Chimera, page 4
He sat staring at me, while I ran my finger along the edge of my cup.
“Is it because of your dad?” he asked after a minute, when it was clear I wasn’t going to say anything.
“Father, not dad.”
“You’re right, you’re right, sorry. Is it because of him, because of what he did? Because you can’t judge all men by his actions you know, not all men are cowards.”
“No, I know, it’s not that.”
“Then what? You’re a beautiful, smart, young woman Emile. Any man would be lucky to have you. Has something happened? I think I recall you going out on dates when we first met. Nothing happened did it?” he asked, concern in his eyes.
“No sir, nothing like that.”
He nodded his head, relieved. “You know, there’s a nice good-looking young man who just moved in to the apartment next to mine a while ago, asked about you.”
“Oh no, no, no, Mr. Anderson, I’m not going out with someone who lives here. I’d have to see them all the time if it didn’t work out.”
“What about that computer thing? Match-maker services. People do that these days don’t they?” he asked and leaned over to pick up a cookie.
“What? No way. Besides, I still get asked out on occasion. I even got a marriage proposal once. But you’re not saying I should get married just because someone asks me are you?”
“No, of course not,” he said, waving his hand through the air, sending cookie crumbs flying. “You need to be absolutely sure about something like that. But there’s no harm in going out with a nice man every once in a while is there?”
I sighed. This wasn’t going to go away, so might as well suck it up. “No, Mr. Anderson, nothing wrong with that…it’s just…well, men are not as…patient…as they were back in…as they used to be.” He turned to me and recognized the expression on my face. It was the same expression I’d had once, when I tried to skip over a sex scene in a book I’d been reading to him, embarrassed to say the words out loud.
“Oh. I see,” he said, looking a little embarrassed himself, and picked up another cookie. “Yeah, times have changed in that regard since then, I’ll give you that. But look, I’m not telling you to go out there and turn into some sort of a floozy.”
I chuckled at the word floozy.
“I don’t think you have floozy in you. All I’m saying is you have to give things a fighting chance. If you stay in here, reading all day, every day, the chance to meet your Barbara might pass you by. You need to go out, meet people, make some friends your own age. Have some fun.” He bit into the cookie and crumbs tumbled down his shirt to the floor.
I thought of the friends I’d had over the years. I’ve never had a paying job, but I’ve volunteered at different places from time to time and have made friends while serving Thanksgiving dinner to homeless people, packing grocery bags at the food bank, or wrapping donated Christmas gifts for children. The problem is, they never seem to stick, these friendships with women my age. I just can’t seem to match their enthusiasm for their favorite subject: men. Which one is hot, which one is single, which one would make a good father, which one has a good job, which one just broke up with their girlfriend and is now up for grabs, which one stood her up, blah, blah, blah. Weddings too, were a big topic of discussion: big poofy white dresses, big poofy hideous bridesmaid’s dresses, bands, flowers, table decorations, have it on the beach, in a picturesque little chapel, go to Aruba for the honeymoon, who to invite, not invite, what will they name the children, who will be the god-parents and on and on it went.
Once, when I went through a presidential phase, reading six or seven biographies, I was talking to a woman named Andrea while cleaning out dog cages at the animal shelter. “Did you know that James Garfield was shot at a train station? He was going to buy a ticket and get on the train like an ordinary citizen. Can you imagine sitting next to the president, talking to him, while on your way to the beach or to visit your in-laws?” I had found the idea fascinating, but her response? “You know who works at the train station? That guy Adam, the one with the green eyes. You know, he plays rugby right? His body sure shows it.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s fascinating too.”
Eventually I just stopped picking up the phone. Knowing that “girl’s night out” wasn’t really that. It would be girls driving together to a club, and then dispersing at the first sign of eligible men showing any sort of interest. Grab ‘em while you can ladies, no, not that one, I saw him first.
