We’d met before, as undergrads at Berkeley and again, four years later, at New York’s Lincoln Center. I’d already rented a flat and for the sake of friendship and frugality Justine moved in that week.
It was easy, we went our separate ways, she to The Village and Cardozo Law and I uptown to Columbia Grad. Saturdays were easy too: riding bikes through Central Park occasionally followed by a film and dinner at some inexpensive ethnic eatery. There was, however, no suggestion of greater intimacy. Bed was out of the question. At night, we kept our distance.
In June I took off for a tutorial in Spain while she opted to intern at some high-end law firm. We agreed, to keep my overhead down, I could sublet to a fellow student for the two months I’d be away. Josh moved in the day I left.
I returned, bursting with love of the Spanish lifestyle, food and spirited women, on September 3rd. The flat was empty. Neither Josh, Justine nor any sign of there habitation existed. My stuff was intact down to my new TV and spare Mac Book.
I tried Justine at the law firm. She’d been gone since August. I called Josh’s aunt in Buffalo. No word of him since late July.
When I contacted the management company, I found the rent had been paid through September, my share as well.
Her first, The Rockies At Night, came late in March. No text but a drawing of clouds and rain. In the upper right corner two sparkling white stars in a box.
The next, Sunrise Over Haleakal? Crater, arrived mid-summer a year later, a colored rendering of a naked boy and girl on a tempting yellow beach, washed by pale blue surf and a red hot sun overhead.
The third, a Gauguin scene: Morning In Tahiti, arrived that October, a pencil sketch of a sailing ship on fire, a plume of smoke in the shape of a woman billowing from the cabin door.
The last arrived mid-winter my final year in New York. Postmarked Fairbanks, Alaska, it pictured a lone wolf running across a snow-covered field. The sketch, an unmarked gravestone beside a bleeding heart pierced by a cupid’s arrow.
I live in Chicago now with my wife of three years and our new baby boy. The winters are miserably cold but the fecund and vibrant Midwestern spring makes it all OK.
The four storied postcards have a place in my study. I’ve framed them side by side, as it was told.
