Brothers
a short story by
Brock Taylor
In June 1945 my mother and Bob’s mother shared a room in the maternity ward. Their husbands were both about nine months back from the war and Bob and I were the result of the two reunions. We were born just an hour apart on the same summer solstice evening. Our mothers, lying six feet apart, experiencing the same confusion of joy and agony, sweating and crying through parallel crescendos of contractions and diminishing periods of reprieve, formed a relationship that they keep to this day. Our fathers, pacing the waiting room like caged bears, exchanged enough words to appreciate the other’s nervousness and to realize that they lived just one block apart on the same beech-lined street. So it was natural that Bob and I grew up being best friends.
Best friends in spite of being so different. In high school we ran in separate packs. I with the jocks and cheerleaders, he with the science and math nerds. He was the school chess champion, I the basketball star. Our friendship survived because we both wanted it to. A whole childhood of shared birthday parties and family outings to the lakes and mountains made us feel more like brothers than friends. When I needed help with an algebra assignment it was Bob I turned to. When he admitted he was too bashful to invite a cutie named Cheryl to a school dance I made it happen for him.
I remember the summer after we graduated from high school a bunch of us spent a weekend at somebody’s lakeside cabin. After a night of carousing and necking, beer and homegrown, I was awakened to hoots and sneers and the pop-pop-popping of what turned out to be a pellet gun. There had been a heavy dew that morning and in the garden that sloped down to the lake the shrubs were spangled in dozens of spider webs that would have otherwise been unnoticed. Mitch and Frank were standing at the railing of the upper deck taking turns trying to shoot the spiders as they hung oblivious in the center of their evening’s work. I brought out a couple of beers and joined the sport. By the time Bob came out to see what was happening we’d killed five or six, leaving a nickel-sized hole gaping in the web where the spider had been. I handed him the rifle after I’d missed on a couple of shots. “Thanks,” he said, then he deftly snapped open the gun and removed the wheel of pellets and the compressed air. “You’re pitiful,” he said holding us collectively in his gaze. “You’ve turned simple beauty into a funeral. What harm were they doing to you?”
We didn’t write much when he was off at MIT becoming an engineer, but we got together when he was home on vacation. In the meantime I went to the nearby journalism school then got a job as the sports writer for the local rag. I continued to play ball with the boys, but it wasn’t the career then that it can be now, and somehow I’d never much taken to the more popular baseball and football. I loved the speed of the basketball, the continuous ebb and flow of action, the tightness of team play that nevertheless permitted, depended upon, explosive moments of individuality and grace. So I wrote about it and it paid the bills.
Bob was always home for our shared birthday since it happened in the summer and his father arranged a job for him at the bottling plant. Our mothers continued to make a big deal out of it and after a barbeque and chocolate cake we’d take our girlfriends out to a movie or to watch submarines off the cliffs above the ocean. He was still going with Cheryl but I had to break a new girl into the routine every year. I didn’t ever see Cheryl around town when he wasn’t there and didn’t think much about the longevity of their relationship.
Bob’s MIT career started off with great promise, but by the time he graduated he seemed to be off his stride and he returned home rather than pursuing a further degree. It turned out that while he hadn’t been writing to me during those years away he’d been in constant contact with Cheryl and they married within a couple months of his return. I shared everyone’s disappointment in him, but was happy to have him around again. I liked Cheryl and figured he couldn’t do much better in that department. He got a job with the city planning office and was soon studying the feasibility of the various building projects; roads, bridges, water and sewage systems. He was happy in his quiet way. Cheryl produced babies, one, two, three, and they bought a modest house out on the cliffs with the best view in the county.
Every summer solstice Cheryl would invite me for dinner and I’d take a good bottle of wine and a better bottle of Scotch, sometimes a girlfriend, sometimes not. Every Christmas I returned with gifts for the kids and a bottle of Champagne to wash down the turkey. Our friendship evolved into a pleasant nothing, warmth without substance, care without concern. I thought it was perfect, just what friendships were supposed to be.
