From The Recesses – God Gives a Wink

Page 1 of 3

I don’t have any rational way to explain Oriel Laurent’s presence in my life, but I’ve got to chalk her up to something. When my non-religious friends hear the story, they tend to rationalize it as random chance, pure dumb luck. But they have the luxury of leaving her on the far side of their memories, an outlier best forgotten lest she disprove their hard-won atheism. I can’t do that. Alternatively, upon hearing the saga of Oriel, my religious friends tend to explain its meaning just as easily. They say, “Well, that’s quite a story. But everything happens for a reason, you know!”

But no, no it doesn’t.

I can’t accept that everything happens for a reason. Everything happens “for reasons,” sure. I punch you in the nose, your nose bleeds. But one singular reason, one Grand Plan which dictated in time immemorial that I would be compelled (as a cue from the same stage manager who directed Cleopatra’s finger dive into the asp pit and Hitler’s invasion of the Sudetenland) to punch you in the nose? Nonsense.

Just imagine the ennui of an Almighty in such a universal diorama. One grand plan would mean that he, at the very beginning of time made a wind-up toy of a universe and ever since has been watching from on high, alone and bored off his tits, muttering to himself, “And now they do this. And now they do that. And now they do this. And now. And now. And now . . .” Forever.

Yet, still we need (or at least I need) a way to explain the inexplicable flashes of spirit that punctuate our lives, and so my mind drifts to a different cosmology, a different Creator, altogether. Now, before you laugh, remember that there are billions of human beans on this planet that take the truth of talking snakes and burning bushes quite literally. There are a billion or so more that believe we live hundreds of thousands of lives (as many as there are leaves on all the trees of the forest) with a final reward of never having to live again. Also, there are those who believe that heaven is hierarchical and filled with willing virgins (somehow recycled, one would imagine). There the purest of the pure transcend to a penthouse in the sky, colloquially known as “7th Heaven” from where they can actually gaze upon the face of God.

In my metaphorical metaphysics, no one can actually see God. The room’s too crowded and the Creator too crafty for such a thing. In my mind, the unseen universe is a grand old speakeasy with an infinitely long, elbow-polished oak bar. And God? He’s the most silent of silent partner, hidden amongst the revelers, but watching. Always watching. Whoever he is — maybe tonight he’s that old man in the corner by the jakes wrapped around his dead-end whiskey, maybe he’s the high-roller in the banquette with the three dames from Chicago, maybe he’s your barman, so you might want to remember the tip — you’ll never know. Still, my God, he’s always checking out your action, watching how you treat the staff, seeing if you stand to greet both friends and strangers, eavesdropping  on the stories you tell and noting how much you pitch in when the inevitable tragedy comes to visit the bar.

And in this world, every once in a while, when he decides you deserve a buyback or little special attention from the house, he gives a wink and tips his hat to the manager, and for a while anyway, your world becomes magical.

Oriel.

Back in 1982, when I was a fifteen-year-old kid, so gangly and weightless that my friends described me as “squiggly,” a French exchange student moved to my hometown. She was eighteen and after a few weeks, through miracles beyond mini-miracles, she moved into my house. She was exotic and brilliant, erotic and beautiful. Nothing at all like the girls I knew at Binghamton High School. One of the most important differences was that she liked me. She really liked me. Her name was Oriel Laurent.

Over the following months, Oriel was either my first or my damn-near first on just about everything, physically and emotionally. She was the first woman who let me linger in her eyes for hours. The first one who listened to my heart beating and told me her fears, her head on my chest. She was the first woman with whom I sensed the living pulse of it all and who showed me to look for beauty in the whole world around me. She was my first love. I fell for her in a way that, nearly 30 years later, I find difficult to explain. I was in tear-your-hair-out, shout-it-from-the-roof-tops love. And when she left, I was a mess of smoldering, emotional ashes. Something powerful had happened.

We promised to stay in touch. But after a few months, we failed. Despite it all, I was still a kid. But I thought of her every day and believed that I’d never love anyone again. I remember wondering if a day would ever pass during which she wouldn’t drop into my thoughts, if only for a second. And she did, for years, every time I saw the arc of a seagull or took a walk through Recreation Park, past the statue on the top of the hill, or smelled a clove cigarette. Much changed over the years, but into my twenties, Oriel was still in me. Deeply.

Years later, in the Spring of 1989, while walking home from the Ladbroke Grove tube station in London, I finally decided to give her a ring. I’d moved to London a few months earlier, landed a job at a West Kensington pub and had been thinking for some time that this was the closest, physically, I’d been to Oriel since the early 1980s. Why not give her a ring? The day Oriel left, she gave me a piece of paper with her phone number and I’d transferred it from wallet to subsequent wallet over the years. There was a phone booth outside a small grocery store near my flat. I went upstairs and emptied the pilfered pint glass that I’d been filling with pound coins on my dresser, took out her number and sat on the edge of the bed wondering if I should really do it after all. What if she’d forgotten me? We hadn’t spoken in nearly 7 years.

I took a few deep breaths and went downstairs.

I dropped in the coins and dialed the number. The phone rang six times, and just as I was about to put the receiver down, she picked up the phone.

“Oriel?” was all I said.

She paused for half a second, and said, “Mike? Is that you?”

The number I called was to her grandmother’s home in Nice. Oriel hadn’t lived there in years, but was visiting at the time. Within the frame of the ten-minute call she’d convinced me to come to her as soon as possible.

I quit my job, settled affairs around London, and a few weeks later, I was on my way to Paris.

Page 1 of 3 1 2 3 Next