For the next few days, I worked on a song about waiting, finished it, and recorded it. I put some synthesizer tracks on it and used a drum machine. I recorded a couple of harmonizing vocal tracks. It had been a long time since I had gotten so elaborate on a song.
Diana still hadn’t called. I thought of calling her. Should I? Maybe she just needed a little encouragement. Maybe she needed to know I was sincere, that I meant it when I said that I wanted to be involved with her and Jack, that I would be consistent in wanting this, that it wasn’t just some kind of a phase.
I could call her, and we could go to the movies, something easy, something neutral, where we didn’t have to talk too much or deal with each other. Why not? She still liked me; I could tell. She called all those times after we got together, didn’t she? I would just show her that I had always cared about her, that I had been thinking about her all these years. I could make a whole CD with the songs I’d written about her. It would be like Layla.
Something told me that I shouldn’t call her, so I went to see Ellen.
“You just have to give her some time to think, Tom,” she said. “You’re sure there was chemistry?”
“I’m sure there was,” I said. “Pretty sure, I felt it anyway.”
“It usually goes both ways,” she said, nodding, reassuring me.
I looked at Ellen, sturdy, emotionally stable Ellen. “Sometimes I am so sick of being myself that I just don’t think I can take another minute,” I said. “Do you know what I mean?”
She closed her eyes, blew out a stream of air. “Yes. I do, God, yes.”
Ellen used to be married. I went to the wedding. It was in Pennsylvania, where they were living. The guy worked in her law firm, and they stayed married five years. He left her for someone else in the same firm. Ellen quit the firm and moved back out here. She said she would never get married again. She wanted a kid, though. I think she missed the possibility of a child way more than she missed having the husband. She checked into the various options—domestic adoption, international adoption, in vitro fertilization with donated sperm. None of these things worked out for her, for one reason or another. Eventually, she stopped talking about it. I don’t believe that she stopped wanting a child, but she seemed to have decided that it hurt too much to talk about it.
“Do you think it’s possible to change things about yourself? I mean, on purpose. Let’s say there was something seriously wrong with your personality. Could you change and be a different way, if you wanted to badly enough?” I asked her.
“Oh, Tom,” she said. “I really, really would like to believe that.” She sighed this heavy, sad sigh that had years of heartbreak in it.
I wanted to fix this for her, to repair the things in her life that had disappointed her. A little frantically, I looked around her place. “Ellen?” I said.
“What?”
“You know that TV you’ve got in your bedroom?”
“Yes.”
“I could put that up on one of those suspended shelves. Then you’d have more floor space and a better view of the TV.”
She said, “I guess. But you don’t have to.”
“No problem. I want to. I’ll go to Home Depot tomorrow.”