Every once in a while I feel a love story coming on it’s like nourishment.
I don’t even remember who shot JR about that summer but I remember everything about first time I saw Ted, same summer, he was the friend of Uncle Roberts’ son who my parents had met on their previous visit to Coleraine and said if ever you come to Canada…
I was driving a blue pickup patchouly laden not quite a flower in my hair but colour, probably, and smoke – I was a glass-blower for a neon company – and he was fresh out of the military a clean cut lad of undiluted Irish descent and high colour, exquisitely blushed, square when I hugged him he smelled of soap, something lavender, he later said he was suddenly overcome with the thought I might lead him astray, my speciality. Perceptive guy.
We raced around the airport like a car chase I could’t find my way out and when I did I got on the wrong road it opened up like an invitation, sang like the Salem witches, but I came out of it just in time did a highly illegal turn and a couple of hairy minutes later we were on the right road going the right way, Alex Harvey’s rendition of Delilah loud from my dangling speakers. I lit a cigarette and smiled over at Ted who was colourless, shaken, but he smiled in a genuine way and his spreading mouth whispered Heavens to Murgatroyd as if he were a hundred years old and I just fucking howled.
My parents were waiting, they had his room, my old one, ready and had “scored” tickets to the Tutankhamun exhibition the following morning and were anxious about the jet lag so they said bring him straight here we will feed him something light and they didn’t say and bore him to death but certainly it was their intention to dance him through the house, a dark tango, his visit a sudden murder ballad.
I saw the light on the night that I passed by her window.
I ended up staying on the couch, I had no work scheduled the next day, Ted said can’t you come? and my mother said there are only three tickets and I said I can sneak in and went with them, I snuck in, such a cinch although the gates were heavily armed and I had the feeling my mother was going to turn me in – she disapproved so heartily of me I was not the daughter she had hoped for, nothing demure about me like the pictures she got from her sister, her two little girls Prim and Grim I called them – but we had the most wonderful day if you can believe it in that tomb it was like my parents suddenly approved of me they laughed instead of tsk-tsking my mother didn’t shake her sad head even once, and on the way out, Ted opened the crook of his arm for mine and looked at me in a way I’d only seen in movies.
