Deja vu All Over Again

by Larry Brill

  “In fact it is worse than if you were a student. Set an example and be an adult.” Festerhaven frowned. The principal wasn’t impressed with Nate’s classroom attire.

  FesterBoss had a good sense of humor when he wanted, though used it sparingly on campus. Maybe that was part of the job. He kind of, sort of, almost liked the guy and Nate could see why Julie attached herself to him even if he didn’t deserve her. If only she knew… He tucked the skateboard under his arm and walked off, his conscience following close behind.

  “He’s a liar and a cheat,” it hissed in his left ear.

  “It’s none of your business,” it screamed in his right.

  He had first period free, so he went to the music department. Seth Naylor asked him to drop in for a talk.

  Nate sat down on a stool next to the music teacher’s desk at the front of the room. He picked up a guitar and plucked notes, searching for the opening riff from “Stairway to Heaven.” He knew it once upon a time.

  Seth blushed as he turned his iPad so that Nate could see the picture on the screen. “This is Angela.”

  Nate leaned forward. “Angel Strings. She looks pretty.” It was an unflattering selfie posted on the dating site called WinkConnection.com. Nate had never investigated one of those match sites before. He assumed this one was typical as he read the profile beneath Angel Strings’ picture. Played the violin and cello. Worked as a therapist teaching music to kids with disabilities. Liked Mozart and Adele equally.

  “It says she’s looking for a guy who’s not afraid to dance in public. That says a lot. You got any moves?”

  “Uh, Arthur Murray Studios. It’s been years. Does Salsa count?”

  “I hear it’s making a comeback.”

  He reached out with his thumb and finger to enlarge the picture. Angela had red hair pulled back with a wide-open Irish face full of freckles and eyes that, if you could believe the selfie, lacked color. She wasn’t a beauty but, as Seth said, her picture wouldn’t make you puke. No, actually Angela was cuter than that. He knew that sometimes love was blind, and sometimes it was merely cross-eyed. She had clearly captured Seth’s heart. The most remarkable feature Angela had, however, was tiny lips that were quite off-center enough to give the impression she was perpetually perplexed.

  He nodded and gave Seth a thumbs-up that provided a kind of validation. “Wink Connection dot com? I never considered you as the type to need help from a dating website. Does it really work as they advertise?”

  “My sister found her husband on the Wink app. I’m going to be an uncle now,” Seth said with a grin. He said his sister pestered him to give it a try and so he had exchanged online “winks” with a number of women over the past year.

  “Did you ever meet any of them?”

  “No. I couldn’t do that. I mean, I could, but they always lost interest after we got past the winks and flirts and emailed back and forth a few times.” He looked at the picture of Angel Strings. Nate thought it was a way to avoid looking at him. “I was hoping I could get your help. You know how to write things. You were talking about writing love scenes for your movies a while back, and it got me thinking. You must be good at it since you’ve had all that success.”

  Success? Hardly.

  Seth went on, “Me? If it’s not on the music scale, I can’t write it. Somebody else has to come up with the lyrics because words fail me. I’m lost. Totally clueless.”

  It really was that bad. Seth showed him an exchange with a woman called “Snooky Shoes.” It was stilted yet rambling, and he was self-deprecating in a way that begged for pity.

  “She blocked me from any more emails. You see, I choked. I was trying too hard because she could be the one. Stanford gave her an eight.”

  Nate asked what Stanford had to do with Seth’s love life.

  “Oh, some researchers have this compatibility generator online. You go there and plug in everything you know about somebody and what you know about yourself based on a questionnaire. Some of the dating sites do it with their own algorithms to find the perfect match. The Stanford research site is like their match computers, only on steroids.”

  “My first try was Snooky Shoes, her real name is Lisa, and she scored higher than anyone else after I plugged in all the traits I want to find in a date. But, like I said, I killed it with one bad email. That’s why I want your help to keep from screwing it up with Angela.”

  Snooky Shoes, Angel Strings and computer-driven love; it was all very weird. “She’s the perfect match. According to Stanford?”

  “Nope. I didn’t bother with that. I just know. And I didn’t find her, she found me. She liked my profile picture.” Seth showed Nate his profile page; the photo didn’t have a face. It was a beautiful shot of fingers on the strings of a stand-up bass. MusicMan35. That was his online identity.

  “MusicMan35?”

  “My work. My age. Seemed to fit.”

  And then Seth handed him a flyer promoting an evening of jazz at the Renaissance Club at St. Pedro Square downtown.

  “This you?”

  “It’s a little quartet. A couple of college buddies of mine and one’s father.”

  “Are you guys any good?”

  Seth smiled and nodded. “I think so. We practice a lot, but we’ve never tried to approach the clubs. This is our first one.”

  Nate checked the clock on the wall. The kids would be grateful if he was five minutes late. “I can see why you’re jazzed, pardon the pun.” He said he wouldn’t miss their opening night, and then turned the conversation back to Angel Strings and finding true love.

  “You know, thoughts and feelings about things,” Seth said.

