Playtime (4 page)

So, it’s mid-morning by now, and Blaine is thinking
about hitting the sack for a nap when the doorbell rings again. He opens it,
and standing there with a pot of something in her hand is his ex-girlfriend
Renee. 

 "I heard about your accident," she
says. "Brought you some soup." 

 "Come on in," he says, opens the door
and steps aside for her. 

 "Place hasn’t changed much," she says,
heading for the kitchen, where she sets the pot on the stove and turns back to
him. She looks at the dining table, where his books lay scattered all over. "You
must be all right, got the books going on." 

 "I’m okay," he says, looking at her.
She looks hot as always, dressed in shorts that show off her curves and one of
those Tees they make for women that are softer material, with a lower neckline
showing off a hint of her breasts. She always had been sexy. She is wearing
some type of fragrance. It is light and easy on his nose. 

 She grabs bowls from the cabinet and spoons from
the drawer, dishes the soup up, and he moves some of the books to make room to
eat. The soup is more of a chicken stew, really: with potatoes and rice,
carrots, celery, broccoli, mushrooms. It is dynamite. She had always been a
good cook. And a nourishing, caring person, in her own way. 

 She just likes men too much, is what he thinks.
Her dad had left the house when she was just a baby, and she didn’t know
exactly what she was looking for, or maybe that is only his interpretation.
They had had a good relationship going; she wasn’t the most intellectual of
people, but she was smart. More the practical type. And of course,
great-looking in a distinctive way that you wouldn’t really call beautiful.
Nose a touch long, maybe, and mouth too wide. Green eyes too sharp and knowing.
But it all worked for her, and it had worked for him too. Warmed him like a
bonfire.   

 Because that was the thing about love: it blinded
you. It was a blaze that gathered so much light you couldn’t see clearly, and
with so much warmth it filled your senses, and intellectual incompatibility was
such an abstract deal that it sometimes didn’t even enter the picture. Didn’t
seem an issue. He remembers in that movie,
Havana
, Redford's character
had been as right as right could be about the important things
being
prior to, and the foundation of, language. 

 "Soup's great," he grunts as he hits
the bottom of the bowl and starts tilting it to the side to get the last remaining
dregs. 

 "Glad you like it," she says, yawning, stretching
her arms up and out in a way that lifts her breasts, and seems invitational to
him. She
is
sexy. He had asked her to marry him but she had said that
she wasn’t ready for that, didn’t want to commit. They had been living together
about a year at that point, and he had thought that they
were
committed,
but apparently not. The fact that he really didn’t have a stable income had
been mentioned after her refusal had blossomed into an argument; and after
that
she had finally divulged that she had seen another man while they were together:
two of them in fact, and the last one not very long prior. 

 She seems to be tantalizing him, looking at him
now, bringing those arms down, and he thinks how it always seems that one
person has more power in every relationship; it is very difficult to have a
50/50 deal, and if he had to say who had the power in theirs, he would say
probably she did. Though he fights it like crazy. Like right now he is thinking
about asking her into the bedroom, or just leaning over and smacking her on
those big lips then maybe running his hands all over her butt, and since it had
been him who actually kicked her out after the big fight and her revelations
about other men, then he would be going back on his decision to make a clean
break with her if he couldn’t have the type of relationship he desired. 

 It has been a long six months since all that, and
he has gotten used to his loneliness, but it took a while, kind of like
breaking a drug habit, he bets. Lucky for him he had always been the reclusive
type anyway because she had put a big hole right smack in the center of his
life. 

 "So you look good for a guy that died,"
she says. "How did that feel?" 

 "I saw a long, long tunnel with a brilliant
light at the end," he says seriously. She laughs, uncertain if he is
joking. "No, really," he says, "then I heard this voice. It
seemed like it was all around me. It was a deep, deep baritone. Sounded like
God, maybe." She is buying in now, he can see, leaning forward, breathing
a tiny bit faster. "The voice said ‘I have a plan for you and it’s not
finished. You need to go back.’" 

 "Bullshit," Renee says, but there is a
touch of uncertainty in her tone. He pauses for a long minute, giving her
sincerity, making her wonder, but finally laughs. 

