It would be some time before she'd be ready to leave.
I took out my IPhone and looked at some pictures of her. When I was a kid, no one would've so confused the functions of phone, camera, and computer.
I looked at one of her when she first came to my home outside San Luis Obispo. She stands by the gate in the light California spring rain. The mist makes the steep hills seem to lose resolution and dissolve. Everything around her is green and blooming. Her cab has just driven off. She wears blue jeans and a white blouse.
Feeling a bit sad and regretful, though it was less than a year ago, I launched the video. Again I watched as per instruction she bends and takes off her sandals, the flip-flops she'd worn to fly across the country.
Again, the gate swings open and she walks in.
She stops just far enough up the drive for the gate to close. She unbuttons her blouse, she wears no bra and pulls down her jeans and white panties. She leaves her clothes by the side of the drive.
Again I watched as I often have, her walk up the damp black asphalt, passed the rhododendrons, beds of camellias, daffodils and iris, passed the magnolias and cherries. The drive up to my house was quite beautiful. As she walks, her fine white young flesh gathers a coating of mist and she glows.
Her walk and the video end with her climbing the steps to my front door, waiting a moment, bare feet on the wet stone, before ringing the bell.
I remembered when I first saw her. I've nothing but memory of that moment. As I had plenty of time, I turned the memory over in my mind and let it play.
Only 3 weeks separated that walk in the rain and my first sighting of her.
In memory, I again parked the rental and looked at the long narrow street of townhouses. I was not there by choice entirely. I had sudden business in the dreary little city that was the reason for being for the working class suburb in which Dave and I'd grown up and been friends. Some confluence of sporting events, March madness? an unexpectedly important Nascar race? I don't know. had swallowed most of the hotel space. I'd had a choice of paying a lot for a poor room or staying with my high school and college friend whom I hadn't seen in twenty years.
It was a near thing. I hadn't seen him since his divorce. He'd come west on a visit that had been more his idea than mine. He'd been pretty broken up. He'd made a bad choice of wife, she'd been ambitious and he couldn't meet her expectations. They had 2 little girls. I introduced him to the pleasures I'd grown fond of since I left school and started to make real money. He'd taken to them like a drowning man to a thrown rope. As it turned out the rope came from some not so cheery metaphor, one not involved with rescue, cement blocks figure prominently.
When he returned home, well, to his sad new bachelor digs, he took with him the name of a club. I'd paid for his membership as it was outside his reach.
The detective his wife employed followed him there and took pictures. Faced with the prospect of a scandal that would've cost him his job, he gave up all visiting rights to his children.
Dave'd always been shy and awkward and to be frank, only average in intelligence. That was probably why we were friends back then, I was just the opposite, smart and personable and arrogant, though it's not really arrogance if one's abilities are real, is it?
After the divorce, his shyness and awkwardness remained, but he lost his glad good humor. When his parents died, his mother of cancer, his father shortly after from sadness, he moved back into their house on the block that'd been our stomping grounds as kids. He lived there pretty much as a recluse.
He kept in touch, sending Christmas cards and when his company got email, the occasional message. I replied to neither kind of communication.
In the course of arranging to stay with him, I was surprised to learn that he'd moved a year or so previous.
A light snow fell, one of the many reasons I'd left the Midwest, and it was hard to make out the numbers on the townhouses. I got out of the rental and walked by maybe 2 and found his. I walked up the short brick walk and pressed the buzzer.
She opened the door.
I had never been so surprised in my life. She was such a pretty girl, simply dressed, a modest maize colored blouse tucked neatly into her jeans. Her jeans were simple and crisp and very very blue. She wore no makeup that I could see or jewelry. Her hair was lustrous brown, cut so it made a lively cup of her pretty face. I prefer women's hair to be long, of course. The only imperfection on her oval young face with its ample warm lips, green eyes and fine eyebrows, was a small pale lump just just by her nose. I wouldn't've noticed it if her face hadn't been so close to mine. I stared at it like it was the only explainable thing in a world gone mad. Her feet were bare.
I thought, he must've gotten back in touch with his daughters.
