My road Fire and Rain

My relationship with the girl was now defined as much by what was missing as what was there.  Before we had a pure friendship.  Now that was overlaid with a passion that was so deep and so strong that it spilled over into everything that we did.  Our lovemaking would go on for hours and would be followed by horrible storms of anger and breakups that drove me mad, lasting for weeks, then for months till the desire to be together overwhelmed good sense and morality and we were back at it again.  And though we fought and hated ourselves for our lack of fidelity to what we both believed in, we could in the interim talk for hours every day, never exhausting the topics, never tiring of saying the same things over and over again.

Today I can see the tragedy more clearly.  We were both trying to save each other but from unequal footing.  I could only save her and she was looking for anyone to save.  Let me tell you about her.  She came to New Orleans as an engineer from the corp of engineers ostensibly to polish a paper on potential levy failures co-written with a general from the same corps.  Don’t be surprised, it is a work of fiction.  Her first assignment had been in the middle east repairing roads under sporadic gunfire so the New Orleans assignment was considered an R&R exercise.  She had been recovering and enjoying the benefits of important work, good food and the series of lovers that preceded me.  After the hurricane justified her previously considered alarmist work, her status and specialized knowledge propelled her to promotions and the attention of everyone in the field.  Ultimately, much of the repair and redesign work was put under her control.

When President Bush determined he had to save New Orleans, as opposed to leaving it to somehow save itself, the volume of work necessary to redesign the drainage system throughout the city and oversee the same went to a group that necessarily by then, recognizing her competence, to the girl.  Over the next few years, when our relationship was solidifying into something sexual, the pressures of the job and her diligence in bringing to life the paper she had written as a thesis gave her a larger thing to save, in this case an entire city; if not an economic center for the entire country, and hence the lesser candidates for salvation, the series of lovers before me as it were, fell away.

I’m not sure why our relationship survived this for so long; for the job of redesign continued to grow throughout our relationship, resulting in large trenches being dug through the center of historic streets that closed most of the east west thoroughfares in city for months at a time.  Perhaps it was the sex, which was truly extraordinary.  I cannot take any credit for that, having been only an average lover over the years, and I must, therefore, attribute it entirely to her influence.

And so our relationship tottered between oblivion and the fantasy that we both harbored, that somehow we could save each other, although consciously we didn’t even know the fantasy existed.  To us, however obvious it might be to everyone else, we were just in love.