A Relationship in Three Acts
Dorene O'Brien
I
Miles Beauregard was inconceivably thin. He had curly black hair, pretty hair, straight white teeth and blue eyes that he covered with yellow-tinted horn-rimmed glasses. He wore sweatshirts and canvas shoes and hung out at coffee shops, dark bars and the union at Georgetown University, where as a graduate student he was making a career of alternating concentrations between poetry and classic mythology. Miles was in love with Professor Buckminster, his Modern Poetry and Visual Technologies teacher, and he wrote poems about seducing her on the Greek island of Delos as she projected images of Apollinaire’s concrete poetry across the ceiling of 225A:
Come to me, bright Leto
Blanket me in your silken curls
Golden chains that bind my lips to your breast,
That entwine us on this barren land
Until that certain day that I
Push aside those pillars of restraint
And coax from between your thighs
The immortality of Artemis and Apollo.
Miles Beauregard was not a good poet. But, as a good poet once said, hope springs eternal. He walked around campus with a spiral-bound notebook and two mechanical pencils, and he allowed the slightest breeze or faintest bird song to stir him into a writing reverie that often ended with a poem much worse than the one quoted above. In short, he was a romantic. Like most romantics, his life was filled with self-generated angst and heartbreak, passionate moments of self-induced tears and hysteria, dark days during which he refused to consume anything but a whole-wheat bagel and an Evian.
It was on a particularly loathsome day—Professor Buckminster had verbally castrated him for mispronouncing Don Juan and he had broken one of his mechanical pencils during a flash of inspiration—that Miles wandered into the Terrace and slid into a dark corner booth feeling disconsolate. Certainly he’d been there before, and certainly he knew that he was not liked by the bar’s wait staff, which was, of course, why he went.
A surly blonde waitress in a halter top and blue jean cut-offs approached and threw a napkin onto the table. “Don’t order mead or nectar today,” she said. “I’m in no mood.”
“Hemlock,” said Miles.
“You know,” said the waitress, bending so that her face was level with his, “I’d really like to.”
Couldn’t she see that he was suicidal? All she cared about was making money to buy tacky clothes and hair bleach. “Give me an Absinthe Suissesse,” he said, and spelled it out for her.
The waitress looked doubtful.
“I will not bear another tragedy today,” Miles snapped as he threw open his notebook and began scrawling. He’d written three poems before she returned with his drink.
“He used water and anisette.” She nodded toward the bartender and set the glass squarely onto a cocktail napkin.
Miles did not try to hide his disdain. “Amateurs!” he shouted, but he would not allow her to retrieve the substandard drink as its removal would undermine his suffering.
“Leave it,” he ordered. “And bring another one just to make my pain absolute.”
Fie, fie, intractable wench!
O voluptuous maid with fried locks
And tattered garments
You will be flogged by the Furies
For serving poison to the gods!
He had considered leaving this in lieu of a tip as he scrawled it across the back of the cocktail napkin, but after his second pseudo-Absinthe Suissesse decided it was too good to leave behind and tucked it into the flap of his notebook.
“I saw you staring at me.”
Miles looked up from his paper, pencil still poised over the k in slaked, to see a dark, veiled woman slide into the booth opposite him. “I saw you staring at me,” she repeated.
“Of course I was,” said Miles. “You are the Princess of Aaru.”
“I am no such thing,” she said. “But if you buy me one of those”—here she nodded at his drink—“I will tell you who I am since you appear so interested.”
Miles immediately snapped his fingers at the waitress, who ignored him.
“The proletariat,” he mused, “has refused to work since the French Revolution.”
“Go to the bar and get it yourself,” said the woman. “Don’t draw any attention here.”
Miles fetched two more pseudo-Absinthes Suissesses, but when he returned to the table the woman was gone.
“Princess!” he shouted. “My zephyr of the Aegean, have you drifted off into the sultry night, my heart bouncing along on your turbulent drifts?”
“Shh,” said the woman as she climbed out from under the table sans the veil, which had snagged on a clump of gum during her ascent. “Sit down! And don’t look around. I think they’re here. As a matter of fact,” she added suspiciously, “I think you may be one of them.”
“If you are referring to slaves to your every whim,” he said, “I am indeed one of them. What do you wish? Anything.”
“I wish you’d be quiet,” said the woman, scrunching her nose at the drink before her. “This smells funny,” she said. “What is it?”
“It may as well be poison the way they make it.”
“Never mind,” she said. “Do you see that man over there?”
Miles glanced toward the pool tables where the woman had nodded.
“Don’t look!” she snapped.
“Who is he?” Miles asked, even though he hadn’t seen anyone. “Your boyfriend?”
The woman smirked. “I have no boyfriend.”
“You do now,” Miles said emphatically. “Who is it that quickens your blood? Who is it that terrorizes you? I will manhandle him until he can’t see straight.”
“There are many,” she said. “You don’t understand.”
She looked to be in her early twenties with dark skin, ink black hair pulled into a tight ponytail, big brown eyes and a large nose with a bump at the top, not entirely unattractive. She had full red lips and her teeth needed work.
“So then,” said Miles, “you’re Lebanese. You’ve stolen away from home, uncertain why but following an irresistible path that brought you to me—”
“I’m Iranian,” said the woman. “I’ll say no more.”
“But you promised to tell me who you are if I bought you a drink.”
“All right,” she whispered. “My name is Afsoon, and I was held prisoner until exactly four days ago.”
“Held prisoner! By whom?”
“By whom,” she huffed. “As if you don’t know.”
“Oh, but my Persian dove has me confused with someone else. I can assure you that I know nothing. I imagine I can get quite a few people to attest to that,” he added, but the humor seemed lost on her.
“Let’s just say it’s political.” Here she narrowed her eyes and patted a black bag on the bench beside her. “Maybe I have something they want, and they are determined to get it back.”
“Give it to them,” cried Miles, “and begin a new life with me. We’ll be quite rich. I’m a poet.”
“You want me to abandon the movement?”
“Movement?”
“There is a plot underfoot,” she whispered, “but if I speak of it you will be in great danger.”
“What if they’ve seen you with me?”
“They will torture you, no doubt. But at least you won’t be able to tell them anything.”
“Don’t worry,” Miles reassured her, “I can faint on demand.”
“Do you see that man over there?” she pointed to a Jimmy Buffett look-alike in a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts. “He’s been following me since Tehran.”
“A wonderful disguise,” Miles nodded, “but not clever enough to fool my cunning flower of Shiraz.”
“And that one there,” she nodded.
“How many are there?” he asked, both piqued and frightened by the challenge.
“Who knows,” said the woman. “Enough to capture me and take me back.”
“But they can’t touch you here,” Miles pounded the table for effect, then shook his hand to relieve the pain. “We’ll seek immunity.”
“Don’t you think that’s just where they’re waiting for me? Outside the consulate?”
“Ah, my Tehranian tulip has thought of everything!”
“Yes, well.” Her stomach emitted a loud groan and she caressed it dramatically. “I’m starving.”
“Of course!” said Miles. “You’re on the lam. I’ll go to the bar forthwith and demand a kebob. He returned several minutes later with a bag of Fritos. “Bigots,” he announced, tossing the snack onto the table.
“Shh,” said the woman. “Sit down. My God, you’re difficult.” She ripped open the bag and began devouring.
“What about your family?” asked Miles.
“Hmm?” The corn chips had proven a keen rival for her attention.
“Aren’t you worried they’ll stretch your father on the rack, force your mother into indentured servitude, pillage the virgin territory of your sisters’ bodies if you don’t return with them?”
