The Hedonist Within

Consider this: Valentine’s Day is a holiday named after a Saint who, upon refusal to renounce his faith and stop performing secret marriages, was beaten with clubs and then beheaded on February 14th. We commemorate his death, a decidedly romantic affair, with chocolates and roses and hearts because beheadings and brutal attacks are the universal mark of love (perfect logic?). Doesn’t it seem that pain of this nature coincides more fluently with the plight of single people? Macabre death scenes forebode a certain doomsday quality if you ask me but then we live in a world where horror films gross twice as much as art films. They are, in fact, a favorite date excursion. In this case, love and death are linked, begging the question: On Valentine’s Day, will you or will you not survive, heart intake?

For Agnes the question was answered literally. Valentine’s Day, by the grace of God, had fallen on a Sunday this year. I managed to escape people in general and with the exception of a long run, had almost made it an entire day without a plan, without shame and without the comment there’s someone great out there for you…wait ‘til next year! But it hadn’t even been a year, need I remind the placating mouths of my well intentioned cause holders. There was no rush.

The DLA had decided to postpone their meeting for another week so that everyone could spend the day of the patron saint of love snuggling, cuddling and copulating with their significant others. I spent the day running and had almost made it through a long hot shower before I got the call from Lizzie. I peeked out from the shower and decided to ignore her for the moment. I’d run 16 miles and deserved the hot water running down my back. It wasn’t until I’d showered, changed and poured a glass of red wine that I hit play on the voicemail button.

“Chloe, its Lizzie. Listen. Agnes is in the hospital. Heart attack I think. I’m picking up Tucker and we’re headed to St. Vincent’s hospital. Meet us there if you want to. Otherwise, we’ll call you when we know more.” She hung up without saying goodbye. I thought that only happened in the movies.

I hadn’t spoken to Agnes since the last DL meeting where we got into a fight over love versus self-exploration. I was mad. Half truth. I was embarrassed that what she’d said contained some merit and that fact made me look pathetic. She had me doubting the veracity of the Discount Life and therefore, perhaps myself. But saying I was mad sounded a lot better than saying I was pathetic. I was almost relieved when we canceled this week’s meeting just because I hadn’t quite gotten over it. But the news that Agnes was hospitalized left me in disbelief. Agnes couldn’t die. She’s the token pot stirrer. She’s the standard mirror image character of our group – the devil’s advocate. The character who said all the wrong things, made a thousand bad judgment calls, smoked, drank and cursed and was still going to live to be 100 just to prove a point. Without her, the balance would be off. Haven’t the fates seen the Breakfast Club?

I was in the car when I called Lizzie. She answered, “You coming down here?”

“Yes,” I said. “How is she?”

“She’s in a coma – induced I think but they really aren’t saying much to us. It doesn’t sound great.” A number beeped in the middle of our conversation – one I didn’t recognize. I kept talking. “James said she was making herself a drink and the next thing you know she was vomiting and sweating and getting sick. And then she fell to the floor. “  So the infamous Mr. Coburn was with her.

“Is he there now?”

“Yeah. He’s in the room with her.” The voicemail indicator beeped to tell me I had a message.

“Okay, well. I’ll be there soon.”

“Okay. Hurry. Bye.” I hung up and inspected the number again. Unfamiliar. I checked the voicemail and was surprised to hear the sound of Peter Stone’s voice.

“Hi Chloe. This is Peter Stone. You’re probably out doing something for Valentine’s Day . I hope it’s not too late to call. Anyway, I just wanted to see if you’d like to …uh…grab dinner sometime. Or drinks. Or whatever. I…uh…I’ll wear a rain coat to protect my clothes and maybe we can have some wine.” He’d sounded nervous until he made the joke, during which his confidence surged. “So, yeah, just give me a call and we’ll set up a date. Talk to you soon.” He left his number and signed off. Should I call back? I debated this internally and decided to wait. After all, when someone texted you, you never text right back. There was that appropriate amount of lag time necessary to prove you are busy and not at all desperately waiting beside the phone. The same goes for phone calls. It was nice though, to have someone think ahead. I found myself smiling about Peter Stone.

The hospital rose before me like the twin towers. For me, they carried an almost equal sense of foreboding. I found Lizzie and Tucker in the waiting room. Tucker flipped through a magazine. Lizzie stood by the vending machines, cup of hospital coffee in hand. She turned to me and waved gently when she saw me. I approached her cautiously, the tension in the air suggested we might all explode if we let ourselves show one ounce too much emotion.

“Any news?” I asked quietly.

