Tag: short story

The Waiter Considers Psychoanalysis

Post author By toddric
Post date May 3, 2021
No Comments on The Waiter Considers Psychoanalysis

“Have you ever been attracted to psychoanalysis?” asks Hilda Rubenstein, nodding her thanks to Philip as he sets a goblet of white wine before her.

“Are we speaking of undergoing psychoanalysis?” asks Philip, stepping back from the table where Hilda is dining alone. “Or studying the methodology?”

“Undergoing,” says Hilda, tasting the wine. “Oh you’re right, Philip. I love this. And for so long I thought Riesling would be too sweet for my taste.”

“Wine appellations often confuse more than clarify,” says Philip, pleased she likes the wine.

Hilda is Swiss, seventy-four, tall and sturdy with long silvery gray hair she always wears in a braid. A Jungian psychoanalyst, she has lived in Berkeley, California for forty years. Widowed nine years ago, Hilda’s one child, Tamara, is a playwright and professor of Drama at a university in Oregon, no grandchildren in sight. And though Hilda has many acquaintances, her husband was her best friend and she misses him.

Philip’s mother was French, his father Italian American, and he grew up speaking French at home, English in the outside world. He is forty-seven, childless, and has been a waiter for twenty years, the last nine at the famed Le Scélérat in Berkeley. Graceful and slender, with dark brown eyes and curly black hair, he has been serving Hilda every Wednesday evening for his entire tenure at Le Scélérat, and she is by far his favorite customer.

“To answer your question,” says Philip, speaking French with Hilda as they often do when she dines alone, “no, I have never considered undergoing psychoanalysis. Both the cost, which I cannot easily afford, and a preference for more body-oriented therapies led me elsewhere.”

“I would like to offer you free sessions,” says Hilda, replying in French. “Twice a week for an hour and a half each time. If this appeals to you, let me know.”

On a warm day in September, Philip and his sweetheart Lisa are picnicking on Baker Beach in San Francisco with their friends Marcel and Andrea. Lisa is thirty-nine, a massage therapist, Marcel is forty-four, a waiter at Le Vagabond in San Francisco, and Andrea, Marcel’s wife, is forty-one, a sous chef at Le Vagabond.

When Philip mentions Hilda’s offer of free psychoanalysis, Andrea, girlish with short black hair and tattoos of small flowers scattered sparingly on her arms and legs, says with a faint German accent, “Oh you must, Philip. What an opportunity.”

“Is she in love with you?” asks Marcel, who also has short black hair but no tattoos, his French accent not faint. “Beware, Philip. Transference and so forth.”

“She’s fond of me,” says Philip, smiling at Marcel’s characteristic skepticism. “She’s semi-retired and doesn’t need the money. This would be a gift to me and a fascination for her.”

“So much for the vaunted neutrality of the therapist,” says Marcel, staying in character. “The process is already compromised by your friendship.”

“She’s a Jungian,” says Lisa, her brown hair shoulder-length, her accent purely Californian, though she was born in Brazil and spoke only Brazilian Portuguese until she was ten. “They are not so enthralled by the Freudian insistence on the therapist remaining emotionally detached.”

“Psychoanalysis,” says Andrea, who in the privacy of her thoughts is in love with Philip. “You’ll be analyzing your dreams with a dream expert. How fantastic.”

“And delving into why you chose to be a waiter,” says Marcel, arching an eyebrow, “rather than continuing your stellar career as a chef.”

“Oh I know why I fled the kitchen for the tables,” says Philip, enjoying the passing parade, many of the beachgoers naked.

“Why did you?” asks Andrea, sounding surprised. “I didn’t know you knew.”

“Nor did I,” says Marcel, looking at Lisa. “Did you know he knew?”

“Of course,” she says, smiling at Philip. “He has no secrets from me.”

“I became a waiter,” says Philip, with a meaningful shrug, “because I knew I’d be a good one and I’d still be in the restaurant business without the killing pressure of having to make three hundred perfect entrees every night.”

“But why not an actor?” asks Andrea, who thinks of Philip as a movie star who has yet to make a movie.

“I’m too shy,” says Philip, comically covering his face with both hands. “And I’m not much interested in acting.”

“But why are you so shy?” asks Marcel, affecting an exaggerated German accent. “Zis vee vill uncover in zychoanalysis.”

Stuck in a traffic jam on the Bay Bridge going back to Berkeley after their day at the beach, Lisa driving, Philip says, “I’ve decided not to accept Hilda’s gift of psychoanalysis.”

“Because?” asks Lisa, taking her foot off the brake to let her little car roll forward a few inches before she applies the brake again.

“Because,” he says, searching for the right words, “I think I may have become too important to her.”

“You’ve waited on her every week for nine years,” says Lisa, whose clients frequently fall in love with her. “And you enjoy each other.”

“Yes, and our enjoyment is enhanced by her not knowing all the details of my past,” he says, looking to his right as a turquoise Mustang convertible draws even with them, the driver a striking Latina wearing a sleeveless white scoop-necked T-shirt, her mop of curls bubble-gum pink, her companion in the passenger seat an enormous black and white hound.

Lisa gawks at the pink-haired gal and the giant dog and says, “Imagine being in a relationship with her.”

“If only her hair wasn’t pink,” says Philip, relieved not to be entering psychoanalysis with Hilda. “I have no problem with the rest of her.”

“Humor me,” says Lisa, playfully. “We’ll be stuck on the bridge for at least another half-hour. Imagine this bombshell is your wife.”

“I can’t imagine she’s anyone’s wife,” he says, smiling at the woman, which causes the woman to wave coquettishly.

“How old do you think she is?” asks Lisa, intrigued by the bombshell. “And what does she do for a living?”

“Twenty-five,” he guesses. “An exotic dancer, otherwise known as a stripper.”

“I think she’s thirty-two,” says Lisa, smiling at the woman. “Cuts hair in a hip salon.”

“Her muscular arms,” says Philip, admiring the woman’s physique, “speak of pole dancing.”

“Ask her?” says Lisa, hitting a button so Philip’s window goes down.

“Hi,” says the woman, just a few feet away from Philip. “Does this suck or what?”

“Yes,” says Philip, trying not to stare at the woman’s beautiful breasts. “We’re trying to guess your profession and how old you are.”

“What’s your guess?” she asks, pursing her lips as if expecting a kiss.

“Exotic dancer, cuts hair in a hip salon,” he says, wishing he could see her without pink hair and makeup. “Twenty-five and thirty-two.”

“I’m thirty-seven,” she says, giving him a sexy smile. “I make people happy. You want my card?”

“Sure,” he says, reddening.

“You two look like fun,” she says, handing him a bubble-gum pink card.

Now drivers behind them sound their horns.

“Thank you,” says Philip, glancing at the card and seeing the name Desea writ in vermillion.

“Call me,” says Desea, winking at him as she pulls ahead. “I love doing couples.”

The next time Philip serves Hilda at Le Scélérat she is dining with her daughter Tamara, who is forty, and Tamara’s partner Celine who is forty-five.

“How nice to see you again,” says Philip, bowing to Tamara who resembles Hilda to a remarkable degree, her dark blonde hair in a braid identical to her mother’s.

“Philip,” says Tamara, in a businesslike way, “this is Celine.”

Philip bows to Celine, a regal African American woman with glossy black hair in four intricate braids threaded with yellow wooden beads.

“A man of few words,” says Celine, making a comical face. “What’s not to like?”

After a bit more chitchat, supper is ordered, and Philip goes to the wait station to enter their order into the computer.

Now he stops by the table of another of his regulars, Miles Levinson, a blustery fellow in his sixties who Philip serves three times weekly, Miles fabulously wealthy and possessed of an apparently inexhaustible supply of younger women to dine with.

Philip arrives in time to replenish the wine glasses, Miles’s companion tonight a striking Serbian named Sophie. She’s wearing a red skirt and a black tuxedo jacket barely buttoned over her otherwise uncaged breasts, her red hair in a long braid coiled atop her head.

“This Marcassin Pinot is everything you promised,” says Miles, watching Philip divide the last of the bottle equally between the two glasses. “Shall we have another bottle, Sophie?”

Philip turns to Sophie.

“I certainly don’t need more wine,” she says, yawning majestically. “I could go to sleep on this table right now.”

“Then no more wine,” says Miles, waving the thought away. “We’ll have cheesecake and chocolate mousse and I’ll have a large glass of sherry. You know the kind I like.”

“Of course,” says Philip, turning to Sophie. “Coffee for you?”

“You are a genius,” she says, kissing the air in his direction. “Why didn’t I think of this?”

Philip checks on Hilda and Tamara and Celine mid-meal, and Hilda says to Tamara, “Tell Philip about his part in your play.”

“Please,” says Philip, glancing around his section and calculating he has a long moment to tarry with them.

“Comedy of manners,” says Tamara, nodding approvingly as Philip refills her wine glass. “Barely masking the tragic, of course. Several key scenes take place in a restaurant, and I’ve modeled the waiter after you, though the only person who could ever do the waiter justice as I imagine him, is you.”

“I look forward to seeing the play,” says Philip, who often feels he is an actor playing the part of a waiter. “My friends and I very much enjoyed your play Jumbo Shrimp at Berkeley Rep last year.”

“Well actually,” says Tamara, clearing her throat, “I would love for you to vet the restaurant scenes. It’s crucial they be authentic. I’ll pay you for your time, of course.”

“Does the waiter appear in any scenes other than those at table?” asks Philip, gazing intently at Tamara.

“No,” she says, shaking her head. “He’s purely a functionary. But an important device.”

“Except at the end,” says Celine, nodding knowingly. “He’s not at the table at the end.”

“Oh of course,” says Tamara, chagrined. “The dream sequence. But he’s still a waiter. Only in a different context.”

“I’d be happy to vet your scenes,” says Philip, refilling Hilda’s glass with the last of the Reisling.

“Shall we have another bottle?” asks Hilda, looking from Tamara to Celine.

“Oh why not?” says Tamara, happily drunk. “It’s so good. And to think I always thought Reisling would be too sweet.”

A few days later, on one of his days off, Philip reads Tamara’s play Ziggurat and makes notes on the pages of the several scenes involving a waiter serving the main characters. He marvels at the way Tamara weaves the waiter’s minimal lines into the lengthy dialogues that occur in his absence.

“She uses his coming and going to create suspense again and again within the scenes,” says Philip, describing Tamara’s play to Lisa over supper at a Chinese restaurant. “Sometimes to set up punch lines, sometimes to give the audience a moment to wonder what the characters will say when the waiter departs. It’s a brilliant device, and she’s absolutely right, the more believable the waiter, the more thrilling the dialogue surrounding his coming and going will be.”

The next time Philip serves Hilda at Le Scélérat she is dining alone and he takes the opportunity to inform her of his decision not to enter psychoanalysis with her.

“I’m disappointed,” she says with obvious sorrow. “I was looking forward to getting to know you away from this setting where our conversations are so brief and we only seem to scratch the surface of things.”

“I, too, wish to connect with you away from here,” he says, replying in French. “Only not through psychoanalysis. And it occurred to me you might like to join me and a few of my good friends for supper at my house when I unveil the latest versions of recipes I’m working on for a cookbook I hope to publish one day.”

“Oh Philip,” she says, tears springing to her eyes, “I would be delighted.”

fin

Four of Wands

Tags crucial restaurant scenes be authentic, famed Le Scélérat, Four of Wands, Hilda Jungian Psychoanalyst, I make people happy, Philip and Lisa and Marcel and Andrea, short story, The Waiter Considers Psychoanalysis, The Waiter short story, Todd Walton, Under the Table Books, why not an actor?, why so shy?

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The Cook and the Mouse and the Cat

Post author By toddric
Post date January 20, 2021
No Comments on The Cook and the Mouse and the Cat

Francois

This is a story about a woman named Genevieve. She is a cook for two writers who live in a beautiful house in Lausanne, not far from Lake Geneva. Genevieve is fifty-seven and has blonde hair turning silver. She lives with her husband Henri, a gardener, in a cottage next door to the beautiful house where the writers live.

Genevieve’s parents were bakers who had a bakery in Lausanne called Bon Pain. Genevieve began working in the bakery when she was eight. She loved to bake and she became adept at making delicious breads and pies and cookies. Indeed, Genevieve might have inherited the family business except when she was sixteen she fell in love and ran off with a young man to Zurich where she found work in a restaurant and eventually became an excellent chef, though the young man left her for another.

She reconciled with her parents when she was in her thirties and began spending her holidays in Lausanne. On one of those holidays she met Henri, a gardener, and they fell in love and she moved back to Lausanne and married Henri. For the first few years of their marriage, they lived in a small house on a large estate where Henri was one of three gardeners, and Genevieve was a chef in a fine restaurant.

When Genevieve was forty-four and Henri was forty-one, she was hired by the University of Lausanne to be the housekeeper and cook in the house where writers would come to live for years at a time, and Henri was hired as the gardener and caretaker of the property. They have lived in the cottage next to the writers’ house now for thirteen years and hope to live there for many more years.

The kitchen in the writers’ house is large and airy, modern but not too modern, and Genevieve would change nothing except have a bigger oven and an eight-burner stove instead of a six-burner. But these are small things and she is content to wait until either the stove or the oven needs replacing, which won’t be for some years yet.

Our story begins one winter morning when Genevieve arrives in the kitchen to make coffee and breakfast for the writers and finds evidence that a mouse or mice invaded the kitchen during the night.

“Mon dieu,” says Genevieve, who speaks French, a little German, and very little English. “Twelve years without a sign of a mouse, and now this.”