*
My mother always said I wasn’t the marrying kind. Even on my wedding day she said it, not sparing my bride’s feelings. I suspected she was right, but I was thirty and Bonnie seemed as good as any to try it with, so we took the plunge. It lasted ninety-six days. The breakup was pretty amicable and only cost me my Camaro and five grand. I can’t say I learned too much from the experience except that my mother was sometimes right, and that I shouldn’t try it again. It has suited me well enough.
Of course, I’m always playing the dating game, which isn’t all roses, but I’ve learned a few survival rules. Actually, there are only two. Never lie to her and never commit to anything more than a month away. And if you think about it, if your intent is to stay single and you follow the first rule the second is never an issue. In the long run people want different things from a relationship, but in the short run they are usually amazingly in sync. Thoughtfulness, fun, excitement, tenderness, courtesy, and lots of loving. When the excitement of new nakedness and sweet surprises wears off, longer term concerns surface, differences become apparent, but parting can still be easy if heavy promises have been avoided, and it can usually be achieved without rancor. I have lots of ex-girlfriends but very few enemies.
Admitting up front that I’m not looking for a long-term relationship significantly reduces the field, but the sea is vast and full of wonderful fish. Some women choose not to believe me, others hope to reform me, but most are just happy to know what they’re getting into. The important thing is not to fall in love, or in lust, prematurely; before it is within your grasp. What greater force is there against truth than lust? It’s another rule, I suppose, and hard-learned. Bob recently accused me of never truly knowing love, and I hadn’t the heart to really argue with him. Maybe he was right. His experience was certainly different from mine. He so constant, I always moving on; one a habit as much as the other, I suspect.
*
Over the years I saw less of Bob. In the beginning he and Cheryl would arrange a babysitter and we’d go to movies together, three or four of us, or out to dinner, sometimes bowling. They would invite me and my current with them for a beach picnic, or I’d suggest some weekends that we all go to the zoo. I didn’t have any kids in my life and I didn’t mind them occasionally, and it was always good to see Bob and find him happy. But then the invitations dried up and excuses were made and, except for the required birthday get-togethers, we almost never saw each other. I started phoning Bob at work and suggesting he come to a game with me, or we shoot some pool, just the two of us, and sometimes that would happen. Finally I realized that it was Cheryl. Not that she didn’t like me but that I had become a threat to her, to her marriage. My libertine ways. When I put it to Bob he would just wave it off as ridiculous, but I knew it was true.
Then one day in September of 1987, when we were all forty-two, Cheryl just up and left him. She didn’t run off with anyone, just moved into an apartment in the neighboring town and took her kids with her. Bob still claims he doesn’t know why. They fought like dogs over the kids, the house, the car, even the furniture and record collection. Incompatible was her word for it. They were simply incompatible and couldn’t live together anymore. She wanted out. She wanted a divorce, the house, the kids, the bank account, everything. She wanted him gone, out of her life. They both bought expensive lawyers and battled it out in court. The list of petty crimes and inconsiderate moments that she held against him was endless, specific, and embarrassingly public, and she delivered it with such venom that it was clear at once that there was no hope of reconciliation. Still, he fought on, blinded at first by bewilderment, then anger, then vindictiveness. Fighting first for his marriage, then for his children, and finally for his possessions. Although he lost the war he won the final battle, and was left with the house with the best view in the county, but no one to share it with, a houseful of furniture with no one to use it, half of a savings account with no one to spend it on, and a family sedan that would never take his family anywhere ever again.
I think he bored her to death, but that’s just my opinion. She took up a while later with an Italian art dealer and spent a lot of time abroad.
Poor Bob! I saw a lot of him for a while. For a few months it was pretty grim. All he could talk about was his bewilderment and the injustice of it all. He won visitation rights and got to see his kids once in a while but didn’t seem to get any pleasure from it. After a while I think it became more of a duty than anything. Maybe she soured them to him, but if so, he never said. I encouraged him to get away but he said he was too busy at work. I tried to set him up with a few women but he wasn’t interested, and I think it was mutual. We shot a lot of pool, drank beer, watched basketball games at the dome and on TV at his place. Gradually he seemed to get over it, or at least to adjust to his new situation. I became distracted by a new girlfriend, then another; and he suddenly seemed to be busy every weekend, and I noticed that we weren’t living in each other’s laps anymore.
