I gave him a name, Frank Sechs, and some of my actual and imagined history, and I gave him a lady friend named Naples LaTour. Naples was invented from a girl I dated in college and another girl who inspired an all-consuming infatuation from the moment I first saw her. I didn't know her name. We shared one class one year. By chance, I saw her after I'd carried my secret flame for over a year and I asked her for a date. And she said, so kindly, "I'm married."
So inventing the character of Naples allowed me to imagine all sorts of outcomes other than "I'm married." I found that these imaginary people could generate insights as I wrote their story, and so I continued to put pieces of that story together once in a while. Years could lapse before another installment.
I just took up interest in their story this summer, so I'm going to begin by posting the initial parts and then add new parts as I develop them over the coming months or years.
Frank and Naples
If I were a writer...
If I
were a writer, I’d tell you a story in the usual order of things,
beginning-middle-end, and a love would develop, fail, and either revive or kill
the belief in hope for one of the main characters or you, the reader. But I’m not a writer. I’m a detective with no skill set, just a
hunch or two and a taste for finding things out.
Well,
this story begins a while ago, but not at the beginning of it. I was having a night out with a couple of
friends at a micro brewery. Tom Harry was
winning a dart game again, playing with college kids who believed his story
about never having thrown a dart before. Naples LaTour, a woman of some repute locally, was at my side
encouraging me to buy her another round.
“You’re
round enough already, Baby,” was all I could say, hoping to upgrade her mood. The smile that began somewhere behind her eyes
exerted a pull on the corners of her mouth.
I saw the smile blossom as I finished my beer, noticing that someone
seen through smeared potato chip grease on a beer glass is, nevertheless,
someone. I didn’t evaluate the image I’d
just seen, and I don’t think she realized that looking at her as a distortion
filled me with both a dread and something else, something like a calling of
some kind, a knell.
I can’t
help reality, reader. This story begins
with a greasy beer glass, and the view of a woman who was once the most
remarkable girl in my life, and the impossibility of prolonging that view, or
that remarkable girl.
From Bible Grove to
Spelling
In the
spell of monotony on the trip south from Bible Grove, a place poetic and
hopeful in the unpeopled map of northeastern Missouri, one has time to imagine
how to participate in the whimsy that is in the place names of this part of the
country. There’s Fairdealing in the
southeast, Bolivar in the southwest, and Savannah north of St. Joe. Savannah was named “Union” until that became
an unspeakable word in those parts 140 years ago. There’s the imaginary town of Spelling. I like to go there (“I” being private
detective Frank Sechs) with Naples for a plate of Jalapeno poppers at the diner
that’s open weekends in October while the Police Academy is in session.
I’ve
been friends with Naples LaTour, on and off, for a long time. She’s got a voice that sounds like Dutch
chocolate to me, like Jane Fonda in her late thirties. These days she’s had her hair cut short, and
it’s real dark brown again like it was when she posed for that Cosmo cover that
the manager of the Weiss Market had to pull off the shelves. Her deep brown eyes have always seemed to
glisten, as if she misted them or something, but I don’t think she does, and
when she looks my way, those eyes hold me.
The less
said about her name the better. Once
when she didn’t want to drive all the way to Spelling with me, she said, “wouldn’t
you rather tour Naples instead?”
I met
her for lunch yesterday to try to get used to the idea that she’s in my story. We agreed to let the relationship simmer for
a while and see where it might go. For I
don’t know how many years we thought we were part of different stories, but
here we are. Where will it lead?
Greetings from Naples
I belong
in the autobiography of Frank Sechs, but that doesn’t mean I will let him tell
you a very tall tale at my expense! When
he made that remark about viewing me through potato chip grease, I didn’t know
whether to walk out or imagine he was getting into a serious vein. You don’t know that he likes to say whatever
comes to mind, whether true or not, and he thought I’d get a charge out of
that. Well, it’s flat lying, that’s what
it is, and he paid dearly.
