(MUSIC: GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY)
When I met her, it was at a low point in my life, the summer after I graduated from high school, when I had a job washing dishes in a cafeteria in Minneapolis. Friends of mine were going to college and I hadn't applied anywhere because I had an idea in my head that a writer shouldn't go to college, that a writer should go out and see the world and have experiences, and now I wasn't sure. Wasn't sure where to go to have experiences. Wasn't sure if I was a writer. Wasn't sure that the University would even accept me now. Thought that maybe dishwashing wouldn't be such a temporary job for me.
It was hard work, washing dishes, but not without its pleasures. There is a sense of accomplishment, of having been useful. I stood at the sink, in front of the window where people set their trays of dirty dishes, and I would look at each tray with its canteloupe rind, the empty coffee cup, the crust of toast, the remains of corn flakes, and scrape it into the garbage disposal, and feel that I had some place in the world.
And it was good to look at people as they appeared for two seconds, and some of them were so memorable --- the Sausage Woman, the Gravy Man, the Man who eats with his shirt --- and then there was her.
She was slender and dark and had black hair cut very short. She was very elegant. And older. Twenty-five, at least.
Every morning she appeared at the window and put her tray in (RACHMANINOFF) --- I looked at her orange peels, her coffee cup, one uneaten slice of rye toast, egg shells, and three strips of bacon, untouched. I imagined that she and I had had breakfast together and I imagined things I might have said and what she might have said.
And then I wrote a sonnet for her, not a very good one:
Come to my window, as in a dream,
And put your tray into my hand,
Here in this world of soap and steam,
Lady, I wait for your command.
If you smile and catch my eye,
Lady, I'll know you are the one,
You are the comet in my sky,
You shall be golden as the sun.
You shall be my moon and more,
You shall be almost everything.
I wait for you beside the door.
Come, love. Come and sing.
Sing for this May that never again shall be ours
So green, so rich, so redolent of grass and flowers.
(RACH CONTINUED)
I wrote the poem on a card and the next morning, when she put her tray in the window, I stuck the card in her hand. I gave her a sonnet and she gave me a plate smeared with syrup, and grape seeds.
It was a hard morning, as always, heaving racks of dishes onto the conveyor and pulling the racks off the other end before the machine jammed, and picking up stacks of hot plates and rushing them to the kitchen, and the cooks always yelled at me, it didn't make any difference how fast I worked. And then I took a break and suddenly, she was there. (DELILAH: LINE #1)
I'm glad you liked it. It wasn't that good a poem.
(DELILAH: LINE #2)
Well, I mean it was okay, it just wasn't the best I ever wrote.
(DELILAH: LINE #3)
You're right, it is a bad habit, apologizing, I always do it. I'm sorry.
(DELILAH: LINE #4)
Well, I don't know. I may go to the University. Or I may go to France.
(DELILAH: LINE #5)
Oh, you have? Oh. Interesting. Say--- are you busy tonight?
(DELILAH: LINE #6)
I was thinking that we could go have a glass of wine or something. I mean, if you can't, it's okay. But if you could--- it would be great. But probably you're busy. You've probably got a lot of things going on. And I understand. We could make it another time. We could do it in a couple years. Whenever.
(DELILAH: LINE 7)
You can? Tonight? You're sure?
(DELILAH: LINE 8)
See you at eight o'clock.
(PIANO VARIATION ON DELILAH THEME, ROMANTIC)
I thought about her all day in the steam and heat of the scullery. After I washed dishes, I had to wash the pots, and scrape off the hard black crusts in the bottom, but there is nothing that can deflate the spirit of a man who is meeting a woman afterwards. On my way back to the rooming house, I bought a tanning cream called Man Tan. I bought a cologne called Swank. I bought a pack of cigarettes, my first. I spent an hour trying on different combinations of shirts and pants to get exactly the right look.
I lived in a rooming house that was the cheapest I could find, and after I moved in, I found out that it was so cheap because it was sort of a halfway house for the mentally ill. The downstairs was full of older men and women who sat around all day, drowsy on Thorazine, their eyes glazed, their heads wobbly, and as I walked out in my blue checked shirt and chinos and a brown herringbone sportcoat and saddle shoes, they looked up and smiled --- even in their haze, they could tell I was going to meet a woman.
