102

Here’s my rough draft for today, Saturday 04.25.26

Going away for my MA seemed like a good idea.  All my UH English Lit profs were for it.  So, BA in hand, off “the rock” I flew.

       How to find an apartment in Madison, Wisconsin, 101.

       I purchased a paper to peruse while I drank my coffee and dunked my several donuts.  Thanks to the time of year, there was a whole section dedicated exclusively to student rentals and, never having lived anywhere but in my parents’ home, I marveled at all the possibilities for houses and apartments and dorm rooms, shared and unshared living rooms and bathrooms, and places that had yards or common green spaces.

       If I’d been an undergrad, I might have been naïve enough to be tempted by the dorms, but from my experiences partying it up in the University of Hawai‘i dorms, I pretty much knew dorms were not going to help promote serious study habits.

       Horrors to the possibility of shared bathrooms.  That was out.  Way out.  I was not going to come all the way to Madison to catch some kind of weird disease due the germs of others.  Just imagining people spitting in a shared sink made me ill.

       Screw shared bedrooms.  I already knew I snored at some volume, and there was no way I wanted to get stuck with someone who had the same volume problem or worse.  Also, the idea of being attacked by some psycho bedroom mate, or even housemate, for that matter, meant that there was only one possibility:  It would be either a one-bedroom apartment or a studio, depending on what I could afford.

       The hunt thus narrowed, I scanned the columns again.  Actually, the one-bedrooms looked pretty affordable.  Just recently now, I looked them up on the Web, and one-bedrooms still look affordable in Madison, compared especially to Hawai‘i rental units geared toward students at UH.

       It was cute the way lots of the buildings were named, but after traveling a few of the columns it dawned on me that all the buildings in Honolulu were named as well.  This killed the charm of the thing, until . . .

       Jane Huston House.  I couldn’t believe it.  Jane Huston was the place where my mom had lived, in the only apartment on the first floor of the building, when she had attended UW.  They had one-bedrooms, and the price looked great, especially since it was a mere four blocks from campus.

       Cooper Inc., the company that owned Jane Huston, turned out to have quite a few buildings scattered throughout the downtown area.  I went outside to the payphone and called them.  The man who answered, I found out as we spoke, was Mr. Cooper himself.  He loved that I was from Hawai‘i, and he found the story of my mom having lived in Jane Huston House charming.

       “That bottom floor apartment isn’t available, but we do have one last one-bedroom.  You’d better hurry over there to see it before it’s gone.”

       I don’t know why, but I panicked.  All of a sudden, it became imperative that I live in Jane Huston, my mom having lived in this place.  “I’ll get there as quickly as I can.”

       Boom, the phone hit the hook and I left the smell of burned rubber behind me.  I’d told Mr. Cooper where I was, and he said I was only about three miles from Jane Huston.  His directions were perfect.  I screeched into the parking lot maybe twenty minutes later.

       Bounding to the front door, I rang the bell.  Whoa.  This very attractive, I assumed Mid-Western, maiden came and opened it.  “Are you Mr. Lee?” she asked.

       “Yes, yes I am.  I guess Mr. Cooper called you.”

       She laughed.  “Well, ah, I’m not psychic, although my dad and I do have a pretty close connection.”  She stuck out her hand.  “I’m Cindy Cooper.  It’s nice to meet you.  Let me take you upstairs to see the place.”  She pointed to the elevator.  “The apartment is on the second floor.  The stairs are usually faster than that thing.”

       I stopped on the first step.  Sitting off in a corner was a room with glass windows running from about midway up the walls.  It looked like a tropical forest.  Huge Boston ferns hung in pots from the ceiling and there were orchids all along the window ledge.  I could also see other types of flowers and some tree ferns further in.

       “That room is spectacular.”

       “Oh, thank you,” she said.  “That’s my apartment.”

       I looked at her.  “The only apartment on the ground floor then, right?”

       “Why yes, it is.  How did you know that?”

       “My mom lived in there when she went to school here.”

       “Wow!  That is amazing,” Cindy said.  “Up until I started attending UW, it was still being rented out.  I’ve been in there for three years now.  I love that apartment.”

       I asked why there was only one apartment on the ground floor.

       She pointed to a pair of very ornately carved double doors across from us, just past the elevator.  “That whole side used to be a dining hall and a common living room area.  They even had a small library in there with a huge fireplace.  Right now it’s just storage for all kinds of stuff, beds, chairs, tables, whatever.  My dad always talks about converting it to more apartments.  One of these days I suppose it could happen.”

       I followed her upstairs.  Great legs.  She swung open the door and I was in love.  It opened onto a very large living room, dining room, and kitchen area. Cindy explained the layout to me, showed me the bathroom and the bedroom, and explained that all utilities were included, except telephone.  She pointed to a cable running out of the wall, a wire that hooked up to a gigantic TV antenna on the roof.

       I would spend many a night up on that roof playing guitar, drinking beer, and smoking dope.  Even better, I was always the only person up there.

       “I have no TV,” I said.  “I think it would kill my studying.”

       “Oh, I see.”

