The Ending
By Paul Rabinowitz
I. Post-it Note
This morning before driving over the suspension bridge that brings me to where you paint, I shaved my head. Not because I needed to, usually that comes every four days when stubble marks distinct lines between skin and new growth. But this morning I felt something different, the need to do something more. Like after a long hot summer when I slip my arms through the worn leather jacket I purchased at a secondhand store and feel the cool material on my bare arms, a second skin. Turning sideways I look into the ornate full length mirror which hangs opposite your painting and squint until the photons settle and my reflection is clarified and then I turn again to your painting and wonder.
I remember you told me once how a Buddhist monk goes through his initiation ceremony. He accepts his precepts, then leaves behind his relationship with the material world, casting aside all his earthly possessions. Everything that was is now lost in the past as he looks ahead to his first glimpse of Enlightenment. Only now can he be free. I wonder how that freedom feels.
I step outside to check the weather and fill my lungs with morning air. I close my eyes and breathe. The image of your painting flashes in the dark of my vision. My body is wrapped tightly inside, fascia coming alive as my internal organs awaken and communicate with each other. I hold my breath longer than is natural. The need for air becomes too great to resist and I breathe again. I see it again, the face a blaze of color and feeling. I was there. I remember.
Driving into the bright morning sun I recall the last chapter of a book I read years ago by Leornard Cohen who said a monastery can be a lonely and dark place. He had too much time to think about his flesh and past relationships, all things he missed from the material world. What remained for him was only a few seconds each day to contemplate higher truths and Enlightenment. How he tried to fit together his different layers of understanding, of yearning. I think about yearning.
I pull down the visor to block the light. The churning in my stomach ceases. I speed up in anticipation of seeing your new art and feel my car careen slightly off-center as it scrapes the cement barricade of the bridge’s EZ Pass lane. With no concern for the damage, I find a soul music station as the morning sun spreads its golden light over the sparkling sea below. The barricade is behind me now. The music helps.
As I enter the east-bound ramp of the bridge, I remember you telling me that the subject in the painting hanging opposite my ornate mirror was a prostitute you’d met years ago. You asked her how she did it, how she kept her feelings safe.
“Listen, my body is used a dozen times in a day. But I forget as soon as they hand me the money and walk out the door. Except once, maybe twice, I remember, I was swept up, and one of them took me by surprise.”
You said you’d put down your brush when she said this.
“Once a customer came in just to talk. I asked if he wanted anything else because he’d still have to pay. It was my time, you know.”
“No,” he said. “Nothing else. Just this.”
“I removed his leather jacket and then his shirt. I held him tight against me. We didn’t move. I didn’t and he didn’t, not once. When the hour was up I walked out with him, to see him to his car. I’d never done that before. He handed me more money and a Post-it note he took from the dusty table at the entrance where the clay Buddha sits with the incense. On it he wrote, ‘I love you.’”
You stopped painting when she told you this, you said, just as I sat so still listening to you. I remembered this as I crossed the bridge. I think of what it means to love.
II. Fiddle Leaf Fig Tree
I parked in the only open spot on a dead-end street in front of a pile of broken plastic pipes. On the right side of the street was a string of mom and pop automotive shops. A blaring drone of machines and drills broke the quiet hum of the Brooklyn morning. Alida’s art studio was located in an old warehouse building across the street. Directly in front of the broken pipes was a wrecked car. A houseless person had set up a home there, crafting a sitting area with several repaired lawn chairs and tens of plants. Each one was set inside clay urns and plastic pots and arranged in two neat rows that led from the passenger door of the car. Their front entrance.
“Need something?” he said, as I clicked the button on the key to ensure my car was locked.
“No, just admiring your space.”
He paused a minute, then returned to watering his potted plants.
“Your fiddle leaf fig is pretty impressive,” I said.
He stood up and shaded his eyes from the morning sun.
“I’m impressed you know its name,” he said. “People usually don’t. And you can call me Tom.”
“Nice to meet you. You can call me Mike.”
He poured a full bucket of water into the fiddle leaf fig urn.