She has a cup of coffee to sharpen her senses and makes a careful search of the kitchen cupboards and under the sink and behind the refrigerator. And at the bottom of the wall adjacent to the oven she finds a small hole in front of which is a tiny telltale mouse turd.

“Monsieur or Madame mouse?” says Genevieve, speaking to the hole in the wall. “May I have a word with you? I promise not to hurt you if you will come out and speak to me.”

The whiskered snout of a small brown mouse emerges from the hole. “It’s Madame. Madame Fifi.”

“Bonjour Madame Fifi,” says Genevieve, who loves all animals, even mice. “I see you have found a nice warm place to live. Are you planning to stay long?”

“As long as I can,” says the mouse, sticking her head out a little further to have a look at Genevieve.

“Are you alone in there?” asks Genevieve, smiling at the cute little rodent.

“I am presently alone,” says the mouse, “though I am pregnant, so soon there will be more of us.”

“Ah,” says Genevieve, pursing her lips. “This is unfortunate and I must ask you to leave before you give birth.”

“Ask all you want,” says the mouse, somewhat haughtily, “but I’m staying. It’s dreadfully cold outside, the rats in the woodshed are merciless, and food is scarce, though not in your marvelous kitchen.”

“If you were the only mouse in my kitchen and you did not show yourself during the day, I would have no problem with you living here. But I cannot have mice. A mouse, yes. Mice, no.”

“Alas,” says the mouse, “pregnancy is never my choice. I am powerless to elude the males of my kind, even my own progeny. So babies will be born.”

“Could you bear them elsewhere and return here alone?” asks Genevieve, who has grown fond of the mouse.

“Nay. I’m a good mother,” says the mouse with a note of pride in her voice. “This is my nature.”

“Then I must get a cat,” says Genevieve, regretfully.

“If you must, you must,” says the mouse, stoically. “I can only be a mouse.”

So Genevieve tells Henri and the writers about the mouse, and everyone agrees a cat would be a welcome addition to the kitchen, mice or no mice.

Henri makes inquiries and a one-year-old orange and white cat named Francois is gotten from a fishmonger with too many cats. Francois, a most affectionate feline, is overjoyed to move from a cold wet shed into a warm house where people pet him and tell him he is beautiful and feed him well, though not too well lest he have no appetite for mice.

One morning, a year after Francois joined the household, Genevieve is alone with Francois in the kitchen.

“Now tell me Francois,” says Genevieve, scratching Francois behind his ears, “have you killed all the mice?”

“All but one,” says Francois, loving Genevieve’s touch. “Her name is Madame Fifi and she told me you declared that if she is the only mouse in the house I am not to eat her, and so I have not, though I have caught her twice and would have eaten her had she not been the last.”

“But is it not your nature to kill and eat her?” says Genevieve, astounded by Francois’s story. “How could you resist?”

“It is my nature to kill and eat mice, yes,” says Francois, purring as Genevieve pets him. “But it is also my nature to be prudent. And since you do not feed me quite enough to leave me full at night, I very much appreciate the mouthfuls of meat Madame Fifi provides me when her babies come of age and venture forth from the hole in search of food.”

“You are a most ingenious cat, Francois,” says Genevieve, gazing fondly at her pet, “and since I rarely find a mouse turd in my kitchen, I will leave the mouse situation to you.”

Some months later, on another morning when Francois and Genevieve are alone in the kitchen, Francois says, “Genevieve, I have sad news.”

“Tell me,” says Genevieve, bending down to stroke Francois’s glossy fur.

“Madame Fifi is dead. I came upon her corpse last night and put her behind the oven.”

“Does this mean there are no more mice in the house now?” asks Genevieve, gazing sadly at the little hole in the wall.

“No more just yet,” says Francois, “though Madame Fifi’s lair waits only for another mouse to discover that commodious hideout.”

“Shall I have Henri fill up the hole?” asks Genevieve, gazing at Francois. “And feed you more at night?”

“Yes, please,” says Francois, rubbing against Genevieve’s legs. “There are plenty of mice to catch in the garden by day.”

“And do you think Madame Fifi will be the last mouse to live in my kitchen?” asks Genevieve, putting on a pair of old gardening gloves to pick up the stiff little body and throw the corpse outside for the crows to find.

“For a time she will be the last,” says Francois, purring loudly as Genevieve pours milk into his bowl. “But as I’m sure you know, there are no end of mice in the world.”

fin

Simple Song (Shy)

Tags Francois the cat, Genevieve the cook, Henri the gardener, Madame Fifi the mouse, no end of mice in the world, short story, The Cook and the Mouse and the Cat, the writers house in Lausanne, Todd Walton, Under the Table Books

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Rosalind Finds the Plot

On a warm day in August, Rosalind Peoples is taking a bath in a huge white claw-foot bathtub with enormous brass fixtures, the bathroom filled with summer sunlight. Rosalind and her mother Dez Peoples, a well-known American poet, are the guests of Oliver Rochambeau, a French movie star, at his spectacular estate in Burgundy, a 19^th Century villa surrounded by vineyards and olive groves.

Dez is sixty-eight, Rosalind thirty, and they are ostensibly visiting Oliver, who is sixty-four, to work on a screenplay based on Dez’s collection of poems In Lausanne. However, the real purpose of their visit is for Oliver and Dez to carry on with their love affair—Oliver married, Dez not.

Rosalind wishes Oliver would divorce his wife and marry Dez, though Dez says she doesn’t want to marry Oliver. For his part, Oliver loves his wife, the delightful British actress Aurelia Nichols, and has no plans to divorce her. Aurelia spends most of her time in England where she is a mainstay on a long-running BBC drama and doesn’t mind Oliver’s affairs so long as he is a good and loving husband, which he is.

Dez and Rosalind have four months remaining on a five-year fellowship that has provided them with a lovely house in Lausanne, Switzerland, along with generous monthly stipends. At year’s end, barring unforeseen largesse, they must return to America, specifically to the small town of Ophelia near Seattle, though neither of them wants to go back to America. They have applied for permanent residency in Switzerland, but have been told the chances of gaining such status are slim.

Five months ago, Dez published In Love Poems, her sixteenth volume of poetry. The book of seventy-seven love poems came out in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Danish, and Portuguese editions simultaneously with the English edition and is a great success in Europe.

The screenplay of In Lausanne has yet to materialize because Oliver and his movie sidekick Paul Descartes and the several writers they hired over the last year and eight months have failed to come up with a story line uniting the poems into a movie Paul and Oliver want to make.

Rosalind was in love with Paul for several months after he and Oliver descended upon them in Lausanne to secure the movie rights to In Lausanne, and Paul was likewise smitten with Rosalind. But unlike Oliver, Paul is not one to have affairs, and he remained faithful to his then-fiancé now-wife Mariana Borba rather than succumb to his attraction to Rosalind.

After recovering from her infatuation with Paul, Rosalind met a charming Swiss fellow named Leon, and they have been lovers for seven months now. Leon is a piano tuner and pianist a few years older than Rosalind. He says he will gladly marry her, which would allow her to go on living in Switzerland but won’t solve Dez’s citizenship dilemma; and Rosalind wouldn’t think of staying in Europe if her mother is exiled to America.

Hunger eventually overcomes the pleasure of lolling in the warm bath, so Rosalind climbs out of the tub and stands at the second-story window overlooking Oliver’s vineyards. As she gazes down at the vines heavy with grapes, she is startled by a vision of how to shape the forty-two poems of In Lausanne into a comedy drama she knows Paul and Oliver and Dez will love.

“Oh my God,” she says in English, which she rarely speaks now that French is her everyday language. “How did we not see it?”

Rosalind finds Dez and Oliver on the veranda having coffee at a big dining table shaded by an enormous blue umbrella, both wearing floppy sunhats and short-sleeved shirts and dark glasses.

Dez has the dreamy look of a woman well loved and appears to Rosalind to have shed ten years since she and Oliver began their love affair a year ago.

Oliver, his mother British, his father French, a rakishly handsome fellow with curly black hair going gray, greets Rosalind in English with a Devonshire accent. “Ah fair Rosalind. Did you tell the kitchen what you want for breakfast?”

“I did,” says Rosalind, sitting across from Oliver and Dez. “Merci.”

“I’m taking your mother to see Cathedrale Saint-Etienne today,” says Oliver, smiling warmly at Rosalind. “Would you like to join us?”

“No merci,” says Rosalind, glad to see her mother so relaxed and happy. “I’m working on something I hope to dazzle you with when Paul and Mariana come tomorrow.”

“Is this about the screenplay?” says Oliver, excited. “Tell us.”

“Not quite yet,” says Rosalind, nodding graciously to the young woman who serves her coffee. “I want to make sure I’m not imagining things before I make my presentation.”

“I know there’s a movie in there,” says Oliver, making a fist and thumping the table. “But it eludes us.”

“Thank goodness I don’t care,” says Dez, gazing at her lover. “Though I’d love to see you as the gardener and Paul as the man who is forever lost.”

Oliver frowns. “I, the gardener? No, I see Paul in that role.”

“Either way,” says Dez, looking at Rosalind. “Who do you see as the gardener, darling?”

“I’m less concerned with casting right now,” says Rosalind, sipping her coffee, “than with narrative flow.”

“Plot,” says Oliver, beseeching the sky. “The elusive plot.”

“Elusive?” says Rosalind, arching her eyebrow. “Or too obvious?”

“If you find a viable plot for this movie,” says Oliver, raising a declarative finger, “we will hire you to write the screenplay.”

“Then I’ll finally have a career,” says Rosalind, making a goofy face at her mother. “Other than attendant to the queen.”

“I prefer duchess,” says Dez, making an equally goofy face at her daughter. “Far too much responsibility being a queen.”

When Oliver and Dez motor off to the cathedral, Rosalind sequesters herself in her bedroom with a copy of In Lausanne and writes the titles of the forty-two poems onto pieces of white typing paper, one title writ large per page. Now she numbers the titles 1 to 42 and lays the pages out on her queen-sized bed in seven rows, six pages to a row.

After studying the arrangement of pages for some minutes, she moves Poem #7, The Gardener Goes Fishing, to where Poem #1 is, and moves Poem #1, The Unlikely Rose, to where Poem #14 is, and moves Poem #14, The Cook and the Mouse and the Cat, to where Poem #2 is, and continues reordering the pages until all the poems have changed places.

Satisfied with the new order of poems, she renumbers the pages to match their places in the modified sequence, gathers the pages in their new order, sits down on the bed, and slowly leafs through the pages to confirm the new sequence does, indeed, make an intriguing story with a beginning, middle, and end.

Walking in the olive grove in the late afternoon, Rosalind considers whether she wants to write a screenplay based on her mother’s poems, and she decides she does.

And the moment she makes her decision, she feels something shift inside her.

“I know what I am,” she says, looking up at the myriad silver leaves. “I’m a story teller.”

Paul Descartes, a beautiful Frenchman in his thirties famous for his comedies, and Paul’s Portuguese wife Mariana Borba, also in her thirties, famous for her beauty, arrive at Oliver’s villa the next morning to stay for a few days and unwind after six weeks of filming a big-budget thriller in Miami.

During lunch on the veranda, Mariana says in French, “This was the last American movie I will ever be in. Paul is contracted to do another, but I would rather make movies about real people, not violent cartoons. I did not become an actor to be in cartoons.”

“The Americans are very good at choreographing car chases and scenes of violence,” says Paul, nodding in agreement, “but their stories and dialogue are idiotic. For example, in the movie we just made, which they are calling Secret Killers—original, no?—the hero played by Lloyd Carter, a rogue government agent fighting a host of villains, says to me, ‘We go through that door, our chances of surviving are not good.’ And I reply, ‘What else is new?’ We shoot the scene this way seven times and it falls flat every time. So I say to the director, ‘What if instead of What else is new? I say Then why go through the door?’ And when I suggest this to him, everyone on the set laughs.”

“A big laugh,” says Mariana, laughing at her memory of the film crew laughing uproariously at Paul’s rejoinder.

“And Lloyd,” says Paul, continuing, “gets very excited and says, ‘Yes, then I will say You got a better idea? And I say, ‘We could go for coffee at a nice café.’ And again, everyone on the set bursts into laughter. And the director glares at me and says, “This is not a comedy.” And I say ‘Yes, I know, but you do want a laugh here, don’t you?’ And he says, ‘That’s none of your business. That’s why we have writers.’ So I shut up because they were paying me more money than I have ever been paid to be in a movie and we did the scene again with What else is new? And that was that.”

“You could not pay me to go to this movie,” says Mariana, shaking her head. “Though they paid me a fortune to be in five scenes with Lloyd. In three scenes I wear bikinis, in one scene a transparent nightgown, in the last scene… nothing.”

“For that,” says Oliver, nodding thoughtfully, “I would go to this movie.”

“Speaking of movies,” says Paul, turning to Rosalind, “Oliver tells me you have a new idea for In Lausanne? I so want to make this movie, but we have yet to find the story that ties everything together.”

“I found it,” says Rosalind, smiling at her mother.

“And if you like her story,” says Dez, looking at Paul, “Oliver promised Rosalind you would hire her to write the screenplay.”

“Yes, of course,” says Paul, nodding emphatically. “What is the story?”

“I will make my presentation after lunch,” says Rosalind, sipping her wine. “Lest we be too distracted by this marvelous food.”

When everyone is seated in the living room, Rosalind stands before them and says, “Once upon a time there were four people. A charming fellow who is forever lost, a woman who is a cook and speaks to animals, a man who is a gardener and speaks to plants and insects and birds, and a woman who has a dog and is looking for love. In fact, they are all looking for love.

