Chapters 5 - 8 *** Enter Rose


5

...Pretty little one that I adore, you're the only girl my heart beats for... My Cherie Amour    (Stevie Wonder)

Rose was ten years old the first time I ever laid eyes on her. I was sitting in the lobby of the clubhouse; it was about six o'clock on a warm summer evening, and I was drinking a cream soda when she wandered in. That moment is frozen in my mind forever. The radio was playing "My Cherie Amour" when the door opened and a mop of brown hair stuck its head in, followed by the girl underneath. She was probably under four and a half feet tall, wearing sandals, jean shorts, and a t-shirt with the prism and rainbow from the "Dark Side of the Moon" album cover. I watched as she idly walked over to the kitchen area and poked around in the cupboards and refrigerator, pausing to turn on the cold water faucet over the sink for a couple of seconds. As she came out of the kitchen, she saw me for the first time, and gave me a shy smile that almost broke my heart.

"Hi, my mom and I just moved in today," she said, "and mom said I could check this place out while she signs some stuff in the office."

"Sure, help yourself," I told her, "this place is for anybody that lives here. There are games in that alcove over there, and down that hallway is the swimming pool. Do you like to swim?"

"Yeah, I love to swim," she said. "Can you swim anytime you want?"

"Well, it's supposed to be closed after 10 on weeknights and midnight on Friday and Saturday, but I don't say anything to anybody if they're having fun. Most people leave on time anyway."

"Oh," she said, and her eyes got a little bigger, "are you the lifeguard?"

"No," I laughed, "we don't have a lifeguard. I just pick up around the place and do odd jobs here and there. I'm Jack of all trades." Smiling at her felt even better when she returned the smile with a 200 watter of her own. "Do you like soda pop?" I asked, still smiling.

"Mostly just root beer," she said, ticking it off on her finger like the first item in a list, "but I like cream soda," (item number two) "which I see you have some of, as well."

"Well then, come over here and let me get you one," I laughed, and I led the way over to the soda machine on the far wall. When I pulled out the key for the machine, opened the front, lifted a cream soda, closed and locked it, and handed the can to her, her hand flew up to her mouth and her eyes were huge.

"Omygod, that was amazing! That was sooo flippin' cool! You are one handy guy to know! Thank you!"

I leaned in conspiratorially. "I don't do that for just anybody you know, only me. And now you. Guess I just consider it a fringe benefit." Putting my hand dramatically to my mouth, as if trying to prevent anybody but her from hearing me, I said in an obviously fake sotto voce, "The pay ain't that great, to tell you the truth." I was rewarded with a genuine giggle. "You guys will get free stuff, anyway, at the meet and greet. It's this lame party the complex throws once a month so new tenants can meet the current tenants. They lay out pizza and chips and soda, and somebody usually brings dessert. You just missed the last one, the next one is more than three weeks away. Tell your mom about it if you don't see anything on the notice boards. That's supposed to be my job, too, keeping those boards up to date, but I gotta tell ya, it ain't much fun. God, listen to me complain! You'd think I hate my life."

"No, no," she said earnestly, and laid a little hand on my forearm, "I think your life sounds cool as all Hell! Oh! I mean, uh, uh..." (she stammered so charmingly), "cool as heck! I mean, uh, uh..."

I felt laughter coming up from the gut as I said, "Don't worry about it, sweetheart! I like a woman who can curse a little. Makes her more human, you know? More real. More fun." I wanted to put my hand over hers as it lay on my arm, just for the human contact, but I couldn't bring myself to do it, to take anything that even resembled a liberty with her.

At that moment, the door opened and a pretty brunette stuck her head in. "Rose, honey, let's go move in, I've got the keys. Oh, hello there," she said, this last directed to me.

"Hi," I said, "would you like me to help carry boxes or anything?"

"Oh, thanks, that's really sweet of you, but we'll manage. We don't have that much stuff. Come on, Rose, let's go." Rose walked out with her mother. Just before she left, she glanced out to make sure her mother was far enough ahead of her, then turned and gave me that shy smile again.

"Well, I guess I'll be seeing you around. It was really, really nice to meet you, Jack." And then she was gone before I could tell her my name was Brent.

6

...I think I dreamed you into life... I Knew I Loved You    (Savage Garden)

The next time I saw her was the next day, when she came down to swim. She was wearing a pink one-piece decorated with roses, a skinny kid with all the beauty of youth, just on the verge of starting to fill out. She gave me a huge grin when she saw me and came over to where I was picking up towels and tossing them in a laundry basket.

"Hi, Jack!" she said, and I'd have sworn she fluttered her eyelashes at me just the least little bit.

"Hi, Rose," I said, and I was about to correct her on my name, when I paused. I don't know what made me hesitate; maybe it was because Jack was the first name she had ever called me, which sort of meant she had named me, and that pleased me for some obscure reason. But whatever the reason, I chose instead to comment on the huge beach towel she was carrying. It had a picture of mermaids in the ocean, breasts demurely covered by flowing locks of hair, and I remarked that I liked her towel, then pointed out where she could get a towel from a basket near the diving board if she ever forgot to bring the mermaids with her.

