I couldn’t hear their exact words through the floor, but the happy sounds indicated Maria was making a hubbub of my poem.
I sat on her bed, silently awaiting the bliss to come. I was, for that moment, happy. Even doubts about her past could not penetrate my concentration. Smiling, I looked around her room. On the wall across from her bed I noticed something I’d never noticed before: a window frame. It wasn’t a window opened up to the outside. In fact, Maria’s little basement hideout had no real windows whatsoever. The window I noticed that night was a simple, glassless, mahogany frame adorned with a pair of silky yellow drapes which opened up to the cinder block wall.
Before I had another second to ponder my discovery, Maria fluttered back down the stairs, poem in hand.
“So, did they like it?” I asked.
Maria beamed. Tears rolled down her eyes as we embraced.
“Maria, I was just wondering what that was,” I said, pointing to the non-window.
“Oh, I guess you never noticed that before, huh? Well, in case you didn’t realize, I don’t have any real windows down here. Long story short, there’s a second-floor apartment upstairs above my parents’ place. When I was a little girl, I used to live there. Back then, I had two real windows in my room and both allowed the sunlight to stream in all day. But when my father lost his job and my family was short on money, we had to rent out that floor. So me and my sister moved down here, to the basement.”
“Where’s your sister’s room?” I asked.
“It’s back there,” she said, pointing to a splintery wooden door leading to what I thought was the boiler room. “But she’s never home. She’s always at her boyfriend’s house around the corner. She sleeps there all the time. So I have this little basement all to myself. And we have it to ourselves.”
“But what about the window?” I asked.
“Oh yea, the window. Anyway, when I was about nine years old, I begged my mother to let me move back upstairs. I didn’t understand why we had to give up the second floor. I told her, ‘Mommy, I want to look out my window again.’ Sympathetically, she said I couldn’t have my old room and old window back, but she’d give me the next best thing: my very own special window, one that I could look through and see whatever I wanted, not just Ridgewood.” She chuckled and then continued. “My mother always promised that someday I’d have a real window to look through. But it’s been seven years and, well, you know the rest.”
“Maria, that’s the most touching story I’ve ever heard. If I could buy you a house with a big bay window I would. Maybe next Valentine’s Day.” I smiled.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “I don’t need a real window anymore. Until tonight, I’d never realized just how much you understood me or my life. Your poem has opened up a window to my heart tonight. And only you and I have the privilege to gaze through it, to see what’s inside.
“I love you, A.J.”
“I love you, too, baby.”
I should have made every day thereafter like Valentine’s Day.
Instead, weeks passed, more snowfall came, and I couldn’t stop worrying. Don’t you know, I asked the snow one day while shoveling, that Maria is lying to me? But the snow didn’t respond. It just melted, slowly, day after day, ultimately revealing the old neighborhood once again. Shoveling the snow each week, I thought of a zillion creative ways that Maria could lie to me. It’s all I could think about.
Images of her laughing and joking with her old friends and boyfriends struck me like lightening each moment I was awake. As I lay in bed each night, aching to fall asleep in peace, elaborate conspiracy theories involving Maria bounced like racquetballs within my head.
Each morning I woke charged with jealousy. Wicked thoughts began to dance and play within my mind before my first cigarette, teasing and taunting me like little children with BB guns. The thoughts knew who was boss. I could fight like hell each day, and occasionally win a battle against my own shame, but it would eventually win the war. Burglars can’t help but rob a home when the door is left wide open with nobody home.
My days went something like this: One moment I’d be in school, doing math or history, and then—wham!—a thought would whack me with a punch in the jaw. With each thought, the swelling and stinging intensified in the form of more thoughts; the pain and thoughts grew exponentially. More images of Maria kissing some faceless boy I’d never met; more pictures of her smiling little face laughing at another guy’s joke; more fear and hatred for people long gone from her mind.
Sick thoughts. Crazy thoughts.
These thoughts were more intense when I was with her. When I gazed into her eyes, memories of times of which I wasn’t part of multiplied like amoeba, first two, then four, then eight. And then, within minutes, a thousand crazy thoughts would permeate my mind, forcing me to stop whatever I was doing and obey their lead. After being bombarded by these thoughts, my heart would feel empty and weak, and soon be overcome by resentment.
No, not resentment. Hatred.
I hated Maria for her past. Not because her past was particularly despicable, but because she had a past, period. There was a time before me, A.J. L’Enfant, and I couldn’t bear to think of it. And yet I thought about it all the time.
Laying nude on Maria’s bed, wrapped in her soft arms, it would begin oh-so-innocently. Amidst a beautiful conversation with Maria following sex, or a snowball fight, or whatever, that little devil would appear on my shoulder and whisper, “Ask her, A.J. Ask her.” The devil knew precisely what particular worry was rupturing my head at the moment: ex-boyfriends, alcohol, whatever. Seldom did I subtly introduce my fears to her as a best friend should feel comfortable doing. Usually, I’d accuse her, out of the blue, of drinking again. She’d always deny it, of course. But I’d persist. I wouldn’t—no, I couldn’t—let her forget about what she did with her cousin Upstate the previous summer. It was tattooed on my brain. Occasionally, during one of Maria’s moments of rebellion, she’d say something like, “Yea, well you drank, too.” Then she’d fold her arms and smirk, seemingly victorious. But the little devil would remind me to remind her that I drank primarily because of her, because she’d upset me so much, even though that was the furthest thing from the truth.
One day—I think it was in mid-March, right before Easter—Maria and I went shopping at Queens Center Mall. What followed was a typical scenario from that period in my life. We were in Stern’s looking for an Easter dress, but Maria couldn’t find anything she liked. I admit I was getting a little frustrated, because she’d already tried on a dozen dresses and I just wanted to go back to her place and relax. “Let’s try The Limited,” I suggested. As we entered the store, a fat guidette tapped her on the shoulder and started screaming happily.
“Is this the infamous A.J.?” she asked. “The greatest boy alive you’re always talking about?”
Maria smiled. “Yep,” she said, locking her right arm around my left. “This is my lover boy.” She gently brushed the back of her hand against my forehead and pushed the hair out of my eyes, just like mommy used to do.
“Maria’s always talking about you,” the girl said. “It’s always ‘A.J. this and A.J. that.’ I never hear anything else! You’re one lucky guy to have a girlfriend like Maria. She’s so proud of you going into the Air Force and everything. She says you’re going to take her up in a jet and make out with her in the sky.” She giggled and looked for Maria’s approval.