“At the beginning of our story we spend some time with each of the four people and we are fascinated and amused by their eccentricities and kindness to others. Then each of them sets out on a journey. The woman with a dog is the only one of the four who knows she is looking for love, but they all are, and that becomes clear as we watch them on their adventures.

“Then the woman who is a cook meets the fellow who is forever lost and they fall in love, and the gardener meets the woman with a dog and they fall in love, too. However, through a series of delightful twists and turns, the gardener becomes paired with the woman who is a cook, and the man who is forever lost becomes lovers with the woman with a dog, and in the end they are neighbors, all of them good friends. The final scene is a supper in the home of the woman who is a cook, our foursome very much who they have always been, only now they are together and content.”

Having told the story, Rosalind presents Oliver and Paul and Mariana each with a list of the forty-two poems from In Lausanne in the order of the story she just told.

Paul quickly reads the list and jumps up to embrace Rosalind. “You found our movie,” he cries. “It was there all the while.”

“Fantastic,” says Mariana, the next to embrace Rosalind. “Now this is a movie I will gladly pay to see.”

“Oh you won’t have to pay,” says Rosalind, looking into Mariana’s eyes. “Because you will be the woman with a dog.”

Upon their return to Lausanne, Dez gets a call from Karl Fleury, the sponsor of their fellowship from the University of Lausanne, asking if he might come see her.

Karl comes to lunch the next day and during dessert Karl announces that because of Dez’s valuable contributions to Swiss culture, attested to by a petition signed by hundreds of Swiss artists and writers and academics, Dez and Rosalind have been granted permanent residency by the Swiss government.

“And,” says Karl, his eyes sparkling, “the university would like to offer you a three-year extension of your fellowships and residency at The Writer’s House.”

“Oh Karl, dear Karl, thank you,” says Dez, rising to embrace Rosalind. “Now I won’t have to kill myself.”

“You’re not serious,” says Karl, startled into nervous laughter.

mother and daughter cling to each other

sobbing in relief and joy.

fin

Lounge Act In Heaven

Tags love affair, Marian Borba, Oliver Rochambeau and Paul Descartes, reordering the pages, Rosalind and Dez In Lausanne, Rosalind Finds the Plot, screenplay of In Lausanne, sequel to Only Be Rosalind, short story, the poems have changed places, there all the while, Todd Walton, Under the Table Books

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Only Be Rosalind

Dez Peoples is sixty-six, an American poet living in Lausanne, Switzerland with her daughter Rosalind, who is twenty-eight, a photographer and writer. They have lived in Lausanne for three years and have two years remaining on a fellowship from the University of Lausanne that provides them with a lovely house and monthly stipends more than sufficient for their needs.

Six months ago, Dez published her fifteenth volume of poems called In Lausanne, the American edition appearing a month before the German, French, and Spanish editions came out in Europe, after which In Lausanne became a cause célèbre.

On a glorious afternoon in April, Dez and Rosalind return to their house from a long ramble along Lake Geneva with Rosalind’s cute brown mutt Bianca, and they are just sitting down to a late lunch when someone knocks confidently on the front door.

Genevieve, Dez and Rosalind’s charming housekeeper and cook, answers the door and says in French to the two men waiting there, “May I help you?”

“Yes, my name is Oliver Rochambeau,” one of the men replies, his voice a resonant baritone. “And this is my friend Paul Descartes. We would very much like to speak to Dez Peoples. Is she at home today?”

“Madame sees visitors by appointment on Thursdays,” says Genevieve, who has made this speech many times to those wishing to see Dez. “I will give you a card with the number to call to make an appointment.”

“Oh is there no possibility of seeing her today?” asks the other man with some urgency, his voice a pleasing tenor. “We are only here for the afternoon and then we’re returning to Burgundy. We would only take a moment of her time.”

“I’m very sorry,” says Genevieve, who has the feeling she knows these men, but can’t remember where she’s seen them before. “Many people wish to speak to her.”

Rosalind, who has been listening from the kitchen, appears with appointment book in hand, smiles at the two handsome men—one of whom she guesses is fifty-three, the other thirty-five—and says in her fair French, “Hello. I’m Dez’s secretary. Would you like to make an appointment to meet with her?”

“You can only be Rosalind,” says the younger of the two men in fair English. “You are just as your mother describes you in She Walks Her Dog, only much more beautiful.”

“I am Rosalind,” she says, sticking to French. “Who are you?”

“I am Paul Descartes,” he says, bowing to her. “And this is my colleague Oliver Rochambeau. We are hopeful of securing the film rights to your mother’s book In Lausanne.”

“Ah,” exclaims Genevieve, clapping her hands. “Now I know who you are. The funny detectives. These are my husband’s favorite movies. Please don’t leave. I must go get him.”

“Well,” says Rosalind, pleasantly disarmed, “you may as well come in. We’re just sitting down to lunch. Please join us.”

When Genevieve’s husband Henri comes in from the garden, Dez insists Henri and Genevieve join them for lunch, which prompts Genevieve to open an excellent bottle of French chardonnay to go with her fish stew.

Oliver tastes the stew and says, “Mon dieu. I have never tasted better.”

“Incroyable,” says Paul, gazing wide-eyed at Genevieve.

“The fish was caught this morning,” says Genevieve, blushing. “And the onions and potatoes and herbs came from Henri’s garden just this morning.”

“A genius cook for a genius poet,” says Oliver, raising his glass to Dez. “To your extraordinary poetry.”

“To Genevieve,” says Dez, raising her glass.

“We are in the book, you know. Henri and I,” says Genevieve, smiling at her husband. “I am the cook in The Cook and the Mouse and the Cat, and Henri is the gardener in the seven poems about the gardener.”

“I love the gardener poems,” says Paul, grinning at Henri. “You’re immortal now.”

“No, no, no, no, no,” says Henri, shivering with delight to be praised by his favorite movie star. “I’m just a gardener.”

“When I read your poems in French,” says Oliver, gazing at Dez, “they are like little mysteries, you know. Addictive. And they always make me smile at the end. But when I read them in English they are great comedy. I assume you wrote them in English.”

“Yes,” says Dez, who is having a most extraordinary experience sitting across from Oliver, her attraction to him overwhelming. “I only write in English. So far. Though I have begun to dream in French.”

“We are told,” says Rosalind, tickled by her mother’s infatuation with Oliver, “that the German and Spanish translations are funny, too, but the French translation is more nostalgic, or as you say mysterious.”

“French humor is so different than English humor,” says Paul, gazing at Rosalind as if seeing a vision. “Not the physical comedy, of course. But the languages are so different. Did you laugh the first time you read these poems?”

“I did,” says Rosalind, profoundly smitten with Paul. “I had no idea Mama could be so funny in writing. I mean… she’s very funny in… in life, but her poems before In Lausanne were never so funny.”

“The first time I saw your movie The Stolen Jewels,” says Henri, gawking at Oliver, “I laughed until I cried. The scene where you keep handing the food under the table thinking Paul is there and he has long ago crawled away and it is those two big dogs who keep nudging your leg and you keep feeding them? I have watched that scene hundreds of times and I always laugh so hard. This is genius to me.”

“We have a DVD,” says Genevieve, pouring out the last of the wine into Dez and Rosalind’s glasses. “Sometimes we just watch the cooking scenes and laugh.”

“I am so happy to have met you,” says Henri, getting up from the table and bowing to Oliver and Paul. “Please excuse me. I must finish in the garden before dusk.”

“I will go now, too,” says Genevieve, following Henri. “We hope to see you again.”

“What a charming couple,” says Oliver, switching to English. “And what a cook is Genevieve. Be careful some rich movie star doesn’t steal them away from you.”

“Oh they are not ours,” says Dez in English. “They are attached to this house which we’ve been given for five years by the university, after which other writers will take our place.”

“Then take them with you,” says Paul, nodding emphatically.

“That is beyond our means,” says Dez, suddenly weary and wishing these enchanting men would go.

Sensing her weariness, Oliver says, “We will leave you now, but if we could meet tomorrow morning after breakfast to discuss the movie rights to your book, we will find a hotel room and come again tomorrow. If not, we will speed home to Burgundy and I’ll call you if that seems better for you.”

“Tomorrow at ten will be fine,” says Dez, very much wanting to see him again.

“Excellent,” says Oliver, finishing his wine. “Thank you for the marvelous lunch. It was a great pleasure to meet you.”

“A delight,” says Paul, winking at Rosalind.

When Paul and Oliver are gone, Dez and Rosalind retire to the living room—Dez lying down on the sofa, Rosalind collapsing in an armchair.

Silence reigns before they both speak at once, Dez saying, “I can’t believe…” and Rosalind saying, “Can you believe…”

“You go first,” says Dez, closing her eyes and seeing Oliver gazing at her.

“Oh my God, Mama, I’m in love,” says Rosalind, hugging herself. “Has there ever been a more beautiful enchanting man than Paul?”

“Only Oliver,” says Dez, imagining his arms around her. “I haven’t felt this way in forty years, if I ever felt this way. I thought I might have an orgasm during lunch just looking at him and hearing his voice. I really did.”

“They’re probably both married,” says Rosalind, pouting. “Though I saw no rings. You don’t think they could be gay, do you?”

“If Oliver is gay, I am gay,” says Dez, who feels she has become someone entirely different than whoever she was before she met Oliver. “Would you borrow the DVD of their movie from Genevieve? I need to see him again or go mad.”

“Oh Mama, you really are in love,” says Rosalind, who has never known her mother to be in love with anyone.

“Is this love?” says Dez, falling asleep. “Being demolished?”

When Dez wakes two hours later, she finds a comforter over her and Rosalind sitting at the table by the window writing in her notebook.

“What time is it, darling,” asks Dez, speaking English.

Rosalind looks up and smiles. “Not quite six. And you called me darling. You must still be in love with Oliver.”

Dez sits up. “So it wasn’t a dream. They exist. Oliver and Paul.”

“They exist,” says Rosalind, closing her notebook. “And we both fell in love with them as have thousands of other women before us. I sleuthed around on the Internet. They’re both huge stars in Europe. Oliver’s mother is British, his father French. He’s been in lots of French movies and lots of British television shows. Paul is entirely French, a comedian and acrobat and singer turned movie actor. They’ve made three movies together as the Funny Detectives. Henri loaned us two of their movies. The Stolen Jewels and The Pilfered Recipe.”

“How old is Oliver?” asks Dez, holding her breath.

“Sixty-two,” says Roz, coming to sit with her mother on the sofa.

“Married?”

“He’s been married twice and has two grown daughters. I don’t think he’s married now, but he may be in a relationship with a British actress. Not sure.”

“And Paul?”

“Paul is thirty-four and engaged to a Portuguese actress named Mariana Borba who was in the last two Funny Detective movies. She’s insanely beautiful, so my only hope is that you make it a condition of the movie sale that Paul dump her and marry me. Please Mama?”

“Of course, darling,” says Dez, putting her arms around her daughter. “Shall we watch one of their movies before supper?”

They sit side-by-side on the sofa and watch The Stolen Jewels on Rosalind’s big laptop computer. The movie is brilliantly silly, the two detectives going undercover as a chef and a waiter in a gourmet restaurant in Paris where murders of restaurant critics and rival restaurateurs occur at regular intervals throughout the film.

Paul plays the part of Victor, a man of few words, keenly observant and capable of remarkable feats of dexterity and strength except in the presence of attractive women whose mere glances in his direction transform him into a colossal goofball. He masquerades as a waiter and is by turns phenomenally graceful and hilariously clumsy.

Oliver plays James, a man of dubious intelligence who frequently shares with Victor his deductive reasoning reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes’s reasoning in those classic mysteries. However, unlike Sherlock, James is invariably wrong. Yet in the end, the two funny guys catch the murderers and save the day.

At movie’s end, Rosalind says, “I wish we’d never met them. They’ve set the bar impossibly high. Who could ever compare to Paul?”

“Only Oliver,” says Dez, wistfully. “But I could never live with him. I would be too distracted to ever write again. I’d just follow him around worshipping him.”

“So sayeth the renowned feminist poet,” says Rosalind, nudging her mother.

“Feminism schmeminism,” says Dez, getting up. “Let’s go out for supper.”

“You know who Oliver is?” says Dez, as she and Rosalind walk home in the moonlight from Brasserie Saint-Laurent, their favorite restaurant in Lausanne.

“A handsome charming movie star,” says Rosalind, stating the obvious.

“He’s my masculine alter ego.” Dez laughs. “Listen to me. I’ve lost my mind.”

“I think it’s wonderful we both fell in love,” says Rosalind, gazing up at the nearly full moon. “Regardless of outcome, I like knowing I still can. I was beginning to wonder.”

“I assumed I couldn’t,” says Dez, thinking back over her life and finding no evidence of feeling about anyone as she feels about Oliver. “But it turns out I could. I’m speaking of love, not lust. I fell in lust all the time before you were born.”

“But you do you lust after Oliver,” says Rosalind as they arrive home. “Hence the near orgasm at lunch. Lust certainly plays a large part in my attraction to Paul. I felt like we were having telepathic sex at lunch today. I was anyway.”

“Maybe that’s all this is,” says Dez, unlocking the front door. “Lust at sixty-six. I haven’t lusted after anyone in twenty-nine years, not since lust made you, my darling.”

They have chamomile tea and oatmeal cookies in the kitchen before going to bed.

“Doesn’t it strike you as a bit far fetched, if not absurd,” says Dez, frowning at Rosalind, “that they want to buy the movie rights to In Lausanne? What movie, I wonder, do they see in that collection of poems?”

“Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life was based on a poem,” says Rosalind, tossing a little piece of cookie to her dog Bianca. “When I was sleuthing around about Oliver and Paul, I also asked about movies based on poems, and there are quite a few. The Charge of the Light Brigade. It’s A Wonderful Life. Alice’s Restaurant. Several more. Poems that tell good stories.”

“Yes, but those poems all have plots,” says Dez, chuckling at the thought of her poems becoming scenes in a movie. “Mine are merely moments of the continuum.”

“That’s what stories are,” says Rosalind, thinking of Paul’s amazing strength and grace in The Stolen Jewels. “Maybe they’ll want you to help them write the screenplay and they’ll need to meet with you many times.”

“Yes. And they’ll come to realize they can’t live without us,” says Dez, yawning. “And we’ll have a double wedding and live happily ever after.”

“Where?” asks Rosalind, yawning, too. “Where will we live happily ever after?”

“Here,” says Dez, finishing her tea. “In Lausanne.”

After breakfast the next morning, Dez tries on three different dresses in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom, and when she is in her last dress, by far the most revealing of the three, she comes out of the trance she’s been in since meeting Oliver and sees she is sixty-six, not fifty-one or forty-three or thirty-four.

So she hangs up her dresses and puts on a favorite turquoise dress shirt, turquoise earrings, and black jeans, captures her graying brown hair in a ponytail, and says to her reflection, “You are a handsome woman in your sixties. Oliver has come for your poems, not for you.”

Rosalind puts on her sexiest dress, a summery green opalescent curve-clinging scoop-necked thing, paints her lips burgundy, and impales her short auburn hair with a red rose bud.

Oliver and Paul arrive promptly at ten, both wearing white summer suits, and Oliver present Dez with a bouquet of seven spectacular roses, which Genevieve puts in a white porcelain vase and makes the centerpiece of the kitchen table where Dez and Rosalind and Paul and Oliver convene for coffee and Genevieve’s just-baked cinnamon coffee cake.

“So…” says Oliver, looking at Dez, “we would like to offer you 10,000 euros for a one-year option of the movie rights to In Lausanne, against a purchase price of 150,000 euros should the film be made. And you would get two per cent of the net proceeds, should there be any, which is highly unlikely.”

“Hence the movie business maxim,” says Paul, whose gaze keeps returning to Rosalind’s lips, “the money you get is the money you get.”

“Okay,” says Dez, who is greatly relieved to be over her infatuation with Oliver, though she still thinks he’s marvelous.

“Okay?” says Oliver, placing a hand on his heart. “Yes? Fantastic. I will have our agent contact your agent and we will go from there.”

“I don’t have an agent,” says Dez, feeling glad she doesn’t. “My editor at Werner Schaffen is Dirk Rosenfeld. I will ask him to represent me.”

“Whatever you like,” says Oliver, nodding. “We are absolutely thrilled to have the chance to make a movie from your poems.”

“We’ve made lots of money with our silly movies,” says Paul, exchanging glances with Oliver, “and now we want to make something more meaningful. Something deeper. Something that touches the soul, not just the funny bone, but the funny bone, too.”

“We can’t wait to see what you come up with,” says Rosalind, looking at Paul and thinking I would do anything to be with you.

“Which brings up another matter,” says Oliver, placing his hands together as in prayer. “We would love to show you the screenplay as it develops and hear your critique, for which we will pay you.”

“No need to pay us,” says Dez, shaking her head. “We’d love to see the drafts and tell you what we think.”

“Well then,” says Oliver, looking at Paul and Rosalind and lastly at Dez, “we will take no more of your time.”

“You are welcome to take as much of our time as you want,” says Dez, speaking without forethought. “We are in love with you and hope to see you again.”

“The feeling is mutual,” says Paul, delighted by Dez’s candor. “I’m about to shoot two movies in quick succession, sadly neither with Oliver, after which I plan to turn my full attention to In Lausanne.”

“Whereas I am not so busy,” says Oliver, sounding happy to say so, “and I would love to visit you here and for you to come stay with me in Burgundy where we can work on the screenplay and I will be your tour guide.”

When Oliver and Paul drive away—Paul having kissed Rosalind on the lips in parting—Dez and Rosalind walk with Bianca on a footpath tracing the shore of Lake Geneva.

“I may write a hundred love poems now,” says Dez, holding Rosalind’s hand. “What will you do?”

“I will live for as long as I can,” says Rosalind, smiling dreamily, “in the magic of his kiss.”

fin

Here We Go

Tags Dez Peoples poet, French humor and English humor, Funny Detectives, Genevieve and Henri, In Lausanne, lust at sixty-six, movie rights to poetry, movie stars, Oliver Rochambeau and Paul Descartes, Only Be Rosalind, poetry, Rosalind Peoples, sequel to Rosalind and Dez In Lausanne, short story, the money you get is the money you get, The Pilfered Recipe, The Stolen Jewels, Todd Walton, Under the Table Books

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Rosalind and Dez In Lausanne

Post author By toddric
Post date January 10, 2021
No Comments on Rosalind and Dez In Lausanne

This is the sequel to Rosalind’s Choice.

Dear Katrina

Rosalind here, hoping all is well with you and the gang at Café Bleu. I’ve taken to writing actual letters again as part of my attempt to wean myself from my phone, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a while now. So far the results are good. I’m less anxious, sleeping better, and I have much more energy during the day.

I miss you, but I don’t miss the daily grind, pun intended. Remember when we calculated I made 50,000 lattes a year during my four years there. I wonder how many tens of thousands of tables I cleared? Not that I think what I’m doing now is any more important than working at Café Bleu. I don’t. But I’m grateful for the respite and the change.

We’ve been living in Lausanne for exactly nine months. I still wake up many mornings thinking I’m in Seattle. Then my new reality dawns on me and I jump out of bed and wander through this lovely old house to the kitchen where most mornings I find Mama speaking her quickly improving French with Genevieve, our cook and housekeeper.

Yes, we have a housekeeper and a resident gardener and handyman. Genevieve is fifty-seven and her husband Henri is fifty-four. They live in a large cottage on the other side of our enormous vegetable garden. They have lived here for eleven years, cooking and cleaning and gardening for the writers who come to live here. They insist we are their favorites of the five writers they’ve served, and we believe them because we adore them.

If it were up to Genevieve, she would work for us seven days a week, coming and going throughout the day, cooking all our meals, and cleaning a room or two. However, Mama insists we fend for ourselves two days a week, so Genevieve allows this, though she often comes over on her supposed days off to see if we need anything, stays to chat, and the next thing we know she’s making us lunch or soaking beans for tomorrow’s stew or helping me improve the supper I’m making.

Henri has granted us a patch of ground in the vegetable garden because Mama loves to garden, but then he assumes dominion over what we plant, so now we mostly acquiesce to Henri being the gardener, we the lucky recipients of his bounty.

Both Henri and Genevieve speak very little English, which is a good thing because otherwise we would never learn French, which we are both learning pretty well due to blabbing with Genevieve who was a chef in a fine restaurant before becoming housekeeper and cook of The Writer’s House, which is what our house is called by the locals and our hosts at the university.

What do we do all day?

For the first few months we were zealous tourists exploring Lausanne, which is a beautiful old city. We’ve been to Geneva twice and Zurich for five days in May to visit Mama’s translator Dirk Rosenfeld and be feted by her publisher Werner Schaffen. Then in August we went to Germany for three weeks and Mama read at universities and in small theatres.

In America a few thousand people may know of Dez Peoples, but in Germany and Switzerland and France and Spain her poems are taught in schools and universities, and the German, French, and Spanish translations of her poetry sell thousands of copies every year.

And now that she’s here instead of on the other side of the world, she has visitors. Poets, novelists, philosophers, professors, playwrights, journalists, musicians, all wanting to talk to her and have her sign copies of her books and invite her to read with them or come to their universities. And I am her appointment secretary! Wednesday and Thursday afternoons are reserved for these visitors, and every week or two we have a dinner party. Mama’s sponsor at the university, Karl Fleury, a wonderful man who refers to Mama as my poet, comes to the parties with his Spanish wife Carmen, and we invite three or four other people, and Genevieve and I make a feast.

Et moi? I take long walks with Bianca who has no trouble communicating with Swiss dogs, and I go to market with Genevieve almost every day. I’m learning so much about food and cooking from her. When you come to visit, we’ll go to market every day and cook marvelous things together.

And I’ve started writing stories and poems and scenes for plays. I haven’t finished anything I like very much, but I’m enjoying the practice. I’m also taking lots of pictures, mostly of people who come to visit, and of Genevieve and Henri and Mama. Switzerland is so picturesque, but I’m most interested in taking pictures of people.

I can hear you wondering what about men? Well I am madly in love with living here in what Mama calls The Land Where You Don’t Need A Car Because Trains Go Everywhere, but I haven’t fallen in love with anyone. Yet. I’ve been on a few dates and had a thrilling kiss from a handsome guy who was eager to get married and have kids with me, but I am definitely not ready for that.

We have four years and three more months here. The guest room awaits you.

Love,

Roz

On a Thursday in early October, Dez gives an interview to Andrea, a young French journalist. They sit in the living room of The Writer’s House and Andrea records the interview on her phone.

Andrea: (her English quite good) How is it for you living here?

Dez: Unlike anything I’ve ever known or dreamed of.

Andrea: How so?

Dez: I’ve been publishing poems in America for twenty-five years, and by American standards I am a successful poet, though only one of my books sold more than a thousand copies in America. In those twenty-five years, I’ve gotten a handful of letters from American readers and a few other American writers. But here I am something of a literary celebrity because Dirk Rosenfeld translated my poems into German for the Werner Schaffen editions and their success inspired French and Spanish translations. But if not for Dirk’s translations, and his insisting Werner Schaffen publish me in the first place, I would not be here and you would have no interest in me. Furthermore, I might never have published another volume of poetry in America if not for the success of the German English edition of my first volume.

Andrea: You don’t think another publisher would have done for you what Werner Schaffen did?

Dez: They never would have heard of me. The fact is I am the beneficiary of incredibly good luck.

Andrea: Yet your poems are masterpieces. Surely you would have eventually been recognized.

Dez: I appreciate your praise, but I think you are naïve. A far as I’m concerned, culture results from nepotism and the occasional fluke. Many brilliant writers never succeed in publishing anything, and the same is true for musicians and artists.

Andrea: So how did Dirk come to read your first volume of poems? Before Rosalind, yes?

Dez: (nodding) Dirk tells the story better than I. You should ask him.

Andrea: I will. But for now would you mind giving me your version?

Dez: He was in Paris on business for Werner Schaffen. He and I are the same age, so he was thirty-nine. He went to a café for lunch and there were two American women having a difficult time with their waiter. Dirk offered his services as translator for the women, they asked him to join them, and during the meal, when they learned he was a translator of English books into German, one of the women handed him a copy of Before Rosalind and said, “You should translate these poems. They’re fantastic.” Dirk read the book on the train returning to Switzerland and became my champion.

Andrea: Did you ever get a chance to thank the woman who gave him your book?

Dez: I did. Her name is Elaine Cantrell. I sent her a copy of my second book Now She Is Two and thanked her for giving my first book to Dirk. She wrote back and we’ve corresponded ever since. In fact, she and her partner are coming to visit here in the spring. We’ve never met in-person, but we’re old friends now and I’m looking forward to spending time with her. She’s a psychotherapist in Boston.

Andrea: Your daughter Rosalind is here with you in Lausanne?

Dez: I would not have come without her.

Andrea: May I ask why?

Dez: She’s my best friend and I wouldn’t want to spend five years living so far from her. My residency here is for five years.

Andrea: And then you’ll return to America?

Dez: Barring another miracle.

Andrea: What do you mean?

Dez: I mean I would love to live here for the rest of my life. I have no desire to return to America. It’s a punitive society. If you don’t have lots of money, life is hard there. And even if you have lots of money, the culture is ageist and sexist and racist and painfully mediocre. Here you have free healthcare, fantastic public transportation, free education, hundreds of excellent small publishers, marvelous theatres and performance venues, and an ethos of sharing. Most of what people here assume are the basic rights of life don’t exist in America. So why would I want to go back?

Andrea: I’m sure the Swiss would love to make you a citizen of their country. And so would the French and the Germans.

Dez: From your lips to God’s ears.

fin

Missing You

Tags Dez Peoples poet, poetry, Rosalind and Dez In Lausanne, sequel to Rosalinds Choice, short story, Todd Walton, Under the Table Books

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Rosalind’s Choice

This is the sequel to After Rosalind.

The only child of a well-known American poet, Rosalind Peoples always thought she would be a poet, too, but at twenty-five has yet to develop the habit of writing poems. An attractive gal with short auburn hair, a yoga practitioner and dutiful twice-daily walker of her cute brown mutt Bianca, Rosalind lives in Seattle, works in a bakery café called Café Bleu, and shares a small apartment near the university with her boyfriend Zorro Bernstein, an aspiring filmmaker ten years her senior who makes frequent schmoozing trips to Los Angeles and directs videos for musicians hoping to go viral on YouTube.

Rosalind’s mother, Dez Peoples, lives in the small town of Ophelia, Washington, a three-hour drive from Seattle. Dez has published fourteen volumes of poetry with American publishers, and all those collections have been published in German-English editions by a Swiss publisher; and her last four volumes have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese, yet she still works in a stationery store to make her minimal ends meet. She has been offered teaching positions at several universities but declined the offers because, as she said in a recent interview with a German literary magazine, “All I know about writing poetry is to try to make poems I’m satisfied with, but I have no idea how to teach someone to try.”

