A tired grey morning rain, boarding the elevated train in Chicago, reaching up to grab the strap, standing shoulder to shoulder. She shoots a fast glance as the train lurches forward and our shoulders touch. Decides I’m safe. Leans down to keep scrolling her phone, shakes the red hair from her face. The train slows, a seat opens, I invite her to sit down with my eyes and a nod. She does. And from the packed aisle of the train, no one moves to sit next to her. She looks up at me and with a tiny smile of amusement and with a shake of the head asks the world, “Was it something I said?”
So I sit down next to her. Shoulder to shoulder. Lightly grazing thighs with the rumble and clank of the train on down to the center of the city. She looks up from the phone. I am remembering your smile. Perhaps, she sees me and wonders about a grandfather she never knew as we touch shoulders. What’s the old man smiling about?
Then the train doors swish open and I hear the rain, I’m back in Paris with the water washing down the gutters of the ancient stone streets that flow, like time, down the hill from the gleaming white Basilica Sacre Coeur. I smell coffee that lights up the morning and like Holly Near once sang, “frees my soul and I ain’t ready to grow that old.”
Once again, I am six hours or so from sitting down next to you on the steps of the Basilica, gazing out together over Paris in the mid day sunlight and saying the absolute most profound thing I could come up with at the time, which was, “Wow.”
At which point, you looked over with only enough interest to smirk, “That was deep.”
A few seconds passed, you got up, paused to look at the rippling city in the sunlight below, stretched, and I almost believed, like McMurtry once said, that it really was possible to fall in love with someone while they were stretching.
Being pretty good with the more primal of life’s needs, I remember saying something about being hungry. Probably something dumb like, “Know where you can get any good French food around here?” Then, and this is a mystery I still never have and never will, till my very last breath, figure out, somehow we were in a café, there was wine that amazed, and cheese and fruit and sausage and the afternoon shadows were falling in a way that marked our Paris as the one of centuries past.
We never stopped talking.
My new book had just come out. I remember reading you stories out loud. I remember telling you instantly the truth in the story about how the Blonde had come back with coffee and croissants one spring morning and announced, “Roger? I’m a Princess. I just thought you should know.”
The Princess was soon gone. Vanished except for the way she hovered over so many stories. And now you’re gone too.
Which is why it’s so strange that you keep coming back and filling in what’s between the lines of all these new stories.
But back then? I thought that loving someone enough meant that eventually they’d change.
And of course that doesn’t happen.
So the city lights dimmed. And you stayed, until it was time, for both of us to go.
And as much as I sang and wrote and wrote about all those mysteries you never believed in, I never imagined you’d come back. I never imagined a sequel.
Till right this very second.
The Chicago train swishes into the Grand Station, the red haired woman gets up and wonder of wonders, leaves a smile for her imagined Grandfather, me. She smiles at me and there you are. That smile like a sequel. That smile brings you back.
From the smoky mists that rise from the fires you lit, in a story called “Pale Grey For Guilt” John McDonald’s timeless hero Travis McGee writes a letter to his future,
“ . . . and now and again, when she is asleep and you are awake, and your arms are around her and you are sleeping like spoons, with her head tucked under your ugly chin, pretend it is ‘me’, who loved you.”
Even right here in this story, the young girl leaves the train. And you came back.
Something like hope. When the rain stops on Easter morning.
There is a sequel. You came back.