Weeks of coloring and grading passed and it was on my birthday that I decided to ask Chloe again about the coloring book. Honestly, I had begun to find the venture a bit childish. It amazed me how much time she’d spent on the project. After I told her how I felt, she closed the book, looked up and handed it to me explaining that it was my birthday gift. I accepted it, and as I flipped through the soft pages I was amazed by what she had created. Each of the scenes had been colored in a different, yet familiar, artistic style. Kids on sliding boards had been rendered with impressionistic colors and textures. The jungle gym had a pop-art feel, and the kids climbing trees had been rendered in a classic style that, with a little imagination, reminded me of the Great Masters.
“Give something time, Theo, and it may still surprise you,” she’d said.
That statement was and should have stayed the founding phrase of our marriage. Our life together was a distinctly happy one, only peppered with occasional moments where one or both of us lost sight of the value of the other. It was normal married-person stuff. Until Morton Petes and his mocking ‘suicide.’ He destroyed the fragile balance. When I thought that he’d died, I found it too difficult to live between the mathematical and the human. I’d believed that I’d wrongly applied my talent to Morton’s suicidal patterns and was, thus, responsible for his death. Chloe, for all of her unexpected actions and positive personality, was no match for my grief or for the strength of my new conviction in the separation of patterns and people.
On the day that she finally left (and I don’t blame her even now) I was thinking of what she’d once said “Give something time, Theo, and it may still surprise you.” I looked up from the corner chair where I’d come to reside and said to her silhouette in the doorway, “I’m sorry. I’ve taken all that I can of your time.”
As Polly and I drove to Memphis I began to feel guilty. She wasn’t aware that an emotional landscape lay just beneath the landscape of this music town. She also didn’t know that Memphis was where Chloe now lived. Every so often, I looked at her in the passenger seat and was happy to see her profile or her smile, but each time I also wondered how much longer she’d be there. Or how much longer I wanted her to be. Or how much longer it was safe for her to be.
Polly insisted that we stay at a hotel near Graceland and had begun to sing Elvis Presley songs as we approached the city. Now, it’s been said that you can tell a lot about a person by whether they are an Elvis fan or not. There was something about Graceland, though, that forced you to decide quickly which you were. The whole street is a temple to the man, or at least to the image of the man and you were either with it, or in a world of Elvis hurt. Polly was with it. Full on. And so she sang. I was able to enjoy the place for the sheer statement to human obsession. Still, I had my thoughts split between possible threats to me and, by association, Polly, what I’d do once I finally caught up with Morton Petes and the ghost of my marriage walking through Memphis.
The blonde impersonator in my passenger seat pointed to me as she sang, Oh let me be your … uhhh … Teddy Bear. I pulled into the parking lot of the Days Inn on Elvis Presley Blvd. Yes, the hotel with the neon Elvis that flashed between gyration poses to approximate the actual motion of the now-dead Pelvis. It made me either grin or grimace to see it all, the two expressions are sometimes indistinguishable. I entered the lobby and walked up to the woman working the desk. Behind her on a television, Elvis was dancing on a Hawaiian beach, on a looped tape, dancing and singing and looking at pretty girls forever. The woman asked me if I wanted two beds or one.
“Two!” shouted Polly from my side, although I hadn’t known that she was there.
“One,” I corrected her and Polly was, finally, speechless.
We checked into our room and immediately raised the air conditioning level to max. I wondered how anyone ever felt comfortable in the humidity or if they just adapted like people who stop realizing that their pets smelled. I stood over the cool air and let it dry my face until I felt chilled. I jumped on the bed where Polly was waiting.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hello Mr. Burnkey,” she responded, “I’m not the expert, but I think that you just broke your pattern.”
“Polly, I’m worried about this escaped Columbia, Missouri math guy. He seems to have a vendetta against people like me. He wants ‘the sighted’ to go to hell and I’m not ready to leave the earth just yet.”
“More like nearsighted in your case.”
Blank stare.
“OK, first of all, these missile silo guys need a better name. Let’s see, how about, The Six?”
“Polly, this is serious.”
“I know, and they deserve a good name so that we can refer to them seriously and not have to waste eight words doing it. How about The Less-Brainy Sextet?”
“No.”
“The Six and Tired?”
“Polly.”
“The Clifton Pawns?”
“That’s not bad.”
“OK, so when the last of the Clifton Pawns catches up to me, things may get dangerous. I’m not sure that I want you to be involved in that.”
“Why not? Do you care for me Mr. Burnkey?”
“You know Polly, I do. You have made this trip a lot easier for me. You have kept me from being lonely. You have shared the open road and all the sights with me. You’ve matched my talent for patterns with your own pattern for human interaction. You’ve been a real asset.”
“You like me.”