She lived in a women's residential hotel near downtown Minneapolis. I walked there, not having a car, and as I walked I lit a cigarette and practiced not coughing or choking. I practiced letting the smoke curl out of my mouth and then inhaling it up my nose and watched myself in store windows. I had seen a French man do that once in a movie. And then I noticed that I had put tanning cream on my face and not on my neck. It looked bad. So I had to button my shirt up to the top. And when I walked in the front door of her hotel, I had thought up a number of interesting conversational topics, I was ready to go in a many different directions.
We walked across the park. The cafe was in the park, beside the pond. Flowers from a wedding floated in the water.
MJ: Somebody said this was a pretty expensive cafe----
GK: It's all right. I have a lot of money.
MJ: Are you sure? There's a soda fountain at Walgreen's.
GK: No, no, no ---- I want to sit outdoors.
MJ: It's pretty, isn't it. All those tables and the candles and the white linen --- I love candles.
GK: So do I.
MJ: Do you really?
GK: I do. I think that eating outdoors by candlelight is the ---- it's---- it's very romantic. In the broadest sense of the term.
MJ: Of course.
The truth was, I had never eaten outdoors by candlelight ever in my life.
(PIANO SWELL)
We walked onto the bridge that went over the pond. There was a trail of moonlight across the water and the reflections of paper lanterns in the cafe next to the pond. At the peak of the arch of the bridge, she stopped and looked down at the water, and I looked at her, a girl in a white summer dress. An older woman of twenty-five. She stood, her arms braced against the railing, looking across the water in the moonlight.
(FAURE)
She and I sat in the cafe in the park and I pulled out a cigarette, thinking it would make me look older, so the waiter wouldn't ask for my ID when I ordered wine. I tapped the cigarette on my thumbnail, lit it.
MJ: I don't mean to embarrass you, but I thought you should know that there's a stain on your pants leg.
GK: There is? Oh, there is.
MJ: You must have brushed against something.
GK: I looked at the stain, which was copper-colored, and I could see that whatever it was, it was eating holes in my pants. And also in my sportcoat.
MJ: If you don't mind my asking, why is your face sort of brown and your neck isn't?
GK: It's an allergy. Hi---
TR: Good evening. What can I bring you?
GK: We'd like a couple glasses of your red wine.
TR: Very well. What kind do you want?
GK: You have different kinds?
TR: They're up there, on the blackboard.
GK: Oh. I see. Well, we'd try a couple of the Chabliss.
TR: The Chablis is a white wine.
GK: Right. Okay. Well, then how about a couple of the Bordooks.
TR: You'd like the Bordeaux?
GK: The Bordeaux would be good. Yes. The Bordeaux, I think.
TR: Very well.
It was a summer night. And even though I was eighteen, I knew that to sit at a table under the stars on a warm night across from a beautiful woman is an experience that a person should have as often as possible. I imagined that I was in love with her which was easy to do. She was beautiful and there was a moon out and it was summer. And any romantic love is a fiction, we know that, it's a beautiful illusion, it can't last. But I was eighteen--- fiction was all I had to live on.
MJ: I'm glad we came here.
GK: So am I.
And I was, even though acid was eating my pants and my face was darker than my neck and I was adding up in my mind what this would cost and it would be a whole week's salary, it didn't matter. It didn't matter that I would have to be at work at 6 in the morning. I felt supremely happy. That's the great thing about dishwashing --- when you're done with work, everything that happens afterward is pure pleasure. You come out of the steam and heat of the scullery and just the smell of grass and trees is sheer joy after you'd had soap up your nose. We sat at the table, looking across the pond, and I put my hand on the table so that if she wanted to hold it, she would know where it was.
(ONE FINE DAY)
GK: Is Paris as beautiful as they say?
MJ: It's like this.
GK: Paris is like this---- like Minneapolis?
MJ: It's like this night. Right now.
GK: Paris is----
MJ: Yes.
GK: This is a Parisian night.
MJ: It's just like this.
