The Opal

I’m not a man of considerable means. I do, however, posses great imaginative wealth, that is to say, I imagine greatly. I also possess, in abundance, love and passion which is stowed in a silo inside of my soul, perfectly concealed and undaunted by change and the dubiety of life. I don’t think most people know that about me because I am a relatively quiet man. They might say I am thoughtful, or wise, or patient, or penitent, or maybe, socially inept or purblind, but by no means would these imaginary people speak of my grand imagination or say anything at all of my romanticism. That is my great secret from the world. As is my unspoken disappointment with everyone I’ve ever thought I loved, or thought that loved me. 

I’ve skirted through life with little to speak of, never amounted to much in anything, quit practically everything after a short while, bounced from job to job, bill to bill, never established a career or anything that lasted. I am a sort of misfit. Constantly out of place. All that keeps me from being a drifter is my house, but it never became a home. I’ve had only a few cars. Nothing flashy or extraordinary in anyway. They were serviceable and clean. Dependable for a while until they weren’t. I drove them until the wheels fell off. And such has been my history with women. I keep them until either they leave me or until they die. Two past girlfriends have died, one of cancer and one in an car accident. Two funerals I’ve sat at wondering if she was the one, knowing better all the while. One had been promising, however, but the other, well, who really knows.

I have never left anyone. I have allowed them to have that distinction when there seemed to be no other option. They've all ended in a scorched earth way. For certain, I was gone already, but I wasn’t interested in making a formal declaration as to the end state of our affair. My last girlfriend, a silly word for someone nearly 40 years-old, if you ask me, left me for what she called, “the finer things in life.” It amused me after she had gone and I realized as I got older, the reasons people gave for leaving someone were like punchlines to bad jokes. They were whatever they could scrounge up that sounded good enough to conceal the real reason they left.

I don’t know what the finer things in life are, but that phrase toils periodically in my mind, though the lady does not. It comes sometimes like a Jehovah’s Witness when I am pulling weeds or waking the dog. The finer things in life, I suppose, are not pulling weeds or scooping dog shit out of the backyard. Or lazily reading books, waiting for Mrs. Right to ring my bell. I asked my dog, Bogey, what he supposes it means, but he is as clueless as myself and just looks at me and licks his black lips, so I don’t suppose he knows, either. I think maybe it is caviar and Cadillacs, but I suppose Cadillacs aren’t so fine anymore considering that I drive one. I think of ocean liners and cruises and yachts and champagne and fast women, the kind that wear a lot of makeup and little clothes. The kind with expensive handbags and heels. None of which I like, but they are the usual inventory.

I don’t wish to sound petulant or morose, for I am neither. I am a relatively happy man. My job pays well enough to live a good middle-class life, and my house, though quaint, is mine and it has a wonderful garden and flower beds that I have cultivated over the years to what they are today. And it pleases me when people stop and have a look and say something complimentary of my roses, or my azaleas, or my peonies. Or when they notice the pruning work I’ve done on my Canadian hemlock. Or when the clematis blooms blue buds up the pergola and I sit near my fire pit on the stone seat-wall and have a cold beer after a long day. A ballgame on the transistor radio. Just the sound. The murmur of the crowd and the announcers now and then describing the events as they happen. And that fire pops and an ember flies heavenward like an ascending soul, something lost or given. Something traded or returned. But what does the world or these flowers care for Andy Parker? With or without me, they would be nonetheless what they are. They would continue on as though I never were here. And in time, a month or two, maybe a year, it would be like I never was here at all. I would be what this fire will be come morning.  

There is more to this life than romance and relationships that are fleeting and, as good as they can be at times, inevitably doomed by their mortal nature. Suppose I live an entire life with someone, very much in love, so much so that I grow to depend upon her for happiness and pleasure to the extent that I find little happiness or pleasure in anything else, and then she dies of cancer, either suddenly or slowly. Do I want to be bereft in such a way? To know no other pleasure or contentment than that which lies in a funeral parlor, bled of life, a who that has become a that, that then becomes a plastic box of gray ashes that I am to either put on my mantle or spread somewhere supposedly meaningful? And that is, as good as it gets, as happy an ending as can be expected. Or else it is that I die and leave some sad little old lady alone in a home to find her own way to her eternal reward without me to make her laugh any longer. I don’t wish for such sadness, nor do I wish to wretchedly bestow such on someone else.

