By WesternRose
WesternRose@aol.com
 

Category: Skinner POV and SkinnerAngst
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Walter S. Skinner is not mine. Damn. Sharon Skinner is a
creation of 1013 productions. Archibald and Jeanne MacFarland are
original characters of my own creation. This story is not written for
financial gain or other compensation, just for fun.
Archive: Please ask and I will send a copy.
Feedback: To <mailto:WesternRose@aol.com>WesternRose@aol.com, please!
 
 

Goodnight, Sharon.
 

Los Angeles is a desert. No matter how green the lawns get or how many
turquoise-watered swimming pools are dug, it is a desert. Tonight there
is rain in the desert. For three weeks out of the year it rains merry
hell. I was posted here years ago, and now I'm back.

When Sharon and I first married, this was our home. I was a brick agent
bucking for a law degree at night. She was a freshly degreed art student
from University of Chicago. We were young, in love and truly believed
that we had the world by the balls, the world just did not know it at
the time.

Everywhere I go in Los Angeles I can see her.

We ate at Musso and Frank's on Hollywood Boulevard. We shopped Western
Avenue for used furniture. We took Sharon's parents to dinner at the
Dresden in Los Feliz. We rented a funky little duplex near Larchmont
Village, and we had picnics in Griffith Park. Our favorite weekends
consisted of a drive up PCH and a stop at Neptune's in Oxnard for
lobster boats and strawberry shortcake. We loved each other then. I know
we did. I remember it.

It was not easy for Sharon to be married to me. Her father was a senior
partner at San Francisco's hottest law firm. She shopped at Neiman
Marcus and I. Magnin. She took weekends at the lake house in Tahoe or
the ranch in Santa Rosa. She went to Santa Catalina and attended
debutante balls.

I was a 'Nam vet who had worked his way through his undergraduate degree
as a bouncer, roughneck and an Austin PD beat cop. I occasionally woke
up screaming and sometimes violent. I had a job that I could not talk to
her about, that kept me on odd hours, and had me dealing with the scum
of the Earth.

It did not matter to her. She loved me. The cute girl with the new FIAT
convertible fell for the big ox in the '72 Skylark.

Her father, on the other hand, hated my guts. I refused to consider
joining his firm after getting my JD, declined to talk about Bureau
business, and would not kiss his ass if it were USDA Prime sirloin and I
were starving to death. Archibald MacFarland hated to think that there
was anyone that he could not buy, bully, bend or bullshit.

He offered to pay my tuition and all expenses to Harvard so that I could
pursue my LL.D. Just leave San Francisco now and he would use his
connections in Washington to clear it with the Bureau. He even had the
plane ticket ready. I told him to fuck off.

I can't go back to the hotel. I can't sleep anyway and the temptation of
room service scotch is not something that I would be able to turn away
from right now.

I drive east on Melrose and then down June Street, windshield wipers
thump-thumping, past all the nice Hancock Park houses that Sharon liked.
Lord, how I wanted to give her one. But she picked out our little place
in Larchmont, close to Westwood, with the Federal Building and UCLA for
me and the art community for her.

She got a job working for an interior decorator, and even made our tacky
little place look good. I would come home around 10:00 at night to the
smell of paint or fabric glue and find her asleep on the sofa, bathed in
the blue glow of the second-hand television. She clipped coupons and
shopped at the Bargain Circus on La Brea. I worked all day and studied
all night. It was not much of a life for a girl who liked to party at
the drop of a hat.

Drive down Rosewood, one ... two ... third from the corner. I stop
across the street from it and put the car in park. A single-story
Mediterranean style duplex. Orangey-red tiles and white stucco, with a
scraggly orange tree in a yard that was mostly crabgrass. I could swear
that the damn orange tree has not grown an inch.

Tears sting at the back of my eyes. I can see her picking the damn
oranges with her long, reddish-brown hair blowing in the Santa Ana
winds. I can picture the long, elegant lines of her. I can feel the
curve of her hip under my hand and see the way she held her head for a
kiss. Sometimes I see her so clearly it's as if she never died.

I rest my head on the steering wheel of the rental and close my eyes. I
wish that I had never come back to LA.

