Try Again
by Brian Greene
Claire was Chris’s new roommate. Chris was after me to try
dating her.
Chris and I had been friends for about 12 years by then. We
were both veterans of working in the book business. In years past, we’d hustled
in various indie book shops, ultimately in management capacities, in the major
Northeastern city where we lived. Now, with all the mom and pop stores long
gone, I was an Assistant Manager at a downtown Barnes & Noble and Chris had
an office job with B&N, serving as an assistant to a group of buyers.
I’d never met Claire, and when Chris described her look to
me, I swore to him I’d never seen her. Or I had and she hadn’t made an
impression. He said she knew who I was and that she was interested in me.
“She thinks you’re hot. And she likes power pop and bourbon.
You two’re probably soul mates. What’re you waiting for?”
I wasn’t all that eager to date then. I’d been divorced for
around four months, after a two-year separation. Sure, that’s enough time to be
ready. But getting over a broken marriage (we’d been wedded for 14 years) is a
process of grieving, at least it was for me. The decision to split was mutual
and I knew it was the right move for both my ex and me, but there was still a
lot of pain to absorb, along with regret and guilt. There were certain albums I
loved that I could never listen to anymore, because they were ones she and I
especially liked to hear while together. I still couldn’t look at pictures of
her pregnant with our daughter without breaking down and sobbing.
But I knew I needed to try. I forced myself to get on two
dating apps and had been on a handful of dates that were pleasant enough but
that didn’t lead to anything lasting. I still had my profiles up, but I rarely
took the time to swipe, look at my likes, or respond to any messages I got.
One Saturday night, I went to bed before 8:00 because there
was nothing in particular that I wanted to do and I was tired of my own
thoughts. I’d dropped my daughter with my ex earlier that afternoon and
wouldn’t see her again until Wednesday evening. I was off from work both
Saturday and Sunday. When I woke up that Sunday, I knew something needed to
change. I was fully rested and slurping my second cup of coffee by 5:30 a.m. At
around 9:00, I called Chris.
“Is your roomy still up for meeting me? I might have time
for that today.”
“She’s asleep. Like I was before your call. Like any sane
person is this time on a Sunday. I’ll give her your number and tell her to call
you later.”
The call came at around 11:20.
“Hey hottie!”
Her voice was loud and scratchy.
“I hafta work from noon to six. I sell overpriced shoes at a
ridiculous store in a crappy strip mall. Why don’t you come over at 7? I have
the first two Big Star albums on vinyl, the original Ardent ones. They were my
dad’s. You hafta bring over some bourbon and some kinda mixer.”
Chris sent me a text that read, “I’ll find something to do
tonight to give you two the pad to yourselves. Don’t fall in love too hard.”
Claire stands around 5’8 (one inch taller than me) and is
fair-skinned and willowy. That night, her peroxide blond hair was cut short in
a pixie style, and she wore barrettes on either side of her head. She had on
oversized, horn-rimmed glasses. When she smiled widely, as she did the second I
walked into the apartment, I noticed she was missing a tooth, about two spaces
to the left of her front teeth. At 42 (making her six years my junior), she
looked like an overaged indie girl, possibly a future bag lady. I thought she
was the cutest thing I’d seen in a long while.
I can’t clearly recall what Claire and I talked about during
the initial part of my visit. We drank glasses of the Wild Turkey and
Schweppe’s ginger ale I brought over as Big Star’s #1 Record spun on their
turntable. I know I said something about a few of the songs on that album being
too sappy for me while I loved most of it, and her telling me about an
experience she and two friends recently had panhandling in front of a train station.
By the time the second side of the album was on, Claire and
I were sprawled across their ratty, thrift shop-purchased living room sofa. The
skin on her forearms was coarse and scaly, qualities I’d never come across
before on a human. I remember thinking Crocodile Girl and picturing her
as a half-human/half-reptile being in some kind of fantasy movie.
As Chris Bell cried/sang “Try Again,” I swirled my tongue
around the gap in Claire’s mouth where her missing tooth should’ve been.
Later, we were naked and Claire got up to replay #1
Record. She put her scaly arms back around my neck and sighed deeply. After
Bell sang the words, “I feel like I’m dying” on the album’s opener, Claire
asked me, “What do you think the afterlife is?”
“Hmm. I don’t have any particular religious beliefs. If
you’d asked me before my daughter was born, I would’ve said there won’t be one
and that’s how it should be. We’ll just die and that’s that, we won’t go
anywhere else and we won’t know or feel anything. But now I want an afterlife.
I need there to be one. I’ve seen my daughter suffer. That changed me. I
need to be with her in a place where she can’t be hurt anymore.”
Alex Chilton sang, “It gets so hard in times like now to
hold on,” and I asked Claire for her take on what happens after we die.
“Do you know about this guy John Lilly? No? Oh, wow. You should.
He was a doctor and scientist who did all these far-out experiments with
consciousness expansion. Like with dolphins and isolation tanks, sometimes
while tripping on Special K. That movie Altered States with William Hurt?
That’s based on him. Anyway, I read this interview with him from really late in
his life where the interviewer asked him what he thought the afterlife would
be. He said he had no idea but he hoped he would be reincarnated with five
other people in the brain of a sperm whale. I could go for something like
that.”
We were quiet for a stretch. Then, when “Watch the Sunrise”
played this time through the album, I cried. I didn’t know if it was about my
ex-wife, my daughter, or what.
Through my tears I said to Claire, “I’m sorry. I don’t know
what this is. I’m having a great time with you.”
Alex Chilton sang the words, “It’s okay to look outside/your
love, it will abide” and Crocodile Girl pulled me closer to her.
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