“I revived this one for a friend,” Tom said. “A miracle of sorts.”
I gazed up at the six floors of arch top windows stretching the length of the massive building. In many of them were the silhouettes of artists working. Their bowed heads close to the glass exploiting the morning light. I imagined them deep in their creative processes affixing elements of the material world to memories of their past, shaping and summoning what they wanted to preserve and leaving the rest.
“Looking for someone?” a man asked as he pushed open the industrial metal door with his hip, muscular forearms wrapped tightly around a large cardboard box.
“Yes. Alida.”
He twisted his head and looked up at one of the windows as if to find her there.
“You mean Izabelle?”
I was thrown for a moment but remembered she said she sometimes used different names, but I had never heard her referred to as Izabelle.
“She knows you’re coming?”
“Yes.”
“You a dealer?”
“I have one of her works.”
He crossed the street and handed the box to Tom.
“You should buzz her,” Tom said, looking inside the box. “Cell phone reception is spotty up there.”
He took a few items out from the box and threw the rest over the plastic pipes. I was struck by the contrast between his orderly rows of plants, the tidiness of the little sitting room he’d made, and this carelessness, the trash now all over the pipes.
As I searched for the name Izabelle in the row of names next to the buttons, the large metal door swung open again.
“Hey.”
I turned toward the voice and saw Alida standing in front of me. She wore a pale blue jumpsuit with white converse sneakers. Her clothes were covered in paint.
“I was about to buzz you, but I couldn’t find your name.”
She pointed to one of the labels.
“Right there.”
I leaned closer and saw the name was Izabelle.
She looked at me intensely, squinting, and I had the urge to hide.
“You have a cut on your head,” she said. “Looks like it’s bleeding.”
“Here?” I touched the back of my head. I remembered shaving. I also remembered feeling something, but I hadn’t checked before I left the house, just kept moving forward.
Alida leaned closer.
“Yeah. It looks kinda deep. It’s still bleeding. I have some alcohol and Band-Aids in my studio.”
Alida stood back from examining the wound I’d been oblivious to.
“You gotta slow down,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “Be more careful.”
I wanted to say something, but had learned through trial and fire to always hold back.
“Was there traffic?”
“Not really.”
“Sorry you had to take such a long drive on a Saturday.”
“I enjoy the drive. It’s quiet in the morning and gives me a pause to do some thinking.”
“What did you think about?”
I’d first met Alida at a dance performance the previous year at a small theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She was with her partner, a soft-spoken woman with bright blue eyes. The audience sat at small cocktail tables set around the elevated stage.
“Can I look at that,” she’d asked me, pointing to the program on my table.
“They gave me two,” I said. “You can have this one.”
Her partner’s arms were folded as she stared straight ahead.
“I just want to see when our friend is performing.”
“Keep it, no worries.”
“Thanks. I’m Alida.”
She asked if I knew anyone performing. I told her I didn’t, and was curious about this new theater that had opened just the month before.
“What’s your friend’s name?” I said.
“Carissa.”
“He meant your friend the dancer, not me,” said Carissa, not turning to look at us or join the conversation.
Alida pointed to a name on the program and leaned toward me.
“Her name is Cory,” she whispered. “She’s incredible. Wait until you see her.”
“She just has a crush on her,” said Carissa, looking at Alida and rolling her eyes.
“She’s just jealous,” said Alida.
“I know her,” I said. “She is amazing.”
Alida’s eyes widened and she went completely still.
“What? No. You’re kidding?”
I put on my glasses and looked at her photo.
“She went to Juilliard with my daughter.”
“Wow. That’s crazy. Is your daughter a dancer, too?”
“A violinist. She was a great musician. They did a bunch of performances together. They were getting somewhere really fascinating.”
“Why don’t you move over to his table,” Carissa said.
“She doesn’t play anymore?” said Alida.
“She died a few years ago.”
There was that awkward, heavy silence I had almost grown used to but not quite.
“I’m so so sorry,” Alida said, her eyes welling up. “What do you do?”
“I’m a screenwriter.”
“Anything I’d know?”
“Goodbye, October.”