"Do you swim, Jack?" she asked, and I realized I had better correct her sooner rather than later. "My name's really Brent," I told her with a smile, "when I said I was Jack of all trades, that was just an expression. And yes, I do swim, but not as much as you'd think for someone who's around a pool all the time. And I'd kind of like it if you keep calling me Jack. It'll always remind me of how we met." She blushed just a little, then nodded. "Okay, Jack it is," she said, and it has been ever since.

Rose swam for a while, then got out and sat down at the table with me to talk. She told me about her parents' divorce, about moving from place to place with her mom, and about how with each move, she hoped it was the last one, that she could just settle into one place for a while and get to make friends. She spent a lot of time talking about how horribly lonely she was. She rambled for a long while, and I just let her. I could see how easy on the eyes she was going to be when she got older, how sweet and pretty she was just then. Looking back on it now, I can see that it was wrong to entertain such thoughts, but at the time, it was pleasant just to sit there and imagine what she would look like when she got to be 16, 18, 20 years old.

Rose started asking all about me. Where did I stay, how did I like being a handyman, did I have many friends? I wound up telling her far more than I intended. Far, far more. I shared with her that I didn't have any friends either, so I knew all about loneliness, and how bad it felt to just want to have someone to call friend, someone to be closer to than anybody else on earth. It felt so good, so very damned good, to get even a little of it off my chest that it was like a narcotic, and I had to keep talking to keep taking hits of that feeling. I felt like I was floating, or maybe drifting on some unseen tide, literally high with the sensation of being able to share my heart. I swear I don't know how we got so close, so fast, it just happened, and I don't know how it could have happened any differently. I even wound up showing her my room behind the pool, which she thought was fantastic. To her, living behind a swimming pool seemed like an adventure, like having a neat hiding place in plain sight.

7

...maybe millions of people go by, but they all disappear from view... I Only Have Eyes For You    (The Flamingos)

After that, we saw each other on an almost daily basis. She spent a lot of time around the pool, and I told her that if she ever needed to just get away and be alone for awhile, she was welcome to go into my room even if I wasn't there. I went so far as to show her where I hid the spare key to my room, and then as I also showed where I hid the spare key to the soda machine, I extracted a promise from her not to overdo it on the root beer; also to be extra careful to never get caught. A distant alarm was going off in the back of my head, trying to warn me about the danger I was setting myself up for; but I didn't heed it, I shoved it down as much as I could so I could just enjoy Rose's friendship. Twice in that first week alone, she came into my room and sat on the cot or the floor while I turned on the radio or played a cassette and we talked about our lives, our hopes, our likes and dislikes, and basically just cemented a lifelong friendship.

The strongest connection we had right at the start was our mutual loneliness. I think we recognized something in each other, something of the savage hunger for companionship that hunted us down like animals and nailed us in the heart. Rose told me that her mom, Marjorie, had left her dad, Stan, when she was six, taking her on a cross-country trek from one city to another, hunting down relatives to latch onto, as she made a desperate effort to get back on her feet as a single mom. With each move, the strain of making friends, then having to give them up, had been devastating to Rose. She was starting to feel, she confided, that she was never going to have so much as one good friend all her life. Marjorie tried to be there for her as much as she could, but all too often Rose had been left alone in whatever apartment or boarding house they were in at the time while her mom tried to get on with the business of surviving. She didn't blame her mom, but she fiercely missed having her dad around. She started to mist up as she talked about him, and I could see a full cloudburst on the horizon. I was bold enough to hold her face in my hand and dab at the corner of her eye with my thumb. "Life is long, Rose," I offered as I gazed into those huge innocent eyes, "and nobody knows what waits for us. You might get your dad back yet. I admit, it seems unlikely, but you just have to hold onto that hope. Sometimes hope is the only thing we have." She sniffled and snuffed and wiped her eyes, and her watery smile was a thing of such radiant beauty that it reached into my chest and squeezed my heart so hard that I almost started crying myself.

As she probed gently into the reasons for my loneliness, she wanted to know about my past loves. Had I ever been married? What was it like? Did I miss them? Did I want to get back with them? I mentioned Iris briefly, describing her as my first love (which drew a big dreamy sigh from Rose); as I told her, I got a strange sensation in my stomach that had something to do with my telling her about Iris, when I had never so much as mentioned that part of my life to Lilly. Of course, she wanted to know all about my relationship with Iris, and I obliged the best I could by dredging up my feelings and leaving out the pseudosex. When I said that I had often called Iris on the phone just before going to bed because I wanted her voice to be the last thing I heard before going to sleep, Rose produced a weird little wail; I thought at first something was wrong with her, but then she drew a huge breath and, laying a hand on my shoulder and gazing earnestly into my eyes, told me that was the most romantic thing she'd ever heard. I hadn't thought of it in those terms before, and it gave me a slow flush of pleasure to consider it. Then I gave Rose a quick sketch of my life with Lilly. I couldn't have gone into too much detail without talking about our sex life, so I kept it short and sweet. It really wasn?t fair of me to do that to Lilly, telling Rose about the heartbreak and agony of the walkout, and not telling her about the beginning, about the three most ecstatic months of my life that Lilly gave me before she walked out. In the end, what Rose understood about me was that out of a life of 38 years, less than 2 of them had been with a partner, and less than half that time had been happy for me.