“I thought I said that. Anyway, I have a feeling that things are going to get more serious soon. The fact that Morton Petes seems to be cycling back to his original name makes me think he may be even more unwound than I first thought.”
“Are you worried for my safety?”
“Yes. You didn’t see the dead man in the missile silo. This Clifton Pawn guy has good reason to be upset and he won’t necessarily have the balance to separate his cult thinking and the coldness of math from the value of human life.”
Polly shifted on the bed. She was quiet for a while.
“Come here,” she said patting a spot on the bed next to her. I moved across the bed and lay down beside her. She set her head on my chest and before long she was asleep.
It’s hard to tell how the paths of people are going to cross. I drove to downtown Memphis in the Mustang and a street festival was taking place on the famous Beale Street. Roads were blocked off and people were walking around with drinks in their hands, hollering to their friends and trying to meet new ones. I wondered how close the path of Chloe was to my own path and thus Polly’s. Was Chloe at the street fair and just inside the last building I’d passed? Had Polly awaken to discover that I’d slipped out of the apartment after she’d fallen asleep?
As I walked, I thought about Chloe. I wondered if she’d remarried. I wondered if she had kept the coloring book that she’d made for me, I couldn’t find it in my home when I finally decided to clean. It was funny to think that in a place so foreign to me, that somewhere, not far from here was someone so familiar. Or would she be familiar? Had too much time passed?
In Boston, Chloe had chosen the home where we’d lived. As a girl, she’d always wanted to live in a street with the name of a tree. We’d lived on Elm in our Boston suburb. Beyond the name of the street, she wanted to be able to see the sunset from her front porch and so we’d found a house that faced West with no houses across from us to detract from the view. It had taken us months to find a house that met her seemingly simple requirements, but once we did, her happiness made it worthwhile. It was the most demanding thing that she had ever asked of me.
I walked past the fair and onward in the humid night. Before long I arrived at a hotel called the Lorraine Hotel and it seemed to be deserted. A golden light fell on the building which hadn’t seemed to have changed much since the 1960’s. Outside the main door, two white cars were parked in front of the building. Something struck me as familiar and suddenly I remembered a photo that my mother had once shown me from an old newspaper. She told me, as she pointed to the same hotel that was in front of me, that ‘sometimes good men can only stay in the world so long.’ The article was talking about the death of Martin Luther King Jr. The black and white of the newspaper in my memory faded into the brown light of the same hotel in front of me. It had been preserved just as it was on that April early evening when the reverend was killed.
The hotel, kept as it was, made me feel that I was on hallowed ground. A sense of calm filled me. For a long while I stood and looked at the hotel balcony and the memorial wreath that was affixed to it. I listened to the buzz of the overhead lights and the occasional shout from a nearby bar. I had never witnessed a stronger memorial. I thought about the fight that some people had to wage for what they believed, all to end in their early deaths. I couldn’t compare anything that I’d been through to the fight or times of this great man, but I could appreciate the consistency of loss. I decided that if I could prevent more loss from happening in my life, that I’d do so. I walked back to my car and then drove to the airport.
I arrived back at the hotel at 2:00 in the morning. Polly was still asleep and I set a few papers on the desk by the door. Then I moved to lay in the bed next to her. She stirred.
“Where’ve you been math-boy?” she asked in a low voice full of sleep.
I didn’t respond, but instead I kissed her. What began as a startled moment became all together different as we pulled each other close. I let my mind clear and appreciated the feel and smell of Polly against me. The textures of our pressed lips became lost in our kiss. She moved her hands across my back, looking for the best way to hold me, if possible, closer. We struggled to be less two people and to touch as much of one's body with the other's until we fell asleep.
Again I awoke as Polly slept. I moved to the end of the bed and started to gather my things. Once I had them arranged, I checked the papers on the desk. A one-way ticket back to Seattle in Polly’s name, and some cash for cab fare and incidentals lay there. I sighed as I walked back to her sleeping with her face pushed against a defeated pillow. I whispered, “I’m sorry. I’ve taken all that I can of your time,” and I left the room and Polly.
As the highway to Georgia started to glow with the rising son, I was reminded of the dark streets that I’d left behind in Memphis. I had driven out of Graceland and was on the highway when I looked to my left and down from the elevated road. I had watched the street signs go by and my senses responded to something below. I took the first off ramp. I back-tracked to the street where my glance had fallen from the highway. There, at the end of a street was a house facing due West with no obstructions to its view. The house had an upper level that was painted green and a white porch-enclosed level below. I looked out of the window of my car and saw that the street was called Oak. I stopped the car and looked to the windows of the house and whoever was sleeping within. Could it be the place where Chloe had chosen to live? Was she only a few feet from me, sleeping in the night, her face the only thing familiar in a newly created life? I wasn’t sure, but just in case, I wished her well and drove back to the highway.
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