Miss You

But today, I'm wearing tights. I wear tights four days out of the week. Friday, I'm always in jeans. Fundamentally, a day where I wear tights is by definition a worse day than one on which I don't; but lately, ever since Dima killed himself, I can't help but think that Saturdays are the bottom of the barrel.

I look at my card. Harley Karlov. Boston Consulting Group. Partner. Now there's an oxymoron.

Dima, or more properly, Dmitri, didn't actually commit suicide. He just left one day. One September Saturday we were a happily married couple living a comfortable double-income existence and then that afternoon he just rode off in a cab and flew back to Moscow. He wanted to start his company that very moment. He didn't try and convince me; he didn't wait until I got a transfer, nothing. He just picked up and left to set up shop off of Red Square. Seven weeks later, just after I'd gotten my first interview at BCG Moscow, the loser had to go and get himself killed by flying in the face of tradition and refusing to pay the ex-KGB mafia their due. I mean, being Russian he should have known that pay-offs were de rigeur and unavoidable. Three years in America made him soft and righteous, and now look.

Burlington, Vermont has never been an exceptionally inviting place in February. This February was no exception. Why and how I managed to keep up my spirits this winter after all that has happened is a mystery. I know it's sick but Dima leaving hurt more than Dima dying. As a little girl, I never imagined that I would grow up to be one of those women whose husband left them. Why did you go? Why were you so stubborn? When my fingers and toes go numb as I walk home some days after work, I feel a communion with Dima, lying six feet below his mother's frozen okra patch in Belarus.

As I got on the plane today, to get to my client's depressing nuclear building in Woburn, I found myself doodling, putting words together like "sorrow" and "bleak" and "end", until finally I found I had written a poem:

When depression and sorrow have taken hold

The world's bright dulled to a bleak flame

In a dark room, you let the air get heavy and useless

Head's a-spinning, legs a-shaking, and suddenly,

You're noxious, on the ground, close to asphyxiation;

But miraculously, the fog lifts, the exhaust fumes cease

And you realize you're out of gas.

"Delta airlines is announcing the arrival of flight number thirty-seven eighty three from Burlington. Passengers can be met at Gate Eight."

Nobody's meeting me.

I don't know why they're announcing this. Who in their right mind would be meeting a flight at 7:55am at Logan anyway?

I navigate in and out of other business travelers' way as I find my way to my customary limo stand and duck in to check to see if it's Kat. She's my favorite driver, always telling me about her dates that weekend with the sexiest men of the East African community in Cambridge. Escapism is priceless. There's Kat. She asks, "Miss Harley, would you mind terribly if Omar drove with us today?"

Behind her is her boy of the month, standing aside until I say, "Of course, not."

In he steps into the passenger-side seat shrugging off his coat in one motion. I get a sense of the muscles on his back through his tee-shirt. It's the first rush I've had in ages.

An hour later and I am at the client's bombshelter of a building, sitting quietly at my desk at precisely nine a.m., waiting for the client to stumble in. This moment of peace is probably better used checking email or voicemail but at that very moment, I want to do nothing but just sit as still as possible, to try and keep the cold from penetrating me even deeper than it already has.

"Why, Harley, you're looking positively glowing this morning?" someone tries to cheer me up.

"The only glow might be from all the radioactive waste they've got in the water here," I crack.

Lunch is eaten at my desk, on the phone. It's gotten to the point that I have to pick non-crunchy foods so that the other people at the other end of the telephone line can't tell I'm eating.

Dima used to say how madly in love he was. He said he was senseless. And he was. It was like he was swept up in this life that he never dreamed possible for himself. A programmer and a scientist at heart, his expectations for romance didn't come close to his imagination. When he met me at a conference at MIT, he was stricken with a fever. He couldn't put two words together; he couldn't even do simple arithmetic. I was flattered that a genius of his proportion could be so overwhelmed with admiration, both physical and intellectual, for me. He thought my consulting life was thrilling, as glamorous as a Hollywood starlet's. He relished my curves too. And when I invited him back to my room on the last night of the conference, he loved me so completely I thought I could die the next morning having had experienced the pinnacle of life.

