Truths of the Heart Page 4

  “Don't forget … airport tomorrow….”

  “I know, 5:30.”

  “Good girl. I'll wanna get something to eat, then get home and get a hot bath, you can do my back. And don't forget to paint your toe nails, know what I mean. Maybe we can have a bottle of Chablis.”

  She closed her eyes. “Perhaps, now get some sleep.”

  “Trying to get rid of me?”

  “Carl….”

  “Airport tomorrow, 5:30 sharp.”

  “You mean today.”

  “You got it.”

  “Nighty by.”

  “Oh, hey babe, almost forgot, did I tell you about Dent?”

  She knew of whom he spoke. She had met the pasty affable Denton Ruffin.

  He had been Carl's former Notre Dame coach. Now a Detroit financial mogul, also an NFL official, Dent happened to be engaged to Rachelle's Michigan State colleague, Dr.Kim Lee.

  Rachelle said, “What about him?”

  “He's going to my best man … ain' that a kick in the ass!”

  “I … yes.”

  “That's all you can say?”

  “You want expletives or adjectives?”

  “Wise ass.”

  Dumb ass, she thought, checked the impulse and said, “Well, that's good, Kim was looking forward to being at the wedding anyway, this will make it even better.”

  “Who Kim?”

  “Carl … Dr. Kim Lee, my colleague, she's engaged to Dent, you know that.”

  Silence then, “Ah, ah … ah….”

  “Cat got your tongue, what's the matter?”

  “I don't na anything about that.”

  “You do too.”

  “No, I do not.”

  “Carl, I know you do.”

  “Swear to gawd.”

  “Get some sleep, I'll see you tomorrow.”

  “5:30, sharp, Northwest, loves ya.”

  “I love you too.”

  “Bye babe.”

  Rachelle put the phone down with a thought, Carl knew Dent was engaged to Kim.

  She turned the light off, closed her eyes and, unable to sleep, began wandering around in Carl's denial of Kim and Denton's engagement:

  She had met Denton Ruffin, roughly a year ago, the same night she had met Carl. Kim had been dating suave world traveler Dent for some time. He had been the quarterback coach at Notre Dame when Carl played there. Dent was now a partner with Martin Lang & Ruffin, a Detroit wealth-management company. He also happened to be an NFL official. Kim had flown with Dent in Martin Lang & Ruffin's private jet to the Caymans. Been aboard, moored at the Detroit Yacht Club, his fifty-foot yacht TOUCHDOWN. The inconvenient pickle in their relationship—Dent was being sued by wife Penny for divorce. He had moved out of their Grosse Pointe mansion, now lived on TOUCHDOWN. There were no children.

  Rachelle heard T.S. jump on the bed and nuzzle up to her. She stoked him and, thoughts of Dent, Carl, and Kim stewing around like a simmering pot of gefilte fish stew, she recalled the night of her first Dent/Carl encounter:

  Kim regularly attended Detroit Lions home football games. Dent's firm leased a $150,000 a year Ford Stadium suite. She invited Rachelle to a game. Not a fan, she declined. Kim related how the suite had a great view, sumptuous food, super beverages, and best of all, no rah-rah of the crowd. “You need to get away, please.” The last no rah-rah perk and umpteenth please persuaded Rachelle to accept Kim's offer. Then things nearly got scrapped when she refused to stay the night on Dent's yacht. Instead, she and Kim checked into the Detroit Omni. They met Dent at the High Five, an infamous sports bar/restaurant located in Detroit's old warehouse district. The establishment featured a fifty foot chrome and steel bar, seventy red booths, and brick walls dripping with a glut of autographed sport's star photos. Scattered around in glass cases were signed footballs, basketballs, helmets, jerseys, and baseball gloves and bats; a full size formula-one sports car hung from the ceiling. Pink, blue, and red neon signs advertising Coors, Corona, Bud Light, Labatt Blue. An ATM machine sat in one corner. Cigar and cigarette smoke mingling with the smell of aged beef and human flesh. Everywhere, TV screens spewed sports video, some silent, some with sound.

