CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Nate de Bergerac
Kick. Push. Glide.
By the following Monday morning, Nate was more depressed than ever. Things were totally effed up.
Kick. Push. Glide. He leaned and steered his skateboard through a slight curve and a mild slope down the sidewalk. Wobbly, he had to concentrate to maintain his balance. Skateboarding used to be second nature to him once upon a time; now his reflexes were slow, his balance was bad, and, worse, he couldn’t do it fearlessly like he did as a teen. Fear and gravity were the greatest threats to competent boarding. He cruised down the street with a hand on the bandage that covered most of his chin, hiding the road rash he got from a face plant on the way home from school on Friday. Maybe it was time to buy an alternative mode of transportation. He could afford a car now. Granted, the starting teacher’s salary didn’t measure up to the allowance a couple of his students pulled down each month. But they were the exception at MHHS.
He had played two games with Festerhaven’s softball team over the weekend. Only two weak hits along with two errors, a lackluster performance at best. He couldn’t concentrate. Aaron, the husband of Festerhaven’s throat-hockey partner, was there, and the way Loretta stayed near his side, you’d never guess she had a double play going with the principal. Festerhaven, for his part, was more attentive to Julie, and it put an extra spark in her day. Worse, Aaron turned out to be a decent guy and a great teammate and didn’t deserve to have his world crushed if Nate ratted out his wife. Julie would hate him for tattling on her fiancé. They were two hearts he didn’t want to break, even if it wasn’t his fault. More to the point, it was none of his business. Nate wished he had Carla Almeida’s brass ovaries, sex change notwithstanding. She considered everything her business, and he doubted she would find anything wrong with setting the record straight with all the parties involved.
Lean left. Lean right.
Kick. Push. Glide.
Stumble. Stop. Remount.
He rolled past two students on the sidewalk approaching the school. They were several feet apart, and he took them on like cones on a slalom course. He had his Giants cap on backwards and wore Panama Jack sunglasses and an oversized Hawaiian shirt. Somewhere in the nineties, he guessed, the dress code changed for teachers in the public schools. The fashion line separating the faculty and the students crumbled like the Berlin Wall. He had been such a dweeb showing up to class in a tie that first week. His mother approved of the laid-back look and gave him some of Charlie’s old tie-dyed shirts from the sixties to wear. If he couldn’t be the most respected teacher on campus, he would definitely be the coolest.
Kick. Push. Whoa! Steady, fella.
Nate stumbled off his skateboard as he took the corner at the end of a wall of lockers outside the English quad, pulled down by a strong hand.
“Mr. Evans. What do you think you’re doing?”
“Oh. Hey, Russ. I mean, Mr. Festerhaven.”
Two girls snickered as they stepped around the men. Nate had seen plenty of smirks from students as he wheeled each morning onto campus and the “what-the-iff#@?” looks from a couple of teachers. But a “what-the-eff#@?” look from the principal was not a good way to start the day.
“That sign over there that says no skateboarding on campus means no skateboarding,” Festerhaven said. “Don’t think you get a pass because you are faculty. You don’t. If I could, I’d have you in detention and send a note home to your parents.”
If only. Nate answered to his parents every day, and would as long as he went on living in their house, which could be forever at this rate. Sure, he could afford to move out, but that would ruin the fantasy he had crafted. He was determined to live with his parents at least through graduation in the spring to find out where this story, this life was going to take him. Another big plus, the bedroom at his parents’ place felt safe and comfortable. He could understand why moving back home was all the rage with millenials these days. If Festerhaven knew that little fact, he might try to send a note home to Mom and Dad, so his threat wasn’t entirely empty. Then again, Nate’s mother would tear it up and toss it like so many of the disciplinary tickets he had gotten for rogue but harmless behavior as a teen. Mom believed a little civil disobedience was good training for the real world.
“In fact it is worse than if you were a student. Set an example and be an adult.” Festerhaven frowned. The principal wasn’t impressed with Nate’s classroom attire.