 "I really don’t remember anything," he
says. "The doc says I may get some of that memory back or I might not.
More likely not, he told me, in these trauma cases. I have been thinking about
it, though, and it seems to me that I should appreciate this opportunity I’ve
been given, this second chance." 

 "Couldn’t hurt," she says. "It’s
always good to get a second chance. It doesn’t happen that often."   

 She is looking down with a strange look on her
face, and he has leaned over and touched her before he knows he is going to do
it, and when she looks up he
does
smack those big lips, and before you
can say boo they are in the bedroom, and it is like the past six months have
been a long, bad dream, and he has woken up. 

They are stretched out, touching each other now and
then in different spots, kissing occasionally, love-making done for a bit,
getting reacquainted. Blaine has that good post-coital bliss going, feels
really relaxed, but that goes away after a time, and like the junkie he speculates
he is, he needs another hit of her. So they do
that,
and then he is
really relaxed: her too, he can tell, and they fall asleep on each other for a
time and wake up. She turns on her side with the sheet trailing down off her,
and he is treated to the sight of her round, naked ass and the outlines of the
knobby bones in her spine showing through translucently healthy skin. Quite a
sight it is, and it makes his loneliness even more apparent in his mind. 

 It is afternoon by now, and Blaine rolls over to
look at her face-to-face:
hombre a mujer
.   

 "Did not see that coming," he says. 

 "Why," she replies, "you didn’t
miss me that much?" 

 "Oh, I missed you. I just thought that I had
worked through it, gotten over it. Apparently not." 

 "I took advantage of you in a weak moment,"
she says, smiling at him, licking her lips, and he kisses her again, trying to
follow that tongue. 

 "Apparently so." 

 "You were still dazzled by the light from
the tunnel." 

 He sighs. She doesn’t forget much. Not that great
on forgiveness either. "Hey," he says. "That experience has
changed me. It’s made me realize how short this all can be. That it can all be
taken away any minute." 

 "You don’t feel like fate has chosen you,
got your name now?" she asks. "Like you’re invincible?" 

 He is lying on his back, staring up at the
ceiling. "Nope," he says, "exact opposite, if anything. I feel
like I got a chance that I shouldn’t have gotten, an extra free shot. Like
maybe I ought to be more careful, not so reckless." 

 "You don’t feel like somebody up there is on
your side?" she asks, propping up on
her
side on her elbow, looking
down at him. 

 He thinks about that for a minute. "You know
I believe in science," he says. "Reasonable explanations and all
that. But I have never been able to get rid of the feeling that the universe is
not just this totally impartial, uncaring place. I’ve always felt that we’re
more part of everything than we realize; that maybe the scientific viewpoint is
only
part
of what is going on; that what is going on is bigger than that,
somehow. That maybe we have resources to call on that we just don’t realize." 

 She’s interested now, he can tell. "You mean
like supernatural things, ESP type things?" 

 "No, not really." 

 "You mean religious things? God?" 

 "No," he says. "Not in the sense
that people usually mean that." 

 "Well, what
do
you mean?" 

 "I think we’re connected in ways we don’t
completely understand," Blaine says, clears his throat. "To each
other and to everything else." He realizes he is sounding a bit whacked, like
one of those Eastern mystics. 

 "So you are thinking that maybe you called
out for help in some way when you were dying," she says, "and somehow
got an answer?" 

 "Yes," he says without thinking, then, "No.
I don’t know. I wish the memory would come back to me. Then I would know more,
anyway. It’s a funny feeling not remembering something so important. Like I
should know." 

They fight the nasty urge to get out of bed by
ringing the bell for round three of their bout, and he’s thinking that she is
way ahead on points; he will lose for certain if they go to the judges’
scorecards, so he makes the big move, and he is pretty sure he has her reeling:
a feeling she confirms after a few minutes more. Then they both fall sound
asleep again. When he wakes this time and wakes her, he can see through the
slits of the blinds that they have loved the day away, and evening is falling
outside. 

 He had been like a starving orphan chewing on a
crust of bread during round one, but his equilibrium has been reestablished
now, and he feels more comfortable when she reacts to his touch by opening her
eyes and blinking up at him. 