       She beckoned me to the middle one of the three windows.  Once she opened it, the sound from the street poured in.  I came to her side.  We were sort of squeezed together, our heads sticking out the window.  My body heated up a tad.

       Although not too bad, the noise surprised me. “As you can see,” she said, “you’d be right above the front door.  Sometimes people hang around out there on the stoop, more likely on a Friday or Saturday night.  If the noise bothers you, you can always close the windows and run the A.C.  In the winter, of course, you won’t have a problem.”

       We pulled back inside.  What a beauty.  She closed the window.  Instant silence.  Like deep in the bowels of the library type silence.  “That’s amazing,” I said.  “This place is really is soundproof, huh?”

       “It’s awesome,” she said.  “Living here is like being in your own home.  You won’t hear any of your neighbors either, on the sides or above.  It’s like the tomb in these apartments.  They just don’t build ‘um like this anymore.”

       I was sold.  Cindy directed me to the downtown office of Cooper Inc.  I met her dad, filled out the paperwork, put down my deposit and first month’s rent, then headed back to my place, my now home away from home.

       The summer heat is pretty brutal in Madison.  It has two somewhat large lakes on both sides of it, so the humidity on the worst days is unbearable.  Thank goodness for air-conditioning.

       I went down the block to State Street, the main campus drag.  There was a store on the corner.  I bought the makings for sandwiches and went back to my apartment.

       Entering the building, I saw Cindy conversing with a young man.  She was obviously upset.  See saw me.  “Oh, Lanning, let me introduce you to my husband.”

       No name. We shook hands.

       So much for that happy possibility, I thought while I munched down a salami sandwich.

       “I gotta find a new woman,” I said aloud to the romance gods.

       This became my mantra.  I had been and would be chanting it for more single-guy days than I had hoped.

       Every Friday night at the Wisconsin student union, in the most popular watering hole on campus, a place called the Rathskeller, or more correctly DER Rathskeller, there was open mic night.  Anybody could get up and do anything.  I’d seen singers/musicians of all sorts, poets, performance artists, comedians, a puppet show woman once – you name it.  Well, the first Friday of the semester, because I thought my playing was getting pretty good, I wanted to check out the current talent scene to see if I might give it a go there in the near future.

       I listened to a few different people with whom I thought I stood on par, and then there was:

       My oh my, my landlady, Cindy.  Guitar and singing.  She was good.  Hell, she was fantastic.  She played maybe three or four songs, one for sure was Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.”  The rest I don’t recall.

       Done, she sat down with some friends at a table nearby.  I wanted to go over and say how much I enjoyed her performance, but they were into their own thing, and I didn’t want to interfere.

       I finished off my pitcher – and let me tell you, Friends, pitchers of Old Style beer were $2.75.  And $1.00 of that was the deposit on the pitcher – a genuine glass pitcher.  It was a deal and a half.  I finished off my pitcher and took it to the bar to retrieve my deposit.

       Mission accomplished, I turned to see if it might be a good time to congratulate Cindy on her performance.  It wasn’t; her group was leaving.

       Oh well.  I wandered to the head then shivered out into the North Pole winter wonderland night.

       As luck would have it, I spotted the friend-free Cindy lugging her guitar up ahead, moving fast back to Jane Huston House.

       Now I’m a very shy guy.  My entire life I’ve been that way.  But you know, a pitcher of beer can — well you actually do know.  So . . .

       I picked up the pace and came alongside her.

       “Hey Cindy.  You were great tonight. Great. Really great.”

       She laughed and thanked me.  We were both breathing steam for the pace of our walking.  Then I had a bright idea.

       “Hey, can I carry that for you?”

       She looked up at me, smiled, and passed it over.

       And that, my friends, is how you can make your life shift gears in an instant, for better or for worse.

       We entered Jane Huston and I followed her to that hothouse jungle.  “Come on in,” she said.

       No need to ask me twice.  I slung the guitar case through the door.  “Where do you want this?”

       “Anywhere’s good.”  She opened up the fridge.  “I think you and I are both maybe one beer short of enough.  Ready for the next one?”

       Of freakin course you can bet your proverbial bottom dollar I wanted to drink beer with her, but geez.  “Ah, won’t your husband be coming in?”

       “WoooHooo!” she cheered.  “No.  N.O.  He’s gone.  History.  My divorce is finalized.”

       I WooHoooed internally myself.  “Oh, well, sure, I’ll have a beer.”

       It was one of the best beers of my life.  Brave guy that I now was, I asked her if she’d play.  Guitar, that is.

       She did.  Then another beer.  And then . . . 

       We became very, very good friends.

       You know, every woman I’ve ever had more than a passing acquaintance with is, or was when she was in school, a good student.  I place a lot of value in that.  I’ve been lucky that way.

       Cindy was no exception.  A finance major, she took school very seriously, so we spent a lot of time together studying, and that energy upped my academic game a bit.

       We’d spend hours, mostly in my apartment, quietly studying.  And neither one of us resented that about the other, upset because we might have felt we were taking away time from our relationship.  This was an essential part of that relationship.  The pursuit of academic excellence.  My kind of woman.

