Saturday, February 14, 2009

Perfection.

Together, hand in hand, they went out to the Avenue at about a quarter to closing. Only steps up the street from Oxford's there was a doorway with a step up. She said,

"Here!"

He said,

"Fine."

They stood in the doorway which was only deep enough for them to stand facing one another in before the glass door to a small lighted foyer. He leaned his back to the stone lentil.

"Here?" he asked with a grin.

"Yes."

She looked up into his eyes. Her beautiful face was extraordinary with its smile that was at once shy and sensuous; hungry for him she was so completely eager to play. She looked up at him from such an appealingly bashful downward glance. His own look was confident and ready, looking down with his mouth curled in a grin of unhurried expectation. He was waiting for her embrace.

It was just a moment and then she leaned her whole body up against him in something like a fulsome physical sigh. Their fit was so complete. He was just that much taller than she; she was just that slight when he laid his hands over her hips and her lips came up to his. Her small hands, her slender arms hugged his, drawing their two bodies even closer into one another.

Their eyes were closed for a long moment and then again hers were laughing.

She murmured her satisfaction,

"Oh, I like that, I like that, I like that! It was as good as I thought it would be."

It had been entirely sweet and wet and dark and warm and wonderful.

He grinned possesively with his hands caressing up to her waist and down to the tops of her incredible legs, until his finger tips felt the warmth and tenderness of taut tan thighs and asked,

"Good enough to try again?"

Her eyes promised there would be many agains and she told him,

"Carla."

Her name was Carla.

"Charlie," he laughed and asked her, "How perfect is that?"

Her laugh agreed that together they were that and immediately she pressed her whole body and self tighter against him once more. Her face filled the small of his chest and shoulder, her hands found the space between his broad and bowed back and the rough texture of the stone.

"How could anything be better, Charlie?" the breathe of her words was warm through the fabric of his shirt.

Their eyes had met only moments after arriving in the bar at a little after ten.... "No one goes to Oxford's before ten," they'd been told. "Nothing much ever happens on the Avenue till after ten."....She had the most extraordinary legs - not long but shapely and firm and evenly tan below a short, flaired skirt that was gray and white plaid and pleated around; his hair was kind of crew cut but not so severe and he wore an open dress shirt with brown pin stripes over a black tee and tan trousers, no silly baseball cap or sloganed shirt.... He was already at the bar with his friends ordering their first round of drinks; she was coming in and being led by the hand to the other end of the room by her decidedly plainer looking friend when they exchanged a look in the single moment that they had before losing sight of one another in the crowd. It was a look that made certain neither would hook up with anyone else before finding one another for a second time. It was a glance that said, yes, that's it, that's what I want! coy and dazzled on the one hand and completely self-certain on the other. They continued to glimpse one another near and far through the crowd as they moved about the room and the evening wore on. Each time the look made was the same look and the same promise that, whatever else they would be experiencing over the course of the evening, they were meant to approach one another and come together.

When they did, it was a little after one. He had the most wonderful voice and opened with just the right and funny thing to say commenting on all the odd people there seemed to be about them in the crowd. She knew immediately what he meant and said she had been thinking just that same thought though they both agreed the crowd at Oxford's wasn't a half bad crowd. But, just the same, they laughed, it had its share of those who were, as they agreed to call them, undecorative people. Standing together they found these and those whose shapes and sizes, clothes, hair and skin art they found laughable. "Now, he should never come out in anything like that...!" "I would never, ever be seen ....!" All the while, their eyes were on one another, too, discovering finenesses and exchanging anticipations they didn't need to speak of. All the while she was thinking how it would be to feel her fingers not nearly reach round his arms, how her cheek might nestle beneath his wide shoulder. He was imagining the softness of her lips as his own pressed down on them, wondering how her breasts that seemed so right would feel pressed against the abs he had worked so long to harden.

And, then, just at the same moment, they both stopped trying to speak. And, their eyes, having taken one another in all over, met just as the words and music around them chorused up and out in an expanding bright burst of song.

"I can see me lovin' no body but you
For all my life..."

The song so agreed with everything they were feeling and thinking about one another that it seemed some sort of confirmation and miracle. It said to them both Yes! and Now! and it drew the smiles that had never left their lips wide and their hands together in unison.

The crowd even seemed to open for them as they made their way out to the street, toward the light outside.

"The only one for me is you,
And you for me,
So happy together,
So happy together...."

Their embrace was seamless and went on and on as song followed song from the bar mingled with talk and laughter. And, then, while they still embraced and kissed, the music ended and the talk and laughter were left alone to mingle only with the rising and falling choruses of traffic on the Avenue. The sidewalk filed and emptied with one departing crowd from the bar after another, too, as they continued to hold one another and kiss.

