If he’d had a sister, things might have been different. As a girl, she would have known about other girls, and could have clued him in on all sorts of magical approaches. Patrick had a sister. Her name was Melissa. She was thirteen and ugly. Patrick said there was nothing in this world uglier than a thirteen-year-old sister.
“Sure there are, plenty of things,” he said.
“Name some.”
He tried to and failed.
Melissa weighed more than Patrick did. She played tennis and basketball and field hockey, all to win. Melissa took tap-dancing lessons. She had special tap-dancing shoes, whose soles were overlaid with heavy metal at the toes. You could hear Melissa tap dancing all over town, Patrick said.
Patrick also said Tim shouldn’t feel bad about not having a sister.
“What they do is,” Patrick said, “they use up all the hot water. Plus, they’re always having slumber parties. Once I told my mother I wanted to have a slumber party, and she acted like I was a pervert.”
Patrick said he had to shave three times a week—except his cheeks were as rosy and smooth as a baby’s behind, no matter what he said. Everyone in Patrick’s family had red hair. Patrick’s father had only a little rim of red hair trailing around behind his ears. Patrick was resigned to being bald, eventually, he said, if he lived long enough.
This summer, Tim and Patrick planned on hiking the Appalachian Trail. They would start at Mount Katahdin in Maine and keep going until they hit Georgia. He hadn’t told his mother yet. She’d only start worrying about a bear grabbing him out of his sleeping bag and swallowing him whole. Or, in her mind’s eye, she’d see a knife-wielding weirdo hanging out in the men’s room, ready to spring on the first sixteen-year-old innocent who came in to take a leak.
“You want to hear about the hundred and fifty Spanish dudes in the Pyrenees who wanted wives?” Patrick asked. “I read it in the paper.” Tim didn’t bother to answer, knowing there was no way in the world he could stop Patrick from telling him about the hundred and fifty Spanish dudes in the Pyrenees who wanted wives. Once on course, Patrick was rarely, if ever, deflected.
“They’re all lonely bachelors, see, so they decide they’ll advertise in the paper for wives, the way they did in the olden days. They put in this ad saying they’re looking for a hundred and fifty women to marry. Next thing you know, the Pyrenees are swarming with a hundred and fifty dames rattling around, looking for the lonely dudes who’re looking for wives.
“Then, you know what happened? Those dudes keep hanging out in the local bar and grill, as always, tossing horseshoes, leaning on the pinball machine, all like that, chewing the fat. Paying the dames no mind at all. Next thing, the girls get disgusted and take off to where they came from, without so much as getting pinched, even. And the dudes are left high and dry and as lonely as ever.” Patrick shook his head sadly. “That’s us, Tim,” he said. “Lonely bachelors who don’t know squat about what makes the fair sex tick.”
“Hey, speak for yourself,” he told Patrick. “I’m into writing love letters.” Until he’d said it, he hadn’t actually decided.
“The price of stamps just went up, and you decide to start writing love letters.” Patrick rolled his eyes. “Your timing stinks.”
“I said I was into writing them, not necessarily mailing them.” It was definitely helpful to talk things out, to put stuff into words to get a clearer picture of what you were thinking about in the first place. He felt as if he’d taken a giant step in the right direction.
“If you’re going to write those letters, you have to send them to somebody. Else you’ll be just like those Spanish dudes—all talk and no action,” Patrick said.
“That’s my middle name,” he said.
“And there’s always the possibility of breach of promise,” Patrick told him. “That’s when she sues you because you promised to marry her in writing and then you backed out.”
“So who’s talking marry? I only want to be pals. Honest, Patrick, you should read some of those old love letters. Those guys were full of it. A lot of sensuous desire was going on back then. A lot of heavy breathing. Hearts and souls and Death with a capital D. Carriages pulling out at dawn.”
“Hey, hey.” Patrick looked interested. “Do they cover whips and studded wristbands and black leather?”
“You can’t have everything,” he said. “But some of the stuff they put down on paper is so outrageous you wouldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t dare write some of the things they write. So I invent.”
