“So?” Bernice plunked her coffee down on the table and stared innocently.
“Jeez,” Buddy laughed. “You don’t let go, do you?”
“Like a terrier, she is,” Harry put in.
They both stared wide-eyed. He hadn’t said anything that amounted to a complete sentence all evening. Not much that amounted to a comprehensible word.
Instead, he’d spoken the language of annoyed glances and demanding grunts, which Bernice both responded to and ignored in the same instant with her movements and gestures.
“You shut up!” she commanded happily.
The slightest twitch of a smile upturned the corners of his mouth.
“It’s a longish story,” Buddy warned.
“There’s water in the tap, coffee in that canister over on the counter, and a coffee machine ready to combine the two into an eye-popping brew if anyone gets tired. So?”
“One condition,” Buddy challenged. She nodded in preemptive agreement as if, like a shark at a poker table, she had already intuited what he was about to say. “If I tell my romantic tale, you and Harry have to share yours,” he proposed, glancing at each of them in turn. Harry’s lip twitched again, and Bernice nodded.
He sighed, not sure he was ready to follow his frayed marriage thread down memory’s maze. But he was trapped. They all knew it. His hosts waited. Expectantly.
“Actually,” Buddy began, “my first love this side of the Rockies was Leanne’s sister, Sam. I met her in 1990 when I was assigned to write what I considered a puff piece on the first Times Colonist 10K Run. Sam had registered as a newbie jogger in that inaugural trot, which the desk considered a great feel-good story. I didn’t share their enthusiasm. I wanted to be doing serious political coverage at city hall or the legislature, not wasting my superior journalistic talent tracking a herd of two-legged antelopes bent on getting from point A to point A by joggling their bones over 10 kilometres. That, and an almost instinctive dislike of running, set me up with some serious attitude going into the assignment.
“But, wherever you happen to be, that’s your starting line,” Buddy concluded, “so I bucked up, grabbed my notebook, and headed off to her place up on Cook Street.”
I liked Sam right off. Buddy remembered. There was an energy about her you couldn’t not like.
“Doesn’t it amaze you how quickly we determine what kind of person someone is and how that first impression turns out to be true more often than not?” he said. “Like or ‘Don’t like? The judgment’s made in a split second. Instinctively. Before you even know it.”
Then we begin building our notions of who a person is around that embedded kernel.
“There was no denying Sam emitted signals that interfered with my journalistic integrity,” Buddy said.
Bernice had been trying not to, but couldn’t help interrupting his description of that first encounter between him and Samantha. Harry astounded the two of them by actually laughing—a constricted wheeze forced out of him like the air escaping from a punctured tire.
“Hush, you old goat!” she chastised. Harry smirked.
“And you?” she glared, “I can’t believe you actually judge people that way.”
“It wasn’t judgement! She was flirting. And it would have been rude of me not to have played along, wouldn’t it?” Buddy objected.
“Flirting?”
“You know what I mean. Playfulness with intriguing connotations. I do question first impressions of that sort, but can’t help making them. It’s like a cat seeing a mouse,” he faltered, hoping she wouldn’t pounce on his inept analogy.
“As I recall, it didn’t take me long to make up my mind about you, dear.” Harry put in.
“Well, I’ve had the better part of a century to make up my mind about you, sweetheart. And I’m coming to the conclusion that you’re a stubborn old stick who doesn’t know which shoe goes on which foot when they’re not both stuck in your mouth.” She looked pleased with herself. Harry laughed until the last bit of air had been forced out of him, like a squeezed accordion.
Buddy watched—fondly he had to admit.
Not that I would have wanted their kind of marriage or that I envied Harry’s role in their pantomimes, he recoiled. But he could see they loved each other in their own peculiar ways.
“Anyway,” he continued his story, “after the interview, Sam gave me what I mistook for the look.”
“The look?” Bernice cut in. “What look?”
“Oh, don’t be such a prude,” Harry groaned. “You know the look he’s talking about.”
“And how was it mistook?”
“We..ell,” Harry drawled, stretching the word almost beyond comprehension, “if you’d let him get through his spiel, or even a proper sentence, maybe we’ll find out.”
She clenched her jaw shut, shooting Harry a fierce glance, which he dismissed with a snort.
