The Love Letters of J. Timothy Owen (6 page)

“Where do we go? And how do we get there?” Tim wanted to know. “I don't have my license yet, and even after I get it, I'll bet my mother will still be there in the passenger seat, wringing her hands and jamming on the brakes every time we come to a red light. She's always afraid I won't see it and I'll go right through and cause a five-car pileup. Probably she'll be in the passenger seat on my first date, too, keeping her eye on me. My date will be stashed in the back,” he ended mournfully.

“Entirely possible,” Patrick agreed, making him feel worse. “Mothers are everywhere. Ask Sophie to the basketball game. Tell her you'll meet her inside. That way you won't have to pick her up or take her home. Or buy her a corsage.”

“A corsage!” he almost shouted. “Who wears a corsage to a basketball game? You are some weird dude, Patrick, you know that?”

Undisturbed, Patrick said, “All you have to do is sit next to her and you both watch the game. You don't have to talk to her or anything. That way, if you don't like her, or she doesn't like you, you're not out any bucks. If you meet her inside, she has to pay for herself, right? OK, so right away, you're ahead of the game.” Patrick snapped his fingers, pleased with himself. “Then, after, if you guys really interface and all, you ask her if she's thirsty. She says yes, so you buy her a Coke.”

“Patrick, you are so full of it.”

“In my other life,” said Patrick smugly, “I had plenty of dates. I was a regular Don Juan with the girls.” Patrick was into reincarnation. In his life before this one, he said, he'd been a
doge
in a palazzo in Venice. “You shoulda seen me in a gondola,” Patrick bragged. “Singing ‘O Sole Mio,' sailing up and down the Grand Canal, and fighting off the crowds of señoritas crawling all over me.”

“There aren't any señoritas in Italy, Patrick,” he said. “You're sure it was the Grand Canal? Sounds to me like you're confused.”

Patrick grinned. “Hey, it was me who was there, not you, Tim. You had to be there. Seeing is believing, right?”

Patrick could make you believe anything. Almost anything.

“Whatever you do,” Patrick got back to the matter at hand, “don't go steady. If you go steady, then you have to start going to her house for Sunday dinner, start sending her corsages, making nice with her old man, remembering her birthday. Stuff like that. It gets really involved.”

“I haven't even asked her to a basketball game yet,” he said. “You're moving too fast for me.”

“The thing about love letters, you have to ask for 'em back after you break up,” Patrick sailed on without a pause. “I read that somewhere in one of those girls' mags that Melissa gets. You'd be amazed what you can pick up from them. Otherwise, if she doesn't give 'em back, the love letters, I mean, she might show 'em to her friends, and they'd have a field day, laughing up a storm at all the dumb things you wrote, and word would get out that you're some super cluck and, boy, would they make fun of you! You don't want that to happen, do you? The best thing, Tim, is not to write her love letters, just call her on the phone and talk lovey-dovey all you want. That way, unless her old man's running a tap on the phone, it's only your word against hers.”

“What if I write love letters to her and she won't give 'em back when we break up? And how can we break up when we've never had a date?”

Patrick shook his head. “If she refuses to return your letters, she's not worthy of you in the first place, Tim.”

“Man,” he grumbled, “this has to be the shortest courtship on record! One minute I'm telling her to meet me inside the gym to see the basketball game, the next she won't give me back my love letters. What do I do now?”

“You're on the fast track, son,” Patrick told him, patting him on the back. “But you got yourself into this mess, you get yourself out.”

Chapter 8

Saturday morning his father called to say he and Joy were going to the driving range to hit some golf balls, did he want to come along?

“Sure,” he said, not really wanting to go. “Sure, that'd be great, Dad.” If it'd been just him and his father, fine, but Joy made him self-conscious.

His mother had gone to an auction with Kev. He wrote a note telling her where he'd gone. “A thousand greetings from yr. loving son,” he signed it. Seeing as how he was her only son, there'd be no confusion there.