FesterBoss had a good sense of humor when he wanted, though used it sparingly on campus. Maybe that was part of the job. He kind of, sort of, almost liked the guy and Nate could see why Julie attached herself to him even if he didn’t deserve her. If only she knew… He tucked the skateboard under his arm and walked off, his conscience following close behind.
“He’s a liar and a cheat,” it hissed in his left ear.
“It’s none of your business,” it screamed in his right.
He had first period free, so he went to the music department. Seth Naylor asked him to drop in for a talk.
Nate sat down on a stool next to the music teacher’s desk at the front of the room. He picked up a guitar and plucked notes, searching for the opening riff from “Stairway to Heaven.” He knew it once upon a time.
Seth blushed as he turned his iPad so that Nate could see the picture on the screen. “This is Angela.”
Nate leaned forward. “Angel Strings. She looks pretty.” It was an unflattering selfie posted on the dating site called WinkConnection.com. Nate had never investigated one of those match sites before. He assumed this one was typical as he read the profile beneath Angel Strings’ picture. Played the violin and cello. Worked as a therapist teaching music to kids with disabilities. Liked Mozart and Adele equally.
“It says she’s looking for a guy who’s not afraid to dance in public. That says a lot. You got any moves?”
“Uh, Arthur Murray Studios. It’s been years. Does Salsa count?”
“I hear it’s making a comeback.”
He reached out with his thumb and finger to enlarge the picture. Angela had red hair pulled back with a wide-open Irish face full of freckles and eyes that, if you could believe the selfie, lacked color. She wasn’t a beauty but, as Seth said, her picture wouldn’t make you puke. No, actually Angela was cuter than that. He knew that sometimes love was blind, and sometimes it was merely cross-eyed. She had clearly captured Seth’s heart. The most remarkable feature Angela had, however, was tiny lips that were quite off-center enough to give the impression she was perpetually perplexed.
He nodded and gave Seth a thumbs-up that provided a kind of validation. “Wink Connection dot com? I never considered you as the type to need help from a dating website. Does it really work as they advertise?”
“My sister found her husband on the Wink app. I’m going to be an uncle now,” Seth said with a grin. He said his sister pestered him to give it a try and so he had exchanged online “winks” with a number of women over the past year.
“Did you ever meet any of them?”
“No. I couldn’t do that. I mean, I could, but they always lost interest after we got past the winks and flirts and emailed back and forth a few times.” He looked at the picture of Angel Strings. Nate thought it was a way to avoid looking at him. “I was hoping I could get your help. You know how to write things. You were talking about writing love scenes for your movies a while back, and it got me thinking. You must be good at it since you’ve had all that success.”
Success? Hardly.
Seth went on, “Me? If it’s not on the music scale, I can’t write it. Somebody else has to come up with the lyrics because words fail me. I’m lost. Totally clueless.”
It really was that bad. Seth showed him an exchange with a woman called “Snooky Shoes.” It was stilted yet rambling, and he was self-deprecating in a way that begged for pity.
“She blocked me from any more emails. You see, I choked. I was trying too hard because she could be the one. Stanford gave her an eight.”
Nate asked what Stanford had to do with Seth’s love life.
“Oh, some researchers have this compatibility generator online. You go there and plug in everything you know about somebody and what you know about yourself based on a questionnaire. Some of the dating sites do it with their own algorithms to find the perfect match. The Stanford research site is like their match computers, only on steroids.”
“My first try was Snooky Shoes, her real name is Lisa, and she scored higher than anyone else after I plugged in all the traits I want to find in a date. But, like I said, I killed it with one bad email. That’s why I want your help to keep from screwing it up with Angela.”
Snooky Shoes, Angel Strings and computer-driven love; it was all very weird. “She’s the perfect match. According to Stanford?”
“Nope. I didn’t bother with that. I just know. And I didn’t find her, she found me. She liked my profile picture.” Seth showed Nate his profile page; the photo didn’t have a face. It was a beautiful shot of fingers on the strings of a stand-up bass. MusicMan35. That was his online identity.
“MusicMan35?”
“My work. My age. Seemed to fit.”
And then Seth handed him a flyer promoting an evening of jazz at the Renaissance Club at St. Pedro Square downtown.
