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Gone

I haven't seen Tina in weeks.

It was raining that night, sort of off and on like the sky couldn't make up her mind. Just like a woman. Isn't it just like a woman? What song is that from? Isn't it just like a woman? Laurie Anderson, I think. He said, she said, something like that. Dang, I wish I could remember the name of that song. I'll have to look it up.

The rain would beat against the old windows of our reclaimed loft, rattling them like a snare drum for a few moments, and then pause, waiting for the next cue. I'd been patrolling in the middle of it, and I was still in my wet spandex, dripping on the ceramic tile in the area we'd defined as the kitchen, although there weren't any walls to separate it from the rest of the high-ceilinged space. The drops made dark spots, like red blood on the orange terra cotta.

Tina was pissed. As angry as the rain sounded on the windows, she sounded angrier. I couldn't blame her. She had every right. Her anger came and went, too, just like the rain on the windows, ebbing into a brooding silence, broken by the occasional sob or mutter -- but it kept coming back.

She never screamed, though her voice carried over even the rain on the windows. She just battered me with insults: about my morals, about my intelligence, about our lovemaking, about my mother. The words drummed my ears, drummed my brain, my heart, but not like a snare drum. I felt them like a kettle drum, each solid hit setting off sympathetic vibrations in my chest, rattling my ribcage.

Sympathetic is the right word, for sure. I knew how she felt, and knew I deserved everything she said, every insult, every hurtful word. Well, everything except for the parts about my mother. I don't know why Tina thinks she has anything to do with it. That part, I didn't understand, but I still let her go on, hurting me, or trying, as much as I'd hurt her.

I hadn't hit her, hadn't said anything mean to her. I never tried to hurt her. I never meant to. Too bad, actions speak louder than words.

She pretty much disappeared right in front of my eyes.

Her voice was raised, and she was yelling, crying, asking, "How could you?" for the uncountable-th time. I still couldn't look her in the eyes. I stared at her knees instead -- the only part of her that didn't seem capable of showing her anger. If some part of her didn't look angry, then maybe I had a chance at getting through this, of us moving on.

I opened the fridge to get a beer. Cold air stole the heat from my damp hair. I stayed in a crouch, pretending to look to the back of the lowest shelf -- I needed a reason to be hunched against her, and a cold beer seemed as good as any.

She got quiet after continuing her tirade at my back for a few seconds. I thought maybe she'd finally realized that it was time to move beyond that. I grabbed the green neck of a Heineken, and slid the bottle out of the fridge as I looked over at her knees. They weren't there.

She had disappeared, from mid-thigh to the ends of her painted toenails. Of course, I could no longer see the gentle green of the nail polish, since it had vanished, invisible, along with everything else at that end of her legs.

By the time I was done looking where her feet weren't, the rest of her legs had disappeared, up to the tops of her thighs. Tina was half a woman, then, floating in the air. The transition edge across her thighs, from visible to invisible, was hard to look at. It made me dizzy, like my brain couldn't process it properly. I took a pull on my Heineken, feeling the cold fizz its way down my throat, and felt brave enough to look at my Vanishing Girl again.

I immediately wished I'd kept staring down the side of the smooth green bottle. Her eyes were just as green, but her gaze was far colder than the beer. I wanted to look away, but her eyes were so cold, I was frozen, watching.

Watching, as the rest of her faded from view, like ice turning clear as glass, and then as clear as the sky -- she never said anything, and I wished that she'd start with the insults again, become more heated, and bring herself back to me.

She was there, and then she wasn't. After she was completely gone, after I'd given up hoping she was still around, after I was sure she'd left the loft in the undetectable way that makes her the famous Vanishing Girl, I noticed that the rain had finally let up. The sky was still grey, and the air was still cold, but the wind had stopped gusting, and gone off with the rain clouds to somewhere else. The irony struck me as I finished my fifth Heineken: both the rain and the woman had made up their mind... and left.

I can still see it, the decision set in her boldly attractive features, hardest in her cold, green eyes. Her face was the last part of her to fade, the last thing she let me see. Maybe it was the light shining through as she became more and more translucent, but her eyes seemed to turn from their bright bottle green to a frozen pall, like sea ice, before finally disappearing altogether. Her eyes, her face, were the last things I saw of her.

I sure miss her pretty face.

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