Grout Girl

A short piece of fiction by yours truly:

Grout Girl

“We sometimes encounter people even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.” Fydor Dostoevsky

***

Grout: A thin, course mortar poured into various narrow cavities, as masonry joints or rock fissures, to fill them and consolidate the adjoining objects into a solid mass.

***

Annabelle’s is a funky bar with class. I love the place because it oozes an atmosphere of anticipation. When you sit at the bar or in a booth at Annabelle’s you can’t help but have the feeling that something is going to happen. Whether it is the deep red of the walls, faded in places to a musty pink, or the lighting, always dim, or the smell, a combination of garlic , ground beef and beer, or the music which defines categorization, something unexpected was about to happen.  It was there that I first saw Fiona, my Grout Girl.

Although grout comes in many colors, Fiona was pale. I'm not talking about race.  No, when I say she was pale, I say so because everything about her blended into everything else. Pale and tall and and proud and pencil thin. She reminded me of a heron because she was so still and she had this long neck.  I have never known anyone who could fade into an environment, become almost invisible, while simultaneously controlling the room through her sagacious presence. Fiona possessed a silent charisma, a charisma that walloped you when you least expected it, and  when she  turned on that invisible switch, there was no escaping her magic.

“I like it, I love it, I want some more of it. I like it, I love it, I want some more of it.” The band droned on, repeating the stanza endlessly as I sat at the bar nursing a beer. Annabelle’s is a great place to people watch which is why I generally go there alone. I’m a compulsive author, always looking for characters to put in my stories. Characters abound at Annabelle’s.

“Ah oh, here comes trouble,” said the bar tender. Two cops walked through the door obviously looking for someone. They looked like Mutt and Jeff, it was comical.  One was big. He didn’t walk, he swaggered. He had a mean face and a ruddy complexion and he always kept his hand on his hip, he looked as if he was fondling his firearm, or at the very least checking to make sure that it was still there. The other cop was much smaller, one of those guys whose eyes project a macroscopic view of the world, he had seen it all and nothing, absolutely nothing surprised him any more.

They scanned the room then walked over to a booth next to the bar. I realized later that Fiona was in full heron mode which is why I had not noticed her among the foursome. I like it, I love it, I want some more of it.

“Are you Fiona Lombardi?” (Fiona Lombardi.  What a great name, it kind of rolls off the tongue.)

“I am.”

“You need to come with us.”

“All right.” Both cops looked relieved. No fight, no fuss, no hassle. Fiona was sitting next to the wall so there was a great deal of standing and shifting of positions among her companions so that Fiona could slide across the seat and stand up. 

I remember reading somewhere that Marilyn Monroe had an amazing talent. She could turn her Marilyn Monroe persona on and off at will. If she did not want to be seen, she turned Marilyn off and walked down Fifth Avenue unnoticed. If she wanted attention, she turned Marilyn on. I will never know what Fiona did as she left Annabelle’s with Mutt and Jeff, but something altered. Like Marilyn, she wanted to be noticed so between the booth and the door she became the center of attention. It was at that moment that I set my sights on Fiona. I didn’t know it, but I was to be in for a bumpy ride.

“What was that all about?” The bar tender and I watched together as the people in the booth reassembled without Fiona.

“That’s Fiona.”

“One of the locals? I never noticed her before.”

“No, I think she is from California, she’s not local.”

“Yeah, she has that ‘California Babe’ look about her.” A most unpleasant trait of mine, I tend to stereotype people way too quickly, and the truth is Fiona did not have that beach baby beach baby down on the sand look.  She defied stereotyping.

“She has been coming in a lot lately. Doesn’t seem to be wanting for money, she picks up the tab more often than not.”

“Why do you suppose the cops are interested in her?”

“Rumor has it she has a fondness for fires.”

“A fondness for fires? She’s an arsonist?”

“You didn’t hear it from me.”

Now I was curious, what a great plot for a story.  I had the title already in my head: “A Fondness for Fires.”

“She sure doesn’t look like an arsonist.”

“What does an arsonist look like?” The bar tender multi-tasked as we talked, cocktail shakers, crushed ice and frosted margaritas came and went as we spoke.

“I dunno. Sneaky. Shifty. She looks more like an art student at the local college of fine arts. She doesn’t belong behind bars.”

“You never know,” said the bar tender, wiping his hands on his dirty white apron. “She settles comfortably in bars, she has been here almost every day this week.”

Fiona haunted me, I was unable to get her off my mind and  set out to find out everything I could about her. It wasn’t hard. Her life was an open book, but a book that conveniently left out some rather important elements - like any family history or where she got the money she spent so lavishly on furnishing her condo and eating out almost every day. Within a few weeks I found myself firmly ensconced in that condo with the  butter-soft  brown leather sofa, the espresso machine, the giant flat-screen television mounted on the wall and her shoes. OMG, Fiona loved shoes. In retrospect, I should have realized that she was far more in love with her shoes than she was with me but beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.  Fiona was the beauty, I the beholder, a beholder blinded by the light.

Although she seemed to have a large circle of friends, I was never privy to them. Our romance wasn’t a romance, it was some kind of a bizarre tango,  a tango in which she led, I followed, and it was all sub rosa - with one big chink in the armor. I couldn’t shake the bar tender’s words, “she has a fondness for fires.”

By then it was too late, she had become the grout that held all the disjointed aspects of my life together. Nice things began to happen to me. My writing began to jell into a coherent novel, my brother and I patched up our long-standing feud, I  got a raise, I sold a poem, I finally sold my cabin in spite of the lousy real estate market. I was in love, desperately, stupidly in love.

One day I asked her what happened the day she was led out of Annabelle’s by the two policemen. Fiona had been coming and going, quietly leaving the condo without a goodbye and returning unnoticed by me as I lay buried in my growing novel. My initial take on her held true, she was indeed a heron in human form. Sometimes she scared the shit out of me standing so quietly behind me as I typed into my computer.

“The police kept me for hours doing their “good cop, bad cop” routine.”

“Why?”

“They thought I was responsible for setting a fire.”

“Whatever gave them that idea?”

“Someone tipped them off.”

“But who would say such a thing, who would lie like that?”

“It wasn’t a lie.”

I was dumbfounded. I looked at her in amazement, it was as if scales had been removed from my eyes. As I looked, I began to smell smoke coming from the small room I had converted into an office, and as my computer burned, I realized I had not backed up my novel.  Only a week later my brother committed suicide, I lost my job and the sale of my cabin fell through.  In some horrible way, Fiona was indeed the mortar that held all the unrelated areas of my life together, and when, like a good heron, she quietly flew away, everything fell apart.

It's All Temporary