“I am an only child. And my parents are dead.”
“Not…” Miles nodded toward Jimmy Buffett.
“No, no,” she said. “A freak camel incident in Kashmir.”
“No!” Miles gasped.
“My goodness, you’re making such a fuss,” the woman scolded, “people are staring.”
Miles looked up to survey the bar. No one was looking.
The woman crushed the empty Fritos bag into a ball with her bejeweled fingers and tossed it onto the table between them. “This is my chance,” she suddenly stood. “I must run or die.”
“I’ll run with you,” cried Miles, but his intentions, as usual, were stronger than his ability. She disappeared into a crowd of coeds arguing the medical benefits of beer, and by the time he’d mustered the energy to consider chasing her, his head was spinning from drink and his heart breaking from desire. He looked for Jimmy Buffet but he, too, was gone.
“Godspeed, my love!” he whimpered.
/ * * *
That night he crawled into the cot in his Village A apartment on campus—he did not share his apartment with anyone since he preferred absolute silence to write and since his father was wealthy enough to provide that silence—and he would be surprised to learn that he preferred a cot to a bed since it was much more uncomfortable. He thought only of Afsoon. Oh, how he loved her, his darling, daring little fugitive! He yanked open his notebook
Caspian goddess, Shah of my heart!
Chased into my arms by the evil schemes of men
How far from the desert you wander!
How far from the Gulf!
Your suffering begets my salvation (cruelest and most
ironic of circumstances!)
In the midst of your pain
I, too, am imbued with desires.
I long to fall into the tunnels of your eyes
And burrow into your delectable mountains
Am I not as sinister a pursuer as those that forced you
from the bosom of the Caucasus?
Miles Beauregard, who was not a good poet, often exploited his ken for geography in verse. He fell asleep that evening with the notebook clutched to his chest, his face wet with tears. Here, indeed, was an opportunity for angst.
He skipped the next two meetings of Professor Buckminster’s class; let her suffer. It didn’t matter, for he was utterly devoted to Afsoon. Now if only he could find her. Evenings he spent at the Terrace in their booth waiting patiently while sipping gin and pomegranate juice. After a week of drinking quietly alone the waitress became suspicious.
“You in that hemlock mood again?” she asked.
Miles, too despondent to argue with a woman whose fate he had recently cast most violently in lyric, closed his eyes and sighed. “How could I expect you to understand?” he said. “You whose most recent concerns involve hair dye and breast augmentation?” Miles did not realize that she had trotted off to deliver two Labatts and a Gin Rickey to more festive consumers before he’d even uttered the word “dye.”
During his fourth consecutive night at the Terrace, Miles spotted Jimmy Buffett wearing a camouflage tee shirt and matching bandanna. He forced down three Brave Bulls and sprang from the dark shadows of the bar into the lighted arena of pool tables; Miles Horninger was not a large man and, dizzy from tequila, actually fell into Jimmy Buffett, who spontaneously embraced him. Miles seized the opportunity to frisk him.
“What the hell are you doing?” yelled Jimmy Buffett, pushing him off and brushing his waist and buttocks where Miles had groped him.
Miles swayed from the balls to the heels of his feet but stared into his opponent’s steely eyes. “Where is she?”
“Where is who?” said Jimmy, still rubbing the memory of Miles’ touch from his body.
“What have you done with her?” Miles demanded.
Jimmy Buffett stared.
Miles nodded. “I expected this,” he said.
“Go sleep it off, man.”
“Here.” Miles gave him a sheet of notebook paper containing his address. “She turns up here within two days, no questions asked,” he slurred. “She doesn’t, I call my boys at the CIA.” Miles winked and weaved out of the bar.
When Miles showed up at Professor Buckminster’s class the following day, she acted like she hadn’t even missed him, but after class she summoned him.
“Miles,” she said, “you were uncharacteristically distracted today, and it’s not like you to be absent.”
He sighed and closed his eyes to stave off a headache. Wasn’t it just like a woman to come around when you no longer desired her?
“I’ve had a lot going on,” he said. “I don’t know where to begin, but it all started—”
“That’s all right,” she said. “I just need your assignment.”
He opened his notebook, plucked out several pages and proffered them. “Is this enough?” he asked.
“Yes.” She stared at the torn pages. “It certainly is.”
That evening Miles was blocked entry to the Terrace by two men, each the size of a small car.
“Sorry, man,” said one of them. “Orders.”
“Isn’t this overkill?” said Miles.
“It can be. That’s up to you.”
Miles sat on a curb in front of the bar and succumbed to inspiration, scribbling wildly in his notebook until the sun dropped lazily into the Potomac.
II
Miles slept until noon the next day, and he barely had the energy to drag himself across campus to the Sandwich Nook, where he forced down an egg salad on croissant, two orange-cranberry scones and a hazelnut cappuccino. Contrary to his mood, the sun shot warm lasers across the commons when he exited the diner, and he took shelter on a circular cement ledge surrounding a poorly landscaped micro-jungle of junipers and dwarf pines. Refusing to leave until the sun relented and forgetting just how stubborn the sun can be, he fell asleep on the ledge, which was not entirely unlike his cot at Village A. Even nature was against him, he realized, as he underwent an aerial bombardment—leaves, berries, insects. He swatted aimlessly, eyes closed, until something larger, heavier and more solid, like a mid-sized rock, grazed his left shoulder. Bolting upright, his notebook slipping into the compost, he found himself staring at a distant figure outlined by the sun, holy and magnificent.
“I thought you were dead,” yelled Afsoon, outfitted in dark glasses, a trench coat and a purple fedora. “Here.” The note she had wrapped in a larger rock landed somewhere in the dirt behind Miles—his heart murmur had precluded him from playing sports as a child—and by the time he fished it out she had disappeared. His breath quickened and his hands shook as he pried the paper loose and read: There is a flower stand at the corner of 35th and Reservoir.
Miles shook the dirt from his book, shoved the paper into his pocket and glanced around; he could not risk being followed. He headed up P Street toward 35th, but between the sun’s heat and the psychological scars he retained from being lost for several hours during an Outward-Bound camping trip with his father, he grew disoriented.
“Pssst,” a laurel bush hissed at him sharply. “Where are you going!”
“I’m lost without you!” Miles pleaded with the leaves as passersby stared.
“Be quiet!” snapped the bush. “My God, you’re difficult. Just meet me at the Coffee Grind at fifteen hundred hours. Can you find your way?”
“I-I-I think so, my beloved product of photosynthesis.”
“All right then.”
“One more thing, my veiled vixen of vinery,” he whispered, “what time is that?”
The bush sighed and said, “Three o’clock.”
At fifteen hundred hours Miles found himself seated at a small corner table he had paid two students ten dollars each to abandon, and he stared at two pieces of baklava on the plates before him. He would not eat until she arrived; in fact, he would go on a hunger strike until he saw her again. Her entrance at fifteen hundred fifty hours was bittersweet; Miles was overjoyed at the appearance of the hideous fedora yet unconsciously understood that a dark period of artistic expression was forever lost upon its arrival.
“Darling,” said Miles, “allow me to kiss the hand of your choice at once.”
“What’s this?” She stared at the pastry.
“A simulacrum, I’m afraid.”
“A what?”
“Certainly not what you’re accustomed to, but this country’s best attempt at pistachio baklava. I’ll take it back.”
She grabbed his wrist lightly when he reached for her plate and he let out a small cry. “Leave it,” she said as she slipped off her sunglasses and attacked the confection.” There’s something you should know.” She pulled the hat flap over her face and, peeking around it, surveyed the coffee shop. “Things are not always what they seem.”