  “Keep it simple. Compliment her about her interesting profile, you are impressed with the work she does, and you have a lot in common, and then suggest you meet up for coffee. Four simple steps and you got yourself a date.”

  “It’s not that simple. Here, read this. How am I going to answer that?”

  Nate could see his point. Seth had apparently asked Angel Strings to describe herself. The response was creative but weighed down by references to moonlit walks on the beach, the joy of finding a child’s chalk hopscotch on the sidewalk, the smell of rosemary just before it goes into her pasta sauce, and music. A lot of references to music, which made sense given it was the common thread binding these two. Nate reread the email and couldn’t decide if Angel Strings was as deep as Emily Dickenson or as shallow as a Kardashian on a good day. Ultimately he decided she was simply a hopeless romantic, like him. He could relate, just not in so many flowery words.

  “It’s really something.”

  Seth was up and pacing. He finally sat at the piano bench and poked distractedly with a finger on the keyboard. “I tried writing back, but I couldn’t get it to sing. Not like she did.”

  That was an interesting choice of words, Nate thought.

  Seth said, “I want your help. Write something for me just as good. But honest. Exactly how I feel.”

  “Your feelings, but my words? I’m not sure how honest that is. It sounds so very Cyrano de Bergerac.” Talk about life imitating art.

  “Cyrano de Bergerac?”

  “Old story. Done a thousand times from Shakespeare to Steve Martin. A guy who is good at romance steps in to, let’s say, woo a girl for a friend who’s too lame or too ugly—no offense meant there—to do it himself. Think Steve Martin and Darryl Hannah in Roxanne. Janeane Garofalo did a chick version with cats and dogs. I even ripped it off myself for a plot one time.”

  Wrong Face, Wrong Time was still sitting in some studio exec’s office long past its shelf life. Hmm, should he dust it off and try again?

  “Well, if you’ve done it before; you can do it for me, can’t you? It would mean a heck of a lot.”

  Sure, Nate felt it shouldn’t be a problem, and he’d give it more thought than your average, run-of-the-mill Nate Evans script. Seth played a series of chords and a pretty little riff. He played as if his fingers had a mind of their own, unconcerned w
ith the pressing issue of making a pass at a woman neither one of them knew. It was a tune that touched familiar emotional notes inside him even though he’d never heard it before.

  “Okay,” Nate said. “But promise me that if this works, you’ll bring her to one of my Popcorn Thursday classes. I’m letting the kids bring dates now, for extra credit. Maybe I’ll show Roxanne. Just for you. In fact, why not come by for the next one anyway? It’s always the first Thursday of the month. We start at fifth period and kids get extra credit for staying an hour over to finish the movie. I’ll have the popcorn machine set up. Movie and popcorn and soda. What better way to kill an afternoon after school?”

  “What are you showing this time?”

  “Tootsie. Dustin Hoffman. Jessica Lange.”

  Nate felt as if he’d been tossed into the teaching pool and left to sink or swim with little direction, so for his creative writing class, he simply did what came naturally to him. He watched movies. Now he assigned his students to write film reviews for credit.

  By the time Nate left the music room, he had wrung enough of Seth’s views on life, love and music to send a response to Angel Strings sure to intrigue her, as well as three different follow-up letters Seth could use depending upon her reaction.

  That night he sat on his bed, not ready to sleep, wondering why he was alone at his age. He went to his computer. If you could believe the Internet, over a third of the singles in America were on one dating site or another these days. That was a boatload of lonely people. Seth had told him where to find the Stanford University compatibility website. He started filling in answers to the questionnaire. If there was a Julie Cooper clone, Nate hoped she was out there somewhere.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Nate Pops the Question

  Dustin Hoffman was marching down a New York City street in a dress and a wig when Julie slipped into Nate’s classroom. She stopped at a table set up near the door, picked up a red-striped bag of popcorn and then sat down at a desk next to him in the back of the room. She stared straight ahead, her eyes on the movie that played on a screen in front of about twenty students. She didn’t look at him as she silently offered him the bag with one hand while she snacked on the popcorn with the other. Nate took a handful, avoiding her eyes in return. Instead, he looked off past Seth Naylor, who sat on his left, to the window that he had covered with cardboard to darken the room. After the first Popcorn Thursday, two of his students painted a decent image of a theater marquee on the makeshift window blind. Now Showing!

  Nate could recite every line from Tootsie by heart, so he spent the remainder of the movie watching her from the corner of his eye. He was happy to see her, of course, but why did he have this sensation of being trapped? It had been weeks since he’d watched Festerhaven ride off into the sunset from the ball field with another woman, and Nate still hadn’t figured out what to do about it. He hadn’t been avoiding Julie, exactly, but he had stopped finding excuses to pass by her office or loiter in the faculty lounge at those times when he knew she was most likely to show up. He dumped on Eppie about his suspicions that FesterScum was two-timing his girl, venting his anger, but agreed that he shouldn’t be the one to tattle on him. Not right away. Instead, she had pressed him again to make an honest pitch to Julie about how he felt and see what happened.

  “Go big or go home.”

  Woody also got the story and had advised him in more than one email to “go all Guido on his ass.”