Yet, despite the realization, I yearn. Especially, in quiet times. Through oceans of lonely nights in the boat of my bed adrift. Dreaming that there can be someone in the world like me somewhere. Not exactly like me, by no means, but like me by all means. Who recognizes that which I recognize. Whose ideals and values are not continents apart from mine. Who is lovely and who is sane yet crazy and who finds the same pleasures in life that I do. A night on a porch swing, the chains creaking their endless chorus, libations of wine. An old movie. Fall nights, crisp and cool. The smell of burning leaves, twigs, a distant woodburner. A warm bed in a cold room. Hardwood floors more than carpet. A tent in the woods. A fire that pops and sizzles. A good book that you purposefully read slow so it will not end too quickly. Lazy, rainy mornings in bed and way too much sex. Someone not filled with triviality, or jealousy. One who rejects groupthink and doublespeak and pop culture, who is not brainwashed by commercials or fads. One who does not have too much or too little ambition. Not one with the roaming eye or lust for a presumptive next, or who dallies on about some celebrity crush, the eternal shopper, the malcontent, the morose, the dimwit, or an arrogant one. I’ve had all of them, ran the full gamut. One as unique as me. As the tobacco pipe I smoke. As interesting and as strange. Who loves kids and parades. Puppies and old music. Kittens and toads. But I die slowly in knowing she is not of this day and age and I do not belong here without her.
  
She might wear floral prints and dresses and sometimes, dare I say, gloves. Not for the sake of the cold. Gloves for the sake of gloves. And pearls, only for elegance. Often I dream too much. I let myself down too often. I’ve found little in women beyond perfidy and shallowness, not to disparage the species for I am sure men would fare no better on a similar scale of judgment. But there was a significant lack of depth in the dry souls of my past and when I attempted to drill for more in them, hoping to extract what was there but never realized, there was only the crumbling and gnashing of bedrock. Dry bones, dust, and sand. Raisins for hearts. For as much as they all say they love a love story, particularly The Notebook, or Romeo and Juliet, I haven’t at all noticed such to be true.

No one seemed to adore the romance of everyday life and they appeared more like delusional stargazers, dreaming of distant can-never-be fairytales, not to notice the burgeoning one beneath their very obtuse noses. The man spending his last ten bucks on flowers and chocolates or wine. Buying a ring he could not possibly afford. Or staying up with them into the early hours of morning just to listen and to be with them, when he has to work early. Or doing their dishes so they can relax. Or other corporeal pleasures decorum precludes me from detailing. I can say in short, that I have been woefully let down by the female of this human species inexorably so that I often feel like a fool for pursuing another. I am a joke I tell of myself. 

It was by chance that I first saw her. It occurred in the warehouse on the corner of Mulberry and Queen Street where they used to make shoes a hundred or so years ago. I visit the Olde Shoe Factory, as it is called, many times a month and I don’t know without that pleasure what I would do with my spare time. It is filled with oddities like me and, perhaps, that is my attraction. I belong amidst old newspapers and vintage glassware and military uniforms from The War. My house is decorated with countless items from the mall, as they call it, each that I value immensely. Not antiques of great monetary worth, to be clear. Simple things like a bronze cherub lamp with a green and orange tulip shade. A Santa Maria model boat. A framed picture of a race horse from the 1930’s and a marionette I named Herman. A coat-tree, a milk can, that sort of thing. I am not sure what other people do with their time besides sleep and work. I suppose much is given to the God of TV, sitting like perfunctory rubes glowing in its hypnotic celestial orb, or to the care of children and games. I have no children and my TV sits like an otiose ornament in my house as though it waits for an occasion that very rarely comes. It waits for purpose the way I wait for a Mrs. Parker. This is what I do with my time. I wander through the antique mall and I covet.

She was standing by a grandfather clock in a blue flower print dress trying on a pair of ivory-colored gloves. She was by herself and she laughed at the gloves because they wouldn’t fit. And I watched her, through the wires of a gilded birdcage with no bird. I was pretending to try on a pair of old wire-framed spectacles, though I had no interest in them at all. Although her hands and wrists were quite small and delicate, the gloves were ridiculously smaller, so it was a comedy of sorts that only she and I were privy to.

“A century of deterioration, I suppose,” I blurted impetuously. Something about her compelled me, for I was never one to speak so recklessly to someone I had never met. I startled her, but she stood there like a deer in the comfort of her own surroundings and smiled at me and nodded her head in a supposed agreement. My God, how beautiful she was. I knew at a glance that I had never seen anyone more beautiful and quickly in a vision I could prognosticate our life together. Our wedding, our kids, our travels. I could see her on our porch swing, smiling, drinking wine. I could see her by the fire. On the beach somewhere. Under an umbrella. Her hair was dark blonde, in curls and shoulder length, and her eyes were like amber-colored glass, incandescent universes of peaceful life behind them. Her smile at me, an impromptu and hapless admirer in sloppy torn jeans, a wrinkled Beatles t-shirt and a ballcap on my head to conceal a shiftless head of hair, lifted my spirit in such a way that only a beautiful woman can. For all of my prior disparaging, I remain an ardent and hopeful admirer of the species. The thought of what may be, if the stars aligned themselves in such a way, burst like supernovas in my mind, but I knew I was stargazing at such a place that no method of travel could ever send me.

