Title: Goodnight, Sharon. Author: WesternRose Category: Skinner POV and SkinnerAngst Rating: PG Disclaimer: Walter S. Skinner is not mine. Damn. Sharon Skinner is a creation of 1013 productions. Archibald and Jeanne MacFarland are original characters of my own creation. This story is not written for financial gain or other compensation, just for fun. Archive: SIS, SkinneristaX, IOHO, WalterTorture, all others please ask and I will send a copy. Feedback: To WesternRose@aol.com, please! Goodnight, Sharon. Los Angeles is a desert. No matter how green the lawns get or how many turquoise-watered swimming pools are dug, it is a desert. Tonight there is rain in the desert. For three weeks out of the year it rains merry hell. I was posted here years ago, and now I'm back. When Sharon and I first married, this was our home. I was a brick agent bucking for a law degree at night. She was a freshly degreed art student from University of Chicago. We were young, in love and truly believed that we had the world by the balls, the world just did not know it at the time. Everywhere I go in Los Angeles I can see her. We ate at Musso and Frank's on Hollywood Boulevard. We shopped Western Avenue for used furniture. We took Sharon's parents to dinner at the Dresden in Los Feliz. We rented a funky little duplex near Larchmont Village, and we had picnics in Griffith Park. Our favorite weekends consisted of a drive up PCH and a stop at Neptune's in Oxnard for lobster boats and strawberry shortcake. We loved each other then. I know we did. I remember it. It was not easy for Sharon to be married to me. Her father was a senior partner at San Francisco’s hottest law firm. She shopped at Neiman Marcus and I. Magnin. She took weekends at the lake house in Tahoe or the ranch in Santa Rosa. She went to Santa Catalina and attended debutante balls. I was a 'Nam vet who had worked his way through his undergraduate degree as a bouncer, roughneck and an Austin PD beat cop. I occasionally woke up screaming and sometimes violent. I had a job that I could not talk to her about, that kept me on odd hours, and had me dealing with the scum of the Earth. It did not matter to her. She loved me. The cute girl with the new FIAT convertible fell for the big ox in the '72 Skylark. Her father, on the other hand, hated my guts. I refused to consider joining his firm after getting my JD, declined to talk about Bureau business, and would not kiss his ass if it were USDA Prime sirloin and I were starving to death. Archibald MacFarland hated to think that there was anyone that he could not buy, bully, bend or bullshit. He offered to pay my tuition and all expenses to Harvard so that I could pursue my LL.D. Just leave San Francisco now and he would use his connections in Washington to clear it with the Bureau. He even had the plane ticket ready. I told him to fuck off. I can't go back to the hotel. I can't sleep anyway and the temptation of room service scotch is not something that I would be able to turn away from right now. I drive east on Melrose and then down June Street, windshield wipers thump-thumping, past all the nice Hancock Park houses that Sharon liked. Lord, how I wanted to give her one. But she picked out our little place in Larchmont, close to Westwood, with the Federal Building and UCLA for me and the art community for her. She got a job working for an interior decorator, and even made our tacky little place look good. I would come home around 10:00 at night to the smell of paint or fabric glue and find her asleep on the sofa, bathed in the blue glow of the second-hand television. She clipped coupons and shopped at the Bargain Circus on La Brea. I worked all day and studied all night. It was not much of a life for a girl who liked to party at the drop of a hat. Drive down Rosewood, one ... two ... third from the corner. I stop across the street from it and put the car in park. A single-story Mediterranean style duplex. Orangey-red tiles and white stucco, with a scraggly orange tree in a yard that was mostly crabgrass. I could swear that the damn orange tree has not grown an inch. Tears sting at the back of my eyes. I can see her picking the damn oranges with her long, reddish-brown hair blowing in the Santa Ana winds. I can picture the long, elegant lines of her. I can feel the curve of her hip under my hand and see the way she held her head for a kiss. Sometimes I see her so clearly it's as if she never died. I rest my head on the steering wheel of the rental and close my eyes. I wish that I had never come back to LA. I had to sell the house in Silver Springs. I would come home and be afraid to go into the house. I would have to talk myself out of the car and into the kitchen to throw leftover Chinese takeout in the