Left Hook

From a distance, it appeared that two bodies were writhing in tangled lovemaking. But why would two people make love in broad daylight on the brown, un-watered lawn of this Melrose home? Even in LA, you didn’t often see this kind of spectacle.

As the police approached, it was clear that a woman and man were doing something on the lawn, but as the two officers cautiously drew closer to the lump of human conflict that thrashed about in front of them, it became clear that it was far from love that was being made.

The first cop jumped in and pulled the dainty blond combatant off the punch-pummeled body of the man that lie underneath her. Lola threw one last punch at Buck, who now all too viscerally understood that nothing hurts so much as the searing sting of a fuming ex-girlfriend’s well-placed left hook.

Hoped You Were Dead.

Lola’s mind filled with a kind of black mental grease that covered and clouded everything; her thoughts, her memory, even the pathways of the sensations that futilely tired to run from her spider-like fingers and reed-thin arms, to her brain. “Buck?” she stammered, as she desperately clutched her driver’s license. She looked up into Buck’s similarly stunned, yet surprisingly expressionless face. Everything escaped from her—--every thought of control, of location, of who she was now. “Buck? Buck. I hoped you were dead.”

Bridge-Building

Hadn’t he met her half-way, in fact, more than half-way? Richard pictured love as an expansive river over which two lovers, typically, built a bridge toward one another. Aren’t we supposed to meet in the middle? he thought. A current of fear ran through him now, as he imagined that he was building the entire bridge himself. At first, he pictured Lola, innocently standing on the other side, her dainty hands seemingly beckoning him, but as he approached her, he could see she was really waving him away, as if she had decided bridge-building was not for her. Richard feared he was about to fall now, into the deepest, darkest flow of the speeding torrent.

Backing-up into the Future?

Following the unmistakable thud of the collision, Lola grabbed her purse and jumped out of her little car. She skittered around the back, and immediately bent over the right rear fender to see how much damage she’d done. Thankfully, it wasn’t too bad—after all, she’d only been going a few miles an hour, as she tried, unsuccessfully, to maneuver out the tight parking space in front of Jackie's house. As she examined the damage to her car, the driver of the car she’d bumped, a man who appeared to be in his early thirties, approached her with his drivers license in one hand, and his sunglasses in the other. Lola didn't immediately look up, but if she had, she would have seen that the man who approached her walked towards her with an oddly familiar gait. She would have seen that he was wearing blue jeans, a white shirt, and cowboy boots.

Electra Uninsured

Even though Lola had started therapy with Jackie, months ago, as a way to find out if Richard had been cheating on her, she was surprised now to discover that she was actually learning things—seemingly important things-- about herself, despite her original ulterior motives.

Know thyself, isn’t that what Socrates had said, or had it been the oracle at Delphi? Lola couldn’t recall now, she was preoccupied with today’s session.

Emerging from Jackie’s office, she crossed the burnt grass of Jackie’s front lawn, and slid behind the steering wheel of her little smudge of a beige compact car. She was lost in thought about today’s session: did she really choose men who, on the one hand, reminded her of all the things her father was unable to be for her, but on the other hand, were just like her father in some imperceptible way? Heedlessly, she shifted the transmission into reverse, and immediately backed into the car parked behind her. The smash of collapsing metal instantly jarred Lola from thoughts of her ‘Electra complex,’ to fears that she hadn’t paid her auto insurance bill in more than two years.

She Wears His Cologne

Lola gently daubed a bit of Richard’s cologne behind each of her ears and then sneaked just an ever-so tiny splash onto her chest. It didn’t bother her at all that she was wearing a man’s cologne. How many women, she wondered, were confident enough—or just didn’t know better than---to wear a man’s cologne? The sweet, earthy fragrance mingled with her natural sent, and the resulting admixture smelled simultaneously woodsy and oceanic, like the scent of a stand of California Redwoods towering next to the Big Sur coast. She immediately imagined the roots of huge trees anchoring her lithe body to the earth, as early morning striated sunlight combed through her being, like streamers of light cutting through the forest’s foggy canopy.

Unmarked Border

An imperceptible line runs between love and not love, and it is a gray, ambiguous territory on either side. Sometimes we tread one side, sometimes the other, as if unknowingly crossing and re-crossing an unmarked border.

As Richard pulled his car up to the front of the restaurant to pick her up, Lola opened the car door and gracefully slipped into the passenger seat. Surprisingly, tonight, she felt a kind of gratuitous glow for this plain, yet unusual man, who worked so hard to make her happy, and about whom she often wondered if she really were in love.

Now, as Richard gently smiled at her, and pointed the car toward 4th Street, Lola discovered she didn’t care if she couldn’t quite tell which side of that blurred border she now stood.

Richard calmly eased the car into the right lane, careful as he did so—or so it seemed to her—to stay within the neat white lines of his narrow lane.