Her Name was Lola
Part 4By Steve Finbow
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Click here to read from Part 1
They met twice or three times a week over the next three months. The geography of there meetings had dwindled from most pubs in the local area to just two – the new Inn and the Steeles. Most of their nights consisted of Stella Artois for him, red wine for her, and a meal. They questioned and told stories and he was careful not to give away too much but he told her about his first wife, his alcoholism, and his three brushes with death and she told him about her mother and her dreams of becoming a professional actress and sometimes the muscles in his jaw ached because he wanted to kiss her so much and he clenched his teeth against this desire because they had passed that stage and they kissed each other on the lips to say good night and he would hug her and then kiss her again and that was that and he had the annoying habit of texting her once they had parted and she never returned the text and he went home depressed and didn’t take a bath and went straight to bed without reading. Once he had phoned her and she had been abrupt and said she’d call him later in the week. And he had hated himself for that and wanted to call her back but didn’t and texted her early the next morning and her reply was light and funny and she said she could see him that night and it put him in a good mood and he wrote a short story that was nothing about her but was about her and he emailed it to an online magazine and it was accepted and he took her out that night to a restaurant instead of a pub to celebrate and she told him her boyfriend was coming over for Christmas and they were going to France for four weeks and he didn’t say anything. He just didn’t. He didn’t.
They went to The Steeles the night before she was leaving and she asked if he wanted to meet her boyfriend and he said OK but hadn’t expected her to call him and ask him to drop by the pub; he thought he’d have time to make an excuse – he was busy that night, or ill, or both. The boyfriend arrived twenty minutes later and looked like he’d been running.
‘This is Steve,’ Lola said to the boyfriend.
‘Would you like a drink?’ He said.
‘Is there a wine list?’
The boyfriend studied the list for at least fifteen minutes and then asked for something the pub did not have. He finally settled on a large glass of house red.
‘I hear you’re a writer,’ the boyfriend said.
Oh, no, not again, he thought.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What do you do?’
‘I’m a producer. Well, assistant producer. But I want to study wine. We’re going to Paris and we’re going to visit vineyards while we are in France.’
The “we’s” fell like hammer blows.
‘Oh, really.’
Lola remained silent.
‘So, how old are you?’ the boyfriend asked. ‘41? 42?’
'We don’t do age,’ Lola said.
‘Look. I have to go,’ he said. ‘Have fun in France. Have a good Christmas, I mean Hanukkah.’
‘You too,’ Lola said.
‘Nice to meet you,’ the boyfriend said.
Yeah, right, he thought.
Lola walked him outside and hugged him.
‘I’ll miss you,’ she said.
‘I’ll miss you,’ he said, and as an afterthought, ‘I’ll text you.’
‘My cell doesn’t work in France,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Text me when you get back. Have fun.’ He didn’t mean it.
‘You too,’ she said, and kissed him on the cheek.
‘Oh’ he said, ‘I got you these.’
He took two books from his bag: Henry James’s Daisy Miller and Russell Hoban’s Her Name Was Lola. He wanted to explain the James but decided not to.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
He walked away and then turned and looked back; she was inside and he could see their twisted silhouettes incarnadined behind the ripple-red stained glass.
Four weeks. He missed her the first week. He read a lot: Stephen Elliot’s Happy Baby, Harry Mulisch’s Siegfried, Wodehouse’s Code of the Woosters, Coetzee’s Master of St Petersburg. A week before Christmas, he was hospitalised for three days with diabetic ketoacidosis due to increased ketone presence in his body – all that Thai food, all those beers – and he spent the time in agony reading Henry James’s The Ambassadors and he copied into his notebook, alongside other quotes, these:
It made her for some reason – the irrelevance or whatever – laugh.
And
But everything was unpleasant; it was odd how everything had
suddenly turned so.And
..and in the light of Paris one sees what things resemble.
And
The sign was that – though it was her own affair – he understood;
the sign would be that – though it was her own affair – she was free
to clutch. Since she took him for a firm object – much as he might to
his own sense appear at times to rock – he would do his best to be one.And
A man in trouble must be possessed of a woman.
He underlined that one. Twice.He was home on Christmas Eve but weak and testy. He had been invited to his local pub for lunch and although he didn’t want to go he thought he should and did and enjoyed the first hour or so drinking and talking with people he hadn’t seen since last Christmas. The customers sang songs. The table was set, crackers pulled and seats taken. He put on a gold pointed hat and read out jokes from the crackers. Two years ago, in front of his friends’ elderly relations and young daughters, he had responded to the question ‘What do you call a man with a spade?’ not with the answer ‘Dug’ but with the off-the-cuff remark ‘A nigger lover.’ It was there. He’d said it. It went quiet and then the eldest daughter laughed, relieving the tension. Last year, sitting around the tree, watching people open their presents, it was the turn of the younger daughter (sixteen), tearing off the wrapping paper she held up a bra and knickers set with a pen kit which allowed her to customise her underwear – a gift from the elderly relatives – and she had turned to the room and said, ‘What can I write,’ and instantly he had said, ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,’ and again was met with silence. He wondered if he should just say something rude and get it over with but started to feel ill and only managed a few slices of turkey and a couple of stuffing balls before he made his apologies and went home. He spent the rest of the day on the sofa and, at 9pm, watched Apocalypse Now and took three hours to drink a can of beer. He didn’t do much between Christmas and New Year. New Year he spent with friends. A week before Lola’s return he was determined not to see her, to say he was busy, that he was going away, that he thought it better that they left it at that because he knew in her absence he had fallen a little in love with her.
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Click here for Steve Finbow's bio and a list of works published.
© 2005 Me Three