microwave. I could not park in the garage because her car was not there. It was in the impound lot in DC, nothing more than a twist of metal and broken glass. As I ate I would tell myself that I could sleep in the den. I did not have to get the scotch out from under the sink. I did not have to go upstairs with a coffee mug full of it, curl around Sharon's pillow and drink myself to sleep. One night I took my sidearm to bed with me. I put it beside my mug on the bedside table, changed into my sweats and curled around her pillow. I drank the whole mug of scotch, gulping it down as I talked to the empty room. I told Sharon everything that night, everything that I should have told her in life, but did not for what seemed to be the right reasons. I know where I went wrong. I just don't know when. When did I learn to shut up so well that I forgot how to speak? I made another trip to the kitchen and the scotch bottle, maybe another one after that. I woke up with a colossal hangover and the unmistakable taste of gun-oil and metal in my mouth. I got up, showered, took aspirin and went apartment hunting. One more night in that house and I knew that I really would eat a bullet. I rented an apartment in the Viva Tower that same day and slept there that night on the floor. The house went on the market that Monday. I did not bring anything into the Viva apartment except the boxes and furniture that I had moved out with when we separated. I did not buy a bed for six months. I was too afraid of waking up in it alone so I slept on the couch. Sharon's mother handled her personal effects after her death. Her clothes went to Catholic Charities, her jewelry to a good cause for auction later, and some keepsakes to herself, Sharon's friends, and to me. Sharon saved my notes, the ticket stubs from the movies we went to see and the silly stuffed animals I won for her at the Los Angeles County fair. Faith. It is a strange thing. When I would wake up in the middle of the night, God was not there but Sharon was. She was my reason. I think that the worst feeling that I have ever had in my life was the first time that I rolled over and she was not there. The rain is getting a bit heavier as I put the car in gear and pull away from the curb. I drive down Rosewood to Highland and turn right. Archie MacFarland died on our seventh wedding anniversary, the same year I was promoted to Unit Chief in Organized Crime and ordered to Washington. He was grudgingly proud of me, but told me before he died that I should have taken his offer. Since her death, I often find myself wishing that I had. She would have a nice house in Burlingame, a husband who could talk to her about his day and a nice normal life. Instead she got me with a security clearance, a move every two years in my first decade with the Bureau and no... I wipe my eyes on my sleeve. I can't tell if I'm glad that I left my Sig in the hotel safe or not. Making a left on Santa Monica, I stop at Oki-Dog for a teriyaki on a stick and a Coke. I want a drink. I want a cigarette, or maybe a joint. I want this whole week to never have happened. I do not want to know what I now know. Back in the car and drive west down the empty boulevard, heading for the hills and the beach. It was an invitation to address a class in Criminal Law at Loyola that brought me out here for the first time in a decade. Jeanne contacted my office and asked if I might come and see her at the senior community that she now called home. I said that I would. After speaking to a bunch of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed law students, I drove out to Pasadena. I parked the white Cavalier in the visitor’s lot of the Huntington Casitas, a tasteful little collection of cottages with whopping price tags. Rain had been threatening all day, and the clouds scudded at the tops of the green hills as I walked up the path to cottage 27. Jeanne had always been very reserved with me. The proper San Francisco society lady was her persona and she wore it like armor. Even when planning Sharon’s funeral, she was together and I was the one who was falling apart. So when she greeted me warmly, I was a little surprised. I was invited in, tea was poured and the proprieties observed. We made small talk about weather and national news. Jeanne was looking into her bone china teacup as if it held the answer to every question. I settled back to wait. I know when something is eating at someone. She opened her mouth a few times, and then closed it, frowning. I remember Sharon telling her mom about the house in Silver Springs. She was so excited to finally have a real house to make a home in. It was a white four-bedroom, three-and-a-half bath Southern Colonial on three-quarters of a wooded acre. Prettiest thing you