“You could always copy,” Patrick said.
“Copy?” The idea had been noodling around in his head. Copy. “But somebody might sue me for plagiarism. If you copy something word for word, that’s plagiarism, isn’t it?”
“We’re talking love letters here, son, not stuff for publication. All those cats that wrote the letters are daid, right? You’re not planning on publishing their letters for money, passing them off as yours, are you? So what’s your prob?” Patrick’s shoulders brushed the tips of his ears, and his palms turned upward as he made his point.
“I read in the paper about a kid who entered a short story contest,” Tim said. “He copied a story O. Henry or somebody famous wrote, copied it down word for word. Then he signed his name and entered it in the contest.”
“What happened?”
“He won first prize. The judges liked his work. They thought he showed talent. Thought he should be encouraged to make writing his life’s work.”
“Smart judges,” Patrick said. “What was the prize? A trip for two to Australia?” Ever since he was little, Patrick had wanted to go to Australia to try for a ride in a kangaroo’s pouch.
“I don’t know. But, to follow through, some guy pointed out the story had been written by O. Henry, or whoever it was, and the judges found the story in a collection of famous short stories. Then they called in the kid’s father and the kid admitted he’d lifted it verbatim from the book. ‘OK, so I stole it,’ the kid said. ‘So what?’”
He and Patrick shook their heads. “Dumb,” Patrick said. “Really dumb. And arrogant. How arrogant can you get?”
“They can’t send him to jail for trying, can they? I mean, no money was involved.” Tim had checked the paper for a week after, looking for some follow-up, but there’d been nothing.
“They might give him ten years for trying,” said Patrick. “Either that or take up ditch digging instead.”
“Patrick?”
“I’m listening.”
“What do you think your soul looks like? If you could see it, I mean, what would it remind you of?”
Patrick considered. “A hard-boiled egg.”
Trust Patrick.
“How about yours?” Patrick wanted to know.
“I think mine might look like a laser beam.”
“Try telling Sister Mary Teresa that.” Sister Mary Teresa was the nun who had instructed them both in catechism before they’d made their first communion. In addition to having them commit the Ten Commandments to memory, as well as the Hail Mary and the Lord’s Prayer, Sister Mary Teresa had kept them in line by intimidation and sheer strength of will. Sister Mary Teresa was small but fierce, Tim recalled. One look from those little dark eyes and you knew you’d done something requiring penance, even if you couldn’t think of what it was. Three decades of the rosary might fix things up, if you were lucky.
Patrick said he had it on good authority that Sister Mary Teresa was a midget. A tall midget, Patrick said. No matter. When Sister Mary Teresa laid one of her tiny hands on you, for whatever reason, there went the ball game, so to speak.
Still, they tried.
The memory of Danny Brennan running off at the mouth about Sister Mary Teresa, when Danny hadn’t known she was around, was still fresh in their minds, even though it had happened long ago. Danny had just gotten warmed up, telling about Sister Mary Teresa being arrested for shoplifting, not knowing she was approaching from the rear on her little cat feet. The expression on Danny�
��s face when he saw her was memorable. She propelled him before her like a hostage, and when he emerged from her office, Danny Brennan was a beaten man. You didn’t fool around with Sister Mary Teresa, if you were smart.
“Yeah, actually, I was thinking of engaging Sister Mary Teresa in a philosophical discussion about souls and stuff,” he told Patrick. “I have to get my act together first, though.”
“I’d hate to have to hang around until you get your act together,” Patrick said.
Chapter 7
“Hey, Sophie, how’s tricks?”
He couldn’t believe he’d said it. Last night he’d tossed and turned, trying to get what was to be his spontaneous witticism just right. It seemed to have lost something in the translation.
Sophie looked startled and ducked her head so her chin was almost resting on her chest.
“Remember me?” He’d sworn he wouldn’t say that. “I was mowing the grass next door when you sat on Benjy. I let you out of the bathroom. Remember?”
He’d blown it. No two ways about it, he’d blown it but good.
