Harpoons of Love
I stood in front of my mailbox and pulled out some envelopes.
I looked at my mother’s mail. Even after she died, her faraway
friends still wrote her. They wanted to let her know how they were
doing. I should write them back and tell them that she’s dead.
Instead, I wrote them back pretending to be my mother.
Jerome "Jerry" Terroine, my neighbor, stared at me while
I looked at the bottom of my bathrobe slippers. He pulled a letter
from my hand.
"That’s mine," he told me.
"But it’s addressed to me," I said.
"It is mine."
"Okay."
"Mail. I’m going to put my mail in your box. I need to
pick some of my mail from your box also," he said.
"Whatever." I scratched my beard and blinked at the afternoon
light and realized that I should never have left my couch.
"The twat, the postman twat, is fucking with my mail on purpose.
So I’m sending my mail out, under cover of camouflage. I’m
putting your address on all of my mail. Putting it in your mailbox.
To fool him." Jerry put some letters in my mailbox and put the
flag up. My name was printed on the return address.
"You have neat handwriting," I told him.
I held up his letter to the sun and looked through it. I thought I
saw a drawing of a heart, like faint cracks on the concrete. Jerry
popped me on the top of my head.
"You really should get dressed. It is the middle of the afternoon,"
he said.
"You’ve got a point there," I said.
"If your mother were alive, she’d be highly disappointed."
My mother died a few years ago, but it still seems like she was around.
Overall, I think I was a disappointment to her. I tried college, but
it didn’t work out for me. And I never could get up in the morning
to keep a job. Most mornings, I usually got as far as my couch. So
I sat on this couch and played with my laptop. And my mom would tell
me,
"You are stuck in neutral. You are stuck." And I told her,
"No, I’m just good at watching life go by." And she
had to agree about that. Deep down, I had no complaints. She had really
good life insurance, and I had really good wireless Internet.
Kandi, my girlfriend, came over to my house. We met on MySpace. She
visited me because I didn’t like to travel much. I had steamed
open all of Jerry’s letters.
"What gives you the right?" she asked me.
"He’s a jerk."
"You’re a jerk too."
"It’s okay. If he’s nice, I give most of them back."
Some tears bubbled on the edge of my eyelids. I wiped my eyes.
"Oh baby, are you upset about your mom?"
"No. Sally, Jerry’s girlfriend, writes really good love
letters. Jerry and Sally are having a long-distance pen-pal relationship.
Neither knows what the other looks like. And I’m brimming with
anticipation."
"Anticipation?"
"In these letters I hold, they have mailed each other their pictures!"
After I told Kandi about Sally’s latest letter, Kandi wanted
to have sex. After yanking out the power cord to my notebook, she
took off all of her clothes and danced around. After I ignored her,
Kandi fell asleep on the couch. Sally was in the midst of recounting
her heartbreaking affair with a tugboat captain. The captain had used
her and was about to deflower her amid a spray of crashing waves.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. The lavender paper crinkled
a little bit in my hands, and it smelled of lilacs.
While Kandi napped, I sobbed as I read about Sally’s terrible
sea-lashed deflowerment: "Like a sharp harpoon stabbing my soul,
a harpoon of love."
After Sally’s masterpiece, I had to know what she looked like.
I lunged at the last two letters and ripped them open. Pictures. Jerry,
nude, grabbed his harpoon. I shrieked and flung his picture from me.
Sally on the other hand had taken off her glasses and just unbuttoned
the top button of her blouse. She held her glasses and peered myopically
with muted sensuality, at the camera.
This surely wouldn’t do. I was inspired. While Kandi drowsed
in her birthday suit, I snapped her picture and dropped the Polaroid
into Jerry’s envelope. And then I took a picture of myself (fully
clothed) wearing my mother’s Yacht Club hat at a jaunty nautical
angle, and I put it in Sally’s envelope. And very carefully,
I, holding only the corner of Jerry’s photo, stuffed his nude
picture down the garbage disposal.
Three weeks later, I stared out the window at my mailbox, Kandi pleaded with me to go to the mall.
"Where is my sea breeze? Where is the harpoon to my heart?" I asked as I pointed to the door. I showed Kandi the door.
"Where is my love?" she asked.
"Where is my melodrama, is more like it," I told her.
She cried and carried on outside on the stoop. Jerry walked by. He goggled his eyes and threw up his hands. He made a strangling sobbing noise. Jerry threw himself at her feet sobbing and telling her that he loved her and her melon-like breasts. "True love," Jerry said. "I can’t believe you came all this way because of my letters. That is true love," he said. Kandi said, "Ick." Jerry pleaded with her. She sat unmoved. He agreed to take her to the mall. Kandi cocked her head. She murmured something about the Interwebs. He raised his head, and, proudly, told her he didn’t have Internet access, and she burst into tears and agreed to go out with him. They both walked off holding hands while crying.
Fortunately, I didn’t have much time to reflect. I had to finish my confessional to Sally about my dalliance with my twelfth grade math teacher, and I had to let my mother’s friends know how her bridge tournament was going. And, time ticked, because inching down the street, the mailman in his white truck came closer. While I signed Jerry’s name with a flourish, the mailman’s truck got stuck in neutral, and the truck revved and revved, while the postman banged on the steering wheel cursing. The gears clashed and jerked, while the truck just glided to a stop next to the yellow painted curb.