dontravis.com blog post #617
Image Courtesy of Flaticon:
Hope you
enjoyed my “Tricky” story. Just proves things don’t always turn out the way you
intended them to.
Today, we’ll try another short story. A one-parter, this time.
****
HABITAT
I often wondered if I hadn’t
hit old age when I turned thirty. I can see similarities with my late father’s
life as he approached sixty. Comfortable in his own skin. Insular in some ways…
many ways, actually. Mildly irritated at change, no matter how trivial.
“Hick,” Clark Baer was always
saying, “you gotta act your age. You’re in the prime of life, man. Don’t throw
it away hiding behind four walls.”
Now that takes some
explaining. First, my name is Jonathan Fielders, but I’m not handy with tools
and gadgets, and I was always saying something like “what’s the doohickey I
need for this job?” So Clark dubbed me Doohickey, and that morphed into Hickey,
and then he took the lazy way and simply called me Hick.
That out of the way, who’s
Clark Baer? He’s the guy who moved into the apartment next to mine three years
ago and overnight became my best friend. Four years younger than I am, Clark was
a good-looking, gregarious, jock type always on the go. He had loads of
friends, both male and female, but somehow, we bonded when I rang his doorbell
and asked to borrow some doohickey I needed at the moment.
From that time on, this
raven-haired, sloe-eyed woman chaser used me to decompress. At the end of a
frantic, social engagement-packed weekend, he’d knock on my door, breeze in,
grab a beer or a soda, shuck his shoes, and plop down to recount his week. A
homebody by choice, I enjoyed our intimate talks. And they did become intimate.
He wasn’t a screw-and-tell sort of a guy, but I heard enough of his exploits to
know he was regarded as a cocksman among the distaff set.
After letting off enough
steam, he’d pick up his shoes and head across the stairwell to his place and
retire, usually leaving me chuckling at some of the predicaments he got himself
into.
Don’t want you to get the
impression I was anti-social, far from it. I liked people. But I was a
free-lance journalist who usually worked from my home doing research by phone
or by internet, and then writing my articles. So I got tired of talking to
strangers. Sometimes it was easier to settle down with a book in the evenings
than to get dressed and go out.
There was no lady in my life
at the moment, but, once again, don’t get me wrong. I liked women and have had
my share. But in all honesty, I guess my sex drive was substandard. When the
time came in a relationship where intimacy was expected, I’d find myself
looking at sex as “paying my dues.” Don’t know another guy my age with that
attitude. Even so, I was totally comfortable in the space I’d created for
myself. In my environment… my habitat.
When Caroline Carlo moved into
the apartment complex a couple of stairwells down from us, it was no surprise
to see her walking past my place on Clark’s arm. He usually moved fast. One
Sunday afternoon, they returned from somewhere and saw me sitting on my patio
reading James Lee Burke’s Creole Belle. They stopped, and I met
Caroline.
After that, she caught me on
the patio a couple of times and waved or said hello. Pretty woman, but awfully
blonde. Nonetheless, she was pleasant, and before you know it, I was sitting in
her dining area having coffee and a very good cherry tart. After that, of
course, I had to respond with tea and blueberry muffins… although mine came
from Kroger’s, not my own oven. But mostly, I saw Caroline going here, there,
and yon with Clark.
Things had a way of moving at
their own momentum, and somehow, I ended up inviting her to the Little Theater.
Pleasant evening. Good play; good company. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I
wondered if Clark was aware I’d stolen Caroline for the night. Then I mused
over his reaction to that fact.
And I got one. Negative. He
failed to pop in that evening to recount his weekend. First time that happened
in a long time.
My habitat seemed threatened,
but the following weekend, Clark seemed to be over it and recounted his date
with a new brunette of his acquaintance. Apparently, quite an athletic one… at
least in the sack. So when Caroline called the next day to say a friend had
given her tickets to Oppenheimer, I agreed to go.
I enjoyed the three-hour movie,
although it deviated from the way my father had described the period. But I
wasn’t around at the birth of the atomic bomb, so who knows? Mostly, the movie
brought home to me the fluidity of facts, how they—or the interpretation of
them—changes with time. I had no doubt that dropping those two bombs on two
Japanese cities saved lives in the long run, but today, you could get into a
heated argument over that opinion..
After the movie, my world
turned more cataclysmic than that super bomb. When I took Caroline back to her
apartment, Clark ran into us in the parking lot, and although his words were
civil, I saw sparks in his eyes. At the door, I took the expected goodnight
kiss, but allowed Caroline to talk me inside. Tea turned into a cocktail, which
turned into a session in her bed. She was just as lovely—and as blonde—sans
clothing as she was fully dressed. And, she proved to be a sexual athlete,
turning me every which way but loose. Stimulating and enjoyable… but enough was
enough. When I finally stumbled around getting dressed, the clock read three
a.m. Thank goodness I didn’t have a deadline tomorrow, or I’d have been in
trouble.
Caroline kissed me as I left
and murmured, “I do like older men.”
That puzzled the hell out of
me because I couldn’t be more than three or four years older than she was. I
shrugged it off and walked to my stairwell, key in hand. Clark stood in his
doorway with a look on his face I could only call disappointed. He closed the
door without acknowledging my greeting.
That night changed my habitat
forever. Caroline surprised me by moving out of the apartment complex a couple
of weeks later. New job in Dallas, was her hurried explanation. Boom! She was
gone.
Clark avoided me totally. He
changed his habits so that we seldom ran across one another. I made deliberate
efforts to be on the patio when he left for work—which was a fixed pattern—but
he rushed down the sidewalk without even responding to my cheerful good mornings.
As I watched him get into his car in the parking lot one day, I noticed his
trim body and graceful movements, and belatedly understood Caroline’s murmured
comment that she liked older men. Older than Clark. She was hung up on my best
friend and neighbor, but he wasn’t moving fast enough for her. So she used me
to prompt him along. Backfired. Big time. For both of us.
By the time Clark’s lease on
his apartment expired, we were exchanging insincere “good mornings” and good
evenings,” but that was all. Then I saw him moving items out of the apartment.
I had no opportunity to question him about his intentions before some of his
buddies showed up in a Pensky truck, and my fears were confirmed. The laughter
and frivolity of the group working to load my friend’s furniture into the van
nearly broke me. After a couple of hours the nature of the activity changed,
cluing me that they were about finished loading his things. I was struggling to
deal with my loss when the doorbell rang. When I opened the door, Clark stood
there looking handsome, although there was a hurt look lurking behind his eyes.
“Wanted to say goodbye,” he
said. “And thought you might like to have this.”
He handed over a Bavarian
stein with Viking markings and a pewter cap I’d drunk many a beer from over the
years, and was gone. I watched from the patio as he rejoined his friends as
they closed up the van, bundled into their cars, and drove off in a procession.
I dropped into a chair, the
stein clutched in my arms as it struck me how much my comfortable environment,
my habitat was changed. Destroyed, was likely a better words. Destroyed by a bedroom
romp that hadn’t meant that much to me. Certainly not as much as the friendship
it cost.
What do you
know, another story about actions and intentions gone wrong. I must be in a “frame
of mind.”
Stay safe and stay strong.
Now my
mantra: Keep on reading and keep on writing. You have something to say… so
say it!
A link
to The Cutie-Pie Murders:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ambxgy7e5ndmimk/CutiePieMurders%5BThe%5D.zip?dl=0
My
personal links:
Email: don.travis@aol.com.
Facebook: www.facebook.com/donald.travis.982
Twitter: @dontravis3
See you next Thursday.
Don
New Posts every Thursday morning at 6:00 a.m. US Mountain time.
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