“Oh,” said Sophie, remembering. “Yeah. Sorry I got mad. I was pretty uptight. I can’t stand to be locked in anyplace.”
She raised her head and looked straight at him. Her eyes were gray! And all along he’d thought they were blue. Amazing! Absolutely amazing.
“My brother locked me in the closet when I was really little, and I can still remember the feeling of panic. I always panic when I’m locked in. I’m claustrophobic, you see.”
“How do you do on an airplane?” he asked, impressed by her easy use of “claustrophobic.”
“I’ve never been on one. And maybe I never will. I fight it, but it’s no good. I’m not afraid of anything else,” she said defensively. “Just that one thing.”
“That’s OK. I’m afraid of snakes and porcupines.”
“You are?” He could see he’d hit a nerve. Already she liked him better. God, if he’d known that would do it, he could’ve thrown in a few more things he was afraid of. Roller coasters. Girls. His little voice told him, “Quit while you’re ahead.” Maybe she’d like him now that she knew he wasn’t Attila the Hun. Nothing like sharing a few phobias to cement a friendship.
Sophie wore a red-and-black plaid shirt made of some hairy fabric. He longed to reach out and touch her, to get the feel of it—the fabric, not her. But he was too smart for that. He knew better than to touch her. This girl would take a lot of getting to know before he knew her. If he ever did.
“Hi, Soph.” A girl wearing a sweater about eight sizes too big for her stood there, looking at them, her eyes curious. “What’s up?”
“Nothing much,” said Sophie. The girl tapped her foot and twirled a piece of her hair around and around, never letting her gaze drop. “This is my friend Barbara,” Sophie said. He nodded at Barbara, who nodded back. “This is Tim.” Sophie concluded her introductions, addressing the words to the air over Barbara’s head. His heart soared. She knew his name!
Later, eating lunch in the cafeteria, he told Patrick, “I think I might have a crush on her.”
“It’s all those letters you been reading.” Patrick checked out a banana for black spots, which freaked him out. “They’d give an aardvark ideas. Shooting you full of sensuous desire. Man. What you do now is, you ask her out.” Patrick popped part of the banana in his mouth and discarded the rest. “That’s what you do when you have a crush on a girl. You ask her out.”
“Where do we go? And how do we get there?” Tim wanted to know. “I don’t have my license yet, and even after I get it, I’ll bet my mother will still be there in the passenger seat, wringing her hands and jamming on the brakes every time we come to a red light. She’s always afraid I won’t see it and I’ll go right through and cause a five-car pileup. Probably she’ll be in the passenger seat on my first date, too, keeping her eye on me. My date will be stashed in the back,” he ended mournfully.
“Entirely possible,” Patrick agreed, making him feel worse. “Mothers are everywhere. Ask Sophie to the basketball game. Tell her you’ll meet her inside. That way you won’t have to pick her up or take her home. Or buy her a corsage.”
“A corsage!” he almost shouted. “Who wears a corsage to a basketball game? You are some weird dude, Patrick, you know that?”
Undisturbed, Patrick said, “All you have to do is sit next to her and you both watch the game. You don’t have to talk to her or anything. That way, if you don’t like her, or she doesn’t like you, you’re not out any bucks. If you meet her inside, she has to pay for herself, right? OK, so right away, you’re ahead of the game.” Patrick snapped his fingers, pleased with himself. “Then, after, if you guys really interface and all, you ask her if she’s thirsty. She says yes, so you buy her a Coke.”
“Patrick, you are so full of it.”
“In my other life,” said Patrick smugly, “I had plenty of dates. I was a regular Don Juan with the girls.” Patrick was into reincarnation. In his life before this one, he said, he’d been a doge in a palazzo in Venice. “You shoulda seen me in a gondola,” Patrick bragged. “Singing ‘O Sole Mio,’ sailing up and down the Grand Canal, and fighting off the crowds of señoritas crawling all over me.”
“There aren’t any señoritas in Italy, Patrick,” he said. “You’re sure it was the Grand Canal? Sounds to me like you’re confused.”
Patrick grinned. “Hey, it was me who was there, not you, Tim. You had to be there. Seeing is believing, right?”
