It Had Been Years (2 page)

It is not uncommon for such a thing as affairs and trysts to happen in a town built on greed and deceit with a hint of the public well being thrown in just for good measure.  Most men in this city or for that matter most men of power have liaisons from time to time at the very least.  In just a few hours she would introduce her lover into a world that he may have never even imagined. A world so deeply hidden from most
who
knew her that she gave him acceptable wardrobe recommendations and told him where to meet her and her companion.

She was not the kind of woman you would introduce to your mother.  She was not the kind of person who would give a fuck about ever meeting your mother or anyone else for that matter. 
Nadrea
was everything you expect from a fetish sex kitten, nothing different and nothing more.  She was the adult version of a trust fund kid, the fully grown spawn of a successful Wall Street investment banker.  She was pretty but even when dressed in a somewhat demure manner her look is still exotic and edgy; 5’5” with dark reddish brown hair and a thin but curvaceous build.  Life presents so many of us with choices and we must decide who we become.  Since money has never been an issue to her,
Nadrea
has chosen to become the only thing she knew how.  Perhaps it was lack of hugs and parental affection, or it could have been the that no one ever treated her as just a little girl, but almost always she was catered to as if she were a princess.  She grew up with a magnificent view of Central Park from her bedroom and Fifth Avenue from her family room, and of course she attended only the finest schools.  She never took the subway although the station was just a few blocks away.  But the family took a driver in a black
Mercedes ,
as a family they did not take the subway or train, not even once.  Such things were just not done!  Not long after her escape from New York to American University it became obvious that D.C. would become her home.

D.C. after all would add a measure of safety to her world, large and diverse enough to fulfill her desires, a short hop back to Manhattan if needed and most importantly distant enough from the prying eyes of her advisors, father’s friends, and associates.  All of who she was most certain had their own demons that were well hidden from sight.  She was not as certain that she could or wanted to hide her lifestyle from plain sight and housekeepers who would inevitably become friends by working across the many different family residences and would undoubtedly discuss her less than modest proclivities.  Her brownstone was, of course, in an affluent part of town in a predominately gay neighborhood.  She was not
gay,
perhaps Bi Sexual at times, but she most often preferred the company of men.  The home’s three stories stood there in a stately
fashion more akin to the past than the present.  The interior décor excluding one bedroom and the entire third floor was a traditional Colonial American and English.  Many of the portraits had come from a friend who was redoing an apartment on the Upper East Side.  Tens of thousands of dollars of art would be wastefully discarded if it were not otherwise passed to her to adorn her walls. These were images of people and places long since gone, from an era long since past.   Her tastes certainly didn’t fit her lifestyle, but it was elegant none the less.    

Nadrea’s
life had been filled with unrealistic expectations and social pressures, all of which came from being a child of two outwardly successful and high profile people.  Her father found Wall Street to be a playground and the fortunes and egos such a place can create are so vast they are beyond the imagination of most ordinary people.  His was no exception.
Her mother had no soul, a strange characteristic for an educated woman who had dedicated her life to healing others,  it’s
not that she didn’t love her offspring, but showing a kind and patient love can be an awkward thing for a person so driven,  it was best left to those more capable or paid to do so. 
Nadrea
had been a bright girl but lacked the desire to deal with such trivial things as a parent’s reluctant attention
.
Her friends were few and far between and if anything her best friend growing up was not of the New York elite, but Sam who was the son of their single parent door man, Billy.  

Billy always spoke to her.  Perhaps spoke was the wrong word…he talked to her, he listened and kidded.  He was as much her friend as anyone.  He knew she was a lonely awkward child and he knew because he was much the same at her age. Sam, Billy’s son would be around throughout the days in the summer coming and going without purpose and with a pleasant youthful abandon. Her time spent with Sam was simpler, it was refreshing, it was never about possession but about doing things, going to the park, playing ball.  Once on what she considered to be an especially daring day they left the island of Manhattan and crossed into each of the other boroughs by train or by cab.  She had never left her part of the city to go to its other parts except for journeys to see her Grandmother on Long Island Sound or on weekends at the family’s summer house in the Hamptons.  It felt as if she was seeing strange new worlds with each stop, each new cab ride.  She
marveled at how busy and a city unto itself Brooklyn Avenue seemed.  At last, they found themselves in a small pizza place between a laundry mat and a Chinese owned nail salon on Staten Island.  Feasting on thin crust pizza and stealing glances at each other.  Sam was wearing jean shorts, Blue & White Nike Running shoes, and a Yankees T-shirt that was large enough to fit his father. She was in her black short shorts from
Banana Republic
, a Brooks brothers ladies Golf shirt and her favorite Prada Sandals.  The pizza was perhaps the best she would ever have and often when the subject of pizza comes up she would remember the day with Sam and how good the pizza tasted.  Sam could always get her to be braver than she ever intended and he ordered up Calamari for them to try.  The appeal for him was it was something he imagined would connect her world to his.  Little did he know that she already felt connected and such a simple thing as food could never bridge the gap between their worlds any more than his friendship already
had.