And with that metaphor realized, and as though God meant to challenge it, the oldies radio program on the mall’s radio played “You Send Me” by Sam Cooke. And through a shelf or two of porcelain, stained glassware, a broken cuckoo clock, and a century of trinkets and toys, things thrown out or left behind and bought and resold by grifters and auction hawks, I practically danced with myself, hoping she would say something back. How oddly hesitant she seemed, still looking down at those gloves before putting them gently back on the shelf where they belonged, carefully placing the small paper price tag which hung from a string. Then she walked towards me. Her eyes closed, humming the song. I wanted to dance with her, to be so forward that I would not even ask, just take her in my arms and dance, but I was not so deliberate in anything I did, so I just waited for her to come closer and hopefully say something of worth to me. She smiled again, clearly noticing me. Then she approached and said, “I am a Yankees fan as well. There will never be another Babe.”

I was awestruck and didn’t understand what she meant for a moment. Then I realized the cap I wore was a Yankees cap. I wasn’t a fan, I just liked the hat. I had bought it there months earlier. An old one. Probably from the days of Mickey Mantle, 1960 or so. “No. There certainly will not,” I agreed. “The Babe was one of a kind.”

“I don’t know any of the new players. I heard that DiMaggio was alright.”

“Yeah,” I chuckled. “I suppose he was alright.”

She smiled. “My name is Hazel. Hazel Graham. I have seen you here before.”

“Yeah. I’m Andy. Andy Parker. And I come, um, fairly often. I am, well, I’m always looking for something to fill my house. I’m a collector, somewhat, of unique things.”

“Your house?”

I paused. Although she stood right in front of me and spoke directly to me it was as though she were sleepwalking or confused. She looked disoriented.

“Yes. I live a few blocks over on Wheeling Street.”

“Wheeling Street?! I lived on Wheeling Street! But it was some time ago. 120 Wheeling.”

“Oh, I am at the other end. 833.”

“By the school?” she asked excitedly.

“Yes. But it is no longer there.”

“What happened?”

“They turned it into apartments.”

“Oh. I went to school there when I was a little girl. Did you?”

“No. I, um, I grew up on the other side of town. But I didn’t know it was still around that recently.”

“It was a nice school. The teachers were strict but fair to me. I had so many friends. I enjoyed my days there.”

“You still live in town?”

“Yes. I live here,” she said.

“Here?” I chuckled.

“Yes,” she grinned. “I work here. I am here all the time.”

“Oh. Well, then money is well.”

“Oh, no. No, they don’t pay me as they should. I’m here because this is where I belong. But you can ask me about anything in the store and I’ll tell you all about it. How much it is. Where it came from. What it was used for, if you don’t know. Anything. For instance, the hat you are wearing, it was sold in the second shelf of vendor booth 114 for 35 dollars - which is a bargain. It is a 1962 official team hat. How it was acquired is somewhat of an enigma, but that is part of the fun of this place. There is so much mystery into who once owned these things, where they’ve gone onto, and on what occasion they were worn, used, or displayed. And how they looked in their original condition.”

I smiled at her, nodding in agreement. But my smile was a woefully inept ambassador for that which happened inside of me. In that moment of time there was such a change that swept over me, which I suppose is what happens whenever I see or meet a beautiful woman. But this was far more than the ordinary evolution of myself in such a time. Looking at her was like looking at the rarest and purest thing on this Earth. Like something no one had ever looked upon or had before. No one had looked at her as I did, so I felt. This was something entirely too beautiful to put to words. I stood there and listened to her talk as she gave me an impromptu tour of the three-story antique mall, which lasted for better than an hour. There wasn’t a nook or cranny of the place that she didn’t show me, and by the time she was finished with me, my basket was full. So, I suppose, we both satisfied our general purposes. Hers to sell and mine to buy.

Only I didn’t simply buy items of the store, nor is that all she sold me. I bought hope, and a dream, and in her as a female, as a perspective partner for me, though clearly she was beyond my equal which I do not say as a kind of defect of my self-confidence, nor to devalue myself. I say so because she was beyond anyone’s equal in beauty alone, not counting her obvious charm and wit. She was classy and timeless and it perplexed me for just a little that she would work here, though it seems snobbish to think. But I figured it to be some sort of family business, or perhaps one of those change-of-life freshly divorced jobs. I make such wild conjectures in the absence of knowledge and my head was suddenly a busy factory full of them, as busy as the little hands that once laced shoes here over a century ago. 