I had to sell the house in Silver Spring. I would come home and be
afraid to go into the house. I would have to talk myself out of the car
and into the kitchen to throw leftover Chinese takeout in the microwave.
I could not park in the garage because her car was not there. It was in
the impound lot in DC, nothing more than a twist of metal and broken
glass.

As I ate I would tell myself that I could sleep in the den. I did not
have to get the scotch out from under the sink. I did not have to go
upstairs with a coffee mug full of it, curl around Sharon's pillow and
drink myself to sleep.

One night I took my sidearm to bed with me. I put it beside my mug on
the bedside table, changed into my sweats and curled around her pillow.
I drank the whole mug of scotch, gulping it down as I talked to the
empty room. I told Sharon everything that night, everything that I
should have told her in life, but did not for what seemed to be the
right reasons.

I know where I went wrong. I just don't know when. When did I learn to
shut up so well that I forgot how to speak?

I made another trip to the kitchen and the scotch bottle, maybe another
one after that. I woke up with a colossal hangover and the unmistakable
taste of gun-oil and metal in my mouth. I got up, showered, took aspirin
and went apartment hunting. One more night in that house and I knew that
I really would eat a bullet.

I rented an apartment in the Viva Tower that same day and slept there
that night on the floor. The house went on the market that Monday. I did
not bring anything into the Viva apartment except the boxes and
furniture that I had moved out with when we separated.

I did not buy a bed for six months. I was too afraid of waking up in it
alone so I slept on the couch.

Sharon's mother handled her personal effects after her death. Her
clothes went to Catholic Charities, her jewelry to a good cause for
auction later, and some keepsakes to herself, Sharon's friends, and to
me. Sharon saved my notes, the ticket stubs from the movies we went to
see and the silly stuffed animals I won for her at the Los Angeles
County fair.

Faith. It is a strange thing. When I would wake up in the middle of the
night, God was not there but Sharon was. She was my reason. I think that
the worst feeling that I have ever had in my life was the first time
that I rolled over and she was not there.

The rain is getting a bit heavier as I put the car in gear and pull away
from the curb. I drive down Rosewood to Highland and turn right.

Archie MacFarland died on our seventh wedding anniversary, the same year
I was promoted to Unit Chief in Organized Crime and ordered to
Washington. He was grudgingly proud of me, but told me before he died
that I should have taken his offer.

Since her death, I often find myself wishing that I had. She would have
a nice house in Burlingame, a husband who could talk to her about his
day and a nice normal life. Instead she got me with a security
clearance, a move every two years in my first decade with the Bureau and
no...

I wipe my eyes on my sleeve. I can't tell if I'm glad that I left my Sig
in the hotel safe or not.

Making a left on Santa Monica, I stop at Oki-Dog for a teriyaki on a
stick and a Coke. I want a drink. I want a cigarette, or maybe a joint.
I want this whole week to never have happened. I do not want to know
what I now know.

Back in the car and drive west down the empty boulevard, heading for the
hills and the beach.

It was an invitation to address a class in Criminal Law at Loyola that
brought me out here for the first time in a decade. Jeanne contacted my
office and asked if I might come and see her at the senior community
that she now called home. I said that I would.

After speaking to a bunch of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed law students,
I drove out to Pasadena. I parked the white Cavalier in the visitorâs
lot of the Huntington Casitas, a tasteful little collection of cottages
with whopping price tags. Rain had been threatening all day, and the
clouds scudded at the tops of the green hills as I walked up the path to
cottage 27.

Jeanne had always been very reserved with me. The proper San Francisco
society lady was her persona and she wore it like armor. Even when
planning Sharon's funeral, she was together and I was the one who was
falling apart. So when she greeted me warmly, I was a little surprised.

I was invited in, tea was poured and the proprieties observed. We made
small talk about weather and national news. Jeanne was looking into her
bone china teacup as if it held the answer to every question. I settled
back to wait. I know when something is eating at someone. She opened her
mouth a few times, and then closed it, frowning.