I took a drag on my cigarette. We drank our wine. I suppose it was good. It tasted good. How could it not be? And just at that moment, a white convertible pulled up at the stoplight not far away and the top was down and the radio was playing a song.
(PIAF SONG----)
The man at the wheel had his right arm around a woman in a pale green gown. She had dark red lipstick. He had long hair combed back on the sides and combed up in a pompadour in front and he turned and smiled at her and she leaned forward and kissed him on the lips.
(PIAF CONT'D)
And then the light turned green and they pulled away.
(PIAF SONG SLOWLY FADES)
And I leaned forward and I recited a poem by A.E. Housman----
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now,
Is hung with bloom along the bough.
It stands along the woodland ride,
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now of my three score years and ten,
Twenty will not come again.
Subtract from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since, to look at things in bloom,
Fifty springs is little room,
Along the woodland I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
MJ: That's beautiful. Did you write that?
She was moved by that poem. She put her hand on the table and looked into my eyes, and I put my hand on her hand and looked into her eyes. It was the sweetest thing.
GK: No, I didn't. Housman did.
MJ: Oh.
GK: But I'll write one for you.
MJ: You already did.
GK: I'll write a better one.
We ate dinner. I could feel the air on the skin of my thigh where the acid had eaten my pants but I didn't care. Drinking wine in a cafe in the city on a summer night, radios playing, the whisper of tires on hot asphalt, the whisper of voices. The night was intoxicating in its sweetness. I was drunk on the stars and the grass, and the beauty and poignance of the world.
MJ: So --- are you in college? or what----
GK: I may be. In the fall. I may go to the University.
MJ: I see.
GK: Hard to say at this point. Or I may travel.
MJ: What would you major in if you went?
GK: Oh, I don't know. English. Hard to say. I don't think it matters. I think that all that a writer really needs is experience. You can't get that out of books, you know ---- a writer has to see things, has to see war, death, violence, has to experience poverty --- how could a person write who never knew what it was like to be broke? Or be in love?
MJ: Have you ever been in love?
GK: Oh sure. I suppose.
MJ: You suppose?
GK: Like right now.
MJ: You're in love now?
GK: I could be.
And she reached over and put her hand on my hand.
MJ: You're very sweet.
GK: She smiled. "You're very sweet," is a sweet way of saying "No thank you." And that was fine. It was a beautiful night, it didn't matter that we weren't in love. We could have been.
I remember her, we had supper together a few times, I remember how she was so good at making every little occasion slightly grand, making a little ceremony out of the simplest meal. Even a cup of coffee was a ceremony. How she loved candles. Every meal deserved a candle, even if it were only a sandwich. Every meal is sacred, and every conversation over a meal is to be enjoyed. She was such good company. She was the first woman I ever ate dinner with outdoors by candlight.
Sitting and looking across the water and thinking how, though we make terrible mistakes, we waste our money, we have love and then we lost love, and all around us, such violence, such cruelty, and acid is eating our pants, nonetheless we go on.
Every summer night, the stars in the trees, the flowers, the reflections in the water, ---- Monet saw this same summer night, and Brahms, Shakespeare, and Yeats, they all saw this ----
I wrote another poem for her, years later, and didn't know where she was to send it to her, so here it is, and I hope she hears it.
Here on a warm night, drunk on its smell,
Drunk on the crickets and the starry sky,
Oh, the lovely lies that I could tell
With this moonlit pond to tell them by.
But I will remember this sweet spring night,
So lovely and to me so full of grace,
Above your head, the universe had hung its lights,
And I reached out my hand to touch your face.
I believed in impulse, being eighteen,
Believed in the foolish vision that turns out to be true,
Believed that all that is essential is unseen,
And for a lovely moment I believed in you.
All of the lovers and the love they made:
Nothing that was between them was a mistake.
All that was ever done for love's sake,
Was not wasted and will never fade.
All who have loved shall be forever young
And always walk in grandeur on a spring night
Along the avenue,
They live in every song that is ever sung,
In every painting of pure light,
In every pas de deux.
O love that shines in every star
And love reflected in the silver moon.
It is not here, but it's not far.
Not yet, but it will be here soon.
(FINAL SONG)
© 1997 by Garrison Keillor