He would
have you think I’m a cheap trick, to hear him talk. I will have you know that he has not
frequented a tap room since the 60s and does not know the first thing about
dart sharks. He only mentioned that
because he thinks he overheard one late one night at the New College Diner when
he was feeling sorry for himself about the lack of a girl in his life. And then I walked in. He’d never heard a civilized Louisiana accent
(who has?) before he met me and he couldn’t establish my talk. He thought we all sound like Justin Wilson
and tell Boudreau and Thibideaux jokes, I gua-ran-tee.
I am
part of the Langlanais family. My only
brother became a college teacher with the Christian Brothers. Naples is a family name on my mother’s
side. It was Lucia Napoli when she came
to America in the 1920s as a baby, and the Immigration officer changed the
family name to Naples on the spot. Everyone called my mom Mimi, I don't know
why, and when she married Jean-Claude Langlanais, he insisted on carrying her
family name into the first generation of their children. I met Gaston LaTour in high school, when he
was on the football team and I played field hockey. Our elopement was impulsive, our marriage
brief, our happiness a pipe-dream.
People in town shunned me after we ran off. The LaTours and the Langlanais clan had not
been on good terms anyway, and this confirmed everyone’s worst suspicions about
the other family. I got an athletic
scholarship to Penn State, and that’s where I met Frank Six.
That’s
right. His name was Six then. His grandfather, Reinhart Sechs had been
treated just as my mother had been, and had been renamed Randy Six by the
immigration officer. People with German
names usually took care of changing their names on their own during the First
World War, but Frank’s grandfather had come over after the Franco-Prussian War,
so the family was named Six until Frank had his name legally changed to the way
his ancestors knew it. This was some
time after we met and I like to think that I was responsible for what he later
called his “year of coming clean.”
Of
course, everyone at school thought I was some kind of hippy with a name like
Naples LaTour, and the beefy guys who asked me out thought they were in for a
night of smooth sailing. Were they ever
surprised! Consequently, I didn’t have
many second dates in those years. I was
feeling down about that one night in November.
Thanksgiving was a week away and I wasn't going home for it. There was rain coming, you could feel it in
your cheekbones when the wind hit you.
There weren’t a lot of people out, a few here and there, and not many
cars on College Avenue. Every now and
then the only sound was that of the dry leaves retreating along the curb like a
memory so painful you can’t bring it back to mind, like a picture that shatters
before you can compose it, the pieces falling away, away into the dark. I went into the diner to get warm, maybe have
some pie and coffee, and as I walked down the aisle to a vacant table in the
back, there was this boy I’d seen playing his guitar at the HUB, and he was
having pie and coffee, and he looked up just then and our eyes met and kind of
locked. He knew he’d seen me somewhere,
I just knew it.
“Hi.”
“Hi. I’ve seen you playing the guitar.”
“I hoped
I’d see you again, but you won’t imagine the reason. Can you join me?”
That’s
how it started. A boy with a line and a
girl with a yearning for a boy with enough brains to have a line. And what a line. Before too long he was talking about how my
face seemed to blush all the time and how my dark eyes looked so vulnerable and
inviting, and how my hair did this or that when the light was on it. It all sounded so true, I began to fall in
love! I went to the ladies room to see
if I could see what he saw when I looked in the mirror. And what made me go for a long walk with him
after our dessert was that I could!
Maybe love is when you create a person who isn’t there, and then they
become what wasn’t, so, sometimes for a long time, sometimes for a lifetime, it
is.
--Naples
LaTour
How it got started
It was a
long time ago, I was just a cub, away at the university and pining for a love
that was not to be. It was a Thursday
night in the wee small hours of the morning and I was out on South Allen
savoring the loneliness of the silent streets, the dark store fronts, and the
stoplights changing yellow-red-green with no traffic or people to direct. A single light bulb illuminated the doorway
of Centre Taxi, but no one needed a ride.