Everything in the night around them was wholly outside of them and their absolute pleasure in eac other.

"Chuck?"

Charlie's best pal, Chris, was the one who came closest. The others had all walked on and were gathered up the street knotted on the curb away from the dark buildings to wait while Chris lingered after Charlie.

"Godda go, pal!"

Maddy, Carla's friend, waited alone patient but abandoned leaning back against the dark glass of Oxford's front window the other side of the entry way. Her purse dangled between her legs and swung in slow time with her gaze down upon it.

Parted, even by the briefest space, Carla and Charlie felt so suddenly incomplete. For long moments they could only look at one another with sad knowledge.

But, then, their smiles returned. His was that total certainty, self-assurance; hers that sly hunger. His hand touched, grazed down her arm and over her elbow; her hand reached up and traced his shoulder.

"I have to...." they both said.

And they both laughed sadly.

"Yeah," he said.

There were backward glances after that and, each time, they found that they had both had the same urge to find one another for one more look.

Charlie's Brooks had parked in the lot behind Oxford Square, half way down to the Starbuck's end of the block beneath the low hanging branches of a tree. Maddy's car was around the corner at Lola's in Wilmer Street. Brooks drove them out on to Oxford where there was no traffic and the light at Monroe was green so they turned toward the expressway with out stopping once. Maddy turned off of Harper on to Goodman to take the two of them to her apartment over on Alexander where she was putting Carla up a few days.

The others in Brooks' car made only a little small talk at first. It wasn't until they were at the light at Canterbury that Chris, beside Brooks in the front seat, smirked,

"Leave it to you, Charlie!"

The half-hearted laughter in the car made Charlie shy and he didn't say anything in return.

The darkened and silent side streets kept Maddy silent and it wasn't until they were at Park Avenue that she commented,

"Only your first night in town...." with an implied smirk.

Carla was curled kittenishly down in the seat beside her.

"And I didn't want to come out. Thank you, thank you!"

Her friend was so clearly still entranced and had spoken so sweetly that Maddy had to feel a bit less left out.

"You two seemed to really hit it off," she said with far less irony than she might have spoken with only a moment before.

Brooks wasn't too busy taking the car up to the overpass to say with a glance into the rear view that couldn't have found Charlie in the corner of the rear seat,

"You two seemed pretty hot and heavy?"

Charlie really wasn't feeling yet like talking. He only said,

"It was hot."

Chris caught the mood his friend was in, if the others didn't.

"She looked quite the girl," he said.

Charlie found himself saying, knowing how it must sound,

"She's everything you could want."

Carla confided,

"He was just what I needed. He was perfect."

Maddy had turned down Park and into the dark of the tree lined section of the Avenue toward Rowley and Meigs and, then, Alexander. Her friend's good fortune was, again, a little wearing and she was silent.

Davlin wanted to know,

"Could I get her number?"

"No!" Charlie said, decidedly and not with any of the usual humor.

And, somehow, Chris understood then that Charlie hadn't either.

"Did you get her name?" he asked.

"Carla...." Charlie remembered.

"Carla....?" Chris said and waited but Charlie said nothing more.

Maddy, in her mood, almost said,

"Too bad you're only here a few days."

"An address?" Chris wondered, feeling he had to smile now despite himself.

When there was only a complete and total silence from the rear seat, Chris did smile, he even laughed.

"Perfect!"

Friday, February 13, 2009

Yeah, Right!

Last Tuesday was slow for Steve but got a little slam bang there for a while at the end.

Afterward he came home to 640 Monroe with a sack of grub from Dog Town and decided to check his mail on the way up to his room.

The only thing was a blue flyer from Chase Bank down the Avenue.

Something like two hours earlier, at the end of the afternoon, he had been rushing to finish some correspondence and found, when he logged off, that he had only a half hour to make it to the P.O. down on Broad Street and post his package.

A do-able walk, he had told himself pushing through the heavy door at the foot of the stairs and going out through the one step across lobby along side those self-same mail boxes to get himself out on the street, Monroe.

And, then, whuddayuh know? there was a No. 7 bus just pulling into the curb at the corner in front of Lola's.

It wasn't there for him; he'd only just come out on the street. But he hardly had to run to catch it.

The doors opened and a passenger descended to walk off immediately and disappear. The doors closed. But he got to them just as, tapped on the glass and was admitted to ride.

It was a day warm for February, last Tuesday, even if the sky was all over gray and it would have been both wonderful and worth it to walk but, now, with this fortunate convergence of himself and a bus, a dollar fare would leave no question of his getting his package to Virginia off on time. Catching the bus was the right thing, he told himself, while No. 7 growled out into traffic and made for downtown.