 "So what about us?" she asks, looking
up. 

 "I don’t know," he says, looking down. "Maybe
I was wrong to force the issue of marriage and all. Are you seeing someone now?" 

 "I was for a while after we split, but I
decided to take a break from men, get my bearings." 

 Not a bad idea, he thinks, for her to think about
things for a bit. He doesn’t trust the fact that she had never had a strong
male influence in her life growing up. To him it meant she didn’t have a real
model to compare men to, something to judge them against. So, she was
necessarily feeling her way through the relationship deal somewhat blindly. No
polar star to steer against. It wasn’t her fault, really, but in his mind it
raised doubts about counting on her. And that was what it was all about, wasn’t
it? Someone you could count on and who could count on you. All the rest of it
was just lust and empty rhetoric. 

 "Does that mean you're seeing women?"
he asks. 

 She pinches him hard, which really isn't an
answer, but he lets it go. 

 He knows he’s oversimplifying; he can feel it. He
has that tendency. He wants to pull things apart and analyze them, but a lot of
the time they are more than the sum of their parts. That was what he had been
thinking about the scientific world view, also. 

 "I missed you," he says. "It took
more than you know to break away from you. I don’t know how many times I can do
that." 

 "Let’s just not push for a while," she
says: "Just wing it, play it by ear: think about it. Could we do that?" 

 He nods, doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t want to
argue about their relationship, anyway. Whatever the future holds this day has
been one to remember. It's never too late to ruin a good thing, but he will not
do anything to ruin this one right now. He wants to post it in his mental scrapbook
just the way it is. 

She gathers her stuff up and goes, leaving Blaine
not quite the man he’d been yesterday. Nothing truly settled between them, no
real commitment still. Sexually content as a man can be, though. Something to
be said for that. 

 It feels almost as if the clock has gone
backwards, and he has travelled back in time. 

 That doesn’t scare Blaine because he believes in
time travel, like any good brain scientist does. After all, what is it when you
have a memory of an event that occurred long ago? A strong visceral memory,
like he had seeing and being close to Renee? Time travel of a sort, for sure. You
raided the past to think about the now and make plans for the future. Brain
scientists called it memory of the future. 

 That was what memory was. It was a time machine
designed to take you back into the past to someplace that had been useful to
you, someplace that would help you survive. Though sometimes it seemed like a
device made to torture you, he knew that wasn’t really so. 

 And what about a good book or novel, or a movie? The
best ensconced you in some type of virtual reality so convincing that you
momentarily forgot where you actually were, took you into the distant past or
yet-to-come future or some physical place you’d never been in "real life."
Conventional novels were usually set at least slightly in the past, using
"said" and "asked" in the dialogue, making it all a bit
easier for readers to follow. Although readers ignored that after a while: they
translated the words of conversations and books into the "gist" of it
all. Most folks had an automatic tendency to make stories intelligible.   

 And they played with time in other ways in those
media also. Lifetimes were compressed into 90 minutes. Entire eras collapsed
into an hour. It was magical the things that could be done to time. A good book
could cover the entire history of the universe. Maybe you’d be done with it in
a few days. 

 He brings his mind back to the present and his
own recent past with his gal Renee. He thinks the main thing bothering her is the
fact that he has no real steady income. That pisses him off in a big way, makes
him wonder. Is that all it’s ever about? If you didn’t bring the bacon home in
some form or fashion, no women for you, pal. But he knows it's not that simple. 

 She and her mom had grubbed along her entire
childhood. She had told him that. No dad, struggling to make ends meet, with
never enough money for nice clothes or going out with her little girl pals. So
she’s got this whole complex deal going on in her head, with the no male role
model and the poverty thing going on, except for the times when her mother had
hooked up with guys, which from what she had told Blaine, were frequent enough,
but the guys never had seemed to last, and as Renee had grown older and more
mature, at least a couple had tried to hit on her. Maybe succeeded. She was sort
of vague about that, hadn’t actually said it or anything. It was just a feeling
he got listening to her. So she had issues, definite issues.   