I felt like the last person in the world on that hot August night before
summer term finals. It would be an hour
or two before the first shift showed up at the Corner Room to start the coffee
and turn on the lights. I kicked a candy
wrapper on the sidewalk and kicked it again, and it occurred to me to find a
bench and just sit there and wait a day or two for the Sunday New York
Times.
Yellow...red...green.
The
groan and swish of the street sweeper lumbering down an alley somewhere to my
right.
If I had
known then that this night would replay itself in my dreams of failure for the
rest of my life, I probably would never have become a detective. It certainly wasn’t on my career radar at
that time...I only wanted to be a landscaper.
The air was still humid from the thunder shower we’d had hours ago, and
I savored the smell of wet concrete like a corpse. I wished I’d brought my pipe, my tobacco
pouch, my pipe cleaners, tamper, lighter.
But my Bermuda shorts were too tight for all that stuff and I didn’t
want to look ridiculous when I saw my reflection in the windows. This familiar part of town seemed like an
empty stage after the show has closed, the discarded programs tossed into the
trash, and the set torn down to the last staple. And there I was, a lone actor one scene too
late.
At some
point I realized that I wasn’t on the sidewalk at all but was walking dead
center down the middle of College Avenue, heading towards the stand of oaks
where she’d first let me kiss her. The
recorded sound of Big Ben announced the half hour from the tower of Old
Main...half-past what, though? Half past
nothing.
I heard
a sob, over to the left.
A girl
was huddled on one of the benches that face the row of shops across the
avenue. What should I do? Leave her in
the privacy of her tears? Announce my
presence with the clack of my sandals?
Rushing over seemed a really bad idea.
When you’re wallowing in the notion that you’re the last person in the
world, you don’t want to reconstruct your pity to include a companion. Should I pretend not to see her, but let her
know I was present?
I was
thinking all these things as I stepped in her direction. She didn’t hear me approach. I stopped about five feet from her and knelt
down on one knee and said softly, “excuse me.....I’m ...”
That was
all I got out before she took a sharp, audible gasp and locked her eyes on
mine. They were big, brown eyes, set in
a round face, framed by her dark brown hair.
“I’m
Frank, I said...I wonder if you should be out here alone...can I help you?”
“I’m not
going back.”
“Miss? Can I help you?”
I stayed
down on one knee, no motion, my eyes unable to look away from her eyes, which
seemed to look through me and deep into my past, my future, and my nature.
Something
in her expression relaxed by half a degree.
She said, “I don’t need help,” and looked away up the empty street.
yellow...red...green
“My name
is Frank,” I said. “I don’t think I should just leave you here alone at this
hour.”
She
looked through the back of my eyes this time.
I couldn’t move.
“Well,
Frank, you are a gallant boy, and you look like you are waiting for Queen
Elizabeth to knight you.”
She
rubbed her eyes and looked up the street again, and then looked up the other
direction.
yellow...red...green
“I’m
taking a final tomorrow and I don’t know the material,” I said. “I never expected to have a conversation out
here.”
“I don’t
know what I’m doing tomorrow,” she said.
“What final?”
“Baroque
Art History. The grad students are
writing down everything the professor says, and I never think he’s going to
TEST us on that stuff, and then he does.
I think I’m not supposed to understand his world the way they do. But it has been an interesting D to earn,
I’ll admit that.”
“When is
your final?”
“Eight. I’ll have to get some black coffee before
then or he won’t have any answers to decorate with comments.”
“I don’t
have any coffee here; sorry,” she whispered, and she looked up again and miles
through the back of my life.
“I’m
Frank,” I said, “and in more ways than one today I don’t know what to say next
and I’m waiting for the door to open and the light to go on and the smell of
coffee to bring me back into the world.”
“I’m
waiting for a door to open, too,” she said.