See, Rose is so smart. She's sharp, and she started picking up on my moods right away, knowing when I needed a little extra zaniness to pull me out of a bad spot. It felt so good to get so much attention from another person, especially one as funny and as quick as my little Rose, that I willfully blinded myself to her age; too often, I thought of her not as a 10-year-old, or as a little girl, but as a confidante and pal. Chums. And I loved her as such, although I didn't use the word love at that time when I thought about our relationship. To tell the truth, I don't think I ever really thought about our relationship at all, at that point. There was nothing to think about, nothing to analyze. She was simply my best friend, my only friend, and I knew I was fond of her, and that was about it. No tortured soul-searching, no endless self-fought battles over the meaning of our relationship. Yet.

One thing I did notice (and it should have set off warning bells in my head) was that I no longer seemed to be instinctively drawn to the women who came to swim. Sure, I still noticed them, but more and more often as I fantasized about them, I realized it was an effort to do so. The sex-crazed daydreams that had crowded my skull and refused to leave, that had taken up permanent residence in my thoughts, suddenly found themselves on the back stoop, crowded around the door, knocking and yowling to come back in; and it took an act of will to force myself to recapture the lust. I don't know when I finally gave up forcing it, but I do know that I did. I might have chalked it up to long overdue maturity, or simply having Rose's friendship to fill the void, but whatever it was, I didn't bother to analyze it; I simply accepted it. The ladies fell out of favor, and I couldn't bother myself to mourn the loss...

8

...you look through the years and see what you could have been, oh, what you might have been, if you had had more time... Take The Long Way Home    (Supertramp)

I believe Marjorie knew how much time Rose was spending at the clubhouse, but I didn't think she had any idea that most of that time was spent with me, or how close we had become. At the meet and greet, I could tell Marjorie had had a few drinks before she came, because she seemed a little unsteady, and at the clubhouse bar she had mixed herself some kind of cocktail and was nursing it along. While Rose fed quarters into the Ms. Pac-man machine (knowing she could go get the key and get her quarters back once she was alone), Marjorie chatted me up, leaning in just a little too close and putting her hand on my back just a little too often. I tried to pretend she was hitting on me, but I knew it wasn't really so; the sense of her slipping sobriety was all the explanation I needed. She got so close that I could actually feel the warmth of her body on my skin, and the feel of her fingers in the small of my back got my attention like nothing else would have. I wanted to return the gesture, to put my fingers on her back, to be able to feel her, to have that contact (however briefly), as a promise, a prelude to something more; wanted it so badly, was burning with it, a man on fire, but I didn't dare, didn't trust myself, didn't trust the situation. Still, it fueled a pleasant daydream in which I was dating Marjorie and being a father to Rose. Marjorie told me about her divorce, seemingly reluctant to discuss it yet somehow driven to get it out; as if she owed me some kind of backstory on the little girl I was seeing so much of. Stan had made a game effort to keep in touch with Rose, Marjorie admitted, as they fled (her word) from one place to another; at least for the first handful of months. Stan sent birthday cards and Christmas gifts, and he actually talked to Rose on the phone two or three times, but he could never get anything worked out to come and see her, or to have her visit him. In the end, Stan had just drifted out of the picture. Marjorie hadn't wanted any alimony or child support, because she honestly just wanted to put Stan behind her forever. Many times she regretted that decision, especially when she got laid off from one menial job after another and had to keep starting over somewhere else. As her confession trailed off, her eyes seemed to go out of focus, roving about the clubhouse. When she had made a full circuit of the room, her gaze came back to rest on me, and she put a hand on my back, rubbing briefly (!) and moving up to rest the hand on my shoulder (!). She leaned in consipiratorially, until her mouth was only inches from my ear; but when she spoke, it was in a normal conversational tone of voice. She thanked me for befriending Rose, and something in the way she worded it made it sound like I was doing it out of some kind of honor or pity or nobility. She was grateful beyond words (she said) for having me around to treat her daughter so nicely. I realized then that Rose had been telling her mother about me; the tiny alarm got a little louder at the thought of her finding Rose and me alone in my room, but I had started to get pretty good at muffling the alarm, and this was just one more. Marjorie admitted that she didn't have as much time for Rose as she should have, and she genuinely regretted robbing Rose of a stable childhood. She had a steadier job now than what she had been surviving on, and it looked like she was actually going to be able to stay put for a while. Even so, she was gratified that Rose should have made such a good friend of me. She'd rather have her daughter spending time in a clean place close by with a decent guy like me to look out for her, than out there, who knows where, doing who knows what, with who knows what kind of creeps. I wasn't quite sure how to take it that I had been granted status as "not one of the creeps". I supposed it was comforting, to think that something about me encouraged that kind of trust.