“What do you mean, my little falafel?”
“I’m not really Iranian.”
“No wonder you didn’t recognize the cake.”
“I wasn’t a political prisoner, either.”
“That follows.”
“My real name is Ramona, and I’m in serious trouble.”
“Any idiot could see that,” he said, reaching for her hand only to have his slapped away.
She scraped the dregs of phyllo from her plate. “Can I trust you?” she asked.
Miles suddenly recalled Jimmy Buffett’s steely eyes, his long vigils at the bar. “Can you trust me? I waited for you night after night at the Terrace, even attacked the man you said was following you.”
“Attacked him?”
“Well, in a manner of speaking.”
“Never mind. I have no choice but to trust you. If you turn me in, so be it.”
“I’m not hearing this!” Miles cried. “I’ve been nothing but a most loyal follower, although I had a few problems with the following part. Nevertheless—”
“Pipe down!” said Ramona, pulling her hat brim further forward to conceal her face. “Do you recall the incident at the animal lab?”
“Which one?”
She narrowed her eyes as if just then realizing the obvious. “I can’t be more specific than that until I know you’re not wired.”
“Would you like to frisk me?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What if I talk and you just nod?”
Ramona winked, and it was then that he noticed the large birthmark at the crease of her left eye. He’d forgotten how pretty she was, front teeth notwithstanding.
“Last month most of the animals were released or stolen,” he said. “The lab was trashed and Professor Nettles was bitten on the left testicle by an escaped rodent who had been sleeping on his chair.”
“He was?”
“That’s not public knowledge. My father’s a friend of his.”
“I see where your loyalties lie.” Ramona stiffened.
“No, no, my heroine of the downtrodden. That rodent could have bitten off both testicles and I wouldn’t turn you in. Professor Nettles has already propagated, and none too happily.”
“Created more meat-eating elitist brats born with silver spoons in their mouths, no doubt.”
Miles took exception to this since it described him precisely but for the meat-eating part—he had been unable to get a good steak since leaving Scarsdale to attend Georgetown U and so, in a textbook deprivation move, became a vegetarian.
“Only two brats, my darling,” he assured her.
“I’m thirsty. This pastry.” She then entered into a coughing jag that had every occupant of the shop either staring or offering assistance. “A double mocha latte with whipped cream and caramel,” she managed. “Grande.”
Miles fetched the drink and the fit ceased shortly after she raised the steaming cup to her lips. When she dabbed her watering eyes with a napkin printed with antique coffee grinders, Miles noticed that the birthmark was gone.
“Listen,” she whispered, “it’s not only campus security on the case. They’ve called in the police, the Secret Service, even Scotland Yard.”
“Scotland Yard?” he said with disgust. “Europeans want to get in on everything.”
“We aren’t supposed to know. Some guy there’s a specialist in subduing animal rights activists.”
Miles realized then what he’d dreaded realizing all along. “We?” he asked.
Ramona slapped her hand to her mouth as if to recapture the newly escaped words.
“Just tell me that you think of me when your hand grazes that of the man who unlocks cages beside you,’ he said, “that as you look up from the blueprints of the Leavey Center it’s my eyes and not his that you see.”
“Sure,” she said. “Why not.”
“Say...did you have anything to do with Gandhi?” he asked, recalling the life-size fiberglass cow painted like a butcher’s shop poster and covered with vegetarian slogans linking beef consumption to heart attacks, cancer and impotence. It had been bound with barbed wire and duct tape to the food counter in the main cafeteria the week before, and the cafeteria was closed until a SWAT team confirmed that it had not been rigged with explosives. Students had affectionately named the anti-carnivore cow after the slain Hindu passive resistance icon, but the dean was irate and threatened immediate expulsion to the perpetrators for not only breaking into the cafeteria but for their seditious response to the school’s menu selections.
At first Ramona looked confused, but then nodded knowingly. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Why, my love is a master of bovine design!”
“I don’t know about that,” she smiled, gazing about absently until her eye caught something just beyond Miles’s right ear. She gulped down the remainder of her coffee and rushed into the restroom. When Miles glanced behind him, he noticed two campus security guards staring through the café window. After waiting several minutes, heart pounding, wondering why they had neither entered nor left, he asked a woman newly seated at a neighboring table to check the ladies’ room for a short dark woman with a crooked nose wearing a tacky coat and a purple fedora. The woman collected her espresso and moved to a distant sofa. One was always alone in these matters.
Miles knocked quietly at the women’s restroom door and cursed himself for not creating code names and passwords.
“Ramona,” he whispered, but heard nothing. He opened the door slowly and stepped inside. The light rustle of toilet paper escaped from the only occupied stall, and he immediately entered the one beside it. “They’re still out there,” he whispered, “but don’t worry, I have a plan. We’ll switch clothes, then you can escape while they’re apprehending me. Stand on the toilet and look over—you’ll see that I’m not wired.”
“I don’t think so.”
Just as Miles flung his John Coltrane sweatshirt and Land’s End Dockers on the wall between them, he heard her door click open.
“Wait,” he cried, stepping out of the stall in his underwear and sneakers. “I need your clothes.”
Standing before him was Professor Buckminster, who had stopped in to relieve herself after a three-hour Poetry and Ethics seminar. When Miles reached up to retrieve his pants, he noticed that the window above the sink hung wildly askew.
“I thought you were someone else,” he said while slipping his pants over his Wildsmith loafers, Professor Buckminster standing before him, mouth agape.
In his rooftop apartment that evening Miles stared at the Potomac and considered throwing himself in. Damn his father for teaching him to swim, although not very well. He imagined himself impaled on the Washington Monument, then turned his attention to the Lincoln Memorial. He flipped open his notebook.
How I long to sit in your safe and secure (yet cold) lap
High on your pedestal.
How I envy you your stone heart,
Your panoramic view
You’ve seen her, perhaps you watch her even now
But that will forever be your secret
Damn those marble lips!
O Captain, my Captain! Part them just once for me!
Miles Beauregard, a bad poet who had trouble enlisting human allies, often invoked the aid of inanimate objects. He secured his notebook to a loop of his Dockers with a rubber band and haunted the connecting catwalks of the apartment complex. Maybe she was looking for him; it wasn’t impossible. He threaded the crowds on several of the public decks, finally giving up and sulking back to his apartment, where an urgent telephone message from his father awaited him.
It wasn’t until he returned the call and his father relayed in minute detail his conversation with Professor Buckminster that he realized what an opportunity had been lost with his old flame that very afternoon in the women’s restroom at the Coffee Grind. Imagine if Ramona had not slipped through the window—the three of them together—it was too much.
“I made a mistake, Dad. Those symbols on the doors look an awful lot alike.”
“Of course,” said his father, “your astigmatism. But that doesn’t explain your requesting her clothes. Son, are you a cross-dresser? It’s perfectly all right if you are, you can tell me.”
“No!” Miles yelled into the receiver. “I was helping a friend, but I can’t tell you more. My line may be bugged.”
“Why would your line be bugged?”
“This is Washington, Dad.”
“Do you want me to come down?”
“Maybe after finals. I’m under a lot of pressure right now.”
“I understand. That’s what I told your professor. I convinced her not to go to the administration with this.”
Miles grinned. So Buckminster did have a thing for him.