“Anyway,” Buddy interjected, “I asked her out.”
“Out? Where too?”
Harry rolled his eyes.
“Well,” Buddy hesitated, “to my place.”
“To your place! On a first date!”
“It was her suggestion, not mine. And as it turned out, she wasn’t coming on her own.”
“Can I bring my sister and a friend along?” she’d added hastily, accepting her own invitation with an apologetic smile.
Buddy remembered his surprise and how he’d blushed at being ambushed that way. But how could I have refused without looking churlish?
“I still love Sam… As a dutiful and infatuated brother-in-law,” he continued. “But warily. I’ve never forgotten the trick she pulled on me that day, even though I’ve forgiven her many times over.”
“So a couple of days later, the three of them appeared at my door. I was living in a cramped flat above a store in Fairfield. There wasn’t really room at my kitchen table for the four of us. Besides, I didn’t have enough chairs. So we retired to my sitting room/study, where we were going to eat dinner off our laps—lasagne, accompanied by a nice wine, to be followed up by coffee and my signature dessert, Cherry-O-Cheese Pie!”
“Cherry-O-Cheese Pie!” Bernice gushed. “Oh, Harry, remember when I used to make those?”
Harry nodded. “That was before they invented diabetes,” he said wistfully.
“Love is blind, as they say,” Buddy pressed on. “So, beautiful as Leanne was, all my attention remained focused on Samantha. As for her ‘friend’ Curt, I wished he wasn’t there—that he’d never existed. He was handsome and obviously in love with the object of my own affection, so I judged him shallow and not worthy of her attention.
“As fate would have it, their marriage will almost certainly outlast mine and Leanne‘s.”
And Curt is a decent guy, even if he’s grown more stuffy and formal with age.
“Anyway, dinner turned out to be a complete and utter disaster.” Buddy said. “The baked lasagna came out of the oven burnt and rubbery. The wine didn’t help; it went down like sour grapes. Curt was obviously put out at having been lured into the lair of a potential rival, and I was in an equally combative mood.
“Then came the pièce de résistance, my famous Cherry-O-Cheese Pie, which had been a winner at parties and get-togethers since my college days. In my usual manner, I served it with a flourish, navigating the dessert plates from kitchen to sofa like flying saucers coming in for landing. First Sam, as the guest of honour, then Leanne, as her respected sister, then…”
“In my experience, accidents aren’t usually chance events,” Buddy interjected. “They are deliberate catastrophes, staged by our unconscious selves, that show us up for who we truly are.
“Curt’s wedge of Cherry-O-Cheese Pie glided out of the kitchen and homed in like a guided missile. It banked steeply, approaching target over my coffee table, then, for some ever-unaccountable reason, the plate dipped and stopped short. The pie, inevitably obeying the laws of physics, continued its forward trajectory, arced downward like a wingless bird, and landed—splat—right in its intended victim’s lap.
“All hell broke loose. I thought Curt was going to leap over the coffee table and end our relationship then and there with a fist to my jaw. Samantha, to her credit, intervened.
“‘Come on, let’s go!’ she’d commanded, not so much in anger as barely concealed delight at having engineered such a drama. Escorting her wounded, enraged companion out the door, she shouted over her shoulder for Leanne to follow.
“And that’s when her plan went off the rails.
“‘You guys head out. I’m going to finish my dessert,’ Leanne called after them. She was laughing hysterically. I’ll never forget that. It wasn’t until very late that I drove her home, and I only let her go with a promise to see me again sometime. Soon!
“And that’s how we met.”
“That is the most outrageous love story I’ve ever heard!” Bernice clapped, her eyes bright with admiration.
“Me too,” Harry shook his head. “You couldn’t make that up, so it must be true.”
“Okay,” Buddy said once things settled. “I’ve lived up to my part of the bargain. Now it’s your turn.”
“Oh, my!” Bernice feigned exhaustion, sighing. “Look at the time! We’ll have to wait for our next dinner. Midsummer Murders is about to start on Knowledge Network, and we don’t want to miss that, do we, Harry?”
Harry didn’t take much persuading, and so it was agreed Buddy would come over for another dinner. Bernice promised to whip up a Cherry-O-Cheese Pie for the occasion.
Next: Avatar