I was out jogging one Saturday morning, taking the arduous but scenic route along the cliffs, when I passed his house and noticed a pickup truck in the driveway with Bob under its hood. It turned out that he’d sold his sedan, traded it for the used Ford. Change is good, I thought, maybe even said it aloud. I imagined him heading off for the hills, buying a cabin by a lake, rescuing spiders, hauling hay for his horses. But no, he’d seen a nice sideboard he wanted but couldn’t get it home. When I suggested that that was what delivery services were for he told me that could get expensive. Bob had discovered flea markets, garage and estate sales, and auction houses. This was a passion I’d never seen in a man. Perhaps passion is too strong a word. Interest might be closer. He explained to me he’d always had an interest in fine things, and I remembered as a kid in school he’d used a fountain pen, maybe even carried a leather briefcase. He was an engineer, after all, and cared about precision and line. Now he had the time. It turned out that there was another reason that he let me in on later.
Good, I thought, maybe even said it aloud. Get rid of all this dowdy old furniture and replace it with tasteful antiques or modern elegance. He shook his head. He couldn’t get rid of his kid’s beds. What if the kids wanted to come home? His parents had given them that living room set as a wedding present. He was going to get it re-sprung, maybe change the upholstery. He rolled up the garage door to show me the slightly dinged dining room suite he’d picked up the month before for a song. American Arts and Craft, 1900’s. He was going to refinish it in his spare time. We went into the house to look at the grand piano that occupied fully a third of the living room. What a deal he’d got on it! “You taking lessons?” I asked him. I was sure he didn’t play. He ran his hand along the edge of its closed lid and shook his head. “So, you’re in the used piano business now? You’re going to sell it? Your kids play?” He continued to shake his head. I reached and grabbed him by the arm. “You might have got a good price on it,” I told him, “but it’s still a hell of a lot of money. What’s the idea?” He had a far away look in his eyes when he turned to me and I let go of his arm.
“Just a fantasy, I guess,” he said as he walked around the piano and stooped to pull out its bench, “that someday I’ll meet the perfect woman and she’ll come over for a glass of wine or something, and will see the piano and will smile and pull out the bench and sit down at it,” he sat, “and will open the keyboard,” he raised the lid, “and remove the felt,” he rolled the felt that protected the keys and placed it beside him on the bench, “and begin to play beautiful music,” he waved his hands and wiggled his fingers above the keys, “and she will fall in love with me just for owning such a thing.”
“Did you get it tuned?” I asked him.
“It’s tuned,” he said, still watching his hands float above the keys.
*
One day a couple of years after the divorce, he invited me by to watch the Wednesday night game and there was Roxanne. She wasn’t much over thirty; petite, blue eyes, blonde hair, standing in his kitchen nuking up some popcorn for us to share. She was a secretary at his office; had been there over a year. Wow! I could see that Bob’s days of bluedom and longing were over. He gave me a wink as we sat three in a row on the couch in front of the TV. She saw the wink and turned to give him a great wet kiss. “You play?” I asked her, indicating the piano. I looked past her as she laughed at the idea, to see Bob glaring at me and making tiny shaking movements with his head.
Turns out she was married, I learned at halftime. Ah shit, I couldn’t believe it! But wait, there was hope. Her husband was in the slammer for abusing their daughter. That was the good news. The bad news was that her husband was in the slammer for abusing their daughter. An eleven-year-old. After the game I went home and added another rule to my short list. Don’t fall for a woman, beautiful or not, whose husband is in the slammer for abusing their daughter. Of course, that was a rule for me, who didn’t want a long-term relationship. Maybe it wasn’t a rule for Bob.
Bob and Roxanne became an item. They took sailing lessons together, joined a tennis club, took wine-tasting classes, began stocking an impressive cellar, but mostly they antiqued, which was a new verb for me. She lived in her house and he lived in his and they continued a playful rivalry trying to out-do each other in the bargain antique business. Ho-hum. I was happy for them but, for some reason, we barely kept in touch.
“Bob,” I said to him one day, a year or two into their relationship, “why don’t you two move in together? Why maintain two households?” And he told me that it was her daughter, Julie’s fault. Julie hated Bob.