Seconds later the bus was slowing again as it came up on the red light at Goodman. While they were still moving, beginning to slow down and just passing Enright's Thirst Parlor, Steve noticed out the window on the right a cop couple on stroll patrol shoulder to shoulder going the bus' direction out on the sidewalk. Without cap or coat, the two were blue straight-arrow models for a Police Academy poster this fine afternoon. He was tall and slender and she had her hair tied back and, with her hands together on her belt buckle, her shoulders squared.

The two of them were such remarkably fine young officers Steve want to comment on them. But this was a bus full of weary looking late afternoon riders and no kind of audience. All were filling their seats like sacks and staring slumber-eyed straight ahead of them to no where.

The bus, held up at the light behind other traffic, wasn't quite at the front of the Chase Bank at the corner and the young cop couple over took and passed it. The light went green just as the boy/girl patrol turned smartly in through the glass outer vestibule door in the bank's cropped off Goodman/Monroe corner where the ATM resides.

And, just at the same moment, with the bus crawling out into Goodman gaining speed, Steve saw that there were two police cruisers parked up along the curb just before the Goodman entrance to the bank's parking lot. A funny thought occurred.

"Y'don't suppose they knocked over the bank again?" he spoke out loud.

The somnolist in the first forward looking seat on the aisle managed to look around where Steve indicated. His hang down face had that patient, enduring look of all veteran bus ridding, health clinic visiting folk.

"That'd be third time this year," Steve suggested.

Something like a smile came to the traveler's face after all. An appreciative smile, Steve thought it. These days who wouldn't smile at the thought of a bank being robbed?

The ride downtown left Steve off just the other side of the Inner Loop overpass in front of the Strong Museum. Across the way the steel construction frame for the new office building going up on the corner of Woodbury was already part of the high rise sky line of the downtown City of Rochester behind and above it. The girders were that rust brown and the building frame was a huge new playground Jungle Gym appropriate for a spot across from a Museum of Play.

Steve cut across through the museum grounds. The new skating rink in front of 10 Manhattan Square was a shallow artificial pond once more in the fair for February weather. The thought occurred to him that, when the inevitable next freeze came, he'd want to come down here after dark and take in what the rink looked like with lights all around it and the magic midtown city looming above it against the night sky.

There was a line at the post office but he had come in plenty of time and his Valentine package went off to Herndon, VA, with assurances that it would arrive well before Saturday.

After, he stood out in front of the office and decided to go home by Alexander Street and Park Avenue. He was still thinking he might walk up Park and revisit Stevers candy store for a little late shopping for more local loved ones.

Instead, he turned down Rowley and came home to Monroe that way putting his shopping off to the morning when he would have letters to Penn Yan and Bloomfield ready to go. He was still, then, thinking he'd go home and make a healthful salad for his supper but, then, after he had walked home, he decided instead to walk on up to Dog Town and treat himself to Italian Sausage and an order of fries.

"That for here or to go?" he was asked.

"Go," he said.

There was a plate of home make cookies on the counter as he had hoped there might be and two looked like Oatmeal Raisin.

The Canine Commune was busy and several orders were in ahead of his for the Meth Head crew in the kitchen back of the counter to fill. The end of the counter toward the door was especially crowded with others waiting for food to go and the tables toward the front windows and the door were especially full of customers dining on dogs and burgers.

Steve was about to pass the time taking in the place's gallery of art, at least the framed photographs of dogs on the walls away the crammed front of the place when he overheard some one ask,

"Which bank is this?"

"Chase Bank, down here...."

One of the owners was standing with his back to the wall in the gap at the end of the counter along side the menu sign that describes the Town's specialty dogs.

"...Cops were through here lookin' for the guy. Asked me had I seen anybody suspicious, anybody run by here?"

The owner looked all non-plus.

"People run by here all the time," he said. And, making a further face, added, "Who don't look suspicious?"

"Whole neighborhood looks suspicious!" one of his listeners agreed and the laughter continued.

"Third time this year," Steve spoke up.

"Second time for this one guy!" he was told.

Steve was thinking about what had been said about the neighborhood.

"I was in Exxon one morning," he related. "Guy comes in there complaining to a cop having coffee that this dude talking to himself was back out there up the street again. Cop said, 'You're going to have to be more specific.'"

It got a good laugh. They were a good crowd and knew Monroe.

When Steve came home to 640 and checked his mail the only thing in his box was a blue flyer from the Chase Bank. If he opened a checking acount with them, the bank would give him a hundred dollars.

"Yeah, right!"