She Loves Me

“But I tell, you, America, he just doesn’t love you,” Rudy stated flatly, refilling her glass with a rich red vintage that he had ordered especially for the occasion. “He sometimes says that he does, I know, but he just doesn’t.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” America replied, tossing her hair in a derisive fashion. “I don’t want to hear this. I have every confidence that he’s—”
“I mean, I’m sure he’s faithful—I’d never suggest anything like that!—but loyalty isn’t the same as love!”
“I don’t think you know what love is, Rudy.”
“He doesn’t love you, and he doesn’t love me,” Rudy insisted, then leaned in over into the candlelight. “Nobody can love you the way I love you.” He drained his glass, wiped his head with a silk handkerchief, then put his hand over his heart. “My love is higher than the highest mountain, deeper than the deepest sea, stronger—”
“Careful, Rudy. You’re getting into copyright infringement territory.” She chuckled. “To say nothing of showing your age.”
“…amber waves of grain,” he concluded sheepishly, then trailed off and took a slug of the rather good Bordeaux. “I want to be your guy!” he declared. “Your one and only! I want to take you around. Show you off. I want you to be always at my side! You’re the wind—”
“I’m warning you, Rudy. There are laws governing this kind of thing.”
“At my back,” he muttered in conclusion. Another gulp of wine. “I am totally in love with you, and he’s not!”
“I’m not so sure,” she replied. Her eyes showed skepticism.
“He criticizes you all the time. Finds fault with so much that you do.”
“That’s just candor. And honesty. He understands me and takes me as I am. He’s showing his feelings. A girl likes that.”
“I show my feelings.”
“I don’t trust your feelings,” she said. He looked hurt, but she lowered her tone. “I think you only love me for what you can get out of me.”
“How can you say such a thing? I love you!”
She gave him a narrow look. “I have trouble with a lot that you do and say. It doesn’t seem to be, well, compassionate.”
“Compassion is my middle name!” Rudy insisted. “No one can show more compassion than I can. Look at 9/11! You don’t get to be ‘America’s Mayor’ for nothing. I was the hero of 9/11!”
“Again, not so sure,” America replied. “It wasn’t like you actually did anything.” He started to protest, but she waved his comment away. “And there’s that thing with your wife . . . “
“A misunderstanding! Everything was taken out of context.
“And you’re always wanting me to hang out with your friends. And they….actually, they seem to stand for things that aren’t very positive, overall, at least not for me.”
“Like what?” Rudy demanded, genuinely surprised.
“Well,” America placed a long, gracefully manicured nail to her lips in thought. “A lot of me is poor, for one thing, barely above the poverty line. And most of your friends are richer than Croesus. I mean, I’m living on hamburger helper a lot of the time, and your crowd is swimming in champagne.”
Rudy refilled his glass and nudged hers over toward her a bit. “What does poverty have to do with love?”
“A lot!” America replied firmly. “Especially when you consider how hungry and homeless I am in a lot of places. It’s especially hard in those parts of me that are very young or very old. Some other parts of me have given a lot for you and your buddies, but those parts are left to struggle, wither and even die without any help at all.”
“I’m exceptionally proud of those parts,” he pointed out. “I thank them for their service all the time!”
“It takes more than a handshake and a parade to show the gratitude of a nation,” she stated, “even when what was given wasn't really necessary and caused more problems than it solved.”
Rudy jabbed a finger in the air. “The Lord helps those—”
“Things are out of balance,” she interrupted. “I don’t get equal pay for equal work, some parts of me are in need of immediate attention, shoring up, repair and common care. Other parts that are not the same color have problems in every walk of life, are even deliberately targeted for harm.”
“I’d never harm you!”
“And a lot of the time, I can’t find decent work at all, no matter who I am. And when I do, it doesn’t pay well enough for me to get by, to take care of my children. Your crowd is vacationing in exotic places while we’re all digging out of blizzards and suffering through droughts. And don’t get me started on their denying the damage we’re doing to the climate. I’d say you do a lot of harm, on the whole. Doing nothing is worse, sometimes, than doing something bad."
“But you have my love!” Rudy declared. “Climate is for the scientists to figure out. I’m not a scientist. I’m a lover and a patriot! Look at 9/11.”
“Love don’t feel the bulldog,” America stated flatly. “Your buddies also want to me to play dumb all the time, keeping education and opportunity away from me when they had all the advantages I had to give.”
“Oh, now, that’s not true. Some of them worked their way up from Harvard and fast-food restaurants…” Rudy started.
“There’s also this: You don’t like a lot of me because of where I come from.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I mean that I stand out there in New York Harbor with my torch and that heavy book and announce to the world that I welcome all sorts of people, especially the poor and oppressed, those ‘yearning to be free,’ and all that, but you and your friends want to turn all these folks away, send them back to be tortured or killed or die of starvation, even though they’re already here.”
