A Knoxville Love Fable
by Jack Mauro
Note: For our second annual summer fiction serial, we turn again to local author Jack Mauro. Over the next five weeks, he'll be spinning a tale of romance and happenstance, constructed entirely of local materials. Don't try this at home. The story starts now....
Enola Tyrwhitt is hopping down Gay Street. This is ridiculous.
She had been lazing on the cool grass of Krutch Park, and a bee had seen the tender sole of her left foot as a threat, or as a sexy flower unwilling, when push came to shove, to commit. Miss Tyrwhitt did not perceive this attack as a deliberate one. Not at first, anyway. But the circumstance of her innocently reclining figure, the one foot resting on the opposite knee, the sun on her face and arms and bare feet, was nearly a still life. Aside from the serene closing of her eyes, she had made no movement. Yet the bee came, the bee stang, and so she wonders. While she hops.
Enola's demure Civic Hatchback is several blocks away, irritatingly stationed at a meter up Gay Street. Several blocks is hundreds of hops. Occasionally she executes a sort of bouncing walk, by means of allowing the ball of the injured foot to glance off the sidewalk. But this is even more ungainly than the hopping, less speedy, and certainly more painful.
This is a late Thursday afternoon in the modest Southern hive of Knoxville, Tennessee. In July. Thursday is a business day. But July is summer, and summer is greedy. It is not content to rule the weekend, and wants dominion over the industrious days. Were the season a month or two longer, it just might get it, too. As it is, Thursday or no Thursday, people are out of their offices and seeking the urban equivalents of fragrant hay to sleep upon, and cowherds and milkmaids to flirt with. People are out, on the street, in the park, nowhere and everywhere.
Do these people look at Miss Tyrwhitt? They most certainly do. The attention is a little late in coming and sluggish when it does—this is the sort of summer afternoon when the sun is revenging itself on the earth for some old and unknown insult—but they look. Older witnesses take her in and conclude: a shard of glass. A few more green of the idle spectators, the less creased of skin and more saggy of clothing, think: a bad trip. All at least silently mouth, poor girl. Then both old and young look away, embarrassed for her and ashamed of the laziness or fear that makes coming to her aid out of the question. Miss Tyrwhitt is not embarrassed, though. Whatever sense of appearing ludicrous she felt she projected was discarded before the first dozen hops had been made. That is the good thing about pain.
Meanwhile.
Drew Morrigan is dashingly inclined in a doorway to a building long closed up. He is a tall and well built foundation to waves of magnificent black hair. One wants to applaud what one can make out of his torso, for not many upper bodies could hold their own in comparison to what one can tell is an extraordinary duet of masculine leg. A dimple, and he would be a cartoon. He has in his hands the day's newspaper. Propped against an artificial stone column, classic statuary in living color himself, he unfurls it. He is reading the first paragraph of a story of indictment at a local level when his eye is caught by something odd. He can see and ignore the heads across the street; they move steadily along the top of the page. But one head is calling for attention by virtue of bobbing. There it is, there it isn't, there it is. This head is a duck in a carnival shooting gallery. Drew lowers his newspaper.
The scene from overhead—were a local news helicopter cruising the skies for signs of earthbound human interest—is geometrically wonderful. It is a peach of a visual story. Dot Drew crosses the street and times his progress to intersect with the bouncing dot of Miss Tyrwhitt. The points stop where the points meet. Then they become one fatter dot and resume. Borne like a bride in the stranger's arms, Miss Tyrwhitt reaches her car via the gallantry and excellent thighs of Drew Morrigan.
At eye level, several spectators applaud and someone shouts, cryptically, "Y'all go easy, now!" from a passing car. So it can be seen that there was nothing for the two to do, then, but marry. Enola Tyrwhitt had found her soul mate.
But there is one more view to be taken of this scene, beyond that of the imaginary aerial and the earthbound and real. Squint hard, squint long, and there it is.
It reveals the Knoxville downtown as it would reveal any downtown when a bolt of love strikes: as the slot machine island in a monstrous casino. Everyone, absolutely everyone, is pumping coins into any one of a thousand one-armed bandits of love. Enola Tyrwhitt is the innocent girl who slips her money just once into her own and brings forth a rolling, clanging victory, the ka-ching! of the blessed, a triptych of three cherries. Bells sound and electric whistles blow. And everyone in downtown Knoxville looks to see the winner, smiles at her, and silently congratulates her or hates her or both. Then everyone feverishly digs for more quarters.
It was early July, blistering July of 1998, when the stinger of the bee set into motion the hops and romance of Enola's love. June would have been more right. June is for weddings, for romance. July is merely about sex. But the timing, though inverted, works nonetheless, because romance waits behind sex like a great singer in line to audition after a flashy and bad one.
The grand mystique of true love is decorated with littler puzzles, like a mysterious lady draped in many strange scarves. Of these a genuine corker is that so completely fulfilling a thing—which we know true love is—should need its own press corps. It's usually the flimsier emotional states that demand attention, that cry out for recognition. Yet love ... love likes spotlights. It wants publicity, and lots of it. One must tell of one's love, tell it to many, and in so doing gather responses envious, pleased, bored and banal. Real friends should be relied upon to deliver the happiest, the most selfless, affirmations. Sometimes, they even do.