“Not really. She’s hooked up to a bunch of machines and sleeping. She looks awful.” She pointed down a long hallway. “She’s down there. Third door on the right. James is with her.” I made my way down the corridor, the blue-ish gray tile inflicting me with psychosomatic symptoms: I felt sick myself, like we were all in a mortuary. I stopped before I reached the door to Agnes’s room and peered inside the glass. I could see her lying prone, her face placid but for the angry looking tubes protruding from her mouth. The man I assumed to be James Coburn was sitting in a chair next to her bed. He was holding her hand. Staring at her. Something about the way he concentrated on her made me feel like I was interrupting. I turned to walk back to Lizzie and Tucker but his eye caught mine. He smiled and held my gaze, like an invitation I felt I had to accept. I entered the room and whispered, “Hi. I’m Chloe. A friend of Agnes.”

He stood to shake my hand. “James. The same.” He looked down at her and then back up at me. “She was fine one minute and sick the next. It was the weirdest thing.” He towered over me. He was tall and broad and had big fluffy gray hair. His look was disheveled but his eyes were simple. Easy to read: expressive. He sat down again and took her hand. “So you’re the ring leader,” he said.

“The ring leader?”

“Agnes calls you the ring leader cause of that DLA thing.”

I smiled. “Maybe I am.”

“She says you two fought over me.” He chuckled and used one hand to massage his chin, like a cowboy in a western right before he says something profound and sticks up one eyebrow. “I’m hardly used to one woman fighting over me, let alone two.” Okay, not that profound.  But still I stayed quiet. “It’s okay. She wasn’t really mad, you know.”

“It wasn’t really about you,” I said. “It was more about us. You were just the topic that ignited the fight.”

“You don’t think I should marry her, huh?” I wanted to say put me on the spot there buddy. It was one thing to tell Agnes that. It was another to tell James to his face. I was aware that I was moving my mouth but no sound came out. “It’s okay. Given her track record I’m sure it would be stupid.” He stole the words right from my mouth. “But I’m thinking of doing it anyway.” He said this with such tenderness I felt something in my heart shift. “It’s crazy but sometimes crazy is good. I mean look at her. You don’t know what’s going to happen. Alive one minute. Dead the next. You can plan all you want but ….man proposes, God disposes. Life’s going to happen: with you or around you. Shouldn’t we choose what makes us happy? Let the rest iron itself out.”

“Sounds like a proposal to me,” I said. He smiled.

“I guess maybe it is. Agnes, will you marry me?” He stroked her hair. Her machine beeped back at him in response.

“I might ask again tomorrow, “ I said. “If you’d like her to remember.”

“I’ll ask her again. When she’s ready.” He leaned back in his chair and ran his hands through his hair. He looked exhausted and suddenly I felt that my presence was crowding him.

“You know, I think I’m going to grab a coffee. Can I get you something?”

“Nah,” was all he said. I watched him looking at her for a beat longer and backed out of the room.

In the waiting room Lizzie & Ticker asked how Agnes was. “Same,” I said.

“I can’t believe it,” Tucker said. “She won’t be in here long. It’s Agnes. She wouldn’t give the doctors the satisfaction.”

Lizzie said, “At least we know if she goes…she’s going happy.” We were silent, our expressions questioning. “Well I mean, she made it pretty clear that she was content with her life. I think she’d be satisfied.”

We sat in the waiting room for another hour before I thought about calling Peter Stone back. When I reached from the phone I came up empty handed. “I think I left my phone in the car,” I said out loud to no one in particular.

“Actually, I was thinking of heading out, “Lizzie said. “They’ll keep us posted and we’re not doing any good here.”

“I’ll go tell James,” Tucker volunteered. As he walked away I noticed he was wearing a new pair of jeans and a certain satisfaction came over me. The DLA hadn’t provided all the answers but it had helped. Six months ago Tucker was ages from a new pair of jeans. Then I reprimanded myself for thinking about denim when one of our friends was laid out in the hospital.

I thought through what James had said walking back to the car. Life is short and you could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Shouldn’t we be happy? But if we were all hedonists, thinking only of ourselves and our pleasure first, the world would be a cruel place; immediate gratification alone doesn’t result in peace of mind. The truth was that despite flying solo on Valentine’s Day – I was contented too. We had our first performance for the orchestra that Thursday and I was finally playing the violin out loud. I was living securely and pleasantly in my own apartment. I had achieved the goals set on my list and despite what Agnes said about the Discount Life having ulterior love seeking motives, I had to submit that whatever truth existed in that statement didn’t diminish the validity that it was also about learning yourself. I was there. Six months and counting and I was living life without discounts. All the Way. I thanked Agnes silently for giving me that perspective and grieved as I opened the car door, sliding behind the wheel, that I might not have the chance to tell her. To clean the air between us.

I reached for my phone, the decision to call Peter Stone a done deal in my mind. But the call never happened. When I picked up the phone I had a text message. From Christian: Maudlin…was all it said. Despite myself – I broke into a huge smile and drove home feeling that after all my dissemination, James was right.