“No way!” she said, hitting the flat of her hand on the table.
“You’ve seen it?”
“Sourpuss and I saw it last weekend.”
Carissa turned her head and locked into our conversation.
“What did you think?” I said.
“Are you serious? Freakin’ loved it.”
Carissa closed one eye and shook her head.
“Tell him the truth,” she said.
“Well, I had a little issue with the ending.”
“Most people do,” I said.
It was true. People took issue with the ending.
“I loved the two characters but thought he would be more empathetic and feel her pain after all he’d been through. Like, I thought all that would have made him stronger, not more closed off.”
“So you think he had it in him to help her?”
“I do. But I dunno. Look, it's your film.”
“Not really. Once it’s out in the world, it’s out in the world and it belongs to everyone. It comes alive differently for everyone who sees it, you know? I know that and I respect it. That’s art.”
Alida nodded.
“You see, I fell in love with both of them,” she said. “That’s why when she walked him out to the car I thought he would have given her the Post-it note.”
“That was what I thought too before we worked on it, but once we’d been in the world of the script for a while that felt maybe like the predictable ending, a happy ending.”
“So you wanted to make a film just for the surprise.”
I looked down at the photo of the dancer, Cory.
“No, I just thought this ending felt more like life.”
“Can you be quiet please,” a woman from the table behind us whispered.
Alida ignored her.
“But she was the one person who could help him find that truth you kept referring to in your film. And he could have shown her he was getting it if he’d handed her the Post-it, do you see what I’m saying?”
The lights blinked on and off.
“So why let her go?” I said, placing my reading glasses on the table.
“People need people even if they are made from different cloth. He felt something for her and she for him. Actually what they had was pretty deep. She was so willing to just listen and hold him.”
The room went black.
“What they had together in those one or two meetings was so deep. I’d never seen a film portray a relationship like that. It was so real.”
“So he should have opened up to her and given her the Post-it note? Couldn’t the audience understand and feel how real it was even if he didn’t go the step of giving her the note?”
“The writing was so good that it still would have given you the surprise ending you wanted, but with a subtle twist.”
Cory walked out on stage, and held her position as the music ricocheted off the walls of the tiny theater.
“Thanks for your honesty,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
“That’s why I keep Carissa around.”
She rested her hand on Carissa’s shoulder.
“Here’s my card,” I said. “Maybe we can grab a coffee. I’d love to hear more about what you thought.”
I looked at my finger and noticed blood trickling down.
“Hey, Izabelle,” Tom shouted. “What d’ya think?”
He’d glued bits of colored glass to the door of the car and arranged the potted plants along the ground to highlight and make space for his new mosaic.
“I love it, Tom,” Alida called over to him. “You’re an artist.”
“You still didn’t tell me what you thought about on the way over today,” Alida said.
A few days after my first encounter with Alida I noticed the large scale painting that hung in my therapist’s office was done by her. She called it, October Morning—the name of my film. I thought about that as I walked into the room for my weekly one hour session. I was feeling better that day and it was having a positive effect on my session. After two years and unspeakable amounts of money and time, I was able to reach down deep and hoist to the surface the guilt I was consumed with following the tragedy. At that moment of revelation as if a meteor hit me square on the head, my therapist looked at her wristwatch.
I understood that above all this was still a business, but I felt after so much hard work I was owed at least another 10 minutes. My self realization that what happened was not because of me, but rather a turn of events that we have no real control over. Like an earthquake causing buildings to topple and mountainsides to crumble, the alignments of people in places at that right or wrong time can seal one’s fate, does seal fate for people. That admission is what I wanted to say to my doctor. Instead, I watched her turn her wrist as if in slow motion, and stretch her neck to get a good glimpse. Images shot through my head but the one that stuck was of her yawning, slinking horizontal onto the couch and closing her eyes.
“Wake me up when you’re finished,” she’d say.
I got up, thanked her for her precious time and shut the door behind me. As I walked slowly past the receptionist, I figured maybe my therapist would come out.
“I understand you’re angry,” she might say and walk me to my car.
