September 22, 2007--Saturday Story: Crazy Rona--Part Four

In Part Three Lloyd continued to drive relentlessly north toward Amherst where he was to join an accrediting team at the University of Massachusetts. In the passenger seat was his administrative assistant who continued to tell him about her childhood. And a sad one it continued to be. He, it must be admitted, had other things in mind and thus was eager to get to the Great Western Motel where he had reserved a room for her. With the rest of the team he was booked into the Amherst Inn; but never managed to check in because, after a disappointing dinner at the Asparagus Valley Roadhouse, he found himself with Rona at the Great Western and she had already agreed to remove her sweater. So in the endlessly and inexplicably delayed Part Four, we find them . . . On the drive back to New York it was clear that something had changed. Rona no longer talked about her childhood or life in her garment bag; and though as we drove she was curled up into a ball as she had been on the trip north, as we headed south into the rising sun, she was this time curled up not against the door but against me. It would not be inappropriate to pause here to ask what had happened to bring about this literal turn of events. It would even be fair to seek to take a step backward to ask what I had been up to, luring my assistant away on an overnight trip whose purpose had nothing to do with work or any kind of assisting. Though this occurred at a time well before there were work practices and even laws that forbade this kind of miscreance I was still placing my association with the university at considerable risk—innuendoes, flirtations, even an after work drink or two was one thing, but a night at the Great Western in Massachusetts was so across the line that if it became known I would yet again have been forced to resign; and this time, with my reputation so shredded, would likely have needed to change my name, create a new professional identity for myself, and consider going back into the family’s sheet metal business. It would also be appropriate to ask what Rona might have been thinking. When I invited her to join me to play a questionable, quasi-professional overnight role 200 miles distant from N.Y.U. she must have suspected that my invitation was about something other than work. And, if that is true, what would have possessed someone as smart and savvy and talented and worldly and beautiful and young to have agreed to run away for two days with someone so desperate, so out of shape, so disheveled, and so old? You would need to ask her; but if you were to ask me, I would speculate that she too was desperate in her own way and sensed something about me, beyond my being her boss (though that too must have come somewhat into play) that made me attractive to her in spite of my softening body and by-then well thinned-out hair. While I confessedly was attracted to her obvious bodaciousness and dreamed about the possibility of getting my literal hands on that (I feel compelled here to be ashamedly honest), as a person mature-beyond-her-years she must have been attracted to, well, at least interested in my other qualities. Perhaps, if you press me, she might have been thinking I was capable of hearing her, she in her youth would have put it that way. Perhaps she could have been imagining that she could get me to take in the facts of her life and by deploying my interpretive and analytical capacities (I had been, she knew, quite a Blake scholar after all and before that had been a pre-med with an interest, maybe a slight talent in psychoanalysis). I might thus have become a sympathetic and even helpful supervisor, friend, or . . . lover. And through that long evening, night, and chilly dawn up in Amherst, sleeping almost not at all, perhaps I did not entirely disappoint Rona either as a lover (again you will have to ask her) or as an emerging friend; because during our lovers’ pauses, which because of my limitations grew longer and longer, she, actually we, continued to exchange stories that we felt defined our lives: Rona told about how, because she felt like an emotional and biological alien within her seeming family, when alone she had rummaged through every nook, cranny, cupboard, and drawer in their house seeking the adoption papers that she hoped would prove she was not of their progeny. I in turn told her about how I grew up in an extended family so suffused with superstitions and fears of illness, doom, and death that at a very early age I was assigned to be custodian of the cemetery plot where every weekend during the growing season, on hands and knees, I was expected to crawl among the occupied and still empty grave sites to search out and exterminate all infestations of crab grass and choke weeds. In riposte, as we surfaced gulping for air from our tangled sheets, Rona reported that when she began in fifth grade to manifest signs of severe depression, since her parents denied the evidence manifest right before their eyes (it was then that for the first Rona time began to explore the possibility of retreating to her closet), she was forced on her own to find a psychiatrist who might agree to take her on as a client. And though it was difficult to exhume incidents from my life to match this story of sadness, I did manage to pull one up from my deep subconscious and told her about how, in grade school gym class, I met with continuous public ridicule because of my overgrown and underdeveloped body—how Mr. Schurr, recently returned from military service where he was reputed to have been a sadistic drill sergeant, would bellow for all in the school to hear, especially the girls after whom I was beginning to lust, “You [meaning me] with the sunken chest, throw your bird-boned shoulders back and try to stand at attention.” And though I quivered close to tears as I recounted this twice-weekly humiliation and she pulled me close to comfort me in her arms, in truth I sensed she wanted me near so I would not be able to see her smiling at the patheticness of my kiddyhood tale of woe; and while cradling me thus she told me how after the psychiatrist failed to help her and the garment bag did not adequately provide shelter from her demons, she affixed herself to the Italian family next door, the Nostras, and effectively became their sixth child; and by doing so, absorbed in their love and through them coming to understand she was not Crazy Rona, she began to rescue herself. And though I had no equivalent tale of escape, I did tell her finally about my lifelong pursuit of happiness—about how when I found the courage to stammer to my father that that would be my life’s goal; and in response he asked, after asserting that being consistent and responsible were pursuits enough for any man, he asked more than rhetorically, “What does happiness have to do with anything?” And how, though I had a ready answer then—“Everything”--until now my pursuit had not yielded very much. After these soulful confessions, by the morning, when we had no choice but to rouse and mobilize ourselves, I had begun to hear her and maybe muttered a response or two along the way that indicated that whatever her attraction to me might have been she had not been entirely self-deceived. And I realized that, in spite of myself, I had been attracted to more than just Rona’s flesh. Thus, if that morning you too were heading south and had passed Rona and Lloyd on the highway, and had looked through the driver’s window at the couple, us, in the car next to yours, and then if you had slowed down enough to enable you to see a much young woman nestled against a much older man, you would have been mistaken to assume that something untoward was going on. Instead, you should have more appropriately concluded that you had stolen a glimpse of something quite rare--the emergence of happiness. Go figure.