Silently he stalked through the house, imagining himself a pirate out for the plunder. The stereo was old and not worth carrying. The camera was an unreliable Polaroid. The silver was plate and also heavy. His mother had no furs or jewels. About the only thing worth stealing was his bike, a sixteenth-birthday present from both his parents. They had chipped in to buy it for him, which fact touched him greatly. A touring bike, complete with aerodynamic saddle, easy highroll pressure tires, and a fully lugged hand-built frame; it was so beautiful, he was almost afraid to ride it, for fear it might get banged up. That bike was the Rolls Royce of bikes. He kept it polished to a high gloss, and he had had the best lock made to lock it up anytime he took it out. If he had his way, he'd also install an alarm system on it, rigged to blast off at the police station if someone so much as laid a pinky on it.

His father said they'd be around for him at about ten. He had almost an hour to kill. He scrubbed out the shower stall, his weekly chore, and swabbed down the kitchen floor for good measure. The kitchen was, by his lights, the nicest room in the house. He had helped his mother hang the wallpaper, which was bright and cheerful, and together, they'd done a good job.

Chores over, he hit the book. As he took the stairs two at a time, he thought, somewhat sheepishly, that the world's best love letters had become an obsession with him. Whenever he settled down with them for a good read, he was swept away on a tide of feeling that no other book he'd ever read had produced. He felt almost as if he'd written those letters himself.

One he liked in particular. He had its place marked in the book so he could turn directly to it without wasting a moment. Now he read it aloud to an empty room.

“I am at your tiny feet, beloved—I kiss them, I roll myself under the soles of them and place them on the nape of my neck—I sweep my hair with the places where you are to walk and prostrate myself under your footprints.”

Crazy. A foot nut. A foot fetishist.

The writer of the letter was Franz Liszt, composer, pianist, born 1811, died 1886. Franz Liszt, lover boy, writer of Liszt's
Hungarian Rhapsody
. A pianist of note at age nine. A true weirdo.

Outside, his father honked, summoning him to the golf range. He shoved the book under his pillow, where it would be waiting when he returned from his triumphal golf debut.

He hopped into the backseat. Joy turned to look at him. “Oh, Tim,” she said, wrinkling her nose. He'd noticed she wrinkled her nose a lot. Apparently it was the barometer of her emotions. Right now she was registering dismay.

“You're not going like that, are you?” Joy said softly.

“I'm clean,” he said, looking down at himself.

“Like what?” his father said.

“We're not going anyplace fancy, are we?” Tim asked. “I thought we were just going to hit some balls at the driving range.” He smiled out the window, wishing he'd never come. “I mean, we're not going to a club or anything, are we?”

People worry too much about what they put on their backs, he thought. One suit of clothes for funerals and weddings and one pair of what he'd called “party shoes” when he was little ought to take care of everything. He liked clothes that were effortless. Soft, old clothes. One of his favorite sayings was “Dress comfortably.” He thought Joy was a trifle overdressed, to tell the truth. But he wouldn't have thought to comment on her clothes. She had no right to comment on his.

This promises to be a fun-filled morning, he thought.

“Keep your head down and your elbows in, Tim. And keep your eye on the ball.” Old Joy, it turned out, was a golf instructor, as well as a computer programmer. She sounded like the guys on TV who give thirty-second-spot golf lessons between rounds of a tournament.

“You have a nice swing, Tim, but you simply have to keep your eye on the ball.” This after he'd taken several swings at the ball and missed it completely. Whiffs, they were called. Talk about humiliation. Try swinging at an inanimate object and missing it. He had heard that golf could be a humiliating game.

Next to them a kid of about ten was getting golf lessons from his father. The father had a short fuse, and every time the kid swung at the ball the father brought out a little booklet and read the dos and don'ts of the game to the kid in a loud voice. The kid was nearly in tears. Fun thing to do on a Saturday morning. Beats playing Softball.

Tim and his father drove golf balls under Joy's watchful, narrowed eyes. Instructions flowed from between her thin, tight lips. Maybe his father's next girlfriend, or neighbor, whatever, would turn out to be something simple, like a snorkeler. He certainly hoped so. His watch, a Swatch watch, was guaranteed to be good as far as a hundred feet underwater. He'd always wanted to test it out.