  Not a bad idea, except that Nate didn’t have proof. Twice he found the principal alone, and he had opportunity to talk about work and sports and women and other manly pursuits. Nate hoped that by buddying up and sneaking in a deliberately random leading question, he might get some kind of admission, possibly a locker room screw-and-tell kind of brag, but FesterSnake deflected his attempts to get to the bottom of it.

  Julie stuck around after the students had left for the day. Seth lingered, too, and fidgeted with growing impatience like someone waiting outside an occupied bathroom. They made small talk about the movie until it was clear Julie was in no hurry and would outlast him.

  “Let’s talk later,” Seth finally said.

  “I’m glad you came by today.” Nate began to straighten up the classroom, pushing desks back into neat rows.

  “It was fun. I’d never seen that one before.”

  That was appalling. “You’ve never seen Tootsie? You need to get out more.”

  “I’ll see what I can do about that.”

  An awkward silence followed; they were like strangers at a dance, neither one knowing how to break the ice.

  Finally, she said, “Is it just me? You’ve been a bit…” She searched for the words. “A bit distant lately. Ever since that little joke I played on you at the softball field lot last month.”

  “We both got a laugh. Forget about it.”

  He couldn’t.

  In fact, she had thrown him a curve. What was she thinking challenging him to recall their first kiss? It sounded like a flirt. It felt like a flirt. He wanted it to be a flirt. He couldn’t let go of it, even if he denied it when she asked. In the days that followed, he ran it through his mind over and over like a favorite movie and fantasized about different ways it could have or might play out. He added it to the story he was writing, working so late into the night that he slept through first period the following day. Did she Like him? Not in a friendly, “just friends” way, but Like with a capital L. The kind of Like that takes a guy and gal to the next level, going steady, or whatever the adult equivalent was. Ultimately he convinced himself that just because he wanted it to be flirtatious didn’t make it so.

  “It’s all good,” he said to reassure her. He changed the subject and asked about her daughter’s big move. “I heard she was going to Texas or some other Godforsaken land far, far away. Are you okay with that?”

  “Not really. But I don’t have a say in the matter. I’m happy for them, naturally.”

  She left it there. She was sad, and Nate hated it when people were sad. No, a better description was that Julie was blue. Blue was less problem-specific and more temporary, easier to fix. There was a quiet beauty in being blue; it had been captured by painters and filmmakers through the centuries and seldom failed to tug the heartstrings. He loved the way the fluorescent lights overhead added a yellow tint to her skin and highlighted her hair. The rogue strands of gray were gone and she had added just a few soft, pink highlights. It was a youthful statement that he adored. Although the corners of her mouth turned south, the little creases there that came with age pointed north, hinting that a smile would be back shortly. Julie was the most depressingly beautiful thing he had ever seen.

  “Maybe that’s the real reason I came by for the movie this afternoon. I was feeling a little down and I thought this would be a pick-me-up.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Yes. It was fun. Plus, you’re fun to be around because nothing ever bothers you. And you’re so full of…”

  “Life?” Nate said.

  “No. Shit. Full of shit, but in a good way.” Now the smile returned.

  “I’m glad I could help.” He picked up his backpack and his skateboard, flipped off the lights and held the door for her as they left. The autumn shadows from the library were long and cool as they skirted the fountain, walking back to her office. He stopped and pulled a coin from his pocket, closed his eyes and tossed it in the fountain.

  “What did you wish for?”

  “For somebody or something to pull you out of this funk you’re in today.” He wanted to volunteer for the job. It was tempting. He should have wished for someone to come along and resolve for him the static in his brain that was Julie Cooper-Finch and what to do about her. Someone who would take a fist and bang the top of his head to clear up the picture like he used to do to his mother’s first black-and-white TV. “Although I have to say, as funks go, you wear it well,” he added. He turned to leave, but she stopped him, holding out a palm and using her eyes to turn his atten
tion to the fountain. He pulled loose change from his pocket. Somewhere he had picked up a gold dollar coin, and he gave it to her.

  “I’m not sure this one is worth that much, but here goes.” She tossed it high into the air, and it landed only a few inches inside the fountain’s rim. Just good enough.

  “So what about your wish?”

  She hesitated. “To be a little more like you. To have fun without having to schedule it. To not worry so much about things.”

  “The Julie Cooper I knew used to be like that.”

  “Me? Never.”

  “Yes, you. Fountain Girl.”

  “Never heard of her.” Julie chucked him on the arm. He got his wish; she was in a happier place now.

  They turned away from the fountain and started down the path to the administration building. Did she just brush the back of his hand with hers as they walked? Was it intentional? They parted at her office door. She went to collect her things; he went to the faculty lounge to stall. Only a few stragglers were left on campus, and Festerhaven’s office was dark. Good. He caught up with her as she was leaving the building and walked her to her car. It was a nondescript compact, rental-car white, clean as a whistle and probably paid off, he thought. A perfectly practical choice for a practical person. Fountain Girl would have put a bumper sticker on it at the very least, maybe hung a dream catcher from the rearview mirror.