Better Lucky Than Good - Short story
Published by OPEN CITY 2004
The Columbus Day weekend began with a grizzly rain splattering on the Hudson. I shut the windows for the first time in months and dressed in heavy clothes for breakfast. The shoes and jacket were unnaturally heavy after a season of shorts and sandals. Luckily Global Warming guaranteed the city would heat up before the leaves fell from the trees.
I ran from my apartment building, dodging the raindrops on East 10th Street. Halfway into 9th Street a young man and woman walked my way underneath an umbrella. The long black raincoat acted as a chador and a pale scarf covered her head. The hyena laugh gave away the woman’s identity. I almost said hello, but Gabrielle appeared happy and I lowered my head. She didn’t need to see me.
She must have recognized my walk, for she called my name with a touch of disbelief.
I feigned surprise. “Gabrielle, I’m surprised to see you in New York.”
“I’m shooting a film here, so it’s nice to be out of Paris.” She tugged the scarf and unleashed her casually coifed blonde hair. Her beauty remained as intoxicating as our final kiss good-bye in Paris.
“You haven’t aged a day.”
“Most men say that.” The timeworn compliment was lead to her ears.
“It’s the truth.” I had seen her in a film by Claude Lelouch several nights before. She had been naked. Her breasts were flat against her chest. Her blonde hair hung down her back. It was too familiar to view the entire sex scene.
“Thanks.” She introduced the handsome young man as the lead actor in the movie. “He’ll hit it big.”
“Only if the camera lets me.” His agent must have promised him a golden career. His smile was filled by youth and his hair was lusterous. He probably thought eh could live forever.
“Congratulations,” I offered and the actor started a discourse on acting. I had been in a movie once. Acting was not a joke, but I cut him short with a question to Gabrielle. “How long are you in town?”
“Just another week. Maybe we can meet for lunch.” She stepped closer to the young man to either re-establish his interest or for shelter under the umbrella.
I stuck my hands in my pockets. “I’m at the same number.”
“The same apartment?”
When we had been contemplating of a life together, she had visited the three narrow rooms of 3E. A loft or a hotel room on the park was more a movie starlet’s style. “I’ve been living there since 1977.”
“Except for when you stayed with me?” She lilted her head to the side and a golden curtain slipped across her face.
“And a couple of other places.” Gabrielle and I might have spent part of a lifetime with each other instead of less than a half-year. It took me a long time to discover that she gave me months more than her other lovers. Wanting any more was asking too much.
“Your friend, Jeffery, he introduced us.”
“Jeffery’s dead almost seven years and his girls are almost grown.”
Paris and Manhattan were populated by ghosts of both the living and dead. She touched my hand as a silent apology for our failed romance. “And your friends in Paris bet you would go to an early grave. In fact I heard you died in a motorcycle accident.”
“A truck hit me head-on in Burma and killed me instantly.” I lifted my bent left wrist and she shook her head. “You’re joking?”
“I hit the windshield and flipped to land on a pile of rice and an old woman. She looked in the air for the airplane from which I had fallen.”
“You were always lucky.”
Her words aged me a hundred years, because they weren’t true in love. Unable to resist the urge to let slip a nasty riposte, I asked, “How’s your pig?”
“He passed away a couple of years ago.”
I derived no pleasure from her pig’s death. “Sorry, you really loved that pig.”
“You had a pig?” The young actor expressed his emotive range like he was auditioning for the role of her lover.
“A little pig,” I said, then explained, “She considered cats and dogs dirty.”
“And pigs are clean?” he chuckled and Gabrielle narrowed her Atlantic green eyes.
I answered for her. “Cleaner than humans. They only wallow in the mud to stay cool. Her pig was toilet-trained.”
“So you’re a pig-lover.” The actor was struggling with the improvised script.
“Why not? They saved my life.”
“How?”
“It’s a long story and we have to rehearse our lines.” Gabrielle had heard the tale and leaned forward to kiss me.
I knew better than to let my lips touch hers and turned my head. The twin pecks on the cheeks were a far cry from making love in the shadows on the Tuilleries. “Still wearing Chanel.”
“Some things stay the same.” The tolling from the St. Mark’s steeple broke the spell of the past and she tucked her arm under his. “Good seeing you. Take care.”
“Don’t worry about me, I’m indestructible.” I walked away soaked by the rain.
Once we had lain naked in bed for days on end giving each other more pleasure than either of us deserved. I had bought flowers and she had cooked meals fit for a deposed king. I confused her lust for love. My error hurt. I hadn’t been a young man in 1988 and she was right. None of my friends, enemies, or family had expected to live long enough to have gray hair.
I had been drowned by a double-overhead wave in Bali, beaten to a pulp with baseball bats on the Lower East Side, drunkenly blown the red-lights on Comm. Ave in Boston, survived a Olds 88 t-boning my VW in front of the Surf Nantasket as well as countless scrapes with death. A second sooner or later crossing a street and a car might have crushed me on its fender. A slip in the bath and I drown. Fitness had no influence on my survival and I believed in luck, which is little protection against the deadliest assassin of all. Yourself.
In THE COMEDIANS Graham Greene writes, “However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains a courageous act, for he has judged by the laws of averages that to live will be more miserable than death. His sense of mathematics has to be greater than his sense of survival.”
I had majored in math during college and gambled in Reno on my twenty-first birthday, yet nothing had prepared me for a sudden lurch toward the brink of self-destruction in 1988.