Miles did not see his beloved for fifteen days, during which he wavered between creating a new obsession and devoting the rest of his life to her memory. If he began to admire Professor Buckminster’s calves or entertain doubt concerning Ramona’s role as a subversive, he quickly contemplated and then wrote about her limpid eyes, her snaggle-toothed smile, her chocolate birthmark. Her close brush with Scotland Yard—even the story about being a political prisoner could be true—made him realize his amour was living the kind of life about which he only dreamed.
III
Miles stayed in bed until three o’clock on the sixteenth day of Ramona’s absence, and that evening threw on his Latin quotations sweatshirt, cargo pants and boat shoes before heading toward the union, where through the window he glimpsed her sporting a blond wig and a red and white checked sundress. She was playing pool with several men, and when she drew her body across the table to attempt a long shot, he lost his breath—maybe it was his asthma, but certainly the picture of her draped seductively across the felt had at least triggered it. His heart leapt and his energy returned; he nearly opened the thick glass door with one hand before bounding toward her and without preliminaries kneeling down to kiss her left pinkie as she’d slithered from the table.
“My love,” he exclaimed.
“Mah gracious,” she said, her right hand fanned across her chest. Miles detected a bad Southern accent.
“Who’s that?” asked one of her longhaired, beer-drinking cohorts.
“We must go,” she said, casting her pool cue to the floor.
When they exited the union, Miles seized her hand and cried, “Ramona! How I’ve—”
“Actually,” she drawled, “mah name is Kits.”
Miles was immediately deflated; sixteen long days of pining after a woman who within seconds after reunion becomes someone else!
“Really?” said Miles, dropping her hand as if it were infested. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re running from the Polynesian police for performing the hula without a license, or that you’re a visitor from the planet Zoron on a mission to colonize the Earth, or that you masterminded the imminent downfall of Microsoft.”
Kits collapsed onto a decorative bench in front of the campus bookstore before pulling an embroidered handkerchief from her checkered clutch and dabbing the corner of her eye where the birthmark had once been. “Mahles, sweet Mahles,” she cried. “I know A’ve been dishonest, but you must believe Ah had a good reason. Can you eva forgive me?”
When she touched his face, Miles extracted his inhaler and took several puffs. “I suppose,” he said, “just promise me one thing.”
“Enna-thing.”
“Lose the accent.”
She glanced around. “All right. I needed it to fool the Secret Service,” she explained. “I told them I’m from Georgia.”
“Why did you do that?”
She shook her head. “So they wouldn’t think I’m from Georgia.”
“Ah.”
After several moments of awkward silence, Miles became desperate that she, growing bored or nervous, would attempt another escape only to return as someone else, so he launched into a desperate interview. “So you’re from Georgia,” he said, “the Peach State. Have you seen Flannery O’Connor’s personal collection at Georgia College? How about Charlemagne’s Kingdom in Helen—”
“Are you testing me?”
Miles bolted upright. “Of course not, my beloved chameleon!”
“Well, I’ve been testing you,” she said, “with the political prisoner and animal activist stories, to see if I could trust you. Listen.” She glanced around cautiously, sidled up to Miles and pressed her lips to his left ear. His wheezing grew so rapid that he wasn’t certain he had heard her correctly when she said: “The Secret Service suspects I’m about the blow the lid off the White House, and they’re right.”
“Explosives?” he ventured.
“Not literally.”
“Oh.”
She sighed deeply. “Do you know who your father is?”
“Of course I do,” said Miles. “A balding neurosurgeon with bad taste in clothes.”
“No, no, do you really know? I mean, do you have a relationship?”
Miles resurrected harrowing memories of learning to swim, the Outward-Bound trip. “I guess.”
“Well, what would you say if I told you that you know my father as well as I do? That the whole country knows my father as well as I do?” Here she began to sob uncontrollably, and Miles thought her wise to forego facial ornamentation in light of her distress. He put his arm around her shoulder.
“Watch the dress,” she snapped. “It’s not mine.”
He studied the ebb and flow of her delectable mountains when she resumed sobbing.
“My darling,” he said, “allow me to comfort them, uh, you.” She let him caress her shoulder with his left hand as he sucked on the inhaler in his right. When he regained his breath, he asked about her father.
“Let’s just say he was a highly elected political official.”
“Not Bill?”
She waved her handkerchief. “That would be a cliché.”
“Then who?”
“Let’s just say it’s someone who seduced my young and impressionable mother on a threadbare mattress in a cheap motel in the Red-Light district of Atlanta.”
“Is it Tom Delay?” he asked. “He seems like someone who would do that.”
“Don’t look,” said Kits, jumping from the bench and embarking on a brisk walk. “They’re behind us.”
“The Secret Service?” said Miles, fumbling with his inhaler as he strove to keep up.
“Bingo.”
“Listen,” he suggested, “we need a plan. A place to meet after the enemy scatters us. How about my apartment?”
“Are you crazy?” she said, moving her lips like an amateur ventriloquist. “They’ve followed you for sure. I’m amazed you’re not bound and gagged in a dank basement with electrodes stuck to your nuts.”
“Then where?” said Miles, panting from the exertion of the block-long trot.
“The juice bar in the Quad.”
“That place is always packed!”
“It’s easy to get lost in a crowd,” she winked and bolted across 37th, leaving him to the mercy of the Feds.
When Miles turned around to give himself up, arms raised to expose the perspiration stains on his favorite sweatshirt, no one was there.
He resumed his trek, stopping several times to puff on his inhaler, and when he finally found his way to the juice bar it was closed. He stared through the window at the back lit menu board and sighed. He then fumbled for several long minutes with the rubber band on his belt loop before finally snapping it—his thumb would later require medical attention, he knew—to free his notebook before all inspiration was lost.
Afsoon, Ramona, Kits!
Les belles dames sans merci!
My three ravenous fates,
How you consume my heart,
like a pulsating pot sticker
How you weave the strands of my existence
--not to mention my stomach--
into a chaotic bundle of knots!
Return to me, one and all
And I will drink you in like a multi-grain, protein-rich
Fruity-Tofutti.
Miles Beauregard, a struggling poet who unwittingly usurped and subsequently destroyed good poetry, spent the next week lulling about the juice bar, drinking carrot-mango spritzes and lemon-pea pod smoothies and writing bad poetry. The health drinks were energizing, and since they precluded him from generating the type of depression he deemed indispensable to clear thinking, he abandoned the juice bar for his cot back at Village A, where a search plan emerged in its entirety within seventy-two hours.
• • •
Kits, a.k.a. Ramona, a.k.a. Afsoon, was actually Gladys Thornsby, a drama major at Georgetown U whose father was an Executive Vice President for Lockheed Martin and whose mother was a federal judge. Both were disappointed in their only child’s vocation, blaming themselves for realizing belatedly what their short-sighted encouragement of her melodramatic childhood performances would reap, questioning after it was too late the Montessori mission and the Dr. Spock approach. They would encourage her no more and vowed never to attend a performance, although because she lived with them they were forced to witness her transformations into the character du jour, their secret, disparaging term for their daughter’s homework.
Miles, who could not gather sufficient strength to embark on a personal search for Kits, hired a private investigator instead. When he learned only three days after submitting a $300 retainer that Gladys Thornsby was a college student at Georgetown U who disrespected her wealthy parents and who persistently engaged in melodramatic and ludicrous flights of fancy, he was filled with both pity and revulsion. He quickly opened his notebook and wrote a poem comparing Professor Buckminster’s hands to twin octopi that first embraced, then caressed, and finally ravaged him in the floating, milk-filled lake of Ardvisura.
Originally appeared in Chicago Tribune Sunday literary supplement, 2014.
