Goddess

In the darkness he waits for her. The cool night air is punctured by passing headlights- an intermittent pulse of life. It’s a deserted place, a country road. A packing plant gone unused these several months since operations moved to Mexico. Down the road, as he observed coming in tonight, a housing development is in the works. He rolls his eyes, imagining the traffic here in a few years’ time.

For most of today, his nerves have played at him—more, it’s a sense of unease he can’t explain. They’ve been seeing each other forever, at least it seems that way. She’s younger than he is. There are times he thinks she’s had no one else. In the past, there were even moments when he’d found her inexperience charming. Now, however, he’s fairly certain that she sees other men. It doesn’t upset him like it once might have, though he worries about her judgment sometimes. He has no desire to discuss such things with her for fear it will lead to further “talks”—the very animal he dreads. Every so often, just to comfort her, on saying goodnight he adds, “Be mine.” It suffices, he thinks, to keep them on track in her eyes.

As for anticipating the woman he’s now waiting for—that stopped, as such, long ago. She’s cute enough. Heavier than he likes. And he’s never been much for blonds, oddly. But whenever he calls, she comes. And she does whatever he asks. No… it isn’t nerves. He’s unsettled, he decides, swallowing to rid the sharp taste in his mouth.

On the periphery a car slows. His body tenses as he watches for a turn signal. Nothing. He relaxes. The refrain of an old Bruce Springsteen song suddenly rattles the darkness. Cell phone display reads “Pamela,” and he takes a breath. She is the receptionist in his office. A gorgeous brunette, she’s starred in his fantasies many a night. For now, he mutes the ringer and continues his vigil. His mind drifts helplessly to the enigma of Pam’s husband. The women in his office spend their coffee breaks day after day giggling, referring to their men as louts. Not she. Pam stands out among the bulging soccer-mom nags and complainers. He wonders what she thinks of him.

Glancing to the dash, he rolls up his windows and turns the ignition off. The air is sucked out of the car and silence fills his ears. “Money is money,” he says. His watch reads 7:49. He mutters a profanity. She’s late, and when she arrives she’ll inevitably want to talk about some damn thing before they can be quiet and be together. He will tell her that he loves her, as he has grown accustomed to doing, because it gets her focused and in the mood. But he does love the perfume she wears—some nights he’d lost himself in that scent, in her eager arms, her soft hair, her warm inside. He closes his eyes and massages his shaft, daydreaming of a woman—an amalgam of she, Pamela, and of his wife (before).

A few seconds pass. A sedan with a raucous engine makes a right turn. Passing beneath a row of yellow lights bordering the far end of the lot, the car’s driver extinguishes the high beams. Making a giant loop, the car parks beside him. A woman gets out. She fidgets with her hair in the creeping moonlight. They gaze intently at one another. Then she smiles broadly and runs to his passenger door. Pulling it open, she leaps in excitedly, flooding the interior with light. “You started without me,” she says, laughing. “You couldn’t wait?” Leaning in, she pulls his hand back and places hers upon him.

For some reason she starts talking about the first time they met—then she corrects herself. “It wasn’t when we met. Weeks later, you really noticed me. Talked to me. Remember? You gave me a ride home after that Christmas party. I was tired, probably a little drunk, and I slept some of the way. But there, next to me, I could sense you wanting me. That blue jacket of yours with the plaid hood, it’s ingrained in my memory from that night. I will never ever forget it, or your annoying penchant for sports, exercise. Everything so foreign to me.” She laughed. “You’re a part of me in a way I can’t explain. (You make me feel so high and so low at the same time.)”

She says she missed him today. Longed for him in every way imaginable. She is nervous about his newly quieted expression. Begins sputtering promises of her fidelity to him—there has never been another, there will never be... She interweaves these declarations with praise for him, for his commitment to his wife. In truth, she hates his wife and chooses suddenly to say this, to scream it, but she backtracks immediately because he loved this woman once—still, she knows.
One day we’ll really be together, she whispers. Is it a question? She takes his hands and wraps them around her. She pulls him toward her and forgets all else.

These are things she feels. This is what she would’ve said when he asked “how are you?” if he had asked—if she thought, even for a minute, that he gave a damn.

That man, the man she made love to most every night, was all in her mind.