22- She’s a mystery to me
Journal: March 22, 1987
It is 7 o’clock at night on the second day of spring, a
gust, sun shining day with fluffy clouds and still bare trees, and people
walking up and down the road of West Jersey, suddenly released from the city
prison in the unrolling of seasons.
I drove along old roads, slightly melancholy, thinking of
Fran and the walks we used to take here at Jockey Hollow. I actually hoped to
see her car parked in its usual spot, half wanted to meet here in the middle of
the woods where we used to make love, not to make love this time, but to talk
with her in a place where she couldn’t just dash away.
Not a confrontation, just a friendly meeting and a friendly
chat.
But her car wasn’t there and I didn’t bother going into the
woods, though I should have.
I was, too, trying to avoid thinking about Peggy and the
coming date on Thursday night, scared of the vast silences I more than expect
to engulf us.
It is partly a problem of culture – like the time I brought
my ex-wife to the lake to meet my friends, and she felt intimidated, they
talked about poetry, the stars, music and other stuff, and she felt out of
touch.
“Give me a beer party anytime,” she told me later, making me
realize just how little in common I had with her as well.
While I expect much better from Peggy because she is far
more intelligent than my ex wife, but there is a gulf between us, her world is
not my world, her interests are not mine (except maybe for the NY Giants), and
I’m terrified we might hit a brick wall. She is an accountant. I am a baker.
She is a Republican; I’m not. She wears her politics around her neck like a
crucifix, while I try to avoid the subject – as I try and fail with the other Republican
in my life, Burger King John.
It may be an illusion, we reaching out for each other,
struggling to be comfortable in each other’s world.
While I can gesture and laugh at the bar jokes that surround
me, I really can’t get into the mindset or use the stock phrases or adopt the
habits that she and others have.
I keep searching for something deeper and more meaningful,
and keep coming up empty.
No, that’s not quite
true either.
I get clues to something deeper, only Peggy is too elusive
to expose it, bobbing and dodging like a professional prize fighter, managing
to avoid my efforts the more I probe.
She doesn’t really talk about the past – at least not yet –
or when she does, she only relays the safe incidents. She mentions funny
moments concerning her father and mother. But I sense there is something more
significant there.
She also avoids talking about previous lovers, only brief
blushes, a pronoun or first name before hurrying on to some other subject.
Once at the bar she mentioned an ex-boyfriend, underlining
the Ex for me. A suggestion? I suppose do.
Maybe she learned a lesson my ex-wife neve learned, about
killing off hope for the future by too provocative mentioning of the past.
But this mine field leaves very few avenues for meaningful
conversation, or to give me any perspective or anything to think about later.
This lack of information makes me wonder about the men I do
know she knows, such as Tommy, the mafia guy from the Meadowlands with bad
knees who I sometimes talk to at the bar. He’s no macho man, yet there is
attraction. I saw them kissing in the car outside the bar one night, and the
old pangs of jealousy rose up in me – even though I’ve not yet kissed her
myself or yet even gone on at date with her.
It was also an uncomfortable moment since it came after they
both asked me to walk out into the parking lot with them, and my knowing she
was interested in me in that way as well. It seemed so inappropriate that I
wondered maybe if it was staged, some kind of test – which I with my silence may
have passed or failed. Who can tell? The act still bothers me. If it is a clue
as to what I can expect from her, what motivates her, then I have yet to
unravel it.
While I can’t say she is lying, sometimes I get the
impression she is. She talked about going to Montclair State College, as if she
needed to establish that link the way my exwife never could, but it is also a
bit of status in a world where going to college doesn’t mean much practically
(when dancers needs to be pretty and sexy, and not so much intelligent) yet
gives her a cultural badge most of the patrons lack.
Peggy claims to have been out on her own since age 16,
although she clearly lived at her parents house when she graduated high school
in 1977. When I asked her about her attachment to sports, she talked freely
about her high school football team and how this translated into love of the NY
Giants.
“I only follow professional sports now,” she said.
Most of the time I haven’t a clue as to what she is thinking
or even how she really feels about me.
She may be a little concerned about my shyness and maybe
even a little turned off by the fact that I have not made any advances.
Is she as startled by the silences between us as I am? Is
she annoyed by the fact that I show up often when she dances?
As Roy Orbison once sang, “She’s a mystery to me.”
Sometimes, when I’m with her at the club, I feel like her
pet, tied to a barstool in anticipation for when she gets off the stage, afraid
to smile at the barmaid for fear of making Peggy angry, or talk to other
patrons for fear she might think I’m talking about her to them, bragging maybe
or worse, making fun.
Is she playing me for a fool?
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