  Rachelle learned from Kim that High Five was a favorite hangout for high rollers in the world of sports. Also courted were politicians, lawyers, power brokers, movers and shakers. All were welcomed and pampered by owner Tommi Gilmour. And guess what—not a few of the pampered guests were clients of Dent. Rachelle recalled seeing the buxom lady servers decked out in skimpy Victoria's Secret sleepwear with a tinge of embarrassment. Greeted by Tommi Gilmour, seated in a maroon leather booth, she recalled thinking: this Tommi lady is a strange bird, actually bizarre. A bottle of white merlot served at Tommi's order, Kim related that Tommi lived in a plush penthouse above the High Five. If you were good you might be invited there. Rachelle would never forget Tommi's tummy-tuck chuckle.

  Rachelle then remembered Dent's arrival, like he had just stepped from an Esquire photo shoot—tanned, six feet tall, healthy glow, slender build, tailored blue suit, white shirt, red tie, shiny black shoes, slick graying black hair, and manicured fingernails. Kim introduced him and Rachelle recalled his oyster-y marble blue eyes locking hers, undressing her, a haunting hunger, almost a fear, like he was being pursued by somebody or thing, wanting to share it. She recalled his copper tanned hands and the giant diamond ring on his left pinky and the sucking way he kissed Kim on the cheek, then said he had to speak to Tommi in private. Kim's look of embarrassment as they left and even now Rachelle felt that icky feeling she had then felt.

  She remembered, after what seemed an hour, Dent returned alone. He ordered a glass of Chardonnay and said, like somebody might be watching, “My NFL crew is off this week, I may imbibe.”

  Shortly after that, Carl entered. A handsome hunk, smiling, confident, in control, Rachelle recalled being attracted by his hard carnal maleness. As the night progressed, it was obvious that Carl and Dent were bosom buddies. Dent, the highlight of the dinner, told jokes, high fived customer clients, while Carl's hands roamed over, around, and stroked Rachelle like she was a regulation Wilson NFL football. Carl, on his third Coke, no drinking, he played tomorrow, invited Rachelle to be his guest, “down on the sidelines, sit on the bench, at tomorrow's game”. Amazing herself, third glass of merlot, she accepted.

  The weeks following, more often than not, two or three times a day, Carl called her. When the Lions played home games, he insisted that she drive over, staying the weekend at his condo.

  T.S. stirred. Rachelle yawned, looked at the time, 4:55, and a funk feeling came over her as she recalled Kim's excited words the Sunday night she and Kim drove back to Lansing from the memorable Detroit football game: “Rachelle, Dent proposed, his divorce will be final in a month, we're going to be married in the spring. I'm so excited.”

  Out of nowhere T.S. began snoring.

  “T.S., stop that.”

  He did and, billowing the curtains, a sudden gust of cool wind fluttered through the open window.

  Hint of fall, harbinger inklings of short days popped up. Pre wedding jitters, Doc. Not unusual they tell me … who the hell is they…? she thought.

  Work to do at the office, picking Carl up at the airport, T.S. purring, the time 4:59 A.M., she pulled a pillow over her head and tried to get back to sleep.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Monday, August 5, 8:00 AM

  Seth Trudow—six-one, slender (a track & field athlete in high school),his hair resembled ripe uncut wheat after a summer thunderstorm. His maple-brown eyes observing everything, he appeared to be taking inventory of the space between molecules.

  Fall semester commencing in three weeks, Seth had preregistered for his required courses. A senior, he needed eight elective credits outside his major (Fine Arts—emphasis studio painting) to graduate in the spring. Out of the blue, a new Communication Department offering by Dr. Rachelle Zannes came to his attention. Reading about the course in the Fine Arts Department's newsletter, intrigued
by the creative processes—a white canvas, a blank page, a block of marble, a chunk of formless clay, something from nothing waiting in the stillness—his interest was piqued.

  And now here he was, in the hallway outside the locked Bessey Hall office of Dr. Rachelle Zannes, waited for someone, anyone to arrive.

  Dressed in white painter pants, black flight boots (remnant of his Air Force tour of duty), and a black T-shirt, he held, in his right hand, the admission form that would permit him to take Com. 501. The course, briefly described as Communication of truths through the arts, seemed like a natural. Only problem: not open to undergraduates, he had to get special permission.