I remember Sharon telling her mom about the house in Silver Spring. She
was so excited to finally have a real house to make a home in. It was a
white four-bedroom, three-and-a-half bath Southern Colonial on three-
quarters of a wooded acre. Prettiest thing you ever saw and I busted my
butt to get it for her. We were doing all right. Sharon landed a
decorator's gig right away, and all the struggles were really paying
off.

One night Sharon asked me if I thought that the bedroom next to ours
might be a good nursery. I damned near choked to death.

After she performed the Heimlich maneuver and my ears had stopped
ringing, she explained that no, she was not pregnant. At least not yet.
She knew I wanted a house full of kids, so did she, but for the first
ten years of marriage we had been too financially strapped to feel
comfortable with it. Law school eats a lot of money and so does
relocating every two years. I had come up eating a lot of cornbread and
oleo when things were tight. I did not want that for my kids.

We tried that night. We tried a lot of nights thereafter. We read books,
took vitamins, had special diets, and had sex in positions that were not
in the Kama Sutra and chilled my testicles. We consulted specialists.
Sharon's eggs were viable, my sperm wiggly and fast, but there was just
no hookup. We tried artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization,
everything that we could afford and a few things that we couldn't.

There were times when we thought that she had caught. All false alarms.
Gradually she began to sleep farther and farther away from me on the
bed. After a while we stopped making love at all. One night I came home
to find a note on the refrigerator. "I need some time. I'm at Mom and
Dad's. Love, Sharon."

It was the first time that she left me. I called and left messages with
Jeanne or the maid or the houseman. Two weeks later, Sharon called back.

"Please, baby, please come home," were the first words out of my mouth.

She told me that she needed time to think and then she asked me a very
odd question. She asked me if I had slept with anyone else during our
marriage, if I had ever been tempted. I thought that she was feeling
that I was getting some on the side because I had been giving her some
space. I swore high and low that I hadn't. I promised to spend more time
with her, anything to get her home.

She started to cry and hung up on me.

She called every day after that. I tried so damn hard to tell her what
she meant to me. I wanted her to know that when I had said, "I do" I
really meant it. She would usually be quiet through this, then tell me
goodnight. A few times she ripped me to shreds in that patrician tone of
voice and then hung up with a bang.

I stewed for a while after one of those. I know that I came up
scrambling. I grew up on oil fields from Texas to Kuwait. My folks were
proud and we never took from anyone what we could earn. My brothers and
I were the first members of either family to get past the tenth grade,
much less to college and obtain advanced degrees. We all worked our way
through in various jobs with our folks chipping in once in a while out
of Dad's disability and pension.

It stung. It hurt like hell to think that some rich boy who had had it
all handed to him might actually appeal to her. Sure, she would not have
had to clip all those coupons, but after I got my Juris Doctor things
had been a hell of a lot easier. The next time she called, I told her
that if she did not want a self-made man to go ahead and have daddy draw
up the papers. She could go ahead and marry some manicured, blow-dried
rich boy with his nose square up daddy's ass.

She said nothing for a while, then hung up very softly.

Sharon came home two months after she left. Three days after I told her
off. She was in the kitchen when I got home from work. I just stood in
the door to the garage and blinked in disbelief. I had been waiting for
the FedEx man to come with the papers. She cried and hugged me so tight
that my ribs creaked. I was crying into her hair, whispering that
whatever I had done I would make it up to her somehow, just never leave
me again.

I roll down the windows, catching the salt breeze of the Pacific and the
green smell of wet grass. Do you know that the Atlantic smells different
from the Pacific? I can't put a finger on it, but it is a different
ocean smell. It even looks different, the Atlantic is gray-green and the
Pacific is gray-blue. I find PCH and begin to drive north, past Santa
Monica's gaudy pier and the pricey oceanfront and hill homes of Pacific
Palisades and Malibu.

I can feel it building in my chest. Grief, rage and pain swirling and
knotting. Grief that she was taken from me, rage that she left me, and
pain that she never told me....

Jeanne spoke hesitantly. It's not a nice thing when your son-in-law
makes the papers after being found in bed with a dead hooker. It was the
one time I was unfaithful, not that I did not have lots of opportunity
or lacked offers of that sort, but I could not let myself take advantage
of them.