But she disappeared somewhere between the larger antiques of the basement and the first floor cash register. I looked around for her to tell her goodbye, but she was nowhere to be found. I assumed that she was distracted by some work or another customer, so I didn’t think much of it. I had to remind myself that I was not as special as she made feel and that it was only her doing her job and her kindness as a person that did so. It was a drug to which I had never become immune, but whose effect would diminish when allayed by reason and the sobriety of being removed from the woman. Still I was a bit morose when I looked over by where I saw her first, through the birdcage and by that grandfather clock, not to see her. When the lady at the register asked me if I found everything okay, I thought to pay Hazel a sincere compliment, but I simply had another quick glance around, nodded, and pulled out my wallet to pay.

I became even more frequent a customer of the Olde Shoe than ever before. And every time I went in, Hazel was there, near the same spot. It was the second or third visit when she showed me her favorite piece in the mall. It was a beautiful, large opal antique ring beset in an oval cluster of small diamonds. The opal was colorful, like Earth itself from the eye of the moon. The box was open and the ring sat in it as though it were a pearl in an oyster’s mouth. I was awestruck by it. How it gleamed in the lights of the showcase, and how she looked at it longingly. The glass case it was kept in reminded me of one of those old glass coffins I had seen in movies, only it stood upright, and we stood there looking at some beautiful invisible corpse and the ring on her equally invisible finger.

“How much is it?” I asked.

“The opal? Oh. It is priceless,” she replied, a bit listlessly. I expected her to say something more of it as she did with every other thing she had showed me on our previous tours. To give me a long history of its origin and the value of the price as marked. But she didn’t. She just stood there and stared at it and it left me with a strange feeling that there was more to that ring than I knew. The inside of the ornate box said “Pidduck and Sons - Hanley and Newcastle,” which I imagined to be an English jeweler of bygone era. I do not suspect there is still a Pidduck and Sons, or such a ring for sale anywhere other than here.

“Hazel?”

She smiled awake, as though she were stalled and I had suddenly winded her gear. “Yes, Andy?”

“Are you going to buy the ring?”

“Oh, I couldn’t. And it wouldn’t be right at all for a girl to buy herself such a beautiful ring, would it?”

“Well, this day and age, I would say - ”

“Yes. This day and age. To which I do not belong,” she pined. “This isn’t my time, Andy. It just isn’t. That is why I am here. I belong here with all these old things. The old music they play. This is me.”

I wanted to agree with her and say I felt the same, but I didn’t say anything. I was sorry I asked her about it because it seemed to sadden her. But she turned and smiled at me as though to change her mood and the length of her vintage pink dress fanned to an airy bell-shape before it settled flat to her legs again. She was like no one I ever knew and I was determined I would ask her out on a date. I was buying more dreams from her, stocks of dreams that she was inadvertently selling me, and the time we spent together in the store, the rainy Saturday afternoons, or the Tuesdays when I played hooky from work so to see her when it was not so busy, were not enough. I added more days. An hour here and there after work before they closed. A Saturday and a Sunday. We talked and we laughed. We once danced on the third floor when there were no other customers around. A week soon became a month and she was always happy to see me and it was never awkward. It was as though it was not obvious to her at all that I came so often only to see her. That I augmented such a perfunctory interest in antiques and was promoted from novice to afficionado, all because of her. I even considered renting my own booth and becoming an antique dealer just to get that much closer to her.

It would have been the only thing that soured it for me, had she to express some suspicion over my motives or to stop selling me interest in the dream of which I owned the lionshare. Or had she to display some discourtesy, either intended or not, or spoke of another man, or dream of her own that was contrary to my dreams of her. But she did not. And I reasoned it to be a latent expression of mutual interest, and what was but a spark on a matchstick became a wildfire and my desire for her, and to remain in her company as often as possible, consumed all other interests.

It was a month and some days later when I decided I would at last ask her on a date. The progression to that point felt natural. It would not be a hard proposition to make for we talked so easily to one another by then that it simply would be a matter of phrasing it so not to stumble on my words, and to choose the right opportunity to suggest it. I was not nervous in the least, nor had I any trepidation of being rejected because the time had come and even though I was a patient man, my patience knew when to pack their bags and move on the way the down knows to shed from the gosling. So I fixed my hair outside of the warehouse in the reflection of the glass doors and like a determined goose I walked in and went directly to her where she stood on a stepladder dusting a shelf of porcelain Christmas bells with a feather duster. She smiled as she always smiled when she saw me and said, “Oh, hey Andy!”