Rosalind graduated with a degree in English from the University of Washington, her special interest the comedies of Shakespeare and the stories of Edith Wharton and Isaac Bashevis Singer. “That and three bucks,” her boyfriend Zorro likes to say, “will get you a cup of coffee and no refill.”

On a cold Saturday morning in late October, Zorro is smoking dope and watching a college football game on television in the living room of their small apartment when Rosalind comes in with a letter in hand.

“So you have another dupe in Los Angeles,” she says, throwing the letter at him. “I didn’t open it, but the return address is North Hollywood and she wrote on the envelope See you soon, honey pie.”

“Oh God, Roz. I’m…”

“I don’t want to know,” she says, cutting him off. “I’m going to my mother’s for a few days. Please be gone when I get back.”

Rosalind arrives at her childhood home in Ophelia in time for supper, after which she and her mother sit together on the sofa in the living room, a fire crackling in the fireplace. They sip peach brandy and enjoy the cats Miranda and Gonzalo and the mutt Bianca nestling around them.

After Rosalind vents about Zorro ending their three-year relationship in such a sneaky cowardly mean-spirited way, Dez, who is sixty-three and hasn’t been in a relationship since Rosalind’s father left when Rosalind was a baby says, “A blessing he’s gone.”

“He loved talking about integrity,” says Rosalind, furious with herself for trusting the wastrel. “Artistic and otherwise. Now watch. He’ll end up making horror movies.”

“Was he born Zorro?” asks Dez, who always wanted to call him Zero.

“Born Malcolm,” says Rosalind, making a spluttering sound. “He said the name Zorro came to him in a dream. That should have set off warning sirens but lust made me stupid.”

“As lust will,” says Dez, gazing fondly at her daughter. “So now what?”

“Oh I’m keeping the apartment,” says Roz, shrugging. “Housing in Seattle is insane. I just have to find a good roommate, someone who won’t mind sleeping in the living room.” She grins at her mother. “Want to come live with me?”

“I would love to live with you,” says Dez, a tremble in her voice. “But not in Seattle.”

“You want me to move back here?” says Rosalind, wrinkling her nose. “I love it here, Mama, but not yet. You stayed away for twenty years. Shouldn’t I stay away for at least ten? Prove I can make it on my own? Find my calling?”

“You’ve made it on your own since you were seventeen,” says Dez, getting up to put another log on the fire. “And your calling will find you when you’re ready to be found.”

“Are you okay, Mama?” asks Rosalind, sensing her mother’s disquiet. “Missing Grandma?”

“No, not at all,” says Dez, shaking her head. “She was a ghost those last two years. A very confused ghost. Exhausting.”

“So what’s bothering you?”

“I have to make a decision about something that involves you,” says Dez, her eyes brimming with tears, “and I’m having a difficult time, which is why I’m so glad you’re here, though I’m sorry Zorro ended things the way he did.”

“If he’d just been honest,” says Rosalind, unused to seeing her mother so emotional. “What do you have to decide?”

“Well…” says Dez, heading for the kitchen. “Tea?”

“Mama, what is it?”

“I’ve won a prize,” says Dez, stopping on the threshold between the living room and kitchen.

“The Pulitzer?” says Rosalind, who thinks all her mother’s books should have won the Pulitzer.

Dez laughs. “No. I don’t think I’ll never win that one. This is from a university in Switzerland that gives writers stipends so they can write without having to work at another job. I would be free to do anything I want.”

“Fantastic,” says Rosalind, ever amazed by what her mother’s poetry brings her. “So what’s to decide?”

“I would have to move to Switzerland, to a beautiful house in Lausanne on Lake Geneva.” She pauses. “For five years.”

“You would live in Switzerland for five years?” says Rosalind, stunned by the thought of being apart from her mother for so long.

“If I accept the prize,” says Dez, nodding. “And I’ll definitely accept if you’ll come with me.”

“I could come with you?” says Rosalind, grimacing in disbelief. “For the whole five years? They’d let me?”

“I told them I might only accept if you came with me, and they said that would be fine and they would increase the stipend to accommodate you. Of course you don’t have to, and I may accept even if you don’t come, but I’m not sure I can be happy living so far away from you for five years. This is my dilemma.”

“What about my dog?” says Rosalind, who is so flummoxed she can hardly think.

“You would bring Bianca,” says Dez, calmly. “And the cats would stay here with whoever I rent the place to. Cat lovers, of course.”

Rosalind has been to Europe twice with her mother, once when she was eleven, once when she was thirteen, their trips paid for by Dez’s Swiss publisher. And they certainly would have gone to Europe a few more times except Ernestine, Dez’s mother, began to falter mentally and Dez would neither take her to Europe again nor leave her in the care of others and go without her.

The next morning, Sunday, heavy rain keeps them inside, and after breakfast they play Scrabble by the fire.

“Is this what we’d do in Switzerland?” asks Rosalind, smiling sleepily at her mother, neither of them having slept well. “Play Scrabble and loll around?”

“If we want,” says Dez, using all her letters to spell gigantic and taking a seemingly insurmountable lead.

“But seriously,” says Rosalind, her head throbbing. “In Seattle I have to work six days a week to pay the rent and buy food. If I didn’t have to work… what would I do?”

“You can get a job in Switzerland if you want,” says Dez, grouping and regrouping the letters on her tray. “Or you can travel. Take pictures. Build birdhouses. Raise rabbits. Work in the garden. The house has a lovely garden and a big lily pond. You could write a play. Take piano lessons. There’s a fine piano in the house. You can do anything you want. Or nothing. We just get to live in a wonderful place and not worry about money for five years. What a concept.”

“I feel like such a failure,” says Rosalind, spelling fritz, the z landing on a triple-word-score square, which makes the seemingly insurmountable lead suddenly surmountable. “I’m twenty-five and I haven’t done anything with my life except make lattes and live with a phony jerk and pick up dog poop and ride on your coattails.”

“When have you ever ridden on my coattails?” says Dez, frowning. “You had after-school jobs in high school, got a full scholarship to college, and you’ve supported yourself ever since.”

“You know what I mean,” says Rosalind, disconsolately. “My resume reads BA in English, University of Washington, used to take pretty good pictures, daughter of brilliant poet. I don’t deserve a five-year dream life in Switzerland. I need to make something of my life. Become something.”

“I didn’t publish my first poem until I was thirty-nine and you were two,” says Dez, spelling index, the x on a double-letter-score square. “Until then my resume was BA in Dance, San Francisco State, three years with money-losing dance company, waitress.”

“Yes, but you were always writing poems,” says Rosalind, spelling alarm. “You knew what you were. A poet. What am I?”

“So let’s say you don’t come with me,” says Dez, getting up to answer the loud knocking at the door. “And you stay in Seattle working as a waitress. Why would that be a better way to make something of your life than living with me in Switzerland?”

“I would not be dependent on you,” says Rosalind, closing her eyes and seeing the picture she took of Dez twelve years ago, standing at the prow of a ferryboat plying the waters of Lake Zurich.

Dez opens the door and here is Becky Fletcher and her adorable children, Wade who is four and Jenny who is two. Becky was Rosalind’s best friend in elementary school and high school.

“I should have called first,” says Becky in her booming voice, “but we were driving by and saw Roz’s car, so… hey Roz.”

“Hey Becky,” says Rosalind, coming to give her old pal a hug. “Oh my God. Look at your gigantic children. They’ve doubled in size since August.”

“Tell me about it,” says Becky, laughing uproariously. “Can you believe it?”

“Come in, come in,” says Dez, smiling at the little cuties. “I’ll make some cocoa.”

“Oh don’t go to any trouble,” says Becky, who would clearly love for Dez to go to some trouble. “I should have called first.”

“It’s fine,” says Rosalind, helping Becky out of her sopping raincoat. “Come get warm by the fire.”

“I like cocoa,” says Wade, frowning gravely. “Only not too hot or I burn my mouth.”

“I have to pee,” says Jenny, doing a little jig.

“First we pee,” says Becky, scooping up Jenny and carrying her down the hall to the bathroom, “and then we have not-too-hot cocoa.”

And in this moment of Becky disappearing down the hallway with Jenny, and Bianca coming to sniff Wade as he takes off his raincoat and drops the soggy thing on the floor and follows Dez into the kitchen, Rosalind decides to go to Switzerland with her mother, though she doesn’t realize she’s made her decision until some days later.

Only when she gets back to her tiny Zorro-less apartment in Seattle and she’s sitting on her ratty futon and the traffic is roaring by outside her too-thin windows and another long week of making lattes and clearing tables awaits her, does she realize she’s made up her mind.

“Mama,” she says when Dez answers her phone. “I’ve decided to come with you and be your fellow artist in Switzerland, though I have no idea what kind of artist I’ll be.”

“Oh darling,” says Dez, who has only called Rosalind darling a few other times in her life. “I’m so proud of you.”

“Why are you proud of me?” asks Rosalind, mystified by her mother’s choice of words. “I haven’t done anything to be proud of.”

“If you knew you as I know you,” says Dez, vastly relieved that Rosalind is coming with her, “you would know why I’m proud of you.”

“Tell me.”

“I would have to tell you the story of your life,” says Dez, crying for joy.

“Tell me one thing.”

Dez closes her eyes and waits for a memory to emerge.

“A year ago when you took that marvelous picture of me for Ordinary Amazement, you dressed me in a long gray skirt and a white blouse and stuck an overblown yellow rose in my hair and had me stand in the vegetable garden while you went up on the roof of the house and took picture after picture of me looking up at you, my fearless daughter moving around on the steep roof with the sureness of a practiced acrobat, never doubting you’d get something good.”

fin

Darling

Tags another dupe in Los Angeles, anything you want or nothing, Darling, Dez Peoples, End School Zone, grouping and regrouping the letters, how to teach someone to try, Lausanne Switzerland, never doubting you would get something good, Ordinary Amazement, poetry, Rosalind Peoples, Rosalinds Choice, Scrabble words, sequel to After Rosalind, short story, Todd Walton, Under the Table Books, Zorro Bernstein

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After Rosalind

This is a story about Desdemona Peoples, known to her friends and those who read her poetry as Dez Peoples. She works at Oberon’s, the only stationery store in town, and used to be married to Larry Peoples who is now married to Penny Peoples. Given that they all live in Ophelia, Washington, a small town, you may wonder why Dez doesn’t drop Peoples and go back to using her maiden name Persons to make things less confusing for everyone. And the reason she doesn’t go back to Persons is poetry.

A striking brunette, Dez was born in Ophelia, the youngest of three kids with two older brothers. Her father Skip was a logger, her mother Ernestine a housewife who took in sewing work to supplement the family income, and both Dez’s brothers became loggers, too. By the age of twelve, Dez was determined to get out of Ophelia and never come back. Blazingly smart, she thought everybody in town was an idiot. Now she knows everybody in Ophelia is not an idiot, but when she was twelve that’s what she thought.

Dez graduated from high school at sixteen and went to college at San Francisco State where she majored in Dance. Upon graduating with honors, she moved to Portland and joined a modern dance company called Epiphany, had parts in several plays, and wrote poetry. She worked as a waitress, had a series of musician boyfriends, wrote hundreds of poems, and tried to get them published with little success.

When Dez was thirty-seven her father died and she went back to Ophelia to take care of her grieving mother. After she’d been home for a month, she had a fling with Larry Peoples who had briefly been her boyfriend in high school, and because her birth control implant gave up the ghost six months early, she got pregnant, married Larry, and took his last name to make things less confusing for everyone in Ophelia.

Much to her surprise, Dez enjoyed being married to Larry who was sweet to her during her pregnancy and sweet to their child Rosalind until Lindy, as Larry called Rosalind, was three. Then Larry got together with Penny and had little to do with Dez or Rosalind ever again.

But during Larry’s initial sweetness to her and their child, Dez stopped signing her poems Desdemona Persons and started signing them Dez Peoples, and the minute she made that change, literary magazines started publishing her poems, which led to Seven Painted Elephants Press publishing her first volume of poems Before Rosalind, which was subsequently published in a German-English edition by the Swiss publisher Werner Schaffen. And when Before Rosalind proved successful, Seven Painted Elephants Press published Dez’s second volume of poems Now She Is Two and Werner Schaffen published a German-English edition of that collection, too.

Which is not to say Dez became famous, but as poets in America fare, she was faring quite well, which is why when she and Larry divorced, she kept on being Dez Peoples.

On a muggy Saturday in August—Rosalind eight, Dez forty-six, and Dez’s mother Ernestine seventy-two—Dez and Rosalind are working in the vegetable garden in back of the two-story house where Dez grew up, digging horse manure into the soil for planting pole beans and potatoes.

Ernestine comes out on the back porch and says, “Phone for you Dez. Somebody named Lulu.”

Rosalind laughs. “You mean Zulu, Grandma.”

“Lulu, Zulu,” says Ernestine, laughing, too. “Some sort of ulu.”

“Dig on, Roz,” says Dez, hurrying to the house. “I won’t be long.”

Zulu Manhattan is Dez’s editor at Articulate Dinosaur Press in Seattle, publisher of Dez’s last three volumes of poetry. Dez’s latest volume, her seventh, Controversial Recipes, just came out in America and Europe and is getting stellar reviews. Werner Schaffen has published German-English editions of all seven of Dez’s books and she now has a small following in Germany and Switzerland.

“Hey Dez,” says Zulu, her accent southern, “we just got a call from James Billings. Well… from his people. Do you know him?”