But that didn’t happen. I told the receptionist I would not pay for the session.
“I’m not paying, and I’m not coming back,” I told her, and slipped the paper back toward her.
“I’m not supposed to say this,” she said, “but between the two of us, your therapist is the most well respected in the country in dealing with your kind of trauma. It’s your prerogative to feel you’re being ignored, but maybe, just maybe, her actions were premeditated.”
I felt a bit uneasy about her knowledge of what went on beyond the closed doors. My rational self said it was just a coincidence. I wondered if I was not the first to storm out and tell her I was not paying. I wanted this incident with my therapist to be mine. Maybe, I wanted this tragedy and all that came after it to also be just mine. I glanced at the wall where the diplomas from Cornell, Harvard and University of Pennsylvania were displayed, and then settled on Alida’s painting with the name of my film, the strangeness of encountering this gesture toward my own work in the office of my own therapist. A mother was holding the hand of a young child. One could only see the back of the woman. She wore a long, sleeveless summer dress. The child had turned to face us. It appeared she was signaling to the viewer with her free hand that something was not right. She squinted as if fearful of the outcome of where they were going. The woman was barefoot with broad shoulders. Her posture was exaggerated as if she was walking on a stage to receive some kind of award. I looked back at the receptionist.
“The only thing premeditated here is the fact I’ll not pay for this session.”
“I’ll mail it to you,” she said without expression. “You can take it up with your insurance company.”
I walked over to the painting and stared into it.
“You didn’t tell me what you thought about on your way over,” Alida called me out from where I’d landed in the past.
After that incident with my therapist, I retreated back into a solitary existence. I came to a decision not to speak about what happened to anyone unless it was a stranger. A guarantee that I’d never see the person again. But the more I shut myself off from the physical world, the more I had to deal with physical pain. I started going to massage therapists. Some of them were legit, and some were well versed in the art of happy endings. The doctors of happy endings would listen to me up to a point but they wanted to do their thing and get to the next customer.
“How do you want it,” they’d ask.
That’s when I dressed, paid them for their time and headed out.
Once, or maybe twice, I went to a massage therapist that was different.
“Anything you want?” she said in an accented voice at the beginning of the hour.
I thought about it.
“Would you hold me?”
“Sure, baby. What else?”
“That’s it.”
I told her the whole story. I felt her arms tighten and then loosen and tighten again around my body. She stayed with me as my therapist had not, and I could feel it. I closed my eyes and told the entire story. When I was done I opened my eyes and saw her dark brown eyes were filled with tears.
“Are you gonna tell me what you were thinking about on the drive over?” says Alida. Her tone had shifted. She sounded concerned.
“Just thinking about a new story for my next film.”
Her eyes caught the morning sun.
“I’ll get the bandages and rubbing alcohol. Be right back.”
Tom was moving the Fiddle Leaf Fig to get it into a new patch of sunlight when suddenly an oversized SUV turned quickly onto the dead end street and double-parked in front of my spot. Tom’s car jerked as the man got out, slammed the heavy door and walked with purpose towards Tom.
“Can you move those plants?”
Tom put down his watering can and wiped his face with a dirty bandana he pulled from his back pocket.
“It will take me some time to do that.”
“You’re taking up space here,” he says, as he removed his sunglasses. “It’s also illegal.”
Tom remained frozen as if his legs were stuck in cement. A girl in her mid-twenties jumped out of the SUV and ran over to Tom.
“Ignore him. He’s an asshole.”
“Get the fuck back in the car,” the man says.
“You’re not my father.”
“Get the fuck in the car.”
Alida pushed open the old warehouse door holding a first-aid kit. She stepped off the platform of the building and walked quickly over to the girl.
“You OK?”
“Get the fuck away from her,” the man says, grabbing the fiddle leaf fig tree and throwing it on the pile of plastic tubes where Tom had thrown what was left in the box a few minutes before.
“Now I have room to park.”
Alida positioned her body between him and the girl.
“He’s allowed to be here,” she said. “You have no right to throw his plant.”
“Get the fuck back in the car,” he yelled to the girl.
