Hello rest of my life, p.1
Hello, Rest of My Life, page 1
Hello, Rest of My Life
Copyright © 2021 Rick Lenz. All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photocopying form without written permission of the publisher or author. The exception would be in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles, or reviews and pages, where permission is specifically granted by the publisher or author. Although every precaution has been taken to verify the accuracy of the information contained herein, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for damages that may result from the use of information contained within.
Chromodroid Press
ISBN: 978-0-9848442-6-5 (Trade Paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-9848442-8-9 (eBook)
Maps by Linda Lenz
For Linda
Also by Rick Lenz
North of Hollywood
The Alexandrite
Impersonators Anonymous
“The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”
— Rumi
“Time is
Too slow for those who Wait,
Too swift for those who Fear,
Too long for those who Grieve,
Too short for those who Rejoice,
But for those who love,
Time is not.”
— Henry Van Dyke
1
(2021) SAMANTHA
I live with my wife Samantha in Valley Glen in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles.
I never thought I’d have it this good.
It feels, in some part of me, that I loved Sam even before I stood outside her apartment, anxious from blind date nerves.
She answered the doorbell, looked puzzled, then relieved, and said, “Not bad.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I grinned and said, “Hi. I’m Danny Maytree.”
She took my hand, smiled warmly at me, and said, “It’s nice to know you.”
You just don’t get good blind dates. At least I never did. You get: “I’ve had this flu that keeps hanging on, but it’s getting better … I think. Are you divorced?”
“Yes, a few years now,” I say.
“You’re an amateur,” says this date that won’t work out for either of us. “I’m a three-time loser, but my shrink says that’s all behind me, and he should know, I guess.”
Which she doesn’t explain.
But Samantha, who says “Not bad,” has no problems, or doesn’t tell me about them on our first date, a blind one—which is odd.
Her eyes, I could fall into those eyes.
She speaks of this and that, and so do I; it doesn’t matter because I just fell in love with her, in her doorway. Or maybe I loved her even before that.
So I came in and stayed.
One night, early in our years together, Samantha seemed to have drifted off to sleep, lying on her stomach. As I was about to turn the lights off, she said quietly, “Pet me.”
I didn’t move for a few moments, trying to decide exactly what that meant. No one had ever said anything like that to me. Something about the confidence of that sort of command amazed me. It combined self-dominion with trust, as if in her life, when seemingly insignificant requests had been made, they had been automatically granted. And I was going to grant this one, and it felt good.
I rolled over on one elbow and gently, beginning over one eyebrow, stroked Sam’s forehead, moving my hand softly over her light brown hair to behind her ear.
At first it felt sort of odd to me, petting her, but pretty soon I fell into a tender and natural rhythm. I lightly smoothed back her hair, concentrating on doing it so that even if she were still awake, she might be almost unaware she was being petted. And I got lost in a ritual kind of affection I didn’t even know I was capable of.
I slid my right hand down to her neck and left shoulder, and as far down her back as I could comfortably reach without disturbing her rest. Eventually, I stroked up and down her left arm until I reached her hand. It was smooth, but it was also the hand of a peasant girl, made to work, to do labor. At the same time, there was a graceful vulnerability to her hand.
I studied her in the lamplight, her face relaxed and at peace. I was pretty sure she would be sleeping serenely even if I weren’t lying next to her. It was nice being a part of that peace; it made me feel calm, and I began to get sleepy.
It could have been five or fifteen minutes later when I rolled over, turned off my bedside lamp, and dropped off to sleep.
I had a bad day yesterday.
I’m working on a new novel, a time travel story that was coming along beautifully, I thought, but now it’s making no sense at all. I’ve painted myself into a corner and I don’t see any way out of it. I had stupid notion on top of stupid notion, and for the rest of the day I couldn’t let go of the careening thoughts and sensations that reminded me of my loose cannon younger days when, as often as not, I employed the whole nest of my malevolent emotional demons to steer my life. It feels as if I’m trying to bludgeon the story in my novel with identical finesse.
Before dawn today—it was still dark out—I woke up and started rehashing my problems, a real effective technique for beginning a happy day.
A little while later, Sam woke up and asked me what the trouble was. I told her and she suggested I try to get some more sleep. I heaved a big sigh and lay down beside her.
The next thing I knew, she was running her fingers over my head, caressing my neck, shoulders, and upper back … petting me.
When I woke up, I felt better.
Over forty years after we met, Sam and I are having our magic hour before dinner. The light is a cinematographer’s dream, the day’s toil is done, and our dog Tali is at our feet. At the moment his chin is resting on my left foot, which is getting all pins and needles because I don’t want to disturb his peaceful sleep. Anyway, as far as the three of us are concerned, all is well with the world. At the moment we’re reminiscing—an activity, I confess, usually initiated by me.