And all the men, the same men women found so irresistible, always seemed like too much of something to me: too cocky, too immature, too married, too divorced, too drunk, too loud, too arrogant, too big, too obnoxious. Maybe I’d get married when I was sixty. Men might be better companions at that age. Tired and worn down, wanting no more than to sit in front of the TV with a bowl of soup and a newspaper to read. The cockiness and arrogance evaporating as soon as they realized they can no longer even eat a slice of pizza without being debilitated by heartburn.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t see that Mike had beautiful eyes, it was that Mike also had a tendency to burp. Loudly. Proudly. Who cares about eyes then? Phillip, yes, he was smart and articulate and could converse on a wide variety of topics, but he also spit. All the time. How could I possibly think about kissing him if he had that much excess saliva in his mouth that he felt the need to expel it every five minutes? Dwight, with the gorgeous hair, likes football a little too much. Once, during a Superbowl party he’d invited me to, he’d stuffed potato chips in his mouth and yelled at the television at the same time, little greasy potato flakes popping out of his mouth. Several times he’d jumped up from the couch, the bowl of chips on his lap dropping to the floor, and pounded his chest like a gorilla when a fat guy wearing spandex knocked another even fatter guy also wearing spandex to the ground. Could I really fall in love with someone who acts like a gorilla while watching other men in tights act like gorillas? I didn’t think I could.
“So you told me that whole story, which I’m grateful for, don’t get me wrong, but you told me that whole story just so you can tell me you want me to find a boyfriend?”
“No, no, I told you that story for a few reasons. One, that people need each other,” he put out his thumb to indicate the first reason and more crumbs trickled out of his palm. “Without Barbara, I wouldn’t be here right now. Plain and simple. And it wasn’t just taking the gun from my hand either. She made my life what it was, a happy life. We weren’t rich, we didn’t travel the world, and all our dreams may not have come true, but she made my life worth living. Every single second of it.” More crumbs fell out of his hand as he touched the ring over his shirt. “And, two,” index finger, more crumbs “I think you’re looking for perfection. You find flaws in people and you dismiss them. No one is perfect, Emile, no one. You met me as an old man, a worn down old man with grandchildren and great-grandchildren. You had no idea that I was once like all these young men you find fault with. A hothead with an ego. An ego that caused the death of a young boy. Or that I was a weak drunk who almost took his own life with no regard for the wife he’d be leaving behind. Shoot, I even had a gambling problem in my forties, but we won’t get into that right now.”
“Plus, you throw cookie crumbs on people’s floors,” I said, smiling.
“What was it you said about that young man you were dating for a while? The one I thought was very well mannered, the one with the neat hair? Something about his knuckles.”
“They were huge Mr. Anderson, like a big bag of giant marbles.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “Knuckles. Emile, you’re going to have a hell of a time finding a person to share your life with if you can’t get past something as silly as knuckles.”
“So what was Barbara’s flaw?”
“She was a bad driver.”
I laughed. “That’s not a flaw, Mr. Anderson.”
“It is when you have to buy five cars in three years.” He chuckled again and bent over trying to gather the crumbs he’d dropped.
“No, Mr. Anderson, I was joking, leave them, I have to vacuum anyway.” I reached down with my own hand to get him to stop trying to clean up and he grabbed it, straightening back up.
“The other reason, for telling you the story, is…life is short. James only had eighteen years. You’ve now had five more years than he did, and you haven’t done anything with them.” I looked away. This forty-year-old woman version of Mr. Anderson was a little on the abrasive side. You can’t switch sides Mr. Anderson, you can’t, you filled out the forms, swore your allegiance to the left-line.
“I’m sorry,” he said, releasing my hand. “It’s guilt. No matter what, I’ve spent my life trying to make up for what happened to James, it’s what I’m doing with you. But that doesn’t change the fact that I still want those things for you. You may not ever want to get married or have kids or change the world and that’s fine, but you’ll never know will you, if you stay here, hiding out. Your mother wouldn’t have wanted that would she? She herself wasn’t on this earth very long but she did have you while she was here. She did have that.” He grabbed another cookie, this time putting his hand under it as he took a bite, which made me smile.