“Hello, Hazel.” I must have sounded determined because she looked back at me strangely, still whisking those bells. Buddy Holly serenaded us with “Everyday,” and my heart beat a little faster and I bit my lip and then I asked her.

“Would you like to go to a drive-in movie with me Friday night?”

And then she stopped whisking as though someone had spit on her grave, and she stood there looking at those bells for a moment. Then she carefully stepped down and I knew the answer was not to be in my favor by the look upon her suddenly pallid face, so I immediately regretted asking and all my prior resolutions to be fine if she said no deserted me. She looked as though I had invited her to a funeral. And Louis and Ella were singing “Dream A Little Dream of Me” when she delivered upon me like the Enola Gay delivered upon Nagasaki, the bomb, prefaced with an apology that dropped over me like leaflets warning of an impending nuclear holocaust of my soul.

“I am sorry, Andy. I can’t go with you. It sounds fun. It really does. I’ve never been to a drive-in movie. I wish that I could, but, I just can’t. I can’t.”

“Well, that’s okay. I just stopped in to ask. I’m sorry to have interrupted you. I got to get back to something, though.”

“Wait,” she implored. “You can’t stay a while? There are a lot of new things in the basement that just came in that you might find interesting, old newspapers and some books. I thought I would show you this - ”

“No, Hazel. I’ll be back soon, though. We will catch up then. But I got to get back to the office. I forgot some papers and I got to finish them up by tomorrow.”

She looked as sad as I felt, which was odd for me in that she had turned me down. I smiled a fake mask of a smile that felt as though it cracked my face, but the look on hers was decidedly more genuine and sorrowful. Or perhaps, it was pity for me that I did not recognize. It was that her kindness wouldn’t allow her to feel decent about turning me down. Maybe she did so for good reason. I was not upset with her at all. I was embarrassed that I thought that she might have said yes. And so I walked out, which was the perfect time for Audrey Hepburn to sing “Moon River” as I darted like a frightened rabbit through narrow aisles of old coats and glassware and old tables and croquet sets and someone’s fine china and Tiffany lamps and whisky barrels and vintage beer signs and Persian rugs. I inadvertently knocked over a box of vintage Valentine’s Day cards and stopped to pick them up, not assessing the irony of it, all the broken hearts there scattered on the floor before me to gather. I heard her call my name after I had put that box back on the table where it belonged, but I was far enough away to pretend that I didn’t hear her and near enough to the door that I could get away before she called me again.

I took a deep breath when I was outside. The feeling I felt must have been something of what Napoleon felt at Waterloo realizing he was defeated and all his ambition was for not. All the men he conscripted to kill, for only a resounding defeat. This was the Great Crash, caused by my excessive speculation and presumption. All the hope and dreams I had bought had caused me to go bankrupt and had been stolen from me by one single no, for whatever reason, good or bad, whether she was in a relationship or just not interested, whether she had prior plans or was a lesbian, nothing would console me, nothing could make it right. I was the broke tycoon throwing himself out the thirty-story window to the cold surface of 1929 New York.

But I looked up longingly at the brick building and the large windows and I walked slowly to my car. Maybe she would come out the door and catch me like you would see in a movie. Maybe the question had simply caught her off-guard and she might reconsider it. Maybe it would start raining and she would jump into my arms and we would kiss on the sidewalk in a puddle in the rain. Maybe she was only afraid because of someone she knew before me. So I walked side by side with an indifferent ant at his pace until I realized she was not coming. But then, near the parking lot, I stood with my hands like pouting sandbags in my pockets when I looked up at the large white window and saw her blank face looking down on me. She still looked sad. She held up the palm of her hand as though to say goodbye or to catch my attention, I wasn’t sure which, and she slowly dropped it as she said three words I could read on her lips. “I am sorry.”    

I faked a smile and waved back at her and shook my head as though there was no reason to be sorry. This is the way that life goes. An affair cannot be bought by one person’s overwhelming desire for another. It is a two-way sell or it is something sinister. Both must mortgage their past and debit their hearts for the person at hand or browse in another shop. Perhaps, one just around the corner. I waved again and turned the corner to the parking lot and got in my car and drove away feeling like a silly and ridiculous man. I don’t know if she stayed long enough to watch me drive away. I didn’t look back up as I pulled out onto Queen Street and passed the window. I was riddled with embarrassment. It wasn’t about my ego. I had no ego. It was simply that I was embarrassed that I thought she had any interest in me as anything other than a customer of the store in which she worked, or at most, a doting admirer.