ever saw and I busted my butt to get it for her. We were doing all right. Sharon landed a decorator’s gig right away, and all the struggles were really paying off. One night Sharon asked me if I thought that the bedroom next to ours might be a good nursery. I damned near choked to death. After she performed the Heimlich maneuver and my ears had stopped ringing, she explained that no, she was not pregnant. At least not yet. She knew I wanted a house full of kids, so did she, but for the first ten years of marriage we had been too financially strapped to feel comfortable with it. Law school eats a lot of money and so does relocating every two years. I had come up eating a lot of cornbread and oleo when things were tight. I did not want that for my kids. We tried that night. We tried a lot of nights thereafter. We read books, took vitamins, had special diets, and had sex in positions that were not in the Kama Sutra and chilled my testicles. We consulted specialists. Sharon’s eggs were viable, my sperm wiggly and fast, but there was just no hookup. We tried artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, everything that we could afford and a few things that we couldn’t. There were times when we thought that she had caught. All false alarms. Gradually she began to sleep farther and farther away from me on the bed. After a while we stopped making love at all. One night I came home to find a note on the refrigerator. "I need some time. I’m at Mom and Dad’s. Love, Sharon." It was the first time that she left me. I called and left messages with Jeanne or the maid or the houseman. Two weeks later, Sharon called back. "Please, baby, please come home," were the first words out of my mouth. She told me that she needed time to think and then she asked me a very odd question. She asked me if I had slept with anyone else during our marriage, if I had ever been tempted. I thought that she was feeling that I was getting some on the side because I had been giving her some space. I swore high and low that I hadn’t. I promised to spend more time with her, anything to get her home. She started to cry and hung up on me. She called every day after that. I tried so damn hard to tell her what she meant to me. I wanted her to know that when I had said, "I do" I really meant it. She would usually be quiet through this, then tell me goodnight. A few times she ripped me to shreds in that patrician tone of voice and then hung up with a bang. I stewed for a while after one of those. I know that I came up scrambling. I grew up on oil fields from Texas to Kuwait. My folks were proud and we never took from anyone what we could earn. My brothers and I were the first members of either family to get past the tenth grade, much less to college and obtain advanced degrees. We all worked our way through in various jobs with our folks chipping in once in a while out of Dad’s disability and pension. It stung. It hurt like hell to think that some rich boy who had had it all handed to him might actually appeal to her. Sure, she would not have had to clip all those coupons, but after I got my Juris Doctor things had been a hell of a lot easier. The next time she called, I told her that if she did not want a self-made man to go ahead and have daddy draw up the papers. She could go ahead and marry some manicured, blow-dried rich boy with his nose square up daddy’s ass. She said nothing for a while, then hung up very softly. Sharon came home two months after she left. Three days after I told her off. She was in the kitchen when I got home from work. I just stood in the door to the garage and blinked in disbelief. I had been waiting for the FedEx man to come with the papers. She cried and hugged me so tight that my ribs creaked. I was crying into her hair, whispering that whatever I had done I would make it up to her somehow, just never leave me again. I roll down the windows, catching the salt breeze of the Pacific and the green smell of wet grass. Do you know that the Atlantic smells different from the Pacific? I can’t put a finger on it, but it is a different ocean smell. It even looks different, the Atlantic is gray- green and the Pacific is gray-blue. I find PCH and begin to drive north, past Santa Monica’s gaudy pier and the pricey oceanfront and hill homes of Pacific Palisades and Malibu. I can feel it building in my chest. Grief, rage and pain swirling and knotting. Grief that she was taken from me, rage that she left me, and pain that she never told me… Jeanne spoke hesitantly. It’s not a nice thing when your son-in-law makes the papers after being found in bed with a dead hooker. It was the one time I was unfaithful, not that I did not have lots of opportunity or lacked offers of that sort, but I could not let