Hanging Gardens
Inspired by the article "Nebuchadnezzer II" on Wikipedia
We’d spend Sunday afternoons in that cafe. That cafe where she’d sip on hot black coffee, no sugar. She said, it’s from Ethiopia. Coffee is from Ethiopia and that the best is now from Colombia. Her hair, Arabica black, flowed down her back like a villainous cape. Brunette. Brunette but not naturally so. Said… she said that when she was a girl blondes got a bad wrap. She’d blame Baywatch and Carmen Electra. All the boys, she said, would look at her hair, her form and wonder, she imagined, how do blondes taste?
She’s not like that.
Not like that at all. Likes to read, this one. Enjoys Camus and Kafka and cups of coffee far too expensive for my palate. She’s the smart one. The one with the graduate’s hat. What do you call them? I remember her telling me time and time again. Fuck! How could I forget? There’s a picture on the wall. A framed portrait by the door. You can’t miss it. Walk right in and there it is to welcome you into her abode — our abode. A doctorate. God, she’s smart. Smart enough to talk me into circles, loops, spirals… Oh, my head would spin and I would open webpages, buy books and remain silent simply to try and keep up.
She’s not like that, right?
How could she be? At 28, she dropped curtains on the show. It’s time, she said. Time to get serious. I’ve got a biological clock. Gotta settle down. Start thinking about kids, grandkids. I want it all. Got reacquainted at that crucial juncture. She wasn’t like that. Nothing like Electra, nothing like Anderson. She was Portman, she was Watson, she was Streep. Ivy league educated with her hands and feet revving up cloud nine. Not one for country livin’. Not one for country bumpkins.
I don’t think she’s like that.
Called me late one night. Maybe she was out with her friends. A bachelorette party. That’s what they’re called, right? She was at one of those. I could hear the music and the woooos of drunken 30-somethings congratulating their friend for putting the death-nail on some poor young man’s coffin. I want it all, she started. Drunk as a clam, she was. Drunk as a clam. I want kids, I want tenure, I want the house, the picket fence but I can’t have any of it without…
No, she can’t be like that.
Met her when I was a kid. Celestial gold dangling from atop her scalp. The boys’ locker room talk tore down a Madonna and replaced it with le déjeuner sur l'herbe. Not me. Never me. I was nothing like that. When they whispered and mocked, I’d praise, adore, even glorify heavenly form. God is a woman, they said. God is a woman.
We parted ways. She went up north and me… Dad had something lined up. College is for cowards that are too damn scared to pick an axe, he said. So I got to chopping. Been chopping every single day until… until that call came.
She wanted it all but the liberal men up north had loftier aspirations. None of those manicured boys could handle a strong independent woman, she said. They’re all after one thing… one thing and its fucking disgusting. Fuck being a blonde, she said over the phone.
A few weeks later, I was at the airport waiting on a dream to walk into my life. God, she was gorgeous. Don’t think women like being compared to whiskey but she… she was a smooth bourbon on the rocks. On the rocks. I’ve got a thing for hazel eyes but she… she was ice-cold ocean hue where a pair of orbs should have been.
I don’t know how girls up north are but she was odd. She was nothing like that back then. Back in our schooling days. She wasn’t much of a straight shooter. She was a lady — beating around the bush, letting imagination take root. The north, it seemed, took all that away. Said she was done with the corporate world. Done with numbers, spreadsheets and fiscal years replacing birth charts. Somehow she got a posting at the local college and was going to make a difference. But I need a man, she said. A man to hold me down as I take on the world. A man much like me.
Imagine that — this country bumpkin seated on the right hand side of a woman such as her. Took me a second to get my bearings. Took me a minute to parce things out. Was that a proposal? Yes, it is. No words were minced. Goddamn northern girls.
Can she be like that?
We got hitched real quick. Real quick. Her northern friends sat on her side of the aisle. I could tell. I could tell that they were different. Hair sleek back, suits pressed, shoes polished and scents that danced and lingered in that church long after they were gone. I tried. I tried to speak to them. Be, if only for a moment, a part of her world. All their talk pranced around Dostoevsky, Melville, Woolf. Not a single word was here. Nothing was here with us. Feigning a begrudging desire to be elsewhere, I pulled myself away. Away from that haze of intellect that I couldn’t mimic. That sublime place where she, my wife, had come from. But she’d waltz with them, laugh with them. That exalted place with the fancy words and ancient names… that’s where she belonged.
