with more stars than Hollywood. The night was almost cold, a breeze biting through the slacks of my blue glen plaid tropical worsted, as I approached the building called the MAC.
An example of Southern California architecture at its best, the MAC was a mission-style castle with stone-tile masonry walls, a square tower, and a red clay tile roof. I strolled through a charming stone-and-landscape courtyard, across glazed ornamental tile, into a sprawling building rife with hardwood interiors, wooden beams, and decorative ironwork.
I soon found myself in a lounge, where pretty coeds and lucky college boys were laughing and talking, sipping Cokes, having smokes, a few gathered around a wood burning fireplace with a crackling fire going; some card playing and Ping-Pong was going on, too, and a couple couples were doing the hokey pokey to some music on the radio. I asked a coed for directions, then headed past a library, various conference rooms, a dining room, and the kitchen, into the large assembly hall where, on stage, the rehearsal was under way.
I sat with my hat in my lap, amid a scattering of students involved in the production. Vera did indeed play a floozy, and she did a bang-up job of it; but her part was small, and after about an hour, during which her scene was run through half a dozen times, she’d been dismissed, and joined me in the sparse audience.
“Any sign of Paul?” she asked. She was in the same fetching powder blue outfit she’d worn to my office, plus spike heels that may have been part of her
“Nope,” I said.
She craned around to look. “I’m surprised. He’s been haunting rehearsal all week.”
“How long do you have to stay?”
“I’m done, now. Would you walk me to my dorm? The entrance is around back of the building….”
We headed out through the courtyard, where we paused to admire a colorful tiled fountain in the shape of an eight-pointed star; lighting within the fountain painted the dancing spray with a rainbow effect. Her arm was in mine, and she was leaning against me; the smell of Camay soap in the fresh crisp air was bewitching. She was a young, shapely, pretty girl and I was a lonely divorce in his forties, and I was distracted.
Which is why he was on us before I even knew it.
The guy grabbed Vera by the arm linked with mine, and yanked her away.
“Paul!” she squealed.
Paul was tall, knife-blade thin, wearing his army uniform, which was rumpled and wouldn’t pass inspection. Despite his weak chin, he was handsome enough, or would have been if his eyes hadn’t been so wild, and his nostrils flaring.
“What are you doing with this old fart?” he demanded of her. His fists were clenched. He looked like he might hit her at any moment.
But the real reason I sucker punched him was the “old fart” remark. I caught him in the side of the face with a hard left hand and he collapsed like a card table.
Vera stepped back and covered her mouth; college-kid faces began popping up in the arched windows along the ersatz stone facade of the building edging the courtyard. Smiles and wide eyes and pointing fingers….
“Don’t hurt him,” she said, but it wasn’t clear who she meant.
“Leave her alone,” I told him.
He was a pile of long limbs in khaki down there on the ornamental tile. His eyes were crazed, his lower lip trembling.
“She doesn’t want you bothering her,” I said, patting the air with my palms. “Just keep your distance—”
But something was coming up from deep within him, a scream of agony that took the form of words:
And suddenly he was reassembling himself, like a played-backward newsreel of a building demolition, and he was on his feet and hurling himself at me before I could say another word.
I did have time to throw a punch, which caught his jaw and should have sent him down again, but he was fueled by rage, and shook it off and came windmilling at me, fists flailing, one catching my chin and stinging. I backed away, but had forgotten the fountain, and tripped over a star point and tumbled back into the water in a spattering spray. Then I was the one who was flailing, floundering on my back in the shallow water, lucky not to have cracked my skull or broken a damn rib or something.
He was laughing at me, pointing, hysterical, out of control, he had never seen anything so fucking funny, and he was still laughing when I rose like a human wave and leapt out of the fountain at him, dripping wet, hopping mad, doubling him over with a right to the belly, straightening him with a left under the chin, putting him down with a right to the side of his face.
Then he was on one knee, as if proposing. He was not about to get up, not soon, not now. I was dripping water, but he was dripping blood, one side of his mouth a pulpy mess.
Vera stood with a hand to her dark red lips, looking at him with pity, but making no move to go to him.
I just stood there, drenched, waiting to see if a reconciliation was going to take place. Wouldn’t be the first time an old boyfriend got beat up by a girl’s new savior, only to renew her sympathy and interest in the old beau.
Not this time. Vera took my wet arm and said, “We need to get out of here, before the campus police come.”
I nodded, and we left him there, on his hands and knees, his breath heaving, mouth dripping; maybe he was crying.
I was a little out of it, from the scuffle, and I don’t remember exactly how we wound up at my car—a ’50 Packard, a dark green number that belonged to the A-l. But we were sitting in it—me behind the wheel, getting the upholstery wet—and Vera in the rider’s seat, looking at me with concern.
“I don’t want to go back,” she said.