Dorene O'Brien
I
Miles Beauregard was inconceivably thin. He had curly black hair, pretty hair, straight white teeth and blue eyes that he covered with yellow-tinted horn-rimmed glasses. He wore sweatshirts and canvas shoes and hung out at coffee shops, dark bars and the union at Georgetown University, where as a graduate student he was making a career of alternating concentrations between poetry and classic mythology. Miles was in love with Professor Buckminster, his Modern Poetry and Visual Technologies teacher, and he wrote poems about seducing her on the Greek island of Delos as she projected images of Apollinaire’s concrete poetry across the ceiling of 225A:
Come to me, bright Leto
Blanket me in your silken curls
Golden chains that bind my lips to your breast,
That entwine us on this barren land
Until that certain day that I
Push aside those pillars of restraint
And coax from between your thighs
The immortality of Artemis and Apollo.
Miles Beauregard was not a good poet. But, as a good poet once said, hope springs eternal. He walked around campus with a spiral-bound notebook and two mechanical pencils, and he allowed the slightest breeze or faintest bird song to stir him into a writing reverie that often ended with a poem much worse than the one quoted above. In short, he was a romantic. Like most romantics, his life was filled with self-generated angst and heartbreak, passionate moments of self-induced tears and hysteria, dark days during which he refused to consume anything but a whole-wheat bagel and an Evian.
It was on a particularly loathsome day—Professor Buckminster had verbally castrated him for mispronouncing Don Juan and he had broken one of his mechanical pencils during a flash of inspiration—that Miles wandered into the Terrace and slid into a dark corner booth feeling disconsolate. Certainly he’d been there before, and certainly he knew that he was not liked by the bar’s wait staff, which was, of course, why he went.
A surly blonde waitress in a halter top and blue jean cut-offs approached and threw a napkin onto the table. “Don’t order mead or nectar today,” she said. “I’m in no mood.”
“Hemlock,” said Miles.
“You know,” said the waitress, bending so that her face was level with his, “I’d really like to.”
Couldn’t she see that he was suicidal? All she cared about was making money to buy tacky clothes and hair bleach. “Give me an Absinthe Suissesse,” he said, and spelled it out for her.
The waitress looked doubtful.
“I will not bear another tragedy today,” Miles snapped as he threw open his notebook and began scrawling. He’d written three poems before she returned with his drink.
“He used water and anisette.” She nodded toward the bartender and set the glass squarely onto a cocktail napkin.
Miles did not try to hide his disdain. “Amateurs!” he shouted, but he would not allow her to retrieve the substandard drink as its removal would undermine his suffering.
“Leave it,” he ordered. “And bring another one just to make my pain absolute.”
Fie, fie, intractable wench!
O voluptuous maid with fried locks
And tattered garments
You will be flogged by the Furies
For serving poison to the gods!
He had considered leaving this in lieu of a tip as he scrawled it across the back of the cocktail napkin, but after his second pseudo-Absinthe Suissesse decided it was too good to leave behind and tucked it into the flap of his notebook.
“I saw you staring at me.”
Miles looked up from his paper, pencil still poised over the k in slaked, to see a dark, veiled woman slide into the booth opposite him. “I saw you staring at me,” she repeated.
“Of course I was,” said Miles. “You are the Princess of Aaru.”
“I am no such thing,” she said. “But if you buy me one of those”—here she nodded at his drink—“I will tell you who I am since you appear so interested.”
Miles immediately snapped his fingers at the waitress, who ignored him.
“The proletariat,” he mused, “has refused to work since the French Revolution.”
“Go to the bar and get it yourself,” said the woman. “Don’t draw any attention here.”
Miles fetched two more pseudo-Absinthes Suissesses, but when he returned to the table the woman was gone.
“Princess!” he shouted. “My zephyr of the Aegean, have you drifted off into the sultry night, my heart bouncing along on your turbulent drifts?”
“Shh,” said the woman as she climbed out from under the table sans the veil, which had snagged on a clump of gum during her ascent. “Sit down! And don’t look around. I think they’re here. As a matter of fact,” she added suspiciously, “I think you may be one of them.”
“If you are referring to slaves to your every whim,” he said, “I am indeed one of them. What do you wish? Anything.”
“I wish you’d be quiet,” said the woman, scrunching her nose at the drink before her. “This smells funny,” she said. “What is it?”
“It may as well be poison the way they make it.”
“Never mind,” she said. “Do you see that man over there?”
Miles glanced toward the pool tables where the woman had nodded.
“Don’t look!” she snapped.
“Who is he?” Miles asked, even though he hadn’t seen anyone. “Your boyfriend?”
The woman smirked. “I have no boyfriend.”
“You do now,” Miles said emphatically. “Who is it that quickens your blood? Who is it that terrorizes you? I will manhandle him until he can’t see straight.”
“There are many,” she said. “You don’t understand.”
She looked to be in her early twenties with dark skin, ink black hair pulled into a tight ponytail, big brown eyes and a large nose with a bump at the top, not entirely unattractive. She had full red lips and her teeth needed work.
“So then,” said Miles, “you’re Lebanese. You’ve stolen away from home, uncertain why but following an irresistible path that brought you to me—”
“I’m Iranian,” said the woman. “I’ll say no more.”
“But you promised to tell me who you are if I bought you a drink.”
“All right,” she whispered. “My name is Afsoon, and I was held prisoner until exactly four days ago.”
“Held prisoner! By whom?”
“By whom,” she huffed. “As if you don’t know.”
“Oh, but my Persian dove has me confused with someone else. I can assure you that I know nothing. I imagine I can get quite a few people to attest to that,” he added, but the humor seemed lost on her.
“Let’s just say it’s political.” Here she narrowed her eyes and patted a black bag on the bench beside her. “Maybe I have something they want, and they are determined to get it back.”
“Give it to them,” cried Miles, “and begin a new life with me. We’ll be quite rich. I’m a poet.”
“You want me to abandon the movement?”
“Movement?”
“There is a plot underfoot,” she whispered, “but if I speak of it you will be in great danger.”
“What if they’ve seen you with me?”
“They will torture you, no doubt. But at least you won’t be able to tell them anything.”
“Don’t worry,” Miles reassured her, “I can faint on demand.”
“Do you see that man over there?” she pointed to a Jimmy Buffett look-alike in a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts. “He’s been following me since Tehran.”
“A wonderful disguise,” Miles nodded, “but not clever enough to fool my cunning flower of Shiraz.”
“And that one there,” she nodded.
“How many are there?” he asked, both piqued and frightened by the challenge.
“Who knows,” said the woman. “Enough to capture me and take me back.”
“But they can’t touch you here,” Miles pounded the table for effect, then shook his hand to relieve the pain. “We’ll seek immunity.”
“Don’t you think that’s just where they’re waiting for me? Outside the consulate?”
“Ah, my Tehranian tulip has thought of everything!”
“Yes, well.” Her stomach emitted a loud groan and she caressed it dramatically. “I’m starving.”
“Of course!” said Miles. “You’re on the lam. I’ll go to the bar forthwith and demand a kebob. He returned several minutes later with a bag of Fritos. “Bigots,” he announced, tossing the snack onto the table.
“Shh,” said the woman. “Sit down. My God, you’re difficult.” She ripped open the bag and began devouring.
“What about your family?” asked Miles.
“Hmm?” The corn chips had proven a keen rival for her attention.
“Aren’t you worried they’ll stretch your father on the rack, force your mother into indentured servitude, pillage the virgin territory of your sisters’ bodies if you don’t return with them?”