“It’s only natural,” he said, “after what her father did to her, hating men, hating a potential replacement father.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“In five years she’ll be out of the house,” he said. “Then we’ll marry.” It didn’t seem to bother him.
It seemed that the one problem with Roxanne was me. She didn’t like me. Some people are like that. It wasn’t any particular thing I’d said or done, it was who I was that she didn’t like. She told Bob that I was a womanizer and a drunk and that she wouldn’t tolerate my presence. I was a playboy, a flake, a good-for-nothing, and a ne’er-do-well. It put a crimp in our friendship. Bob had to go along with her or lose her, so I was pretty much put aside. We’d still get together at a game and sometimes play some pool if he and Roxanne had nothing going on, but we kept it under wraps. I developed a definite loathing for the woman. Even our long-standing birthday tradition got shelved, and we started to celebrate it a few days later in a bar someplace. A Chivas toast to friendship somehow carries more weight when you’re standing in your friend’s kitchen with your loved ones around. “Brothers,” we’d say, even in the smoky bar, and clink our glasses. “Through thick and thin.”
On one such occasion we were holed up at the back of a jazz place after midnight. Bob wasn’t much of a drinker, but for some reason we’d both tied one on that night. I think it was because we were pushing hard on fifty and feeling it. The band got up for its last set and someone, maybe Bob, had requested something from South Pacific. The singer, a black woman shaped like a refrigerator, decked out in scarlet and gold, started crooning Some Enchanted Evening. Bob sat with his elbows on the table, face in his hands, listening dreamily, then part way through the song he started to talk. “You know, when we were kids, this was my favorite song. All my life it’s been my favorite song. While you and everybody else were going ape-shit over Elvis and Buddy Holly I listened to South Pacific and all those other musicals, Guys and Dolls, Oklahoma. I knew every lyric by heart.” He started naming songs I’d never heard of. “But of them all, this was my favorite, and I’ll tell you why. Well, for two reasons, actually. Probably the main reason is my sister Marge hated it. I remember I was about fourteen, so she’d have been twelve, and I’d put on the LP and was just sitting on the couch humming along to it and she told me she hated this song. When I asked her why she told me because it was a lie. She said it was a lie that love happened like that. Some enchanted evening, you will see a stranger, you will see a stranger, across a crowded room, and somehow you’ll know, you’ll know even then, that somehow you’ll see her again and again. I was amazed to hear her say that because I believed every word of it, and, besides, what could a twelve-year-old know about love? I don’t remember what I said to her or what I did, but I’ve always remembered her little outburst. Whenever I hear this song I think about it. How could a twelve-year-old be so jaded? Maybe that’s why she’s been so unhappy all her life, been through three horrible marriages. Who knows? Maybe I decided to like the song because Marge hated it so much. But the other thing is that I believed it with all my heart. Still do. That’s how it’s supposed to be. That’s how it can be. You will hear her laughter, you will hear her laughter, across a crowded room. Fly to her side and make her your own, or all through your life you will dream all alone. Don’t you think it’s true?”
The singer was winding up the song, “Once you have found her never let her go. Once you have found her never let her go.” I nodded. “It can be true. It can happen like that. Never has for me.”
“Me neither,” he shook his head and took another hit of Chivas.
“Not you and Cheryl?”
He snorted. “Cheryl? That bitch? She dumped me!”
“And you let her go.”
“Not soon enough!”
“And not Roxanne? Looks to me you’re made for each other.”
He shook his head and stared at his drink. “Well, we have fun together, all right. She’s a lot of fun.”
“But…”
“But it’s not like that,” and he closed his eyes and rolled his chin to indicate the singer who had bowed to a smattering of applause and was swaying her big hips, waiting for her entry into Moon River. “Not like it’s supposed to be.”
*
More seasons and years slipped by. Bob and Cheryl’s youngest child, Annie, moved into Bob’s house for her first year at college, but Bob’s pleasure didn’t last the year and over the summer she moved into a house full of other young women. Roxanne’s daughter, Julie, got busted first for smoking, then for selling, pot in the girls’ toilet at high school, then threatened to drop out entirely if Roxanne didn’t let her boyfriend move in with them. Against Bob’s advice she caved in to the demand. Roxanne’s husband was released from jail, which seemed to cause Bob more concern than it did Julie or Roxanne. Bob hired a private detective to track the man to ensure he obeyed the restraining order that barred him from returning to our city. The guy just headed for Florida and Bob wasted a pile of money.