“This you?”
“It’s a little quartet. A couple of college buddies of mine and one’s father.”
“Are you guys any good?”
Seth smiled and nodded. “I think so. We practice a lot, but we’ve never tried to approach the clubs. This is our first one.”
Nate checked the clock on the wall. The kids would be grateful if he was five minutes late. “I can see why you’re jazzed, pardon the pun.” He said he wouldn’t miss their opening night, and then turned the conversation back to Angel Strings and finding true love.
“You know, thoughts and feelings about things,” Seth said.
“Keep it simple. Compliment her about her interesting profile, you are impressed with the work she does, and you have a lot in common, and then suggest you meet up for coffee. Four simple steps and you got yourself a date.”
“It’s not that simple. Here, read this. How am I going to answer that?”
Nate could see his point. Seth had apparently asked Angel Strings to describe herself. The response was creative but weighed down by references to moonlit walks on the beach, the joy of finding a child’s chalk hopscotch on the sidewalk, the smell of rosemary just before it goes into her pasta sauce, and music. A lot of references to music, which made sense given it was the common thread binding these two. Nate reread the email and couldn’t decide if Angel Strings was as deep as Emily Dickenson or as shallow as a Kardashian on a good day. Ultimately he decided she was simply a hopeless romantic, like him. He could relate, just not in so many flowery words.
“It’s really something.”
Seth was up and pacing. He finally sat at the piano bench and poked distractedly with a finger on the keyboard. “I tried writing back, but I couldn’t get it to sing. Not like she did.”
That was an interesting choice of words, Nate thought.
Seth said, “I want your help. Write something for me just as good. But honest. Exactly how I feel.”
“Your feelings, but my words? I’m not sure how honest that is. It sounds so very Cyrano de Bergerac.” Talk about life imitating art.
“Cyrano de Bergerac?”
“Old story. Done a thousand times from Shakespeare to Steve Martin. A guy who is good at romance steps in to, let’s say, woo a girl for a friend who’s too lame or too ugly—no offense meant there—to do it himself. Think Steve Martin and Darryl Hannah in Roxanne. Janeane Garofalo did a chick version with cats and dogs. I even ripped it off myself for a plot one time.”
Wrong Face, Wrong Time was still sitting in some studio exec’s office long past its shelf life. Hmm, should he dust it off and try again?
“Well, if you’ve done it before; you can do it for me, can’t you? It would mean a heck of a lot.”
Sure, Nate felt it shouldn’t be a problem, and he’d give it more thought than your average, run-of-the-mill Nate Evans script. Seth played a series of chords and a pretty little riff. He played as if his fingers had a mind of their own, unconcerned with the pressing issue of making a pass at a woman neither one of them knew. It was a tune that touched familiar emotional notes inside him even though he’d never heard it before.
“Okay,” Nate said. “But promise me that if this works, you’ll bring her to one of my Popcorn Thursday classes. I’m letting the kids bring dates now, for extra credit. Maybe I’ll show Roxanne. Just for you. In fact, why not come by for the next one anyway? It’s always the first Thursday of the month. We start at fifth period and kids get extra credit for staying an hour over to finish the movie. I’ll have the popcorn machine set up. Movie and popcorn and soda. What better way to kill an afternoon after school?”
“What are you showing this time?”
“Tootsie. Dustin Hoffman. Jessica Lange.”
Nate felt as if he’d been tossed into the teaching pool and left to sink or swim with little direction, so for his creative writing class, he simply did what came naturally to him. He watched movies. Now he assigned his students to write film reviews for credit.
By the time Nate left the music room, he had wrung enough of Seth’s views on life, love and music to send a response to Angel Strings sure to intrigue her, as well as three different follow-up letters Seth could use depending upon her reaction.
That night he sat on his bed, not ready to sleep, wondering why he was alone at his age. He went to his computer. If you could believe the Internet, over a third of the singles in America were on one dating site or another these days. That was a boatload of lonely people. Seth had told him where to find the Stanford University compatibility website. He started filling in answers to the questionnaire. If there was a Julie Cooper clone, Nate hoped she was out there somewhere.