“No,” says Dez, sitting at the kitchen table and using the same wall-mounted telephone she grew up with. “Somebody sent me the book he won the Pulitzer for. Can’t think of the title. Haven’t read it yet.”

“Well you better read it, honey,” says Zulu, emphatically, “because he apparently loves your work and wants you to open for him at a big show in Seattle on October fifth, PBS taping the show for a national Christmas special. Wants you to do about twenty minutes. They’ll pay you two grand and put you up at the Four Seasons and interview you for the special, too. Yes?”

“I’ll need to check with my mother,” says Dez, terrified. “Make sure she’s available to take care of Roz. Can I call you back tomorrow? Or Monday?”

“Monday at the latest, darling,” says Zulu, hearing the fear in Dez’s voice. “Billings is going to be the next poet laureate, you know. Or the one after that.”

“I probably can do it,” says Dez, breathlessly. “I’ll call you back.”

Dez hangs up the phone and bows her head. This is her dream come true and her worst nightmare. She wants to be successful and wants to be anonymous.

Ernestine comes in from the garden cradling zucchinis and cucumbers in her apron, dumps the produce on the kitchen counter and says, “You okay, Dez?”

“They want me to read with James Billings in Seattle,” says Dez, anguished. “In October. For a PBS Christmas show.”

“For your new book?” asks Ernestine, getting Dez a glass of water.

Dez smiles at her mother who knows nothing about poetry except that Dez is a poet and Psalms in The Bible are poems.

“James Billings is very famous,” Dez explains, “and it certainly would help my new book if I read with him and a million people watched the show, but I’m not sure I want to.”

“Why not?” asks Ernestine, frowning at her daughter. “Wouldn’t take long. Three-hour drive to Seattle, read your poems, come on home. We’ll hardly know you were gone.”

“You make it sound so wonderfully simple,” says Dez, giving her mother a hug. “But it isn’t.”

As they plant the bean seeds, Dez tells Rosalind about the reading in Seattle.

“Can I come?” asks Rosalind, nodding hopefully. “I love Seattle.”

“I don’t know if I’ll do it,” says Dez, sinking her hands in the soil and closing her eyes.

“Why not?” asks Rosalind, frowning at her mother. “We could go to Pike Street Market and get fish and chips and salt water taffy and go on a ferry boat ride.”

“It’s complicated,” says Dez, thinking Maxine is the only person I know who will understand what I’m up against.

When Ernestine and Rosalind take the mutts Portia and Petruchio for a walk, Dez sits at the kitchen table and calls Maxine in Portland. Maxine is an artist ten years older than Dez who makes her living staging houses for real estate agents. She and Dez shared a flat and were waitresses together when Dez lived in Portland.

“Hey baby girl,” says Maxine when she hears Dez’s voice. “I’ve been meaning to call you and tell you how much I love the new poems. The one about the old lady buying whiskey in the Pakistani liquor store? I laughed until I cried. You just get better and better. And who took the picture of you on the jacket? You look like Kate Winslet with dark brown hair.”

“Roz took it,” says Dez, smiling as she recalls standing in the vegetable garden, her hair still wet from her shower, Rosalind snapping pictures with a tiny camera. “You got a minute?”

“For you, baby girl, all day.”

Dez tells Maxine about the gig with Nathan Grayson and her mixed feeling about saying Yes, and Maxine says, “Self-sabotage or self-preservation? That is the question.”

“I’m not unhappy,” says Dez, as if that might be a good enough reason not to read with James Billings.

“What are you afraid of?” asks Maxine, getting out her notebook.

“I write poetry,” says Dez with anger in her voice. “I don’t want to be mistaken for Kate Winslet with dark brown hair.”

“You’d be sensational,” says Maxine, writing Sensational at the top of a blank page. “And that would open a Pandora’s Box of interest in you. Tell me why that’s bad.”

“I like not being famous,” says Dez, hearing how false she sounds.

“And what will happen if you don’t do it?” asks Maxine, writing Pandora’s Box under Sensational.

“If I don’t do it,” says Dez, knowing how the world works, “my publisher will drop me and I will ever after be known as the uppity bitch who wouldn’t read with James Billings.”

Maxine laughs. “You are so not an uppity bitch, baby girl.”

Silence.

“I’m stuck,” says Dez, quoting Rosalind who often says I’m stuck when seeking help.

“Let’s go back to the beginning,” says Maxine, writing The Beginning under Pandora’s Box. “Why do you write poems?”

“To capture moments,” says Dez, thinking of Rosalind on her knees in the garden placing big white beans in the little trench snaking through the dark brown soil.

“Why capture moments?” asks Maxine, writing Moments.

“To share them with others.”

“Why do you want to do that?”

“To connect. Maybe help.”

“Help?”

“You know… maybe awaken someone a little.”

“Do it, Dez,” says Maxine, writing Awaken! “Pandora won’t bother you much in Ophelia.”

So Dez takes the gig.

At the end of Dez’s sound check a few hours before the big show, James Billings and his entourage enter the vast theatre and Grayson strides down the center aisle to meet Dez coming off the stage.

A movie-star handsome fellow in his fifties, his hair a flawless gray pompadour, James takes Dez’s hand in both of his and says, “Your author photos don’t lie. Why no videos?”

“I’m low tech,” says Dez, who got her hair cut stylishly short for the reading. “Just write.”

“So you’ll do about ten minutes,” says James, winking at Dez. “Sound good?”

“I was told twenty,” says Dez, having memorized six poems that take her seventeen minutes to recite without haste.

“Less is more,” says James, winking at her again. “Aim for ten. They always take fifteen.”

“Will do,” says Dez, wanting to like James but finding him repulsive.

“Perfecto,” says James, winking at her a third time. “Just be yourself.”

The first poem Dez recites is called Café Idyll, about a day in her life as a waitress—the seventeen hundred people in the audience entranced from the first line and roaring with laughter throughout.

Aiming to finish under fifteen minutes, Dez skips her second and third poems and performs A Tale of Two Bass Players, a funny poignant imagining of her long-ago bass player boyfriends showing up in Ophelia to take her back to the life she had in Portland before the coming of Rosalind.

The audience goes bonkers when she finishes the poem, cheering and whistling and applauding thunderously.

Now something in the wings catches Dez’s attention and she glances to her right and sees James Billings gesturing wildly for her to stop, to be done, though she’s only been on for nine minutes.

And when the stage manager and the show’s director fail to calm James down and he’s about to walk onto the stage and do God knows what to get Dez off the stage, Dez leans close to the microphone and says, “I’ll close now with a poem inspired by James Billings who so graciously asked me to read with him.”

Which simple speech quells the beast.

After Rosalind

When I was a child my older brothers would say to boys

questioning the little girl playing ball with them, “She’s tough

as nails. Not afraid of anything.” Which was true for all my

life until at thirty-seven I swelled with child, my Rosalind,

and in a second-trimester dream I drew my sword to fight

a man who would slay me before my babe was born. And

in that bloody duel was born my fear and the prayer

Oh let me live until my babe is born and weaned and strong.

And when my babe was four-years-old my prayer became

Oh let me live until she can make her way without me.

Now Rosalind is eight and as fearless as I

before she came to be, and in a dream

two nights ago that same man came to slay me.

But this time when I drew my sword I felt no fear,

for Rosalind was beside me, her sword drawn, too,

a cunning smile on her soon-to-be-a-woman’s face.

A gorgeous day in October—Rosalind thirteen, Dez fifty-one, Ernestine seventy-seven—they are having breakfast in a café in Zurich, Switzerland with Dirk Rosenfeld, Dez’s translator at Werner Schaffen, publisher of all ten volumes of Dez’s poetry in beautiful German-English editions.

“Soon,” says Dirk, watching Rosalind take a sip of coffee from her mother’s cup, “you will be having your own cups of coffee, Roz.”

“I prefer sipping from my mother’s cup,” says Rosalind, smiling at Dez. “I suppose I might move away some day and then I’ll have my own cups of coffee, though I only ever want a few sips.”

“It begins with a few sips,” says Dirk, nodding sagely. “Then one day we want a little more and a little more, and soon one cup is not enough.”

“That’s me,” says Ernestine, never having imagined she would ever go to Europe as she has now twice with Dez and Rosalind. “Two cups every morning and sometimes three, and another two in the afternoon. But not Dez. She finishes the one with breakfast and that’s it for the day. Been that way since she was twelve.”

“Not counting the twenty years I lived away from home,” says Dez, remembering the cozy flat she shared with Maxine in Portland, purple paisley curtains, big pillows on the living room floor, Othello the cat snoozing on the windowsill, the air rich with the scent of coffee brewing.

fin

Morning Coffee

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6. Future Life

Near the end of Stephen Ornofsky’s performance the audience is laughing so hard, Stephen has to wait several seconds for the laughter to subside before he can say anything else, and as he waits, he is aware he has never before connected so profoundly with an audience, a kind of super joy.

A charming fellow of thirty-four, with short brown hair and wire-frame glasses, Stephen’s show of ever-changing songs and stories has been the Thursday night attraction at McCarthy’s pub in the coastal town of Melody for seven years now.

“As some of you know,” says Stephen when the laughter finally dies down, “I was in therapy for a year when I was a teenager. I was suffering from a crippling psychological disorder known as Being A Teenager.”

Stephen takes the microphone off the stand and crosses the little stage to a high stool where he sits and looks out at the audience, the pub filled to capacity.

“Fortunately I had a wonderful therapist, and what he loved more than anything was interpreting dreams. And being the kind of person I am, I very much wanted to please him. And because I didn’t think my actual dreams were all that interesting, I started making up dreams, really wild ones, and my therapist just loved them and said they were really helping us get to the bottom of my issues.”

The crowd roars with laughter.

“But then I started feeling guilty about misleading my therapist, so I said to him, ‘You know the dreams I’ve been telling you lately? I didn’t actually have those dreams. I made them up.’ And my therapist said, “It doesn’t matter. They still give us valuable information.’ And I said, ‘But they aren’t really about me.’ And he said, ‘Of course they are. Only you can make up those particular dreams, just as only you can have the dreams you actually have. And just as you made up those dreams, Stephen, you can make up your future life. You really can.’”

Stephen crosses the stage, puts the microphone back on the stand, and straps on his guitar.

“So I decided what I really wanted in my future life was a Thursday night gig at McCarthy’s where I sing songs for my friends and tell them stories I think they’ll enjoy. And my dream came true, and this song is for you.

I give to you, you give to me

We plant the seeds to keep the garden growing

You give to him, he gives to her,

she gives to me, I give to you,

we keep the spirit flowing

So now when those night winds blow

I want you to know I will always love you

A good many people wait around after the show to give Stephen a hug or shake his hand, and one of those people is a woman in her mid-thirties visiting from Los Angeles named Nina Zubinsky. Stephen met Nina for the first time a few days ago, and when he found out she was a studio musician, a guitarist, Stephen asked her if she’d like to get together with him and play music. Thinking Stephen might be interested in her romantically, Nina made sure to tell him she was a lesbian, something Stephen never would have guessed.

Tall and slender, Nina has short curly brown hair, dark green eyes, and wears wire-frame glasses. She is dressed identically to Stephen in a black corduroy sports jacket, pale pink dress shirt, black corduroy trousers, and red running shoes.

When Nina’s father Abe, who is one of Stephen’s guitar students, finishes giving Stephen a hug, Nina shakes Stephen’s hand and says, “I am now officially in awe of you and would very much like to play music with you.”

“I’m thrilled,” says Stephen, ferociously attracted to her despite the aforementioned lesbian information. “Your father has my number.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” she says, seeming reluctant to let go of his hand. “You blew my mind. You really did.”

Stephen gets home around midnight to the lovely old house he shares with Maya Johansen, an elderly woman confined to a wheelchair and for whom Stephen is the primary caregiver. To Stephen’s surprise and delight, he finds Maya’s other caregiver, Celia Flores, a beautiful middle-aged Mexican woman, reading by the fire in the living room.

Dressed in a dark blue nightgown, Celia has loosed her long black hair from its workaday bun and removed her copious makeup, which is how Stephen prefers her. She is usually asleep when Stephen gets home from his Thursday night gig—Celia lives with Maya and Stephen from Thursday to Sunday every week—and Stephen guesses she stayed up to talk to him about Maya.

Stephen’s dogs Hortensio, a large black mutt, and Moose, a small brown Chihuahua, are in their beds by the woodstove, and they both briefly open their eyes to look at Stephen and confirm what their ears and noses told them. He’s home.

“How was your show, Esteban?” asks Celia, her Spanish accent quite strong.

“Went well,” says Stephen, flopping down on the sofa. “How was your evening?”

“Okay,” she says, putting down her book. “One day I’ll go to your show again. I’ll ask Josephine to come for a few hours so I can go. I don’t think Maya will ever go again. She so tired at night now. She wants to go to bed earlier and earlier.”

“She told me yesterday she doesn’t think she’ll live another year,” says Stephen, who has lived with Maya for nine years now.

“I don’t like to think about her going,” says Celia, looking at Stephen. “I love my days here with you and Maya.”

Stephen wants to say Then keep coming here after she’s gone, but he knows that’s not possible. This is Celia’s job and she and her husband depend on the income.

Celia smiles. “Maybe you’ll make a million dollars from a song you write and I can be your cook and housekeeper.”

“Nothing would make me happier,” says Stephen, a familiar sorrow taking hold as his performance high fades away and he feels alone in the world with no partner to share his bed and know his deepest feelings.

“Time for me to sleep,” says Celia, getting up from her armchair. “Hasta la mañana.”

