Chapter 25

I should have fucked Sarah.

What a nightmare the last few weeks have been. The semester is ending, so I have had a lot of work to do -- final papers, etc. And I’ve been looking forward to seeing my grandmother, who could die any time in the next few months. So what does Donna do? The week before, she said she wanted to go see her grandmother because she was in the hospital with breast cancer. Considering my grandma’s condition, I let her go, with the understanding that she would be back that Friday for work.

Friday, she did not show up for work. I had to work both my and her shifts. So Saturday, I brought her phone book to work and called her grandmother, who told me 1) she had never been in the hospital and 2) she had not seen her granddaughter in a year. Now I knew she lied. So I called two of her friends I thought she would have gone to see, and neither had seen her. However, her one friend said when she had talked to her last, she had talked about going to Iowa.

I knew she had several friends from Iowa she had met on Facebook, and the $600 phone bill I received in the mail the Thursday before showed over half her calls were to Iowa (I had no calls on the phone bill, by the way). All to one number. She had to be there. Still, I wanted to be sure, so I checked our e-mail, her saved letters, and found a very interesting one from one of her Facebook friends. Her friend was going on about how crazy she was about this guy, giving as an example the way Donna and this guy named Paul were with each other. Clue number one. So I decided to use the Find option on my computer, going to the Start button at the bottom left corner of the screen, then up to Find, then over to Files or Folders, then searching for “Paul” And I found Paul. I found a letter he had written to her using her Excite e-mail account that had been cached in our computer. It went on and on about how much he loved her and wanted to be with her for the rest of his life (poor, naive fool). Clue number two. The next thing I found was a cached web page, a tarot reading web page, where the question you asked was at the top of the web page, followed by the answer in tarot cards. The question was: “Will me and Paul be intamate” (her sentence structure and spelling). Clue number three.

I took my phone bill to work Sunday and called the number. A kid, maybe ten or eleven, answered. I asked if Paul was there. He wasn’t. I asked if L. was there. “No, she’s not here either,” was the reply. I asked if she had been there. “Oh yeah, she’s been here.” “Could you please give her a message for me?” Sure. “Please tell her to call Vance at work. Thanks.”

Ten minutes later, she called: “I’ve been in jail!”

“What are you doing in Iowa?” I asked.

“When I got out, I ran up here.” I asked her who Paul was. “Who’s Paul?” she asked. I told her about everything I had found. She denied it all, saying she didn’t know what I was talking about. After some more discussion, she said, “I guess it’s over then?” Of course! Did she really think I would allow myself to be treated this way? I told her to go to Hell.

I wanted to go see my grandma. I had to plan everything, rearrange my original plans, try to get all my hours in on the weekend so I could have the week to see my mother. I told her she had to be here by Friday if she wanted to get her stuff, because I wasn't going to be here. Last time I talked to her she said a bearing was going out on the back wheel of her car and she had to fix it first. I don’t know if I should believe her or not. Everything has turned out to be a lie (I’m beginning to truly understand how Sarah feels, how she felt when she found out about Michel and Jackie).

And right now, my only real concern is her being gone with all her things. In truth, I am glad to be rid of her. She was spending me into the poorhouse, into bankruptcy. Now I will be able to save my money and pay my bills on time. My phone bill will be all but nonexistent, my electricity bill will probably be half to a third of what it is now (I rarely have the A/C or the TV on, and I actually turn the computer off when I’m not using it). And the food bill will be cut by about a tenth too, because I don’t mind making, say, spaghetti or chili and eating on it for a week. That’s maybe two dollars a day for food. And she eats enough food for a classroom of people. And when she left, I cleaned up the apartment for the first time this year. Papers were everywhere, the floors had been unvacuumed, and since I was working forty hours and going to school full time and she would complain every time I tried to do anything (even laundry!), I could not get it done myself. But when she was gone, I cleaned up the place. It has been over a week since I finished it (it took 3 days to clean), and the apartment is still as clean as the day I finished (though I suppose it could be vacuumed again). So between all this and the fact that she had not had sex with me in the three weeks before she left (something which I understand now, though she had been keeping it down to only once every other week -- not very much for a self-professed nympho) make me glad she is gone and will be gone shortly. Now I can move on with my life. Find someone who will love me like I now know she never did.

Having gone through it all now, I understand what Sarah is going through. I understand why she sits in her apartment, watching television, numb, stunned. How could Michel do this to her? She thought he had loved her. She had loved him. Sure, he was chauvinistic, maybe even misogynistic, but she had not thought he would cheat on her. Especially with Jackie. She thought they hated each other. Their living together was only for convenience and money’s sake. She knew she would not make that mistake again. The next man she went out with was going to be living alone. No roommates. Not even male roommates, in case they were gay lovers. No chances. Never. Not ever. Not again.

What Sarah really needed to do was write. She needed to write about her relationship with Michel, fictionalize it, make it objective, so she could work it out, make her deal with it faster. It would have made her feel better (as this chapter is doing for me already). But she did not have the presence of mind to do that yet. It took me this long to sit down and write it, knowing all the time I had this novel to work on, and that the way I was constructing it would be a perfect outlet, so I should not expect Sarah to do it any faster. I am sure she will deal with it in her fiction, as many writers do, in her own time.

In the meantime, I suppose she will sit in front of her television, feeling sad and a little sorry for herself. It will do her no good to feel sorry for herself, just as it will do her no good to get mad at Michel for being who he was or at herself for not being able to see it in time, but it will take her time to figure that out. For now, there is the television. The single person’s friend. The source of estranged human contact that is just enough to make living alone tolerable. No thoughts. No worries. Just staring at the screen, taking it in with minimum effort, staving off the loneliness that lingers on the outside edges of the screen, keeping our focus on it lest that loneliness engulfs us and sends us into despair.