       There was a 100-author list all MA candidates were supposed to familiarize themselves with before we took the comprehensive exam.  100.  Geez.

       Well, that  got short shrift because I was dealing with my class reading.  One was a Melville seminar.  Brevity may be the soul of wit, but Melville did not give a hen’s tooth about brevity.  Everything, man, including Clarel.  I dare you, friends.  Read all of Clarel.  It was so dense, I had to read it twice, and after that I still needed to review parts of it. Still, please don’t quiz me on Melville’s massively opaque journey to the Holy Land.

       But now with Cindy, hell, I thought I could do anything.

       The reason why we spent the majority of the time at my place was because, as I explained to Cindy, it kind of weirded me out to even kiss in the apartment my mother had lived in.

       One night, spring having well sprung to Madison’s near disbelief and relief, we were up on the roof drinking beer and taking turns on the guitar.  In a moment of silence, looking up at the stars, I said, “Cindy, did I ever tell you how my mom and dad met?”

       I hadn’t.

       “Well, I did I tell you about how my dad started here at UW and then got drafted?  How he came back here after the war to finish off his degree?”

       I hadn’t.

       “Okay, here’s the thing.”  I told her about my dad, the Army, coming back with his Army buddies, drinking in Der Rathskeller and about how he’d seen my mom and wanted to take her to a movie.  He’d gone over to her table and said, ‘Stand up, and if you’re not taller than I am, I’ll take you to a movie.’

       “So,” I said, finishing, “she actually stood up and, in fact, she was a little bit taller than my dad, but they decided to go to a movie anyway.  My mom always said that my dad was the most handsome man she ever met.  And the rest, as they say, is history.  Pretty cool love story, huh?”

       Cindy stared at me for a long, long time.  And then she began to cry.

       It was meant to be a happy story, I thought.  Little did I know I was about to cry too.

       “What is it?  What’s wrong?”

       It took a bit for her to calm down.

       As I say, I’m so very proud of the fact that every woman I’ve become involved with was either a good student at the time, or had been a good student when she was in school.

       Sometimes, however, that fact in fact sucks.

       Cindy explained to me that she would be doing an internship with some Wall Street company that summer, and then she would begin the MBA at UPenn’s Wharton School of Business in the fall.

       Well, good for her.  I teared up at this great news.

       “When do you leave?”

       “The week after graduation.”

       A Wharton MBA.  She’d be set for life.

       Graduation was six weeks away.  The first thing I did, after crying in the bathroom for half-an-hour or so –- she was out in the living room — was wonder what the hell I was going to do now that my love life would die again.

       Sure enough, my energy level for academics took a nosedive.  The following week I dropped my seminar on Melville.  There was a 25- to 30-page paper due for that one, and over the weekend in the library, no matter how hard I tried to concentrate, I could read no articles, nothing on Melville that made any sense.  I would read the same page over and over.  And I still had the work for my other two courses with which to contend.

       Old English had no paper, just the final exam, but the vocabulary memorization was intense.  My Irish drama course, the best reading list of all the courses I took at Madison, taught by the worst professor I’d ever suffered under in all my college days, had only one small paper left, no final.  These seemed do-able, and they were, but studying still meant a struggle.

       That 100-Author list I had to read in preparation for the MA, assembled by Satan, got shifted to the burner in back of the back burner.  At least by dropping the Melville seminar, I had automatically postponed taking the MA comprehensive exam until the end of the following semester.  With only a single seminar course to handle in the fall, I was sure I could finally finish off that blasted reading list.

       Cindy and I spent every moment together that we could.  We still studied a lot together at my place, but there was much less guitar playing as we geared up for the end of the semester.  She had finals in every class, and although she would have to balance study for all of them, I knew she’d pull off another stellar semester performance.

       Dammit.

       I stumbled to the finish line while she flew, and before we knew it, she had to fly.

       Along with her folks and her brother and two sisters, I said goodbye at the airport.  We’d made our most emotional farewells the night before, but I still walked back to my car at 100% emotional bottom.

       I never cried again over Cindy.  We didn’t say much about keeping in touch.  For you younger folks reading this, long-distance phone calls used to be very expensive.  I missed her terribly, but I was definitely becoming more jaded.  You should see me these days.  I am rock-hard when it comes to emotion and relationships.  I will, I’m pretty sure, die a bachelor, and I never wanted it to end this way.

       I had one prof at the University of Hawai‘i whose wife lived on the mainland – Oregon, I believe – and I had one at the University of Wisconsin whose husband lived in Ohio.  If those worked out in the end, more power to them.  I’ve never had a long-distance relationship work.  Letters are okay for a while, but that grows old, as love grows cold.  It’s yet another reason why the internet and cell phones should have been developed earlier.  With Facetime and texting, who knows where I’d be today with someone like Cindy.

       A few weeks later, I found out that Cindy’s youngest sister, a sophomore at UW, would move into the bottom floor apartment.  She was beautiful too, but any ideas about her never entered my mind.  What did enter my mind was that I wanted to move the hell out of Jane Huston Hall when me lease was up.