Lucille has been working at Weiss Clinic in Houston for but a few months when a doctor, an OBGYN, taps her on the shoulder and says her name. It is none other than Dustin, my friend from high school who had given us the keys to the mansion all those years ago. He has only a minute or two to catch up, so the conversation is focused upon the immediate circumstances of how each came to be here in this hallway at this moment, and what a small world it is after all. Then, Dustin’s beeper goes off. They smile and part ways, but before they are out of earshot, Lucille calls out, “You wouldn’t know whatever happened to Sterling, would you?”
A peculiar future hinges upon this seemingly ordinary moment. Little can anyone guess, of course, what kind of future it will be.
A few days later comes Lucille’s call, and that night, we go out to the Capital Grill for dinner and drinks. She looks remarkably unchanged. A faint set of crow’s feet has set into the temples, but otherwise, she is the same Lucille; the fire of youth burning through with a vengeance. The transformation lies in her personality. The once supremely confident schoolgirl now has a bashful side. Every now and then, she breaks out with a bawdy joke, told in a loud Texas twang. Patrons at a few surrounding tables turn their heads in pleasant surprise, which quickly changes to mild dismay. At this point, she catches herself. Her voice is muted, her gestures carefully subdued. The picture she presents in that moment charms: the outburst followed by an act of self-restraint employed, one suspects, at the bidding of hard-won wisdom. She has endured difficult times and emerged only slightly touched by a transcendent self-awareness. Even in the midst of the outburst, I am a captive and unembarrassed audience. Lucille is my past. She is me.
The night ends on a note of innocence, reminiscent of years gone by, when I drop her off at her apartment. A peck on the cheek, and it’s back to the car. The following weekend we go to a shindig hosted by Mark Cuban and his company, Micro Solutions, at Lake Conroe, just north of Houston. The parking lot is bumper-to-bumper BMWs and Audis, the party in full swing. Music pours out onto the lawn where the aromatic smoke from a huge grill spirals over the lake. I ferry Lucille from cloister to cloister, introducing her to the people I’ve worked with since I saw her thirteen years ago. She seems perfectly comfortable in this company until I allude to how much money some of these people are worth. Suddenly, the party is no longer a gathering of friendly computer gnomes, but transforms into a summit of movers and shakers, a party of young princes. At the first sign of the swagger inherent in such royalty, Lucille retreats, receding into corners and vacant hallways, sipping her drink alone.
By late afternoon we have to be going, as Lucille’s babysitter has plans of her own that night. On the way to her place, Lucille says she needs to stop by a pharmacy to pick up a prescription for her migraines. She asks me for the phone, and puts in a call to her neighborhood apothecary. She tells the pharmacist she’ll be there in ten minutes to pick it up.
“You can call in your own prescriptions just like that?” I ask once she hangs up.
“I’m in the industry,” she responds coolly.
“That’s too convenient,” I say. “See, I’d be a fiend within a week.”
In the long silent moment that follows, I realize she doesn’t appreciate even the slightest implication that might question her capacity for self-control and therefore, her professionalism. And I can understand that. Nobody dies when I mess up at work. Then in a horrible instant, I recall the circumstances of her friend’s trouble, and think to myself, “I am a fool…”
As we approach her neighborhood, she silently directs me to the pharmacy. I drop her off before the sliding doors, and five minutes later she emerges, smiling with mock relief, holding up to the sunlight her trophy, a translucent pear-shaped nasal inhaler. Once in the car, she takes a couple of toots, and her world is once again right, the menacing apparition in her brain subdued.
We then head to her apartment, where I see her son, Damien, for the first time. The moment is mind-blowing for me, but I keep my thoughts to myself. The first view is common enough. Damien paws at the arm of the babysitter, a young girl with acne and stringy black hair. She absently clicks through endless cable channels, not wanting to be bothered. The conversation I’m having with myself is brief, yet voluminous in its impact: “Great God Almighty, Lucille has a son!”
The instant the little boy notices us, he ambles into Lucille’s arms as the babysitter recites the afternoon’s events in the manner of all young girls who are too preoccupied to care. Nothing much happened, and she wants her money. Lucille produces a couple of twenties from her purse, and the girl is out of there.
The balance of the afternoon is spent on the floor before the parade of cartoons and children’s shows. Kiddie banter breaks up long stretches of songs sung by seemingly demented adults. Just as I think it might be time for me to be going, Lucille asks if I’d like a bourbon and Coke. It takes me a millisecond to respond, “You bet!”
She pours two drinks, then decides it’s time to put Damien to bed. Once that’s accomplished, we stretch out, and evening fades into night right there on the living room floor. At some point we make it to the bedroom, where Lucille quickly ebbs into sleep. I lie awake beside her, thinking, my mind endlessly wandering.
I contemplate probabilities…how unlikely the last few days seem, the chances of Lucille and me getting back together like this after all these years. I think of how right it feels, how it all must have been orchestrated by some mysterious force, how reunions can seem to be forged by the hand of God Himself. Lucille lies beside me, still as an unspoken whisper, the house filled with the scent of baby powder and a diaper pail somewhere in the darkness. Past and present seem to fuse in this one moment. I feel as though I’ve been rescued from the intolerable torpor of my former daily life, a dulling routine of work and increasingly stale weekend hi-jinks with coworkers and a coterie of friends who go way back, but never so far back as Lucille and me.
And now, with halting suddenness, the future stretches out before me in a succession of sunny vistas. It’s the suddenness that keeps me awake. Such vistas that come late at night are notoriously unreliable. Fantasy intrudes upon reality in the wee hours, as I take my first, tentative steps into the dangerous valley of illusion, where flaws are forgotten, washed away by memories of laughter and the amplified sounds of passions both shared and hoped for.