Elizabeth Birchleaf is Enola's best friend. The bee was on a Thursday, dates with Drew occurred on Friday and on Saturday. Sunday is then a best friend day of no little urgency. It is in fact so imperative an occasion that its absence might well render Enola's soul mate an extended and gratifying delusion. The telling of it to Betsy will pour in the cement, make it solid and real.
The young women are brunching at Cozymel's, where Kingston Pike explodes into a riot of commerce. The idea was Enola's. They could eat, then loiter past the premature sweaters on display at the West Town mall shops. Then, in the rather distinct scheme of the loved and therefore more loving Enola, they might be bad girls and go for drinks. She wants Betsy to have at least two more drinks than she herself will have. Betsy will need them to share the glow, the high, Enola already possesses in her dewy and newly won heart.
"Oh, I just love Mexican crap." Betsy Birchleaf. At 25, she is mistress of an irony too complex for anyone to understand. She doesn't like Mexican food. She doesn't hate it, either. But a part of her doesn't ever want to like it, or be known as someone who does. So she says what she says.
"We'll have the bread pudding after. It's the best."
Betsy's eyes, blue-gray and beautiful and chronically narrowed, become twin dashes of scrutiny at her friend upon this remark. She knows. If the lack of contact from her friend for the last two days hadn't revealed it, if the softly glassed-over patina of Enola's eyes didn't give it away, this exalting of sugared dough into something magical said it, and said it loud. But Betsy will ask nothing until the subject must be discussed.
The waiter comes to their booth. He could be 15 years old, so coltish are his limbs, so clumsy his movements. Yet he carries himself above the neck very suavely. His eyes are insultingly confident, his crooked smile worldly. His face exudes a masculine power completely at odds with the gangly and unnaturally long limbs below it. It is, as young people themselves used to say, bogus.
These are two good-looking women in their 20s. At his table. It is still July, the dark cool of the restaurant's interior notwithstanding. The boy is on several thresholds at once, and all of them are dangerous.
"You ladies ready?" This is said as though the checkpad in the boy's hand were a gold cigarette case, and said directly to Betsy. Slim, small Betsy. She has a heart-shaped face evocative of a fox and of no other creature, and an ash blonde bang topping it. Like the visor on a suit of armor. Betsy is an unholy Joan of Arc on the field of men and women. She doesn't turn her head to him, just yet. She instead looks at Enola. Who would really prefer her friend not destroy any males today, if at all possible. Not today.
"What's your name, honey?" Four hundred lashes bat twice at the young man. Who answers as though the question were for a time and place.
"Buzz. My friends call me, 'Buzz.'" The boy registers his own words as nearly illegally seductive. It is not so bad to be out in the working world, he thinks.
"Tell me," Betsy says, now keeping her gaze lethal and level, "Buzz. Do you have anything here that isn't Mexican crap?"
Pen and pad dropping to the sides of his evolving frame, the boy suddenly emits a few gusts of air. What is expressed through this is a combination of surprise and admiration, liberally peppered with fear. He is furiously thinking of a reply that will be both clever and further his impossibly slim chances of attracting this woman to him. Late adolescence runs to the edges of cliffs fairly often, not having seen many plunges.
Enola then does what is almost rote when she is out with Betsy. She blows a genteel whistle. "Can you give us another minute? Thanks."
The boy departs, the amused weariness of his expression and his shaking head wildly incongruous with the sparse beard upon it. Enola smiles at Betsy, who smiles in return. What Betsy sees across the booth is a face like a sweet meadow, absolute innocence punctuated by a slight overbite, a few freckles on a very nice little nose, and limp chestnut hair over a brow customarily pulled into a puzzled, delicate furrow.
Betsy says then, as she has many times before, "Yeah, yeah. OK. I'll be good."
An hour later. Over fried something as an appetizer, over quesadillas of chicken, over the famous bread pudding, the story of Enola's new love has been in the wings like a Mambo band both women are expecting to appear after dessert.
Before putting her fork down for the last time, Betsy runs its tines over her lips when she is aware that the waiter is watching her. She has not been good. She had coyly brushed non-existent crumbs from her chest when the boy cleared the table. She tossed her hair and threw her neck back, a petite Rita Hayworth in Tennessee, several times. She has in the past hour steadily reduced the boy to the consistency of just about any filling in any dish on the Cozymel's bill of fare. He will talk to friends that evening about women, and with a jaded mistrust more usually apparent in middle-aged Europeans sipping cognac.
"Betsy," Enola begins. "I haven't told you what I did all weekend."
"Let me guess. You fell in love."
"I fell in love!"
Betsy lifts up her arms and holds her palms out, a woman seeing the light, a girl struck by a miracle.
She says, lovingly and laughing, "Well, no shit!"
Next week: Men talk about women, Olive talks about men.
June 27, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 26
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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