  Office hours posted to begin at 8:00 A.M., a round mud-brown clock hanging on the wall read 8:06.

  “Figures,” he said.

  An undergraduate, to get into graduate class, he had to have signature approval from five people in “descending order”–course instructor, student's advisor, department chair, dean of graduate studies, and associate provost.

  Seth had sidestepped the “descending order” instructions. All signatures except Zannes' were on the form. Never available, never in her office, out jogging or running around, phone calls unanswered, probably some air-head professor, he had concluded. But he wanted this course and when he wanted something he usually found a way to get it.

  Killing time, Seth recalled a more personal reason for his interest in this Com 501 class, maybe the most important—the untimely death of his sister Natalie at the age of nineteen. An only sibling, she had wanted to become an author. He often wondered what wondrous things she would have written, discovered, offered. He remembered, living a Huckleberry Finn life in Traverse City Michigan, the special relationship he had with Natalie. She, throughout Seth's childhood, between smatterings of Mother Goose and Hans Christian Anderson, read him poetry. To her soft voice he would fall asleep to the words of Keats, Shelley, Dickinson, the poet's words were imprinted on his memory like grain in drift wood. But it all ended when, just past Seth's sixteenth birthday, Natalie, excited about majoring in English, studying literature, becoming a writer, scheduled to begin classes in the fall at Central Michigan—a drunk driver crossed the center line. She died instantly.

  Beautiful Natalie's kindness, love, lost, never to be. Whittier's words in Maud Muller: For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: tt might have been, haunted Seth to this day and he, experimenting with alcohol at the time of her death, had not touched a drop since.

  He remembered, at the news of Natalie's death, his mother, Martha, a high school English teacher, reciting Lord Byron:

  “Whom the Gods love die young, was said of yore, And many deaths do they escape by this: the death of friends, and that which slays even more—the death of friendship, love, youth, all that is; and since the silent shore awaits at last even those who longest miss the old archer's shafts, perhaps the early grave which men weep over may be meant to save.”

  Then there was his father, a Methodist minister, Reverend Walter C. Trudow. At Natalie's funeral—a raw March day, the ground cold, brown, tears freezing on Walter's raw cheeks, Seth remembered thinking, If Lord Byron was right, God sure doesn't love old dad? He has dumped him living in the garden of dead 'what if' agony.

  Months after the funeral, Seth could never forget his father's rage-filled anger at the senseless death allowed by an absentee God, mumbling in his study, fists shaking at the ceiling: “YOU, asleep at the wheel, huh? The damnable hair in the soup. You could have prevented it if You had wanted to. The conclusion, YOU didn't want to!”

  Then, as it is when love is smashed in fate's chopper of lies, Walter died.

  Not suicide, never, he was a Christian, but self-inflicted nevertheless, as if to please his God, drawn out death, purging original sin, gold's dross puked to the surface; more cruel than a bullet in the mouth.

  Seth was there when Walter came finally face to face with the master he had served for a lifetime, thought he had earned special privileges from. His father's last death rattling whisper, “Sorry Master, forgive my doubt.”

  After ramming that moment though many years of thought, Seth came up with the master's probable answer, “No, no special privileges here, get in line, lie down with the lamb. So sorry my son, no exceptions, we are God, you must pay.”

  And his father probable response, “Thank you, Master.”

  Seth concluded that his father had chickened out.

  Bitter, the present coalescing in nuggets of doubt, he often asked, then and now, of an invisible presence: “Could we please, sometime soon, have the punch line? Procreation, family, marriage, go and replenish the earth with lovely little creatures possessed of free will so they can search for the ultimate Truth? Truth? Who double-crossed whom? To prove what? You began the enigma in the first place!!! What a lie, a dirty lie. What about the living? You hate them? The Bible-thumping idiot praying for You to take the tornado further north, away from his house, 'kill the neighbors across the road, just not me.' Safe in the blood of others. Stomping the canvas of truth in dung-covered boots, a private line to God, grubbing for a pissy pledge of gold. What is this crazy insanity perpetuated on the world. This ruse written, east of the Mediterranean and west of the Dead Sea, by old men and murdering kings.”