She said, "You're Dave's friend Leo! I'm Jane. I'm Dave's well, his, his girl friend." She blushed.
"Come in please," she went on, "Dave couldn't get out of work early, it's month end." He was an accountant. "He'll be home soon. He's so looking forward to seeing you. He's told me a lot about you."
She showed me into a little living room. "Would you like something to drink?"
I managed to say I wouldn't mind a beer. She went through the dining area into the kitchen. Where she was, things seemed to be in sharp focus. Where she wasn't, I had only the sense of a vague blur.
"Let me get your things from your car. Which is it?"
"It's a blue Lexus. It's two doors down. There's a suitcase in the trunk."
"I'm on it," she said, taking the keys.
She walked out the door barefoot though there was a good 2 inches of snow on the ground. I went to the window and watched her stroll to the car like it was a summer day. She was slim with a very nice bottom. I watched her pop the trunk, get my suitcase, and roll it back to the townhouse.
My surprise had surpassed its previous record, set only moments before.
Her feet were quite red when she came in. Though she brushed them on the mat, they left narrow wet footprints on the gleaming wood of the little entryway. "Here, I'll show you your room."
I followed her up the stairs and was shown the sort of cramped second bedroom you'd expect to find in such a place. If it weren't for Jane, I'd've been regretting my choice big time.
I thought that if I had a week to spend there, I'd've surely been able to lure her from Dave. As it was, I only had the night. I had to meet with someone the next day and then had to fly out the next evening. Not much time and I felt desperate.
"The bathroom's there," she said, pointing, there was just the one. "I have to see to dinner. Make yourself at home."
She went downstairs. I followed shortly and leaned against the kitchen doorjamb. She had a pair of steaks marinating. I could smell baked potatoes in the oven. She was preparing artichokes to steam. There was lettuce and tomatoes for a salad. There was a pie, rhubarb I noticed, on the counter. There was her.
We heard the garage door trundle and a car door slam. She waited just a moment then opened a door on the other side of the kitchen just as Dave walked up the steps.
"Hey Leo!" he shouted in pleasure as he came in. "Great to see you."
I had eyes only for Jane and went through the business of greeting my old friend in a perfunctory manner. I did notice that he seemed to have regained some of the good humor he'd had when we were young. She took his coat, hung it, bent and picked up a well worn pair of slippers. Dave of course by this time had me in a bear hug so she had to wait.
While Jane went back to work on dinner, we had a beer ("I see you've a head start," he said).
They had a grill on a little patio out the back door. The patio was still snow covered. There was a shiver of cold air every time she stepped out to do something with it. Her feet left tracks from the door to the steaming grill. For me, the air around her wavered and shimmered with heat.
As I watched her, Dave brought me up-to-date on matters local. He seemed to have gotten back in touch with everyone. I learned, well heard, about who's plumbing business was doing well, who's aluminum siding work had dried up, who'd been laid off and was flipping hamburgers, who'd been laid off and found no hamburgers to flip, who was now married to who and who they'd been married to before.
This was not at all what I wanted to know. I wanted to know how in hell Dave and this wonder had gotten together. I wanted to know what could be done about it. I wanted to know if she was the evening's entertainment. I wanted to fuck her. When Dave'd come out to visit me, I'd arranged for a friend's girlfriend to keep him company, the guy was mad at her and spending the week with Dave was one of her punishments. I didn't think there would be any other girls tonight, just Jane. Would Dave be a sap and share?
I wanted to know if they were happy and what could be done about it...
I'd been growing increasingly dissatisfied with my companions. I suspect they'd always played along with me from a mixture of my personality and my power and my money. It'd never used to bother me. If I thought of it, I assumed the balance was heavily weighed towards the former. Now it bothered me.
Dinner was quite good. We sat at the table in the cramped dining area. She served, then stood behind Dave with her hands clasped behind her neck. Her shoulders lifted and pulled back her firm breasts. That sweet pair pushed plainly against her blouse, bobbing slightly with her movements..
"There've been changes in your life," I observed, "You've moved for one. I thought you'd never leave that house out in Tallmadge."