All the great prophets have been men. Men who conferred with God. Vision. Vision, foresight. Men can see. See into the minutiae of the now and the depths of tomorrow. And it could be that as we see, much like Jonah, we choose to ignore. We deny deny deny. It can’t be real, we’d proclaim. God doesn’t care much for what we think. Don’t care none.
That smile, the high pitch, the twirling of her hair. It ain’t much but it’s something. Something that I never got. Not back then, not as she walked down the aisle or sat by my side. It was nothing but diction, I believed. Nothing but my ignorance. If only I could read more, learn more, then maybe a country bumpkin could get a chance at that smile, the high pitch, the twirling of hair. Get a budding brunette to revert back to blonde days. Blonde ways.
She’s nothing like that. Nothing like Electra, Anderson. A wedding ain’t no vow to man but a vow to God. She believed, I believe. Believed in a power greater than her, greater than us. Every Sunday morning, prior to our sojourn to the cafe with Colombian Arabica and miserable Kenyan Robusta, we’d be in church. The preacher would preach. Rebuke our folly and demand that we turn to Christ. I watched her. Watched her as she watched him. She believed. Took it all in. Took in the word of the Lord and, before me, before the congregation, the townsfolk, she was as pious as could be.
Wasn’t long before the villainous cape started to fade giving way to the exquisite sunlit hue underneath. This is you, I whispered to her one evening. There was no response. Not then. Not until later than night when we were cuddling and cozy in the sack. I don’t like being a blonde. I don’t want to be a blonde, came the long overdue response. With each inch giving way to her blonde, her natural state flourished.
I refuse to see.
The ambitious can’t stand still. There were trips up north. Trips to colleges where she’d meet professors, researchers. She was going to make a difference. More books, more papers, more discoveries. More more more. The trips became more frequent, our distance more pronounced. That cafe, those Sundays, devolved into a married man sequestered in the back wondering whether Indonesian would titillate his newly evolved palate. No one to speak to about the fruity, the acidic, the rancid.
I deny deny deny.
I got a call from her one afternoon. Like most days, like all days, I was out with my axe. Out chopping my way to a liberation that drifted further away with each swing. Little ol’ me was extremely excited about sharing some words with the my love. She — her voice — projected something else.
Country bumpkins know a thing or two about heartbreak, heartache. Papa had a stack of records in his room dedicated to the topic and a cabinet full of whiskey to alleviate the symptoms of a man hurt. Of a man reeling from the pain of mama leaving him alone with her boy.
How did Jonah end up in that whale? The preacher once said the whale represented hell. That in the belly of the beast, Jonah was forced to see. Forced to gaze at the abyss, the burning coals and admit, if only to himself, that I did this.
I did this.
The signs and symptoms of an impending disaster are written on the walls. Oh Nebuchadnezzer, why do you refuse to look at the walls?
I’d rather not see, you see.
Oscar, THIS WAS AMAZING!!!! The topic is really interesting, this happens more often than not, two people ignoring all the warning signs pointing to their incompatibility, refusing to read the writing on the wall, under the sole pretext that « they want it all ». Your writing is fluid, and the pacing is perfect. Your descriptions are vivid, well-researched. They are incredibly evocative and immediately make me feel a certain sensation or feeling, the exact one you’re aiming for. I also admire the rythm/musicality of your sentences and the voice of your narrator.
Here are my highlights:
I want it all, she started. Drunk as a clam, she was. Drunk as a clam.
Smart enough to talk me into circles, loops, spirals… Oh, my head would spin and I would open webpages, buy books and remain silent simply to try and keep up.
Dad had something lined up. College is for cowards that are too damn scared to pick an axe, he said. So I got to chopping. Been chopping every single day until… until that call came.
Hair sleek back, suits pressed, shoes polished and scents that danced and lingered in that church long after they were gone.
Man, this gave me chills