“I’ve just closed one. I don’t
want to open it again. The lights behind
it are the bluest blue, and they burn like Christmas decorations someone forgot
to take down last year and then just left up, what the hell?, and they burn
with the comforts of little blue lies and little blue cuts, and little blue
icicles...Behind that door are familiar sounds, bookshelves, records, clothes,
and a history I don’t want. Behind that
door is a blue, cold wind that makes me shiver down to my backbone on the
hottest night. Behind that door, no one
dreams any more and the telephone rings and rings and rings and rings, and I am
not there to pick it up. I am here.”
yellow...red...green
“I’m
Frank,” I hinted, “and I’m a little blue, too.”
“Little
Boy Blue,” she said. Something like a
smile crept across her face.
yellow...red...green
“My name
is Naples, like the city. LaTour.”
“Six,” I
said. “My name is Frank Six.”
Narrator’s Interlude
I've had lots of time to wonder how Naples gets off that
bench on College Avenue, where she met Frank Six many years ago in the hour
before dawn one August night during finals, to make the phone call that would
get her a place to stay with her hockey coach for a time while she sorted out
her life. Have you? Have you wondered how a nice guy like Frank
Six becomes a professional killer before he seeks a career change, how many
people he offs, what methods he uses, and what he thinks about this kind of
work when he's reading Shakespeare or playing the guitar? Naples La Tour. Was that family name Le Tourneau at some time
before anyone remembered? And what
happened in that year when Frank "came clean" and changed his name to
the original spelling, Sechs, no matter how much kidding he took? Or maybe he never kills anyone, just tells a
tall tale.
And not just that.
Was it Frank or Naples who first realized that being someone's lover for
a very long time entailed a kind of complex psychological theater that had less
to do with the peak moments than with everything else that surrounded
them? Did they come to this
understanding together or in a long period of separation? After they came to it, did they have to work
for years to put it out of mind and just play each other "by
ear?" Did Frank ever in his life
want children?
Why, too, did Naples obsess about the lives of strippers and
then become a nude model for the art class?
And how did that evolve into the cover of Cosmopolitan that Weiss
Markets wouldn't allow to be displayed on the rack?
I don't know, I don't know.
There was a moment there on that bench when Frank did not ask the
question that came into his mind. Naples
sensed him forming the question. She
knew what it would be. She sensed him
put it away and decide to be silent with her.
The entire universe seemed to enter her spirit with that realization,
and Frank became its child in that moment, and Naples realized that something
in her could respond to something in him until the light of stars became pure
music. Yet she also sensed more than
knew that there was business that needed outgrowing, and in that dark hour,
while Frank was waiting, waiting, Frank fell asleep. And Naples knew that if she didn't get up
softly right then, if she didn't walk away, that she would become Frank's love
for a year, five years, ten, but never forever, because what she would be able
to give him would be a thing needy and on the run, and that what she would take
now would be different from what she would need later. In that way, they would never really learn
each other....they would learn a mirage, and their sadness when they stopped
for water would last to the end of their days.
So she left. She walked away, taking
her chances that there would be a day for Frank and her. And when Frank woke up and found her gone he
was forlorn. He, too, walked away...away
from his final exam – he probably took a D in the course for doing that – and
he just walked and walked through the neat neighborhoods of State College,
wondering about the lives behind the walkways and the Tudor facades, wondering
if or how he'd ever see Naples La Tour again.
There's a song by Franz Schubert titled, Frühlingstraum, a
song just before the middle of his long cycle of songs about an alienated man
walking into the great unknown across a winter landscape. "I dreamed of the flowers that bloom in
May," he says on the way to the loss of his mind, "of green meadows
and the lusty cries of birds. But the
bird calls woke me up in the cold and darkness and there on the window I thought
I saw flowers. Go ahead, laugh at the
one who sees flowers in winter."
Three thoughts, three sections.
