B.E Taylor
448 W Grand Ave
Eau Claire Wi 54703
taylorb@uwec.edu
A Likely Story
Say in the beginning it was only a beginning. A page you turn or not,
some innocent exposition, an outline of the possible.
One time, early on, he pursued her at a local tavern, so much so she told
him later that her friends had taken her aside and warned, “That old guy is putting
the moves on you.” And she demurred, no, flat out refused, but not so much that
they didn’t end up outside the bar together at closing time in a fine rain.
“Give me a kiss,” he started out saying,” One little insignificant kiss.”
“No,” she said, he thought even then without thinking nearly long enough.
“It would mean nothing to you and everything to me.” It was a line he had
had been successful with before. “No,” she breathed deeply into his face.
And then either she stalked off or he bowed his drunken courtier bow and
took his leave.
Who would it hurt, what did it matter, where could it lead? There were
choices of course but what were the odds?
Story was the first time they ever spent the night together he was felled by
fever, by guilt and expectation, undone and unmanned. The lady nursed him in
ways by which his queen would not have been amused and fresh from the shower
kneeling before him, her head turbaned by a towel only the better motels can get
that white, he fingered lightly the beads of her spine.
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Traditionally, there are people who don’t matter much in your classic love
story—chief among them, husbands and wives. Then family, who mostly just get
in the way—children, for instance, get sent to bed early, sent off to camp, ignored
or are navigated often unsuccessfully around. They are walked over walked
through walked out on. That’s how everyone knows this is serious.
Friends are another matter, fewer than you expect, their shallow wallawalla, the panderers and confidantes—the requisite soubrette, the doomed to
second banana. “Don’t do it,” they say knowing well you will. “Be careful.” “If I
were you …” When what you really want is an “atta-boy” or “you-go-girl.”
Maybe at least a “Watch out! Behind you.”
It was nobody’s fault. They didn’t mean for it to happen. Nobody expected
it to turn out this way. They didn’t mean to, want to, couldn’t have imagined.
“What was it you wanted back then?” she confronted him one year later at
a P.C. convention in New Orleans. They both thought this is what it might mean
to be star-crossed.
“What is it you want?” she corrected herself somewhat, somebody other
than he might have thought, presumptuously, “Love, Sex, Romance?”
“Yes,” he answered immediately, finally and thankfully.
She said nothing but did not get up and leave.
They could dance, they thought, in a place like this, could linger obvious
over foreign coffees, cognac and the just desserts of sin. This far from home
anything could happen which is why they had to go this far. In a distant city
together among strangers with all she was or was not wearing beneath her new
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dress only they knowing. Though anyone who watched even a giddy while might
have naughtily guessed or read with furtive heart, or remembered once the earthly
scent of motel soap and mortal pretense.
Everything was preview, all the attractions coming attractions. You
might have just as well put it on the lobby marquee: J. & T. in room 578, a
standard single double smoking. A triple scarlet A rating. Sorry no passes.
Then things got complicated—the way a pool table gets complicated as
soon as someone breaks—took on a life of their own, choices got made. Stuff
happened. People did stuff. Pretty soon you couldn’t tell one from the other.
Once in one local motel, one of their first, at the edge of town, he felt they
needed an excuse for checking in at ten o’clock in the morning “Been driving all
night,” he said to the clerk, rubbing his eyes, and gave a Missouri address.
Another time just across the highway, her in her babushka and sunglasses, him
lugging their breakfast from Burger King, they couldn’t get the key to work, had
to call the chambermaid to let them in who turned out to be a student of his wife
from of a couple of years ago or a distant cousin of her husband depending on
who of the many people suddenly involved was telling the story.
Action’s character, isn’t it? Character’s fate? The arc’s inevitable or at
least explainable though not to them of course. There were excuses, if not
reasons, that everybody would have little choice but to live with. The plot would
thicken, predictably impossible, as fated as unlikely.
Story got to be, at the end, or nearly the end, after all was almost said, if
not done, they married and lived, maybe even happily, after all, who knows, ever
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after? Or maybe they married much earlier and illegally, drunkenly on a Vegas
junket. They hit the quarter slots early in the trip and big, well for them—eighty
dollars or eight hundred, or quarters—it was hard for even them to tell after a
while. She in what became her lucky nylons, him in what he knew right then was
his lucky Bolo tie.
Freddy Bell, thirty years after leaving Freddy and The Bell Boys, did a
passable Sinatra but a great Bobby Vale. The drinks were comped, the first day’s
winnings threatened to pay for everything. Later that night or the next morning or
the morning after that they snuck up to the abandoned penthouse ballroom, up
against the big windows while a sand storm scoured and swirled the neon
reflected in her face. Or he always wished he had, like she wanted. He would have
to, in his own less operatic ways, try to make that early lapse up to her from then
on.
Anyway, at some point later she did cling to him and suggest he tear them
off her—her soon to be lucky nylons she meant. Anyway when he got back home
he did hang that string tie—Four Aces—off his bedroom dresser mirror, and his
wife never asked what that was or why or what it meant.
Another story was one night, they decided to leave a tape recorder running
while they were in what they called their “hotel mode,” the door triple locked and
no one in the entire town who knew where they were or cared to. The next
morning they listened to the tape. He was, he thought, grumbling and rumbley
pontificate; her, she said, squawking like Toots, an old rumdum she knew at her
parent’s favorite bar . “It’s like pitying and fearing them at the same time,” one or
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the other of them said. “I want to be those people,” the other said, “I don’t care
what they sound like. I don’t care what it costs.”
So there was conflict, of course—isn’t this a story of a he and a she, and
all the ping and the pong of all that rising action. A climax or two if not an
epiphany, there seemed so anyway, at least as they were happening.
Maybe they get too used to it all to weep anymore in a parking lot at such
a usual thing as parting. The knowing and unknowing world too busy going home
to wonder or to care. Birds coming or going. All the trees putting off or on their
show of leaves. “See you,” someone says or doesn’t. “Monday.” Then there’s the
left turn and the right, the predictable nature of the antipodal, the Spring and the
Fall of it all while all the lights in every direction blink to stop or go or at least
proceed with caution.
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