Against my better judgment, I go up with the woman to her apartment. Objectively speaking, it’s, like, a smart thing to do. The woman is clever, fun, good-looking and (most important of all) eager. Nevertheless, it’s against my better judgment because the particulars of the case don’t quite mesh with the objective descriptors of clever, fun, good-looking and (most important of all) eager. The particulars of the case include a rumour about a freshly deceased boyfriend. I can’t help but wonder if the woman’s eagerness isn’t pasted on, like a cheap rouge, to mask a grief that hasn’t had time to resolve itself into a maturing life experience that she can subtly reference in a tender post-coital moment along with a thank-you for helping me beyond my grief to this place of more-considered reflection. That would be the appropriate approach. Instead, she gives the impression of a dancer-on-graves, a Gertrude in Elsinore, your typical Danish party girl for whom being with a man (as an answer to loneliness or insecurity or whatever) is more important than giving the dead their due. But that’s not all. The rumour has it that not only is the former boyfriend deceased but also he became deceased all of a sudden when his face hit the pavement twenty stories below the girlfriend’s balcony. Suicide is a troubling thing. It infuses even the girlfriend’s laughter with a sadness that makes me want to assure her that it wasn’t her. I want to tell her that it probably had something to do with clinical depression or misprescribed meds or something but whatever it was, it must’ve been something completely beyond her control and so she can’t blame herself or feel guilty about it. Things like this come to mind but I don’t say them because, lurking in counterpoint to my lovely platitudes is the thought that maybe she did have some place in the former boyfriend’s suicide, certainly a contextual place, one half of a primary relationship whose dissolution she had helped along with, say, an annoying laugh or an intractable habit that rendered her so thoroughly loathsome that the former boyfriend saw no alternative but to leap over the railing.
So do you want a drink? and I accept a gin and tonic while settling onto her sofa and struggling mightily against the Freudian demons that keep goading me to say something about the former boyfriend, about how difficult it must be to scrape a smushed face off the sidewalk, or some other totally inappropriate remark. In the end, I quell the demons only because I keep my objective in view: a plush queen-sized bed with frilly dust slip and quilt in a floral pattern of mauve and puce bloomy-looking swirls.
I do reach my objective. I don’t remember the details, because, by that time, I’ve finished an unspecified number of additional g & t’s but I do remember an overall impression of having a fantastic time with a woman who plays out the grieving scenario to an excruciating climax. When we’re done, she draws me out onto the balcony where we stand naked together leaning on the railing and staring across the velvet skyline.\r\n\r\nThe night holds a perfect stillness until I stare over the railing to the sidewalk below and the woman catches me at it, and I can tell by the horror in her eyes that she knows exactly what I’m thinking.
You bastard, she says. It was a perfect night until you went and
I tell her I’m sorry but she only says for me to go fuck myself and
I don’t catch the rest of what she tells me to go and do because she steps from the balcony and slides the sliding glass door shut behind her.
Aw, com’on. I want to call her by name but I can’t remember what it is.
I bang a few times on the sliding glass door but the woman has disappeared, probably gone to bed and fallen asleep.
Objectively speaking, it’s a beautiful view from the woman’s balcony. Even in the dark, you can see the outline of all the city’s important buildings, the buildings that give a distinctive form to the city, that give it its brand. Nevertheless, that is only objectively speaking; the particulars of the case don’t quite mesh with the beauty that stretches out before me all with way down to the lake, especially when I stare directly down and see the patch of sidewalk (illuminated by orange-tinged streetlights) where a now-deceased boyfriend’s body splattered.
Again I yell and bang against the sliding glass door and again the woman ignores me or doesn’t hear me because she’s asleep or whatever.
It’s fine for me now in the dark but when the sun comes up in a couple hours, the people in the building kitty-corner from me will sit at their kitchen windows eating baguettes and sipping coffees while wondering what a naked man is doing shivering on the balcony across the way, all of which would be fine and could be met with a cheerful smile if it weren’t for the inevitable fact that at least one of those neighbours will own a DSLR camera with a 70-200 mm telephoto lens and will snap a picture of me which he will then post on his favourite social media site which picture will spread virally throughout the infernalnets until some officious snitch at my place of employment forwards a copy of the picture to my boss which cannot help but result in my dismissal because my boss will recognize that I am standing on the balcony of the woman he’s been wanting to bang for years. Taking up an aluminum-framed deck chair, I swing it into the sliding glass door but it bounces off the pane and wafts, slo-mo, over the railing and down, slo-mo, into the canyon between the two condo towers and lands in the middle of the street twenty stories below where it rests unperturbed for at least ten minutes until a firetruck, returning to its station from a false alarm, rumbles over the chair and pulverizes it. With only one aluminum-framed deck chair left, I take care to wind up with a few practice swings before I let fly with the real thing, then shouting a ki-ai from my solar plexus and heaving with all my strength, I run the chair into the glass, but again, it bounces from my grip and sails into the night sky. Clearly, the sliding glass door is made from some shatter-resistant polymer to guard against the off-chance that a stray pigeon or wheeling hawk dive-bombs the window. Fucking engineers.