“I’m done,” she said, throwing a wad of crumpled cash at his face. “I don’t need your money.”
“Pick it up.”
She turned her body toward the platform and locked in on my eyes. I looked over at the fiddle leaf fig tree lying like a corpse on the pile of broken plastic tubes. I remember my daughter told me that before she went on her trip she gave her own giant fiddle leaf fig tree away to a friend. It broke her heart as she had nurtured it in her tiny studio apartment in Brooklyn when she moved there after college. I recall she told me the mild-mannered fiddle leaf fig in the wild can actually be a bit of a bully toward other plants in its native community. She said they have a peculiar way of getting ahead in life by dropping their seeds and lodging in crevices of the roots of taller host plants. As they grow, the young fig plant sends down long, sturdy roots straight into the ground. And as more roots come down they surround, overwhelm, and eventually kill the host tree and the new tree will stand alone on the new structure it’s built.
“I said get the fuck back in the car, bitch.”
As the girl ascends the concrete slabs I notice a tattoo on her arm. It is familiar but I can’t remember where I'd seen it before. Her floral mini dress is slightly soiled with blood and her eye makeup is smudged and running down her cheeks. I shade my eyes from the sun and am reminded of the painting I purchased from Alida that hangs in my house. I remember the face of my daughter the last time I saw her. Like muscle memory that returns when you get on a bicycle for the first time in years, I open my arms as she gets closer. At that moment the ending of my next film comes into light. Looking out at the chaotic scene unfolding down below I put pieces together and see an opening for the redemption of the failed ending of October Morning. I can see now that Alida was right. Izabelle. By any name, she was right. The ending had been a missed opportunity, a failure. I’d shied in a crucial moment away from something important. As if in slow motion, the girl, Izabelle, presses against my body, and I hold on to her.
III. The Ending
I look down at my new name printed across the title page of the final draft of The Ending and wonder. I read it again and feel a new sense of freedom. I think of those Buddhist monks who strip off every material thing to get somewhere new.
“Anonymity,” she whispers, pressing her hand gently on my shoulder. “Where’s your toolkit?”
I point to the cabinet underneath the kitchen sink.
“I like that song on your playlist.”
“Which one?”
“The one about questioning God,” she says. “Couple words I don’t understand, but…”
“That’s a great song. It’s Leonard Cohen. I’ll play it again.”
I hear the sound of light tapping coming from the living room.
“Take a break for a minute and come look at what I did,” she says.
My brain quickly organizes the patterns and makes sense of the shapes of the large painting now occupying my wall space.
“I took down the old one.”
“You didn’t like it?”
“I didn’t think it paired well with this one. Like two different stories. Do you see what I mean?”
Turning my head, I stare at the figure holding the hammer and connect her with the new painting.
“I stuck the Post-it note on the woman’s hand like Izabelle said.”
I remembered crossing the bridge on that day when my thoughts went to the water below. How it must feel when your car lands and then begins to sink and the electric windows don’t respond when you try to get them to open, when you are trying to survive this. An ending that I’d prefer but felt the viewer wouldn’t be able to stomach the correlation between fiction and my truth. How could they?
Like dance partners locked in choreography, we both step back from the large painting. I glance at the full-length mirror as the music plays inside me. At the moment the photons settle in my brain a warm breeze blows through the open window and envelops my body like a warm blanket. When the reflection in the mirror finally clarifies, I run my hand over my freshly-shaved head. The skin is smooth and nick-free. Everything that was is now lost in the past. But now there’s more. I can feel it expanding in front of me and I marvel. That I needed to get to the end to see over the edge.
“Not sure it's needed anymore,” I say, and step slowly toward the figure now occupying my space. I step toward her and hold out my arms.
Paul Rabinowitz is an author, photographer, and founder of ARTS By The People. His works appear in The Sun Magazine, New World Writing, Arcturus-Chicago Review of Books, and elsewhere. Rabinowitz’s poems and fiction are the inspiration for eight award-winning experimental films. He draws inspiration as an outsider looking in, and an insider listening to Tom Waits. www.paulrabinowitz.com