Bob’s oldest got married, and, although I wasn’t invited to the wedding, I went anyway and sat in the back on the groom’s side. I was surprised to see him a full-grown man with a trim reddish beard, already bigger and heavier than his father. His bride was small and slim with piles of black hair and wickedly flashing eyes. After the service she skipped, laughing down the aisle beside her new husband then quickly jumped onto his back for a piggyback ride out into the sunshine and ovation of bells. Cheryl, matronly and radiant, greeted me primly, hiding her surprise at seeing me and pretending she hadn’t worked to block my invitation.
Around the time Julie was supposed to graduate from high school her boyfriend got busted for selling cocaine out of Roxanne’s house, and it cost Roxanne ten grand in legal fees to win acquittal for herself and Julie on a host of secondary charges, but not before Julie was kicked out of school. With her boyfriend serving five years and without a high school diploma, Julie didn’t leave home on schedule, but started working at the Seven-Eleven and attending night classes to try to pick up her missing credits. She told Roxanne she should move in with her dorky boyfriend if she felt like it; just give the house to her. Naturally the wedding plans were delayed.
Besides, other issues had arisen. To start with, Roxanne’s house, in spite of its two-year inhabitation by Julie’s piggish, drug-dealing boyfriend, was bigger and flashier than Bob’s. It was in a bad neighborhood, which was why she could afford it, but it was only ten years old and had hardwood floors and a modern kitchen and an open, airy design. Bob’s house was worth over twice as much because of its perfect location, but it was a dowdy, stucco thing from the fifties with sculpted gold wall-to-wall throughout; low, cottage-cheese ceilings; a small, fusty, pink-tiled kitchen with an in-sink garbage disposal but no dishwasher. It was a given that nothing would induce Bob to move from his house. He’d been there all his adult life; he’d mostly raised his children there, all his memories, good and bad, were tied up in the house. Bob was settled. Besides, he owned it free and clear. If they were going to live together, Roxanne was going to move into Bob’s house; that was obvious. But why should she, now over forty, and having been through her own tough times, have to take a step down in the housing department. She liked her big, airy kitchen, the hardwood floors, the Jacuzzi and skylights in the master bathroom. Bob would have to renovate. Actually, it was worse than that; Bob would have to expand. How else to accommodate their combined furniture collections?
It was at our fiftieth birthday celebration, pushed almost into July that year by conflicting engagements, like a movie with Roxanne and a barbeque with some other acquaintances, that he laid out his woes to me. I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “Just burn it all,” I told him. He looked at me blankly, not understanding my mirth or my suggestion. “You’re about to spend two-hundred grand to add on three rooms and to expand your garage to a three-holer just to accommodate twenty-grand worth of furniture. Save yourself a hundred and eighty by lighting a match!”
He shook his head. “My furniture? You’re suggesting I burn my furniture?”
“Well, it’s apparently not going to be hers!”
“This is serious,” he said. “Don’t be stupid.”
I could see it was serious but I didn’t think I was being stupid. “It’s just stuff, Bob!”
“You don’t understand! It’s our stuff. It’s what we do together, what we have. It’s important!”
“To you or to her?”
He ducked his head as if dodging a bullet, then squinted a bit in the dark. “To her,” he admitted, “more than to me.”
“And what’s important to her? The stuff or the housing of it? Your housing of it, I mean?” I had figured it out and he just scowled at me. “Her price is a fancy house, then, if she’s to marry you. It’s got little to do with the furniture. Am I right?”
“There’s no price,” he spoke through gritted teeth. “There is no buying or selling going on here. The issue is mutual accommodation.”
“Well then, at least get rid of the piano. That thing has just sat there for eight years and never been played.”
“It’s been played.”
“Who’s played it?”
“The piano tuner. Every six months he plays it.”
“Every six months while you wait for a fantasy.”
“Fuck you,” he said, and made to leave. “I thought you were my friend. I must have been nuts to tell you about that.”
