never enough time

“...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…