  Seth remembered going to Natalie's grave site: in the winter dusting snow from the granite headstone, in the spring placing flowers, in the summer sitting with her, autumn, shuffling away leaves. It became so that he felt comfortable there. More so than with the living. Maybe Lord Byron was right after all, those who died young were the lucky ones. The living get to witness the dung covered boots—trampling, trampling, trampling.

  It was no surprise that Seth had developed a crusty shell but, no matter the attempt at hardness, Natalie's giving spirit imbued him.

  After graduating high school, guilt pangs pinging, Seth took a shot at theology. Reasoning, penance for his cynicism, he attended, for six months, Grand Rapids' Corner Stone Bible College.

  But the senseless double-cross death of Natalie, his father's bitterness, and divinity school's covering of blood wasn't for him. So, just turned twenty, he joined the Air Force, serving two years as a communications specialist aboard an AWACS aircraft. A few dollars saved, service completed, he spent a year backpacking England, France, Italy, Greece, then the word—his mother had died. He returned to Travis City, the Trudows had never owned a home, living in parsonages; his mother was buried in a reserved plot next to Walter in the Methodist Church cemetery where he last pastored. A small sum saved, contemplating college, Seth applied to M.S.U. to work for a degree “in something.”

  After one semester, not a science, math or chemistry type, on probation with a 1.9 grade point average, he was referred to an adviser. She asked what he did that didn't cause him to be bored. He remembered, in younger years, his mother had bought him a paint set. He dabbled in bliss for hours. “So,” said adviser with a sure smile, “that would appear to be the ticket.” He switched to fine arts. Now twenty-six, absorbed in painting, taking summer classes, encouraged by his professors, nine months from his BA, he contemplated going to the Chicago Institute of Art.

  He glanced at the clock again, 8:15. He shook his head, “Amazing.” Killing time, Seth scanned, next to the office's worn wood door, a colorful poster for the Broadway musical CATS. Next to the poster was the office number, 204. Below that was a black rectangular plastic name plaque that read in white letters, DR.RACHELLE ZANNES. Below that was a six-inch silver sculpted fish. Engraved in the center of the fish:

  PISCES: Sensitive, tend toward artistic. Creators. Not power hungry,

  humble and modest. Desire to please, hold deep beliefs. Integrity. Easily hurt, carry self doubt. Take emotional involvement seriously and will go to great lengths to please a loved one.

  “Air head... has to be,” he whispered.

  He noted, next to the fish, another plaque with an engraved quote: The old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths
… love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice….William Faulkner's 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

  He whispered, “Head in the ground, feet firmly in the air.”

  He looked, still further below, to a bumper sticker proclaiming: meanings are in people, not in words.

  With a pencil, Seth drew a big smiley face after “words” and wrote: Trouble is, all we gots is words.

  He looked, next to the bumper sticker, an excerpt from an interview Dr. Zannes had given the Journal of Communication:

  “Outside the box thinking has become an inside-the-box cliché with RAP music as a major paradigm shift. Hello!”

  Seth whispered, “Definitely a cuckoo.”

  He heard footsteps. He looked up. A young female approached. Pleasantly plump, overload of stuff under her left arm, large white Styrofoam coffee cup in her right hand, she looked like she had missed then been run over by a bus. Black hair styled like a mop, brown eyes, she wore a short sleeve white blouse with an M.S.U. frowning Spartan caricature on the left front pocket. Loose black pants slopped over the tops of brown flip flops.

  Seth watched as she stopped at the locked door to Zannes office, set the Styrofoam cup on the floor, pluck a key from her front pants' pocket, and, ignoring him, open the door.

  Seth thought, Please, tell me this is not Zannes.

  She picked up her coffee cup, entered, flipped on overhead florescent lights, and went to a blue metal desk that looked like a garbage truck had dropped a full load on its top.

  Seth followed her into a tight reception area that smelled like floor wax.

  He noticed, beyond the cluttered blue steel desk, a closed wooden door. Turning, the female said, “Hey, I'm not open for business yet.”

  “Sign says office hours start at 8:00 around here.”

  “So?”

  “It's 8:20.”

  “So sue me.”

  He looked at the name plaque that sat on the front edge of her desk: KAY JACKSON, Communication Department Assistant.

  He sighed under his breath, “Thank god.”