When I came down to it, I was happy to use the hand. The hand did not
run to tell your wife, your boss or sue you for the end result of a
broken rubber. Hell yes, I looked and even fantasized. What man doesn't?
But my "picture" of myself as a man would not let me fuck any woman
other than my wife.

The last time that we separated I was drunk, depressed, alone and lonely
like I had never been before. There was this pretty young thing who
talked to me as if I were a person. That was all she wrote. For Carinna
Sayles, it was the last page of the book.

For a moment, I did not understand what Jeanne was saying. She had
started by talking about the break-up, the publicity and the events
leading to Sharon's death. What she went to was not something I had been
prepared for.

Another man. They met in DC when Sharon's firm was doing a decorating
job. He was older, wealthy, powerful, and a great deal like Sharon's
dad. Meetings. An affair. A pregnancy. A child that was not mine. Sharon
running home to Mom. An abortion.

She never told me. I never had a clue.

Jeanne told me that he came to see Sharon in San Francisco and that she
refused to see him. I asked who he was. She did not know, Sharon never
told her.

We all want that touch. The reassuring touch of another human being that
makes us feel so alive. Did I become so fixated on my job that I failed
to give her that? She went into the arms of another man the same way I
went into the arms of Carinna, because of something missing.

I tried to walk out the door of the little cottage with Jeanne holding
onto my coat. She told me that this had been eating at her. That I
needed to know, that I was not to blame and that when a marriage fails
it is generally a two-way proposition.

When I woke up in Saigon all those years ago I was in more pain than I
ever thought I could survive. I would watch the clock, breathing in and
out, in and out, waiting for that moment that would bring the Morphine
or I would finally pass out. I'm doing that now. The ocean breathes out
there in the dark and the moon has become the clock in the clearing sky.

I pull into a deserted parking lot and turn off the car. I'm shaking all
over. Sharon.... God! Please let me either pass out or get a shot of
something because I'm fucking losing it I'm fucking losing it and....

I don't know how long I have been sitting in the car, but the moon is
almost down. I could not see, breathe or think for a damn long time. All
I could do was feel like I was drowning. I was sinking in some dark
ocean in my soul and that there was no light to tell me where the
surface was.

We all want something perfect in our lives. Something pure and true that
we can strive to be worthy of.

Sharon was that for me.

Maybe that was my mistake. Maybe she believed that I would not forgive
her for that human need. Maybe she was afraid that I would. The worst
part of all this is that she never found out, and neither did I.

I get out of the car and sit on the hood. I listen to the ocean. I wish
that she was here. Most people think that I am one cold son-of-a-bitch,
in a way that is my armor. I need to be cold to do my job, to hunt the
killers and the thieves and the scum. I had hoped that Sharon knew me
better.

I think about her, I still love her. If she had lived I would have
fought like hell to get her back with me. Maybe in time she would have
been able to tell me about the other man. Maybe in time I would have
been able to tell her about the shadows I have to dance with day in and
day out.

I can see the ocean now. The sun is rising at my back, still behind the
hills that march to the sea. It's cold. I get back in the car and roll
up the windows, and turn on the heat. I've been out all night.

I start the car and pull out of the parking lot. I can take PCH to
Sunset and be back at the Best Western Inn before traffic. I zip through
the turns and make a sudden detour. Sunset to Fairfax and then to Third.
I pull into a space and get out of the car.

Farmer's Market. I thread through the crowd of early birds for Sharon's
favorite early morning treat. Beignets steaming in a wax-paper bag and a
liter of chicory coffee.

I walk back to the car, sipping at the coffee and nibbling at the hot,
sugary, deep-fried dough. Sharon is in every thought, but she is the
Sharon that I loved, flaws and all. I close my eyes and for a second I
see her in a pair of old jeans and a hooded gray sweatshirt, biting into
too-hot dough and cussing around a burned tongue.

I drive back to the hotel and sneak in. The hotel room is as empty as a
politician's promise. I undress and crawl between the sheets, too tired
for even the jolt of caffeine to rescue. I hear the rain start again as
I fall into sleep.

Goodnight, Sharon.
 

The End.