“How about if we play a couple of holes instead of just hitting the balls?” There was a nine-hole course adjacent to the driving range. “I figure that way I might get the idea quicker.”

With a swift, graceful motion, Joy set up a tee, put a ball on it, stood up, swung, and sent the ball soaring.

“Beautiful,” his father said. “Beautiful.” And his father looked at him, encouraging him to encourage Joy. He said it was beautiful, too.

“You don't want to bother with that pitch-and-putt course, Tim,” Joy told him, her voice leaving no room for argument. “After you get the hang of it, I'll take you to my club for a game.”

Not me, he vowed silently. You're not getting me on your club course. Obediently, he and his father drove balls until the bucket was empty.

A heavyset man with a ruddy face came out of the office.

“Morning, folks,” he greeted them. “Enjoying yourselves?”

“Fine, thanks,” his father said. Joy turned her back on the man and put on her golf sweater, yellow to match the rest of her outfit. A chill wind had come up. Dark clouds swarmed.

“Len Feeley,” the large-nosed man said, extending a hand. His father and Len Feeley shook hands. Feeley was Sophie's last name.

Mr. Feeley (he began an imaginary dialogue). I'm seriously thinking of having a crush on your daughter. In fact, I may have one already. I may ask her to a basketball game. OK with you?

“You don't find what you want, let me know. We aim to please.” And Len Feeley lifted his lips in what was surely a smile.

It began to rain.

“Come inside, if you want, till it stops,” Len said. The kid next to them took off. “It's only a shower, Eddie! Come back!” the father yelled. The kid kept on going.

When his father dropped him off at the house, Joy said, “We'll do it again real soon, Tim.”

“Sure you won't have a sandwich with us, Tim?” his father asked.

“Thanks, Dad, but I have work to do, letters to write.” His father's face expressed astonishment. “Since when have you become a letter writer?” his father asked.

“I'm trying it on for size,” he said. “Expanding my horizons. Thanks for the golf, Dad.”

“Don't be discouraged, Tim!” Joy cried. He waved, and watched until the car rounded the corner before he went inside.

Chapter 9

If Sophie had ever made goo-goo eyes at him, made any kind of flirtatious move, he might've lost interest. As it was, her aloofness, her don't-touch-me air fanned the fires of love burning in his insides. Sophie was her own person. No one was getting within easy distance of Sophie until she gave the go-ahead signal. Theirs would be an old-fashioned romance, he decided. He would woo her with sweet words, bunches of daisies plucked from the fields, and an occasional Milky Way bar to let her know how sweet he thought she was. They would have long, heartfelt discussions about everything in the world worth discussing. He would tell her his innermost thoughts, as she would tell him hers. He would tell her how he felt about her, would put his deepest feelings into words, so she would know exactly how deep his love was. Sophie, he knew, was the kind of girl who would give back his love letters without even being asked. If and when they broke up, which they might or might not do.

Maybe he could hang the blame for copying the love letter on Patrick. Hadn't the conversation about the bozo who'd copied an O. Henry short story and entered it in a contest sparked the whole thing? He couldn't be sure. Maybe it was his inability to conjure up enough flowery words on his own that made him decide to copy one of the
One Hundred of the World's Best Love Letters
and mail it to his beloved Sophie. Anonymously. It would have to be anonymously. If he signed his name, he would be a plagiarist, no matter what Patrick said, and romance would probably fly out the window, and they'd wind up hating each other. Well, she'd hate him. He could never hate her.

He wanted to send her a proper love letter, not one written by a randy, sixteen-year-old undercover intellectual. Sophie deserved only the best. Sophie deserved a love letter straight from the pen of one of the world's masters.

Time and again, in his search for the ultimate in love letters, he returned to Franz Liszt—composer, pianist, foot fetishist.

“If you knew how languorously and furiously I have need of you!” old Franz wrote to the Countess D'Agoult, year unknown. “I can do nothing but dream of you! I cannot talk to anyone and to you even less than the others!” See, even old Franz had difficulty talking to the girl of his heart, which undoubtedly was why he resorted to writing torrid love letters, and why he couldn't seem to breathe without his exclamation point.