Patrick could make you believe anything. Almost anything.
“Whatever you do,” Patrick got back to the matter at hand, “don’t go steady. If you go steady, then you have to start going to her house for Sunday dinner, start sending her corsages, making nice with her old man, remembering her birthday. Stuff like that. It gets really involved.”
“I haven’t even asked her to a basketball game yet,” he said. “You’re moving too fast for me.”
“The thing about love letters, you have to ask for ’em back after you break up,” Patrick sailed on without a pause. “I read that somewhere in one of those girls’ mags that Melissa gets. You’d be amazed what you can pick up from them. Otherwise, if she doesn’t give ’em back, the love letters, I mean, she might show ’em to her friends, and they’d have a field day, laughing up a storm at all the dumb things you wrote, and word would get out that you’re some super cluck and, boy, would they make fun of you! You don’t want that to happen, do you? The best thing, Tim, is not to write her love letters, just call her on the phone and talk lovey-dovey all you want. That way, unless her old man’s running a tap on the phone, it’s only your word against hers.”
“What if I write love letters to her and she won’t give ’em back when we break up? And how can we break up when we’ve never had a date?”
Patrick shook his head. “If she refuses to return your letters, she’s not worthy of you in the first place, Tim.”
“Man,” he grumbled, “this has to be the shortest courtship on record! One minute I’m telling her to meet me inside the gym to see the basketball game, the next she won’t give me back my love letters. What do I do now?”
“You’re on the fast track, son,” Patrick told him, patting him on the back. “But you got yourself into this mess, you get yourself out.”
Chapter 8
Saturday morning his father called to say he and Joy were going to the driving range to hit some golf balls, did he want to come along?
“Sure,” he said, not really wanting to go. “Sure, that’d be great, Dad.” If it’d been just him and his father, fine, but Joy made him self-conscious.
His mother had gone to an auction with Kev. He wrote a note telling her where he’d gone. “A thousand greetings from yr. loving son,” he signed it. Seeing as how he was her only son, there’d be no confusion there.
Silently he stalked through the house, imagining himself a pirate out for the plunder. The stereo was old and not worth carrying. The camera was an unreliable
Polaroid. The silver was plate and also heavy. His mother had no furs or jewels. About the only thing worth stealing was his bike, a sixteenth-birthday present from both his parents. They had chipped in to buy it for him, which fact touched him greatly. A touring bike, complete with aerodynamic saddle, easy highroll pressure tires, and a fully lugged hand-built frame; it was so beautiful, he was almost afraid to ride it, for fear it might get banged up. That bike was the Rolls Royce of bikes. He kept it polished to a high gloss, and he had had the best lock made to lock it up anytime he took it out. If he had his way, he’d also install an alarm system on it, rigged to blast off at the police station if someone so much as laid a pinky on it.
His father said they’d be around for him at about ten. He had almost an hour to kill. He scrubbed out the shower stall, his weekly chore, and swabbed down the kitchen floor for good measure. The kitchen was, by his lights, the nicest room in the house. He had helped his mother hang the wallpaper, which was bright and cheerful, and together, they’d done a good job.
Chores over, he hit the book. As he took the stairs two at a time, he thought, somewhat sheepishly, that the world’s best love letters had become an obsession with him. Whenever he settled down with them for a good read, he was swept away on a tide of feeling that no other book he’d ever read had produced. He felt almost as if he’d written those letters himself.
One he liked in particular. He had its place marked in the book so he could turn directly to it without wasting a moment. Now he read it aloud to an empty room.
“I am at your tiny feet, beloved—I kiss them, I roll myself under the soles of them and place them on the nape of my neck—I sweep my hair with the places where you are to walk and prostrate myself under your footprints.”
Crazy. A foot nut. A foot fetishist.
The writer of the letter was Franz Liszt, composer, pianist, born 1811, died 1886. Franz Liszt, lover boy, writer of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody. A pianist of note at age nine. A true weirdo.
The Love Letters of J. Timothy Owen Page 4