My Redacted Life: Chapter 24

The sexy little Redhead had pretty much told me she didn’t want to see me that evening. Oh well. As I started toward my apartment, I saw my neighbor perched, as usual, just inside her screen door. She evidently had started changing clothes after getting home from work and, distracted by the histrionics in the parking lot, had forgotten about her task halfway through.

Anyway, I tried not to look when she said, “Lovers’ quarrel?”

“Beats the hell out of me.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “You feel better than a certain basketball coach I could name.”

Always the last musician in the orchestra to hit the chord, I suddenly realized what just might have happened.

“Are you telling me …?”

“I’m not telling you anything,” she said. I looked at her and quickly averted my eyes.

“So that’s why it was my fault?”

“What was your fault?”

She was evidently in one of her quixotic moods. I resisted another look and turned toward my apartment. As I did, I heard, “It’s your big chance, sport. Don’t blow it.”

I went inside, changed into jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt. I put a jug of wine and a cup in a pillow case and walked down to the “Big Rock.” I sat all alone, just thinking. I had spent a year of my life once sitting alone by bunkers or in towers, staring at the jungle for six hours at a stretch. Much of the time I spent on trying to imagine what life might be like for me if I were lucky enough to, as the anthem said, “get out of this place.”

“The words of a silly song that Doris Day made famous (I read once that she hated it) floated along with the Arkansas River, “Will I be handsome, will I be rich …?” The handsome part was not gong to happen, but I was getting richer, both in finances and in prospects. How about it? Could she be the one? She sure as hell fit the bill, young, pretty, smart, feisty, and with a shared background.

Still, I sometimes thought about going back to San Francisco. I liked Little Rock. I liked San Francisco more. There might even be a place that I liked better than either. Then there was the ocean. Once you have lived by it, you never get over its siren song.

I knew enough about Brenda by now that I knew she would never move any farther from her parents than Little Rock, maybe Fayetteville.

Fayetteville?

Now that’s the way my mind has always worked. One minute I’m deep in serious thought. Then, like a human blackbird, I notice something shiny, my mind drops everything, and I fly after it, at least in my thoughts.

Fayetteville. Why not see if the Redhead wanted to go there this weekend and meet Mike Dunkum, the former Green Beret?

Hell yes. It would be great fun.

Only I wouldn’t be able to ask her until tomorrow, assuming she would even talk to me then. I packed my things in my pillow case and wondered home. Then I began to have doubts. Was it too early to start introducing her to my oddly turned friends? Was Fayetteville a mountain top too far? Had she had second thoughts, and maybe was on the phone with the basketball coach this very instant reestablishing vows with great sobs of happiness?

Was my dream drifting away in the fog?

What the hell was wrong with me?

I decided to read. I had lost my copy of Hemingway’s A Movable Feast somewhere and had traveled out to the bookstore that used to be in the Dillard’s store at Park Plaza Mall. Having asked the young sales clerk where I might find it, and having been pleasantly directed to the cookbook section, I had found it on my own. I was now reading it for maybe the third time.

Lost in Hemingway, now that was the way to spend an evening. Literature is a better mistress than any woman, I felt at that moment. It was much more reliable and consistent. Forget women. The beautiful ones, like the poor, would be with us always. I drifted along with old Ernest as he ended an outing with F. Scott Fitzgerald, warning us never to go on a long trip with someone you don’t love. Good advice.

I heard the sounds of fingernails moving along the screen of my living room window.