“Hasta la mañana,” says Stephen, rousing his dogs and ushering them out to the garden where they pee and Stephen imagines Celia is his wife waiting for him to come to bed.

Nina calls the next morning while Stephen is doing the breakfast dishes and they arrange for him to come to Nina’s father’s house for some guitar playing and lunch.

Abe Zubinsky is sixty-two, a former movie sound engineer in Los Angeles who worked on dozens of Hollywood blockbusters and is now the owner of Studio Z, a small recording studio Abe built adjacent to his house overlooking the Pacific Ocean a couple miles south of Melody.

Abe moved here ten years ago with his second wife Carol, an interior designer. Six months after they arrived, Carol returned to Los Angeles and filed for divorce because, as she is fond of telling people, “I felt like we’d been exiled to Siberia and Abe thought we’d landed in heaven.”

Following a tour of Abe’s spectacular house and the surrounding meadows filled with purple and white wild iris, Stephen and Nina get situated in Abe’s state-of-the-art recording studio, and to humor her father, Nina acquiesces to Abe placing several microphones in the performance room to record the session.

“Something for me to listen to on long winter nights,” says Abe, getting his volumes set. “Two of my favorite people playing music together.”

“You can stay, Pops,” says Nina, tuning her father’s fine old guitar.

“I’ve got a bunch of calls to make,” says Abe, leaving the control room. “Carry on.”

Stephen and Nina are dressed identically again—black cotton T-shirts and baggy blue trousers—and Stephen says, “I assume you are aware of our uncanny tendency to dress alike, and not just alike but exactly alike?”

“I am aware and find it mildly unnerving,” she says, playing a lightning fast melodic run of notes up and down the neck of her guitar that makes Stephen’s jaw drop. “I’m what’s known in the vernacular as an L.L. Bean dyke, and you apparently shop there, too.”

“No, I get my clothes at garage sales,” says Stephen, playing an elegant chord on his small teak guitar, “though Celia recently knitted me a beautiful wool sweater.”

“Celia being?” asks Nina, searching for the elegant chord Stephen just played and quickly finding it. “Nice.”

“Celia is Maya’s other caregiver,” says Stephen, tuning his guitar. “She lives with us from Thursday evening until Sunday morning. An incarnate angel.”

“I was raised by an incarnate angel named Celia,” says Nina, figuring out four more equally elegant chords to go with Stephen’s initial elegant chord. “Celia Maria Gomez. My parents being otherwise engaged on movie sets around the globe, Pops doing sound, Moms a cinematographer, and they rarely worked on the same film.”

“Moms was not Carol,” says Stephen, having met the hyper-perky Carol a couple times before she fled Siberia and returned to Los Angeles.

“No, thank all the gods of all religions,” says Nina, playing the five elegant chords again. “Carol didn’t infiltrate my father’s life until I’d made my escape to the lesbian enclave in Echo Park where I live to this day.”

“Would you mind teaching me those chords you just played?” says Stephen, awed by Nina’s facility on the guitar.

She plays the chords again a few times and Stephen imitates her until he has them memorized.

“Best guitar lesson I’ve ever had,” he says, playing the chords again and again.

“You’re self-taught,” she observes. “Whereas I had excellent teachers from the age of eight and graduated champion hot chick guitarist from the Berklee jazz factory. Yet you’re every bit as good as I am and easily seventy jillion times more original.”

“Nonsense,’ says Stephen, playing the five chords again in a steady rhythm and singing in his smoky tenor, “These chords put me in a melancholy mood, but that don’t mean I’m sad.”

“Hey melancholy is my middle name,” sings Nina to those same five chords, “but that don’t mean I’m bad.”

“Melancholy’s my name, too,” he sings, changing the third and fifth chords, “though I’m not always blue.”

“And I am really digging this song,” she sings, “making it up with you.”

They stop playing and smile shyly at each other.

“Not what I expected,” she says, shaking her head. “Thought you’d play a song from your show and I’d noodle along. Studio work. But no.”

“Speaking of noodling,” says Stephen, thrilled by her playing, “here’s a little something I came up with you might be inclined to noodleize to.”

“Play on, Ornofsky,” she says, feeling a glimmer of something she hasn’t felt since she was fourteen—sexual attraction to a male.

Stephen swings into a Gypsy groove with a run of jazzy chords full of surprising twists and turns, and when Nina has listened to the run three times through she begins to solo with a few choice notes, playing more and more notes with each iteration of the chord sequence until her solo grows complex and majestic and at last she takes over playing the run of chords and Stephen rips off a dazzling solo that ends on the last chord Nina plays.

Mutually astounded, Nina gawks at Stephen and says, “I’m not religious but I’m praying fervently my father’s recording equipment captured that amazing thing we just played.”

“I’ll pray for that, too,” says Stephen, looking into her eyes. “But it doesn’t matter, Nina.”

“It doesn’t?” she says, terrified to be falling in love with him. “Then what does?”

“What matters is we made that together,” he says, grinning at her. “And we’ll always know we did.”

Always Love

Tags 6 Future Life, Abe Zubinsky, all the gods of all religions, Always Love, Celia Flores, five legend chords, Funny Love Story, incarnate angels, make up your future life, Maya Johansen, Nina Zubinsky, short story, songs and stories, Stephen Ornofsky, Todd Walton, Under the Table Books

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3. Stephen Ornofsky

“Celia will be here any minute,” says Maya Johansen, small and slender and seventy-seven, confined to a wheelchair for the last fifteen years. “Go on now, Stephen. You’ll be late.”

“You know my pub show never starts promptly at eight,” says Stephen Ornofsky, Maya’s live-in caretaker for nine years now, a handsome fellow of thirty-four with short brown hair and wire-framed glasses. “You also know I’m incapable of leaving you alone at night. So just relax and enjoy my company until Celia gets here.”

The month is June, the time ten minutes after eight in the evening of a sunny day. Maya and Stephen are seated at a large rectangular wooden table on the deck of Maya’s rambling one-story redwood house in the northern California coastal town of Melody. With a few minutes of daylight left to them, they survey the remains of the delicious fish supper Stephen prepared for them and drink the last of their fine white wine.

Stephen’s two dogs, Hortensio, a big black mutt, and Moose, a small brown Chihuahua, are sprawled on the edge of the deck gazing out over Stephen’s big vegetable garden and down the hill into town, while Stephen’s enormous orange cat Harpo sits in the chair next to Stephen’s and gazes expectantly at his favorite human and hopes for one more piece of delicious cod.

Maya, who was born in Sweden and came to the United States when she was seven, a renowned dancer and choreographer before her terrible car accident, is wearing a black sweater over a blue T-shirt and baggy gray cotton trousers, her long white hair in a braid. She is belted into her old wicker wheelchair so she won’t fall out should she make any abrupt movements with the upper half of her body, movements she often makes. Being paralyzed from the waist down, she must be secured with a seatbelt or these sudden movements might topple her out of her chair.

Stephen, who was born just ten miles north of Melody in the big town of Mill City, is wearing black corduroy trousers and a matching sports jacket over a pale pink dress shirt, his usual attire for his Thursday night gig at McCarthy’s, a gig he’s had for seven years.

“Will you premiere your new song tonight?” asks Maya, who loves it when Stephen sings to her. “I hope so and I hope there’s a marvelous woman in the audience who falls madly in love with you, and you with her.”

“I may sing that song tonight,” says Stephen, smiling at Maya’s fantasy. “I was going to last week, but ran out of time.”

“Maybe start with the new song tonight,” says Maya, who every few months insists on attending Stephen’s show despite the hassle, but of late she’s been too tired in the evening to go anywhere.

“I am now habituated to opening with the raven song,” says Stephen, rising at the sound of tires crunching the gravel driveway—Celia Flores being dropped off by her husband Miguel. “After which Mabel habitually drops a ten-dollar bill in the tip jar to show the others how it’s done, dear woman. And then I’ll sing the new song.” He goes to Maya and kisses her cheek. “See you in the morning.”

“Sleep in if you want,” says Maya, who always cries a little when Stephen leaves her. “Celia can make breakfast, though lately she’s been overcooking the eggs.”

Stephen meets Celia at the front door and says, “Here you are, beautiful as ever.”

“Lo siento Esteban,” says Celia, a Mexican woman in her fifties dressed in white sweater and black slacks, her long black hair in a bun. “The car wouldn’t start and we had to get a jump from our neighbor. Forgive me.”

“Nothing to forgive,” he says, finding Celia adorable. “Maya would love a bath tonight. She’ll say don’t bother, but I know she’d love one and would especially love for you to wash her hair. Every time you do, she waxes euphoric.”

“Of course,” says Celia, nodding anxiously. “You better go now. I’m so sorry we make you late for your show.”

“Not to worry,” says Stephen, picking up his guitar case. “I’ll see you in the morning if you aren’t up when I get home.”

The coastal fog, having withdrawn a mile offshore for the day, returns to blanket the town for the night as Stephen walks the long three blocks from Maya’s house to downtown Melody where the crowd at McCarthy’s awaits him, many in that crowd having known Stephen since he was a teenager and played his guitar and sang his songs on the corner in front of the post office.

Stephen loves this three-block walk, loves the fog filling in the spaces between the houses, loves being alive.

A quiet child and exceedingly bright, Stephen needed glasses at five, started playing guitar when he was six, and did well in school until his second year of high school when his home life became untenable and he took to staying with friends whose parents would allow him to sleep on their sofas.

When he was sixteen, he bought an old Volkswagen van, dropped out of school, and for eighteen months lived in his van on his friend Lisa’s driveway a mile inland from Melody. A few months after he moved to Lisa’s driveway, Stephen fell into a deep depression and Lisa’s father Joseph paid for Stephen to go to a therapist. After a year of therapy, no longer depressed, Stephen moved into the town of Melody, and after another year of living in his van was able to rent a house with two friends and start giving guitar lessons to go with his gardening work.

“And here I am,” says Stephen, arriving at McCarthy’s, Melody’s largest performance venue not counting the Presbyterian church.

A little pod of his fans who smoke are standing in front of the pub having a few last puffs before the show.

Malcolm Hawkins, a big hulking fellow in a long black coat says, “You’re late, Stevie. I’m going into withdrawals. Quick. Sing something.”

“You are the sunshine of my life,” sings Stephen, crooning a little Stevie Wonder. “See you inside.”

“Saved,” says Tommy, dropping his cigarette and snuffing it out with his shoe as he follows Stephen into the pub.

The place is full, standing room only, and people applaud when they see Stephen come in, which is McCarthy’s cue to go up on the little stage and give a brief introduction.

McCarthy, sixty-nine, short and muscular, his bald pate reflecting the stage lights, taps the microphone to hear the amplified pop and says, “And now embarking on his eighth year of performing here we give you the one and only Stephen Ornofsky.”

Having shed his jacket and strapped on his small teak guitar, Stephen takes the stage to loud applause, starts to strum, and when he’s happy with his sound, moves close to the microphone and sings Obadiah, Obadiah, Obadiah my love, I watched you write love poems in the blue sky above. I watched you write words with your ink black wings, and put them to music for something to sing.

Now he nods to the audience and dozens of people sing along as he repeats the verse, some people singing harmonies they’ve figured out over the years of singing along with Stephen, some singing the melody, the pub transformed into a church of beer-drinking revelers.

At song’s end, Stephen steps back from the microphone and Mabel Lundquist, who always sits up front with her partner Suse Malone, makes a pretty show of dropping a ten-dollar bill into the white shoebox with TIPS writ large on the side.

“Merci Mabel,” says Stephen, bowing to her. “Thank you all for coming tonight. I want to follow Obadiah with a brand new song that…” Stephen freezes at the sight of someone in the audience. “Oh my God. Joseph. Haven’t seen you in forever. And this new song… the one I’m about to sing… I wrote for you.” He shakes his head in wonder. “What are the odds?”

A hush falls over the room.

“Not to put you on the spot, Joseph,” says Stephen, playing an eloquent chord, “but how are you?”

“I’m good,” says Joseph, who is seventy-five and sharing a table with a beautiful young woman. “Only now I’m nervous about this song you’re gonna sing.”

The audience laughs appreciatively.

“I believe in everything now,” says Stephen, playing the eloquent chord again and launching into a swingin’ tune, the verses of which comprise a fantastical version of Stephen’s autobiography, the chorus:

Joe Joe Joseph Joe, he may not know it,

but he saved my soul, yes he saved my soul

and he saved my life, Joseph fantastico Joe.

Stephen goes to Joseph’s table between sets and he and Joseph embrace.

“I finally write a song for you after all these years,” says Stephen, stepping back from Joseph to look at him, “and you show up the first time I sing it. And they say there’s no such thing as cosmic synchronicity. Ha!”

“Stephen this is Carmen,” says Joseph, gesturing to the lovely woman at his table. “Carmen, Stephen.”

“A pleasure,” says Stephen, gazing at the beautiful brunette. “I’ve never seen you before, so I’m guessing you either just moved here or you’re visiting from elsewhere, Hollywood perhaps.”

“Santa Rosa,” says Carmen, giving Stephen an adoring look. “I love your music and you’re very funny.”

“What brings you to Melody?” asks Stephen, enthralled by her. “Permanent residency we hope.”

“Joe and I are making a movie together,” she says, acknowledging Stephen’s hope with an arching of her eyebrow, “and we’re planning to shoot it here on the coast, so I’ve been coming over now and then to work with him. I’d love to live here, but… all in good time.”

“A movie. How wonderful,” says Stephen, nodding his thanks to the waitress for bringing him a beer. “If you need any music, keep me in mind. I play piano, too. Kind of metaphysical ambient jazz.”

