“...but
how could you forget shoes?” I was holding Cassie, I stumbled as I tried to
figure out the dance. She hadn’t noticed my misstep and I wondered how long I
had been here, dancing. A makeshift waltz, and Cassie was pressed tight against
me, I used the moment to divert her and spun her into a gallant dip.Time travelers learn to be spontaneous.
“...honestly,
I don’t think I even own a pair of shoes.”
I remembered Cassie, so I must be in the past. Cassie was Vern’s
sister in law who kept touching me,
fussing over me, finding excuses to press her body against mine. This
was the wedding. I cataloged this into my
brain, adjusting to the time shift: Vern’s sister was getting married. Had
gotten married.
“...that’s
what I don’t get! How can you not wear shoes?” I like dancing, dancing allows
you to move, to dodge the bullets, and you can take any moment to steal the
breath away of someone too inquisitive.
“I
don’t find shoes comfortable, I prefer to feel the earth beneath my soles.” The
music swelled signaling the near end of this dance, I liked Cassie, Cassie was
a good time to be lost in, she was warm, gregarious in her pleasure and at the
moment I was the object of her pleasure. And she mine. I spun her about me,
twirling around, cupping my arm behind her and around her womanly waist. I bent
her backwards bringing her to her the edge of her toes, curling underneath my
kiss. She quickly stood, primping her dress, the contrast between us not
forgivable. She: the married mother of four whose husband was too busy reliving
stories long forgotten or cared about along the bar to remember how beautiful
his wife could be… and I: the gypsy time traveler in the thrift store suit and
tie sans shoes 10 years her junior. The next song was a sultry up-beat samba
and I danced about Cassie. She watched me, her eyes hungry for something,
anything more – different; happier. I know that look, I have seen it often like
an aim down the barrel of a gun. She stood there somewhat embarrassed, somewhat
intrigued, and too much distraught about the loss of her time.
Verna
was a friend of mine from Seattle who had been divorced now nearly four years.
Everyone thought we were a couple. This was how she had asked me to play it.
And now Cassie was worried not by her husband, but by coming between the facade
that was Vern and I. Vern needed a babysitter for her two kids and
herself. She needed a man she could
trust, one who was not interested in owning her. She liked being single,
independent, and she also liked having a man around her house. I kept a duffle
bag with all of my belongings behind her couch. I cooked her dinner, read to
the kids and helped with their homework, and protected her when she came home
drunk with some guy she did not really want to be with. Verna was gay, but we
lived in a time that did not allow for the freedom of her love. She had found
me sitting on the Manette bridge once reading poetry. She had been full of
despair and had given serious thought about climbing over the rail and dropping
into the sound. She saw me stretched out on the narrow I-beams hundreds of feet
above the broken surf. Through her tears she still found it a curiosity not
that I was out there on the stanchions but that I was reading Robert Frost. She
had engaged me in debate about the peculiars of the whole New England aspect of
existence as immortalized by the poetry of Robert Frost. “You’ve spent too much
time analyzing poetry instead of reading it. Just read it!” And I showed her
the poem about how there were things that did not like a fence. And she took me
home.
And
now I was in love with Cassie dancing about some Portland banquet hall at a
wedding of people I had never met and probably would never see again. Verna had
needed a man to escort her to this wedding. This family gathering, all of her other male friends had turned
her down. They thought of this as too serious an event. To go with her
to a family gathering, with her kids! That was
commitment too far gone from a night or weekend full of lust and passion. Verna
needed a man, a man so that her family would not “talk” or become to
inquisitive about her singleness, would not delve too deeply, a man who would
keep Vern on that good and narrow path. I pulled the van into Portland around
seven, we went straight to the restaurant where they would not let me in. I did
not have shoes. Jennica, Vern’s 10 year old daughter who made it a habit to curl
up in my lap when she needed a cry, brought me dinner out by the van. It had begun to rain, I
stood there in the rain telling Jennica all of the wonderful things that the
world has to offer if one would only look, if one would only touch the earth
and breathe in the essence of existence. By the end of the night, in those few
hours we had I made them all fall in love with me, even Vern.
But
especially Cassie. Cassie took my hand leading me off the dance floor and down
a servant’s passage between the banquet hall and an empty room with a stage
– there was never enough time, time that
ever fleeting manmade invention that we marked off while waiting to die,
traversing through one moment here another there. -- we stood on that stage our
hands saying more than our words could ever…
