Tyler Knight

The cab has pulled away two minutes ago and I’m still standing at the base of Ann’s stairs. An ambulance is wailing down Divisadero, coming toward my direction.

Why am I really pursuing this? Self-interest? Ego? Maybe she really is better off without me.

As the ambulance passes me by, its howls get longer.

Heh, Doppler shift. Focus. Why am I standing at her doorstep? Christ, I’ve hurt her.

The ambulance is gone. The street falls silent. I’m still standing in the same spot I was when the cab dropped me off. Carry-on at my feet. Flowers in hand.

What’s the right move here?

I climb the steps. I hear the doorbell resonate from inside the house.

—
The kitchen is lit only by the gloom through the windows, filtering through the Marlboro Light she’s sucking on.

She never smoked until she moved here.

“I saw your car at the Embarcadero,” I say.

“Yeah, I was in the center. When Babs and I went into the Royal Exchange they told me you were just there looking for me, so I drove home to wait for you.”

She sits across from me and puts her purse down on the table between us. Peeking out of the top of the purse, I see a Kodak 1 Hour Photo envelope.

“So, you don’t seem surprised to see me,” I say.

“I told you I knew you would come over.”

“I mean, you don’t seem surprised I flew to San Francisco.”

“Nothing surprises me about you anymore.” She gets up from the table go to the cupboard for a vase, then to the sink where she fills it with water. She places the vase of yellow flowers on the table. The Kodak envelope in her purse is yellow.

“Look, I’m sorry Ann. I’ve had a lot of time to think this past month we’ve been apart.”

“What’s going to be different the next time if we do stay together?”

“There won’t be a next time,” I say.

Yellow.

“You keep saying that and yet you keep hurting me,” she says. “I’m tired of it. I mean, even when I’m with you, you’re not really here with me. Mentally anyway. I’m very lonely…I don’t know anymore.”

Sunlight breaks free of the clouds and cuts a path through the grey. The kitchen comes alive and everything is awash in yellow.

“I’m here right now. I know what I want and it’s you. Us.”

“So what, you came all the way here just to tell me you had a vision of Jesus and you’re a changed man?”

“Yes,” I say.

She takes a slow pull from her cigarette, looks at my Versace shirt and back to my eyes. Her words float on the smoke seeping from the corner of her mouth as she snickers, “Sure you are.”

“I love you,” I say.

Purse.

“I don’t feel like doing this right now. I’m meeting the gang at One Market. You can come along if you like.”

I fly all the way here to talk to her and she is blowing me off. She knows how I feel about her friends and bars. She’s fucking with me but if this is a test…

Ann scoffs, “I didn’t think so.”

Go with her. Here is a chance to show her I can change. Don’t blow it.

“Sure, let’s go.”

Purse.

“Suit yourself. I’m going to take a shower and change,” she says.

She leaves and a few moments later I hear the shower.

What the fuck was that all about?

I get up and go to the stove to boil water for tea.

Purse.

The water comes to a boil and I pour a cup. I sit at the table looking the yellow flowers while sipping my tea.

Perhaps I should propose to her again, after we have more time to work things out of course.

My tea cup is warming my hands as I lace my fingers around it. The sun has changed to a lower position in the sky, letting the funk reclaim the kitchen table.

PURSE!

I can still hear the shower running, I snatch Ann’s purse off the table and dig out the yellow envelope.

I open it to snapshots of immaculately dressed, lusty young women and men in an outdoor bar, served up in duplicate. They peer out at me from behind their drinks and their cigarettes, the camera flash turning their eyes demon-red, groping at one another in an Exstacy and Stoli glazed stupor.

Flipping through the pics, I see the erosion of American superiority played out by dim-witted, beautiful actors too self-absorbed to realize that we are in the third act of Western Civilization, and the show must not always go on. Every person I see has the same “chic this week” look of shameless entitlement tailored with “fuck tomorrow” that only the young and the stupid can wear. I hear the laughter, the glasses clanging, and the white noise from a few dozen of one sided monoversations.

And I am there.

Among the red-eyed demon-people whose pupils cut through the night but still can’t see past the six inches in front of their stellar faces. They are speaking to me, or rather at me as I go about bumping and jostling my way through the crowd of gorgeous flesh….”

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