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.
