on N.Y. One to re-watch the lowlights from another Jets loss just to throw some salt on my wounds. It doesn’t really work, I still feel surprisingly little…

There’s a jarringly loud commercial screaming from the TV all of a sudden and I realize that I must have dozed off for a bit. I grab my phone out of my pocket and learn that I have about fifteen minutes to get my ass out the door or I’ll miss the train and that it’s going to snow again today. Ugh.

Somehow I manage to spend all of those fifteen minutes washing my face and brushing my teeth, I guess I’m not exactly running in turbo mode this morning. By the time I’ve got my coat on and my scarf wrapped up tight I’m running five minutes late. I clunk down the stairs in my boots and leave the building, at which point I am again assaulted by brutal atmospheric conditions.

I can still see Mary’s footprints in the stripe of snow between the sidewalk and the street, a DMZ between the parked cars and shoveled sidewalk. The image of her walking away in her scarlet pea coat flashes in my memory. Ruefully, I begin to jog towards the Nostrand Ave station. My joints are achy from the uncomfortable position I slept in and my brain is raging at me for a myriad of reasons, but it’s not like I have a ton of options at this point.

Right as I’m crossing Hancock Street, I’m nearly run over by a predictably disinterested cabbie. I’m about to flip him a very special edition of the bird (a double sideways, if you must know) when I notice that his number is lit. I take it as a sign and duck into the backseat instead. For some ungodly reason, I apologize to him before telling him to head towards the Battery tunnel.

I’m pondering the death of my youth and the utter destruction of my romanticism when I realize that everything whizzing by is oddly distorted, the brooding grey overcast sky replaced by a tainted yellow cloak. I glance ahead out the windshield, which seems normal, then down the taxi license posted behind the front seat.

“Hey Armando,” I interject at the next apparent low point in his bluetooth conversation. What in the world do these cabbies talk about all day anyways? Who’s on the other end of that line that’s so damned interested? Why are they always men? Anyways, I ask him: “What’s with this window?”

“My brother installed the sunny-shield,” the driver replies. “It makes the city seem more cheerful, sunny,” he says matter-of-factly, as if this is a great advance in society on par with the polio vaccine or sliced bread. “Like Bono’s sunglasses,” he adds to bolster his strange argument I suppose.

“Well, it just makes the traffic lights look blue.”

We don’t have much else to say the rest of the ride, and it actually feels great to slink down into the back seat and close my senses. The familiarity of the black leather bouncy bench seat and the mixed odors of leather, body odor, and Rustic Pine Care Freshener are quite comforting. So is being inside the gloriously warm car with all the desolate signs of winter without: snow-covered leaves, pedestrians bundled under strata of outerwear, steam emanating from all sorts of strange city orifices. The wind howls outside even when the cab is stopped, it must be really nasty out there. I wonder if the wind remembers talking to me before, crying out her name. I want to feel connected to the city, if only to have a connection to something right now. I know, I know. I’m being ridiculous.

Or maybe not. As the light turns from orange to blue out of Armando’s magically jaundiced window, a terrific gust of wind screams across the taxi, shaking the whole thing from right to left. The vehicle seems to struggle to lurch forward in the onslaught. And I swear I heard it again.

Meeeeeeh REEEEEEEEE.