13.
The next morning, Richard remembered
to check the mailbox for mail before walking to his car and driving to
work--it'd been a few days since he last remembered to. He threw the handful of papers he found in
there on the passenger seat of his two-year-old Lexus, a vehicle he'd never
anthromorphologized as he had his other cars, for some reason. And then in the elevator on the way up to his
floor, when he finally got a chance to look through the handful of mail, he saw
it: a picture postcard from the site of
the Liberty Bell, in Philadelphia, PA. Was
this from Beth? And if so -- of all the places
to run away and hide in, why Philadelphia?
Puzzling out the answer to this question occupied his thoughts for the
rest of the morning, mercifully, so that for once he was deaf to the niggling
background conversations so common to office life. He went online and did some research about
the city, to see if anything about the place would provide clues to why Beth
might have fled there. John Coltrane
lived in Philadelphia, briefly, in a dangerous neighborhood with the intriguing
name of Strawberry Mansion. Edgar Allen
Poe also lived in Philadelphia for a while too.
His concentration drifted and he thought about Beth's hair; she had a
beautiful mane of hair when they first met, but she cut it all off one night to
spite him, and she never let it grow back.
Then he remembered it: her dad
was from PA, not Philadelphia, though, one of the suburbs, but still-- that
could be a reason for her to go there, to find some vein of comfort in the
gnarled roots of her genes.
It wasn't her craziness, which made her so
vulnerable to the whims of sane people, which had turned him off and made her
intolerable. It'd been her selfishness.
He was in fact tolerant to the point of excess regarding the types of craziness
he'd only seen in women. In fact,
sometimes he thought that was the only reason he didn't quit his job, which he
hated (he wanted to own his own business, be his own boss, have some freedom at
last) -- because of all the crazy women who worked there. God how he pitied, even envied, them all
their fragility and just-barely-hanging-on-ness sometimes. He heard them talking as they walked in
conspiratorial twos past his office, or exited the bathroom, and it seemed
every on of them had an Achilles Heel located in the fragile pretty body of
their personalities. They'd been named
clinically depressed or chronically anxious or even bipolar by some doctor of
theirs, who Richard always imagined to be assholes. To Richard, these women seemed brave as
soldiers, to pull their camisoles over their heads and zip up their pants each
morning despite the nervous trembling of their hands, to speak in normal tones
to their supervisors when they wanted to shout or moan or cry instead. Unlike these brave, albeit mostly unpleasant
women, Beth had given up, years ago, practically the second she met him, he
felt. But he would save her anyway. So the adventure started.
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