It was my shame that kept me away. I stayed home and did my garden, pruned my roses, watered the lawn, walked Bogey. Secretly, I hoped that she would find me. She knew where I lived. I had made that abundantly clear. The house next to where she went to elementary school, I said many times. 833 Wheeling. So I probably sat on my porch a little longer than normal, watching cars pass by, certain my heart may have skipped a beat a time or two when a car pulled along the curb to park in front of my house and a blonde woman got out. Only it was never her. It was someone who would walk up the street to the yuppie bar. And the porch swing groaned my otherwise silent dissonance and late night thunderstorms cried my only cries so sufficiently that I needn’t do anything myself other than to sit there and wait for her to show up or to forget, whichever came, mercifully so.

But she didn’t come and I couldn’t forget. I missed her too much after a month to stay away. Her friendship certainly meant more to me than my pride or embarrassment, so I stopped in on a busy Saturday afternoon when I would look less conspicuous. I wanted to tell her a thing or two I never got the chance to say. I wanted to buy the opal for her, whatever the price, but I didn’t want her to know it was from me. I would buy it and have the lady who owned the store give it to her as a gift of appreciation for all her hard work. It wasn’t some harebrained scheme such as one of those I might have cooked up as a kid in school over a schoolboy crush. No intentional unintentional gift sort of thing. It would be purely sincere. A noble and wholly anonymous gesture.

But she was nowhere to be found. As I looked through the store I began to panic and my head manufactured thoughts as to what happened to her. Maybe she went back to her husband, if she was married, or she quit because of me, or she was fired, or she was in an accident. It went on and on as I walked through the aisles. Then I checked on the opal and it too was gone. The glass case that housed it was full of other rings and trinkets of certain value, but none as beautiful as it. Still on a shelf nearby there were the ivory-colored gloves I remembered her holding when I first saw her, and the grandfather clock. So with no alternative, I had to ask the lady who owned the store, whose name I didn’t even know, what happened to Hazel.

Her name was Sue. And Sue looked at me oddly at first and then shook her head confused. She was behind the counter with a daughter who worked for her and another employee, a teen boy, and an old cantankerous-looking man who sat on a stool.

“Hazel?” Sue considered. “Why, Mr.-”

“Parker. Andrew Parker.”

“Mr. Parker there is no Hazel who works here for me. There is just myself, my two sons, Nick here, my daughter, Grace, and Uncle Billy here. My husband as well. But, no. There is no Hazel.”

“That can’t be! I’ve been coming in here for well over a month and have seen her dusting shelves and putting things away and she has showed me around and told me about everything that comes and goes. She said she worked here so much it is as though she lived - ” And suddenly it made sense to me. It all made sense. I knew why she had said no to the date. Why she had to say no. It was because she could never leave. She was trapped within these walls. She belonged here because of the ring. The opal. I knew it all, yet I didn’t know it. It was then an unconscious revelation, yet to be birthed as a cognizant thought.

“That’s her, alright” Uncle Billy grinned as though something were stuck in his teeth. Everyone looked at him. “I know her. She was here. But she left. There’ve been others, too. Many others. You see I owned this place since the summer of 1980, son, and I’ve seen a lot of people come and go through here. Not people like you and me. Like Hazel. The shadows of people. The souls. Like passing through at a train station. Sometimes they’re here for a week or two, or a month. Sometimes they’re here for a year or two. But they always leave eventually. Couldn’t figure it for a long time.”

“Uncle Billy!” Sue complained. “Have you been drinking again?!”

“Please!” I begged her. “Let him finish.”

He was telling me what I already knew. He continued seeming to enjoy his new relevance in a world that was moving past him. He was a decrepit old man and his bones cricked and creaked as he stood up and he moaned. “Hazel, you say her name was. Was she a pretty blonde? About 5'7"? Always wore them pretty dresses and seemed to mingle about back there by that old grandfather clock?”

“Yes! Yes, that is her! That is exactly her! You know her?”

“No. Can’t say I do. But I seen her. Figured she was in with that old grandfather clock, bein’ that’s where she was most of the time. But she left us and that old grandfather clock is still back there, so it must’ve been somethin’ else.”

“What do you mean?” I asked impatiently, though I already knew. I just needed someone to confirm my suspicion, I suppose. Breathe breath into my unconscious thought. 

“Uncle Billy,” Sue interjected, “what are you trying to say?”

“These old things may not seem like much to some people. To us they’re something we buy and sell and collect, but to those people who had em, well, let me tell you that they mean a great deal more to them than anyone. And sometimes, well, people get themselves attached. Their souls get attached to things and they go where they go, and when they go.”

“Uncle Billy!” Sue complained.

