|
“Let's go to the other spot, over there, where we usually sit.”
“Okay, yeah … sure.”
“Oh poop. Look, someone is already sitting there, on our favorite couch. Guess this'll have to be fine.”
“Yes, that's right, okay now, um huh.” Either way was fine to him.
As Gladys looked and turned to retrace their steps back to her second choice seats, Herman, with a conditioned automatic response, followed his wife – his tone one of accepted compliance to her life-long leadership. Coming to the library adjacent to the senior living quarters afforded the couple the daily option of a short, weather-sheltered walk. Being well neigh into their eighties, Gladys and Herman considered themselves fortunate to be of relative sound mind and body. One cane between them and only cautious brittle steps, absent of their medication's dizziness. He preferred mystery stories in periodicals, she, Hollywood magazines and their gratuitous pulp on celebrities.
Gladys and Herman's collective thin-skinned and vein-laced hands couldn't belie a lifetime's endurance of labor, and the magazines they held bobbed in unison with their sleepy heads. The couple's alteration between dozing and leisurely page-perusing, as they sat in the loveseat by a sunny window, was an image, a reflection's reflection into a mirror – a picture still living, forever remaining fixed in the endless past.
“Oh, look honey. They got married in Hawaii,” Gladys said, pointing to a sitcom star's wedding photo.
“Pardon?” Herman asked, with etiquette toward her reminiscent of a lost generation. His white thick-bristled brows, though recently trimmed, still protruded to the rim of his weighted bi-focals. The couple's library-hushed utterances, the few shared during the lengthy sitting, were evenly dispersed by each other's mutual catnapping. Their presence together
conveyed a familiarity and comfort that only threescore and seven years could secure. Few words were required now about dreams fulfilled or failed. A life's plan completed. Only Gladys and Herman remained, filling empty days in the continued presence of one another, going daily to the connected Hall of Knowledge—the library—to read, to witness each other's sleepy nodding heads.
It wasn't always that way.
Sometimes Herman could still remember her.
Certain smells could penetrate the dried sensors in his nose. Lilacs. Yes, lilacs. By the hedge of lilacs they first had kissed. Or when his gnarled-knuckled hands touched silky fabric, like Gladys' purple scarf, he remembered the woman's hair. The way it shined in the sun that first day—angelic. And though that day was also their last, Herman had more recently thought they had been married as long as he and Gladys had been. It was during these moments, of a memory's subjugation, that he could slip and call Gladys by another name. At least Herman thought he had slipped.
Herman wanted to believe Gladys hadn't known of his extra-marital foray, but of it, he knew better. His wife had, in their youth, often demonstrated a knowledge of him beyond his own. Yet, she never said anything. Gladys never wanted Herman to know his improvement as a husband followed his sin. It had settled him. And really, then in 1936, it was what she had wanted, what she craved – settledness.
Still, his surrendering near the lilac hedge, their continuation at the hotel room, the final fast time in her car before he left for home, wasn't the first time Herman had seen her. In '34, two years before their encounter, he spotted her at a clothing store in the town his work had taken him. A tie was needed. One with the power to impress co-workers who sought similar prestige and advancement. She spotted him as she was languidly perusing panties and push-ups. Instantly, she realized her intentions for him. Herman hadn't required any power-tie to impress her. She already saw it in his eyes and wanted some for herself.
“I think this color goes best with that jacket.”
Herman was struck by the chestnut-haired woman's forthrightness, who had swiftly moved to his side, a purple-laced bra tangled in her fingers. It wasn't usual custom for women to approach strange men, back then. But Herman liked it, its nascent adventurousness. Was the woman referring to the color of the tie he was holding or the under garment she splayed before him? Before he could respond, she took his hand, pulling it close, palm up, as if about to fill it with part of herself. Instead, her heavy-lidded and thick-lashed eyes only smiled at him as she pressed her calling card into his palm, folding his fingers with hers, around it. She turned on her spiked heels and was gone, the click-clacking of them against a tile floor.
She has a calling card?! Herman never heard of such a thing, of a woman.
He had tried to put her from his mind, bought the tie, went to his meeting, later, sweated it out in his hotel room flipping through the bedside Gideon, and, in the morning, headed straightaway to the airport.
Herman fought to forget. The lingerie lady came instead to his dreams.
It wasn't for nearly twenty-four months that he had to go back to that same city. And, while frantic to locate a spare postage stamp he needed, searching the hidden pockets of his wallet while buckled in the DC-9, he found her card. He stared at it. He mouthed her name and remembered anew her smell, her body, her eyes filled with a knowing.
Somewhere between imagination and heaven, Herman's brain committed a compartmentalization, a sectioning off of common sense, the deep blocking of belief that turns one into an all-together different person, while remaining much the same.
The power of self-separation only intensified en route to the hotel. There, Herman called the scroll-typed number printed on the card.
“Yes, of course I remember. I always recall the ones without the nerve to phone me. Did the purple tie end up working for you?”
“It hadn't proffered the promotion I thought was forthcoming, at least not then, anyway.” Had it been two minutes or two years since they spoke?
“Herman?-you did say that was your name, right? Herman.”
“Yes?” He liked hearing her say it.
“Do you have the nerve now?”
“Now?”
“Right now.”
Antique Loyalty, Part 2
story by Darrell Rohling
email him about this piece at djrohling@aol.com |
