Undying Love

by Lloyd B. Abrams

A retirement dinner at a fancy joint on the North Shore. It was the only one I ever attended. Even if they had ever planned one for me, I would never have shown up.

Emily was there. Emily. I’d had a thing for her, a yearning, ever since I saw her standing on the lunch line in the teachers’ cafeteria during my first year teaching in our high school. I even passed by her room and looked in on her, through the reinforced glass door panes, when she was standing in front of a class. But I never acted on the attraction. To me, she was untouchable – not to mention that we were both married. Plus, I had never been the wandering type – least of all, a Don Juan, a womanizer, a philanderer.

Before I burned out from teaching special ed – I saw it coming like a California wildfire – I switched to math, which happened to be her subject area. She loaned me her lesson plans for Course I for which I was so grateful. Several years later I became program chairman. During three terms she worked with me as my office assistant for one compensatory period, and sometimes more, every day. But one summer she transferred to another high school a bit closer to her home. Her move seemed rather sudden.

A couple of screwdrivers later, in a corner of the lobby where it was quieter and more private, we were rehashing old times. Alcohol was quite the lubricant. I admitted that I had a crush on her for years, but always from afar – even after the school day had ended and she stayed on at the beginning of each term to help me finish my heavy load of paperwork. She told me she had very similar feelings and that’s why she’d needed to transfer. No longer could she tolerate working with me in close proximity.

As the evening ended, after we had mostly sobered up, I walked her out to the parking lot. I wanted to kiss her, to hold her. But at the same time, I felt myself backing away. Withdrawing emotionally when my space is threatened has always been my modus operandi.

We caught up with each other several times a year, usually during the afternoon of the semi-annual open-school evenings, when it wasn’t worth my time and effort to drive home and then back. She was having a horrid time with her husband, a degenerate gambler, who had found a way to empty her retirement savings account. Also, her twenty-something daughter was acting out in a dangerous way. So throughout, surprisingly, it was I who seemed to be living the comparatively “normal” middle class lifestyle free of major tsuris and angst.

After she retired, Emily sold her Brooklyn duplex, and purchased a condominium near the water in my own Long Island village. I always wondered why she had chosen to live in Freeport, as in “of all the gin mills in all the world …”

I tried to call her every March 14, which was Pi-day. Occasionally, when I’d pass her building, which was along one of my walking loops, I’d look for her car parked on the street, still with the same license plate number as on Rockaway Parkway when I’d spot her on the way to school.

I’d look up at Emily’s second floor window to see if the lights were on or if there was any activity. Sometimes I’d knock on her door, and she’d greet me warmly but, as always, somewhat formally. That was actually a good thing. We’d catch up about her declining health and my health challenges, about people we knew from school, about our children and grandchildren, about the good ol’ times, such as they were. But I could never stay too long in her smoke-filled home. Her smoking – which eventually did her in – might have been a major cause that turned me off, besides my own overall hesitancy. Even as I was leaving, I couldn’t bring myself to draw too close.

It’s been over a year since she’s died from lung cancer and associated heart problems. In our last telephone conversation, after she had to abandon her condo and move into her daughter’s suburban home, I told her again that I’d always loved her.

… and that I always will.

Based on the workshop prompt “catching up”

Rev 4 / August 3, 2019

Up to the beginning of the story

August 3, 2019 … Copyright © 2019, Lloyd B. Abrams