“It’s true. Y’all seen it. You just deny what ya see. Tell yourself it’s nothin’ or it’s a beam of light through a window or a cold draft for no reason at all. They walk right by you and you don’t see em like me and this fella sees em. We see em as they are. Or, I suppose, as they were. Just like they’re real folks.”

The daughter spoke up, “Cool! Are you saying we have ghosts?”

Uncle Billy grinned wryly. “We got all kinds of ghosts, honey. Always have. Always will. But mister, you’re girl, she’s gone. I know it when they leave. Like I said, she hasn’t been around for a few weeks now.”

It should have been enough to blow my mind and to sink the ship of my sanity. I should have either been completely dismayed and discouraged by what he said or committed to a lunatic asylum. But I was not. I was no less in love with Hazel Graham then I was before I walked through the door. And my mind toiled again, turning out more fantastic ideas.

“The ring,” I cried. “The opal ring. When was it sold and to whom?”

“I can’t give you that information,” Sue began before Uncle Billy made his way to the register. He grabbed a metal filing box and stuck a key in it. “Uncle Billy!”

“Oh, Susy. Can’t you see the boy’s in love. We’ve all been in love, ain’t we? It may be with a ghost, but I’ve never been one to interfere in affairs of the heart and I am not about to start now.”

Sue relented and smiled at me sympathetically. Her daughter giggled excitedly before handling another customer who was ready to check out, completely unaware of the strange nature of our conversation.

After a few minutes of rustling around, Uncle Billy pulled a sales slip out of the box and put on his bifocals to look it over. 

“Ah! Here we go!” He took out a pen and notepad and laboriously wrote down an address. “A lawyer in town here bought the ring. Said it was a gift for his wife, I remember. Here’s the address. Just a few blocks away.”

I thanked him and took the address and ran out the door. I didn’t even consider the insanity that I was pursuing a ghost or going to buy a ring I didn’t need with the hope to conjure her. But such as it was, I was smiling on my way to the lawyer’s house, full of optimism and hope. Then it occurred to me that the ring might have sold for more than I could afford. What would I do then? And what would I do if she was no longer attached to the ring? Maybe she did whatever it is that souls do in the afterlife when they lose attachment to the things that were so dear to them in life. Perhaps, it was only temporary. But even if this was all for not, I knew I had to try. And even if it meant that we would be confined to my house, our house, it would be a love story I would happily live.

It was a grand house. An old 19th century Victorian. White-painted bricks and dark green shutters that actually shut. Elegant shrubbery but a lack of flowers. They probably thought flowers to be ostentatious. I rang the bell and the lawyer answered the door. I had known him from a billboard or from the newspaper. I made my case clear to him, as outlandish as it was. As unbelievable and remarkable and extraordinary as it was, I laid it all out.

He looked at me and shook his bald head. “You must be crazy, son. What kind of fool do you take me for? I bought that ring for my wife and it is hers now. It is not for sale. I’m sorry, but I don’t believe in silly ghost stories. Good day to you.”

His wife was apparently listening from behind the door because she prevented him from shutting it. She was wearing the ring when she made herself known and took it off, handing it to me. “Well,” she proclaimed, “I believe in love stories.”

“But Elizabeth!”

“Oh, Roger, sell it to him for what you paid. I didn’t care for it anyway. It didn’t fit me right. And if he believes it to belong to this Hazel, then I believe it too. It’s hers, not mine. Besides, you know you’re afraid of ghosts. I’ll go get the box.” She smiled at me and disappeared. I couldn’t be happier holding it in the palm of my hand, thinking of Hazel.

“Okay,” Roger said. “It’s five grand. Cash or check?”

“Five grand?”

His wife appeared again with the box. “Roger! Don’t listen to him,” she said to me. “He paid 3500 for it. Take it, son. You can mail us a check. We know you’re good for it. And good luck!”

Roger pouted futilely as his wife gently shut the door. I was good for it. I wrote them out a check as soon as I got home, stamped it, and dropped it in the outgoing mail. It was all the savings I had. Then I rested the ring in the ring box and sat it down on the dining table, in the middle where it shimmered in the soft amber glow of the Edison bulbs like the treasure it was. I don’t know if I expected that she would come, or if I was so sodden with hope and dreams, yet to dry in the reality of life. The usual unhappy outcome that became all my prior relationships and that came about in one way or another was occurring in its own way now. In an empty house. With me sitting around, looking at the ring, waiting for her to appear as though from nothing. I sat at my large oak table in the dining room and wrote, or drew, or read. In that uncomfortable chair, even with the towel folded over on the seat. I waited. I slept there at times. I ate there. But it was all for not.

