Bill

After my mother passed away my family wasn't exactly sure what to do with me.  I left high school and cycled for a year, I seem to remember.  I just stopped going one day.  Of course I had to return and get my diploma and it was odd to go back - older and wiser than when I had left - with most of my friends having graduated out.  I have three certificates and a degree.  I am not trumpeting my achievements, only to say I have found in life that a change in circumstances or ambitions usually denotes a plunge into a new knowledge base.

I suppose I was depressed.  The centre of our family was gone and something in place of the wreckage was slowly forming.  My younger sister (I have two) came to my aid.  We started to go to the movies together.  We travelled to England.  And it was she who paid the tuition for my first post-secondary certificate.

Books and writing have always been an important part of my life.  It was my mother's inspiration, for she read to us at night before bed - truly a lost art in child-rearing these days.  I decided upon Journalism at the local college.  My sister paid and I was duly engaged, wiping away the smear of depression and a year lost to introspection.

In the first few days of classes Bill seemed already to have formed a circle around him and was on good terms with a number of my classmates.  Who was this fellow who seemed to so easily garner friends at the embryonic start of my new beginning?

He looked like a poor man's Errol Flynn.  He had black hair and a small moustache.  He spoke with a slight lisp.  The words came out of his mouth sibilantly.  His hand movements always struck me as queer, and the hands themselves, very fine, closely cropped, just the other side of masculine, almost.  He was polite, soft-spoken, exact in dress.  Very Ralph Lauren collegiate.  Lots of crews necks and button-down shirts.  Dress shoes with only four or six eyes, which seemed very funny to me at the time, being in a perpetual succession of sneakers myself.  But then again it was the 80s.

That moustache of his was a bit of a storm warning for me.  He was hairy.  Very.  If you have read any of my other stories, or even just off-handedly glanced at the blog (spotted a sidebar image?) then you know that for me, hairy men are it.  A bell goes off (not to be too Pavlovian).  I am single-minded in my affiliation.  Maybe I am overstating?  No.  No.

It wasn't long before I sensed an intellectual bent in Bill with which I could identify.  Considering the topic we were all studying, it made perfect sense.  We quickly became friends, almost to the exclusion of others.  That, of course, suited me just fine.

His father was a chemistry teacher at the college, and a graduate of Oxford.  Bill's father was one of the poorer post-war entrants to that elite institution who had to work during his break - instead of being able to summer in Capri.  After graduating he hopped a boat to Canada and made good.  This then, is how I came to understand Bill's easy manner with our classmates at the beginning of the year.  He had taken other programs, the children of instructors able to attend classes for free (and for credit) as part of the collective bargaining agreement.

Bill and I saw a lot of each other, at college of course, but outside of it as well.  I do remember an odd indoor soccer game at the college and the shower we took together after.  It was the first time I saw him completely naked.  He was uncut.  He looked like a wet animal.  I fell more in love with him after that.

We also took our college placement together, working at the local newspaper alongside the staff and responsible, for the first time in my life, for the quality of my own work.  I recall a lunchtime with him at the paper, in the shell-shock first few days of being a proper reporter.  He wasn't very hungry and his eyes told me that he didn't think he was cut out to be a writer.  "I'm not sure," he said to me.  Afterwards I picked up a job as a copywriter and I recall him saying, "You got the plum."  I myself didn't think it was much of one, but I appreciated that he was happy for me.

Throughout much of our friendship and many deep talks, he had never hinted at the fact that there was someone in his life.  When he announced he was shortly getting married I was thrown for a bit of a loop.  They were a very cute couple, she very sweet, almost saccharine, which suited his soft-spoken ways.  Bill and I had a mutual friend, a fellow who had played soccer with us, and it was he and his girlfriend I got a ride with to the wedding.  I did feel somehow very exposed, going alone, knowing not one girl, having no one in my life, except Bill.

His poor wife-to-be had somehow picked up a case of Bell's palsy a week or two before the wedding.  She was as annoyed as her sweet nature could muster, which spoke to me of her character, as she just went ahead, plowed through.  I respected her after that.  All I remember of the wedding is the car ride there and their dance to close out their reception - before they changed into street clothes and disappeared.  Otherwise, nothing of that night has stayed in my memory.

A darkened dance floor, a spotlight.  Then I heard the keys and horns of The 5th Dimension.

I never saw him after that, we never stayed in contact.  He was married and there was no place for the single friend, I felt.  I knew I would have been an awkward third wheel, flipping burgers in the backyard, eyeing him over another beer.