“We will keep you in mind,” says Joseph, winking at Carmen. “You grew up, Stephen. I had you frozen in time. I’m so glad you’re doing well.”

“Thank you, Joseph,” says Stephen, nodding gratefully. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Listen,” says Joseph, clearing his throat. “I want to apologize for…”

“No need,” says Stephen, gently interrupting. “You were going through a very rough time and I was ready to go. I have nothing but gratitude for what you did for me.” He looks at Carmen. “He allowed me to live at his place and paid for me to get some therapy when I really needed it.”

“He told me,” says Carmen, looking from Stephen to Joseph and back to Stephen.

“And now I must take the stage again,” says Stephen, bowing to Joseph. “Wonderful seeing you again.”

The next morning, Stephen wakes early and takes his dogs for a walk through the foggy town to the post office where he finds in his box two letters from faraway friends and the latest issue of Galapagos, a literary quarterly that published two of Stephen’s poems a few years ago, the only two poems he’s ever had published.

When he gets back to the house, he finds Celia making coffee in the kitchen, still in her nightgown, her hair down, no makeup on yet, which is how Stephen prefers her.

“She wants you to make the eggs today,” says Celia, giving Stephen a sleepy smile. “You want me to get her out of bed and you make the eggs?”

“You never overcook the eggs,” says Stephen, feeling marvelous. “How’s your back this morning?”

“A little sore,” she says, shrugging. “I put her in the bath last night, wash her hair, get her out of the bath, dress her, into her chair, then out of her chair into bed. But I can do this morning.”

“Why not straight to bed from the bath?” he asks, which is what Maya always wants when Stephen bathes her at night.

“She want to wait up for you,” says Celia, nodding. “But then she gets too tired.”

“I’ll get her out of bed this morning,” says Stephen, wanting to caress Celia, but not daring to. “And if you will chop up strawberries and bananas, I’ll make pancakes for breakfast.”

Fridays and Saturdays and Tuesdays are technically Stephen’s days off from caring for Maya, but because he lives with her and they eat most of their meals together and they are devoted to each other, the lines blur on those days. Celia is there from Thursday evening through Sunday late morning, and Josephine comes on Monday evening and stays until Tuesday evening, so Stephen feels much freer on those days to do as he pleases.

Pancakes devoured, Celia goes to take a shower and dress for the day, and Stephen does the dishes and tells Maya about the amazing coincidence of Joseph being in the audience for the unveiling of Joseph Fantastico Joe.

“I’ve never told you,” says Maya, gazing out the kitchen window, “that Joe asked me to marry him.”

“When?” asks Stephen, shocked she withheld this from him until now.

“The year before my accident,” she says, vividly remembering those last months of being able to walk. “After Irene left him we kept bumping into each other around town and having wonderful conversations, and I’d been single for three years, so we went out for supper and went to a couple movies and plays, and then we took a trip together, motel hopping up the coast from here to Astoria and back, and when we got home he asked me to marry him.”

“And?” asks Stephen, expectantly.

“I said ‘Why get married? Why not just be friends and lovers?’ And he said, ‘No. I need to know we’re committed to each other.’ And I said, ‘Isn’t loving each other enough?’ And he got very angry and said, ‘Saying you love someone isn’t the same as proving you love them. And marriage is proof.’ I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. I said, “I’ve been married twice, you’ve been married three times. What did getting married prove? Nothing as far as I can see.’ And that was that. He didn’t speak to me again until a couple months after the accident when he called to ask if he could help, and I said, ‘I’ll let you know,’ but I never wanted anything from him.”

Stephen is in the vegetable garden weeding the broccoli when Celia comes out on the deck with the carry-around phone. “For you Esteban. Should I take a message?”

“No, I’ll come,” he says, climbing the five stairs to the deck and taking the phone from her. “Hello?”

“Stephen, it’s Carmen. We met at the pub last night. I was with Joe.” She waits for him to reply, and when he doesn’t, she says, “I think you’re the only person in the world who calls him Joseph.”

“Oh Carmen,” he says, remembering her now. “Beautiful name and not easy to rhyme.”

“Charmin’?” she suggests. “Alarmin’. Disarmin.”

“Of course. Silly me. Hadn’t thought to excise the g. I’ll get to work on that song right away.”

“Oh good,” she says, laughing. “I’m calling because Joe and I are wondering if you’d be interested in being in our movie.” Again she waits for Stephen to reply, and again he says nothing. “There will be an initial two or three days of the cast improvising scenes, after which Joe and I will write the script, and then there will be two weeks of filming in and around Melody. September-ish. We can pay you four thousand dollars.”

“Who else is in the cast?” asks Stephen, who until now has never even thought about being in a movie.

“Joseph and I, a wonderful actress named Patricia, Murray of Murray’s Seafood, and you. Would you like to meet for coffee and talk about this?”

“Sure,” says Stephen, more interested in seeing Carmen again than being in a movie. “Where and when?”

“Murray’s Seafood in an hour. We’ll treat you to lunch if you haven’t eaten already.”

Stephen informs Celia and Maya he’s going to meet Joseph and Carmen for lunch at Murray’s Seafood, which prompts a powwow about supper resulting in the decision that he bring home three orders of fish & chips.

He shaves, puts on his green Murray’s Seafood sweatshirt over his black McCarthy’s T-shirt, decides to wear jeans instead of shorts, and heads downtown. On his way, he imagines being in a movie with Carmen, and in every scene they tumble into bed.

Joseph and Carmen sit side-by-side facing Stephen across the table.

Carmen looks darling in a billowy white blouse, her dark brown hair in a braid coiled on top of her head.

Joseph looks exhausted, his blue Hawaiian shirt faded and wrinkled.

“So…” says Joseph, smiling a tired smile, “what more can we tell you?”

“Well,” says Stephen, who is now vastly more interested in Carmen than being in their movie, “I understand you have yet to write the script, but the cast you’ve assembled suggests you have an inkling of what the movie might be about. Yes?”

“The quest for a meaningful life,” says Carmen, matter-of-factly, “and possibly meeting a soul mate or two along the way.”

Stephen considers this and smiles wistfully. “I think you will find I’m not much of an actor. Maya and I have a play-reading group and I’m renowned for sounding pretty much the same no matter what part I’m reading.”

“That’s true of most movie actors,” says Joseph, who has directed several big-budget movies. “Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers were the exceptions not the rule.”

“We want you to be you,” says Carmen, nodding in agreement with Joseph. “Only you won’t be Stephen. You’ll be someone else. Patricia might be your mother or your lover, or you might be Joseph’s son or his nephew or his neighbor, or you might be my brother or… but whoever you are, you’ll still be you.”

“Like being in a dream?” says Stephen, trying to understand. “I’m still me, though the dream is nothing like my waking reality?”

“Exactly,” says Carmen, crazy about him. “We will be in a dream together and film the dream.”

Mystery Sweet

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The Dog Who Wanted A Person

Post author By toddric
Post date October 19, 2020
No Comments on The Dog Who Wanted A Person

Part One

Once upon a time there was a dog named Huleekalabulee. His mom called him Hubu or Hubee, his brother Jurgen called him Hube, and his sister called him Bulee. Huleekalabulee’s sister was named Venus.

One morning Huleekalabulee’s mom served Venus and Jurgen and Huleekalabulee their breakfast and said, “Well today you are all one-year-old and you will have to find new homes because I am officially done being your mom. You can come visit me on Dogmas Day and for Dogster and Doggiving, but for the other days you’re on your own.”

“Fine,” said Venus, who was a very beautiful dog and looked more like Mom, who was a Golden Retriever, and less like Dad who was, according to Mom, a big brown mutt. “Jenny Jones who lives next door adores me. I’ll go live with her.”

“Whatever,” said Jurgen, who was quite handsome and looked like a giant Cocker Spaniel. “Mr. Zimbalist who lives across the street already built a house for me in his backyard. I’m outta here.”

“What about you Hubee?” asked Mom. “Where will you go?”

“Well,” said Huleekalabulee, who was an affable big brown mutt, “I guess I’ll do what the dogs in all my favorite dog stories do. Go on a quest to find my person.”

“Good luck with that,” said Jurgen, sneering cynically. “Those are just fantasies, you know. In reality most mutts end up lost and desperate and hungry.”

“Yeah,” said Venus, also sneering cynically. “That’s why Jurgen and I pretended to like Jenny Jones and Mr. Zimbalist. So we wouldn’t end up lost and desperate and hungry.”

“It’s true, dear,” said Mom, who liked Huleekalabulee and found his naiveté charming. “It’s a person-eat-person world out there. You’d better find a person while you’re still kind of cute.”

And so after breakfast, Huleekalabulee packed his saddlebags with his favorite squeaky toy and seventy-seven big hunks of turkey jerky and embarked on his quest.

For starters he walked as far as he usually went with Mom’s humans, Alex and Monica Kronkite, which was to the top of Bullwinkle Butte. From there, Huleekalabulee could see the whole town spread out below him, with mountains to the north and south and east, and the ocean to the west.

“Wow,” said Huleekalabulee. “What a great big world it is. I guess if I could live anywhere I’d like to live near the beach. So that’s where I’ll begin my search for a person to call my own.”

He started down a path going west and only went a little way before he came upon two old mutts blocking the path. One of the old mutts was black, the other a dirty blond.

“Slow down,” said the old dirty blond mutt. “Where are you going?”

“The beach,” said Huleekalabulee. “I’m questing for a person to live with.”

This was so funny to the two old mutts, they laughed for five minutes until the old black mutt said, “Hey, what’s your name?”

“Huleekalabulee,” said Huleekalabulee.

Hearing Huleekalabulee’s name made the two old mutts laugh for another five minutes until the old dirty blond mutt said, “What are you… Hawaiian?”

“Not that I know of,” said Huleekalabulee. “My mom is a Golden Retriever and my father was, according to my mom, a big brown mutt.”

“A bit of advice,” said the old black mutt. “Out here in the rough-and-tumble person-eat-person world, you need a rough-and-tumble sort of name.”

“Or at least a shorter name,” said the old dirty blond mutt. “Who can remember Hakableebleenoonoopoopee?”

“But my name isn’t Hakableebleenoonoopoopee,” said Huleekalabulee. “My name is…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said the old black mutt. “Whatever it is, it should be shorter.”

“What are your names?” asked Huleekalabulee, wondering if either or both of them had a person or people.

“I’m Butch,” said the old dirty blond mutt.

“And I’m Garth,” said the old black mutt.

“It was a pleasure meeting you,” said Huleekalabulee. “And now if you’ll excuse me I want to get to the beach before…”

“Not so fast, kiddo,” said Garth, growling to add menace to his speech. “Why should we let you go by without biting you?”

“Why would you want to bite me?” asked Huleekalabulee. “We just had a lovely interlude full of laughter and potentially helpful advice. Why spoil such a happy time with conflict?”

“He makes a good point,” said Butch, nodding. “I haven’t laughed so hard in years. Not since that person, remember? The jogger? Stepped in my fresh pile of poop and slipped and landed on her face in your fresh pile of poop?”

“Now that was funny,” said Garth, remembering the glorious moment of their poop triumphant. “Okay Hukunanazulu. Go on. And good luck. You’ll need it.”

“One more bit of advice,” said Butch, as he and Garth stepped aside to let Huleekalabulee go by. “If you go to the beach, people will call the park rangers, and if they catch you…”

“You don’t want to know,” said Garth, ominously.

“Only dogs belonging to people are allowed on the beach,” said Butch. “Dogs on leash.”

The path took Huleekalabulee down from Bullwinkle Butte into a part of town where he’d never been before. The houses here were much bigger than the houses in the neighborhood where Huleekalabulee grew up. And around each yard was a tall fence or wall, and the driveways were gated, and those gates were closed.

“Smells very unfriendly here,” said Huleekalabulee, wrinkling his nose.

And just as he was about to leave the street of giant houses, a very large dog with pointy ears and shiny black fur came rushing through the one gate that wasn’t completely shut, and stood between Huleekalabulee and a neighborhood of small pretty houses where human children were playing happily on little lawns and there were no fences or gates.

“Hold it right there,” said the very large shiny black dog. “Just where do you think you’re going?”

“To the beach,” said Huleekalabulee. “Dog willing and the creek don’t rise.”

“Not likely,” said the big pointy-eared dog, his voice full of growls. “I’m a professional attack dog and it is my job to try to bite you and possibly kill you.”

“Why would you want to do that?” asked Huleekalabulee, aghast. “I’m just a lost one-year-old who will never ever ever never ever never ever come back here. And I will give you ten pieces of delicious turkey jerky.”

“Make it twenty pieces and I’ll put on a convincing snarling and lunging act but not bite you,” said the big galoot.

“Twenty it is,” said Huleekalabulee, shaking out twenty pieces of turkey jerky from his saddlebags.

“Yum,” said the big black dog as he chowed down. “By the way, what’s your name?”

“My name is…” And then Huleekalabulee remembered Butch and Garth’s advice. So instead of saying Hulee etcetera, he said, “Hercules.”

“Bit of advice,” said the big black pointy-eared devourer of jerky. “With a name like Hercules you better be one mighty strong canine or lots of dogs are gonna try to kick your butt.”

“Thanks for the tip,” said Huleekalabulee, hurrying away. “I’ll definitely consider alternative monikers.”

Boody Boody Ba

Tags affable brown mutt, fable, fresh pile of poop, Huleekalabulee, old mutts, short story, The Dog Who Wanted A Person, Todd Walton, turkey jerky, Under the Table Books, What are you…Hawaiian?