It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive by Handler Evan

Author:Handler, Evan [Handler, Evan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Argo-Navis
Published: 2012-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

Abbey Leigh was raised by her mother in Darwin, a humid port city near the equator on Australia’s North shore. I’ve never visited Darwin, but it’s been described to me as a place I wouldn’t want to go. “Hardscrabble” was the word that was used, which made me think of a preponderance of bars, and the men stumbling out of them who’d want to beat me up. She’d been conceived when her mother, traveling through Central America as part of a dance troupe, crossed paths with an American soldier she knew only as “PJ, from Sarasota.” A letter was sent via the U.S. Military in an attempt to inform “PJ, from Sarasota” of the pregnancy, but no reply was ever received. Abbey Leigh was raised never knowing her father, whose identity remains a mystery.

This cocktail of facts had imbued Abbey Leigh with a striking combination of toughness and vulnerability. She was a volatile, titillating, ambitious woman-child, and her snappy repartee and skill at putting me on the defensive all contributed toward my infatuation. The fact that she had a deep fascination with human behavior and motivation, as well as a desire to understand her own actions and those of the people she interacted with, made her seem like an antidote to the limitations of the relationship I’d most recently been living with, or running from.

I was open with Abbey Leigh about my lack of availability even as I pursued her. Our attraction for each other was immediate, quickly became huge, and – aside from the fact that we kept it from being consummated during that initial stay in Australia – dominated our dealings with each other.

“You want to give me a massage?” Abbey Leigh once asked, amid her complaints of a muscle in spasm. “People use massages to relax. What are you trying to do, kill me?”

Or, in one of her more tender moments, as we were suffering toward our inevitable separation when I’d return home to New York, Abbey Leigh simultaneously complimented and criticized me.

“You’re a gift,” she said. “You’re an Indian giver, but you’re a gift.”

Abbey Leigh was a clever girl. She also occasionally called me a coward. I never thought she was so clever then.

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