The music in the piano that introduces the section on waking up to
imagine flowers on a frosty window is like the chiming of a clock somewhere,
chiming, chiming, chiming...deliberate of pace, lyrical, as if counting the
hours innumerable, hours of an eternal loneliness, hours without end and
without a woman's nurture...something like the soul of Frank Six that night in
the moments before he met Naples La Tour and fell eternally into the
unfathomable succor of her eyes.
Frank pines
The last time I saw Naples LaTour, before the missing
years that ensued, her lovemaking put me in mind of the arrival of a best
friend from long ago, whose name you couldn’t bring to mind, nor the basis of
your friendship. I wonder now what she
thought of mine. It was an experience
lived as if by someone else, and after it I cried like a kid whose dog has
died.
For months I couldn’t bring her image into my memory, nor
the look of her across the table at the diner, nor the look of her the night we
met, nor the look of her across the pillow.
I would try to remember by analogy to pictures in magazines, though that
notorious Cosmo cover never reminded me of her.
That was not one of her genuine looks.
I sit here now listening to a bluesy piano, a bass player,
and I still can’t bring her back into focus, not the way she was then. I feel drugged, blasted when I think of that
time, as if there’s nothing in my world except the varnish on this small table,
the ash tray, the menu, a glass of beer.
And yet, I know this is now.
Out of that first meeting had come a peculiar sort of
courtship. I wonder if galaxies resemble
our coming together when they meet and pass through each other over the course
of millennia. They meet, they mingle,
they each emerge from the far side of each other, and they move on. Does the meeting of galaxies entail the
exchange of planets, of lakes, of a dairy cow, a diary? It this what happened to Naples and me?
Did we bear the same cells when we emerged from the other
side of each other? Does a soul’s
imprint on another soul affect the blood, the DNA, or only the chemical
balances of what is and was already there?
Naples, Naples, your teeth! How I want to remember you!
Thinking of Naples’ eyes is not the same as re-membering
them. Set in perpetually round and rosy
cheeks, their dark brown essence was one of the utmost succor, sympathy, and
fire. They were the most expressive eyes
I had ever seen, fathomless and containing the urgent power of oceanic
rip-tide. In their power, I was a mere
sprig of seaweed in the surf.
Naples, Naples, how did we change?
It was with Naples that I learned everything important
about lovemaking. Before her I had
imagined the whole of it as a matter of technique and, like dancing, something
done according to various patterns of motion.
It was in dancing that Naples opened up the world of love to me. With her, dancing became a good conversation
at which intent or desire was suggested, nuanced, gamed. The exact motions of legs and feet mattered
not a bit to her.
My own dancing was oafish, I could see a difference
between us right away. She invited me
into a world she created at the moment of the dance. I invited only her admiration, that and the
passage of time and the satisfaction of exertion. But the world she offered was irresistible,
and so I learned to create worlds with her, and when that happened we were
already lovers before we ever merged.
Out of that experience of new worlds created together we
found ourselves changing, despite our need to remain locked in a sort of
unity. The sense of conversation became
jammed by the sense that something unforeseen, unbidden, unwelcome, had moved
us into different zones. I could no
sooner explain it then than I can now.
We never said “goodbye for ever,” never thought it. We expected to see each other regularly after
she moved away. But we had sensed
something suggestive of unbearable pain, I guess, and so a day became two days,
and two days three, and we didn’t talk, and the passage of hours was like the
weight of the sea on a sinking ship.
When we finally talked again – it really wasn’t so long –
the ship had burrowed into the sea floor.
If we were ever to merge again, what would we need…a new ship? A new sea?
A sextant set to a different star?
Oh, table, you look like a mirror in this bluesy
light. I am no longer the young man who
met and loved Naples LaTour. I am no
longer a boy without a star. Somewhere
inside me is that boy…his pain and his loss infuse the layers of “me” that
covered him over. I think if I ever kiss
Naples again, there will be layers of "me" in touch with her, and
more than one of her to encounter me.
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