“They don't speak English," Rudy said. "They’re not our kind of folks! And they might be terrorists!” He raised his voice, causing people to look around. “I mean, look at 9/11.”
“Not everyone who wants to come to me is a terrorist, Rudy," she said. “Truthfully, almost none of them is. Maybe one in a million. A lot of them are just kids, children.”
“Children blow themselves to smithereens every day,” Rudy said, emptying his glass and pouring another one. “I mean, look at 9/11.”
“Look at your family,“ she continued, undeterred. “They came from somewhere else, right? Did they speak English when they got here?”
“That was a long time ago. There weren’t any terrorists then." He took a long thought. “There’s not room for everyone!”
“Tut-tut,” she said. “There’s all kinds of room, and there always has been. You and your cronies just want to keep it all for yourselves.” She put up her hand to stop his further protest. “You make it hard to get here, hard to stay here, and hard to be here. You want them to clean your toilets and shine your shoes and mow your lawn—”
“I don’t have a lawn,” he protested. “I live in an apartment!”
“But they’re all part of me,” she continued. “They’re why I am what I am, why I became what I am in the first place. They made me! They’re all of me and I need them to be the whole me, to grow, to prosper, to become more of what I am and to realize my full potential. You can’t love just part of something, and you can't stop me from being me.”
“We can find a way to work around that,” he whined. “Maybe we can let just the rich ones in.”
“And your friends are always wanting a piece of me. They’re just like you, only interested in what they can get out of me. They’re forever digging into me, cutting me down, slicing bits of me away, boring into me deeply and sucking the life out of me. They fill the air I breathe with chemicals and the water I drink with poison. And they dump their garbage and waste all over me, ruining my outfits and spoiling my natural beauty. Even the fish in the ocean are beginning to avoid me. Your gang is never satisfied, it seems. They always want me to put out more and more, and they offer nothing in return. Wake up in the morning and they're gone. I don't even get breakfast, and there's no free lunch, anymore, either.”
“But it’s all to make you better, to make you greater!”
“How better?” she sniffed. “You’re fickle. You hang around with disgusting and mean strangers and give them things they don’t really want, things you take away from me. You grab up my very best and send it away to die in horrible ways, you hock my valuables for ten cents on the dollar and take crooks out to dinner, leaving me home alone to eat soup over a sink. You throw a lot of me into prison for minor infractions and let felons run around loose, living like kings. You take all I have to offer and squander it. Then you make me pay more for things I could make myself, if you’d just let me, and that makes me feel weak and useless. How is that great? What kind of love is that?”
“It’s the kind that celebrates you!” Rudy insisted. “The kind that keeps you great forever. I mean what about World War II? What about the Man on the Moon? What about Ronald Reagan?”
“Oh, Rudy. That’s all yesterday’s news,” she said, “Look at the record. Things weren’t always so great in the past, either. It’s all about the future, Rudy. If you’d learn to progress a little, you could see that.” She took a dainty sip of wine. “No. If you loved me, you’d love all of me, every part, even the ordinary and common parts, even the parts that need help sometimes, the parts that you don’t want to see or believe exist, the parts you think are a drag on your wealth and status, the parts that are truly almost all of me. If you loved me, you’d take care of all of me, not just the parts you want to use for your own pleasure and benefit.” She gave him a steely look. “The fact is that you don’t love all of me, and that means you don’t love any of me!”
“But I do!” Rudy said. “And, anyway, none of that matters! He doesn’t love you at all. He’ll run off and leave you soon, you’ll see.”
“Well, that’s okay,” she smiled demurely. “I’ve never been a one-guy kind of nation. I like to play the field, switch around now and then, every four or eight years, to be honest, sometimes less, sometimes more, but there's always a new romance around the corner. I’ve even flirted with some of your buddies.”
“I know that,” he said sadly. “But that’s okay, it keeps me going.”
“Most of them are self-serving simpletons, you know. They believe the last thing they heard and never question what they think they know. They’ll say whatever they think I might want to hear, even though they don’t mean a word of it. The truth is, I wouldn't go out with any of them to a dog-fight--or a NASCAR event. Hell, I wouldn't even go with them to the Superbowl or the World Series, and they always sing my song at those events. Being with that bunch of bozos just isn't worth my reputation, to be blunt."
“But they’re super rich!”
She sighed, finished her glass, and took up her purse, making ready to leave. "You just don't get it, Rudy. You never will. That's the saddest thing about you."
“So when will it be my turn?” Rudy asked. "9/11s don't come along every day, you know."
She gave him a long look. “To be truthful, Rudy, it’s never going to be your turn. You never really had a chance with me.” She stood up. “Look, I appreciate the dinner and the wine, but I’m telling you here and now, it’s over. I don’t