“I’ve lectured you enough Emile, and I’ll never do it again. You have my word on that. But will you make me just a small promise? Just promise me that you’ll try. Just step out a few times, see what the world has to offer?”
I picked off a crumb from his blue suspenders.
“Okay, Mr. Anderson, you win. If it’ll make you happy, I’ll try. I promise.”
chapter four
frank’s meat market
It was 10:39 p.m. by the time Hannah finally knocked on my door. Thirty-nine minutes late. There has to be a rule about that sort of thing, surely. Ten minutes late is acceptable, thirty-nine is just rude. I had, in five-minute intervals, opened my door, stood outside, looked around, hands on hips, and tapped my foot. If I’d known which apartment was hers, I’d have walked over there and told her I’d changed my mind, something came up, maybe throwing something in about her lateness. “Someone called around 10:20, after I’d been waiting for twenty minutes, and I figured you weren’t going to show, so…” Not too rude, but enough to let her know it was her fault.
When I opened the door, instead of apologizing, she just waved her hand in an impatient “come on” gesture (as if I were the one who’d been holding things up) because she was on the phone.
Unbelievable.
She turned and started walking towards the parking lot, jabbering away.
Her dress was so tight I could see she was either wearing a thong, or nothing at all underneath it. Either way, ugh. Her spiked heels looked both uncomfortable and unstable, like one false step would snap her ankle and maybe even her knee. She clip-clopped and jingled down the pebbled walkway in front of me, her two hundred or so gold bracelets glimmering in the lights from the lot. I was wearing jeans and square-heeled boots, no jewelry, except for my watch and my mom’s small silver hoop earrings. But I was too annoyed to be worried about being underdressed. I just wanted this night to be over and done with.
She stopped at the curb and waited for me to catch up.
When I reached her, she put a hand over the phone and finally addressed me, “Which one’s yours? My car’s in the shop.”
I pointed to my non-descript compact car and she scrunched up her nose when she saw it. Jeez. Really? As if I’d pointed to a rusty converted ice cream truck with no doors and a giant clown head bobbing on the roof.
“Yes…I am, I told you I would…okay. Bye,” she said into the phone, then put it down and smiled at me, nose back to normal. “Okay! Let’s get going!”
I was glad I was driving. If the night went as badly as I thought it would, I could get up and leave any time I wanted. If it turned bad fast, I could stop at an all-night fast food place on the way home, order three burgers, fries, and a bucket of soda and still get home in time to read my book. The thought comforted me as I opened the door to the driver’s seat. I was hoping it would turn out to be a bad night now.
Leaving the apartment complex, Hannah informed me we were going to a place called Frank’s Meat Market. I’d read in the paper, after there’d been a big brawl in the parking lot, that it had been an actual meat market at one time. When Frank, the butcher and former owner, won a good chunk of money on a scratch-off lottery ticket, he’d closed shop and took off to somewhere unknown, though people said they’d seen him packing his brand new pick-up truck with enough fishing gear to supply a commercial fishing boat before he left. After the building was sold, and it was converted into a nightclub, the new owner kept the name as a joke, meaning to rename it, but the name stuck and he kept it. Most people just called it “The Market.” Or “The ‘Ket,” if you were hipster enough. I was not.
I’d never been to Frank’s (as I called it, not being hip enough to call it anything else) but I’d driven past it plenty of times. My favorite used bookshop was just half a mile down the street from it, and I spent a lot of time there. To me, the cluttered, musty bookshop was a magical place. The Tiffany-styled glass lampshades, which gave off a soft yellow light, the ancient soft armchairs that sucked you in when you sat, the shelves spaced close together and packed with books from floor to ceiling, the dark, scuffed wooden floors, all gave me the feeling that I was in another time, another place, when I was there. I always half expected to see a young boy come running around the corner wearing a newsboy cap, knickers and long socks, yelling “Stock Market crashes! Read all about it!”