“After we’d been together a few weeks you called and said you wanted to come over and talk about something,” says Samantha. “I thought, he’s either going to ask me to marry him or he’s going to break up with me.” A whisper of sadness mixed with surprise. “And you broke up with me.”
“I was going off to do a job. I didn’t want to …”
“Leave me hanging?”
“Well, exactly. I was trying to … I don’t know, do the right thing.”
She sips her wine and says, “You probably thought I was a snob because I didn’t like that tacky restaurant you took me to where they had mashed potatoes and gravy.”
“Well, you were kinda snarky about it,” I say. “You know how you can get snarky? Well, you got snarky. Up until that night, I’d only taken you to nice places.”
“I was bummed out that night. I thought, oh God, I really … liked him but he’s … ordinary. He likes this depressing place. Maybe it hit me that way because I’d been raised in Carbon Falls—you can’t find a more depressing little patch of Pennsylvania—until I was ten and we moved out here. … And it was visceral; that little restaurant felt like scrimping and saving and S&H Green Stamps. Anyway, if you’d taken me to the Cupid’s Hot Dogs stand on the corner that night, I would have been fine. I would have been delighted. And then you would have asked me to marry you. I still would have said it’s too soon, but …” She looks down into her wine. “And then you broke up with me.”
“But none of that was the reason. You were too … nice. I remember when I got back from location in Portland and I called you. Do you remember what went through your mind?”
“Well, I was glad that you were still interested in me. ’Cause in the meantime, you’d been gone for … how long?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. “As you know, once in a while my mind and the conventional notion of time drift a little out of synch. I guess I was gone about a month.” I smile. “If you don’t count the forever before the month.”
Sam smiles back. “Yeah, well, in the meantime, I went to Palm Springs with Mike. I was sad.”
Mike was her previous boyfriend. She’d dated him off and on for ten years. He married someone else after Sam and I got together the next and forever time.
“You were still sad about me,” I say, “a month after we said goodbye?”
“Sure I was. I’d started to care about you. You broke up with me. And of course you were important to me in another way, but …” She gazes into my eyes. “Then you went off to do that … whatever job in Portland. But I thought, well, okay, he doesn’t want this relationship. I’ll go to Palm Springs and spend some time with Mike, and with my mother and Grace.” I smile at the mention of Grace’s name. Sam goes on, “I’ll … just try to get on with it. So when you called and said … Do you remember what you said?”
“I think I said I miss you. I want to see you.”
She frowns. “Yeah. So why did I come to you?”
“I don’t know, but you got in the car and drove over to my apartment.”
“Did you think it was weird that I came to you, not the other way around?”
“No,” I say. “I didn’t think it was weird. Actually, I was kind of flattered.”
“If I’d been one of those girls who was savvy about guys, the ones who know how to play all the games … I didn’t know how to do that.”
Sam says, “Well anyway, I got in the car and came to you. It shocked me that I did that. I’d always been so cautious. Having divorced parents makes you that way.” She shrugs. “It didn’t seem to matter though; I came to you. Also, I had to think of … other people. I had to give you one more chance.”
I nod. “I buzzed the front door and came out of my apartment and met you coming up the stairs and I felt like …”
Sam smiles. I’ve told her this before. “Hello, rest of my life?”
“Yeah, hello, rest of my life. Yes. That was what it felt like. It was the closest thing I’d ever felt to total … is there a word that combines relief and joy?”
Her impossibly blue eyes twinkle. “Euphoria?”
She’s joking, but I’m not. “Yes, that’s it. Euphoria.”
2
(2021) TALI
I’m lying on the floor under a skylight in the dining room of our little cottage in the San Fernando Valley.
Life is precious—maybe especially so because we survived 2020 and, so far, the COVID-19 pandemic. Above me, clearly visible in winter between the branches of an old silver maple, is the only harvest moon there will be this year. I am healthy, in the middle of writing a novel, the subject of which has run away with my imagination, and am married to a woman I wouldn’t be lucky enough to find again in a hundred lifetimes.
Tali curls up next to me, the most mystifying, inscrutable so-called dog in the world. He’s what some people refer to as a “rescue,” although I can’t imagine anything he wouldn’t do to rescue us. He seems to think that practically anything either of us decides to do is great. If you’ve ever had a pet you love almost as much as your child, you know what I mean. Tali wasn’t always that nonjudgmental. He became ours seven years ago, soon after we’d gone to the Animal Rescue Center one day, thinking we might bring a dog home with us.
When we first spotted Tali in the back of his cage, he was curled up, not quite ignoring us. It felt to Sam and me as if he was the one doing the choosing. He regarded us motionlessly for about two minutes, then slowly got up, walked to the front of the cage, and watched us for a while longer. One at a time, he looked us straight in the eye, then swung his gaze appraisingly back to the other. I’d be wrong to say that his look was human, but it was awfully close. He didn’t blink, just deliberately—it seemed—shifted his gaze back and forth between us. He wasn’t pleading; no, it felt as if he were saying, “Where have you been? What took you so long?”