I compare it to times past because it was a matter of disappointment, just as they were. But the degree of disappointment was that which sullied my spirit to a particular dullness which felt utterly irreversible. She made everyone else who came before her so small and I suppose I would have thanked her for dulling all my other heartaches and pains, if only she hadn’t replaced them with the worst of them all. Yet, still I did not close that Pidduck and Sons antique box and that ring remained the pearl in the oyster’s mouth. I never passed the room without glancing over, nor without the hope that I would catch her out of the corner of my eye someday standing there in one of her beautiful old dresses, her hands folded over her belly. The dining room became a sort of mortuary for me, where everything I had ever dreamed of was buried, everything I had ever loved, or wanted, under the wood floorboards of that room. Under the legs of that oak table and chairs.

I wondered why she was attached to the opal. It must be a fantastic story. One of love and sadness, I reasoned. I wondered if there was a man who gave her the ring or if she worked in the jewelry shop and simply fancied it being gifted to her. Or maybe it belonged to her grandmother. Or her mother. How could it have been so special to her that it had, at least temporarily, postponed her eternal reward? I wondered if she actually went to school in the building next to me that was now apartments where people live completely unaware of her and all the generations of children that came through there, that were full of dreams and love and play until life had its way with them, as it has its way with all of us, as it was now having its way with me. They tore down the swing-sets and the jungle gym and the classrooms where children were taught history and mathematics. They are now posh lofts.

I lied in the dark room and watched an old movie for simply the comfort of Humphrey Bogart’s fatherly voice, the ambience of the black-and-white shadows, and the occasional crackle of the film’s grainy strip. Bogey, his namesake dog, lied next to me on the floor indifferent to the movie, but seemingly very much aware of my heartache. He always lies next to me when I am ill or sad and when I am not he prefers the chair across the room that is his by default.

It might have ended there. I had never been so low, so lost, and so without a single cause to live. So abysmally desperate and lonely. I could have simply washed away out to sea as algae does when it realizes its place is not the shore. Or lived obscurely for the rest of my life with a pet or two, went to church and funerals and an occasional birthday party, and dwelled on good memories that were too few and my flowers that came and went with the seasons. Or I could have ended the suffering of it all and been in the good company of those like me who found themselves suddenly and woefully displaced by either time or circumstance, the fraternity of the heartbroken and the alone. 

I couldn’t, though, because there is still a chance she may return. And while there is a chance, I have to remain here in this life. I have to glance at that ring every time I pass the room, think of it no less in twenty or thirty years than I do today, keep it preserved like a museum piece in the glass case I bought for it, as though it is to be served, someday to someone by the good fortune that still sails upon my hopeful seas. I know my fate is to stay here and to wait, probably to grow old alone. Probably to die alone, as well. On the porch swing, night after night, watching cars pull up and women spill out to walk down to the bar down the street. Watching old movies without her with no less hope or dreams that she might suddenly appear as quickly as she had disappeared. Hope is a beautiful thing and it leaves no room for sorrow.
 

But it has occurred to me that maybe she is here, maybe I simply cannot see her. Sometimes I sit and I talk to her. Out on the porch swing. At dinner. While writing love letters I wish to give to her. Silly poems no one besides myself reads. Sometimes when I make dinner, I make it for her. Set two plates and two glasses. Clip and arrange a vase of flowers for her. Play music I think she would like. I ask her advice of things. Which tie to wear, which flowers to plant, which place to go to. I tell her goodnight. I greet her hello. And I tell her good morning, though I wake up to an empty bed. It is a space reserved. It is time well spent. A price paid for when she comes for she will come. This house waits to become a home, just as I wait for her. Should someone ask someday of the oddment of my remaining single and having no interest to date anyone, I might tell them, just as it is. It is simply that the dream of her is worth more than the reality of anyone else.

Then one night, a few years after I bought the ring, Bogey began to stir and pule as he does when a storm approaches. He pissed on the floor. I settled him and assured him there was no storm in the forecast so he could rest easy, but out of fright he barked towards the back stained-glass windows. Then the radio in that room came on suddenly. One I had bought at the antique store. One of those made-to-look-old tabletop jobs people buy for old relatives at Christmas. I caught it’s soft-yellow glowing eye emanating through the blackness of that room I used for a library and infrequently as guest bedroom, the French doors to which were wide open. The radio’s dial turned. There was static and snippets of unwanted songs and broken hackneyed commercials selling American dreams and cars and insurance. It went on for a minute and I figured it was a storm of sorts. One of those heat lightening storms, though I saw no flashes from the window. The dial turned more and the radio traveled back in time and then it finally settled on a meaningful song. A Sam Cooke song. Then the old wood floorboards of the dark room groaned with the welcomed trespass of her long-awaited bare feet.

Darling you send me. Honest you do.