Adding to the magical aura of the bookshop were four housecats that roamed and lounged wherever they pleased, in and between piles of books, or just dozed in the middle of the narrow aisles making people walk over them. One of them was so big and fat that I mistook him for a fluffy throw rug the first time I saw him, splayed out on the floor, motionless, and almost stepped on him. He (his name, Benjamin, was stamped onto a fish-shaped tag around his thick neck) usually only slinked around the shelves and looked at everyone with that old fat bored cat look. That superior I-can’t-believe-I-have-to-share-the-planet-with-you-dull-clumsy-furless-humans look. But from time to time I could get him to play with my shoelace or a pen. I enjoyed watching his pupils grow from slits, if we were near a lamp, to round, dime-sized black circles in an instant when he, like me, was transformed to another place, and he became a lion on a grassy plane in Africa and my shoelace became a mouse, scurrying in the tall grass.
But, I thought miserably, we aren’t heading to the bookshop, we’re heading to a crowded club, and I don’t like crowds. I never have. Even as a child, I could never fully enjoy going to theme parks or festivals. People have postulated that my dislike of crowds comes from the fact that I am an only child and was homeschooled my entire life. I don’t think that has anything to do with it. I just don’t think there’s anything enjoyable about being jostled and manhandled by strangers. Is there really anyone who finds having strangers clammy, dewy forearms pressed up against theirs pleasant?
On the drive over, my agitation at Hannah’s lateness began to subside. She was talkative and charming actually, now that she was off the phone, undistracted. Halfway to the club, she rolled down the window and lit a cigarette without asking me if it was okay and I was proud of the fact that I didn’t immediately want to ring her neck. Flaws, that’s all, people have flaws. No one is perfect. At least she kept the cigarette out of the window and made a conscious effort to blow the smoke away from me when she exhaled. That was something.
When we pulled into the parking lot, she was telling me a funny story about a camping trip she and her friends had gone on and I was beginning to think it might be an enjoyable night after all. And when we walked into the club, I was even more optimistic. It wasn’t as crowded as I had feared.
My first impression: it’s a club. The same kind you can find in every single city in every single state in America. No theme, no waitresses dressed as referees or different species of exotic birds, just tight short skirts and white button-down shirts that glowed under the black lights. To the left of us was a sunken dance floor, lit up from below in various pastel colors and a handful of people were dancing on it, their feet and legs silhouetted against the lights. A long wraparound bar took up half the wall to our right and curved around to the wall in front of us. An upper level, likewise, wrapped around three of the four walls, extending only halfway across the building and clumps of people wearing standing against the open railing, looking down to the level below.
I could feel the thump-sh-thump-sh-thump of the obligatory techno music in my chest and under my feet as we picked an empty spot at the bar and ordered drinks. That was another thing that separated me from my peers: music. Techno was okay, I wasn’t that much of an old codger, but I preferred before-my-time music. Janis Joplin, Etta James, Otis Redding, The Platters, The Manhattans. Even Robert Johnson. If I ever mentioned Robert Johnson to someone under the age of forty, they might assume he was a basketball player who played for the Knicks, not a blues musician who’d made a deal with the devil. It was the cross I bore for being born old.
I ordered a beer, Hannah ordered a frozen strawberry margarita.
“I need to go to the bathroom!” Hannah yelled over the music as soon as we paid the bartender.
“Okay! I’ll be right over there!” I shouted back, pointing at an empty table just under the edge of the overhang of the second level.
Hannah, drink in hand, strolled away. I walked over to the wobbly table, climbed on to one of the stools, and started picking at the paper label on my bottle.
Thirty minutes later, my beer bottle was now naked and empty. Its label picked off and turned into a small pile of gummy paper balls on the tabletop in front of me. And Hannah had not returned.
This is what happens when you don’t avoid pink glittery things.