The summer had started with my faux-cousin, Olivier Brial, throwing me the keys to his family’s beach home. Carnet-sur-Mer wasn’t the Riviera. Only the Riviera was the Riviera, but I wrote during the day, ate with his family in the evening.
The town had no nightlife outside the cafes and by the end of August I had completed my collection of short stories. I thanked the Brials for their hospitality and bid Perpignan farewell, fully confident of my book’s success in Manhattan’s literary world. I hitchhiked along the Autoroute to Avignon and headed into the Luberon, where my friend, Jeffery Kime, was renovating an ancient villa on the outskirts of Menerbes.
Summer ends slowly in Provence and I took a taxi from the national route up an old Roman road. Jeffery’s dog barked out my arrival. His wife and kids shouted out their warm greetings from the terrace. Lunch was set for ten guests. Jeffery introduced me as an ‘author’.
After a long repast of fresh vegetables, succulent fish, and melons accompanied by countless bottles of red wine, I read them a story of swimming naked in the Quincy Quarries. Jeffery’s wife claimed I was the ‘next big writer’. Their friends toasted my upcoming success. We ate fresh foods and drank cheap good wine from bottles emblazoned with stars. The weather was ideal and the scenery of ruined towns stretching through the Luberon Valley should have been a delight, only I woke in a profound despair every morning.
This depression was not the result of a mere hangover. I was inflicted with a disease and I diagnosed its source, peeking out the tiny window. Jeffrey’s youngest daughter was holding onto the tail of their Golden Retriever and relieved herself au natural. Her mother joyously declared, “Matilda’s getting toilet-trained by a dog.”
They laughed without restrain. The women were beautiful. The men had successful artistic job. They were married and their lives were moving towards a reachable goal. I secluded myself in the attic to avoid the other guests. I had no excuse to rationalize my purpose on this planet. My future was a life sentence of solitary confinement.
Completely devastated, I asked myself, “What next?”
Lifting my eyes to the sky gave me the answer.
Jeffery’s house nestled under an escarpment separating the Luberon from the coast. A dirt trail through the vineyards climbed past a quarry. The centuries of labor had created a three-hundred foot cliff. The sheer white face murmured a single syllable. I soon deciphered their whisper into one word.
“Jump.”
Not like David Lee Roth sang in Van Halen’s second album.
Simply, “Jump.”
Jeffrey sensed my dismay and didn’t leave me on my own.
His surveillance wavered with the preparations for a Sunday dinner. His wife asked him to accompany her shopping in Avignon. His four kids begged me to come along. I smiled and said, “I’m going for a long walk.”
“Will you be here, when we return?” Jeffery opened the door to his Volvo. His wife corralled their two daughters into the rear and said, “Where else can he go?”
“Just for a walk in the beautiful French countryside?” I joked with a smile.
As soon as the car disappeared around the curve, I set out for the path skirting the white cliff face. I rested atop the hill. To the west the River Rhone shimmered as a silvery snake under the late August sun and the northern horizon wore the broken toothed snowy Alps. Not a single cloud spoiled the sky and fragrant wildflowers scented the wind. It was too beautiful for any more words and I walked toward the edge, determined to exile the word ‘jump’ from my vocabulary.
Only twenty feet from eternity I heard an inhuman snort to my right and a nasal grunt to my left. The underbrush rustled apart for two little pigs. They were unusually hairy, primeval, and cute. I took a single step toward them.
The babies shivered out a squeal and a louder snort trumpeted from behind a rock. A massive boar with two yellow tusks curling from her snout and coarse black hair coating her sinewy spine trotted protectively before the piglets. The black pearl eyes glared maternal hatred, as the beast methodically scrapped the earth with a cloven hoof before lowering its horrible head to charge in a slather.
Screaming I climbed a wizened tree. The boar rammed the trunk several times and its babies scooted into the bushes. The ugly brute vanished from the plateau. Not sure it wasn’t playing a trick, I swayed in the tree for another minute, realizing my will to survive had beaten my will to die, and I was exhilarated by my escape.
Some priests might deemed the incident a miracle and I might have offered a prayer in thanks, only I wasn’t sure which saint was the patron of pigs. I dropped from the tree and headed to Jeffrey’s house.
The kids were chasing each other in a squall of shouts, the guests were drinking rose and conversing about a nearby neighbor’s book about life in Province. Jeffrey’s wife was slicing a slab of meat for the barbecue and my friend was peeling potatoes. Obviously relieved by my reappearance, he asked, “Where have you been?”
“Out for a walk.” Explaining my mad dash from suicide was a topic for another day and I helped chop the potatoes with a knife. It was sharp and I was careful. “What are we having for dinner?”
“A nice roasted pork.” Jeffery beamed with a lean hunger.
“Pork?” I protested and Jeffery scowled, “You convert to Islam?”
“No visions, a change of heart.” Grateful to the boar’s intercession, if only momentarily, I said, “I‘ll stick to the potatoes for today.”
“Suit yourself,” Jeffery shrugged and I basked idiotically in my triumph over a desperate desire to leave this life before my time. In Paris Jeffery introduced me to Gabrielle. I was happy for a while. Not forever and that romance is a story for a day without the sizzle of bacon waffling on the drizzle
At 50 asking for anything more from life than breakfast becomes risky, but I can deal with surprises, because I’ve had practice, for while pigs can’t fly, they sometimes can save your life.
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