He wanted nothing more than to get his fledgling computer software company off the ground and I just wanted him nearby. I felt smarter by osmosis. My huge salary, American citizenship, and comfortable home all seemed to have a larger purpose as his benefactor, wife and landlady. It was like having all the little doubts in one's mind sewn up into a nice neat package.

"Denis, what is it now?" I ask stingingly as my best-friend calls.

"Why don't you ever stay a couple of days in Boston to see us? Why are you always rushing back to boring old Burlington? You start to miss the snow? We get snow here. Okay, it's brown and icky in a matter of hours but it's still white and fluffy when it's coming down."

"I like to get away and think," I say softly, convincingly.

"Stop thinking, girl. That's your problem. You're just too analytical about everything. You should stay here a Friday night instead of braving the de-icers at Runway Zero-Eight at Logan."

He has a point. But I want that bath. I couldn't do without my soak on Friday.

"And did I tell you about the new hip tub I had put in, under the skylight…." He knows exactly what it takes to get this thirty year-old widow hot.

Denis hangs up, I click over to line two and start explaining why the best approach to the supply chain problem they're having is to institute a world-class extranet with full security, tied into each other's inventory systems.

Two-ten again?! I look over at the damn clock frustrated. I look at my watch and I realize the clock actually has stopped and it's four thirty. If only my office had a window I would know that it's gotten dark already. "Someone get new batteries for that clock!" I yell out and two junior consultants snap to attention.

They're a little afraid of me. Jack and Lisa are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed out of Andover/Harvard and Eton/Oxford respectively. They know everything there is to know about the work but little about life. When they wake up one morning to see that their idyllic little situation has been blown apart by a senseless act of revenge, I wonder how they'll react. Somehow I doubt that will ever happen but I occasionally still feel the urge to blow the whistle on their discreet little romance just to see them suffer through the embarrassment.

Jack comes by and asks me, "Harley, would you like to come to dinner with the rest of us tonight? We're going to the Seafood Grotto. I thought you could use a little pick me-up…" His voice trails off.

Awfully sweet of him to ask. Brown-nosing aside, it was rather astute of him to notice.

"Yes, actually, I'd love to come," I say quietly. "Now go write some slides!" I bark half-jokingly.

Dima used to play the viola for me on the weekends. He said it helped him think. It helped him architect. The man was so brilliant I often wonder if he was fated to peter out. Come to think of it, how old was Einstein when he passed?

The phone rang, again with Denis's number popping up on the caller-ID display.

"Just thought I'd let you know that I was lying before about the hip bath but I just found one and they're getting it installed tomorrow. Click." I smile.

Dima stopped joining me in the bath about two months before he left. He was getting tired of America he said. He kept complaining that people had a sense of entitlement. Back in Belarus, people would die for the kind of job he was offering. He also kept his distance from me. Fewer random lovemaking interludes, fewer touches across the arm as I walked past, fewer glances across the dinner table. I know he wasn't seeing anyone else but there was a sense that he was cheating on me. I was competing for his love with an equation. Once he found it, I guess I should have known I would be banished to second place.

My Yahoo! Weather page showed the expected Saturday temperature for Burlington at -1. I knew it was a bitter February lesson I had to learn but I think God was overdoing it.

Six-thirty came and I found myself sitting at my hotel bar, sipping a glass of Merseault chardonnay from one of the great white wine vineyards of France. How and why they came across a case of this stuff in Woburn still boggles the brain although I suspect that brown-noser par extraordinaire Lisa had the stuff special ordered for the Ramada. And at $15 a glass, it was worth their while. Amazing how a simple glass of summer could temporarily clear the exhaust fumes out of my life.

Dima was shot twice in the head. The police report said that it was definitely mob-related. He hadn't called since he left. I only knew where he was by virtue of two quick emails and a postcard asking me not to follow him. I was already a science-widow even before I cemented the part. In his tireless pursuit to be Dima, he had lost sight of everything, my therapist tells me. Reality, common sense, love, perspective. All gone like extraneous zeroes after the decimal place. I really hate him for demonizing my life. I never wanted to be pitied.

"Are you coming Harley?" Lisa's voice rings out, public-school accent and all.

"To the Grotto…" I announce, stepping out of the hotel. It amazes me how cold my hands could get in a three block walk.