 Also she hops cocktails, in a classy enough bar,
sure, but Blaine knows that guys are in there hitting on her all week long and
it has always been hard for him to take. He also has the sneaking suspicion
that the two guys she had admitted to might not be the entire iceberg, so to
speak. So there’s that. 

 She says that she’s just doing it till she gets
done with school. She’s a student up at the University of Houston and doing
real well, got a 3.7 average, brighter than she lets on. But Blaine thinks it
might be a little more than that.   

 He knows she pulls down money that you wouldn’t
believe doing the cocktail waitress gig. When she told him how much money on a
good night, he had almost choked on a sandwich. God only knew what she would
make if she showed some skin. We’re such suckers, men are, he thinks. We see a
girl that looks like that, have a few beers, and we’re throwing our life
savings at her, trying to get in her pants.   

 And he’s seen her at work enough to know she eats
that stuff with the men up. Eats it up. Floating through that bar like a
butterfly, stinging like a bee, breaking it off in hearts or libidos, or
whatever, all over the place. 

 Blaine has got to admit it isn’t exactly painful
to be seen out with her. He’s walking along beside her, not really that big a
guy or that good-looking, just 6 inches or so taller than she is, but most eyes
are on her anyway, and she really is striking in that way she has, drawing
attention like a wreck on a highway. Blaine can feel the guys looking at her,
looking at him, sizing up the odds at taking their shot. Puts a little more
strut in his stride, maybe, makes him walk just a hair taller. 

 It doesn’t scare him, that’s for sure. When he’d
been a kid he hadn’t gotten the fight thing for a while. Walked away, not
because he was scared, but because he simply didn’t get it, didn’t believe in
hitting somebody. He'd been scared some, okay, but that hadn't been the issue. Just
didn’t see what it solved. But after a while, as he got older, he had seen the
way things were; that people really did take something away from you when you
didn’t fight for it. And that had been the end of his pacifist stage. He’d
enrolled in a Tae Kwon Do school for two years and learned to fight. It wasn’t
like some magic wand that made him invincible; it simply gave him a skill set.
He sparred against some pretty good people and did all right. Had a few street
fights, mostly when he’d been younger, out drinking in one club or another.
Always were fights brewing in the clubs where he drank in his younger days.
Take alcohol, add testosterone, blend well with pretty girls, and bam!   

 Of course he’d felt some fear. He wasn’t saying
he hadn’t been afraid. In his experience you always felt some fear when you
were doing a dangerous thing. Sometimes on the bike he’d felt it, or in the
mountains when he climbed, or at work dealing with some dangerous substance or
situation. The important thing was to keep moving and work
through
the
fear. Once you were moving that knot in your belly vanished, and you climbed
into that envelope of the
now
, which was liberating enough, and did what
you had to do. That was what he had learned: Keep moving, don’t let the fear
freeze you into inaction. It almost always got better when you acted. 

 Of course he carries a gun now, most of the time,
but it is not a cure-all. He has the certificate to carry concealed and that’s
great, but he knows that most of the time if you pull a gun, bad things are
going to happen. It’s just that simple. It’s not something to take lightly.   

 He doesn’t bring one in a bar. Federal building.
Any of the other restricted places. The way he sees it, the weapon gives him an
edge when he might need it. That’s it. It doesn’t make him Superman, more
aggressive, or make him think he’s got more rights than anybody else. He takes several
of his guns out to the range every month or so, just enough to stay fairly
proficient with them. He’s been carrying the little one so long it has become a
habit like brushing his teeth. Just a part of his life. No false confidence
though. Guns were not the answer to most of the things that happened in life,
and the way these guys were shooting up schools, killing youngsters, or the
people that had fired them at work, or random strangers in fast food
franchises, that stuff just sickened him. 

 He sighs again thinking how screwed up the world
can be. It is the middle of the night and he is wide awake again, so he heads
to the kitchen and makes some more of that good coffee and sits at the dining
table leafing through one of the brain books, focusing on that for a while then
thoughts drifting to Renee or the accident or his future. After a while it is 5
a.m. again, and he gets down on the floor and runs through his exercise
routine, dresses in his running clothes, and heads out to the street.