It is about Rita. This. This is. About Rita. And the longest Autumn on record. You’re going to say it's my fault. Not my fault. Mother built a Latin American Orphanage. Brought me back Quetzalteco Brain Fever with the commemorative t-shirt. Heavy sinuses afollowing. Down many days. I would have called. Christ, Jesus. It was just not possible under the suns of that particularly blurry Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Sickness sometimes requires much.… You know all too well. What with your sad pancreas as it is. It was the ex’s fault. I mean your ex-wife’s fault. Rita. It would be your ex-wife out of the two of us. You know that I have no ex-wife. Only a dead one. That’s the first thing she had said. She said so. When she came by. Said she was your ex-wife. Rita. No. Go away. Well your ex-wife: she didn’t listen. That horrible thing of being so locked in a situation, and so much so that you can’t get out of it a second to think, and then add being sick on top of it. You can’t think to think. I just stood there not thinking. Your ex-wife, Rita Hayworth, noting this, staked the place bare, took over, blossomed out nuisances. I know I didn’t call to ask, but why? how come? How come unleash your ex-wife, my fever and all? It’s not my fault. I couldn’t stop her. You know how…. Your ex-wife Rita Hayworth said there were going to be changes. Dusted off the furniture in her work clothes. Inspected the fridge incredulously. Roused my three daughters from bed. Made them cook breakfast. I eyed your ex-wife the whole while. I had to admit that she was not unappealing. What with her curvatures and embankments. I wash my car, she was complaining, not twenty minutes, bird shits on it. She proceeded to kick my dogs angrily, the slower ones anyway. My darling daughters brought forth the bacon and best china. Your ex-wife glared at the food, refusing to eat, pointlessly working into her gums with a toothpick. When exactly, she asked, do you intended to mow the lawn? Upon hearing that I paid a thirteen-year-old boy from the neighbourhood to tend to such things she threw a vase. Urinated on the rug. Insulted my profession. I did not intend to make love to your ex-wife Rita Hayworth. Should have called. I had just gotten over the Guatemalan mind worm. I wish you would have called, though. Put an end to it. Put your lawyers back in contact with hers. Nothing like lawyers to have stopped me pulling off her pajama bottoms. Even just the phone call, really. Maybe then I wouldn’t have come to find your ex-wife most expert in pants and thrusts, having thusly turned my home and three daughters over to her. She put in a new microwave stolen from apartment six in your building. Heating herself a breakfast burrito. Disparaging my daughters and their stubby, most unculinary fingers. Sue looked at her fingers and cried. Beverly-Anne crawled into the fireplace and sooted herself. Angela stared down your ex-wife like a water buffalo. I did the vacuuming as promised. Soon there was a thunderstorm and the power went out. The girls clustered by the fire pit, shakily in arms. The vacuum cleaner purred to sleep. The dogs cried out. The hail hit the windows and shutters like birds. Your ex-wife asked the whereabouts of the attic with its candles and emergency supplies. I had to admit that I had no idea, as that sort of thing only my sadly-no-more-Sally would know. That’s the sort of thing. That’s the sort of thing Sally. Your ex-wife. Rita Hayworth. Was furious just then, exposing her perfect teeth. They became the only things visible in the room. My daughters, cowering, saw her fragmented beating of me through sharp blasts of lightning. I had a dream in which there was a famous painter about whom I was curious and then it turned out that he was me. Sue revived me with smelling salts. First thing I noticed was aural. Soft patter of rain. On the shingles. The whining animals. I became aware. A living room full of: empty pizza boxes: champagne bottles. Curtains burned to crisps. I registered in full that the stink from the rug was awful. There was pasta sauce on the walls. Bird shit everywhere. Sue’s bonnet wore a wreath of cigarette burns. Angela, it seemed, was dead. Beverly-Anne clutched the remains of her dolly and stared into oblivion, clearly shocked to the bare shell. I looked at them briefly and then for your ex-wife. I knew, instinctively, that she was gone. I was too weak from the pummelling to move very far. I crawled for as long as I could. Finally my face dropped with a thud somewhere in the blur of tile. I cried, just then, for your ex-wife. I cried for Rita. The empty house echoed with crazed sobbing. The floorboards rumbled. I cried for missed affection. I cried and I cried. I cried for your ex-wife. Then the phone rang. I picked it up. It was not your ex-wife, as I had hoped and as you well know. Amidst the din of this disaster, the grave of this work, the daughter who may be dead, the stains of pasta sauce that I now suddenly realize may not be pasta sauce at all, the shattered photo at my feet of my sadly-no-more-Sally…there is only one thing I can summon to ask, with the very last of myself, knees aching so: why didn’t you call? now that they’ll blame me…her not even being mine and…why? why me? Well, I guess the stars just aren’t on your side you said just then. And I guess I have to agree. This. This week. This week the longest Autumn on record.
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