“I am an only child. And my parents are dead.”
“Not…” Miles nodded toward Jimmy Buffett.
“No, no,” she said. “A freak camel incident in Kashmir.”
“No!” Miles gasped.
“My goodness, you’re making such a fuss,” the woman scolded, “people are staring.”
Miles looked up to survey the bar. No one was looking.
The woman crushed the empty Fritos bag into a ball with her bejeweled fingers and tossed it onto the table between them. “This is my chance,” she suddenly stood. “I must run or die.”
“I’ll run with you,” cried Miles, but his intentions, as usual, were stronger than his ability. She disappeared into a crowd of coeds arguing the medical benefits of beer, and by the time he’d mustered the energy to consider chasing her, his head was spinning from drink and his heart breaking from desire. He looked for Jimmy Buffet but he, too, was gone.
“Godspeed, my love!” he whimpered.
/ * * *
That night he crawled into the cot in his Village A apartment on campus—he did not share his apartment with anyone since he preferred absolute silence to write and since his father was wealthy enough to provide that silence—and he would be surprised to learn that he preferred a cot to a bed since it was much more uncomfortable. He thought only of Afsoon. Oh, how he loved her, his darling, daring little fugitive! He yanked open his notebook
Caspian goddess, Shah of my heart!
Chased into my arms by the evil schemes of men
How far from the desert you wander!
How far from the Gulf!
Your suffering begets my salvation (cruelest and most
ironic of circumstances!)
In the midst of your pain
I, too, am imbued with desires.
I long to fall into the tunnels of your eyes
And burrow into your delectable mountains
Am I not as sinister a pursuer as those that forced you
from the bosom of the Caucasus?
Miles Beauregard, who was not a good poet, often exploited his ken for geography in verse. He fell asleep that evening with the notebook clutched to his chest, his face wet with tears. Here, indeed, was an opportunity for angst.
He skipped the next two meetings of Professor Buckminster’s class; let her suffer. It didn’t matter, for he was utterly devoted to Afsoon. Now if only he could find her. Evenings he spent at the Terrace in their booth waiting patiently while sipping gin and pomegranate juice. After a week of drinking quietly alone the waitress became suspicious.
“You in that hemlock mood again?” she asked.
Miles, too despondent to argue with a woman whose fate he had recently cast most violently in lyric, closed his eyes and sighed. “How could I expect you to understand?” he said. “You whose most recent concerns involve hair dye and breast augmentation?” Miles did not realize that she had trotted off to deliver two Labatts and a Gin Rickey to more festive consumers before he’d even uttered the word “dye.”
During his fourth consecutive night at the Terrace, Miles spotted Jimmy Buffett wearing a camouflage tee shirt and matching bandanna. He forced down three Brave Bulls and sprang from the dark shadows of the bar into the lighted arena of pool tables; Miles Horninger was not a large man and, dizzy from tequila, actually fell into Jimmy Buffett, who spontaneously embraced him. Miles seized the opportunity to frisk him.
“What the hell are you doing?” yelled Jimmy Buffett, pushing him off and brushing his waist and buttocks where Miles had groped him.
Miles swayed from the balls to the heels of his feet but stared into his opponent’s steely eyes. “Where is she?”
“Where is who?” said Jimmy, still rubbing the memory of Miles’ touch from his body.
“What have you done with her?” Miles demanded.
Jimmy Buffett stared.
Miles nodded. “I expected this,” he said.
“Go sleep it off, man.”
“Here.” Miles gave him a sheet of notebook paper containing his address. “She turns up here within two days, no questions asked,” he slurred. “She doesn’t, I call my boys at the CIA.” Miles winked and weaved out of the bar.
When Miles showed up at Professor Buckminster’s class the following day, she acted like she hadn’t even missed him, but after class she summoned him.
“Miles,” she said, “you were uncharacteristically distracted today, and it’s not like you to be absent.”
He sighed and closed his eyes to stave off a headache. Wasn’t it just like a woman to come around when you no longer desired her?
“I’ve had a lot going on,” he said. “I don’t know where to begin, but it all started—”
“That’s all right,” she said. “I just need your assignment.”
He opened his notebook, plucked out several pages and proffered them. “Is this enough?” he asked.
“Yes.” She stared at the torn pages. “It certainly is.”
That evening Miles was blocked entry to the Terrace by two men, each the size of a small car.
“Sorry, man,” said one of them. “Orders.”
“Isn’t this overkill?” said Miles.
“It can be. That’s up to you.”
Miles sat on a curb in front of the bar and succumbed to inspiration, scribbling wildly in his notebook until the sun dropped lazily into the Potomac.
II
Miles slept until noon the next day, and he barely had the energy to drag himself across campus to the Sandwich Nook, where he forced down an egg salad on croissant, two orange-cranberry scones and a hazelnut cappuccino. Contrary to his mood, the sun shot warm lasers across the commons when he exited the diner, and he took shelter on a circular cement ledge surrounding a poorly landscaped micro-jungle of junipers and dwarf pines. Refusing to leave until the sun relented and forgetting just how stubborn the sun can be, he fell asleep on the ledge, which was not entirely unlike his cot at Village A. Even nature was against him, he realized, as he underwent an aerial bombardment—leaves, berries, insects. He swatted aimlessly, eyes closed, until something larger, heavier and more solid, like a mid-sized rock, grazed his left shoulder. Bolting upright, his notebook slipping into the compost, he found himself staring at a distant figure outlined by the sun, holy and magnificent.
“I thought you were dead,” yelled Afsoon, outfitted in dark glasses, a trench coat and a purple fedora. “Here.” The note she had wrapped in a larger rock landed somewhere in the dirt behind Miles—his heart murmur had precluded him from playing sports as a child—and by the time he fished it out she had disappeared. His breath quickened and his hands shook as he pried the paper loose and read: There is a flower stand at the corner of 35th and Reservoir.
Miles shook the dirt from his book, shoved the paper into his pocket and glanced around; he could not risk being followed. He headed up P Street toward 35th, but between the sun’s heat and the psychological scars he retained from being lost for several hours during an Outward-Bound camping trip with his father, he grew disoriented.
“Pssst,” a laurel bush hissed at him sharply. “Where are you going!”
“I’m lost without you!” Miles pleaded with the leaves as passersby stared.
“Be quiet!” snapped the bush. “My God, you’re difficult. Just meet me at the Coffee Grind at fifteen hundred hours. Can you find your way?”
“I-I-I think so, my beloved product of photosynthesis.”
“All right then.”
“One more thing, my veiled vixen of vinery,” he whispered, “what time is that?”
The bush sighed and said, “Three o’clock.”
At fifteen hundred hours Miles found himself seated at a small corner table he had paid two students ten dollars each to abandon, and he stared at two pieces of baklava on the plates before him. He would not eat until she arrived; in fact, he would go on a hunger strike until he saw her again. Her entrance at fifteen hundred fifty hours was bittersweet; Miles was overjoyed at the appearance of the hideous fedora yet unconsciously understood that a dark period of artistic expression was forever lost upon its arrival.
“Darling,” said Miles, “allow me to kiss the hand of your choice at once.”
“What’s this?” She stared at the pastry.
“A simulacrum, I’m afraid.”
“A what?”
“Certainly not what you’re accustomed to, but this country’s best attempt at pistachio baklava. I’ll take it back.”
She grabbed his wrist lightly when he reached for her plate and he let out a small cry. “Leave it,” she said as she slipped off her sunglasses and attacked the confection.” There’s something you should know.” She pulled the hat flap over her face and, peeking around it, surveyed the coffee shop. “Things are not always what they seem.”