Further investigation of “Maudlin” led to the following definition: Foolishly sentimental. At this, my heart swooned. Should it have? I didn’t know. And I certainly didn’t care. All perspective was lost. All red flags were down. But when I texted him “thinking about you too” – I got no response. Red flag ONE. I chose to ignore it.

I waited two days before I did anything. 48 hours of time to reminisce and replay every last interaction we’d shared. By Tuesday afternoon, Christian was perfect again. He was smart, charming, inquisitive – that faint smell of vanilla I’d noticed? Just his everyday scent. I closed Get Some Manners and put its long term peace of mind pedantics out of my view. Then I texted him: coffee?

He responded, an hour later, with: can’t tonight. Tonight? Did that mean another night? I dissected this comment, studying it for all its implications and then decided to get up and get moving before I drove myself crazy. Something in my gut told me I shouldn’t respond to him. Looking back, I suppose it was the Red flags that, despite my best attempt at denial, were struggling hard to raise themselves.

So I busied myself. I busied myself practicing the violin for the performance on Thursday. I played through my part two, three times before it became clear that I was not focusing. I needed to focus. I needed to run.

And like the months before where I ran and ran to clarity, I ran and ran until I found it. And maybe by design or maybe by sub conscious, I ended up by the coffee shop where Christian and I had our first real moment. I was feeling quite maudlin myself, all those red flags submitting defeat, until I rounded the corner and saw him through the glass window, sitting at a table with a woman. I stopped involuntarily. I was across the street from the shop, he would have to look purposely to see me, which he hadn’t done.

My first thought was maybe they were friends. Then: of course he’s dating – I could hardly expect him to be home alone. Mourning. But something I couldn’t put my finger on hurt more than that, like a slap to the face. And then I realized I had seen that woman before. In the picture frames in a box in his closet, unbeknownst to him. The woman, with her dark locks and toothy smile was Sophia. The ex. There were so many pictures of them in the box: them at a picnic, at the beach, in a field, at a birthday party, on the couch. So many pictures it was as if they were trying to document their happiness.  To remind themselves later of what they had shared. As if the memories in the snapshots would ground them and say See?  We were happy. I have been there.  I have done that.  I recognize that habit.  And the pictures, I told myself, were there because he was too indifferent to toss them. Half Truth. He wasn't indifferent, he was undecided.

Watching them felt like a betrayal – an unfair melodramatic response to be sure; Christian was of course free to date whomever he pleased. But we’d spent intimate hours in the dark reveling over her and why she wasn’t right for him. We’d spent hours dissecting our psyche’s – exposing our vulnerable selves to each other and all in this barren, honest way he claimed not to be able to do with her. I realized that all along I’d expected him to find someone. But I had not expected him to find her. Again. Somehow the choice made all the tenderness and vulnerability he’d shared – an insult. I was his confidant at my own expense. I thought I had set him free. How stupid. He had been free all along.

I blinked my eyes and quite suddenly emerged from my analytic daze. I was still standing, motionless, staring at the two of them. They hadn’t seen me and I chose to use that opportunity to pretend I’d never seen them. I ran home replying James’s words: Life is going to happen with you or around you. Be Happy. Get Some Manners, along the same plain, said: that you could choose to let pain and hurt guide your actions but that wasn’t really goal directive. If you wanted to be happy you had to choose the letting go of pain and hurt. Long term peace was developed, consciously, by people choosing healthy self talk and positive reacting. That was goal directive. You would be happy when you were living truth guided by truth. I could choose the hurt and be angry at Christian (and let’s get serious – of course I wanted to do that – I was a woman in pain – I wanted to kick his ass) but that wouldn’t ultimately help me achieve the long term peace of mind I’d been working so hard at achieving – alone. That was after all, the point in setting Christian free. Red flags and vanilla were there all along – I had been the one to ignore them. Observe and correct. Observe and correct. And be happy. But now I knew that part of me had expected this all along. The emotions, no less real despite our anticlimactic end, had run away with us. Too hot to touch for too long, my mother had said, and she was right. We were retreating to level ground. In my heart I knew that choosing Sophia was the wrong choice for him but he was not asking me for my opinion and my opinion was not going to salvage him. You cannot save people. They have to save themselves. So I ran home, dropping pieces of my hurt and anger with every pounding foot step, with every mile until I reached my front door – heart fully intact. Peaceful.

When I’d showered and changed, I picked up the phone and called Peter Stone. He answered, on the first ring, with “Hey Chloe, I’m glad you called”. No mixed signals. No red flags. No drama but happiness at the notion that I had called. Confirmation: eternal or temporary, I had made a step away from chaos and toward long term peace of mind.  I chose goal directive over immediate gradification.  It would turn out to be the wisest decision of my life.