By the time the sun comes up, I’m less concerned with neighbours catching me naked than I am with drawing warmth from the early light; a wind has risen, and while it’s not exactly blowing with a gale force, it does make things uncomfortable for a naked man trapped two hundred feet above street level. My scrotum has puckered itself into a tight little walnut. I hop from foot to foot and clap myself to stay warm. It’s supposed to be summertime but the nights are unseasonably cold. Every ten or fifteen minutes, I start another round of yelling for whatserface to open the goddam door but she ignores me. I would’ve thought my yelling would disturb at least one neighbour from across the way, somebody who’d step onto their balcony and say, hey, I’m tryna fuckin’ sleep here, and I’d be able to get his attention and finally persuade him to call the police for me but not a single person shows their face. Maybe it’s a condo for the deaf or for a society of narcoleptics.
At eight, the woman appears through the super stress-resistant polymer sliding glass door and smiles and waves and mouths in an exaggerated kindergarten way that she has to go to work and hopes I enjoy my day. I shout for her to unlock the door but as she disappears (presumably into the hall and down an elevator) I recognize a pleading tone that makes me sound like a wimpering infant. I have to pee really bad. All those g and t’s from the night before have filtered into my bladder. That fact doesn’t bother me so much; I have no compunction about aiming high over the railing and seeing how far I can send the stream. More troublesome is the fact that my stomach has been gurgling for the last two hours, a sure sign that I’m about to have a case of diarrhea. As much as I resent this woman for what she’s done, no amount of pleasure at defecating on her balcony can offset the humiliation of being outted as a man who can’t control his bowels.
For reasons I don’t understand, I catch myself wondering what kind of car the woman drives. I hope it’s a Ford Pinto. I hope she has to stop suddenly to keep from running over a kitten and gets rear-ended by a utility truck carrying tanks of compressed gas. I imagine her stumbling from the car with her hair on fire. I imagine her in ICU covered from head to foot in puss-oozing gauze that needs changing every half hour. I imagine visiting her and whispering vengeful nothings into her bandaged ears: you weren’t that good, you know; your boyfriend probably jumped because you’re so bad, you know; I hope you catch necrotic fasciitis from the patient in the next bed and have to get your head amputated.
Leaning far over the railing, I can see onto the balcony immediately below me. There’s a notch at the base of the railing where it’s bolted to the concrete floor. There’s enough space for a toehold. If I swing a leg over the railing and secure my foot in the notch, then lean down and replace a foot with a hand, I can rest my foot on top of the railing below me. From there, I can hop onto the balcony and get someone’s attention in the unit below. Admittedly, it would be a shock to discover a naked man calling for help from your balcony but presumably not such a shock that it would keep you from helping the man. At the very least, you’d call the police and leave it to them to sort out the particulars of the case. Or if there’s no one in the unit below, I can repeat the process until I find an occupied unit.
It seems like a good enough idea in theory but when I’m standing on the other side of the railing with the toes of one foot jammed into the notch at the base of the railing and the toes of the other foot dangling free in space, and when I take a quick peek at the asphalt two hundred feet below, I suffer a kind of paralysis. I’m not sure whether the paralysis is mental or physical. I’m well aware of the fear, which is mental, but my fingers are so firmly locked around the top of the railing that I can’t help but think maybe they’re afflicted with some kind of a temporary debilitating rheumatism. No, that can’t be it, because when I yell for help, all that comes out of my throat is a raspy squeak. As far as I’m aware, rheumatism never seized up anybody’s throat. I close my eyes to keep from staring down at the asphalt but that doesn’t do any good because once my eyes are closed my imagination goes to work visualizing my body hurtling through the air and landing with a dull and final thud and my skull popping like an old gourd and all its innards splattering on the abstract metal sculpture that the condominium corporation wages a continual battle with graffiti artists to keep from being spray painted. If I had my choice of blood or spray paint, I’d choose spray paint any day of the week. Shit. Why am I even thinking like this?
Although I’m an atheist, I try a little prayer, kind of a Pascal’s wager deal: please God, or whatever, please don’t let me loose my bowels. Is it “loose” my bowels? Or “lose” my bowels? Either seems fitting in the circumstances. But what I really want to avoid here isn’t the minor humiliation of letting fly with a runny gruel down the side of a building but the major humiliation of meeting my death in a pile of it at the bottom.
I can’t say that anything as substantial as a life flashes before my eyes in these my (potentially) final moments but one or two odd memories enter my head in spite of my best intentions to keep my head clear just in case a plan drops into it for a visit. One memory is me stuck in a tree and my big sister talking me down. I was just a kid and she was the one who got me to climb the tree in the first place so it was really a simple matter of her taking responsibility for her own actions. It’s not the sort of memory I can use at a time like this. My sister bears enough of a physical resemblance to the woman who has locked me out on this balcony that I can’t find it in myself to imagine her talking me out of this situation, especially when I had sex with her the night before. I mean, I like my sister and all but not enough to imagine myself in bed with her. I mean, what would Mom think? I think the stress of the situation is confusing me.
That’s when the moment of clarity arrives: it strikes me that maybe the former boyfriend didn’t commit suicide after all; maybe he found himself locked on the balcony, just like me, and decided to climb over the railing, just like me, and fell to his death. How many bodies have to pile up below a woman’s balcony before somebody figures out that there’s more going on here than a woman with the bad fortune to be a serial depressed-boyfriend dater?