I grabbed his arm. “Think about it Bob. This is all to marry Roxanne, right? So the piano fantasy’s got to be history. Tell me where I’m wrong.”
He stood, ripping his arm from my grip. “Where are you wrong? Everywhere is where you’re wrong. It’s a fantasy,” he snapped at me, “why should it ever be history? What’s in my head is my business. What do you know about it? You who’ve never been truly in love?” I began to splutter my objection and to pull him back into his chair, but he shook me off. “For you, love is ejaculation!” He spat it at me and left. It was the first birthday ever to have ended badly.
*
We got over it. Of course, the issue between Bob and me was partly caused by Roxanne’s bad-mouthing me. I gather I was something of a talking point between them, and Bob wasn’t immune to her logic. “The fact is, you hurt women,” he told me. “Listen. You let these women fall in love with you, some more than others, but you never return it. There is never any hope of your returning it; it being a matter of principal with you. No wonder women like Roxxy despise you.”
In the meantime Roxanne and Julie resolved their issues, meaning Julie got pregnant and ran off with some guy to Oregon, so Roxanne put her house on the market and Bob re-mortgaged his and hired an architect. A year later the two of them had a house warming to celebrate their updated house and their moving in together. It coincided with our fifth-first birthday, so I was invited. Bob warned me to behave myself and I promised I would. I showed up alone and not too late, I drank only tonic and I left early. The house was impressive; new kitchen, new hardwood throughout, updated lighting in blonde wooden ceilings, a vast new master bedroom with a sunken bath en-suite, heat lamps, skylights, even a second living room, all above the expanded garage. The place was pretty full of furniture, but not choked. I surmised it was the complete merged antique collection. Most of Bob’s old furniture was not in evidence. The wedding gift couch, the children’s bedroom sets, the Formica kitchen table set; they were all gone. I recognized the dining room table from years before in his garage. He’d finally gotten around to finishing it, or perhaps Roxanne had hired it out. The piano looked stunning as the focal point of the living room, and it made an elegant bar, complete with hired and bow-tied barkeeper.
I inspected Bob’s finger for a ring, but didn’t see one. I confess that I’d have been shocked if I had. Who else would he have chosen for his best man, or even witness if they’d just done the civil ceremony? “Oh,” he said when I gently asked, “we’ve decided to give it a one-year trial period. See how we get on living together. We’ve both been on our own for so long now, we’re not sure how it will go.” Sensible. Sensible. I nodded my head and sipped my tonic, then went out to inspect the garage. It was a year before I saw or spoke to Bob again.
*
The following Christmas Sweet Sue waltzed into my life like a summer breeze on a winter day. I was at someone’s office party and we were clustered around her, singing carols from printed sheets while she pounded them out on the old upright. There was such gaiety in her, in her voice, her rocking shoulders, her flushed face when she turned to urge us on to another verse. I brought us some champagne when the songs were finally over and the adulation and congratulations done. Her color was still high and her eyes flashing from all the attention. We toasted, for the tenth time at least, the holiday and the New Year to come, then finally each other because I had refilled our glasses. She was in her early forties, one year divorced after a sixteen-year, childless marriage, and just beginning to show her face in public again. Well, she was always showing her face in public, she corrected herself, since she ran a woman’s clothing store, but I could figure out what she meant. Her husband had taken up with one of her sales clerks and now lived elsewhere. She dazzled me and we left together, although it was a week before our intimacy took its natural course. Sue was everything I’d ever wanted in a woman; generous, sexy, beautiful, warm, fun, considerate, not to mention self-supporting and available.
For her I knew I was just a fling, someone to get her back into the game, but I played it for all I was worth, and suddenly I knew the unthinkable had happened, I had fallen in love. With eyes wide open, all I could see was her. My heart, so jaded, pumped only so I could be with her again. My skin, my body, which had seen and done it all, sang and tingled to her touch as if I were a downy-cheeked youth on my first heavy date. Every moment she could spare for me, I was there. Every waking thought was how to please her, every dream was her embrace.