“What do you mean, my little falafel?”
“I’m not really Iranian.”
“No wonder you didn’t recognize the cake.”
“I wasn’t a political prisoner, either.”
“That follows.”
“My real name is Ramona, and I’m in serious trouble.”
“Any idiot could see that,” he said, reaching for her hand only to have his slapped away.
She scraped the dregs of phyllo from her plate. “Can I trust you?” she asked.
Miles suddenly recalled Jimmy Buffett’s steely eyes, his long vigils at the bar. “Can you trust me? I waited for you night after night at the Terrace, even attacked the man you said was following you.”
“Attacked him?”
“Well, in a manner of speaking.”
“Never mind. I have no choice but to trust you. If you turn me in, so be it.”
“I’m not hearing this!” Miles cried. “I’ve been nothing but a most loyal follower, although I had a few problems with the following part. Nevertheless—”
“Pipe down!” said Ramona, pulling her hat brim further forward to conceal her face. “Do you recall the incident at the animal lab?”
“Which one?”
She narrowed her eyes as if just then realizing the obvious. “I can’t be more specific than that until I know you’re not wired.”
“Would you like to frisk me?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What if I talk and you just nod?”
Ramona winked, and it was then that he noticed the large birthmark at the crease of her left eye. He’d forgotten how pretty she was, front teeth notwithstanding.
“Last month most of the animals were released or stolen,” he said. “The lab was trashed and Professor Nettles was bitten on the left testicle by an escaped rodent who had been sleeping on his chair.”
“He was?”
“That’s not public knowledge. My father’s a friend of his.”
“I see where your loyalties lie.” Ramona stiffened.
“No, no, my heroine of the downtrodden. That rodent could have bitten off both testicles and I wouldn’t turn you in. Professor Nettles has already propagated, and none too happily.”
“Created more meat-eating elitist brats born with silver spoons in their mouths, no doubt.”
Miles took exception to this since it described him precisely but for the meat-eating part—he had been unable to get a good steak since leaving Scarsdale to attend Georgetown U and so, in a textbook deprivation move, became a vegetarian.
“Only two brats, my darling,” he assured her.
“I’m thirsty. This pastry.” She then entered into a coughing jag that had every occupant of the shop either staring or offering assistance. “A double mocha latte with whipped cream and caramel,” she managed. “Grande.”
Miles fetched the drink and the fit ceased shortly after she raised the steaming cup to her lips. When she dabbed her watering eyes with a napkin printed with antique coffee grinders, Miles noticed that the birthmark was gone.
“Listen,” she whispered, “it’s not only campus security on the case. They’ve called in the police, the Secret Service, even Scotland Yard.”
“Scotland Yard?” he said with disgust. “Europeans want to get in on everything.”
“We aren’t supposed to know. Some guy there’s a specialist in subduing animal rights activists.”
Miles realized then what he’d dreaded realizing all along. “We?” he asked.
Ramona slapped her hand to her mouth as if to recapture the newly escaped words.
“Just tell me that you think of me when your hand grazes that of the man who unlocks cages beside you,’ he said, “that as you look up from the blueprints of the Leavey Center it’s my eyes and not his that you see.”
“Sure,” she said. “Why not.”
“Say...did you have anything to do with Gandhi?” he asked, recalling the life-size fiberglass cow painted like a butcher’s shop poster and covered with vegetarian slogans linking beef consumption to heart attacks, cancer and impotence. It had been bound with barbed wire and duct tape to the food counter in the main cafeteria the week before, and the cafeteria was closed until a SWAT team confirmed that it had not been rigged with explosives. Students had affectionately named the anti-carnivore cow after the slain Hindu passive resistance icon, but the dean was irate and threatened immediate expulsion to the perpetrators for not only breaking into the cafeteria but for their seditious response to the school’s menu selections.
At first Ramona looked confused, but then nodded knowingly. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Why, my love is a master of bovine design!”
“I don’t know about that,” she smiled, gazing about absently until her eye caught something just beyond Miles’s right ear. She gulped down the remainder of her coffee and rushed into the restroom. When Miles glanced behind him, he noticed two campus security guards staring through the café window. After waiting several minutes, heart pounding, wondering why they had neither entered nor left, he asked a woman newly seated at a neighboring table to check the ladies’ room for a short dark woman with a crooked nose wearing a tacky coat and a purple fedora. The woman collected her espresso and moved to a distant sofa. One was always alone in these matters.
Miles knocked quietly at the women’s restroom door and cursed himself for not creating code names and passwords.
“Ramona,” he whispered, but heard nothing. He opened the door slowly and stepped inside. The light rustle of toilet paper escaped from the only occupied stall, and he immediately entered the one beside it. “They’re still out there,” he whispered, “but don’t worry, I have a plan. We’ll switch clothes, then you can escape while they’re apprehending me. Stand on the toilet and look over—you’ll see that I’m not wired.”
“I don’t think so.”
Just as Miles flung his John Coltrane sweatshirt and Land’s End Dockers on the wall between them, he heard her door click open.
“Wait,” he cried, stepping out of the stall in his underwear and sneakers. “I need your clothes.”
Standing before him was Professor Buckminster, who had stopped in to relieve herself after a three-hour Poetry and Ethics seminar. When Miles reached up to retrieve his pants, he noticed that the window above the sink hung wildly askew.
“I thought you were someone else,” he said while slipping his pants over his Wildsmith loafers, Professor Buckminster standing before him, mouth agape.
In his rooftop apartment that evening Miles stared at the Potomac and considered throwing himself in. Damn his father for teaching him to swim, although not very well. He imagined himself impaled on the Washington Monument, then turned his attention to the Lincoln Memorial. He flipped open his notebook.
How I long to sit in your safe and secure (yet cold) lap
High on your pedestal.
How I envy you your stone heart,
Your panoramic view
You’ve seen her, perhaps you watch her even now
But that will forever be your secret
Damn those marble lips!
O Captain, my Captain! Part them just once for me!
Miles Beauregard, a bad poet who had trouble enlisting human allies, often invoked the aid of inanimate objects. He secured his notebook to a loop of his Dockers with a rubber band and haunted the connecting catwalks of the apartment complex. Maybe she was looking for him; it wasn’t impossible. He threaded the crowds on several of the public decks, finally giving up and sulking back to his apartment, where an urgent telephone message from his father awaited him.
It wasn’t until he returned the call and his father relayed in minute detail his conversation with Professor Buckminster that he realized what an opportunity had been lost with his old flame that very afternoon in the women’s restroom at the Coffee Grind. Imagine if Ramona had not slipped through the window—the three of them together—it was too much.
“I made a mistake, Dad. Those symbols on the doors look an awful lot alike.”
“Of course,” said his father, “your astigmatism. But that doesn’t explain your requesting her clothes. Son, are you a cross-dresser? It’s perfectly all right if you are, you can tell me.”
“No!” Miles yelled into the receiver. “I was helping a friend, but I can’t tell you more. My line may be bugged.”
“Why would your line be bugged?”
“This is Washington, Dad.”
“Do you want me to come down?”
“Maybe after finals. I’m under a lot of pressure right now.”
“I understand. That’s what I told your professor. I convinced her not to go to the administration with this.”
Miles grinned. So Buckminster did have a thing for him.
