Bethel's Meadow (32 page)

“Damn,” I said. It was a relief to hear that divine intervention had perhaps saved me from a course of antibiotic treatment. “Wally, be careful with your pecker, man. Get it checked out, and always wear the love-glove.”

I then felt someone kissing my neck. I turned around and gave Glory a kiss and a hug. “Thanks for coming, babe.”

She turned to Sidebottom and smiled. “You’re welcome to join us for dinner tonight, Wally. We’ll watch some basketball and chill out for a bit.”

“Thanks, angel face,” he said as he stood. “But I’m going home now. I’m done with drinking and grieving. I’ve got to get back to good. I have to get ready to go back to work. I want to help Vernon out next week to catch up with all the work we couldn’t do because of Sam dying.”

“You’re not driving.” I stood and grabbed his shoulders. “Give me the keys. I’ll drive you home and Glory will follow.”

…

During the drive from Sidebottom’s house I told Glory everything that had happened between me and Samantha. I didn’t leave anything out. I had to be honest about everything, including how I felt about Samantha’s passing.

“It would be hypocritical of me to say I’ll miss her,” I said, “because the last time I saw her I hoped I would never see her again. She had just simply gone too crazy for me to deal with. But I did care about her. I saw the good in her. Despite her harsh view of the world and how terribly cold she could be, I still knew that somewhere inside of her was a very caring and compassionate soul, someone who’d do anything for those she loved and cared about. That’s the part of her that will be sorely missed in this screwed up world.”

I also told Glory I wondered where my manuscript was, now that Samantha was dead. No one had returned it to me.

“You have to print out that manuscript and let me read it,” Glory said. “I won’t leave you alone about it until you do. I have my red pen ready to help you with editing. You might have to perform a few rewrites, so I’ll stay on your butt until we get it done. This is your dream we’re talking about. We’re going to get it ready to show agents. And doggone it, if we can’t find an agent, we can go straight to electronic book format. Either way, I am so excited about this. I’m excited for
you
.”

“Baby, I just don’t know,” I said. “It’s really a rough draft and probably needs
fifty
revisions before I start looking for an agent and such.”

She shook her head—she wasn’t going to give up. “I’m pushing you on this, I really am. Again, this is your dream, Bethel. You want to be a writer—I’m going to help you become one.”

I just kept falling in love with Glory over and over again. I became more convinced than ever that I had truly found a rare treasure.

Maybe it was too soon to feel so good about this relationship. I didn’t know why exactly—I just had a grand feeling about it. I was willing to give her all I had. Everything I possessed I wanted to be ours and ours alone.

I wanted to make all of Glory Nolan’s dreams come true.

37

G
LORY AND I ENDED up at my place for the evening. It was her first appearance at La Casa de Smith. Before coming home we’d stopped to rent a couple of movies and picked up a delicious pizza from a very friendly hole-in-the-wall Italian joint. At first I wasn’t wild about the idea of sitting in front of the TV for the whole evening, but Glory had selected some really interesting and quite riveting foreign films. One of the movies was called
The Lives of Others
, a German-made film, and the other was titled
Kinamand
, a Danish movie. After the second movie ended it was almost one a.m., and I complimented Glory on her selections.

“I’m not kidding,” I said. “Those were two great films. They just don’t make movies like that in the United States anymore.”

Glory smiled. “Isn’t it wonderful to watch a movie that has a genuinely good storyline and doesn’t require the services of George Clooney or Scarlett Johansson to entice people to watch it? That’s why I adore all these foreign films.”

I was delighted with the way Glory was opening up my world. Aside from exposing me to the fine craft of foreign filmmaking, she was teaching me new dance moves, introducing me to new types of cuisine, and recommending poignant books that I otherwise would never have known about. She encouraged me to get back to my writing, saying I needed to do it every day to get sharp and to stay sharp.

It was still an hour or two before I knew I’d be able to fall asleep. So I decided to put myself in the spotlight, and led Glory to my music room.

I offer this advice to all of you budding guitarists: If you have an electric guitar and you don’t know many riffs—and perhaps not even a complete song—get on the Web and learn how to play some tunes by The White Stripes. If you really want to impress a girl, take ten minutes to learn “Seven Nation Army.” All it requires is a slight retuning of the guitar and the use of a slide to play the chords. Then crank up your amp and play along with Jack White on the recording.

While I can’t guarantee the result, I can tell you that as I played that particular number, Glory sat on the couch gazing at me with genuine awe. Okay, maybe she was acting a bit and trying to butter me up. But in the middle of the song she did stand up and walk to the piano, where she banged out the simple bass riff of the tune. She kept perfect time.

I played “Wild Thing” next. It was like The Troggs were right there in the room with us. This time Glory sang along and clapped her hands. Damn, she could sing too. She had a really incredible voice. I knew at some point in her life she’d been trained to sing.

I then segued into another White Stripes number. I played the simple guitar accompaniment to the song I continued to hear in my head every time I saw Glory: “We’re Going to be Friends.” But this time I didn’t have the MP3 stereo turned on. I’d worked on this song quite a bit. And the very second I started finger picking the notes, Glory sang the tune along with me.

Glory had the voice of an angel. She truly did.

We rocked on all night like this. She played some upbeat numbers on the piano, mostly a lot of soul stuff she’d learned from watching one of my favorite films of all time,
The Commitments
. I had to kind of fake it on the guitar with those tunes, but I did a rather decent job of watching her hands for the chord changes.

But it didn’t matter if it was perfect, or even close to being right. The important thing was that we both felt the music in the same way, and together we were having the time of our lives.

I’ll never forget that night. We played on for three hours, until we were both so tired we could barely hold up our heads. We went into my bedroom and I turned down the covers of my bed. I gave her some bedclothes to wear and kissed her goodnight. But when I turned to leave the room to head to the couch in the den, she grabbed my arm and pulled me into bed with her.

