Buildings for the people smell like the people, and sometimes the worst parts of the people. Marin County’s courthouse is no exception, despite its salmon and turquoise exterior, ultra-Wright in its justice-fair lines and circles.
I push open the glass door and am immediately assaulted with the scent of industrial-strength soap barely covering sweat, and possibly urine. It’s too soon to tell, and I try not to focus on it, instead clutching the brace of papers under my arm and looking for the elevator. My back is damp from the hot car. I’m trying not to add to the deep yet faint human smell. It might not be working.
The first floor is considered the lobby level, and the second … I have never figured out. It’s C in the elevator. Could that be for campanile? No, I think that’s a bell tower. It should be M for mezzanine, but it’s not, and I can’t keep thinking about it because it’s time to figure out where room 113 is, on the third level, which is really the first floor.
I feel barely civil as I pull open the glass door to room 113. I look for someone who will be nice, or maybe just smile.
I find Leroy instead.
Leroy is an aging-hippie county worker. His graying hair is slightly long in back, and he has large, light-rimmed square glasses with thick lenses. His mustache is more of a swipe with a wire brush than an actual formation of hair. Pockmarked skin hangs loosely from high cheekbones, although he is perhaps the skinniest white boy I have ever seen. He squints at me and asks in the deadest tone possible, “May I help you.”
Quickly, I glance around at all the other counters: either unoccupied or preoccupied. I have maybe 15 minutes to do this before I am needed back at work. For the love of God, I’m getting Leroy.
Leroy it is. I head to his counter and smile. My hands are shaking; I don’t mean them to be, but I can’t still them. Dinner was elusive the night before, as was sleep. I made up for the latter with a big (free) lunch at work, but the former was making everything slightly nauseating.
“I have some papers to file,” I say carefully.
Leroy says, “All right.” I was waiting for the smile. It’s not his to give, really, this reassurance I’m looking for in another human being, in a stranger, this spark of it’s okay, it’s all going to be okay. Because it is, and my reassurance glands are working overtime but still, I want to connect. And Leroy ain’t havin’ it. He disappears to find my file, the one I began a year ago, with two pieces of paper and $200 and an ocean of tears.
I wish I hadn’t found the journal the night before. This would be so much easier if it were a decision I made from some source of internal strength, some newfound resolve discovered through taking Tai Chi classes or reading Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now or anything else I’ve been toying with lately. But the journal: what a pathetic reason. After a glass of wine, it seemed like a good idea to sift through old words, the past catalogued and neatly shelved beside my bed with a librarian’s care. The lavender fabric cover made the small volume stand out among all the thicker, black-bound ones, but it wasn’t until I had opened it to read the dedication that I knew why this one was different.
It was the only journal I had written to anyone before. The dedication spoke of a love I barely remembered. As I turned the page, I started to blush as if embarrassed. Here were the thoughts I recorded during the long weeks after he left to “be alone” and “figure himself out”. He left because I found out about his affair: not the first, and I’d later learn not the last. But in these words I was still so full of naïve generosity that I spoke of the future we’d start building together – again – after he returned home. I gave him the journal then, hoping he would read it and understand that I forgave him.
We never spoke of the journal after I presented it to him. And he had so thoughtfully returned it to my shelf of journals in the space we shared together that I thought he never read it.
Until I read his dedication, carefully scrawled in his cramped hand under mine.
After my outpourings, his began. Nearly two years later, he continued the journal with words he never gave to me while it still mattered. He wrote about how brave I was to be leaving him, how strong I had always been and how he had admired me so much for it. He wrote about how much he loved me and knew he would never love anyone like that again, that he knew just what he was losing and couldn’t do a thing to prevent it.
I threw the stupid lavender book across my tiny apartment. It didn’t give me the satisfaction of breaking anything. My cat stalked around it, sniffed it, then stared at me as I sobbed. After a while, when my flannel-covered pillow was soaked, I realized I had been repeating, “Not now, not now, not now,” to no one at all.
Eight separate documents spill from my blue plastic folder. I have prepared and printed, signed and dated, double– and triple-checked each one, and still Leroy finds errors. But they are errors he can easily fix, and he does, without much comment. One document I was supposed to have three copies of instead of my meager two, and as my panic rises – please please please can’t it all just be okay so I can do this and get out of here – I ask if I can make a copy of one there.
Leroy replies, with what I think is magnanimity or at least some faint indigestion, “That extra copy really isn’t necessary.” I am relieved but skeptical, and it shows on my face, so he repeats it. Whatever.
He stamps and initials each document and places them in my file. I watch the stack pile up; I watch the collection of eight years of hard-won love and hate that spanned a continent turn into a collection of eight documents in a manila folder in a building that smells like pee. A paralegal will review and file these documents, and in four to six weeks, I will receive a piece of paper that says
it’s over
and someone else, someone who wants never to see or talk to me again, will receive a piece of paper that says the same thing.
My load is lighter as I leave. The blue plastic folder is clamming to my palms and I turn it over and over again. It’s so much thinner and weaker; it’s just digested and shat out the past. As I burst out of the building, I take a deep breath … and I smell autumn. I smell the leaves just like they were last year; I smell the clear blue promise of winter. A large white pick-up truck jacked impossibly high on huge tires eclipses my small black car, and for a moment I can pretend that I am left here, floating, no ties to anything of the past or present, and no concern for the future.
I stand still and gulp air. I don’t remember when I’ve ever been this happy to breathe. No one is looking or waiting, so I just breathe. I breathe and I nod; I know what I’ve just done. It was the right thing to do.
© 2004 by Halsted M. Bernard