On the One train back up from Battery Park, most likely somewhere around 37
th
street, while the city was nearing dusk on a cool early summer day she got her first kiss, kind of.  In actuality she gave her first kiss by leaning over toward Sam,
Nadrea
found hers lips gently touching the side of his face and ever so close to the edge of his mouth.  As she pulled a way, heart pounding, flush with excitement, Sam turned and gently brushed his lips across hers, slowly and softly returning the favor and confirming his interest in her.  That night he held her hand for the first time as they walked back from the station.  What an adventure the day had been, she had traveled through the world in the lap of luxury but never even explored her own world, taken the subway so randomly, sat in a pizza parlor or wondered the streets of Yonkers aimlessly.  Queens was decidedly working class and not all that she imagined a place with such a royal name to be.  Life would not always be so nice, so simple, and so gentle to her, but this day was.  It is the one day she thinks of most often when she is alone.  She wonders what might have been, and fondly recalls her time with Sam.

Sam’s father Billy at the end of that summer took his leave as doorman and moved to Philadelphia to take over his father’s janitorial supply company.  The father and son moved to the end of
the mainline in Philly and as the business grew had the American dream for themselves upon the return of the prodigal son.

Nadrea
went back to the shallow world of wealth and found others to keep the company of, but none of them could ever be Sam.  Most were not gentle and honest, most were not kind and giving, no one would ever hold her hand as she walked off the train again.  She simply wouldn’t allow it.  That was something that she reserved for herself and her memories of that first kiss with Sam.    

In D.C. she took the metro everyday despite the fact that she never needed to and almost always and without fail she could be found closing her eyes and taking one slow deep breath before walking out on the platform and closing an empty had on
itself
.  She was thinking of that day with Sam.  Like most people with their first and second loves in a large and ambiguous pasts she wondered did her ever think of her.  At least she could count on his remembering
her,
of that much she was sure.

Robert was a native of the great state of Nebraska.  As fate would have it, he didn’t literally grow up on a farm, but he was raised on several of them.  One of six kids, he was the only son of
a
agriculture broker.  His native land was mostly home to buffalos and Native Americans before it was descended on by European settlers.  He loves his home state, not with the pride of a lawmaker or man of power, but with the pride of a native son who truly believes that it is the best place on earth to live.  Lincoln and Omaha were far cries from the streets of the D.C. metro and ones on which he was far more comfortable.

Only in Nebraska could one of the 20 largest cities, the word city is loosely used here, more of a town really with a population just under four thousand. A town where by 20 on average all but nine girls that age have moved away, some to other towns, or places like Omaha which offered the allusion of size but many of the comforts of home and a very daring few who went to places where they could truly be anonymous.  At the same time the town’s population of women between seventy and one hundred was 476 women who had largely made their lives and raised their families here, a lot of widowed women would never find another to share their companionship with based on the fact that the men died young here, dropping off dramatically after the age of sixty.  There were only two hundred men in the same age range of those women, and their grandchildren were leaving en masse especially the girls.

He knew the corn business inside and out, he understood the cattle business but hated it. The smell, the cruelty, the deranged and maniacal series of gates used to herd cows through large filthy yards to the slaughter.  Did they know?  Could they tell?  They had to smell the blood as they drew near, complaining in loud disturbed moo’s.  Corn didn’t need to be killed.  Had he actually grown up on a farm, he would have realized that animals were meat and we were meant to eat them.  He would have raised capons and chicks, calves and lambs only to sell as food or butcher them and eat them himself.  Had he actually grown up on a farm, he would have
participated at 4-H events and attended Future Farmers of America Meetings and socials would have been a given. 

Fools who think food comes from supermarkets without blood sacrifice and surrendering their lives for our sustenance never lived on a farm, never suffered through a dry year or herd filled with disease that would put the family’s modest income in peril.  These are the people he loves, that he serves, that he longs to get back to each time he arrives for session.  He’d rather be sitting at the Main Street café in Lincoln, talking with the local farmers and worrying about how much rain they have or haven’t had.    Fishermen always seem to tell fish tales about the one that got away.  Farmers do much the same
thing with rain, especially when it’s dry
, embellishing an eighth of an inch here and quarter of an inch there.  Sitting in a local place in the morning after the work had been started and the day had begun fueling their bodies for the long days in the fields that were to come, the endless puttering and hoping that entailed farming.  They
laughed,
joked and spun tales to keep themselves entertained and amused during the unrelenting journey that is a life.  All while farming to feed an ungrateful and presumptuous world; walking the delicate line of which farm bill would be passed when by mostly useless bureaucrats and what it meant to their lively hood.  Farming was at first only for one’s subsistence, then for their towns and now is dominated by conglomerates that have all but swallowed the small family farm into its ranks, preying on bad years buying farms out of bankruptcy and taking away generations of memories.  Sending those families to toil fulltime in other businesses that dot the landscape, giant retailers, home improvement super stores.  It is the corporate equivalent of trading beads with the natives before sending them to reservations to keep the problems to a minimum and the trouble well off to the side.   These are his friends, the people he tries hardest to please.  The place he feels he belongs.   Home is a far cry from the crime, failing schools and misery that is most often associated with the nation’s capital.  Lincoln is a simpler place with mostly genuine people and enough size to blend in, but small enough to always have a friend around the corner.