In late February, on a sunny day among the daffodils and snowdrops in our public park I went down on one knee, and, holding up the largest solitaire my banker would countenance, I asked her to marry me. She demurred, but I was not dissuaded. I fancied I had pleased her by asking, so I asked again. Our romance continued like a gentle storm, passion unabated. As the days lengthened into the evening hours, and the roses bloomed and let their petals fall, I asked her for the final time to marry me, to stay with me forever, and I swore undying love and fidelity, but she shook her head. A leopard doesn’t change his spots, she told me. She’d had one man desert her and she wouldn’t have another. At our age there is no longer innocence, but at least there was a track record to be checked. She would marry again, but to a faithful man.
And so we agreed to part and I took back the ring. I couldn’t imagine ever growing tired of her, or cheating on her, but I knew myself well enough not really to be sure. It was mid-June, less than a week before my birthday, Bob’s birthday, when we would be fifty-two, and I asked her to go out with me one more time, to Bob’s party. I knew there would be one and I even expected to be invited, I’d behaved so nobly the time before. And there was a tiny thing that she might do for me, call it a birthday present, that would please us both.
The sun had just set when we arrived, but the evening was still warm. In the intervening year Bob had built a huge deck over what had been a concrete patio, and it pushed right up to the cliff’s edge, enhancing his wonderful view. The sky was streaked gold and magenta and it reflected, stippled, off the ocean and set the faces of his guests aglow as they clustered along the railing, oohing and aahing, and sipping champagne. In the center of the deck was a table littered with empty wine bottles and glasses and a half-consumed blue and white birthday cake, and near the sliding door that led to the living room was a gas grill still filling the evening with that hungry aroma of burned flesh and caramelized barbeque sauce. Bob and Roxanne stood shoulder to shoulder in conversation with another couple at the railing, Bob wearing a bent paper party hat on the back of his head.
I ushered Sue in through the front door, avoiding the crowd outside, and we found our way to the kitchen where champagne was being poured. There were more people inside than out, perhaps fifty all together. I gave Sue a kiss and a wink, then found a couple of shot-glasses in Roxanne’s crystal cabinet, circa 1880, and made my way onto the deck, advancing towards Bob with my bottle of Chivas in hand.
“We thought you weren’t going to make it,” he cried when he saw me. I just smiled and gave Roxanne a peck on her proffered cheek.
“Wouldn’t miss my own birthday party,” I said. Roxanne put her arms through those of the couple they’d been talking to and led them into the house without another word. I put the glasses onto the railing and poured us each a stiff shot. We took our drinks and raised them. “Brothers,” we said, clinking and taking a slug. “Through thick and thin.”
Bob introduced me to a couple of people and he dumped some Scotch into their wine glasses and we all toasted again. It was funny how few people I knew there. I guessed that they were mostly Roxanne’s friends. I didn’t think Bob could have raised a crowd of more than a dozen at the best of times. We stood and looked at the dying sunset and he told me about his various house improvement projects. I asked him how the year had gone with Roxanne, and he held his hand out with the palm down and wiggled it. “So, so,” he said. “We’re giving it another year.” People came and went and we shared more Scotch with them, then a few couples had their coats over their arms and had come to say goodnight. It seemed the party was winding down.
Roxanne came to tell Bob that he was being a poor host; that his guests were leaving and he was required within. Bob shrugged at me then we turned to follow her. There was music coming from the house and we could hear it through the open patio door. Someone was playing the piano and singing. Bob touched my arm and cocked his ear and we stopped to listen. Some enchanted evening, you will see a stranger. Of course it was my Sweet Sue. We could just see her over the shoulders of the remaining guests who had turned to take it in. Sue had a wonderful voice, operatic, but she had it under tight control, singing softly, unhurriedly, as if to herself. Her head was bowed, her eyes following her fingers over the keys, and her long, straight hair hung down in front of her shoulders and was buffeted by her forearms as they moved with the melody. Some enchanted evening, you will hear her laughing, you will hear her laughing, across a crowded room. I looked up at Bob, but he wasn’t there. He had floated quietly to the door and I watched as he put his hand on someone’s shoulder to make his way towards the singer. Fly to her side, and make her your own, or all through your life you will dream all alone. I placed the bottle of Chivas and my glass on the cluttered table and slipped up the driveway just as Sue was finishing her song in that wonderfully rising, ever-slowing crescendo. Once you have found her, ne-ver let her go!
Taos
February, 2001
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