We talked for a little bit, then quickly fell to sleep. I held her in my arms all night long, savoring the scent of her sweet perfume, even during my slumber.

I’d never had sweeter dreams.

…

I was the first to awake. I lay in bed for an hour watching Glory sleep, admiring her delicate features and soft fair skin. She was a living, breathing porcelain angel with luxurious red hair and an inspirational hourglass figure. I really wanted to wake her up so I could give her a big hug, to not only show my gratitude for the way she made me feel, but mostly because I just loved feeling her form and its warmth against my body. Before we’d fallen to sleep I was embracing her so firmly that I was afraid of snapping her in two. But she had smiled and told me she loved the way I held her, that no one in her life had ever shown as much passion with a hug as I. “We fit together perfectly,” she’d said before closing her eyes and drifting off to sleep.

Though we still hadn’t consummated our relationship, I knew we were almost there from the way we were progressing in our physical exploration of one another.

Hell, I’ll admit it: I couldn’t bear the thought of going another night of having to sneak into the bathroom to take care of business myself. After a certain point a man wants the woman to help him take care of such matters. But no, I wasn’t going to screw this up. We’d talked a little bit about it—the “sex talk”—and she’d promised me she was nearly ready. She just needed a little more reassurance that only came with time and togetherness.

Though she hadn’t said much about it, I knew my bipolar condition was of concern to Glory. Only in passing had she voiced the opinion that I should at least take a light dose of
something
to fend off the highs and lows of the condition. But she had also said she admired me for my courage in coming off of the meds cold turkey.

The truth was I felt fine now, and glorious sleep had returned. Like a lot of things in a manic-depressive’s life, though, a state of peace and serenity can suddenly vanish without warning. I began to reconsider my stance regarding the meds—perhaps I’d take a light dose of a medication or two that didn’t have such horrible withdrawal symptoms. I figured it would be a sacrifice worth making to shield Glory from the wild swings that can often occur in manic depression.

I quietly got out of bed, tiptoed to the music room, and took a seat at the piano. I flipped the cover up and began doodling on the keys in the high-octave range, plinking out the notes of “Blackbird” by The Beatles. I didn’t know why that particular tune came to my head at first, but after Glory walked in and began softly singing the lyrics to it, the reason for thinking of it occurred to me: my mother had always sung that song to me at bedtime. I hadn’t thought about her doing that in years.

I couldn’t help but weep. Damn, there had been so many emotional moments of late, and I just kept finding a reason to blubber like an idiot. Glory sat on the bench with me and wiped away my tears as she continued to sing, which just made me cry even more.

“What’s wrong, Bethel?” she said after I stopped playing. “Talk to me. What does this song bring back for you?”

I smiled and pecked her on the lips with a kiss. I then gently caressed her chin with my fingers.

“Glory, in just the short time we’ve been together, the one thing that has brought me joy and peace every night when I go to bed has been the scent of your perfume on my body. I normally shower before I go to bed, especially once it turns April and starts getting hot around here. But since the first time you let me hold you, I just never want to shower away your scent. To remove it from my body is like letting you go for good, something I know I’ll never want to do. It reminds me that you’re my best friend, my hope for a new beginning, my chance at redemption. From just your scent on my skin alone I can feel your warmth and kindness, and I can feel the radiance of your brilliant smile.

“And, just now, playing that song, I was reminded of my mother. For the first time in years I remembered her in a different way. Whereas I normally see in my mind’s eye that God-awful image of her lying on the floor, with a gun by her hand and a hole in her head, I instead remembered all the wonderful things she did for me before Dad died.

“Your scent on my skin this morning brought to mind other pleasant scents and fragrances from my childhood. I now vividly recall weekend mornings, being awakened by the tantalizing aroma of homemade biscuits and gravy, as well as that of bacon and pancakes and French toast; or on school mornings how the oatmeal smelled as it simmered on the stove. I remember my mother’s sweet goodbye kisses, and having to wipe her lipstick from my cheek as I walked to school so I wouldn’t catch any guff from my schoolmates, even though I never really wanted to wipe it away. And, like you, she wore the sweetest and most gentle perfume, whose scent lingered on my shirt for hours following our goodbye hug.

“And my father: I can still remember his cologne and aftershave. His manly scent served as a constant and reassuring reminder of his strength and wisdom. He was the man in my life who could solve any problem, whether it was a problem I’d had at school, or if I broke a neighbor’s window with a baseball; his diplomacy in resolving the scrapes I got into was just unbelievable. I was always in awe of that man, the way he’d fought for his country in war, and how right when he came back home, when I knew he was fucked up from seeing some of the most terrible shit any human could possibly see, it didn’t matter. He came back like nothing had happened, and he took care of his wife and son.”

“Baby,” Glory said as she put her arms around me. I was really crying now, but it was a purge of old feelings and memories that I needed to have before I could move forward in life. And as she held me I felt safe. I felt like nothing bad could happen to me while I was in her arms.

After a few moments I lifted my head from her shoulder. “Glory, everything seems to have an expiration date in life. I see people fall in love, but then they become easily bored. They’re in love, but there isn’t enough money. They have great sex for a while, but then a bad day at work turns each of them into stone. Then one bad day turns into two, two days into a week, and a week into a month, a month into a year, and then . . . and then they’re done. The new car smell is gone. The passion has been destroyed by silent, implicit, mutual assent.

“But like that song says: I’d blow it all up, the outside world. I’d blow it
sky high
. I’d give up every material possession and every greedy need just for you, to have a chance at a love that I think we’ll build for ourselves one day. I’d blow the world away and never think a thing of it. I’d have you, and I’d never have need or want of anyone or anything else.