myself take advantage of them. When I came down to it, I was happy to use the hand. The hand did not run to tell your wife, your boss or sue you for the end result of a broken rubber. Hell yes, I looked and even fantasized. What man doesn’t? But my "picture" of myself as a man would not let me fuck any woman other than my wife. The last time that we separated I was drunk, depressed, alone and lonely like I had never been before. There was this pretty young thing who talked to me as if I were a person. That was all she wrote. For Carinna Sayles, it was the last page of the book. For a moment, I did not understand what Jeanne was saying. She had started by talking about the break-up, the publicity and the events leading to Sharon’s death. What she went to was not something I had been prepared for. Another man. They met in DC when Sharon’s firm was doing a decorating job. He was older, wealthy, powerful, and a great deal like Sharon’s dad. Meetings. An affair. A pregnancy. A child that was not mine. Sharon running home to Mom. An abortion. She never told me. I never had a clue. Jeanne told me that he came to see Sharon in San Francisco and that she refused to see him. I asked who he was. She did not know, Sharon never told her. We all want that touch. The reassuring touch of another human being that makes us feel so alive. Did I become so fixated on my job that I failed to give her that? She went into the arms of another man the same way I went into the arms of Carinna, because of something missing. I tried to walk out the door of the little cottage with Jeanne holding onto my coat. She told me that this had been eating at her. That I needed to know, that I was not to blame and that when a marriage fails it is generally a two-way proposition. When I woke up in Saigon all those years ago I was in more pain than I ever thought I could survive. I would watch the clock, breathing in and out, in and out, waiting for that moment that would bring the Morphine or I would finally pass out. I’m doing that now. The ocean breathes out there in the dark and the moon has become the clock in the clearing sky. I pull into a deserted parking lot and turn off the car. I’m shaking all over. Sharon… God! Please let me either pass out or get a shot of something because I’m fucking losing it I’m fucking losing it and … I don’t know how long I have been sitting in the car, but the moon is almost down. I could not see, breathe or think for a damn long time. All I could do was feel like I was drowning. I was sinking in some dark ocean in my soul and that there was no light to tell me where the surface was. We all want something perfect in our lives. Something pure and true that we can strive to be worthy of. Sharon was that for me. Maybe that was my mistake. Maybe she believed that I would not forgive her for that human need. Maybe she was afraid that I would. The worst part of all this is that she never found out, and neither did I. I get out of the car and sit on the hood. I listen to the ocean. I wish that she was here. Most people think that I am one cold son-of-a- bitch, in a way that is my armor. I need to be cold to do my job, to hunt the killers and the thieves and the scum. I had hoped that Sharon knew me better. I think about her, I still love her. If she had lived I would have fought like hell to get her back with me. Maybe in time she would have been able to tell me about the other man. Maybe in time I would have been able to tell her about the shadows I have to dance with day in and day out. I can see the ocean now. The sun is rising at my back, still behind the hills that march to the sea. It’s cold. I get back in the car and roll up the windows, and turn on the heat. I’ve been out all night. I start the car and pull out of the parking lot. I can take PCH to Sunset and be back at the Best Western Inn before traffic. I zip through the turns and make a sudden detour. Sunset to Fairfax and then to Third. I pull into a space and get out of the car. Farmer’s Market. I thread through the crowd of early birds for Sharon’s favorite early morning treat. Beignets steaming in a wax- paper bag and a liter of chicory coffee. I walk back to the car, sipping at the coffee and nibbling at the hot, sugary, deep-fried dough. Sharon is in every thought, but she is the Sharon that I loved, flaws and all. I close my eyes and for a second I see her in a pair of old jeans and a hooded gray sweatshirt, biting into too-hot dough and cussing around a burned tongue. I drive back to the hotel and sneak in. The hotel room is as empty as a politician’s promise. I undress and crawl between the sheets, too tired for even the jolt of caffeine to rescue. I hear the rain start again as I fall into sleep. Goodnight, Sharon. The End.