Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

The sunlight off the apartment complex's pool was brilliant. Not so brilliant that it could blind the eye to the girl- no, not yet a woman but, oh, so close- reclining in the green and white lawn chair near enough in proximity to the water to catch its brilliance but far enough away not to be splashed by the random child's wild cannon ball. Tanning in such places is an art form. She was probably Fragonard. Or, rather, one of his paintings a couple of centuries later if tan rather than bleached-white had been the trend.

In the relative parlance of men, she was “Playboy Hot.” That's quite an accomplishment. Sans airbrush, there is Photoshop. Either way, a perfectly constructed woman can be hacked from a half-ass photograph. In real life it is so rare to actually see. Like lions mating the wild. Mary was it. She bypassed the tickets to the shows, the runways, and all the bullshit that you can only afford if you're way beyond the pool in an apartment complex built with the stipulations that it must house those qualifying for section 8.

And she was mean. And she was cool. Her divorced parents together might have qualified for section 8 housing, but her dad was loaded. It is entirely possible that she didn't even know her mom. I don't have that much back story. There was a ruthlessness in her that the devisers of Dynasty couldn't imagine. Calculation and emotional desperation worked in tandem to get her pretty much anything she wanted. Despite all of this she was a warm human- an unstable creature in a world that wanted more from her than she could possibly cough up. Unless she stood in front of a camera and did nothing else.

She used to set at my card table inside that apartment complex, throwing spades out like she knew what she was doing. There were two Irish people and a Jew there. My girlfriend and I could read and reread ourselves. Joseph and his bobby-pinned skullcap could play spades. It wasn't exactly prison, but we knew how to play cards. She was only 18. And so smart. So beautiful. Everything we wanted as we ate pepperoni pizza (except the Jew). She won sometimes, too. Between her Monroe blond laughs, deep drinks, and genuinely comfortable moments.

There are horrible ways to sully such beautifully sunlit creations. Tales of rock-stars, blow-jobs, buses, and men with hot heads and fast hands. Drugs. Booze. There are bruised eyes, peering tragically keenly from a battered face. But even bluish and hurt that face was too much. Perfect beneath the damage. As if the damage just skipped a step and went strait to her inner being as it must have. In that place everyone surrenders everything and wishes only to be closer. Closer.

Too much money and too much beauty create an unreconcilable situation. Her name is written cleverly with a black Sharpie on my black speakers in a place I would only see when I moved them- as she knew I eventually must. I buy expensive speakers and I keep speakers a long time. Every time they get moved, her name reflects back at me and there is a dazzle to that black on black. Locked into that loopy signature is the instant memory of dirty youth, beauty, and what must be lost as we grow older and move on.

I hope those speakers last until I die. In the sublime difference between the sheen on those letters and the finish on those speakers lies a clue to being hard and soft at the same time. Between the ruthless pursuit of love and the devastating consequences thereof is the innocent laugh of a girl so beautiful that her life becomes the manifestation of destruction and loss.

The sun provides the light, the painter chooses his moment, the model moves ever so slightly. As we strive so ridiculously toward perfection, our only consolation can be that occasionally we can see it first hand.

A clear blue Kansas City sky. Beside the pool. A Mexican boy mid-jump with his legs tucked under his chin and his fingers locked over his knees. The shadows on the concrete under the lawn-chair in a line by line underpinning. Mary is in between reaching forward and deciding whether or not to. This snap-shop memory is precious and dangerous like all the things that make life worth living.