His dark chocolate brown eyes reminded me of King Kong’s when he says, in effect, “How could you do this to me, cage me up like this?” Tali made one last appraisal before his tail wagged. “Okay, we’ll let bygones be bygones.” He was smiling now, unquestionably smiling. “We’re family,” he said. “Let’s go home and be together the way we’re meant to be.”
But he wasn’t available until the morning after next.
Two days later, when the waiting period was over and Tali became officially eligible for adoption, we got to the Animal Rescue Center at 6:15 in the morning in order to be the first in line at the seven o’clock opening. We both knew he was the perfect dog for us and we didn’t want someone else to get him.
We were more than disappointed when we saw that someone had arrived sooner. A well-put-together Beverly Hills type of lady. Sam couldn’t stop herself from asking her what kind of pet she hoped to adopt. The lady described Tali exactly, a light tan poodle-something else mix, maybe some kind of retriever—no one ever knows for sure—with a large irregular brown patch on his right side. Sam and I were brokenhearted. First come, first served. There was no bending the rules. Beverly Hills Lady was going to adopt our dog; there was no reason for us to stay.
We got back in our car and started our dejected drive home.
Halfway there, the Animal Rescue Center called. Tali had nipped Beverly Hills Lady, who then changed her mind. She didn’t want a dog that bit. The man at the rescue center didn’t have to ask if we were still interested. I was already turning the car around as Sam said, “We’re on our way. We want him.”
Tali has been ours for over seven years now. He’s never nipped either of us. He’s never bit anybody since that moment he was specific about whose dog he wanted to be.
Actually, we don’t consider him a dog. He’s the son we never had—a most uncommon son.
How he came to be called Tali is a mystery.
The simple explanation is that it’s the name he came with. The Animal Rescue Center produced a collar he’d been wearing when they picked him up. It had a faded silver tag attached to it. Part of whatever had been inscribed on that tag had worn off. Tali seemed to be the first part of his name; there were more letters, much fainter, after that. No one could make out what those letters had been.
The details of the story are more baffling. On that same tag was what looked like an antiquated telephone number, barely visible. It seemed to be one of those numbers that goes back to the sixties, early seventies at the latest, when they used numbers that began with a word. We were able to make out what seemed to be a CR prefix, followed by -627. We couldn’t read anything beyond that. It didn’t make sense. We think he was about three years old when we got him, so why he wore a tag with a phone number dating back fifty years or more, no one could figure out.
In any case, Samantha and I liked the name Tali, and that’s why our dog held on to the name. As for the CR prefix, I guess we’ll never know. There used to be a prefix in Beverly Hills called Crestview. For two seconds we considered calling him that, but it felt too much like crestfallen, and Tali is anything but that.
I know nothing of his backstory, but whatever it is, it’s got to be fascinating. The strangest, most singular thing about him, among many strange things about Tali, is that as much as he loves Sam and me, our home, and our life together, now and then he disappears. No matter what we devise to prevent him from escaping, he manages to figure a way to outwit us. We’ve erected various kinds of fencing around the backyard, even a wall to keep him from escaping. None of it works. There is nothing Tali cannot dig under, and we can’t keep him inside all the time.
He always comes back and he’s never gone for long—at least as I perceive time—but even as I say that, I realize that sometimes it seems as if it’s a long while. I know that doesn’t make sense. Samantha has a similar sensation.
Perhaps more bizarre than the lengths of his absences is the nature of them. They’re hard to describe. It’s as if he has not run off to anywhere in our neighborhood, or even the San Fernando Valley. Sometimes he returns with his fur covered in vegetative substances that don’t grow anywhere near where we live. One warm spring day, he came home with bright pink wild prairie roses twined in his fur. Wild prairie roses don’t grow within three hundred miles of the San Fernando Valley. Once he came home to us covered with what I was pretty sure was beach sand. Three small shells, called bean clams or Gould’s Wedges colloquially, and found all along the Pacific Coast of California, were snarled in Tali’s matted fur. We live twenty miles from the nearest beach.
Sometimes, when he gets back, he doesn’t even look like the same dog. But he is the same. He loves us the same. He acts the same, and it’s not long before the eerie feeling of his … strangeness lifts. Then he’s back to being the Tali we know and love.
The oddest single experience we had was the time he came back to us covered with mud. We have a friend who works in the geology department at USC. We asked him to analyze it. He called several days later, puzzled. We had told him that a great deal of the mud had been found caked in our dog’s fur.
“Have you been out of the country with him?” our friend asked.
