It happened last year.
She invited us all down to Philadelphia
After more than a decade innocently envisioning, she and Jimmy
as Guinevere and King Arthur, it was a shock to find her with somebody else.
I suppose I got a sense that things were not well during
that picnic a few years ago when she seemed remote from Jimmy. Yet this is an afterthought
and did nothing to lessen the shock.
Despite the ups and downs between those two we all thought
they would end up together and seeing her with someone else seemed in
appropriate if not wrong.
Frank had once tried to date her (I still don’t know how far
that went although there was always a connection between the two, some unspoken
bond that in looking back seems more ominous than it did at the time.)
I had intended to take pictures of the play – the way I had
back when Frank did his Woody Allen production. But the mood changed once I met
her new boyfriend, and I came away with a few blurry photographs of her on
stage, but so blurry, you can’t tell who it is.
Since Frank, Garrick and Jimmy all drove south with me to
see the play, we had to drive back in a strange mood.
Normally – as was the case going south – there is a lot of
chatter, mostly Jimmy picking on Frank, and Garrick complaining about Jimmy
over recent and historic slights.
The return trip was thick with silence, Jimmy’s cool
exterior containing some measure of personal pain we dared not penetrate with
the wrong remark.
We all knew the world had changed, and that the Camelot we
had envisioned since our teens was fading away into the mists, never to be
realized in the way we first imagined.
All of our Arthurian plans for land somewhere where we could
create our own society became remote that last night, in accessible, and as
hard as we tried, we could no longer imagine them possible.
A short time later, we learned that she had engaged this new
man and was scheduled to marry him a short time later.
The fact that Jimmy lived in the attic of her mother’s house
did not occur to us until she asked Jimmy to move out, saying that her new
husband was uncomfortable having her ex-lover living there.
And so stripped of even that portion of his dream, Jimmy
returned to Passaic, first to live with me, and after I moved out, to live in
the apartment next to mine, both of us emerging at times onto the carport
together, with me wondering what thoughts went on in his head, and what dreams
he created to make up for the one big dream he’d lost.
I may never find out.
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