Miles did not see his beloved for fifteen days, during which he wavered between creating a new obsession and devoting the rest of his life to her memory. If he began to admire Professor Buckminster’s calves or entertain doubt concerning Ramona’s role as a subversive, he quickly contemplated and then wrote about her limpid eyes, her snaggle-toothed smile, her chocolate birthmark. Her close brush with Scotland Yard—even the story about being a political prisoner could be true—made him realize his amour was living the kind of life about which he only dreamed.
III
Miles stayed in bed until three o’clock on the sixteenth day of Ramona’s absence, and that evening threw on his Latin quotations sweatshirt, cargo pants and boat shoes before heading toward the union, where through the window he glimpsed her sporting a blond wig and a red and white checked sundress. She was playing pool with several men, and when she drew her body across the table to attempt a long shot, he lost his breath—maybe it was his asthma, but certainly the picture of her draped seductively across the felt had at least triggered it. His heart leapt and his energy returned; he nearly opened the thick glass door with one hand before bounding toward her and without preliminaries kneeling down to kiss her left pinkie as she’d slithered from the table.
“My love,” he exclaimed.
“Mah gracious,” she said, her right hand fanned across her chest. Miles detected a bad Southern accent.
“Who’s that?” asked one of her longhaired, beer-drinking cohorts.
“We must go,” she said, casting her pool cue to the floor.
When they exited the union, Miles seized her hand and cried, “Ramona! How I’ve—”
“Actually,” she drawled, “mah name is Kits.”
Miles was immediately deflated; sixteen long days of pining after a woman who within seconds after reunion becomes someone else!
“Really?” said Miles, dropping her hand as if it were infested. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re running from the Polynesian police for performing the hula without a license, or that you’re a visitor from the planet Zoron on a mission to colonize the Earth, or that you masterminded the imminent downfall of Microsoft.”
Kits collapsed onto a decorative bench in front of the campus bookstore before pulling an embroidered handkerchief from her checkered clutch and dabbing the corner of her eye where the birthmark had once been. “Mahles, sweet Mahles,” she cried. “I know A’ve been dishonest, but you must believe Ah had a good reason. Can you eva forgive me?”
When she touched his face, Miles extracted his inhaler and took several puffs. “I suppose,” he said, “just promise me one thing.”
“Enna-thing.”
“Lose the accent.”
She glanced around. “All right. I needed it to fool the Secret Service,” she explained. “I told them I’m from Georgia.”
“Why did you do that?”
She shook her head. “So they wouldn’t think I’m from Georgia.”
“Ah.”
After several moments of awkward silence, Miles became desperate that she, growing bored or nervous, would attempt another escape only to return as someone else, so he launched into a desperate interview. “So you’re from Georgia,” he said, “the Peach State. Have you seen Flannery O’Connor’s personal collection at Georgia College? How about Charlemagne’s Kingdom in Helen—”
“Are you testing me?”
Miles bolted upright. “Of course not, my beloved chameleon!”
“Well, I’ve been testing you,” she said, “with the political prisoner and animal activist stories, to see if I could trust you. Listen.” She glanced around cautiously, sidled up to Miles and pressed her lips to his left ear. His wheezing grew so rapid that he wasn’t certain he had heard her correctly when she said: “The Secret Service suspects I’m about the blow the lid off the White House, and they’re right.”
“Explosives?” he ventured.
“Not literally.”
“Oh.”
She sighed deeply. “Do you know who your father is?”
“Of course I do,” said Miles. “A balding neurosurgeon with bad taste in clothes.”
“No, no, do you really know? I mean, do you have a relationship?”
Miles resurrected harrowing memories of learning to swim, the Outward-Bound trip. “I guess.”
“Well, what would you say if I told you that you know my father as well as I do? That the whole country knows my father as well as I do?” Here she began to sob uncontrollably, and Miles thought her wise to forego facial ornamentation in light of her distress. He put his arm around her shoulder.
“Watch the dress,” she snapped. “It’s not mine.”
He studied the ebb and flow of her delectable mountains when she resumed sobbing.
“My darling,” he said, “allow me to comfort them, uh, you.” She let him caress her shoulder with his left hand as he sucked on the inhaler in his right. When he regained his breath, he asked about her father.
“Let’s just say he was a highly elected political official.”
“Not Bill?”
She waved her handkerchief. “That would be a cliché.”
“Then who?”
“Let’s just say it’s someone who seduced my young and impressionable mother on a threadbare mattress in a cheap motel in the Red-Light district of Atlanta.”
“Is it Tom Delay?” he asked. “He seems like someone who would do that.”
“Don’t look,” said Kits, jumping from the bench and embarking on a brisk walk. “They’re behind us.”
“The Secret Service?” said Miles, fumbling with his inhaler as he strove to keep up.
“Bingo.”
“Listen,” he suggested, “we need a plan. A place to meet after the enemy scatters us. How about my apartment?”
“Are you crazy?” she said, moving her lips like an amateur ventriloquist. “They’ve followed you for sure. I’m amazed you’re not bound and gagged in a dank basement with electrodes stuck to your nuts.”
“Then where?” said Miles, panting from the exertion of the block-long trot.
“The juice bar in the Quad.”
“That place is always packed!”
“It’s easy to get lost in a crowd,” she winked and bolted across 37th, leaving him to the mercy of the Feds.
When Miles turned around to give himself up, arms raised to expose the perspiration stains on his favorite sweatshirt, no one was there.
He resumed his trek, stopping several times to puff on his inhaler, and when he finally found his way to the juice bar it was closed. He stared through the window at the back lit menu board and sighed. He then fumbled for several long minutes with the rubber band on his belt loop before finally snapping it—his thumb would later require medical attention, he knew—to free his notebook before all inspiration was lost.
Afsoon, Ramona, Kits!
Les belles dames sans merci!
My three ravenous fates,
How you consume my heart,
like a pulsating pot sticker
How you weave the strands of my existence
--not to mention my stomach--
into a chaotic bundle of knots!
Return to me, one and all
And I will drink you in like a multi-grain, protein-rich
Fruity-Tofutti.
Miles Beauregard, a struggling poet who unwittingly usurped and subsequently destroyed good poetry, spent the next week lulling about the juice bar, drinking carrot-mango spritzes and lemon-pea pod smoothies and writing bad poetry. The health drinks were energizing, and since they precluded him from generating the type of depression he deemed indispensable to clear thinking, he abandoned the juice bar for his cot back at Village A, where a search plan emerged in its entirety within seventy-two hours.
• • •
Kits, a.k.a. Ramona, a.k.a. Afsoon, was actually Gladys Thornsby, a drama major at Georgetown U whose father was an Executive Vice President for Lockheed Martin and whose mother was a federal judge. Both were disappointed in their only child’s vocation, blaming themselves for realizing belatedly what their short-sighted encouragement of her melodramatic childhood performances would reap, questioning after it was too late the Montessori mission and the Dr. Spock approach. They would encourage her no more and vowed never to attend a performance, although because she lived with them they were forced to witness her transformations into the character du jour, their secret, disparaging term for their daughter’s homework.
Miles, who could not gather sufficient strength to embark on a personal search for Kits, hired a private investigator instead. When he learned only three days after submitting a $300 retainer that Gladys Thornsby was a college student at Georgetown U who disrespected her wealthy parents and who persistently engaged in melodramatic and ludicrous flights of fancy, he was filled with both pity and revulsion. He quickly opened his notebook and wrote a poem comparing Professor Buckminster’s hands to twin octopi that first embraced, then caressed, and finally ravaged him in the floating, milk-filled lake of Ardvisura.
Originally appeared in Chicago Tribune Sunday literary supplement, 2014.