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  • Champagne:A Love Story
  • Marilyn Abildskov (bio)

I know a woman who spent some time in the loony bin. That's what she called it, the loony bin. Her fiancé had put a shotgun to his head after a long struggle with cocaine and booze and that had sent this woman right around the bend. She told me about her stay in the loony bin, which lasted two weeks, without any embarrassment.

But there were other things, she said. Things she had done leading up to the loony bin, where she stayed for two weeks. Things she didn't like to talk about.

Like what? I asked.

Well, she said. Really, she was too embarrassed to say.

I tried to imagine the worst, but the worst didn't seem that bad and then my mind stalled.

I licked an ashtray, she finally said. When her fiancé died, she could not bear to throw away the remnants of a full ashtray from his house. And one night, in the midst of hearing voices, she licked it, consuming the ashes of his old cigarettes, taking the ashes in with the tenderness of a kiss.

You were sick with grief, I said, understandably out of your head.

The woman smiled. Her eyes were half moons that disappeared when she laughed.

I wanted to tell her about my years living in Japan and the trouble at the end with the men and in particular, a certain man, a Japanese man I'd been in love with, absolutely crazy about, a man who finally turned away from me. But it all seemed kind of small, even next to an ashtray. So I sat there, quiet and sad at this woman's large kitchen table in a sturdy, square, midwestern state, wishing, just wishing I had something, even two weeks in the loony bin, to prove where I'd been, something to show her I knew [End Page 79] the right questions if not the right answers, that I understood as I understand now. Weren't we all crazy once? Stricken with some wild, unruly grief?

Remembering is a way to keep someone near. I have remembered Japan now for seven years. And what I try to remember isn't just the men in my country but also the woman who was me. The me who bought an expensive bottle of champagne one day. Then brought that bottle to a certain man's place one day at noon. The me who believed that love was worth celebrating, troubled and troubling as that love may be.

I have a meeting, the man said, promising to be back by one o'clock.

At two the woman went shopping. Sat down in a café to drink a cup of café au lait. Read a magazine, borrowed from an expatriate friend, filled with words about a famous poet who wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and then stuck her head in the oven and fell asleep.

Later, the poet's husband married the woman he'd been having an affair with and that woman went and put her head in the oven too, as if this head-in-the-oven business were a very cruel but inescapable little copycat trick.

Or maybe there was something wrong with the oven. A pilot light that kept going out.

At three the woman goes for a walk.

At four she decides it is time to celebrate.

She returns to his house. Pops opens a bottle of champagne. Watches the cork fly high, hitting the ceiling and leaving, she suspects, a mark she can now do nothing about. Will he notice? she wonders. Will he care? All celebrations leave their mark, all travel leaves its trace. She wishes she had bought more bottles of champagne and she would open every one, hitting the ceiling, leaving her mark.

She drinks and drinks and drinks and drinks, one glorious solitary swig after another, and isn't it interesting, she thinks, that it has taken her so long to discover the pleasure of what that word, swig, means?

She decides this is a party and she wants to dance. He isn't home so she dances...

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